20 February 2012. A World to Win News Service. With the approach of 8 March, International Women's Day, marked by revolutionary mobilizations in many countries, we are reprinting the following article which first appeared in the 7 March 2005 AWTWNS.
Prostitution is one of the fastest growing components of today’s world economy. Some NGOs and international agencies like to call women who engage in prostitution "sex workers" and refer to the "sex industry" as if prostitution were just another job, like working at a food stand, in a garment factory or at a call centre, but in fact most of the women are youths and children and little more than modern slaves. Workers create commodities, but like old-fashioned slaves these women are commodities to be bought and sold as if they were things, and not human beings. Many hundreds of thousands of women are trafficked every year from the world’s poorest areas to Western Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan, the US, the Arab Gulf states and other countries. This contemporary slave trade generates billions of dollars every year.
There are 400,000 to 500,000 child prostitutes in India. Many are trafficked from Nepal and Bangladesh. An estimated 200,000 women and children fall victim to human trafficking in Southeast Asia alone every year.
Many Southeast Asian villages have been emptied of their 13-19 year-old girls. The tourist industry in many of these countries revolves around prostitution to a large extent. Some 800,000 youth and teenagers in Thailand have been forced into prostitution. It is estimated that the "sex industry" earns 10-14 percent of the country's gross domestic product. While Thailand is the worst, according to an International Labour Organization report, the figures for the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia are similar.
The South-east Asian countries do not openly promote prostitution, but their economies are dependent on it to some degree and their policies have to take this into account. They know what brings many of the tourists and what the young women are being sent abroad to do. The hard currency helps pay their debts to the IMF and the World Bank, who in this sense can be considered the world’s biggest pimps. Governments thrive on the official and unofficial taxes (bribes) that come from issuing licenses for bars, restaurants, hotels and other centres that are covers for brothels, and the income these places earn enters into many other businesses and industries. In fact, prostitution is an integral component of the economy of these countries. Whole layers of capitalists directly engaged in this industry or indirectly benefiting from it have been created and fattened. Despite some talk about combating sex tourism by the governments in the region, they have done nothing real to limit it. In Thailand and Cambodia senior government officials are said to be directly involved, but even if they were not, any serious attack on prostitution would undermine the economy these officials are pledged to develop.
Most women engaged in prostitution have been forced into it by poverty and the malfunctioning of the economy of their country. The economic crisis that overtook South-east Asia in the late 1990s made the situation worse. The number of women driven to prostitution increased dramatically, and countries that earlier had not experienced large-scale prostitution were drawn in. Vietnam and Cambodia – which were largely closed to tourism just a decade ago – are now at risk of becoming established sex tourism destinations like Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
The kind of development promoted by imperialist capital in these countries produces more prostitution, not less. For example, while capitalist industries have developed enough in some parts of Thailand to make that country a "tiger" admired for its economic growth, the collapse of the economy in rural areas that has accompanied this has made life in the villages near impossible, with few opportunities for the peasants to find work that will ensure their survival. In Thailand, prostitutes send $300 million a year to their families in the villages. In Cambodia, 98 percent of girls in prostitution are the main providers for their families. In a survey conducted by the NGO Escape, many women reported that if they gave up prostitution their parents and/or children would starve.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc produced another source of enormous profits for those who mine this human misery. Albania, Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, are the main but not the only source of countries from which women are abducted or tricked into enslavement in the West.
Each year many women from former Soviet-bloc countries like Slovakia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and others whose social structures have imploded are exported to Western Europe and the US. Trafficking has become an integral part of the economies of these countries, too – often the forward edge of the emerging market economy. The prostitution of women and children has paid for many a new concrete tower block in Tirana (Albania) or Chisinau (Moldova). "It is estimated", says a report commissioned by Unicef, "that over the past 10 years, 100,000 Albanian women and girls have been trafficked to Western Europe and other Balkan countries." Some 30,000 prostitutes from Albania are said to be currently working in Western Europe. Documents produced by Unicef and "Save the Children" found "up to 80 per cent of those trafficked from some corners of Albania and Moldova to be children, with reports showing a decline in the average age of children/women being trafficked for prostitution."
Gangs hunt youth and teenage girls through direct contact with a relative, friend or friend of a friend, as well as by posting ads offering fake jobs as waitresses, babysitters or cooks – invariably jobs for women. Most are trafficked by criminal gangs or individual entrepreneurs promising them a better life and the chance to earn a lot of money. Once across the border, they will be auctioned and sold to their next owner. By now, they owe a vast amount of money to the trafficker for 'facilitating" their journey, and will be made to work off debts by servicing up to tens of customers a day, seven days a week. Their debts can never be cleared because they have to pay half of all they earn to the brothel owner and the rest to the trafficker. They are told that if they go to the police for help, they will be arrested and their families back home will have to pay the price.
Often they are threatened with torture and death if they try to escape; for most, finding their way home again would be impossible anyway. Some who dare to escape are re-trafficked quickly.
