The Islamophobia Excuse

AntiWar
Philip Giraldi

It seems that the Republican presidential aspirants’ fervor to confront Islam has receded a bit with the decline and fall of Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, but one can likely still count on Rick Santorum to come up with some bon mots on the threat posed by Shariah law. Those who fear that hands will soon be lopped off shoplifters caught in Cleveland appear to be making much ado about nothing, but there is a much broader and more insidious agenda that is really playing out behind the scenes. Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum are all smart enough to know that Islamic law is hardly poised to dominate the U.S. legal system, but they are using it as the wedge issue to deny the patriotism of Muslims in general and fuel the demands to exercise a military option against Iran.

Promoting fear of Shariah law is essentially a red herring. There are more than 50 predominantly Muslim countries in the world, and, while most have elements of Shariah in their civil and family law, only two have it as their criminal codes. They are Saudi Arabia and Iran, one a close ally of the United States and the West and the other currently playing the cameo role of a threat to the entire world, to borrow a phrase from the eminent Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel. The countries that do not have Shariah as their criminal codes have modeled their laws on European and American models, some borrowing from Roman law and others from British common law.

Depicting Islam as manifestly medieval, backward, and cruel is not new, as it has been going on in one form or another since the Israelis and Palestinians first locked horns. Recognizing that the propaganda that is being ground out in the mainstream media derives from that conflict, it is easy to understand why Muslims are persistently portrayed in negative terms. And it should be equally unsurprising to learn that those who are denigrating Muslims and Islam are almost invariably among the most uncritical supporters of Likudist Israel and all its works.

The list of those who are passionate about how bad Islam is has a familiar ring to it. It is led by the truly vicious and fanatical like Pamela Geller and includes John Bolton, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Krauthammer. Geller has written that there is “a systematic campaign to impose Shariah on the secular marketplace” and to pervert the justice system in favor of Islamic exemptions, a theme that has been picked up by Gingrich and Santorum, both of whom favor pointless laws banning Shariah in any form. In a milder form, the same viewpoint is reflected in both the news coverage and the editorial pages of newspapers like The New York Post, The Washington Post, and even The New York Times. The arguments being made are not necessarily intended to convince anyone other than those who are already more than half onboard, but they are designed to keep the issue of how Muslims are not quite like the rest of us on the back burner to so that the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians and other Arabs will somehow always seem suspect. It also fuels other narratives that the neoconservatives and their friends support, like perpetual warfare against Islamic countries to bring about regime changes, suggesting that there is something that is not quite right in the way that Muslim countries govern themselves. The real objective is, however, spelled out in the paper that the neocons presented to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, “A Clean Break,” advocating the breakup of Arab countries into smaller components that would be perpetually at war with themselves, thereby assuring Israeli predominance in the region. As is so often the case, the conversation in the United States is really all about Israel.

Did John Bolton Just Admit All These Wars Are For Oil?

History Repeating Itself: U.S. Hawks Hover Over Iran

Global Research
William Echols

U.S. Government Already at War with Iran?

-Whether calls for war against Iran are meant to placate American allies in the Middle East who cannot stomach its supposed nuclear ambitions, are an attempt to reassert US dominance in the oil rich region, or are the last signs of a flagging empire lashing out in self-denial, those who are longing for it to be morning again in America might very well expedite its imperial twilight.

History seems to be repeating itself as the hawks who called for the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein are now rattling their sabers for war against Iran. But why are those who once called for a new American Century hopelessly stuck in a bygone era?

In a bellicose diatribe published in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard, senior editor William Kristol accuses Iran of having the blood of American soldiers on its hands. Claiming that “force” is the only language the regime understands, he proceeds to call on the US Congress to “consider authorizing the use of force against Iranian entities that facilitate attacks on our troops, against IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) and other regime elements that sponsor terror, and against the regime’s nuclear weapons program.”

In an October 17 Foreign Policy initiative (FPI) Bulletin, executive director Jamie Fly toes the same line, proclaiming:

“Until now, the president has chosen to be the hapless victim of Iran’s machinations. It is time for President Obama to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors and stand up to tyrants who kill Americans and threaten our interests.

"It is time to take military action against the Iranian government elements that support terrorism and its nuclear program. More diplomacy is not an adequate response.”

Speaking to Fox News on Monday, former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said it was “unfortunate” that Iran did not fear a possible military response in light of recent allegations of an Iranian assassination plot on US soil. Somewhat ironically, Bolton also described President Barack Obama’s recent decision to send 100 troops to stem off a humanitarian crisis in Central Africa as “damaging to our efforts to preserve our military budget.”

It is little wonder that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserts the latest accusations that Iran sought to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US was eerily reminiscent of the weapons of mass destruction claims which provided the casus belli for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"In the past the US administration claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They said it so strongly, they offered and presented documentation and everyone said 'yes, we believe in you, we buy it'," Ahmadinejad said in a live interview on Al Jazeera television.

Ahmadinejad’s cause for alarm might seem justified under the circumstances. Ever since George W. Bush’s January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address, wherein Iran (along with Iraq and North Korea) were labeled as the “Axis of Evil”, neo-conservative policy wonks and senior-level government officials have had the country in their sights. And much like Iraq, the case for war is as mercurial and adaptive as the public opinion it caters to.

Kristol for his part was one of the key proponents for regime change in Iraq, outlining the case in a 2003 book he co-authored entitled The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission. But his desire to effect regime change in the Middle East has earlier roots.

In a 1996 Foreign Affairs article, William Kristol, challenging what he believed was “a tepid consensus that accepts decline of US power in the world as inevitable,” called for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy which would pursue “benevolent hegemony” and “wield its authority unabashedly.”

By June 1997, William Kristol, along with several other prominent neo-conservatives who would have high-level administrative positions in the Bush administration (including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Elliot Abrams), not to mention his brother Jeb Bush, signed off on a statement of principles intended to usher in this halcyon era of American military strength and moral clarity. This statement of principles would come to define the Project for a New American Century.

The four key principles called for increased defense spending and force modernization, the strengthening of ties with democratic allies and the willingness to confront regimes hostile to American interests, the promotion of political and economic freedom abroad, and the “need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

Neocons Attack Egyptian Dissident Mohamed ElBaradei, Again

John Bolton

The Nation
Ari Berman

Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has recently emerged as a leading figure in the Egyptian pro-democracy movement and a credible alternative to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

ElBaradei’s emergence has angered pro-Mubarak neoconservatives, such as Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which is closely aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. “There is a myth being created that ElBaradei is a human rights activist," Hoenlein told an Orthodox Jewish website on Sunday. “He is a stooge of Iran, and I don't use the term lightly. When he was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for which he got a Nobel Peace Prize, he fronted for them, he distorted the reports."

Hysterical rhetoric about ElBaradei is nothing new. The same people who were wrong about Iraq’s nonexistent WMD program are once again trying to distort his work, this time as a prominent dissident in Egypt.

Over at Firedoglake, Marcy Wheeler has an excellent recap of the past neoconservative smear campaign against ElBaradei. Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration pooh-poohed his warning that there was “no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq” and paid no attention to the fact that the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein was pursuing enriched uranium from Niger was based on forged documents, according to IAEA reporting. Despite the fact that almost everything ElBaradei said about Iraq turned out to be correct, the Bush Administration tapped his phone and led a major campaign to prevent him from leading for a third term at IAEA. Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that then–UN Ambassador John Bolton was “going out of his way to bad-mouth” ElBaradei. Nonetheless, ElBaradei was unanimously re-elected as IAEA chief in 2005 and, shortly thereafter, awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his arms control work. “I don’t think we were effective in our campaign to oppose him,” Bolton later admitted.

Nonetheless, the neocons who wildly hyped and distorted military intelligence in Iraq were determined to once again undermine ElBaradei when it came to Iran’s WMD program. “Mohamed ElBaradei is an apologist for Iran,” Bolton said in 2007. Why did Bolton say this? Because ElBaradei has refused to endorse a US- or Israeli-led attack on Iran, much to the chagrin of neocon war cheerleaders. The former IAEA chief has publicly criticized the Iranian government for not cooperating sufficiently with his agency, but he’s also been careful to note that robust diplomacy is the ultimate solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff.

In a 2009 interview with the Washington Post, ElBaradei called a military strike against Iran “absolutely the worst thing that could happen.” He continued:

“There is no military solution.... If a country is bombed, you give them every reason—with the support of everybody in the country and outside the country—to go for nuclear weapons, and nobody can even blame them.
“We've seen in our last report that Iran is not accelerating its production of enriched uranium. Whatever the reason—technical or political—it is something we need to take into account. We don't see an imminent threat tomorrow. “

In a 2007 profile, the New York Times called ElBaradei “an indispensable irritant to Iran and its foes.”
ElBaradei’s clashes with both Tehran and Washington will likely serve him well in Cairo, as he navigates the murky landscape of the current Egyptian regime. He’s been highly critical of Arab autocrats and the Western governments that prop them up. “Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view,” he told the Guardian in March 2010. “It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it's been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.” He’s recently called on the Obama administration to stop supporting the Mubarak regime. If ElBaradei continues to annoy neocons in Washington, it means he’s probably doing something right.

UPDATE: Former Bush speechwriter Ari Fleischer added his voice to the anti-Elbaradei neocon caucus, posting on Twitter: "I don't trust Mohamed ElBaradei. For America, he would be bad news of a different kind." It appears that the Bush Administration's so-called freedom agenda does not apply to democratic leaders it does not like.