US Intervention Issues, Easy To Predict & Do Nothing About

09 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

Tags

Erbil, FRONTLINE, Gaza, Genocide, Humanitarian Intervention, Hypocrisy, Interventions, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Middle East, Military Intervention, Nation-Building, Oil, Peacekeeping, Predictability, Predictions, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Quagmire, Resources, US Foreign Policy, US Interventionism

An F/A-18E Super Hornet takes off from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf, as US air strikes in Iraq begin, August 8, 2014. (AFP/US Navy via http://images.smh.com.au/). In public domain.

We’re back at it in Iraq again, albeit on a limited basis. Humanitarian food and medicine drops, airstrikes on ISIS positions near the US consulate in Erbil (also an oil depot, by the way). The saga that has been the twenty-three year quagmire of Iraq, one entirely of our own making, continues. That President Barack Obama has called this intervention one in prevention of “genocide” doesn’t impress me and many others, considering the actions of Israel in Gaza over the past six weeks. I guess one nation’s genocide is another nation’s defense through indiscriminate killing and wounding. The hypocrisy stinks from here to Pluto and back.

I digress. Americans now loathe the words “Iraq,” “Middle East,” and “intervention.” Yet after Vietnam, and especially after the end of the Cold War, we should have held our government accountable for any interventions without clear causes, clear interests, and clear objectives. Instead, we’ve been stumbling all over the place, like a drunkard with a car full of bombs and shells, careening from one conflict to another, blowing up people, places and property all along this wild and disgusting ride.

But let’s not act as if this was unforeseen. The most astute foreign policy experts withoutPhDs in Soviet studies (e.g., Condoleezza Rice) knew that any major intervention in the Middle East, whether to protect people or US energy interests, would mean intervening over and over again. All with the potential for geopolitical instability as the interventions would stack up over time.

FRONTLINE logo, PBS, August 9 2014. (http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/art/bigfl.jpg).

And no, I’m not talking about a 1993 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies or a 1999 conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That would be far too obscure and inside-expert to be clairvoyant. Try PBS’s FRONTLINE series of documentaries between 1990 and 2000. They did at least three documentaries predicting this gradual but steady destabilizing of the Middle East with the help of an increasingly interventionist American foreign policy, starting with Operation Desert Shield in August 1990.

Below are the three FRONTLINE documentaries that I watched during the period in which experts predicted the infuriatingly unstable world wrought by capricious US foreign policy, economic dominance and military interventions (all from the website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs):

The Arming of Iraq: Frontline Special (aired September 11, 1990)
FRONTLINE examines how Saddam Hussein built Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980’s. Correspondent Hodding Carter inve[s]tigates (sic) the complicity of the US, European governments, and Western corporations in creating the Iraqi military machine the world is now trying to stop.

Give War A Chance (aired May 11, 1999)
FRONTLINE explores the bitter divide between military and civilian attitudes about where, when, and why America employs military force. In examining the gulf between what American diplomats want and what the military is prepared to deliver, correspondent Peter J. Boyer follows the inevitable collision from Vietnam to the Balkans between diplomat Richard Holbrooke and Admiral Leighton Smith. Their careers, and ultimate clash, represent the most vivid example of this critical foreign policy dilemma.

The Future of War (aired October 24, 2000)
The U.S. Army is experiencing an identity crisis brought on by the end of the Cold War. As it heads into the 21st century, the nation’s largest military service is struggling to keep pace with changing technology, changing enemies and increasingly global missions. FRONTLINE examines the Army’s internal debate between those promoting change and those resisting it, and how todays decisions may impact the outcome of wars fought decades from now.

Emaciated and dead cow in desert, Australia, 2009. (Government of Australia via http://www.nsf.gov/news/).

The last one actually included examples of possible future interventions going into the late-2010s, with a particular focus on Iraq.

So to those millions of Americans who don’t want to dwell on the past and only talk about the vapid and the positive, I say that’s hard to do when we let our past fester like carrion in the middle of the Sahara Desert at high noon. The stink is too obvious to ignore, and apparently was so easy to predict that most Americans ignored it. And all to our peril, past, present and future.

Shalom Milhama, Where Do My Sympathies Lie?

21 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arab-Israeli Wars, Colonialism, Conflict, Gaza, Gaza City, Hamas, IDF, Intifada, Invasion, Israel, Jewishness, Judaism, Oppression, Palestine, Palestinians, Police State, Rebellion, Revolution, Settler Colonialism, Terrorism, Two-State Solution, Zionism

“Israel-Palestine peace,” July 29, 2013. (Wickey-nl – Own work via Wikipedia). Licensed under CC-SA- 3.0 (converted from .svg to .jpg file).

As a Hebrew-Israelite between ’81 and ’84, I was taught in temple that we as the members of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel shared a spiritual and physical bond with the descendants of the tribes of Judah and Levi. As a Hebrew-Israelite, I was also taught that Arab, African and Black Muslims were my spiritual cousins, due respect because of the whole Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael story from the Torah. We, Black Jews, Arab Muslims and European-Jewish-Israelis, were related by blood, history, and Yahweh, and so should support each other.