While South-east Asia and Eastern Europe are the main providers of teenage girls for Western consumers, now nearly every poor region in the world is a target for this profitable business. Some 1,000 Mozambicans aged between 14 and 24 are smuggled every year to Johannesburg, where they are forced to work in restaurants or as prostitutes. The UN estimates that in Brazil two million young people under the age of 18 are involved in prostitution. Thousands of Colombian women are lured to Japan with false job offers. The women do not know what is in store for them on arrival but the Japanese government knows very well what will happen when it issues them special visas as "entertainers".
Even Islamic countries like Iran, Morocco and Tunisia – where keeping women covered has been the most common open expression of their oppression and domination – have recently been drawn into global prostitution in a more hidden way. Most women forced into prostitution are meant for domestic consumption but some are exported to Arab Gulf states. According to the Iranian student agency Ilna, every day an average of 54 Iranian girls 16 -25 years old are traded in Karachi, Pakistan, mainly for re-export.
The international scale of this crime is difficult to quantify. The US State Department last year said it believed between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across borders annually. Profits are estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
At an Athens conference it was revealed that up to 20,000 foreign women, the majority from the former Soviet bloc, are working as sex slaves in a billion-dollar industry servicing more than a million men across Greece.
"There are now as many as 80,000 women working as prostitutes in the UK. In London alone, an academic study found that men spend £200 million a year on sex, almost half in massage parlours and saunas… Across the UK, the industry is believed to be worth about £770 million a year, with street prostitution accounting for only about five per cent…. about 600,000 people are illegally brought into the EU each year, the vast majority of them for sexual exploitation." (Observer, 18 April 2004)
"Last year, the [London] Metropolitan police's clubs and vice unit took 300 girls and women, including 10 children, out of brothels. Only 19 percent were British. The rest were from Eastern Europe (25 percent), South-east Asia (13 percent), Western Europe (12 percent) and Africa (2 percent). Country by country, the largest numbers were from Thailand, Russia, Brazil and Kosovo. Superintendent Chris Bradford said: 'It's like a slave market.'" (Guardian, 19 August 2004)
The situation is no better in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden.
Pornography is a sister to prostitution in its treatment of women, and can be considered a part of the "sex industry" in the broader sense. In the US it is estimated to be worth $10 billion a year. Porn movie revenues are bigger than Hollywood’s domestic box-office receipts, and the profits greater, thanks in large part to imported women from Eastern Europe. In the UK, the chief executive of one of the country’s many legal pornography magazine publishers has been identified by BBC as a major contributor to Blair's Labour Party.
This is the reality of today’s world. Two characteristics stand out in these horror stories. First of all, the process of globalisation that exploded after the collapse of the Soviet bloc is one of the main reasons for the new and unprecedented rise in the trafficking of women. Unemployment, poverty, a ruined economy and a torn social fabric are part of the real outcome of an ever more market-driven global economy, especially for people in the third world. In this distorted structure the poverty and misery of the majority is a rich source for the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. And among them women are the first victims of this new phenomenon of capitalism. Millions of children and young women have been enslaved and robbed of their lives so that investors in the sex industry based in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Japan, etc. can accumulate more and more capital.
The other characteristic of world capitalism revealed in the sex industry is the international division of labour. Certain countries are assigned to provide certain commodities in the service of world finance capital. Many of those assigned to provide human material for the so-called sex industry in the world market are poor countries that lack other "natural resources", or whose other products are not enough in high demand globally, or simply ones that have been plundered into devastation by imperialists and colonialists and ruined by years of war. This isn’t a matter of a conscious conspiracy; what happens is that certain countries have been assigned to supply whatever they can produce "best" (most competitively on the world market) by the objective workings of imperialist capital, and people do what they can to survive within this context.
It is undeniable that imperialism is creating global prostitution on a scale never before seen in history. The imperialists are unable to put an end to the trafficking in women, even if they wanted to – which is doubtful, though they might want to keep it more hidden – because their system is grounded in the oppression and exploitation of women. Prostitution can never be wiped out so long as this remains.
The US hijacked the recent UN conference on women's equality by insisting that it formally declare that abortion is not a right for women. Almost completely isolated, the American representative coupled this with a call for a worldwide ban on prostitution, which she called the only way to stop the trafficking of women.
The whole Bush-led crusade against abortion is the US and abroad by is a perfect illustration of the convergence of the rulers in the "advanced" imperialist West and the "backward" countries. Do women have the right to make their own decisions about their sexuality and reproduction, or are their bodies not really their own? Christian fascists and Islamic fundamentalists alike proclaim their "respect" for women while totally opposing the emancipation of women from male authority and the concrete measures that are necessary to change that situation.
Further, this debate at the UN and among NGOs on how to end prostitution has been fruitless. Some countries have made prostitution illegal like the US (in most states) and Sweden; and others have made it legal, like Germany and the Netherlands. But in all of these countries it continues to exist. Whenever these governments decide to crack down on the traffic in women they pass harsher immigration laws, target the prostitutes and pick up a few and deport them. Who can believe that such measures can help end this horror? Their main effect is to put more pressure on victims, who find themselves with even less hope of any acceptable way out of their situation and become more deeply enslaved to their owners.
