Enemies out of Friends

Americans who regard Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's remarks at the U.N. General Assembly as a rant are missing the point, and the important lesson, of the event.

You have to read the entire remarks -- not just the soundbites about the "devil" President Bush. Chavez masterfully shows just how well he understands the United States and how little the reverse is true.

Alluding to Bush's assertion that "my country wants peace," Chavez stated:

That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes.

The speech also shows just how completely U.S. government obduracy concerning Chavez has galvanized the Arab League, Latin American nations and even Europe into a bloc so utterly annoyed as to support granting Venezuela a seat on the U.N. Security Council -- just to irritate the U.S. delegation.

The odd thing is that Venezuela, which was for years little more than the Latin American country estate of the Rockefeller family, was historically the staunchest of U.S. allies in its region. Well handled, the country could have remained close enough, even under Chavez.

The problem is that the U.S. foreign policy establishment just won't take a potential lukewarm friend if a passionate enemy can be had.

The saga of Chavez's Venezuela brings to mind the country of another past demonizer of the United States, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini's Iran -- just as it recalls Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- all formerly allied countries turned battlegrounds.

This is the work product of the pinstriped diplomats at Foggy Bottom and their spy colleagues across the river in Langley, Virginia -- not jihadists.

Iran was a peaceable, Western-friendly kingdom in the early 1950s, when a democratic-minded nationalist, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized what was then called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later changed to British Petroleum and now BP).

In a move that in hindsight seems deliciously ironic, the CIA paid Iranians to create disturbances disguised as Muslim clerics to set the climate for the 1954 coup that installed the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The secularist Shah modernized industry but remained in power until 1979 thanks to the CIA-trained secret police SAVAK, known for decades after for its torture chambers.

Without the Dulles brothers running the State Department and the CIA at the time of the 1954 coup, Iran had every prospect of evolving into a parliamentary democracy, albeit influenced by the local Islamic culture. Instead, 25 years of smoldering wrath brought the mullahs and ayatollahs and their radicalized agenda.

Radicalized by whom, you ask? By the U.S. government's stupid disregard for cultural subtleties and its disdain for democracy abroad. In 1954, Iran could have satisfied its pride by owning its oil; now it wants nuclear weapons.

Will Iranian nuclear weapons go to Iraq's rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or to Osama bin Laden? It's not in Teheran's interests to provide such power to loose cannons.

But leave it to the Ugly Americans at State and the torturers at the CIA and, hell, Iran will help Al Sharpton go nuclear -- just to show it can.

Fantasy Histories

A new cyber-acquaintance who seems to know whereof he speaks offers two versions of history, Israeli and Arab, that not only amuse but also throw some light on the conflicts in the Middle East.

On a list in which I participate, Kal offers the following Israeli version of the story:

[peaceful flutes playing...]

Palestinians do not exist. Geographical Palestine was empty. Jews on the other hand existed, and they had no homeland (they were floating in the air I suppose). So the UN offered them Palestine as a gift, and they gratefully accepted it. There were no rightful citizens of it to object to that peaceful transaction.

[Insert video clip showing UN officials handing over ownership papers to smiling Jewish leaders...]

And then evil Arabs came out of nowhere. [horror music roars...]

Upset by the peace and liberty that their new neighbors enjoy, they were determined to spread fear and destruction.

[Insert images of destruction and Arabs on horses...]

The New Israelis were determined to defend Freedom and Good against the forces of Evil. [marching drums and nationalistic music...] A new Israeli Army was formed, consisting of Doctors, Philosophers, Artists, and other beautiful people to resist
the toothless Arabs' invasion.

[Insert clip of masked Arabs shooting babies...]

THE END

Kal offers the disclaimer that he was born in Jerusalem to a Christian family and has an Israeli birth certificate (but not citizenship) as well as an expired Palestinian travel document.

Now the Arab fantasy history:

[sad violin background...]

In the beginning, all inhabitants of Palestine were perfect Muslim people. They treated the Christian and Jewish minorities with great respect, and gave them more rights and less duties than the average Muslim citizen. These People of the Book lived their Golden Age under Islamic Rule, and they all greatly enjoyed their trouble free life.

[show clip of a priest drinking coffee with an imam...]

