Fix the Middle East…
Fixing the Middle East…
says Professor Leonard Carrier, would be “simple”.
I say it’s not, and furthermore, I’m beginning to wonder if fixing either the Middle East or what’s left Of America is worth it.
(An Exchange of Views between Len Carrier and Dusty Schoch on The Escalating violence in the Middle East)
FIX THE MIDDLE EAST
By Leonard Carrier
…A Simple Plan
How can we stop the escalating violence in the Middle East? I offer a simple plan that can be implemented by President Bush immediately. I propose that our president tell the Israeli government: (1) to stop its attacks on Lebanon, withdraw its forces, and announce a unilateral cease fire, (2) to lift the siege of Gaza, (3) to apologize for killing civilians in Lebanon and Gaza, (3) to repair damage to the infrastructure Israel has destroyed, (4) to release Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons, (5) to start negotiations immediately to end the occupation of Palestine by removing all the settlements on the West Bank, offering a compromise on the governance of Jerusalem, and discussing proper compensation in lieu of a right of return for those people displaced by the Israeli state. Would such a plan work? Of course it would. All our president has to do is threaten to cut off our annual $2.5 billion tax-funded aid to Israel if does not do these things and instruct our UN representative to propose economic sanctions on Israel, as well. The only reason Israel is pushing the envelope in over-reacting to attacks on Israeli soldiers is that our government has stood on the sidelines and allowed them to do it. Will Hamas and Hezbollah then stop their terror attacks. Of course they will. Once Israel does what our president tells it to do, and the Palestinian state approaches nearer to realization, the militants would be marginalized and the Israeli state would be secure. Why hasn’t our president even considered such a plan, a plan that would put him right up there with Mohandas Ghandi as one of the world’s greatest peace makers? My take on it is that he continues to get very bad advice, and he doesn’t know how to stop following it.
Len Carrier *
*(Dr. Leonard Carrier received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Miami in ’56 and ’58, respectively, and his Ph.D from Stanford in 1967. He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and the University of South Florida (Tampa) before spending the rest of his teaching and research career (29 years until 2000) at the University of Miami. )
- IT WON’T WORK AND…
- Do we really want to save what America is becoming?
By: Dusty Schoch
You say: “A Simple Solution”….I say “A Clean Break” and finally I ask: How fired up are you to “save” America?
It makes perfect sense, Len. But the simpler fact is nothing Israel does is done without advance U.S. covert approval. Syria is one of our prime targets in the Armageddon Rapture promised-oil operations manual. Israel’s rockets are now hitting really close to that border. “A Clean Break” is still the covert U.S. policy and Cheney is still implementing Wolfowitz’ plan that executes the Wurmser’s Clean Break.
I’m just about to the point Marlow says Kurtz reached in Heart of Darkness… “Exterminate the Brutes”. Or at least a corollary of it: Let them exterminate each other. Sons of Isaac and Ishmael have been doing this forever. We are allied with Israel and the alliance is clerically and corporately-driven imperialism, one for the honey (as in milk) and two for the dough (oil), three to make ready (Jews+Christians+Corporations) and “go cat (cataclysm) go”.
Evangelical Christians are now openly (turn on your TV) espousing this war as end-time pre-destined Armageddon. It’s Christian/Jewish Zionist Rapture Herrenvolk. Bush is their collective crusading “Captain”. No one’s going to stop this juggernaut unless it’s the clerics…or rather a revolt among the true followers of Islam and Christ. The scariest part of this global clerical insanity is that the Jews and Christian fundies think they can play these end-time games in a pro-active way and Jesus and/or his Father will come and clean up the mess when it’s over. I don’t think the creative writers of Old or New Testament scripture foresaw or factored in the 100,000-year half life of plutonium fallout.
Your proposal is sane and on the money, but totally fairytale. U.S. aid to Israel is given precisely to wage the on-going war with Palestine…and beyond. The vestige of hope (dwindling) I have is still in having the clerics declare peace.http://democratswrite.com/articles_by_democrats/page31.htm
Great dreaming, my friend, but it’s wake-up time. I’ve smelled the coffee. We both, however, need to drink it and get creative. Our country is in the hands of pseudo-Christian crusaders, just as Germany in the late 30’s. Our demagogic exploiter is every bit as crazy as Hitler; every single bit. He has bankrupted our country and ended every major alliance we have save England, and England’s not a major military ally. We’re in deep shit and the only shovel we’re holding is a nuclear button for self-destruction. Our nation today stands as a macro-cosmic Jihad warrior shouting in the Global mall…”Do it my way or it’s Holocaust Highway”. I’m almost to the point of getting philosophic about it. I am (sincerely) looking at property in Panama. I am seriously searching for a 60-foot sea-worthy hull. I am a resident alien. I am salivating for the safety and sanctuary of the open sea.
