AMERICA AND THE
MIDDLE EAST.
It really is my great pleasure to be here this
evening with you at Purdue. I'm very
grateful to Professor Kamalipour and to the Center
for Global Studies for inviting me.
My way of expressing this gratitude is to have a
very candid and serious discussion with you this
evening about our country's policies in that
critical area of the world known, thanks to the
British, as The Middle East.
Right from the start let me say, so you can put
all I will share with you this evening in
perspective, that overall I believe our policies
in the Middle East to be grossly misguided, to be
dangerous to ourselves as well as to others, and
to be the result of ominous special interests that
are out-of-control in our country and need to be
checked.
When we Americans talk about
the Middle East and about foreign policy in
general we do so in a kind of sanitized way making
terrible realities and our complicity in causing
them much more palatable for
ourselves.
We talk about such things as whether we support
one political party or the other, one leader or
another, one policy or
another. We understandably
respond to slogans about "duty, honor, and
country" and we too often innocently accept what
we know to be exaggerations, misleading
simplifications, and falsehoods. We
understandably mourn the thousands of Americans
who are killed and
injured.
But somehow we rarely seem to realize that the
people who live in the Middle East cherish their
own cultures, religions, families, countries and
lives just as we do. We fail to
realize that it is they who feel invaded and
violated and that they feel they have been forced
to fight for their "duty, honor, country and
freedom".
Rarely do our public officials or corporate media
talk about us as
the rest of the world has come to know us -- as
neo-imperialists, as a superpower that uses
its vast spying and military capabilities to
infiltrate and control, to coerce and bribe,
to co-opt and take out those who refuse to succumb
and comply to our interests and
dictates.
Rarely is a John Perkins, author of the CIA
tell-all CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN, or a
Chris Hedges -- or Arundahti Roy or Paul Craig
Roberts or Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky or Ramsey
Clark or John Pilger -- invited on our major news
programs and never ever as regulars as are so many
far lesser others. Indeed many of you
may not even know many of these names though they
are all giants around the world and students in
Europe and the Middle East know them!
Indeed for the people of the Middle East
everything is far more serious, far more real, and
the order of magnitude of death, destruction, and
suffering is far far greater. In
the Middle East the actual result of our policies,
of our mistakes, even in just recent years
is quite mind-boggling. We are talking
about, literally, millions of people who have been
killed, many more millions who have been injured
for life, many more millions who have become
destitute refugees, once normal middle-class
families forced to sell their own daughters into
prostitution to survive. Most of us have no
comprehension what it means to suffer in such
ways, or even to face "crippling
sanctions" so there is not
even affordable medicine or baby food.
Most of us have no idea what it means to go to
sleep at night haunted by anxiety that a
mysterious American drone will attack before we
awake.
In the Middle East we are actually talking about
whole countries that have been destroyed and about
American culpability, complicity, and
responsibility that we rarely if ever hear
seriously discussed by our leaders in Washington
or the corporate media that so caters to
them.
Let me give just one telling example. In the
years before we invaded Iraq the policy was to
sanction, weaken and cripple Iraq.
When an Assistant Secretary General of the U.N.
was sent to Baghdad in 1995 and learned first-hand
what was happening -- that every month 5000
children alone were dying because of the sanctions
-- he not only very publicly resigned in protest
he very publicly charged the U.S. with "genocide."
Asked about this the American Secretary of State
at the time, Madelein Albright, said that though
she was sorry, this was necessary and "worth
it" to punish Saddam
Hussein...who by the way just a few years before
had been our own strong-man ally! And so
Denis Halliday resigned from his top U.N.
position, and like John Perkins, has been speaking
and writing in atonement ever since. A
few years later his successor, Sergio De Mello, a
man many thought might one day be U.N.
Secretary-General, was blown up sitting in his
office in Baghdad.
We are all here tonight because we want to know
more and understand more about what our country is
really doing in the Middle East. And we want
to know more about what we should support and what
we should oppose....and why.
So for this one night please allow me to take you
away from the daily headlines, the swirl of
current events, and to explore with you the deep
historical roots of what we are all collectively
living through. We need to free
ourselves from the daily chatter in order to
explore why what
is happening today is happening. How did
we get to these events? What
alternatives did we
have in the past? What
alternatives do we
still have today rather than the tragic and quite
possibly cataclysmic course we are
on?
