Massive attack

US elections 2008: Hillary Clinton's pledge to 'obliterate' Iran if it attacks Israel is unnecessarily bellicose

By Richard Silverstein
Guardian, 22/04/08

In an interview on ABC's Good Morning America today, Hillary Clinton pledged that if Iran launches a nuclear attack against Israel, the United States would retaliate against Iran. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."


Today promises to be a decisive moment in the Democratic primary campaign, as voters head to the polls in Pennsylvania. Clinton's comments this morning echo remarks she made last week in Philadelphia. There, during the presidential debate, Clinton came just short of promising a nuclear attack on Iran if it were to strike Israel or any of its other Arab neighbours.

According to the transcript this is how the exchange went:

George Stephanopoulos: "Senator Clinton, would you [extend our deterrent to Israel]?"

Hillary Clinton: "Well, in fact ... I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region."

On Warren Olney's To the Point radio show today, Barack Obama's Middle East adviser and former congressman Mel Levine noted that during the Eisenhower administration John Foster Dulles promised the same "massive retaliation" should the Soviet Union attack the US or its allies. This was widely understood as a threat of nuclear attack. Is this really the type of president Americans want? One who so demonises Iran that she's prepared to go to war at the first sign of conflict in the Middle East? Do we want to create a Middle East cold war like the one we had with the Soviets for four decades?

Equally troubling is the fact that Israel, in Clinton's conception, is merely an extension of the US-a member of the greater commonwealth, if you will. Of course, I find the notion of an Iranian attack on Israel disturbing as well. But the idea that we would react to an attack on Israel as if it were an attack on ourselves ties me up in knots.

We are not the same as Israel. We have our interests. Israel has its own. What if Israel attacks Iran first in an attempt to knock out its nuclear programme and Iran counterattacks? After all, Israeli government ministers have threatened a pre-emptive attack on Iran. In the event of such an assault, is Clinton then bound to retaliate massively against Iran though Israel was the aggressor? You can see where this is going, and it isn't any place good.

Clinton's threat was music to one Jewish group's ears: Aipac. She was practically channelling its talking points about Iran and the "existential threat" it poses to Israel. Her rhetoric was meant as red meat for Pennsylvania's Jews in the run up to the state's Democratic presidential primary. She believes they want to hear a battle cry against Iran. This, despite the fact that the latest American Jewish Committee annual opinion survey shows that Jews don't want to rattle sabres with Iran. They want negotiation instead. Of course, Clinton doesn't care so much what the average Jew thinks. She's playing to the Aipac donors and the Jewish PAC money which are more hawkish than the Pope-er, Ehud Olmert.

Compare Clinton's over-the-top response to Obama's modulated one during last week's debate:

Stephanopoulos: "Iran continues to pursue a nuclear option. Those weapons, if they got them, would probably pose the greatest threat to Israel. During the cold war, it was the United States' policy to extend deterrence to our Nato allies. An attack on Great Britain would be treated as if it were an attack on the United States. Should it be US policy now to treat an Iranian attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States?"

Obama: I have said I will do whatever is required to prevent the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons. I believe that that includes direct talks with the Iranians where we are laying out very clearly for them, here are the issues that we find unacceptable, not only development of nuclear weapons but also funding terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their anti-Israel rhetoric and threats towards Israel. I believe that we can offer them carrots and sticks, but we've got to directly engage and make absolutely clear to them what our posture is.

"Now, my belief is that they should also know that I will take no options off the table when it comes to preventing them from using nuclear weapons or obtaining nuclear weapons, and that would include any threats directed at Israel or any of our allies in the region."

Stephanopoulos: "So you would extend our deterrent to Israel?"

Obama: "As I've said before, I think it is very important that Iran understands that an attack on Israel is an attack on our strongest ally in the region, one that we-one whose security we consider paramount, and that would be an act of aggression that I would consider an attack that is unacceptable, and the United States would take appropriate action."

Who would you want answering that phone at 3am? Trigger Finger Clinton? Or Deliberate Obama? A president who promises "massive retaliation" or one who promises the US "would take appropriate action"? And let's not make the mistake of thinking this is merely parsing words. Lately, we've had an administration willing to go to war at the drop of a hat. Lest you think that Clinton might not initiate a regional war if Israel is attacked, think again.

And if you read her response further, you'll see she advocates a regional security umbrella of nations opposed to Iran. An attack on any of them would be the same as an attack on the US. So now you have the US becoming the gendarme of the Middle East willing to go to battle at the least flare-up between Iran and any number of neighbours with whom it might have a dispute. That scares me.