The morality Bush and his ilk want to protect in opposing this traffic, whether hypocritically or not, seeks to preserve the oppression of women in another form. Under the slogan "family values", what their traditional morality seeks is to maintain women as the property not of many men but one, the woman’s husband. People (fathers and mothers who find themselves obliged to enforce patriarchal values) in impoverished villages and other places left hopeless by the global march of capital end up considering selling their daughters because imperialism has turned them into a hot commodity that men will buy in the rich corners of those countries and the world as a whole. Sellers and buyers alike share the view of females as fated to serve men in one form or another. This idea reflects the whole organisation of class society for several thousand years.
The globalisation of prostitution combines the inequality of nations and the inequality of the sexes in one hideous phenomenon. What kind of world is this where the more wealth is created and the more the world is drawn into a single whole, instead of human progress the result is greater tragedy for millions? Today's explosion in the traffic in human females is driven by the catastrophic convergence of two things, one new and the other very old: the destruction wreaked by an unprecedented development of global capitalism that is reaching deep into backward countries and pre-capitalist social systems and reducing everything in the world to something to be bought and sold, and the oppression of women that goes back to the earliest development of private property and the division of society into classes.
The oppression of women has persisted under every exploiting system and been justified by every traditional morality. There is no way to end these crimes without putting an end to the imperialist system and completely revolutionising all of the relations prevailing in today’s world.
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Donnerstag, 23. Februar 2012
Mittwoch, 30. Juni 2010
Israel and the U.S.: who is whose tool?
28 June 2010. A World to Win News Service. The American international policy professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who are critical of U.S. support for Israeli settlement expansion and its attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, argue that ″the unmatched power of the Israel lobby″ distorts U.S. foreign policy. Many people outraged by these crimes have been influenced by their still widely-circulated article ″The Israel Lobby″ that first appeared in The London Review of Books in 2006 (available at lrb.co.uk) and was later expanded into a book published in 21 countries.
Their work contains much useful information about the links between the U.S. and Israel. Yet their basic theory turns reality upside down. The truth is that Israel exists largely thanks to the U.S., because it plays an essential role in American domination in the Middle East and its current quest to ″stabilize″ an unjust and unacceptable situation for the people. In arguing that "American interests" would be better served by less uncritical support for Israel, Mearsheim and Walt do not really confront the nature of the U.S. – a monopoly capitalist country whose wealth and power are inextricably linked to a global empire of exploitation and oppression. Nor do they thoroughly deal with the nature of Israel as a colonial settler state whose existence itself is no more defensible than the apartheid regime in South Africa.
This greatly weakens their critique of the U.S.-Israel nexus and reduces it to wishful thinking. That's especially dangerous at a time when the U.S. is trying to have it both ways, to do everything possible to support Israel's continued existence and aggression and at the same time try to appear as a friend to the Palestinians.
Despite their academic prominence, these two scholars have been the object of a Zionist hate campaign and an intellectual boycott, especially in the U.S. It is shameful that so many writers and public figures who explode in the face of any criticism of Israel have tried to silence Mearsheimer and Walt by pinning the label of anti-Semitism on them. But while these two consider themselves critical friends of Israel, it is true, as their attackers realize and they do not, that once you start to analyse Israel from the point of justice for all, the whole Zionist enterprise can be called into question.
In fact, their argument is essentially similar to the all-too-common idea among the masses of people in the world and the U.S. itself, that U.S. crimes in the greater Middle East and beyond can be explained by ″Jewish pressure groups" rather than a system that basically can't work any other way.
The following reply to Mearsheim and Walt was written in April by Stephen Maher, who describes himself as a graduate student at the American University School of International Service who has lived in the West Bank. We are reprinting it from his blog rationalmanifesto. blogspot. com and electronicintifada. org While we do not share some important elements of his analysis, we welcome both his basic conclusion and his method of taking all the facts into account and testing ideas against reality.
Many of Israel's critics blame an "Israel lobby" for the near-total complicity of the U.S. in Israeli annexation, colonization and cleansing programs in the occupied West Bank. This complicity continues to the present, despite the "row" that erupted after the Israeli government humiliated U.S. Vice President Joe Biden by announcing the construction of 1,600 settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem while he was visiting the country. Indeed, despite the apparent outrage expressed by top White House officials, the administration has made clear that its criticism of Israel will remain purely symbolic. However, as we shall see, the lobby thesis does little to explain U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Years after Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes, Walter Russell Mead and many others published their critiques of the Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer "Israel lobby" thesis, many of the sharpest critics of Israel continue to attribute U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to the influence of the lobby. Given the prevalence of the Israel lobby argument, and the latest diplomatic confrontation between the U.S. and Israel, it is important to revisit the flaws in the thesis, and properly attribute U.S. behaviour to the large concentrations of domestic political and economic power that truly drive U.S. policy.
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is similar to that which is carried out elsewhere in the world, in regions free of "the lobby's" proclaimed corrupting effects. The inflated level of support that the U.S. lends Israel is a rational response to the particular strategic importance of the Middle East, the chief energy-producing region of the world. By building Israel into what Noam Chomsky refers to as an "offshore U.S. military base", it is able to protect its dominance over much of the world's remaining energy resources, a major lever of global power. As we shall see, those blaming the lobby for U.S. policy once again misunderstand the U.S.'s strategic interests in the Middle East, and Israel's central role in advancing them.