There is a central basic
question we should keep in mind tonight as I
remind you of many events. Why are
we so focused on the Middle East in the first
place? Why is
there such escalating what we call "terrorism" in
and from that region? Why all the
hatred for our country -- policies
not people -- that causes
us to make our Embassies into fortresses, to
barricade ourselves in fear, to super spy on
everyone, friend and foe alike, so that even many
of our own citizens believe we have become an
Orwellian state, a disguised police state,
so much so that we are in danger of no
longer being the home of the brave and the land of
the free?
The situation we are living in today didn't start
with 9/11. Indeed 9/11 was
far more a result of
our policies than a cause. And not
just our own policies but those of our key allies
in the region, the two most important of which are
Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which have very
powerful but very different lobbies in Washington
where I have now lived and worked for more than 30
years.
Nor did today's situation begin as some suggest
with the creation of Israel and destruction of
Palestine in 1948. That too was a
result, not in itself the cause.
The phase of world history with the
centrality of the Middle East really began about a
hundred years ago at the time when the entire
region was called the Ottoman Empire and when it
was far easier to travel between Cairo and
Jerusalem and Damascus than it is
today.
For we "New World" Americans,
a hundred years ago is a very long time. But
for the people of the Middle East where there are
churches and synagogues that go back thousands of
year into pre-Islamic times, a hundred years is a
relatively short period in their own history.
Now quite obviously I am going to have to
tremendously summarize much in the next
minutes. What I'm going to share with
you is not just a bunch of events and dates
but also my own conclusions about what really
happened and with what lasting impact.
I'm well aware some of you will find some of these
conclusions troubling. And rightly
so. Indeed when I first heard others
speaking about and explaining what has happened I
remember myself being quite upset and
skeptical.
But serious learning is a struggle and we have to
be able and willing to alter our thinking and
conclusions along the way. That's what
real education is about...not just talking with
each other in our own society but meeting other
people on their own turf, engaging in honest
exchanges with them, relating to them, respecting
them, and trying to share and appreciate their own
fears, pains, and aspirations.
We who are such priviledged citizens of the
superpower whose actions impact not only ourselves
but the entire globe bear the greatest
responsibility of all to truly educate ourselves.
Like many of you I should mention I come from the
Midwest, grew up in Duluth, went to college in
Appleton Wisconsin at Lawrence University where I
first studied government and economics.
Then I left for law school at NYU and then
graduate school at Princeton. What
changed me, what led me to different conclusions
than I would have otherwise reached I'm
sure, was not just being so fortunate to go to
such great American universities. What
really changed me was getting to know people and
having relationships with people around the world
-- especially those I had been taught to believe
were supposed to be my enemies as an American and especially as
an American Jew. Such changes for me
started when I lived for two years at
International House in New York with 600 graduate
students from all around the
world. The changes escalated greatly
when I became the U.N. Representative of the
International Student Movement and in four years
traveled to 35 countries at a critical time in my
own life. Overall I have made about
200 international trips, about half of them to
countries in the Middle East.
Now, let's get to the origins, to the heart, of
what's wrong in the Middle East and why there is
so much war and so little peace in our
lifetime.
It was on one of my many trips to the region that
I found myself in a large Tel Aviv bookstore
searching for an adventure novel to escape with on
the long flight home. I had learned to
decompress after going to refugee camps and
conflict areas by usually spending a few days in
Tel Aviv before flying back to Washington.
Like a deep-sea diver having to come up slowly or
risk getting the bends, I felt this was a way of
dealing with psychological bends. Not
finding a novel that got me excited I ended up in
the history section and came upon a book titled THE
PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE. BUT it
was the subtitle that got my attention, THE
PEACE TO END ALL PEACE. By the
time I got to Washington the next day historian
David Fromkin had provided so much important
perspective, a framework for overall understanding
that I realized I had been missing.
What is happening in the Middle East today began
with the Peace to End all
Peace nearly a hundred
years ago. At the end of World War I,
President Woodrow Wilson spent 6
months in Paris determined
to construct a peaceful, lawful, prosperous, brave
new world. But Wilson's grand vision,
his 14-points anchored in self-determination, were
in the end buried in plots and sub-plots that
prevented the promised Arab State from ever coming
to be -- now as well as then.
Rather than independence demanded and expected by
the Arabs, the European powers at the time were
determined to take control of the region for
themselves. Like most things in life
there were multiple intertwined
reasons. The French were connected to
Africa as well as the Levant and European
"colonialism" was still the mindset of the day.
For the British the Middle East was on the
way to their sub-continent jewel, India.
