Chairman: The topic this evening is American policy: continuity or change. Just as a teaser I will make a few comments. Now that the election results are in, the votes are counted and the speeches have been given, the seemingly endless 2012 election can at long last be put to bed. Barack Obama crossed the finishing line, Eastern time, well before midnight without the drama and the discord of elections in the past despite the whole rigmarole that went.
The past 18 months of this election cycle have thrown us so many issues that came out almost as if to keep political junkies like me entertained. The election results in the US cannot be ignored by any citizen of this world. The election of President Barack Obama has just ended recently. But why is the world so interested in the results. This is a crucial question that everyone is trying to answer using his or her own political interpretation of the global events.
There are those who breathe a sign of relief that the world is much safer and more secure under the leadership of the democrats who they consider much more sober – peace doves. As one surfs the world on the internet to see the reactions of the citizens from different countries it is easy to observe the expression ‘thanks God’ that the world will continue to enjoy peace and tranquility. Again debatable whether we have peace and tranquility under the wise leadership of President Obama and his Democratic Party. This is not what I am saying. This is on different websites and comments. The election fever is over and the results are out. But what does it mean to an ordinary citizen of the world from Africa to the Middle East as well as Asia and Latin America.
Obama certainly faces challenges including the West’s nuclear standoff with Iran, the civil war in Syria, the winding down of the war in Afghanistan and dealing with an increasingly assertive China. So I think the next four years are going to be interesting and one of the questions on the internet if you look at there is the question whether Obama will be assassinated in the next four years. We don’t know. It happened to J.F. Kennedy. Not only Mr Obama but Lincoln was also assassinated and also a few other presidents in the past. America has a tendency of violence which other countries also enjoy. Our two speakers today are eminently suitable to talk about this particular issue.
Peter Rushton: The American elections have had many months of media coverage. The fathomless banality of the presidential "debates" has encouraged the understandable view that
there is no difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney – that the entire process was essentially meaningless. There will be many negative reflections this evening about American "democracy", but let us at least begin with a positive aspect. If there had been a natural majority among the American people in favour of an aggressive foreign policy – a majority of Americans in support of ultra-militant Zionism – then there can be no doubt that Mitt Romney would have won this election. He spent millions of dollars arguing in television ads, on the internet, in direct mailshots and targeted telephone calls, all insisting that President Obama had jeopardised the security of the United States and let down its closest ally Israel; all arguing that American policy should be far more aggressive against Syria, against Iran, in favour of Israel. Yet this multi-million dollar campaign ended in defeat, and for that at least we can be thankful. President Obama’s second term will be far from ideal, and I have no doubt that he will disappoint those who continue to hope for a fundamental change of U.S. policy in the direction of global justice – but President Romney would probably have been a great deal worse. As an illustration of why American politics can matter so much to the rest of us – especially those concerned with the Middle East – we should look back to another U.S. Presidential election that took place against a climate of dramatic events in the Middle East. This was the election campaign of 1948, which took place during the very year of the Nakba. Like the earlier congressional elections of 1946, this election campaign had a serious influence on President Truman’s policy towards Zionism and indirectly on policy here in London: the clearest summation of this effect came in a speech to the House of Commons on 25th February 1947 by the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. This was a time when Britain still