One final note: debate moderator George Stephanopoulos makes a huge assumption in claiming Iranian nuclear weapons "would probably pose the greatest threat to Israel". The distinguished Israeli military analyst Martin Van Creveld has written in the Forward that Iran wants nuclear weapons to defend itself from attack by one of its immediate neighbours (remember the Iran-Iraq war of the late 1980s?). Israel is far back on the list of nations Iran is thinking of when it thinks of the reasons it needs such weapons.

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No Peace Without Hamas

By Mahmoud al-Zahar
Washington Post, 16/04/08

(Mahmoud al-Zahar, a surgeon, is a founder of Hamas. He is foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, which was elected in January 2006)

President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is "business as usual" for the Palestinians.

Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal-from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from its falsified history to its judiciary that "legalizes" the infrastructure of apartheid. Resistance remains our only option. Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world's largest open-air prison, can do no less.

The U.S.-Israeli alliance has sought to negate the results of the January 2006 elections, when the Palestinian people handed our party a mandate to rule. Hundreds of independent monitors, Carter among them, declared this the fairest election ever held in the Arab Middle East. Yet efforts to subvert our democratic experience include the American coup d'etat that created the new sectarian paradigm with Fatah and the continuing warfare against and enforced isolation of Gazans.

Now, finally, we have the welcome tonic of Carter saying what any independent, uncorrupted thinker should conclude: that no "peace plan," "road map" or "legacy" can succeed unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.

Israel's escalation of violence since the staged Annapolis "peace conference" in November has been consistent with its policy of illegal, often deadly collective punishment-in violation of international conventions. Israeli military strikes on Gaza have killed hundreds of Palestinians since then with unwavering White House approval; in 2007 alone the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed was 40 to 1, up from 4 to 1 during the period from 2000 to 2005.

Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled-my first-born-after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.

Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then. But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?

Our movement fights on because we cannot allow the foundational crime at the core of the Jewish state -- the violent expulsion from our lands and villages that made us refugees -- to slip out of world consciousness, forgotten or negotiated away. Judaism -- which gave so much to human culture in the contributions of its ancient lawgivers and modern proponents of tikkun olam -- has corrupted itself in the detour into Zionism, nationalism and apartheid.

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons -- as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential -- not as "gunmen" or "militants." But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.

History teaches us that everything is in flux. Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun, and adversity has taught us patience. As for the Israeli state and its Spartan culture of permanent war, it is all too vulnerable to time, fatigue and demographics: In the end, it is always a question of our children and those who come after us.

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Israeli minister threatens "destruction of the Iranian nation"

By Peter Symonds
World Socialist Web Site, 09/04/08

Amid a massive five-day civil defence drill, a senior Israeli cabinet minister has provocatively threatened Iran with complete destruction in retaliation for any attack. The chilling threat was made amid rising tensions with Syria and continuing hints of a preemptive Israeli military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.


Speaking at the newly-opened Government War Room Headquarters on Monday, National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer warned that the drill was not just "a meaningless spectacle or a fictional scenario. The future reality is likely to be a number of times harsher than that which we recognise now. We are confronted with a situation where the home front becomes the front line."

Ben-Eliezer singled out Tehran, declaring: "An Iranian attack will lead to a harsh retaliation by Israel, which will lead to the destruction of the Iranian nation." While saying that Iran "will not attack Israel so quickly because they understand the ramifications", he added: "Nevertheless, the Iranians are provoking us through their allies Syria and Hezbollah, [providing] them with much weaponry, and with that we have to contend."

Ben-Eliezer is a longstanding Labour Party figure, who previously served as defence minister and deputy prime minister. His remark about Iran "provoking us" is an ominous indication that Israel is preparing its justifications for a new preemptive attack. Last September, Israeli war planes carried out an unprovoked strike on a Syrian site, which, according to leaks in the British and US press, was allegedly a nuclear reactor under construction. The Israeli government provided no explanation and banned any media coverage. Its purpose, however, was clear. In the wake of the failure of its 2006 war against Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Israel was demonstrating—to Iran in particular—that it could strike anywhere in the region.