Additionally there were religious teachings and
attitudes going back to the era of the
Crusaders. And more and more importantly,
the industrial revolution was becoming dependent
on oil and that black gold was in Arabia and the
neighboring areas that made up the heartland of
the Middle East region. Wilson was
preaching self-determination and democracy but
that's not really what he and the West were
practicing -- then or now.
And so THE
PEACE TO END ALL PEACE instead
led to an era of plots, revolutions, coups, wars,
covert ops and more recently drones.
Overall it has been a century of Western
neo-colonialism masked by mandates, misnamed peace
conferences, and "Arab
client regimes" doing our bidding
in return for money and special priviledges from
Western capitals. Regional leaders as
well as academics and journalists who have stood
up against this arrangement have been dealt with
one way or another through co-optation,
intimidation, black-mail, slander, and in some key
cases assassinations. Those who
have accommodated this arrangement have benefited
considerable -- the Saudi Royals, the Mubarak
regime and Generals for decades, the Hashemites of
Jordan, the small Gulf protectorates, and the
Israelis of course but they are a very special
case.
Even before the Paris Peace Conference while
Colonel Lawrence on behalf of the British
Government was promising the Arabs independence if
they fought to defeat the Ottomans, the British
and the French were secretly plotting to take
control of the region. The key document at
the time, top secret then of course back in
1916, is known today as the Sykes-Picot
agreement and it
essentially carved up the region between the two
colonial powers behind everyone's
back.
Also at this time the world Zionist
movement, itself with origins in
colonialist-minded Europe, was plotting to take
over Arab Palestine. The key document
for this came in 1917 and
is known as The Balfour
Declaration. While named for the
British Foreign Minister, it was really the first
Jewish Justice of the American Supreme Court,
Louis Brandeis, a close confidant of President
Wilson, who as much as anyone authored it.
And so, in 1919 In
Paris and in follow-up conferences in Cairo and
throughout the region, THE
PEACE TO END ALL PEACE was
crafted and then codified in a system called Mandates supposedly
legitimized by the new League of Nations.
But in reality it was the victorious armies of the
British and the French that enforced the new
arrangements in the now severely fractured Middle
East, with ten thousand French troops soon to
invade Damascus when the Arabs attempted to
establish a regional government there.
These are the years and the means by which
the artificial borders of key countries including
Iraq and Syria were defined by the Western powers
for their own purposes. With continual
divide and conquer schemes the Ottoman Empire was
carved up with new entities becoming Western
enclaves and protectorates including TransJordan,
Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE. Key countries
became "Arab client regimes" -- Saudi Arabia and
Iraq among them and in later years, Iran under the
Shah. Most of these areas became saddled
with Royal families or ruthless dictators
empowered by the British and French and then in
the years after World War II by our own
country.
For an American analogy just imagine if
foreign powers had manipulated our states in our
formative years so that places called West
Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, California
and New Mexico had all become nominally
independent countries but were actually controlled
and played of against each other from
abroad. Imagine if our continent were
consumed by divisions and feuds and we had border
checks and visa requirements and numerous armies
all arming against each other.
Arab protests and demonstrations began
immediately as rumors swirled what was
happening. The first Palestine
Assembly was held in 1917 to renounce the Balfour
Declaration and demand immediate independence.
In 1929 anti-British
anti-Zionist demonstrations erupted in what was
still known then to the entire world as
Palestine.
A few years later from 1936
to 1939 the Palestinian
people again rose up in a remarkably sustained
rebellion suppressed by the British with mass
killings, arrests, and hangings, and then more
promises of Arab self-determination that were soon
betrayed.
After World War II in 1946 the
new United Nations desperately tried to square the
circle and prevent what we have come to know as
the the Arab-Israeli Conflict. In the
process the first U.N. peace envoy, Count Folk
Bernadette, was assassinated by Jewish
paramilitary in Jerusalem, the famous King David
Hotel was blown up, and the era of modern-day
"terrorism" began.
Interestingly, in those days, a major debate
was underway in Washington over what policies the
U.S. should pursue in the Middle East -- and in
some ways this debate has continued in starts and
stops until today. George Marshall,
then Secretary of State after his role as the most
senior war General, even threatened to resign
because he felt what President Truman was doing
was dangerously politically driven rather than in
the best interests of the country and world peace.
Exhausted by World War II the British Empire
had to pull back from both Palestine and India --
but it left in its wake the two conflicts which
even today could erupt into regional, even
nuclear, confrontation -- the Arab-Israeli
conflict and that between India and Pakistan
over Kashmir.