tried to exercise its own foreign policy; when a British Foreign Secretary spoke his own mind, rather than simply relaying to a helpless nation policies already predetermined in Washington and Tel Aviv. Bevin told his colleagues about the progress he had been hoping to make the previous October [1946] in negotiating a Palestinian settlement and resisting Zionist demands for an immediate influx of another 100,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine. He explained: “There was a feeling—I do not think I overestimated it—when they left me in the Foreign Office that day, that I had the right approach at last. But what happened? I went back to the Paris Peace Conference, and next day—I believe it was the Day of Atonement, or a special day of the Jewish religion—my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister telephoned me at midnight, and told me that the President of the United States was going to issue another statement on the 100,000. I think the country and the world ought to know about this. "I went next morning to the Secretary of State, Mr. Byrnes, and told him how far I had got the day before. I believed we were on the road, if only they would leave us alone. I begged that the statement be not issued, but I was told that if it was not issued by Mr. Truman, a competitive statement would be issued by Mr. Dewey. [This was Truman’s Republican opponent, the
extremely pro-Zionist Governor Thomas Dewey of New York.] In international affairs I cannot settle things if my problem is made the subject of local elections. I hope I am not saying anything to cause bad feeling with the United States, but I feel so intensely about this.” Despite this pro-Zionist intervention, at the elections of that year – 1946 – President Truman’s party lost control of the House and (narrowly) the Senate. He knew that with opinion polls heavily against him he stood no chance of winning re-election in 1948 if he allowed his opponent – Governor Dewey of New York – to outbid him for Jewish support. Instead Truman pulled off what is still regarded as the greatest election upset in U.S. history. As it happens he narrowly lost New York (which is the state with the largest Jewish population, today numbering about 8.4%), but his victory was secured by narrow wins in just three states where Jewish voters that year held the balance: Ohio, California and Illinois. A shift of just a few thousand Jewish voters in those three states would have been enough to defeat Truman and elect Dewey. Only 2% to 2.5% of American population is Jewish, but they are heavily concentrated in 13 states. If a candidate wins those 13 states, then he can lose the other 37 and still be elected president. Only in one state – Michigan – do Arab-Americans slightly outnumber Jewish-Americans, and even there the figures are hardly significant, either side of 1%. No wonder Harry Truman told his ambassador to the 1948 Palestine talks in Geneva: "I won’t tell you what to do or how to vote, but I will only say this. In all of my political experience I don’t ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election." About 78% (some analyses say 74%) of American Jews voted for Obama in 2008, slightly down to around 70% in 2012. So American Jews remained a strongly pro-Obama section of the electorate despite Romney appearing by far the more pro-Israel candidate. There was a perceptible shift among Jewish voters, but it seems only to have been on the same scale as the shift among White Catholics, a group which had been slightly against Obama four years ago but who hardened their pro-Republican stance this year and were about 60-40 pro-Romney. (By contrast Hispanic Catholics – like Hispanic voters in general – hardened their pro-Democrat stance and were about 75-25 pro-Obama.) In terms of religious voting blocs, again by far the strongest Republican support was among White evangelicals – the so-called “born-again” voters, who were 80-20 pro-Romney. This is a key constituency for Israel: Christian Zionists as a voting bloc are far more important than Jews. (Only about 0.6% of Americans are Muslims: about the same level as other religious minorities such as Eastern Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and Jehovah’s Witnesses. About 24% of Americans are Catholics; while the majority would describe themselves as some form of Protestant Christian. About 26% are self-defined Evangelical Protestants – which in the U.S. means they are likely to be an extreme pro-Zionist.)