Geopolitics and the U.S.-Israeli relationship
A central claim of the "Israel lobby" thesis is that the "lobby", however defined, overwhelmingly shapes U.S. policy towards the Middle East. Thus, if the argument were true, its proponents would have to demonstrate that there is something qualitatively unique about U.S. policy towards the Middle East compared with that in other regions of the world. Yet upon careful analysis, we find little difference between the purported distortions caused by the lobby and what is frequently referred to as the "national interest", governed by the same concentrations of domestic power that drive U.S. foreign policy elsewhere.
There are states all around the world that perform similar services to Washington as Israel, projecting U.S. power in their respective regions, whose crimes in advancing Washington's goals are overtly supported and shielded from international condemnation. Take for instance the 30 years of U.S. support for the horrors of the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. In addition to the use of rape and starvation as weapons, and a gruesome torture regime, Indonesian president Suharto slaughtered 150,000 persons out of a population of 650,000. These atrocities were fully supported by the U.S., including supplying the napalm and chemical weapons indiscriminately used by the Indonesian army, which was fully armed and trained by the U.S. As Bill Clinton said, Suharto was "our kind of guy."
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time of the Indonesian invasion, later wrote that "the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" to end the butchering of the East Timorese, a goal he carried out with "no inconsiderable success." Yet this support was not due to the influence of an "Indonesia lobby." Rather, planners had identified Indonesia as one of the three most strategically important regions in the world in 1958, as a result of its oil wealth and important role as a link between the Indian and Pacific oceans.
In some regions, as in Latin America where U.S. clients like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and terrorist armies like the Nicaraguan Contras spent years murdering defenceless peasants demanding basic human rights, the threat is mostly one of "successful defiance;" that is, a country defying U.S. orders and getting away with it. Should the U.S. tolerate one such case, the logic goes, it will embolden resistance to its dictates elsewhere. The danger underlying such defiance – referred to as "the threat of a good example" by Oxfam – is that a country will implement a successful model for independent development, refusing U.S. dictates and seeking to direct much-needed resources to serve the needs of the domestic population instead of wealthy foreign investors.
Such thinking is deeply institutionalized and exhibited by U.S. policy worldwide, going back to the very beginnings of the modern imperial era after World War II. It was clear from early in the war that the U.S. would emerge as the dominant world power in its aftermath, and so the State Department and Council on Foreign Relations began planning to create a post-war international order in which the U.S. would "hold unquestioned power". One way it planned to do so was gaining control of global energy resources, primarily those of Saudi Arabia, which were referred to at the time as "the greatest material prize in history" by the U.S. State Department.
As Franklin Roosevelt's "oil czar" Harold Ickes advised, control of oil was the "key to postwar political arrangements" since a large supply of cheap energy is essential to fuel the world's industrial capitalist economies. This meant that with control of Middle Eastern oil, particularly the vast Saudi reserves, the U.S. could keep its hand on the spigot that would fuel the economies of Europe, Japan and much of the rest of the world. As U.S. planner George Kennan put it, this would give the United States "veto power" over the actions of others. Zbigniew Brzezinski has also more recently discussed the "critical leverage" the U.S. enjoys as a result of its stranglehold on energy supplies.
Thus in the Middle East it is not simply "successful defiance" that the U.S. fears, nor merely independent development. These worries are present as well, but there is an added dimension: should opposition threaten U.S. control of oil resources, a major source of U.S. global power is placed at risk. Under the Nixon Administration, with the U.S. military tied down in Vietnam and direct intervention in the Middle East to defend vital strategic interests unlikely, military aid to pre-revolution Iran (acting as an American regional enforcer) skyrocketed. Amnesty International' s conclusion in 1976 that "no country has a worse human rights record than Iran" was ignored, and U.S. support increased, not because of an "Iran lobby" in the U.S., but rather because such support was advancing U.S. interests.
Strategic concerns also led the U.S. to support other oppressive, reactionary regimes, including Saddam Hussein's worst atrocities. During the Anfal genocide against the Kurds, Iraqi forces used chemical weapons provided by the U.S. against Kurdish civilians, killed perhaps 100,000 persons, and destroyed roughly 80 percent of the villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, while the U.S. moved to block international condemnation of these atrocities. Again, supporting crimes that serve the "national interest" set by large corporations and ruling elites, and shielding them from international criticism is the rule, not the exception.
It is no coincidence that the U.S.-Israel relationship crystallized after Israel destroyed the independent nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in a pre-emptive attack in 1967, permanently ending the role of Egypt as a centre of opposition to U.S. imperialism. Since before World War II, Saudi Arabia had happily served as an "Arab facade," veiling the hand of the true ruling power on the Arabian peninsula, to borrow British colonial terminology. With Nasser's Arab nationalist rhetoric "turning the whole region against the House of Saud", the threat he posed to U.S. power was serious. In response, the State Department concluded that the "logical corollary" to U.S. opposition to Arab nationalism was "support for Israel" as the only reliable pro-U.S. force in the region. Israel's destruction and humiliation of Nasser's regime was thus a major boon for the U.S., and proved to Washington the value of a strong alliance with a powerful Israel.
