Now We Know. America Really Doesn't Care about Injustice in the Middle East.

Now We Know. America Really Doesn't Care about Injustice in the Middle East.
by Robert Fisk
I came to the latest uproarious US diplomatic history with the deepest cynicism. 
And yesterday, in the dust of post-election Cairo - the Egyptian parliamentary 
poll was as usual a mixture of farce and fraud, which is at least better than 
shock and awe - I ploughed through so many thousands of American diplomatic 
reports with something approaching utter hopelessness. After all, they do quote 
President Hosni Mubarak as saying that "you can forget about democracy," don't 
they?
It's not that US diplomats don't understand the Middle East; it's just that 
they've lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove 
that the mainstay of Washington's Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, 
that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli 
alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years 
is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.
There is virtually no talk (so far, at least) of illegal Jewish colonial 
settlements on the West Bank, of Israeli "outposts", of extremist Israeli 
"settlers" whose homes now smallpox the occupied Palestinian West Bank - of the 
vast illegal system of land theft which lies at the heart of the 
Israeli-Palestinian war. And incredibly, all kinds of worthy US diplomats grovel 
and kneel before Israel's demands - many of them apparently fervent supporters 
of Israel - as Mossad bosses and Israel military intelligence agents read their 
wish-list to their benefactors.
There's a wonderful moment in the cables when the Israeli Prime Minister, 
Benjamin Netanyahu, explains to a US congressional delegation on 28 April last 
year that "a Palestinian state must be demilitarised, without control of its 
airspace and electro-magnetic field [sic], and without the power to enter into 
treaties or control its border". Well goodbye, then, to the "viable" (ergo Lord 
Blair of Isfahan) Palestinian state we all supposedly want. And the US Congress 
lads and ladies appear to have said nothing.
Instead, in The New York Times, we read through the Wikileaks files for the best 
quote. Here is Saudi King Abdullah, via his ambassador in Washington (a dab hand 
with the press), sayingthat Abdullah believes America must "cut of the head of 
this snake" - the snake being Iran or Ahmadinejad or Iranian nuclear facilities, 
or whatever.
But the Saudis are always threatening to cut off the head of their latest 
snakes. In 1982, Yasser Arafat said he would cut off Israel's left arm after its 
invasion of Lebanon, and then the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said he 
would cut off Arafat's right arm. And I suppose that when it is revealed to us - 
as, alas, it is in these Wikileaks papers - that unsuitable applicants for US 
visas are called by American diplomats "visa vipers", we can only conclude that 
snakes are much in demand.
The problem is that for decades, Middle East potentates have been threatening to 
chop off the heads of snakes, serpents, rats and Iranian insects - the latter a 
favourite of Saddam Hussein who used US-supplied "insecticide" to destroy them, 
as we all know - while Israeli leaders have called Palestinians "cockroaches" 
(Rafael Eitan), "crocodiles" (Ehud Barak) and "three-legged beasts" (Begin).
Tears of laughter, I have to admit, began to run down my face when I read the 
po-faced US diplomatic report from Bahrain that King Hamad - or "His Supreme 
Highness King Hamad" as he insists on being called, in his Sunni dictatorship 
with a Shia majority and a kingdom slightly larger than the Isle of Wight - had 
announced that the danger of letting the Iranian nuclear programme go on was 
"greater than the danger of stopping it".
That wonderful Palestinian journalist Marwan Bishara was right when he said at 
the weekend that these US diplomatic papers were of more interest to 
anthropologists than political scientists; for they are a record of a deviant 
way of thinking about the Middle East. If King Abdullah (the crumbling Saudi 
version, as opposed to the Plucky Little Jordanian King version) really called 
Ahmadinejad Hitler and Sarkozy's adviser called Iran "a fascist state", it shows 
only that the US State Department is still obsessed with the Second World War.