The electoral arithmetic – most especially the hold of Zionist mythology over Evangelical Protestant voters – is one reason why the "democratic" process influences American politics in favour of the Zionist agenda. Campaign fundraising is another key. Fundraising has been more crucial than ever since the January 2010 Supreme Court ruling that struck out a 2002 campaign finance law as unconstitutional, effectively removing the limits on corporate donations to so-called political action committees. This court decision helped make 2012 the first $6 billion, and within that total many millions of carefully targeted dollars were spent by specifically pro-Israel political action committees. In recent years these specifically Zionist committees were split between the long-established AIPAC and its allies, seen as close to George Bush, and the supposedly liberal J Street, which sought to rebuild traditional Jewish alliances with the Democratic Party. The casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson (who is also an important donor to Israeli politicians) gave $20 million to just one Republican primary candidate, Newt Gingrich, and a total of around $60 million to Republicans in general, including the Romney campaign. Such donors are given enhanced power by the endless American electoral cycle, with the lower House of Congress re-elected every two years. Presidents often find themselves unable to control one or both Houses of Congress – a position that Obama like several predecessors must now resolve through wheeling and dealing to get legislation passed – a process that of course again enhances the power of experienced lobbyists. It is at Congressional level that the power of the Zionist lobby is excercised most brutally. One reason that no anti-Zionist of even the mildest type has been elected President is that Congressional politicians who head down this road are swiftly crushed. The most famous example is the defeat of former Illinois congressman Paul Findley in 1982, who was targetted by Zionist lobbyists who termed him "a dangerous enemy of Israel." This year one of Israel’s few critics on Capitol Hill, Dennis Kucinich, was defeated in an Ohio primary after sixteen years in office. Recent developments inside the Republican Party have seen the rise of a faction termed the "Tea Party", and this revolt by the supposed "right-wing" of the party continued, for example with the removal of veteran Sen. Richard Lugar in Illinois Most of Tea Party is very pro-Israel (though there is a large minority that favours a return to America’s Jeffersonian traditions and wishes to step away from imperial foreign policies – notably Ron Paul, who won significant backing during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this year, and his son Rand Paul, who is a U.S. Senator from Kentucky. But Tea Party activists also favour reducing the size and scope of the federal government, and
seek substantial cuts in foreign aid. Some in the Israeli Lobby fear it would just look too blatant if Congress cut foreign aid to every recipient except Israel, though House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has publicly favoured just such a policy, making aid to Israel exempt from any rules applied to other overseas aid. During the next few weeks the details of U.S. foreign policy will be affected by two appointments. These two key vacancies are for Secretary of State, following the impending retirement of Hillary Clinton, who is very likely to be a presidential candidate herself (and a very pro-Zionist one!) in four years time, and for CIA Director, after the dramatic and in many ways still mysterious resignation of former general David Petraeus. It is of course far too early to say what might lie behind the exposure of this personal scandal which has ended Petraeus’s career, but perhaps it might be relevant to look back two and a half years at testimony given to the U.S. Senate by Gen. Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command which includes the Middle East. Among his 56 pages of testimony, Zionist lobby groups focused minutely on a single paragraph, in which Gen. Petraeus dared to be very mildly critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship: "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [i.e. Central Command’s "area of responsibility"] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world…" Almost immediately these observations drew sharp criticism from one of the most powerful Zionist lobby groups, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who wrote: "The General’s assertions lead to the illusory conclusion that if only there was a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S. could successfully complete its mission in the region. Gen. Petraeus has simply erred …in blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel. This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive." "Dangerous" indeed, perhaps, for the career of Gen. Petraeus, which has now been ended so publicly and dramatically! Other important developments during the next few weeks will be in Congress, where significant power is exercised by the chairman of influential committees, and often by whoever is appointed as the most senior opposition member of these committees. To examine just one of these, we can look at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, whose new chairman is likely to be the Republican congressman Ed Royce, from Orange County, California. Though himself a Roman Catholic, Royce is one of the most committed Zionists on Capitol Hill. It is truly extraordinary that such a key position is likely to be held by this man, who in March 2011 gave a virulent Islamophobic speech at a rally opposing a fundraising dinner in his California district. The dinner was organised by a disaster relief charity, Islamic Circle of North America Relief USA, but was portrayed by Congessman Royce as some form of support
for terrorism. Not content with having Royce as chairman, the Zionist lobby can also look forward to having one of two Demoratic congressmen as senior opposition member on this House Foreign Affairs Committee. The job seems likely to go to either Congressman Ben Sherman of California, or Congressman Elliot Engel of New York – both are staunch Zionists from Russian Jewish immigrant families. Perhaps Congressman Engel might just have the edge, as he actually sponsored a House resolution declaring that Jerusalem should be recognised by the U.S. government as the undivided capital of Israel. The 2012 elections and their aftermath have confirmed that U.S. "democracy" offers American voters no choice regarding their government’s policy on the Middle East, an area crucial both for the prospects of international peace and for any hope of international justice. This lack of choice is not accidental: it is deeply rooted in the structures of American politics which enhance the power of the Zionist lobby.