Then the Jewish Elders of Zion, on a mission to take over the World, and the Christian Crusaders of the West, conspired to destroy the Arabs. [tanks, bombs, and airplanes sound effects...] They decided that Palestine was a good entry point in the Middle East, towards creating Greater Israel, consisting of lands from the Euphrates to the Nile. And without any provocation of any kind, they continuously murdered Arabs throughout the second half of the last century, in order to eliminate them from their lands.

[show dirty crying Arab boy standing under Israeli flag... make sure you skip the part where his mother spanked him for playing soccer in his new outfit, which is really why he's crying...]

Arab Muslims, backed by the good Christians and Jews of Palestine, rose up to the challenge. [piano...] Their mission is to restore superior morality and to end the rule of corrupt Crusader culture, and to recreate the Islamic State of Palestine, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians can relive their Golden Age of happiness, morality, and prosperity.

[show rabbi walking next to priest, skipping the part where it's obvious they're in New York, not in Palestine...]

THE END

Perhaps if such stories could be swapped and edited there might be some hope for peace. Meanwhile, we can at least enjoy a good, dark laugh.

A Lesson from Hezbollah

A fascinating front-page New York Times story today is worth the biblical "price beyond rubies." I'm referring to a filing by correspondent Sabrina Tavernise that tells us that the Hezbollah "has provided essential services for years to Lebanon'’s poor Shiites, settling into their lives."

Tavernise's story, headlined "Charity Wins Deep Loyalty for Hezbollah," begins with a security guard who recounts that the militant Shi'a group whose name in Arabic means Party of God, paid for his wife'’s Caesarean section and an operation on his broken nose, and brought food to his home when he lost his job. Slowly you get the sense that the entire Shi'a community benefits from the largesse of Hezbollah.

Reminds me of the Black Panthers' breakfast programs for children in Oakland, Calif. Or the communal free meals in the town of Assisi once organized by the Communist Party in starving postwar Italy.

One wonders why Israel, according to the CIA Factbook the world's 54th (out of 233) largest gross domestic product of $154 billion, as opposed to Lebanon's 108th economy in the world ($23.6 billion annual GDP), couldn't try the same thing.

It's not as if U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have been resoundingly successful. Nor is it as if Israel's bombardment of civilians in Lebanon has won Eretz Israel the Brotherhood Award of the Year. Quite the contrary on both counts.

Here is where the ancient advice becomes eminently practical.

In the New Testament, Jesus says "You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you." (Matthew 5-43-44).

This passage might suggest that Judaism, the religion of Jesus and his apostles, was a faith of revenge, yet that is not true. The book of Exodus' "An eye for an eye" (21:23) was a humane improvement on disproportional punishment in the ancient world. Moreover, the Hebrew Bible instructs believers "Seek not revenge" (Lev. 19:18.) and has God declare that "Vengeance is mine." (Deut. 32:35).

Nor is the religion of Islam, the religion of Osama bin Laden and Hezbollah, a religion of hatred and vengeance, as the Quran, in Sura 5:45, in a spirit very similar to the Jewish Torah, says: And We ordained therein for them: Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth and wounds equal for equal. But if anyone remits the retaliation by way of charity, it shall be for him an expiation.

How different our current events might have been if on Sept. 12, 2001, President Bush had proclaimed that the United States would not respond to violence with violence, but would challenge Al Qaeda to a contest of charity.

Imagine, then, our B-52s, B-1s and B-2s showering the poorest areas of the Middle East with food and medical supplies.

What could Osama have said? That he rejected these gifts? That he would not join in a competition to see who could be more generous? Who in the Arab world would have supported such peevish stances?

Imagine also what might happen if Israel built schools, hospitals and brought food for the Shi'as of southern Lebanon, challenging the Hezbollah not to a contest of explosions but of generosity.

Here's where Hezbollah has shown the way.

Time to Cut Israel Off

Qana has become the new Guernica.

As in the aerial bombardment of the Basque city of Guernica, Spain, on April 26, 1937, by a Luftwaffe squadron, the dropping of precision-guided bombs by Israeli warplanes on July 30, 2006, on the Lebanese village of Qana amounts to the same thing: a site of senseless murder of children.

There is as yet no poet to console the mothers of Qana, "Do not weep, madre, God will fill their bullet holes with candy," nor is there a Picasso to scream outrage in paint.

