America: What to Do Next?

By Robert Parry
Created Nov 18 2006 - 10:25am

The Nov. 7 elections took the wind out of the blowhard sails that had been
driving the United States toward the shoals of endless war abroad and
authoritarianism at home. But the ship of state still finds itself buffeted
in very stormy seas, with a safe harbor far beyond the horizon.

The question now is what to do next? How does the nation maneuver out of the
dangerous predicament in the Middle East? And what will it take to ensure
that the country is not so easily commandeered again and piloted back toward
disaster?

First, it's important to recognize some of the key reasons why the American
voters were able to wrest at least some control of the nation's helm from
the motley crew of neoconservative ideologues, political operatives and war
profiteers who have dominated George W. Bush's administration.

For five years, the Bush crew had exploited the fear and anger from 9/11 to
overwhelm public doubts about Bush's grim vision of an interminable "war on
terror" and its complementary notion of an all-powerful President
deep-sixing the Founders' concept of checks and balances in government and
"unalienable rights" for the American people.

But - in one of the most encouraging examples of grassroots democracy in
decades - citizen-run Internet sites led the way along with non-traditional
TV and radio, from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" to Air
America and other progressive radio shows, to pull back the veils of
propaganda.

This mix of start-ups, iconoclasts and unconventional media got enough
information to the people so a majority finally could see through the
deceptions.

Meanwhile, the bellicose right-wing media voices - from Rush Limbaugh to Fox
News - were exposed as little more than water carriers for Bush. The day
after the elections, Limbaugh admitted as much. He said [1] he felt
"liberated," adding: "I no longer am going to have to carry the water for
people who I don't think deserve having their water carried."

Many mainstream media personalities were unmasked, too, as frauds and
cowards. They had stood meekly aside as Bush's Iraq War parade passed by, or
they jumped into line themselves, all the better to protect and advance
their careers.

Still, this match-up - pitting the well-funded right-wing propaganda machine
and the giant mainstream media against the tiny information outlets that
dared question Bush's policies - must rank as one of the most imbalanced
contests in modern history.

Internet sites, bloggers, progressive radio stations and Comedy Central's
"fake-news" programs lacked both the resources and the audiences of the
big-time media outlets, but amazingly still prevailed.

Importance of Truth

So, one of the lessons from Election 2006 should be that investment in a
"counter-media" is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do.
Contrary to the long-held opinion of many on the Left, media can be both
cost-effective and crucial to the emergence of a coherent popular movement
of concerned citizens.

It follows that these independent and progressive news sites could do much
more to put the United States back on the right course if they were better
funded. Despite their success in setting the stage for the Nov. 7 elections,
many of these outlets survive hand-to-mouth, and Air America has sought
bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11.

A strategy is needed to make these news and opinion outlets financially
sustainable. That would require a combination of individual donations, ad
buys and foundation grants targeted at the news outlets that stood up to
Bush's propaganda while many others were standing down.

Along with building honest media must come a new national commitment to
valuing truthful information, honest history and straightforward reality.

One of the dangerous lessons from this recent political era is that the
Right - and especially the neoconservatives - learned that they could
manipulate public perceptions through their vast propaganda network. Bluster
and tough-guy talk replaced reason and nuanced thinking.

In effect, the United States ended up with a foreign policy that amounted to
a distillation of the macho harangues from Limbaugh and his many copycat
talk-show hosts.

While Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made use of this right-wing media
infrastructure, they also understood its risks. But George W. Bush lacked
the larger life lessons of his two Republican predecessors; he simply saw
these perception management techniques as a means to unlimited power.

So, Bush rushed the nation into a war in Iraq, exploiting both the
hard-nosed right-wing propaganda apparatus and the weak-kneed mainstream
media. But what the younger George Bush didn't appreciate was that a
manipulated reality or even an ardently wished-for reality is not the same
as real reality.

One of the lessons of the Iraq War should be that silencing responsible
dissent and shutting out cautionary advice may help achieve short-term goals
but can lead to long-term disaster.

Israeli Danger

In that sense, what happened in the United States is interconnected to a
similar dilemma that now confronts - and endangers - Israel.