This unique regional importance is one reason for the tremendous level of aid Israel receives, including more advanced weaponry than that provided to other U.S. clients. Providing Israel with the ability to use overwhelming force against any adversary to the established order has been a pivotal aspect of U.S. regional strategy. Importantly, Israel is also a reliable ally – there is little chance that the Israeli government will be overthrown, and the weapons end up in the hands of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists or independent nationalists as happened in Iran in 1979.
Today, with the increased independence of Europe, and the hungry economies of India and China growing at breakneck speed along with their demand for dwindling energy resources, control over what is left is more crucial than ever. In the September 2009 issue of the Asia-Africa Review, China's former Special Envoy to the Middle East Sun Bigan wrote that "the U.S. has always sought to control the faucet of global oil supplies", and suggested that since Washington would doubtless work to ensure that Iraqi oil remained under its control, China should look elsewhere in the region for an independent energy source. "Iran has bountiful energy resources," Bigan wrote, "and its oil gas reserves are the second biggest in the world, and all are basically under its own control" (emphasis added).
It is partially as a result of this independence that Israel's strategic importance to the U.S. has increased significantly in recent times, particularly since the Shah's cruel, U.S.-supported dictatorship in Iran was overthrown in 1979. With the Shah gone, Israel alone had to terrorize the region into complying with U.S. orders, and ensure that Saudi Arabia's vast oil resources remain under U.S. control. The increased importance of Israel to U.S. policy was illustrated clearly as its regional strategy shifted to "dual containment" during the Clinton years, with Israel countering both Iraq and Iran.
With Iran developing technology that could eventually allow it to produce what are referred to in the February 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review as "anti-access weapons" or weapons of mass destruction that prevent the U.S. from being able to freely use force in any region of the world, this is a crucial moment in Washington's struggle to seize control of Iran. This confrontation, stemming from the desire of the U.S. to control its oil and destroy a base of independent nationalism, makes U.S. support for Israel strategically crucial.
The "Israel lobby" and U.S. pressure
If we adopt "the lobby" hypothesis, we would predict that the U.S. would bend to Israel's will when the interests of the two states diverge, acting against its "national interest". Yet if U.S. policies in the Middle East were damaging its "national interest", as proponents of the lobby argument claim, that must mean that such policies have been a failure. This leads one to ask: a failure for whom? Not for U.S. elites, who have secured control of the major global energy resources while successfully crushing opposition movements, nor for the defence establishment, and most certainly not for the energy corporations. In fact, not only is U.S. policy towards the Middle East similar to that towards other regions of the world, but it has been a profitable, strategic success.
Indeed, the U.S.'s policy towards Israel and the Palestinians is not to achieve an end to the occupation, nor to bring about respect for Palestinian rights – in fact, it is the actor primarily responsible for preventing these outcomes. To the U.S., Israel's "Operation Defensive Shield" in 2002 had sufficiently punished the Palestinians and their compliant U.S.-backed leadership for their intransigence at Camp David. While the Palestinian Authority was already acting as Israel's "subcontractor" and "collaborator" in suppressing resistance to Israeli occupation, in the paraphrased words of former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's deliberate destruction of Palestinian institutions provided the opportunity to rebuild them, and ensure an even greater degree of U.S. control.
The settlement and annexation programs help guarantee Israeli control over the most valuable Palestinian land and water resources, ensuring Israel will remain a dominant society not easily pressured by its neighbours. To help achieve these goals, the U.S. shields Israeli expansion behind a "peace process" in hopes that given enough time the Palestinians will concede more and more of what was once theirs. The primary concern is to present the appearance that the U.S. and Israel are ardently crusading for peace, battling against those who oppose this noble objective. Though it is true that people across the region are appalled and outraged by Israeli crimes, such anger is a small consideration next to the strategic gain of maintaining a strong, dependent ally in the heart of the Middle East.
The reconstitution of an even more tightly-controlled Palestinian Authority, with General Keith Dayton directly supervising the Palestinian security forces, enabled the U.S. to meet these goals while more effectively suppressing resistance to the occupation. Likewise, redeploying Israeli soldiers outside of Gaza allowed Sharon a free hand to continue the annexation of the West Bank while being heralded internationally as a "great man of peace".
The treatment of Israel by the mainstream U.S. media is also standard for all U.S. allies. Coverage in the corporate press is predictably skewed in favour of official U.S. allies and against official enemies, a well-documented phenomenon. Thus, proponents of the lobby thesis are missing the forest for the trees. What they see as the special treatment of Israel by the mainstream press is actually just the normal functioning of the U.S. media and intellectual establishment, apologizing for and defending crimes of official allies while demonizing official enemies.