A few years later, in 1953,
the Iranian people tried to assert their
independence and democracy only to have their
efforts undone by the CIA which reimposed the
ruthless Shah upon them for another
generation!
Then a few years later in 1956, the Brits
and the French colluded with the Israelis to put
down Arab nationalism, then centered in Egypt, by
concocting a war to seize Sinai and the Suez
Canal. In this rare case the American
President, Eisenhower, put his foot down and
stopped that war -- but in doing so he greatly
escalated U.S. involvement in the region which
also then became embroiled in the Cold War with
Russia.
Eisenhower devoted his final speech to the
nation not to smiles and platitudes but rather to
an unprecedented warning that there was a
dangerous military-industrial complex that had to
be brought under control.
Immediately upon taking office President Kennedy,
fearing the ramifications of a Middle East
regional arms race, tried to stop the Israelis
from building nuclear weapons. But the
Israelis not only defied Kennedy they tricked the
inspectors he insisted on sending by constructing
false doors and passageways and secret hidden
underground facilities that successfully hid their
secret nuclear weapons facilities.
Then came the Israeli-instigated 1967 war
whose ramifications we still live with as that is
when the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Syria's
Golan Heights all were occupied. Rarely
spoken about and still unadmitted is the
considerable U.S. complicity in what happened.
The U.S. sent highly valuable secret spy
equipment and de-uniformed military personnel that
made it possible for the Israelis to quickly win
the war and take possession of all of historic
Palestine west of the Jordan.
A few years later, in 1971, the
Egyptians began the War of Attrition along the
Suez Canal and then the 1973 War
during which the U.S. sent a vast air bridge of
military equipment to the Israelis and faced down
the Russians in what was called a "nuclear
alert". After the war the Israelis
raced ahead with settlements and escalated their
occupation policies on the path that has led to
the worse-than-apartheid situation of today.
The Iranian Revolution and the taking of
American hostages came in 1979 greatly
changing our own history as these events led to
Ronald Reagan becoming President. The same
year the U.S. orchestrated the Israel-Egyptian
peace treaty and then caved when the Israelis
backed out of the key Palestinian provisions.
A few months later, masterminded by National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Soviets
were trapped into invading Afghanistan and then
the next year, 1980, the U.S. pushed our ally at
the time, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, to invade Iran
with the aim of upending the Islamic
revolution. That horrible war went on for 8
awful years, millions were killed, and before it
was over the Iraqis used chemical weapons
clandestinely supplied by the United States and
killing many thousands of civilians.
Then in 1981 the
Israelis attacked Iraq destroying a nuclear
reactor near Baghdad and the next year they
invaded Lebanon, repeatedly breaking promises to
the U.S. about their intentions. Israel's
invasion and the subsequent occupation of southern
Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah and the
era of suicide bombers who first struck both the
American Embassy and Marine Barracks in Beirut
killing hundreds.
In 1990, still then our strong-man ally,
Saddam Hussein was manipulated into invading
Kuwait and the Saudi King was deceived to get his
OK for American troops to be stationed in "The
Kingdom" for the first time. That set
the region and the world on the course to 9/11 a
decade later.
The next year Islamic parties won a
democratic election in Algeria but with help and
support from the Americans and their Arab client
regimes a military coup led to a brutal Algerian
civil war...something a kin to what is happening
these days in Egypt.
Then came another another kind of PEACE TO
END ALL PEACE. In a one-of-a-kind
White House event 3000 people celebrated the hand
shake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin
presided over quite graphically by Bill
Clinton. But earlier this month
on the 20th anniversary of this unprecedented
event there were no celebrations. Indeed
rather than peace, that conflict has greatly
escalated and may now be intractable.
Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, was
assassinated a few years later by a right-wing
Israeli. And after squeezing him for all
they could get the Israelis stealth assassinated
Arafat in 2004 after he defiantly refused to sign
away Palestinian rights and give up the struggle.
During the Clinton years the U.S. attempted
coups to topple Saddam, then used brutal economic
sanctions, no-fly-zones, and bombs so that by the
Bush/Cheney years Iraq was ripe for American
invasion. Before he left the White
House Clinton made one final grasp for another
Israeli-Palestinian agreement, desperately trying
to get the man who was his most frequent foreign
guest in the White House, none other than Yasser
Arafat, to do what the U.S. and Israel
demanded. That too failed and soon
exploded making everything still worse.