Tensions with Syria were heightened in mid-February by the murder of top Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in Damascus by a car bomb blast. While Israeli officials denied any involvement, it is widely believed in the region that Israeli intelligence orchestrated the assassination to provoke a response from Hezbollah and set the stage for another war in the Lebanon. In late February, the Bush administration inflamed the situation by stationing the US navy’s Nassau battle group off the Lebanese coast in a show of support for the Lebanese regime of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

Israel’s civil defence mobilisation, dubbed "Turning Point 2", took place in this context. It is the second such exercise since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and the first under the National Emergency Authority established last September. The exercise began on Sunday, is running over five days and involves the entire security apparatus, from the cabinet security committee down.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was at pains to emphasise on Sunday that the mobilisation was "only a drill, with nothing behind it. We have no secret plans." The scenario that his cabinet had to consider, however, was an air and missile assault from Lebanon and Syria on Israeli cities, involving the use of non-conventional weapons. An article in the Jerusalem Post explained that the exercise was not just "drawing from the lessons of the Second Lebanese war" but "in preparation for Iranian nuclear bombs as well as possible chemical and biological attacks".

According to the newspaper, the country’s largest ever drill involves the Israel Police, the Israeli Defence Force Home Front Command, other military branches, all the country’s hospitals, the Fire and Rescue Services, and other emergency services. Rescue services are simulating mass evacuations from populated areas, and hospitals are practising treating thousands of casualties. Yesterday, an estimated 1.7 million schoolchildren were involved in an evacuation drill.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak bluntly explained that the exercise was directly linked to preparations for a new conflict. "The Second Lebanon War created a reality in which the home front is part of the front during a conflict and its resistance is a condition of victory," he said. The scale of the mobilisation indicates that the government and military are not simply planning for rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip or by the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, but a full-scale war. The most obvious targets are Syria and Iran.

Ben-Eliezer’s inflammatory remarks point to the latter. Olmert and other Israeli ministers have repeatedly said they will not tolerate Tehran having the capacity to build a bomb. Articles in the British press over the past year provided details of Israeli training for air strikes on Iran’s enrichment plant at Natanz and other nuclear facilities.

The Israeli government was bitterly critical of the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released in December, which found that the Iranian regime had ended any nuclear weapons program in 2003. Defence Minister Barak rejected the assessment and called for action in the diplomatic sphere and "in other spheres as well". Last November, Barak told a Labour Party meeting that "we cannot take any option off the table [that is, including the military one] and we need to study operational aspects."

Any Israeli strike on Iran would require a green light from Washington. It is significant therefore that over the past month President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA chief Michael Hayden have all rejected the NIE findings. Speaking to ABC News in Jerusalem last month during his Middle East tour, Cheney declared: "Obviously, they’re [Iran] also heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade levels."

Cheney’s unsubstantiated remark is not supported by International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, which have consistently found that the Natanz plant is only enriching uranium to the low levels required for nuclear fuel—as Tehran has always insisted. The lie does point, however, to the fact that significant sections of the Bush administration, together with bulk of the Israeli political establishment, are prepared to use any uranium enrichment capacity—even that permitted under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty—as the pretext for an attack on Iran.

While the US vice-president was relatively cautious in his comments, his Israeli interlocutors were not. President Shimon Peres told the media that "Iran’s only intentions in developing missiles with nuclear warheads are to destroy Israel and threaten the entire world". Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said he had told Cheney "about the need to remove the Iranian threat before [Tehran] arms itself with a nuclear bomb".

Ben-Eliezer’s threat and the home front exercise are two more signs that Israel and the US are actively considering a war against Iran.

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The Meaning of Medvedev

By Dmitri Trenin
Wall Street Journal, 04/04/08

(Mr. Trenin is a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and deputy director of its Moscow Center. He is the author, most recently, of "Getting Russia Right" (Carnegie, 2007))

Russians voted for a new president Sunday, but the true election of course occurred in December when Vladimir Putin publicly anointed his successor. Not that what happened on Sunday, when Russians overwhelmingly approved of Mr. Putin's choice, Dmitry Medvedev, is irrelevant or unimportant. The country's fifth presidential vote in 17 years has several meanings.


Above all, this election seals the rule of a two-term limit on the head of state. Six months ago, it was not clear whether that constitutional norm would stay. Mr. Putin could have relied on his widespread support among the electorate to stay in the Kremlin indefinitely. Today this notion is history. Orderly rotation at the top of the Russian power structure is now assured by an emerging tradition, not just a law which could be amended.