Of course, this is not to argue that there are not organizations in the U.S., like the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC [the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee] that seek to marginalize dissent from Israeli policy in every forum possible. Rather, I am pointing out that the power of these groups pales in comparison to other, far more powerful, interests and concerns. While the AJC or ADL may mobilize for the firing of a professor critical of Israel, for example, that argument is amplified by the elite-owned and controlled press because doing so serves their interests. Likewise, AIPAC can urge unwavering support for Israel on the part of the U.S. government, but without the assent of other far more powerful interests, like the energy corporations and defence establishment, AIPAC's efforts would amount to little. U.S. policy, like that of other states, is rationally planned to serve the interests of the ruling class.
Israel could not sustain its aggressive, expansionist policies without U.S. military aid and diplomatic support. If the Obama Administration wanted to, it could pressure Israel to comply with international law and resolutions, join the international consensus, and enact a two-state solution. While the "Israel lobby" thesis conveniently explains his failure to do so and absolves U.S. policy-makers of responsibility for their ongoing support of Israeli apartheid, violence and annexation, it simply does not stand up under closer scrutiny.
Their work contains much useful information about the links between the U.S. and Israel. Yet their basic theory turns reality upside down. The truth is that Israel exists largely thanks to the U.S., because it plays an essential role in American domination in the Middle East and its current quest to ″stabilize″ an unjust and unacceptable situation for the people. In arguing that "American interests" would be better served by less uncritical support for Israel, Mearsheim and Walt do not really confront the nature of the U.S. – a monopoly capitalist country whose wealth and power are inextricably linked to a global empire of exploitation and oppression. Nor do they thoroughly deal with the nature of Israel as a colonial settler state whose existence itself is no more defensible than the apartheid regime in South Africa.
This greatly weakens their critique of the U.S.-Israel nexus and reduces it to wishful thinking. That's especially dangerous at a time when the U.S. is trying to have it both ways, to do everything possible to support Israel's continued existence and aggression and at the same time try to appear as a friend to the Palestinians.
Despite their academic prominence, these two scholars have been the object of a Zionist hate campaign and an intellectual boycott, especially in the U.S. It is shameful that so many writers and public figures who explode in the face of any criticism of Israel have tried to silence Mearsheimer and Walt by pinning the label of anti-Semitism on them. But while these two consider themselves critical friends of Israel, it is true, as their attackers realize and they do not, that once you start to analyse Israel from the point of justice for all, the whole Zionist enterprise can be called into question.
In fact, their argument is essentially similar to the all-too-common idea among the masses of people in the world and the U.S. itself, that U.S. crimes in the greater Middle East and beyond can be explained by ″Jewish pressure groups" rather than a system that basically can't work any other way.
The following reply to Mearsheim and Walt was written in April by Stephen Maher, who describes himself as a graduate student at the American University School of International Service who has lived in the West Bank. We are reprinting it from his blog rationalmanifesto. blogspot. com and electronicintifada. org While we do not share some important elements of his analysis, we welcome both his basic conclusion and his method of taking all the facts into account and testing ideas against reality.
Many of Israel's critics blame an "Israel lobby" for the near-total complicity of the U.S. in Israeli annexation, colonization and cleansing programs in the occupied West Bank. This complicity continues to the present, despite the "row" that erupted after the Israeli government humiliated U.S. Vice President Joe Biden by announcing the construction of 1,600 settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem while he was visiting the country. Indeed, despite the apparent outrage expressed by top White House officials, the administration has made clear that its criticism of Israel will remain purely symbolic. However, as we shall see, the lobby thesis does little to explain U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Years after Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes, Walter Russell Mead and many others published their critiques of the Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer "Israel lobby" thesis, many of the sharpest critics of Israel continue to attribute U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to the influence of the lobby. Given the prevalence of the Israel lobby argument, and the latest diplomatic confrontation between the U.S. and Israel, it is important to revisit the flaws in the thesis, and properly attribute U.S. behaviour to the large concentrations of domestic political and economic power that truly drive U.S. policy.
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is similar to that which is carried out elsewhere in the world, in regions free of "the lobby's" proclaimed corrupting effects. The inflated level of support that the U.S. lends Israel is a rational response to the particular strategic importance of the Middle East, the chief energy-producing region of the world. By building Israel into what Noam Chomsky refers to as an "offshore U.S. military base", it is able to protect its dominance over much of the world's remaining energy resources, a major lever of global power. As we shall see, those blaming the lobby for U.S. policy once again misunderstand the U.S.'s strategic interests in the Middle East, and Israel's central role in advancing them.
Geopolitics and the U.S.-Israeli relationship
A central claim of the "Israel lobby" thesis is that the "lobby", however defined, overwhelmingly shapes U.S. policy towards the Middle East. Thus, if the argument were true, its proponents would have to demonstrate that there is something qualitatively unique about U.S. policy towards the Middle East compared with that in other regions of the world. Yet upon careful analysis, we find little difference between the purported distortions caused by the lobby and what is frequently referred to as the "national interest", governed by the same concentrations of domestic power that drive U.S. foreign policy elsewhere.