How long, Len, should we rage against the dying of something? What is left of America? Let’s write about that.
Turn on your TV and read your paper. Please show me something of our society (besides a minority of scattered souls who remember the American dream the way we do) you want to preserve. I think the glorious ride may be over.
A country dies when it’s dreams evaporate. We’re a nation of very ignorant and heedless hedonists. We’ve shipped to other shores our productive and creative labor and work ethic; we’ve exchanged ambition for entitlements; We’ve converted Jesus, Prince of Peace to Christ the crusading Zionist conqueror.
Three decades ago we made the world’s best electric and other appliances, the best cars, furniture , textiles …everything. We now make nothing but weapons of mass destruction, and nuclear WMD’s and delivery capability is our only card to play now in international power games. These uglier-than-even-us Arab sheiks have more power and wealth under their sand than we do because of the new “oil standard” of wealth in this new, hell-bent for eco-armageddon global culture of ours.
All the remaining power-hitters on this dying globe are now moving their mighty military minions to the Middle East as forecast in “The Road Warrior” movie….to secure their share of “the juice”. We’re pretty much, Len, you, I and a dwindling mini-minority, a vanishing species in this country. Watch what the x-generation is generating…It’s all narcissistic warring of all against all. The nightmare scenario we heard about in sociology 101, that converted Rome to ruins.
GWB showed us his colors in his first 4 years and was re-elected (almost). We can’t blame the Supreme Court….enough of us voted for a fascist dictator to take his election to court. He “won”. Blue (thinkers) are now the minority among a burgeoning sea of righteously-ignorant red that swells like earth’s own, and for the same globally-warming reasons.
I’m serious, Len. Let’s write about an issue that might, in the debating, turn things around: What’s left of America worth saving? NASCAR? A porn industry whose annual gross would redeem the national debt in a decade? A population of SUV-driving kiss-my-polar-ice crack heads? A union of evangelical (crazy) Christians and state which has converted the Christian Church to the most dangerous lobby since Exxon/mobile and tobacco? NASSA allied science that concentrates 2 percent studying the heavens and 98 percent on how to more efficiently and accurately decimate earth?
When I was a kid, Len, High Point, my home town, was furniture capitol of the world. More furniture was made within 50 miles of my door than everywhere else in the world. We called our furniture club “The String and Splinter Club” because we were also one of the world’s great textile centers. All my industrial buddies (sons who inherited these industries from their industrious dreaming dads) have sold out. They did it piecemeal (one “line” of products at a time) to lower the profile of their Enronian personal-profit plans. The were finally all “constrained” to do it because it was the only way to compete in the global market. Now I’ve suggested we rename our club the “Lint and Dust” Club.
Corporate-run industry of all kinds has turned cannibal. Corporation gobbling up corporation. Unlimited power at the top sucking the blood of the laboring corpus until the labor languishes and the productive burden is shipped to leaner and hungrier shoulders in sweatshops abroad. Predatory marketing prevails as the new American paradigm. Wallymart fist assassinates Kmart, and then feeds off its own and the life blood of its foreign labor. Wallgreens strategically moves its stores right next door to its competitors in areas that cannot support 2 stores, and the bully thrives and the moms and pops die, and all the City Councils’ young cannibals endorse the process because it’ll expand the tax basis.
TV portrays and emulates the new cannibalism with cut-your-neighbor’s throat celebrations in the so-called “reality” shows, where art is eliminated and the object is –always—screw your neighbor before he screws you. The new “American Idol” is elected in a process whose 98-percent effort is exerted in humiliating the 3000 artistic souls who competed for the “honor”.
Welcome to the war of the worlds, the war of all against all. You can’t choose sides because there are none in reality any more. The corporations ultimately machinating the war in the Middle East are transnational. Money has no borders. Money has no allegiances. Money is naturally akin to the most noxious element on earth…Mercury. Money, like “quick silver” gravitates and adheres to itself. It can molecularly bond with any element and in so doing renders the resulting compound manifold times more toxic than itself. Money like mercury is now in our teeth and brain. It can assume any shape and seep into cracks and crevasses too small for the human eye to detect and interdict.
In a nutshell, here’s what’s happening in the Middle East and nothing simple’s going to alter it:
Two decades ago the world’s biggest bullies, U.S. and Russia saw the Sheiks get out of line, mark up the crude barrels and flex their muscles on the sheer (and correct) conviction that, since there were two nuclear bullies out there, neither would have the balls to take over the milk and honey juice under Arab sand. Afghanistan was the proving ground. That country was targeted by Russia because it could provide a pipeline for importing the juice when and if either power took over the Middle East.
