Zionist arrogance continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Now they are openly calling for the US to shed more gentile blood, bring back the draft, and invade more Moslem states if that is necessary to establish Zionist hegemony in the Mideast.
A spymaster's view of the world
By Patrick Seale, Special to Gulf News
Rarely have intelligence agencies wielded more influence, for good or ill, than in these troubled times.
The blood-stained fiasco in Iraq is a monument to the blunders of American and British intelligence, although it is also a tragic illustration of the perverse manipulation of intelligence by political leaders for their own ends.
Britain's general elections on May 5 will test the extent to which the British public has lost faith in Prime Minister Tony Blair because of his alleged lies regarding the threat posed by Saddam Hussain's weapons of mass destruction. In the event, Iraq was found to have none.
In the United States, John Bolton's difficulties in securing Senate approval of his nomination as US ambassador to the United Nations stem largely from his clashes with intelligence officials.
When he uttered shrill warnings that Syria was seeking to acquire unconventional weapons, the CIA and other agencies found no such evidence.
Syria, however, was not blameless on other counts. In Lebanon, the nefarious activities of its intelligence agents seem to have played a determining role in triggering the popular revolt which has forced Syria out of Lebanon under international pressure.
The relationship of secret intelligence to political power is now the subject of intense critical scrutiny, not just in Britain and the United States, but also in the Middle East.
There is hardly a country in the world where secret intelligence has played and continues to play a greater role than in Israel, ever since the creation of the state in 1948, and also in the long years leading up to statehood.
Israel has long relied on covert intelligence operations to subvert, destabilise and divide its neighbours, and has not hesitated to murder its Arab political opponents.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon used to say that Israel's security perimeter extends as far as an F-16 can fly.
His intelligence chiefs might add that Israel's intelligence interests stretch far beyond the Arab hinterland and Iran, to Africa, to the United States on whose generosity and support Israel largely depends China, Europe, and even to New Zealand, where two Mossad agents were recently arrested as they attempted illegally to acquire New Zealand passports.
Efraim Halevy was chief of the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence service, from 1998 to 2002. He was appointed to clean up the organisation following a bungled attempt to kill Hamas leader Khalid Mishaal in Amman. He is now National Security Adviser to Sharon.
Halevy's book
According to his London publisher, he will next year publish a book, Thirteen Years that Changed the World, about Mossad's role in international politics and no doubt his own part in it.
What spymasters say in public is of considerable interest because it gives a clue to the private advice they give their political masters.
Last week Halevy wrote a long article in the Israeli daily Haaretz entitled "The Coming Pax Americana". To a large extent, it is a eulogy of what he calls "the wisdom of US policy" in occupying Iraq, pressuring Syria and containing Iran.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the article is Halevy's prediction perhaps even his recommendation that the United States will maintain a long-term military presence in the heart of the Arab Middle East.
"There is a good possibility," he writes with evident approval, "that Iraq will not be the last country in the region that will require a lengthy American military presence".
His prime candidate for another American military intervention is Saudi Arabia, a kingdom where he envisages a number of "terrifying scenarios", such as the establishment of an "Al Qaida state" or the disintegration of the country into a number of "parallel regimes in different regions".
He quotes "several well-informed observers" in the United States as telling him that, in such an eventuality, the United States would have no choice but to deepen its presence in the Middle East.
"To that end, it will have to renew the [military] draft, to ensure that there are enough forces to deal with developing situations in countries like Saudi Arabia."
Like Henry Kissinger before him, Halevy is hinting at nothing less than an American occupation of the Saudi oil fields! It is ravings such as these that make one doubt the good sense indeed the sanity of some intelligence chiefs.
According to Halevy, the Palestinian territories are another candidate for an American operational military presence if, as he writes, "it should turn out that the Palestinians are not ripe for self-rule".
Clearly, he shares Sharon's reluctance to recognise the Palestinians' right to self-determination in their own independent state.
Regarding Iran's alleged attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, Halevy welcomes wholeheartedly what he calls "the international siege" of Tehran by Britain, France and Germany, supported by the United States.
Iran, he claims, is trying to extricate itself from international pressure by using deception.
In the meantime, he writes, Israel "could not hope for a better combination of players and circumstances in the political campaign that is under way in relation to Iran's nuclear project".
Indeed, he predicts that the "favourable surprise" of the years ahead will be the containment of Iran and the neutralisation of the "existential" danger it poses to Israel.
The one dark cloud in Halevy's optimistic vision is America's adoption of the roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Instead of a "long-term interim solution" of the conflict on which Sharon had set his hopes, the roadmap called for a final and comprehensive permanent status agreement by 2005.
"The fact is that we fell asleep on our watch," Halevy writes.
"Israel was taken totally by surprise when President Bush decided to adopt the roadmap as reflecting his policy just one week before he went to war against Saddam Hussain."
The United States did not recognise, much less adopt, the 14 reservations which Israel made to the roadmap and which in any event had "absolutely no diplomatic or international validity".
Israel had given the United States a unilateral commitment to dismantle outposts established on the West Bank since March 2001.
Such pledges made to the United States, and not to the Palestinians, meant that the United States had become "the exclusive arbiter in all issues of the conflict".
It would be impossible in the future for Israel to exert pressure on the Palestinians in cases where the Americans adopted the Palestinian position.
Worse still, he moaned, Washington might even adopt Arab positions unacceptable to Israel if its regional interests were threatened and if it felt it had to curry favour with the Arabs or "repay" an Arab state.
The framework had been created for an imposed resolution of the conflict. What a disaster!
Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs. He can be contacted at: pseale@gulfnews.com
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