But there is one thing we in the United States can do: stop funding Israel's military adventures.

If we do not, you and I in America become responsible for the dead children of Qana: our taxes and our votes have made them possible to the tune of $3 billion a year, not counting loans and loan guarantees and other forms of aid that some estimate may yield a total 10 times that figure, or even higher.

This is about 15 percent of all U.S. foreign aid. U.S. aid to the 6 million Israelis equals all aid to the 840 million people in the entire continent of Africa. This is disproportionate.

What is the purpose to be served by aid to Israel? Israel is not and has never been a poor country. Our aid to Israel does not gain the United States influence; on the contrary, our troops are dying in Iraq because of our ties to Israel. Why continue, then?

Culturally and religiously, our ties to the State of Israel, founded in 1948, are much more tenuous than the Israel lobby would have us believe, certainly not enough to justify the $85 billion the United States has given it since its founding.

Let's say, for example, that the United States should give aid to Israel because there are Jewish citizens who wants this. First of all, U.S. Jewish support for the State of Israel is not unanimous; many orthodox rabbis at the time of the country's independence thought it was an enormous heresy to establish Israel before the Messiah came to do so.

Even if there were unanimous support, according to the U.S. Census, there are 5.1 million U.S. Jews, who make up less than 2 percent of the population. Given that there are 37.8 million African Americans, or 12.8 percent of the population, shouldn't aid to Africa total multiples of aid to Israel or, conversely, aid to Israel be sliced downward several multiples?

I once admired the plucky Israelis, their social democracy and their self-defense. Over time, however, it has become clear that Israeli social democracy serves only those of the right ethnic background and their "defense" has become a constant attack. Israel even elected as prime minister a war criminal, Ariel Sharon, who was responsible for the 1982 Sabra-Shatila, Lebanon, massacre.

The new attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon, along with the bombing of UN posts to eliminate possible neutral witnesses, leave the observer no choice but to conclude that Israel has lamentably become a rogue nation.

Whatever Israel chooses to do now, it must do on its own -- without U.S. support, or dollars.

World War IV?

News this week from and about the Middle East ranges from the worrisome to the ridiculous, all leading to the question: are we headed for World War IV?

When was World War III, you ask? That was that long, intermittently hot and cold war between the USA and the USSR, with fronts in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, the horn of Africa, Angola, Nicaragua, etc., the war we once thought would never end ... or would end in a mushroom cloud.

We may still get a mushroom cloud, but it won't be deployed from a superpower's silo (unless Dubya does it ... all bets are off on that). Most likely it will be a "dirty bomb" set off by a Muslim zealot ... or an atomic bomb in the nuclear arsenal that Israel is said to possess.

But that comes a bit later than now. That's what Israel could do, in desperation, when Washington and Jerusalem finally succeed at uniting all the Arab nations and, with the grand jihad on, the Arabs are at the gates. That day is no longer very far away, but right now we're still at the beginning of a conflict.

This one, it seems to me, is very similar to the beginning of World War I in the late summer of 1914. For about a month or so barely a day passed without one European country declaring war on another. These days, instead of war declarations we have the fireworks of car bombs, home-made missiles, and aircraft and artillery counterattacks.

But then, does any Arab nation have the bomb under wraps? Then what?

In World War I, Europe fought from trenches and in relentlessly insane advances of mere meters until 8.5 million lives had been expended, 21 million had been wounded and an added 7 million went missing in action.

Twenty years after the end of the war to end all wars, the world went into another paroxism of murder and we, humanity, managed to kill, over nearly 6 years, an estimated 65 million people -- that's about 30,000 people killed every day.

About 40 million were killed in wars between 1945 and 2000, including World War III. And that's a picnic compared to the coming war, since death tolls per atomic bomb are counted in megadeaths (equal to 1,000,000 deaths).

So I'm beginning to think that the term "terrorist" has been misapplied altogether. The odd bomber here and there, even the Sept. 11 suicide attackers, haven't been really all that terrifying.

All they did was wreck a couple of the world's ugliest buildings (and, yes, more lamentably kill about 2,000 people), or in several foreign cities wreck a couple of trains (and, more lamentably again, kill several hundred people). But if you weren't there, or if you don't believe everything on television or radio, their impact was not all that significant.

