Note to Readers:
   During 1997 Mid-East Experts, Academics, and Activists throughout the world have started reading, supporting, and contributing to "Mid-East Realities"; and we have been able to add much to our web site
and continue our unique weekly TV program.  Now we very much need your help if we are to be able to move ahead and to have more impact in the year ahead.  Please message us and join us at this critical
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        "MER is excellent. I don't know of any other
        publication that so consistently and fearlessly
        tells the truth about the oppressive order in the
        Middle East that has long been based on an alliance
        between Washington, the Israelis, and the Arab
        client regimes."

              Prof. Glenn Perry, Dept of Pol Sci, Indiana State Univ.

MER - Washington - 25 December:
     The Israelis are terribly nervous about Iran.  They do everything they can -- which is quite considerable as they quite literally have de facto agents working at the highest levels of the entire Clinton
Administration -- to foment anti-Iranian attitudes and prevent any American-Iranian rapproachment.  And it remains quite conceivable that after further crippling Iraq the American Empire may still turn its covert and military forces against Iran and try to substantially weaken Iran's fast-growing regional military power or even bring about a counter-revolution.  For a basic part of the very structure of the "new world order" in the Middle East is that the U.S and Israel alone rule and alone possess weapons of mass destruction.  Indeed, Israel's military power alone is some seven or eight times greater than the combined forces of all the Arab countries, according to Jane's Military Review!
    It is not the Arabs that really worry the Israelis these days. So far Arab civilization has proven itself completely unable to stand up to the Western encroachments of the post-Ottoman period.  Most Arab
governments and elites have been compromised and co-opted, infiltrated and rendered impotent, many times over.  The so-called "Arab world" remains miserably divided and confused, its institutions backward and feeble.  Today's "Peace Process" by which Israel's conquests are validated and Palestinians are put on Reservations and Bantustans surrounded by military check-points and roadblocks -- could not have
proceeded as it has but for the active support of the Arab "client-regimes" and their embrace by the corrupt businessmen clique that is at the core of the Arafat regime.
    The main Arab client-regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and Amman, along with the lesser client-regimes in the Gulf, Kuwait, and Tunis, are indeed an integral part of this Pax Americana -- but only so long as they acquiesce in it, only so long as they accept the dictates that flow from it.
    No one else according to this grand imperial concept -- which is of course defined by the "dual containment" policy first enunciated by Israel's senior voice in Washington, the new Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Martin Indyk -- is to be allowed to amass the power to truly challenge this overall arrangement.
    It is thus quite fitting that the EVENT OF THE YEAR in the Middle East took place more in the Muslim world than in the Arab world, and took place not in any of the Arab countries, but rather in Tehran. It is also fitting that this amazingly successful conference took place just a few weeks after the American-Israeli "economic summit" conference -- an important structure of the "new world order" --
fizzled in Doha.
    The Turkish nationalist and Islamic forces have so far been outmanuevered by Israel and the U.S. which have struck up a very close relationship with the brutal Turkish military.  But in Iran
independence and assertiveness continue to threaten this "new world order", as well as the Arab client regimes that support it and parasitically feed on it.
     The Tehran Islamic summit earlier this month was pregnant with precisely the kinds of changes, attitudes, and potential challenges, that make both Israel and the U.S. very jumpy.  Having brought Iraq
down through nearly genocidal policies -- first by dropping some 100,000+ bombs on the country and second by using even food and medicine warfare to cripple and render destitute the population --
the current lurking obsession of those building the "new world order" is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
     "The OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) summit turned out to be a historical event and a turning point in the Islamic World," Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, noted on 11 December.  "The
unprecedented unity within the Islamic World which was realized with the unanimous agreement on the final resolution gives hope of settling the problems of the world Muslims," Khamenei continued.
     Now of course there is much here that is simply political hyperbole -- Iran's leaders taking advantage of the substantial opportunities presented to them by the devastation of their enemy, Iraq; the growing disenchantment with American power and Israeli arrogance throughout the region; and the very exposed position taken by the "client-regimes" in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey, in lining up with the U.S. and Israel (no matter what their deceptive rhetoric).
     But even discounting these words in this way, and further realizing the serious possibility of Israeli-American manipulation of public opinion to allow for a crippling blow against Iran in the years ahead, the Tehran Islamic Summit is definitely the most significant Middle Eastern EVENT OF THE YEAR 1997 now ending.