Dr Sami Ramadani : I will address the question broadly whether the debates around a new president in the USA affects foreign policies or not and I will then move on to see how Obama’s election would affect policies towards the Middle East.
Peter looked at the internal dynamics of the US elections and how campaign groups might affect US policies. I am looking more at the impact of those policies and whether they change with new presidents coming to power. I will also address the question of the relationship between US foreign policy and Zionism – something that Peter talked about. I think that is an important question.
The debate areas as to whether US policy changes are normally focused on three areas or three aspects are looked at to suggest that there is or there is no change. One is the question of Republican versus Democrat. Do we get change if there is a Republican President or a Democrat President. Secondly do we get change if the US president is serving in his first term or in his second term. Quite often we hear that a US president is freer because he is not looking forward to be re-elected because he not looking to be re-elected. A third aspect of the debate usually relates to the personal opinion, personal inclinations political and social of the individual candidates: Obama versus Romney for example.
I think regardless of these issues in terms of foreign policy I argue that there isn’t much change. What decides US foreign policy are issues that I will relate to. They are US strategic interests across the world as perceived by certain elite groups in the USA.
On domestic policy there is but there is enough research to suggest that on domestic policy there is sometimes quite substantial differences between the candidates. There is enough research to suggest that in terms of the standard of living of the poorest sections of US society Democratic presidents are marginally better in the effect they have on social and economic policy domestically. On socially policy we can see that in the case of Obama versus Romney there was quite a substantial disagreement on the question of abortion – something that affects the rights of women in the USA. There was a distinct difference that stayed to the very last.
On the question of minority rights what do you do with the 12 million so-called illegal workers in the USA. There was quite a big difference between the two and we will also see this played out during Obamas’s second presidency.
But on foreign policy I argue that usually there is no substantial change on foreign policy because of how strategic interests are perceived by US elite groups and I will talk a bit about those as well.
If you look at a quick list of Republican versus Democratic presidents there is a general opinion, which I think is a myth, that democratic presidents are more peaceful to the world than Republican presidents. And if you look at Roosevelt, a Democrat, he dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Negasaki. If you look at the most peaceful of them all, J F Kennedy he started the Vietnam war. He tried to invade Cuba. Lindon B Johnson who followed him – a democrat – he escalated the Vietnam War. We don’t know what would have happened if Kennedy had not been assassinated but we are talking about Democrat versus Republican. Lindon B Johnson escalated the Vietnam War. It took an extreme right winger like Nixon to stop the Vietnam war.
This is an interesting factor in domestic politics as well in terms of who is more peaceful and who is a greater war monger. The war mongers are usually the candidates who can stop wars more than the peaceful ones because once they are in power they can truly represent the interests of the war mongers by suggesting that a particular war is no longer of benefit to them. This is how Nixon stopped the Vietnam war and how various presidents in the USA behave towards questions of war and peace.
Those who preach peace and power are constantly harassed by war advocating councils and more aggressive circles and they tend to be much more circumspect in suggesting that we should stop war and we should bring the troops home and so on.
Significantly for example on the Iraq war if you look at it strategically you will that it was various US presidents who really prepared the grounds for that war. They included Democratic and Republican presidents. It was Bush who finally pulled the trigger and invaded and occupied Iraq but significantly it was Bush who in the final weeks of his presidency negotiated the final pull out agreements and the security agreement with the Iraqi government. It was he who negotiated that and it was Obama who implemented it once he was in power.
It was an agreement that was reached between the foreign policy advisers of both Obama and Bush as it what to do with the troops in Iraq. They declared Iraq unoccupiable because of both the ferocity of the Iraqi military resistance as well as the political and social opposition to their presence in Iraq. They had to withdraw the bulk of their troops from Iraq. They still have influence. We could refer to those later on as well.
I went through a list of what various presidents do: Hiroshima, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, Palestine, Iraq, the various wars the US got involved in Central America, invasions, coups d’etats, hundreds of attempted coups, attempts at assassination of world leaders. You will find these general characteristics of US policy to be unchanging whoever is the president of the United States.