And that brings us to this 21st century in
which General Ariel Sharon was soon to became
Prime Minister of Israel, with Bush/Cheney and the
Neocons fully empowered in the United
States. That's when 9/11 came.
Now for a few final minutes before I turn
the evening over to you and your questions --
which I urge you to make serious and pointed and
no holds barred -- let me share with you some
conclusions about 9/11 and how our country and
world changed as a result.
As for what really happened on that date I like
many others have great doubts about the government
story. But that's not what I'm here to talk
with you about tonight. Even the
Co-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission have major
doubts about their own report as they have
admitted they now believe they were purposefully "set
up to fail". What we all know is
that as a result of 9/11 our country has been
involved in Middle East land wars and what is
called the "War on Terrorism" --
millions of people are dead, countries are
destroyed, millions more are homeless refugees,
the whole region is in chaos and turmoil, and what
we are told is the enemy, al-Qaeda,
whatever that is, has spread and
metasticized and we are it seems less secure and
more fearful than ever.
What we know for sure is that the Neo-cons and the
associated Military-Industrial complex that
Eisenhower so warned us about were all set to
pounce as soon as 9/11 happened. They
had put all the pieces in place. They had
even published a major document saying that a new
Pearl Harbor was needed so they could pursue the
policies they advocated. Whether
by coincidence or design a small cabal of
like-minded friends, nearly all with intimate
connections to Israel, held most of the key
positions in government at the White House, State
Department, and the Pentagon, as never before or
since.
Let me share with you an extremely telling
story about 9/11 told by General Wesley Clark a
few years ago, himself the former Supreme Allied
Commander of NATO:
"About 10 days after
9/11 I went through the Pentagon and I saw
Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz
and I went downstairs just to say hello to some of
the people on the Joint Staff who use to work for
me and one of the Generals called me and said 'Sir
you've got to come in and talk to me a second.'
And he said 'We've made
the decision to go to war with Iraq!'
This is on or about the 20th of September
(2001). I said, 'We're
going to war with Iraq? Why?' And
he said, 'I don't know!'
'Well did they find some information
connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?' He
said "No no there's
nothing new that way. They just made the
decision to go to war with Iraq!'
So I came back to see him a few weeks later,
and by that time we were bombing in
Afghanistan. And I said 'Are
we still going to war with Iraq?'
'Oh its worse than that!' he
said. He reached over on his desk and picked
up a piece of paper and he said 'I
just got this down from upstairs today
(meaning the Secretary of Defenses
Office). This is a memo that describes
how we are going to take out seven countries
in 5 years, starting with Iraq and then Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and then
finishing off with Iran.'
I said 'Is it
classified?' He said 'Yes
Sir'! I said 'Then
don't show it to me!'
And I saw him a year or two ago and I said 'Do
you remember that?' And he said, 'Sir
I didn't show you that memo! I
didn't show it to you!'
Now, before your
questions some things for you to ponder after I'm
gone:
Imagine a different country
and world if President Eisenhower and Secretary of
State Marshall, both the most senior Generals of
our Army before their days in political positions,
had been listened to and our
military-industrial-corporate complex and war
lobbies had been brought under control.
Imagine if we hadn't been so lied to and
manipulated by our own government about 9/11 and
about how we should respond to it.
Imagine if we had accepted the Afghanistan offer
to turn Bin-Laden over to an international court
and let the evidence be presented. Imagine
if we had avoided all these years of killing and
hatred and so much money wasted, after all of
which the same Taliban and the same Mullah Omar
are waiting to come back when our chastened
military soon departs.
Imagine if Bush/Cheney/Powell/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz
had not insisted on invading Iraq at any cost and
if the huge unprecedented peace demonstrations
around the world had prevailed.
Imagine what a better country we would be today if
the $2 trillion dollars and the vast amount of
time and energy of our leaders had been spent on
building up our own society -- on education,
health-care, industry, polution control, global
warming prevention, and the social and economic
infrastructure that is so desperately now needed
for our future.
And yes, I purposefully repeat, imagine how much
better, stronger, more self-respecting, and more
respected and admired in the world, our country
would be today if the military-industrial complex
and the special-interest foreign lobbies had been
effectively checked by an aroused and informed
citizenry, by a Congress truly of the people, by a
free rather than captive media, and by educators
at universities not fearful but encouraged to
speak up about what has
really happened in the past, what
is really happening now, and
most importantly of all about why.