Charles Malik: The West Is the Problem

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Charles Malik was a former president of the UN General Assembly, a former foreign minister of Lebanon, and a professor of philosophy. He was not only a knowledgeable insider in world politics but had the intellect to understand what was happening in a historical perspective. Malik was deeply disappointed by the West's failure to defend Lebanon as --in part and imperfectly-- an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. In 1984 he wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal where he stated:

For months now the world has been focusing on Lebanon as a problem. The problem is not Lebanon or the importance of Lebanon. The problem is the West. Indeed, the importance of Lebanon is precisely that it raises the problem of the West. Lebanon would never have been a problem if the West itself were not the problem. And the West is not only the problem but also the solution. That is its singular greatness. And the solution is to be true to the deepest value of the West: the primacyof the spirit and the freedom of the soul. [WSJ 3-28-1984]

To confirm what Malik wrote, Lee Smith points out how US policy [he refers mainly to the Obama administration] has befriended the Syrian Assad regime despite its many many offenses against the United States and against Americans:

To survive, Damascus needs the world to ignore what it is up to. It particularly needs indifference in Washington, where the Obama administration has seemed sadly oblivious to the fact that what a regime does at home is indicative of how it will act abroad—or, in the case of Syria, a state sponsor of terror and ally of Iran, how it has acted over the last 40 years, targeting especially American citizens, interests, and allies.
For all that, the administration just wants the Syria issue, the uprising, the opposition, to go away. It would prefer not to deal with it and thus has come up with all sorts of excuses to do just that.
It was five months, and many thousand dead, into the uprising before Obama called on Assad to step down. Instead of leading, the president tasked Syria policy out to Turkey, then to the Arab League, which sent a monitoring delegation led by a former Sudanese intelligence chief suspected of war crimes in Darfur.

Smith goes farther. He argues that its position on Syria, since it asked Assad to leave office, does not indicate real opposition to Assad but rather reluctance to see the Assad clan's fall. Smith raises the question of where the Obama administration and the State Dept really stand:

Unfortunately, the White House has painted itself into a corner. Because the administration has never really wanted to see Assad fall, it has talked only of stopping the violence . . . , with the unstated provision that once the murders stop, the murderer still rules. . . .

The question of where Obama & Co. really stand arises concerning the Iranian nuke bomb project as well. Bear in mind that Iran's ayatollahs are major supporters of the Assad regime and vice versa:

What’s odd is that the White House has let on, through various media surrogates, that it may come to accept the inevitability of the Iranian nuclear program and move toward a policy of containment and deterrence. . . . In its dithering on Syria, the administration shows a lack of seriousness in dealing with Iran. . . .

Yet the Assad regime, going back to 1983 at least, has a record of killing offcial Americans as well as American troops in both Lebanon and Iraq:

Under Assad the Damascus airport was a jihadist transport hub from which foreign fighters were either bused directly to the Iraqi border to fight U.S. troops, or warehoused in Syrian prisons until they could be put to some use. Washington knew very well that Syrian intelligence was working with al Qaeda because it had evidence of it in the Sinjar documents, showing that 90 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq were coming through Syria. When a series of suicide bombings killed hundreds of Iraqis in the fall of 2009, the Obama administration hushed Iraqi officials who pointed a finger at Damascus. In other words, al Qaeda’s position in Syria was a problem U.S. officials were content to ignore when, with the help of Assad’s intelligence agents, the organization was killing American troops and Iraqis. But now the fact that al Qaeda elements, which may still be under the control of Syrian intelligence, are targeting regime installations, is a reason not to support the opposition [here Smith is pointing at Obama administration hypocrisy]. . . . The regime in Damascus that has so much Syrian blood on its hands also, along with its allies in Iran and Hezbollah, has killed many thousands of Americans. In Lebanon, U.S. Marines, diplomats, and intelligence officials were slaughtered by Iranian and Syrian assets; in Iraq, the Syrians and Iranians backed both Sunni and Shia fighters in their war against American troops, leaving almost 5,000 dead and many more thousands wounded [The Weekly Standard, 5 March 2012]

So the Assad regime in Syria has been an enemy of the United States and of Americans, including rank and file soldiers plus diplomats and intelligence officials. Yet the Syrian Assad regime was being coddled by the State Dept in the mid-1970s, under Kissinger and since then. The Baker-Hamilton Report drawn up for the Bush 2 administration in about 2006 recommended helping solve all Middle Eastern problems by pressuring Israel to give up the Golan Heights to Assad-ruled Syria. Apparently, Israel's welfare was secondary to Assad regime welfare. Or just how does one explain the situation that Lee Smith describes together with my extending the picture of Washington indulgence of the Assads back to the mid-1970s?

Western Great Powers Give Iran One Last Chance on Its Nuclear Program -- in 2003!!