Unlike any previous Russian poll, this has been the election of a tandem. Mr. Medvedev will be flanked by Mr. Putin, probably as prime minister. The coming power-sharing will represent a material change of the living constitution, which until now, if reduced to one key provision, stipulated that "all power in the Russian Federation shall be vested in the President of the Russian Federation." Now, Messrs. Putin and Medvedev have supported the literal reading of the Basic Law, which refers to the premier as the chief executive while making the president responsible for national security, defense and foreign affairs, and, of course, the integrity of the constitution.

No one, most likely including these two protagonists, knows how this tandem will function in practice. Despite having the double-headed eagle for their state emblem, Russians have traditionally dreaded duality of power as a harbinger of intense struggle at the top, or even civil war. Even a vice president proved too divisive: Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were plotted against by their respective No. 2s, and the post was abolished in 1993. Yet the situation in which the president himself is the country's only functioning political institution is inherently unstable and increasingly dysfunctional. Building up the prime minister and the cabinet as another institution would be a step in the right direction.

That won't be easy, despite the obvious mutual empathy between Messrs. Putin and Medvedev. Their senior aides may find it difficult to demarcate the new boundaries of their respective power and influence. But, given competent arbitration, a more or less stable arrangement does not look impossible over time. Eventually, other federal bodies which now exist as mere agencies of the presidency, from the two houses of parliament to the high courts to the established political parties, may gain more autonomy and evolve into institutions in their own right. If so, Russia's top establishment would acquire a structure, making the system as a whole more resilient and thus more stable.

Mr. Medvedev's arrival at the Kremlin is billed as the continuation of the Putin course. In reality, Mr. Putin's "stabilizing" tenure secured the gains made under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Vladimir Putin was the end of one era; Dmitry Medvedev opens a new one.

Mr. Putin's principal achievement has been pulling the country together again and making sure that capitalism triumphs in Russia. Mr. Medvedev's task is twofold: to make decisive progress toward the rule of law, and to improve Russians' health, housing and education standards, even as the country moves past its commodities-driven economy and builds a foundation for economic innovation.

The new cycle will probably extend well beyond Mr. Medevdev's time in office, but the next four years will be crucial. Not only are public expectations very high. Virtually across the board, Russia has reached the limits of the current economic model. Further accumulation of petrodollars brings growth but no development. Further centralization of state control stifles the economy. Courts that cater to the interests of the powers-that-be -- or those who pay to ruin their competitors -- make property rights conditional.

Any real progress toward a more open and innovative economy will have to come at the expense of well-entrenched bureaucrats. Many of them believe they have just hit a bonanza in the form of state corporations, and they won't cede ground easily. Yet the Kremlin has been spending more time blasting its political opponents, particularly liberals from the "damned '90s," than reaching out to Russia's best and brightest to engage in a joint modernization effort.

Even when left to their own devices, Russian liberals have fared badly, bickering among themselves. For years, many of their leaders have looked like walking monuments to the time when they were young and full of spirited energy. The Kremlin, their nemesis, added insult to injury when it fielded a fake liberal candidate, the virtually unknown Andrei Bogdanov, to contest Sunday's election on behalf of the liberal electorate. (He received just over 1% of the vote.)

However, liberalism in Russia is far from dead. It is assuming a new face and drafting a new agenda. It includes businessmen and professionals who demand more economic freedom and want to trim the powers of the corrupt bureaucracy. It includes middle-class people who are increasingly working together to protect their rights as citizens and property owners. And it includes liberal-minded top bureaucrats and technocrats who realize that, without freedom and accountability, Russia will utterly fail in a competitive, globalized environment. In the future, the old liberal-democracy and human-rights crowd may be succeeded by a sturdier bunch of national liberals who would eventually be able to share power with the dominant conservatives and the emerging social democrats.

This is a long-term prospect at best. For now, the world would be right to see Russia, still essentially authoritarian, making moves toward constitutionalism and wish it well.

As for foreign policy, its style may change under President Medvedev, but its substance will remain the same. Today's Russia is a lonely great power, practicing realpolitik amid globalization. Ukraine is a good example: Moscow no longer fancies it as part of the realm, but it has stopped subsidizing it with cheap gas and has learned to play its principal political clans off one another. Russia is resolved to compete for economic advantages, political influence and cultural impact, but it is willing to cooperate when the terms seem to be right.

European by birth but culturally non-Western, Russia is gradually transforming itself into a Western-type society and economy, while politically standing very much apart from Europe. It is a country to watch closely. Dmitry Medvedev comes at an interesting time.

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