America defeated Russia (and their pipe line pipe dream) in Afghanistan as Communist Russia defeated the U.S. in Viet Nam. Our stinger missiles pretty much did the trick, coupled with our C.I.A. schooling of bin Laden and his Al Qaeda warriors.
That was in 1992. With Russia’s failure, rose American/Israeli combined religious and corporate ambition.
Today there is no real difference between clerical and corporate America, as the wedding of Evangelical Christianity to corporations via the TV broadcast media is now consummated.
Eight years pass during which the Zionist Jews actively preach and teach (via U.S. think tanks, Institutes and Foundations) the methodology in taking over the Middle East, calling it a “re-ordering process”, and this plan was inherent in the “Mein Kamph” of World War Three, which has been under way since 9/11/01. “A Clean Break” is the Mein Kamph of which I speak, and it was tendered to and rejected by a sane Netanyahu in 1998. This new Middle Eastern order was, by Netanyahu seen for what it was, a thinly-veiled plan for U.S. invasion and take-over at the symbiotic instigation of their little Jewish puppet state…Israel.
You could make a case for WW III’s having begun in 1948 with the declaration of Israeli statehood, as every battle for the maintenance of that statehood was fought and won with U.S. Military machinery, training and aid.
England may have been instrumental in the formation of Israel, but America has been wholly responsible for its establishment and maintenance. This reality is not a secret in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the informed world.
But, defense of Israel has never been a “friendly” or selfless undertaking from American standpoint. They are our friends now because they are our only port of unrestricted call in the middle of the alien-Islamics’ oil fields. They are our Kurtz in the heart of Islamic petroleum darkness. At one time, we were the Marlowe’s, conscientiously trying to bring crazy-Kurtz Israel around to quitting its genocidal games with its Arab neighbors. But this was mission impossible from the date of inception (48). You can’t displace Arabs in the heart of Islam with Jews and sit back and say, “It’s a done deal”. The Hatfields and McCoys of the Old Testament will never ever be a done deal.
But that doesn’t militate against the Clean Break plan of Middle Eastern oil take-over. It in fact makes the plan
Doable. It’s the virtual back bone of the plan. So long as Israel is playing its “Fort Apache in the Bronx” game in the heart of petro darkness, there will be turmoil, and where there is warring turmoil, the U.S. will have an excuse to maintain its military allied presence. It takes an I.Q. of at least 60 to master this Middle-Eastern math.
But you must keep your eyes on the doughnut and not the hole. The hole is 9/11, Homeland Security, Saddham, al Qaeda, bin Laden, Hezzbolla, Hamas, Zionism, Rapture, Armageddon and most of all …TERRORISM. The doughnut is oil. The JUICE. The juice is the corporations’ currency and currency is the corporations’ life blood.
From Netanyahu’s rejection of “A Clean Break” in ’98 to the Bush Doctrine of 2001, was only about 3 years.
The war to take over the Middle East needed a pretext, and 9/11 became it. We all know the rest of the story.
The “Bush Doctrine” that “justified” the U.S. invasions sequentially of Afghanistan and then Iraq, was simply an execution of the Wurmser’s Clean Break. It was machinated through the A.E.I. (American Enterprise Institute) and more precisely, via David Frum’s recording of Richard Perle’s dictation of the essential phrase (Bush Doctrine) in GWB’s address to Congress that declared WWIII – That being, that “America would tolerate no nation harboring terrorists”. That doctrine was the carte blanch—and pretext– to invade any country in the world, including all Arab countries, but excluding essentially no sovereign nation. The details are still documented in the July 2003 Vanity Fair.
These “institutes” and “foundations” are funded with the money their shareholders have in stock and other wealth. These institutes (A.E.I., the Wurmsers’ pet Hudson Institute ,P.N.A.C, etc.) hire as their “objective” policy-preaching gurus, and think-tank leaders, old-guard politicians who are re-cycled in and out of corporate and political chairs like Dick Cheney and G.W.B., i.e. in oil-drilling business or oil-refining failure one day and elected politicians the next.
These corporations are running the world and currently waging war to control the juice (oil/energy). Who ever controls the energy controls the wealth. The “hole” is terrorism, WMD’s, assaults by so-called “insurgents” on Israel and American soldiers (actually invaders and internationally criminal occupiers of Iraq and Afghanistan).
In the process of waging their war for the “juice”, and through their virtual control of the media and the fundamental religions in America (now merged with corporations as said before), the corporations have, in classical Orwellian (1984) fashion brainwashed and anesthetized America’s “red” citizens and with fear and repetitions of the “big lies” (WMD’s, wanting to “democratize” Iraq, etc.) have lobotomized a weakling, waning and lazy nation into believing that killing 60,000 civilians (in Iraq and Afghanistan) without provocation can be…for any reason…justified…even rendered “righteous”.