During the 1970s, the Israeli government grew frustrated with U.S. pressure
pushing the Israeli government to reach peace agreements with its Arab
neighbors and to resolve the issue of Palestinian statehood.

Infuriated by acts of Palestinian terrorism, the Israeli Likud Party rose to
power with the goal of putting Jewish settlers on occupied Palestinian
territory and generally hitting back whenever Arab threats arose, not
granting concessions or making peace.

Likud's hostility was especially intense toward President Jimmy Carter
because he had pressed Israel into a negotiated settlement with Egypt that
involved returning the Sinai. Carter also demanded progress toward creating
a Palestinian homeland.

The Likud view was expressed bluntly by Israeli intelligence officer David
Kimche in his book, The Last Option. Kimche bitterly described how Carter
had pressured Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to surrender territory
to the Arabs in exchange for peace.

"Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in
Washington, while Israel was being taken to the cleaners by the experts of
the National Security Council and the Middle East specialists of the State
Department," Kimche wrote.

"They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and
[Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at
collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from
territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the
establishment of a Palestinian state," Kimche wrote.

In that time frame - late in the Carter administration - Likud opted for a
different course. It began collaborating with Christian fundamentalists on
the American Right (the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) and worked
with a rising group of political intellectuals known as the
neoconservatives, many of whom were Jewish with strong affections for
Israel.

Israeli leaders also encouraged friendly lobbying groups, such as the
powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], to punish U.S.
lawmakers who were viewed as insufficiently supportive of Israel.

As these allied forces amassed greater clout within the U.S. government and
inside the American news media, the pressure on Israel to seek a lasting
peace with its neighbors mostly dissipated. Reagan and Bush I peace
initiatives were half-hearted, and President Bill Clinton's last-minute stab
at an Israeli-Palestinian deal fell short.

Then, when George W. Bush became President in 2001, he abandoned any notion
of pushing Israel toward a peace agreement.

Bush, who as Texas governor once had been the guest of Israel's Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon on a helicopter tour over the cramped Palestinian city
of Gaza, made clear he was ready to remove all restraints on what Israel
could do to break the will of the Palestinians.

Ten days after the Inauguration, at the first meeting of the National
Security Council, Bush signalled a "hands-off" policy toward the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
who later gave an insider account to author Ron Suskind for the book, The
Price of Loyalty.

"We're going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the
Mideast conflict," Bush was quoted as saying. "We're going to tilt it back
toward Israel. And we're going to be consistent."

Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed strong misgivings, predicting that
U.S. disengagement would lead to "dire consequences." But Bush shrugged off
the concerns, saying "Maybe that's the best way to get things back in
balance." Bush added, "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really
clarify things."

The Long War

So, years of U.S. diplomatic efforts to resolve the Middle East conflict
abruptly ended. The Likud-led government soon launched some of the deadliest
attacks ever seen in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Palestinians
countered with suicide bombings that killed Israeli civilians. The cycle of
violence spiralled out of control.

Meanwhile, the political clout of the Christian Right/neocons/AIPAC
alliance, combined with the intimidating style of the right-wing news media,
silenced any meaningful debate within the United States about the Middle
East.

The 9/11 attacks added explosive fuel to the fire, with Bush and the neocons
suddenly empowered to target all cases of Muslim militancy as part of a
broad "war on terror," which would give no quarter and make no concession to
Islamic radicalism, whether tied to 9/11 or not.

In effect, Likud's enemies had become America's enemies. So, after a brief
war against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan, Bush turned his
attention to one of Israel's most hated adversaries, Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Bush's neoconservative advisers promoted a strategy that, in effect, aimed
at resolving the security threat to Israel by projecting American military
power into the heart of the Arab world, Iraq, and then using that strategic
foothold to intimidate neighboring Muslim nations with the goal of
eventually forcing the Palestinians to submit to Israel's terms.

This theory held that the solution to the problems faced in Jerusalem ran
through Baghdad. The neocons also joked that after Iraq, they would have the
choice of either taking Damascus in Syria or Tehran in Iran. "Real men go to
Tehran," they quipped.