There were to be no contradictions in supporting the right of Israel to exist as a nation-state, this despite the fact that the Arab states of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan had fought “to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea” in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Israel had a Jehovah-given right to the land between the cedar forests of Lebanon and the Sinai Desert, between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, at least, that’s what the Torah said. It was a covenant right that couldn’t be undone by anyone or anything except by El Shaddai himself.

So naturally, despite my growing knowledge of history, I supported Israel in everything it did in defense of itself. So if Mossad or an Israeli commando unit assassinated a foreign minister, it was fine. When Israel launched an air strike and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in June ’81, I was all for it. Golda Meir was among my group of female heroes as a preteen and teenager. Somehow in those three years as a Hebrew-Israelite, my political perspective on Israel merged with my religious perspective on Judaism and my understanding of the oppression that Blacks, Africans and Jews have all faced in recent centuries.

My understanding of all this, though, began to change even before I converted to Christianity in ’84. It started with an exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in ’84 and ’85, during the government-imposed famine that killed nearly half a million Ethiopians. Unlike the claims of Hebrew-Israelites in the US, the claims of Ethiopian Jews could be clearly traced back to 1000 BCE, the time of King Solomon. Yet for months, Israel held up the immigration process, and then created policies that would make it even more difficult for this groups and the country’s other 120,000 Ethiopian Jews to assimilate. No doubt the fact that it took Israel until ’75 to officially recognize these Ethiopian Jews as Jews has played a role in their somewhat segregated existence in the country.

Faris Odeh throws a stone at an Israeli tank near the Israel-Gaza border, October 29, 2000, during the 2nd Palestinian Intifada (ten days before the IDF gunned him down in Gaza). (http://socialistworker.org).

Then came the First Palestinian Intifada of ’87 that ran well into the ’90s, when the setting up of Palestinian self-governance zones in Gaza, the West Bank and Jericho gradually began to take shape, leading ultimately to the current state of invasion and chaos between Israel and Gaza. The Intifada began just as I was beginning to understand the full nature of oppression beyond slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. For years, it seemed like I saw the same images of Palestinian youth throwing rocks and marching in the streets while the Israeli Defense Forces responded with tanks, machine guns, tear gas and bulldozers, taking land to build new Israeli settlements in the process.

By that point, I’d become interested in South African history, or apartheid in another part of the world. Comparing and contrasting student movements against Jim Crow in the US and against apartheid in South Africa led me to one simple conclusion beyond that undergraduate research paper. That settlement for one group of people was removal, segregation and loss of rights and lands for another group. This was a process that was particularly horrible in South Africa. It led to protests nonviolent and violent, terrorist activities, extreme and ruthless counter-terrorist activities, and international outrage, protests and divestment before the Afrikaner leadership in South Africa finally moved to dismantle their ugly system.

It made me realize that what was going on in Israel wasn’t all that different from what had been going on in South Africa for nearly a century. Only, it involved a population of Palestinians only slightly larger that the population of European-born Israeli Jews and their descendants, not a nine-to-one advantage in favor of Black South Africans. Only the form of nationalism in Israel grew out of a mix of Torah-based birthright, European-based ethnocentrism (the first two otherwise known as Zionism) and post-World War I imperialism the British imposed on the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and not out of Boer nationalism and anti-Black African racism.

A Palestinian boy rests on a mattress next to the rubble of a house destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, Gaza City, July 9, 2014. (Reuters; http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

Aside from these unique features, the theme was the same. A democracy for a select and easily identifiable us (read race and religion here, or at least, skin color and not obviously Muslim). A refugee existence and well-policed apartheid state for those who aren’t us, an assumed group of radical terrorists, even from birth.

It’s a bit too late to be on any side that supports the dissolution of Israel as a nation-state. But to support this Israeli government, a right-wing one that responses to any act of violence toward Israelis — whether random or deliberately terrorist in nature — as if Egypt, Jordan and Syria are invading again. It strains my almost boundless imagination. To say that it’s okay to respond to homemade rockets with a military airstrike and ground invasion in an area as densely population as the island of Manhattan is ridiculous. To suggest that the demolition of Gaza isn’t about resources or is a both-sides-are-equally-guilty scenario is to either live in denial or to see Palestinians as less human than Israelis. Last I checked, Hamas doesn’t have an air force or Russian T-72 tanks.

So here’s what I see. A one-state solution, forcing Israelis and Palestinians to live together, forcing Israel to end its version of an apartheid system, and forcing both groups regardless of politics to come up with a path to full citizenship rights for Palestinians. Period. The two-state solution is a mirage, and some Israelis seem to only want one state, for Israelis only. Of course, this means that those Palestinians who support an armed struggle will eventually have to follow the path that Nelson Mandela and the ANC and Yasser Arafat and the PLO followed decades ago. Just not today, not while the IDF is destroying a city. At least not until the world and especially the US divests from the state of Israel and embargoes all arms shipments.

I wish sometimes that I could go back to that simpler time, when Israel seemed to represent what was right in this world, and the US in supporting them. But I can’t. Those Hebrew-Israelite days were my most oppressed ones as well.