The corporations have succeeded in America in gaining a nation’s endorsement of and participation in unprovoked genocide…for the purpose of securing the juice.
With all the evidence in…that the WMD’s etc. were lies, and the war was in fact “unjust” and for the oil, and that the Vice President’s own corporate boss (Halliburton) was engineering the war for the juice and sale of the juice, we Americans re-elected these criminals.
America has become a criminal fascist nation. We are, alone, waging World War III to secure control of the Middle East. Bush’s little bitch Tony B and his GB soldiers don’t count as a meaningful “sovereign” ally. We have none.
We could stop Israel’s bombing of Palestine and Lebanon instantly (as Len Carrier suggests) simply by threatening to terminate our fiscal support of Israel without which they couldn’t survive, much less wage war. We don’t do this because Israel’s war is necessary for ours to continue. The next target in the “Clean Break” war plan is Syria…and/ or Iran…after which we (and our Bush royal relatives in Saudi Arabia) will own both the juice and the juice pipeline. Then it will be most probable that the proverbial Armageddon manure will hit the Middle Eastern fan…all depending on whether Russia and/or China will let us get away with grabbing the juice without paying a price that can only be calculated on a nuclear-powered calculator.
And in case you haven’t read the papers, Russia and China are already gearing up for their allied response to Corporate America’s (not overly) covert plan to commandeer the juice machine.
The question remains, Len, can you think of any reasons to get fired up about saving a country that would let this sort of thing happen…at best…out of ignorance? If I were young enough to join and participate actively in a physical revolution, I would at least attempt to start a movement whereby the blue states (actually all the intelligent and educated metro areas of America) would secede from the red (the rural, ignorant and religiously right). In effect, the red states, in re-electing Bush were voting to continue America’s evolution from benign democracy to fascistic imperialist. When is it the “right time” to man the life boats when you know you’re sailing on Titanic? Have you checked on property values in Panama? Sailing…anyone?
Dusty
July 18, 2006
LEN’S (BEAUTIFUL) FINAL RESPONSE…
A VOICE OF COURAGE and
A BREATH OF HOPE
Dusty sees the world as it is. I see it as I would like it to be. I think that Dusty would like it to be the way I would like it to be, but he sees no hope of getting there from the way it is. He paints a grim but fairly accurate picture of our present foreign policy: an imperialistic venture fueled by the corrosive combination of greedy corporations, military war-mongers, and fervent Armageddonists. I say fairly accurate because I don’t think that we’re calling the shots with these present Israeli military ventures. The United States and Israel have different interests. It just so happens that these interests now coincide. We want a strong military ally in the Middle East as a counterweight to Syria and Iran so we can grab the oil; and they want us to stand aside so they can complete their takeover of the rest of Palestine. In both our countries the hard-liners have taken over, and we’re now at their mercy. So my simple plan is really not one I expect Bush to implement. He’s too far gone down the wrong path.
But that doesn’t mean we should give up pointing out the right path–although my preference would be Paris over Panama if it ever came to that–because I think our country is worth fighting for. I used to say that we get the government we deserve, but then a friend reminded me that I’m not getting the government I deserve, and Dusty is not getting the government he deserves, and there are lots of Israelis who aren’t getting the government they deserve, either. So what do we do about it? I say we keep reminding people that we’ve gone through bleaker periods in our history–like the Great Depression and World War II–and we’ve come out of them. We should keep insisting that our Constitution says that our the government is constituted “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” with no mention at all of big business. We keep exposing the corruption and the war-profiteering of corporations; we tell the Bible-thumpers to get out of politics and get back in their churches and synagogues; we refuse to be called “anti-Semitic” when we point out the immoral actions of the Israeli government; we keep reminding our elected officials that they are supposed to be serving us and not themselves and their fat-cat cronies. And when these officials don’t listen, we set up a hue and cry and drive them from office.
Right now the militarists, the fat-cats, the hegemonists, the pious religionists, and the smug Wall Street types have the upper hand. But remember that it’s always supposed to be darkest before dawn. Winston Churchill said it best: never give up–never, never, never, never.
– Len Carrier
Dusty, Signing Off…
Thanks, Len for the breath of courage and fresh air. At Valley Forge I’d have been the shivering boy just about to sneak away back to his Shenandoah valley home, and you’d have been….Well, Thanks, General. I’ll try and bundle up and keep watch another fortnight. But I have to say, you’ve got me thinking about Paris…that thought may keep me warm these nightmarishly bleak nights.
Dusty
July 18, 2006