In the grand scheme of things, these events were tiny. For example, most people in Afghanistan, where the Sept. 11 attacks were planned and directed, had no idea about the planes crashing into -- "What's that you say? Buildings a hundred storeys tall? Nice fairy tale, ha, ha ha." -- the World Trade Center.

So, the main effect of these "terrorists" has been annoyances about the truly stupid things done in the name of security, such as checking everybody's shoes after the one real shoe-bomber sailed through checkpoints even though he was a known suspect.

The real terrorists, I would contend, are sitting in the Oval Office and the Israeli prime minister's office. They're the ones launching World War IV with insane warring that will, as sure as the cows eventually come home, goose some lunatic to start using an A-bomb to show his is bigger than the other guy's.

On that score, Dubya makes me very scared.

Don't Cry For Me, Mar del Plata

Mar del Plata, known to Argentines as "La Ciudad Feliz" (The Happy City), became an unhappy place last week. The middle class resort of choice for roughly a century hosted a summit conference on trade and a popular stadium rally to decry the globalization of greed for the few and poverty for the many. The metropolis also became the site for the overshadowing violent acts of a few who seem unconnected to either peaceful assembly.

Who were these rowdies and why were they there?

My Argentine sources tell me this is part and parcel of what has been going on for several years at least. The party or candidate most likely to benefit from the appearance of disorder hires a bunch of thugs to go smash things while political events are going on. Citizens engaged in the peaceful expression of grievances get branded as "violent," when in fact the violence comes from the established order.

Agents provocateurs.

The French is not incidental. The use of agents paid to provoke violence, to "force" the hand of the law to come down with its full complement of counterviolence, was first documented in the 19th century uprisings in France, in which the government sent spies to falsely radicalize action and create an excuse for repression.

If Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America, it is because Argentina has long been influenced by the styles of France, in politics as in fashion. Peronists, in particular, with a history leading back to the radical right of the 1930s, have always employed thugs; and their example has been emulated by other segments of the political spectrum.

In this case, however, the Peronists had nothing to gain. President Kirchner, a left-of-center Peronist, was not impressed with the Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Nor are his colleagues in Brazil, Uruguay or Venezuela, to name a few.) A peaceful protest was enough to provide the symbolic popular sentiment against FTAA to justify his opposition.

Someone else stood to gain from violent disruptions.

A U.S. president who knows nothing about policy, except what his svengalis whisper to him, had sat in on the deliberations of 33 heads of state looking bored and annoyed that everyone was not praising and applauding him. The FTAA, his proposal, fell so flat that it failed resoundingly, despite diplomatic efforts to paper over that fact. Indeed, the conference was such a disaster that President Bush hastily and rudely departed before the summit had ended.

How difficult can it have been for the CIA chief of station in Buenos Aires to make a few calls and get a truckload of rowdies in the streets of Mar del Plata?

What a convenient smokescreen for yet another Bush foreign policy failure! The violence created at last the pretext for repression. A city that was already under siege (schools were closed and half the city was walled off from the summit proceedings) witnessed a violent police response and the predictable deaths.

The violence, not the lawful protest nor the trade summit failure, became the leading item in the news cycle. The 30-second attention span of the public was distracted from the truth. No one will ever know.

Dulce et Decorum Est?

Nothing calls into question the meaning of "patriotism" so much as the false pride asserted by American war veterans who demand that all criticism of U.S. combatants be stifled lest their feelings be hurt.

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" wrote Horatio in his advice to youth: how sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland! Military recruitment has become such a permanent fixture in the United States, which has yet to spare even one generation from war, that the poet's axiom rarely is examined.

Frequently enough, the notion is sprinkled with holy water as clerics bless troops and carnage is turned into virtue, as if war were what Jesus intended in his call for ultimate self-sacrifice, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Mottos such as "God and Country," or in some Catholic countries "God, Country, Home," merge cross and sword into a term recently used ill-advisedly by President Bush: crusade.

Bush has forgotten, or more likely never knew, that the Christian West lost the Crusades to the Muslim Middle East -- much as his own misadventures in Iraq have ceded the initiative of war to the present-day fanatical Muslim insurrection we know as al Qaeda.