Why is that? I would use the term the military-industrial complex. It is a term commonly used to talk about the US economy and social and economic structures. Now this phrase the military-industrial complex even though it sounds very left wing and even Marxist in its connotations. It was a phrase coined by Roosevelt himself. He pointed to the dangers of the rising power of the military industrial complex. The military complex in the USA was perceived to be a major threat to social cohesion in the United States and to democracy itself and the democratic game in the USA.
The military industrial complex is a good expression because if you at the US economy the purely military sector is very, very powerful. The US military budget constitutes half of all the military budgets of the world put together. It is a massive, massive sector.
Now if you look at the question of industries and advanced technologies these themselves are closely linked to military research – directly or indirectly whether we talk about satellite technology, computerization etc. The civilian products that come out of these advanced researches are often a by product of the military research. A lot of the gadgets we use – whether it is the GPS street finder on our mobile phones or the Teflon that we use in our kitchens are generally products of military research. Or civilian research that gets incorporated into the military because they spot certain advantages in terms of funding the military budgets. In US universities most advanced, technological research is also linked to the military. So the military industrial complex is quite a good representation of where the real power lies in the USA.
Allied to this military industrial complex is the question of oil and gas. Oil and gas happen to be the number one source of energy but also vitally – and that is often forgotten – gas and oil are important specially petroleum, are an important raw material in the chemical-industrial scene that it is not only a source of energy but it is a very important raw material. If you look around this room you will see most of the stuff we see has some link to the by products of petroleum, from the paint on the walls to the various plastics we use.
A lot of the new materials that get discovered cannot be processed without some input of a by product of petroleum. So the petrochemical industry is quite vital to the modern industrial scene.
So control of oil and gas becomes crucial. The oil companies become really important within the American scene. The oil companies in the USA produce, explore and use foreign oil as well. There is a contradiction between the two. The enormous rises in oil prices helps the domestic producers it helps to boost the profits of those who sell the oil after exploring it but it also affects the USA in terms of importing oil into the US economy itself. It is a rather optimum price that they quarrel about.
This military industrial complex arms exports abroad. The oil and gas industry and so on. It is these factors that we need to study to try and figure out what the US policies and plans are in every particular period rather getting into the façade of conflicts between the various individuals and candidates in the United States. We should not completely ignore them as they sometimes represent conflicting interests within US society but ultimately these important strategic geo political interests of the United States become really crucial.
For example in looking today at events in the Middle East what US policy would be towards any particular issue we should not ignore that there is a shift now in US policy in terms of military presence, in terms of attention to the south China Sea. Why the South China Sea? Why is the US channeling much more of its military attention in terms of movement of their aircraft carriers into the area. Why are American strategists now outputting much more analysis about the South China Sea? Why is the United States which destroyed Vietnam killing three million of its people trying to befriend Vietnam. They are utilizing Chinese Vietnamese differences. Why are they insisting that Japan should be supported in its differences with China?
There is a lot to be said about noticing what goes on.
Obviously one of the reasons that there oil in the South China Sea. Massive reserves have been discovered but also China is a major rising power in the world. Look ahead ten, 15, 20 years you will see that China will become the most important economic power. It will by pass the USA. Some predict that within four to five years, in terms of GDP at least, China’s economy
will bypass that of the United States. China is a rising military and economic power that the USA is quite worried about in terms of its future policies.
To go back to the Middle East, the Middle East is as we know the most important region in the world for producing oil and gas. It has the highest discovered reserves although Venezuela is becoming increasingly important but the Middle East remains the most source of energy – a very strategic area in terms of the criss crossing of interests between Europe, Africa and Asia as well as those oil and gas reserves.
US policy towards the Middle East has been familiar to most of us. Israel is its favorite ally, Israel is the close friend of the US that has to protected at all conflicts. In terms of conflicts and the US role in conflicts in the Middle East. Who do they support and who do they oppose at any one particular time.
I take the view quite strongly that it is not Zionism the runs US policy. It is US policy and directs how Zionism is operating today. In that I am not obviously unique. A few famous individuals who share this view are Noam Chomsky a left writer and intellectual American and Nasrallah the leader of Hezbollah. They agree that the USA dominates Israel and uses Israel. But appearances can be very deceptive and in this case they are deceptive because of the identity of interests between the US and Israel, especially for the last twenty or thirty years. There is a complete identity of interests. The US strategic interests in the Middle East are identical to Zionist interests Zionist interests being to occupy the whole of Palestine, to bring in more Jewish migrants into the historic land of Palestine, establish settlements, ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people and become a very powerful state, with unknown borders. What are the borders of Israel? Even leading Zionists would not tell you what the borders of Israel are. It is an expanding project to establish a very powerful state from the Nile to the Euphrates as they would have dreamed of doing. So this is the Zionist project at heart. If you go back to the late 19th century and the first Zionist conference that is the project.
Now recently: 1956 was a crucial year in which the United States started dominating Israeli policy. It was the year of the tripartite aggression by Israel, Britain and France, the occupation of Sinai following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain, Israel and France cooked up a secret plan to invade Egyptian territory. Israeli forces moved with the support of Britain and France and so on. It is a long story. They occupied the Sinai. Now who forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai so quickly? Eisenhower – the United States. They forced them because they were not party to that policy. It coincided with the dominance of the United States on the world stage after WW2 and it signaled the demise of the old colonial powers, Britain and France and the rise and dominance of the United States across the world and particularly in the Middle East, one of the most important strategic areas of the of the world.
1956 alerted the Zionists alerted US policy makers as to the importance of Israel as well as the Zionists realizing that the new power that the new power to worship and to serve is the USA. Ever since Israel has been forced by the United States to follow certain policies, not only in terms of stopping them becoming very aggressive because they might hurt US policy but occasionally they forced Israel to become even more aggressive then even the Zionists wanted.
And very significantly in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon because the Lebanese resistance movement started defeating the Israeli forces, Israeli military leaders, Zionist leaders became very concerned about the losses they were suffering in Lebanon. They wanted to end that war and withdraw. It was the United States pressurizing them to prolong that war and to refusing at the Security Council to call for an end. The United States was dreaming of crushing Hezbollah
inside Lebanon as a prelude to affecting Syria, as a prelude to encircling Iran. And playing on the contradictions in the arena.
Now one area that I am sure we will touch on which I will conclude on is the Arab uprisings and the attempts by the United States to stir up sectarian war in the Middle East. I think US policy in the Middle East will increasingly rely on trying to stir up warfare between Shia and Sunni. This is going to become the anchor or US policies in the region. One of the reasons for this is they will be able to use Arab forces and Arab regimes in this conflict. They will avoid putting land forces on the ground because of the defeat they suffered in Iraq, the casualties in Iraq, they will try and use drone attacks, maybe airforce interventions but troops on the ground are off the agenda because of the pressure of American public opinion because they do not want massive losses and they have found in Saudi Arabia and Qatar ready suppliers of finance to fund wars and to utilize certain movements, jihadists, takfiris and others to instigate internal warfare, Shia versus Sunnis. If this continues and deepens then the encirclement of Iran would become more easily achievable and perhaps a future war would become more possible against Iran. One of the first stages in that is to affect change in Syria. I will stop here.
* Peter Rushton is a historian and political analyst, currently researching British Middle East policy at the National Archives. In the 1990s he was among the first web designers to organise online services for political parties, featured by the Financial Times at the 2001 general election when he attended the Liberal Democrat and Conservative party conferences. In recent years he has been a frequent broadcaster on Russia Today, Press TV and IRIB.
**Dr Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in Sociology and a contributor to “The Guardian” on Iraq and the Middle East. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Stop the War Coalition. He opposed Saddam’s regime, but campaigned against the US-led sanctions and war of aggression on Iraq.