But the conquest of Iraq did not go exactly as planned. A stubborn
insurgency, complicated by jihadist terrorism and sectarian violence between
Sunni and Shiite Muslims, threw Iraq into bloody chaos.

Though leading U.S. neocons complained about the incompetence of Bush's
execution of the Iraq War, their solution to the overall problem was mostly
to up the ante, expanding the "long war" to take on other enemies of Israel,
such as Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a longtime Likud politician who had
switched to the new Kadima party, entered the fray in summer 2006. He
responded to a round of tit-for-tat violence in Gaza and along the Lebanese
border with major military escalations against the Palestinians in Gaza and
against Hezbollah-related targets in Lebanon.

According to press accounts, the Bush administration even encouraged Israel
to widen its military campaign to include Syria, a recommendation that the
Olmert government rejected. Still, the Israeli offensive against Lebanon
degenerated into a fiasco. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Israeli
Leaders Fault Bush on War [2]."]

Election 2006

A Republican victory on Nov. 7 would have given Bush what he surely would
have viewed as a new mandate to continue and broaden his tough-guy
strategies in the Middle East. But it was becoming increasingly apparent to
millions of Americans that Bush's approach represented a dead end that was
quickly filling with a staggering number of bodies, both of U.S. soldiers
and Middle Easterners.

To a large degree, the fallacy of Bush's neocon strategy was the belief that
force almost alone could defeat Islamic militancy. By essentially ruling out
any meaningful concessions to legitimate Muslim grievances, such as the
plight of the Palestinians, Bush and the neocons set a course for a
bloodbath in the Middle East.

Beyond the inhumanity of the neocon strategy, it also carried a virtual
certainty of failure. Nearly six years into the Bush administration, CIA
Director Michael Hayden explained one of its unintended consequences, the
resurgent power of Iran's Islamic government.

"The Iranian hand appears to be powerful and I would offer the view: It
appears to be growing and Iranian ambitions in Iraq seem to be expanding,"
Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, told the Senate Armed Services
Committee on Nov. 15. "I would suggest to you, right now [Iran] seems to be
conducting a foreign policy with a feeling of almost dangerous
triumphalism."

Bush, the neocons and the hardline Israelis had become victims of their
success in shouting down or discrediting critics who favored a less violent
course. The peace advocates were routinely smeared as "soft on terror" or
"anti-Israel."

To this day, neocons still rant and rave against Jimmy Carter. However, from
the perspective of more than a quarter century later, Carter's advice about
resolving the Palestinian dispute and reaching peace accords with Israel's
Arab neighbors does not look like such a bad idea.

So, another lesson from the Nov. 7 elections is that manipulating
perceptions and creating false one-sided realities - like those that have
guided U.S. policy in the Middle East - can be dangerous even for those
doing the manipulating.

Slim Hope

The Republican defeat in Election 2006 opens the door slightly for a
reexamination of the overall U.S. strategy toward the Middle East. But it's
hard to envision a serious rethinking of the policy without a substantial
growth in the fledgling independent news media and a stiffening of spines
among American politicians.

Fearful of losing Jewish-American votes to Republicans, Democrats have shown
little interest in reasserting the traditional U.S. role as Israel's
concerned friend, offering both military protection and sage advice, whether
always welcomed or not.

If such a broader debate were possible, it might make sense to suggest that
U.S. forces now caught in Iraq's sectarian strife could serve the cause of
regional peace much more if they helped Israel remove its settlements from
the Golan Heights and the West Bank, clearing the way for peace treaties
with Syria and the Palestinians.

The United States also could achieve substantial goodwill in the Muslim
world by shifting some U.S. reconstruction money from Iraq to improving the
economic infrastructure of the Palestinians. That way, there might be some
attractive life alternatives to young people otherwise tempted to join the
ranks of suicide bombers.

But these options have little hope as long as the American political/media
structure remains closed to fresh ideas.

In that sense, the Nov. 7 elections represented less a decisive victory
against Bush's grim vision than a hopeful opportunity to turn the American
Republic back toward its great traditions and forward into a rational
future.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson