The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Hillary Clinton Knew All Along – Saudi
Arabia and Qatar Are Funding Isis
There is a bizarre discontinuity between
what the Obama administration knew about the
jihadis and what they would say in public
By Patrick Cockburn
October 18, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Independent"
-
It is
fortunate for
Saudi Arabia and
Qatar that the furore over the
sexual antics of
Donald Trump is preventing much
attention being given to the latest batch of
leaked emails to and from
Hillary Clinton. Most fascinating of
these is what reads like a
US State Department memo, dated 17
August 2014, on the appropriate US response
to the rapid advance of Isis forces, which
were then sweeping through northern Iraq and
eastern Syria.
At
the time, the US government was not
admitting that Saudi Arabia and its Sunni
allies were supporting
Isis and
al-Qaeda-type movements. But in
the leaked memo, which says that it
draws on “western intelligence, US
intelligence and sources in the region”
there is no ambivalence about who is backing
Isis, which at the time of writing was
butchering and raping Yazidi villagers and
slaughtering captured Iraqi and Syrian
soldiers.
The
memo says: “We need to use our diplomatic
and more traditional intelligence assets to
bring pressure on the governments of Qatar
and Saudi Arabia, which are providing
clandestine financial and logistic support
to Isis and other radical groups in the
region.” This was evidently received wisdom
in the upper ranks of the US government, but
never openly admitted because to it was held
that to antagonise Saudi Arabia, the Gulf
monarchies, Turkey and Pakistan would
fatally undermine US power in the Middle
East and South Asia.
For
an extraordinarily long period after 9/11,
the US refused to confront these traditional
Sunni allies and thereby ensured that the
“War on Terror” would fail decisively; 15
years later, al-Qaeda in its different
guises is much stronger than it used to be
because shadowy state sponsors, without whom
it could not have survived, were given a
free pass.
It
is not as if Hillary Clinton as Secretary of
State and the US foreign policy
establishment in general did not know what
was happening. An earlier WikiLeaks release
of a State Department cable sent under her
name in December 2009 states that “Saudi
Arabia remains a critical financial support
base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba
in Pakistan].” But Saudi complicity with
these movements never became a central
political issue in the US. Why not?
The
answer is that the US did not think it was
in its interests to cut its traditional
Sunni allies loose and put a great deal of
resources into making sure that this did not
happen. They brought on side compliant
journalists, academics and politicians
willing to give overt or covert support to
Saudi positions.
The
real views of senior officials in the White
House and the State Department were only
periodically visible and, even when their
frankness made news, what they said was
swiftly forgotten. Earlier this year, for
instance, Jeffrey Goldberg in The
Atlantic wrote a piece based on
numerous interviews with Barack Obama in
which Obama “questioned, often harshly, the
role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play
in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is
clearly irritated that foreign policy
orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia
as an ally”.
It
is worth recalling White House cynicism
about how that foreign policy orthodoxy in
Washington was produced and how easily its
influence could be bought. Goldberg reported
that “a widely held sentiment inside the
White House is that many of the most
prominent foreign-policy think tanks in
Washington are doing the bidding of their
Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one
administration official refer to
Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of
these think tanks, as ‘Arab-occupied
territory’.”
Despite this, television and newspaper
interview self-declared academic experts
from these same think tanks on Isis, Syria,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are wilfully
ignoring or happily disregarding their
partisan sympathies.
The
Hillary Clinton email of August 2014 takes
for granted that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are
funding Isis – but this was not the
journalistic or academic conventional wisdom
of the day. Instead, there was much
assertion that the newly declared caliphate
was self-supporting through the sale of oil,
taxes and antiquities; it therefore followed
that Isis did not need money from Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf. The same argument could
not be made to explain the funding of Jabhat
al-Nusra, which controlled no oilfields, but
even in the case of Isis the belief in its
self-sufficiency was always shaky.
Iraqi and Kurdish leaders said that they did
not believe a word of it, claiming privately
that Isis was blackmailing the Gulf states
by threatening violence on their territory
unless they paid up. The Iraqi and Kurdish
officials never produced proof of this, but
it seemed unlikely that men as tough and
ruthless as the Isis leaders would have
satisfied themselves with taxing truck
traffic and shopkeepers in the extensive but
poor lands they ruled and not extracted far
larger sums from fabulously wealthy private
and state donors in the oil producers of the
Gulf.
Ecuador cut off
Assange’s internet at U.S. request,
WikiLeaks says:
Wikileaks said Tuesday that Secretary of
State John Kerry asked Ecuador to stop
WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, from
publishing leaked emails that could disrupt
peace negotiations with a guerrilla group in
Colombia. |
