[...]
With each passing day, the campaign becomes bloodier and the post-war tasks costlier for the Americans. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are deranged people in the US administration who want this war to be costly in the hopes that it would effect a radical shift in US foreign policy.
Extensive losses for Iraq, followed by similar ones on the US side, followed by victory. Such scenario could wipe out for good the memory of Vietnam. Grenada and Panama were too easy to leave much of a mark. What the US's extremist elite craves is a victory fraught with suffering -- one that would change foreign policy as well as the public perception of war. Such a victory could make the US public more accepting of the idea of costly but successful military adventures.
Such vision is reminiscent of Sharon's. He has repeatedly said that the problem in Israel is not the army's ability to achieve victory, but the public's low tolerance of human losses. "Let's win", he often tells the Israelis. The impatience of US hard-line Republicans with the anti-war movement echoes the sentiments of the Israeli right-wing concerning the Intifada.
The course of battle in Iraq has contradicted the expectations of the Pentagon. The reaction of public opinion, inside and outside the United States, to the ongoing war is likely to disappoint Washington's deranged hard-liners who believe that the UN is an anachronism and that the United States should take its military prowess more seriously. The primary goal of US hard-line strategists is to achieve a decisive military and political victory in Iraq, and to impose US hegemony on the region by force. This goal is more important than oil because oil could be obtained through applying commercial and economic pressure.
Many Israeli officials see Pentagon hard-liners as their long-awaited saviours. "The Americans have at last come to see our point of view", the officials must now be rejoicing. The sad truth is that neither American nor Israeli hard-liners are listening. Neither is aware of the disasters their actions would unleash. They think they will laugh last and longest, but their actions will bring forth only tears.
* The writer is a leading Palestinian political activist and member of the Knesset.
weekly.ahram.org.eg
Hopefully, this war will eventually demonstrate that the US and Israel are not one and the same... Long ago, I predicted such a watershed geopolitical shift --I claimed that Israel would one day distance itself from the US in order to complete Eurasia (Russia + the EU + Israel)... Judeofascist Eurasia, that is. Over the past decades, US opinion has been shamelessly brainwashed into believing that the US and Israeli fabrics were identical, that Zionism and the American Dream were merely the opposite sides of the same coin. No longer --this Zionist war and its aftermath will likely help Americans debunk the Judeofascist myth... No, Israel is not a fragile piece of America thrust into barbarism, if only because America itself is not an enlarged replica of Israel.
Gus |