I loved the stunning report of a visitor to the US embassy in Ankara who told 
diplomats that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was dying of leukemia. Not 
because the poor old boy is a cancer victim - he is not - but because this is 
the same old nonsense we've been peddled about the Middle East's recalcitrant 
leaders for so many years. I remember the days when American or British 
"diplomatic sources" insisted that Gaddafi was dying of cancer, that Khomeini 
was dying of cancer (long before he died), that Khomeini was already dead of 
cancer - again, long before he died - that the Palestinian contract killer Abu 
Nidal was dying of cancer, 20 years before he was murdered by Saddam. Even in 
Northern Ireland, Britain's half-baked spooks told us that the Protestant 
Vanguard leader William Craig was dying of cancer. And of course, he lived on, 
like the awful Gaddafi, whose Ukrainian nurse is described by the Americans as 
"voluptuous". Of course she is. Aren't all blonde dames "voluptuous" in such 
descriptions?
One of the most interesting reflections - dutifully ignored by most of the 
pro-Wikileaks papers yesterday - came in a cable on a meeting between a US 
Senate delegation and President Bashar Assad of Syria earlier this year. 
America, Assad told his guests, possessed "a huge information apparatus" but 
lacked the ability to analyse this information successfully. "While we lack your 
intelligence abilities," he says in rather sinister fashion, "we succeed in 
fighting extremists because we have better analysts ... in the US you like to 
shoot [terrorists]. Suffocating their networks is far more effective." Iran, he 
concluded, was the most important country in the region, followed by Turkey and 
- number three - Syria itself. Poor old Israel didn't get a look in.
Of course President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is "driven by paranoia" - so is 
everyone in that land, including most of Nato and especially theUnited States - 
and naturally the President of Yemen pretends to his own people that he is 
killing al-Qa'ida representatives when we all know it's General David Petraeus's 
warriors who are the culprits. Muslim leaders have constantly been claiming 
American military prowess against other Muslims as their own work.
Of course, we must not be too cynical. I loved the American diplomatic report 
(from Cairo, of course, not from Tel Aviv) which said that Netanyahu was 
"elegant and charming ... but never keeps his promises". But doesn't that apply 
to half the Arab leaders as well?
And then we come to the dank and frightening reporting of a meeting between 
Andrew Shapiro, "Assistant Secretary of State for the US Political-Military 
Bureau", meeting with Israel's spooks almost exactly a year ago. Israel was 
unable to protect its Cessna Caravan and Raven unmanned pilotless drones over 
southern Lebanon, admits Mossad. (Hezbollah will be obliged for this nugget.) An 
Israeli "J5" Colonel Shimon Arad waffles on upon the dangers of "Hezbollahstan" 
and Hamastan" and the "internal political deadlock" in Lebanon - there wasn't 
then, but there is now - and about Lebanon as a "volatile military arena" and 
the country's "susceptibility to outside influences, including Syria, Iran and 
Saudi Arabia".
And, of course - though Colonel Arad doesn't mention this - American influence 
and Israeli influence and French influence and British influence and Turkish 
influence. Shapiro "cited the need to provide an alternative to Hezbollah" - the 
Costa Rican police force, perhaps? - and suggested that the Lebanese army would 
come to the defence of Hezbollah (unlikely, in the circumstances).
There's a priceless denial of the UN Goldstone report on the Gaza atrocities of 
2008-09 by reserve Major General Amos Gilad, who says that the document's 
criticisms of Israel are "baseless" because the Israeli military made 300,000 
phone calls to houses in Gaza ahead of strikes ... to prevent civilian 
casualties". Poor old Shapiro seems to have reacted in silence. That would be a 
phone call to a fifth of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, kids, babies 
and all. And even then they killed 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians. 
Of course the Palestinian Authority of the bland Mahmoud Abbas didn't want to 
take over this killing field after the Israelis had won - another offer made by 
Israel with US knowledge - because Israel didn't win. It didn't even find its 
missing soldier in the tunnels of Gaza.
There's a symbolic moment when Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi - 
not to be compared to the "distant and uncharismatic personage" of his brother 
Khalifa - worries about Iran in front of the US ambassador Richard Olsen who 
then suggests that he has "a strategic view of the region that is curiously 
close to the Israeli one". But of course he does. Line them up. They will pray 
in their golden mosques, these kings and emirs and generals, buying more and 
more American weapons to protect themselves from the "Hitler" of Tehran - 
better, I suppose, than the 2003 Hitler of the Tigris or the 1956 Mussolini of 
the Nile - and entreat God that they will be saved by the might of America and 
Israel. I can't wait for the next episode in this fantasy.
 
© 2010 The Independent
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper.  He is 
the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for 
Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.