There are states all around the world that perform similar services to Washington as Israel, projecting U.S. power in their respective regions, whose crimes in advancing Washington's goals are overtly supported and shielded from international condemnation. Take for instance the 30 years of U.S. support for the horrors of the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. In addition to the use of rape and starvation as weapons, and a gruesome torture regime, Indonesian president Suharto slaughtered 150,000 persons out of a population of 650,000. These atrocities were fully supported by the U.S., including supplying the napalm and chemical weapons indiscriminately used by the Indonesian army, which was fully armed and trained by the U.S. As Bill Clinton said, Suharto was "our kind of guy."
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time of the Indonesian invasion, later wrote that "the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" to end the butchering of the East Timorese, a goal he carried out with "no inconsiderable success." Yet this support was not due to the influence of an "Indonesia lobby." Rather, planners had identified Indonesia as one of the three most strategically important regions in the world in 1958, as a result of its oil wealth and important role as a link between the Indian and Pacific oceans.
In some regions, as in Latin America where U.S. clients like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and terrorist armies like the Nicaraguan Contras spent years murdering defenceless peasants demanding basic human rights, the threat is mostly one of "successful defiance;" that is, a country defying U.S. orders and getting away with it. Should the U.S. tolerate one such case, the logic goes, it will embolden resistance to its dictates elsewhere. The danger underlying such defiance – referred to as "the threat of a good example" by Oxfam – is that a country will implement a successful model for independent development, refusing U.S. dictates and seeking to direct much-needed resources to serve the needs of the domestic population instead of wealthy foreign investors.
Such thinking is deeply institutionalized and exhibited by U.S. policy worldwide, going back to the very beginnings of the modern imperial era after World War II. It was clear from early in the war that the U.S. would emerge as the dominant world power in its aftermath, and so the State Department and Council on Foreign Relations began planning to create a post-war international order in which the U.S. would "hold unquestioned power". One way it planned to do so was gaining control of global energy resources, primarily those of Saudi Arabia, which were referred to at the time as "the greatest material prize in history" by the U.S. State Department.
As Franklin Roosevelt's "oil czar" Harold Ickes advised, control of oil was the "key to postwar political arrangements" since a large supply of cheap energy is essential to fuel the world's industrial capitalist economies. This meant that with control of Middle Eastern oil, particularly the vast Saudi reserves, the U.S. could keep its hand on the spigot that would fuel the economies of Europe, Japan and much of the rest of the world. As U.S. planner George Kennan put it, this would give the United States "veto power" over the actions of others. Zbigniew Brzezinski has also more recently discussed the "critical leverage" the U.S. enjoys as a result of its stranglehold on energy supplies.
Thus in the Middle East it is not simply "successful defiance" that the U.S. fears, nor merely independent development. These worries are present as well, but there is an added dimension: should opposition threaten U.S. control of oil resources, a major source of U.S. global power is placed at risk. Under the Nixon Administration, with the U.S. military tied down in Vietnam and direct intervention in the Middle East to defend vital strategic interests unlikely, military aid to pre-revolution Iran (acting as an American regional enforcer) skyrocketed. Amnesty International' s conclusion in 1976 that "no country has a worse human rights record than Iran" was ignored, and U.S. support increased, not because of an "Iran lobby" in the U.S., but rather because such support was advancing U.S. interests.
Strategic concerns also led the U.S. to support other oppressive, reactionary regimes, including Saddam Hussein's worst atrocities. During the Anfal genocide against the Kurds, Iraqi forces used chemical weapons provided by the U.S. against Kurdish civilians, killed perhaps 100,000 persons, and destroyed roughly 80 percent of the villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, while the U.S. moved to block international condemnation of these atrocities. Again, supporting crimes that serve the "national interest" set by large corporations and ruling elites, and shielding them from international criticism is the rule, not the exception.
It is no coincidence that the U.S.-Israel relationship crystallized after Israel destroyed the independent nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in a pre-emptive attack in 1967, permanently ending the role of Egypt as a centre of opposition to U.S. imperialism. Since before World War II, Saudi Arabia had happily served as an "Arab facade," veiling the hand of the true ruling power on the Arabian peninsula, to borrow British colonial terminology. With Nasser's Arab nationalist rhetoric "turning the whole region against the House of Saud", the threat he posed to U.S. power was serious. In response, the State Department concluded that the "logical corollary" to U.S. opposition to Arab nationalism was "support for Israel" as the only reliable pro-U.S. force in the region. Israel's destruction and humiliation of Nasser's regime was thus a major boon for the U.S., and proved to Washington the value of a strong alliance with a powerful Israel.
This unique regional importance is one reason for the tremendous level of aid Israel receives, including more advanced weaponry than that provided to other U.S. clients. Providing Israel with the ability to use overwhelming force against any adversary to the established order has been a pivotal aspect of U.S. regional strategy. Importantly, Israel is also a reliable ally – there is little chance that the Israeli government will be overthrown, and the weapons end up in the hands of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists or independent nationalists as happened in Iran in 1979.