Similarly, we in the American republic risk repeating the blighted history of the Roman virtue of patriotism if we close our eyes to the perils of adopting this questionable ethical imperative as a dogmatic truism above criticism.

To understand this we need recall how Roman patriotism, which was similar to the traditional nationalism of the last century and a half, hung its rhetorical hat on the notion of "patria," Latin for "father's land." The term "patria" originally meant the estate or homestead under the sway of the "pater familias" or male head of household, usually the patriarch of an extended family.

Beginning in monarchical Rome, and running through the republic and empire, the pater familias held power of life and death over wife, children, slaves, cattle and crops, all of whom were sustained by the wealth and bounty of his land. Young Patricians, the male sons or grandsons of the pater, gave evidence of their worthiness by risking life and limb to defend the patrimony, or inheritance.

Rich, young imperial Romans gave their lives to debauchery and violent sport. They left soldiering to the sons of Romans so poor that they could pay no taxes -- their only contribution they could make to the commonwealth was children (in Latin, "proles"). These proletarians were sent to serve in Rome's Legions.

Horatio's words at the dawning of the imperium served as consolation for those who died in battle, since those who served and survived now received the spoils of conquest -- which made up for the patrimony they lacked.

Here's where the moral tale comes to haunt us.

In similar terms, the sons of the landed gentry of the original Thirteen States fought the King of England to defend their patrimony in a war in which neither slaves nor indentured servants, much less Indians, were expected to fight. The few who did were regarded as exceptional.

Such patriotism, as in Rome, was short lived: dead men cannot inherit wealth.

Indeed, our War of Independence was so widely regarded as a struggle to the benefit of large landholders, that many poorer farmers refused to pay the taxes to defray the debt contracted to pay the military costs, in a movement known as the Whiskey Rebellion. By the Civil War, social privilege became enshrined in law: a U.S. wealthy young man could buy his way out of conscription by paying for someone to serve in his stead. U.S. soldiers through the end of World War I received meager postwar compensation, as witnessed eloquently by the popular song "Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?"

It was only after World War II, when the spoils were so gargantuan that the even the wealthy could not sop up the bounty, that a semblance of a new social contract -- albeit only with veterans, and mostly to the benefit of whites -- was crafted. An entire college-educated middle class arose out of GI Bill funds and the prosperity to employ the new graduates.

When predominantly non-white veterans returned from Vietnam -- the two white Vietnam-vintage presidents so far did not serve in that war -- no similar reward was offered: the Greenback of free enterprise was willing to fight the Reds to the last impoverished, Black recruit. After that, they were on their own; today Black Vietnam veterans are homeless by the thousands, thrown out of halfway houses by that great "patriot," Ronald Reagan -- another flagwaver who did not see a second of battle.

The Bush Administration has developed empty flagwaving and hollow patriotic-sounding rhetoric to a fine art. Not long after September 11, it proposed legislation disguised as "economic stimulus" that actually reimburses millions in taxes from previous years to the nation's top corporations, precisely as they lay off hundreds of thousands of Americans from work.

Where can the unemployed go? To fight in Iraq, of course!

As the Abu-Ghraib torture scandal shows, the fighting men and women in Iraq come from the families least educated, least to benefit from Bush's tax cuts.

The wealthy, meanwhile, are laughing at those suckered into becoming cannon fodder. If each member of society, emulating the greedy few at the top, merely scrambles to the hills to protect the blood-related nuclear tribe, do we have a civilization worth saving?

Clearly a broader, more modern sense of what patriotism means is needed. As human beings we are all citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, as we are of the United States or England or New Zealand.

Being called to lay down one's life for another need not mean martyrdom nor pointless death. To lay down my life and allow my earthly body to be killed in a relatively finite period of time, while painful, is ultimately easier than handing over my life in service to another over decades.

We are patriots? Let us pay our taxes cheerfully and press our leaders to use them for the general welfare, not merely to bolster privilege and inequity or to repay bribery.

We are patriots? Let us strive to make sure the least in our society have food, clothing, shelter, schooling and the change to earn a living.

We are patriots? Let us do some of the considerate small things that glue a society together: respecting traffic lights, turning off appliances that use up energy when they are not needed, accepting minor inconveniences for the good of the community, be it local, state, or national.

We are patriots? Let us realize that our "fatherland" is really the world.