Today, with the increased independence of Europe, and the hungry economies of India and China growing at breakneck speed along with their demand for dwindling energy resources, control over what is left is more crucial than ever. In the September 2009 issue of the Asia-Africa Review, China's former Special Envoy to the Middle East Sun Bigan wrote that "the U.S. has always sought to control the faucet of global oil supplies", and suggested that since Washington would doubtless work to ensure that Iraqi oil remained under its control, China should look elsewhere in the region for an independent energy source. "Iran has bountiful energy resources," Bigan wrote, "and its oil gas reserves are the second biggest in the world, and all are basically under its own control" (emphasis added).
It is partially as a result of this independence that Israel's strategic importance to the U.S. has increased significantly in recent times, particularly since the Shah's cruel, U.S.-supported dictatorship in Iran was overthrown in 1979. With the Shah gone, Israel alone had to terrorize the region into complying with U.S. orders, and ensure that Saudi Arabia's vast oil resources remain under U.S. control. The increased importance of Israel to U.S. policy was illustrated clearly as its regional strategy shifted to "dual containment" during the Clinton years, with Israel countering both Iraq and Iran.
With Iran developing technology that could eventually allow it to produce what are referred to in the February 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review as "anti-access weapons" or weapons of mass destruction that prevent the U.S. from being able to freely use force in any region of the world, this is a crucial moment in Washington's struggle to seize control of Iran. This confrontation, stemming from the desire of the U.S. to control its oil and destroy a base of independent nationalism, makes U.S. support for Israel strategically crucial.
The "Israel lobby" and U.S. pressure
If we adopt "the lobby" hypothesis, we would predict that the U.S. would bend to Israel's will when the interests of the two states diverge, acting against its "national interest". Yet if U.S. policies in the Middle East were damaging its "national interest", as proponents of the lobby argument claim, that must mean that such policies have been a failure. This leads one to ask: a failure for whom? Not for U.S. elites, who have secured control of the major global energy resources while successfully crushing opposition movements, nor for the defence establishment, and most certainly not for the energy corporations. In fact, not only is U.S. policy towards the Middle East similar to that towards other regions of the world, but it has been a profitable, strategic success.
Indeed, the U.S.'s policy towards Israel and the Palestinians is not to achieve an end to the occupation, nor to bring about respect for Palestinian rights – in fact, it is the actor primarily responsible for preventing these outcomes. To the U.S., Israel's "Operation Defensive Shield" in 2002 had sufficiently punished the Palestinians and their compliant U.S.-backed leadership for their intransigence at Camp David. While the Palestinian Authority was already acting as Israel's "subcontractor" and "collaborator" in suppressing resistance to Israeli occupation, in the paraphrased words of former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's deliberate destruction of Palestinian institutions provided the opportunity to rebuild them, and ensure an even greater degree of U.S. control.
The settlement and annexation programs help guarantee Israeli control over the most valuable Palestinian land and water resources, ensuring Israel will remain a dominant society not easily pressured by its neighbours. To help achieve these goals, the U.S. shields Israeli expansion behind a "peace process" in hopes that given enough time the Palestinians will concede more and more of what was once theirs. The primary concern is to present the appearance that the U.S. and Israel are ardently crusading for peace, battling against those who oppose this noble objective. Though it is true that people across the region are appalled and outraged by Israeli crimes, such anger is a small consideration next to the strategic gain of maintaining a strong, dependent ally in the heart of the Middle East.
The reconstitution of an even more tightly-controlled Palestinian Authority, with General Keith Dayton directly supervising the Palestinian security forces, enabled the U.S. to meet these goals while more effectively suppressing resistance to the occupation. Likewise, redeploying Israeli soldiers outside of Gaza allowed Sharon a free hand to continue the annexation of the West Bank while being heralded internationally as a "great man of peace".
The treatment of Israel by the mainstream U.S. media is also standard for all U.S. allies. Coverage in the corporate press is predictably skewed in favour of official U.S. allies and against official enemies, a well-documented phenomenon. Thus, proponents of the lobby thesis are missing the forest for the trees. What they see as the special treatment of Israel by the mainstream press is actually just the normal functioning of the U.S. media and intellectual establishment, apologizing for and defending crimes of official allies while demonizing official enemies.
Of course, this is not to argue that there are not organizations in the U.S., like the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC [the lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee] that seek to marginalize dissent from Israeli policy in every forum possible. Rather, I am pointing out that the power of these groups pales in comparison to other, far more powerful, interests and concerns. While the AJC or ADL may mobilize for the firing of a professor critical of Israel, for example, that argument is amplified by the elite-owned and controlled press because doing so serves their interests. Likewise, AIPAC can urge unwavering support for Israel on the part of the U.S. government, but without the assent of other far more powerful interests, like the energy corporations and defence establishment, AIPAC's efforts would amount to little. U.S. policy, like that of other states, is rationally planned to serve the interests of the ruling class.
Israel could not sustain its aggressive, expansionist policies without U.S. military aid and diplomatic support. If the Obama Administration wanted to, it could pressure Israel to comply with international law and resolutions, join the international consensus, and enact a two-state solution. While the "Israel lobby" thesis conveniently explains his failure to do so and absolves U.S. policy-makers of responsibility for their ongoing support of Israeli apartheid, violence and annexation, it simply does not stand up under closer scrutiny.
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