UPDATING 1-4 & 11 & 12 & 13 & 20 & 3-3 & 4 & 4-21-2010

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools

One of the good things about reading old newspapers is that, if you're still alive and kicking and the world still spinning on its axis, then the terrible things that the old paper reported are really not all that bad. You can look back at the horrors and crimes of the past and take satisfaction in still being alive. Another thing is that old newspaper articles can illuminate what is happening now as you read. I found a good example of that in a report from September 10, 2003, in Avvenire, that I came across just lately. Germany, Great Britain and France, I learned, wanted to give Iran a "last chance" to prove that it was fulfilling its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT] and was not developing nuclear weapons. And these powers had persuaded the United States to agree that the IAEA [international atomic energy agency] should give Iran one last chance. US ambassador Kenneth Brill, who sits on the IAEA's council of governors, announced that the US had been persuaded by other member states sitting on the council of governors

"to give Iran a last chance to stop its evasions."
[ I had at first translated Brill's statement fromthe Italian translation back into English. I have since found the original English text (quoted just above) here & here]

So the Agency governors decided that Iran has "till the end of October, 2003," to prove that it is not in non-fulfillment of its obligations under the NPT. That's very reassuring to read now in the first days of 2010. After all, the same thing, the same last chance, several times repeated, has been given to the Iranians and is being given again. So the "last chance" was given over and over. Yet, I and whoever reads this is still alive. So maybe things aren't so bad.

Now, what sort of regime was in power in Iran that the West was treating so leniently? It was a very Judeophobic regime. It was a regime that hated Israel. It was also a regime that had come to power with the help of the Carter administration in the United States, that is, with the help of president jimmah carter and his national insecurity advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of them fervent haters of Israel.

Then, the Iranian Islamist regime, at first headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, had sent assassins abroad to kill Iranian opponents of the regime, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, Shapur Bakhtiar, and others. There is a list of 58 assassination attempts --mostly successful-- outside Iran, perpetrated by Islamic Republic agents. The list includes names of places and victims, intended and unintended, of assassination. The victims were mostly Iranians living abroad, opponents of the regime, but included several non-Iranians, among them translators of Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, as well as collateral victims. The murders were perpetrated on orders of the regime. The total number of victims is several more than 58 [here]. Some of the victims were murdered in the United States and France, although both states had done much to make Khomeini's return to Iran possible. That is not very nice international behavior. But Iran didn't care about offending and the West did not seem especially offended, not even states where such murders had been perpetrated by Iranian agents.

We cannot forget the countless people killed by the regime within Iran, although we don't know their names. On the other hand, the death sentence issued by Khomeini against the novelist Salman Rushdie was notorious. Rushdie has been living in hiding from Iranian assassins for more than 20 years. His offense was Islamic blasphemy, which Khomeini, Ahmadinajad and their gang wanted to forbid even in non-Muslim countries. It's curious how few Western intellectuals were willing to stand up for Rushdie's freedom of speech, even while he was living in Britain. Rushdie's life is still in danger. None of this brought the Western great powers to strongly oppose the Iranian regime. After all, the United States and France had served as midwives for the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and his gang.

The Judeophobia of the Khomeini regime and its Lebanese satellite, Hizbollah, known at first in the West as "The Party of God" [the literal translation of Hizbollah], is notorious. A Hizbollah paper in Lebanon wrote, in reaction to the French elections of 1987 [or 1988?] that "The Jewish microbe is everywhere" [Le microbe juif est partout]. This was because the elections did not turn out as Hizbollah/Iran had wanted, for which they blamed the Jewish voters in France. [This was published in LeFigaro at that time].

But the really strong expressions of hatred of Jews [stronger even than those before] appeared on 20 October 2006 when Ahmadinajad warned

"Israel will disappear . . . [because of] the rage of hundreds of millions of Muslims"

He described the Israeli people as

terrorists and enemies of religion [= Islam].
[quoted by Carlo Panella in Fascismo Islamico (Milan: Rizzoli 2007), pp 23-24.

This is a case of projection where Islamic fanatics project their own character on others, particularly on their designated enemies. Ahmadinajad also lied in that same speech about Britain and the United States creating Israel, a lie that fit in conveniently with what walt-mearsheimer were saying at the time. All this was known about Ahmadinajad and his regime in 2006, yet the "last chances," which were being given already in 2003, continued to be given. US secretary of state, Colin Powell, appointed by George W Bush, declared himself "open to dialogue" with Iran in 2003 [Corriere della Sera, 31 December 2003]. Likewise, candidate, later president, Barak Hussein Obama, declared that he was eager for dialogue, smart diplomacy, and negotiations with Iran in the years 2008 and 2009. So last chances go back more than six years from now, as does openness to dialogue.

This was all notwithstanding the Iranian boasts over the years of military advances, specifically in long-range rocket development, as well as in nuclear development. These rockets can reach Europe, not to mention Israel. What have all the attempts to placate Islamist Iran achieved? Iran recently declared that it would develop ten new uranium enrichment sites [International Herald Tribune, 30 November 2009].

The Iranian government responded defiantly Sunday [11-29-2009] to an international call for a halt in its uranium enrichment work by vowing to do the opposite, as it approved a plan to build ten additional enrichment facilities.
[IHT, 11-30-2009]

It sure as hell looks like the major Western powers want Iran to have The bomb. We forecast in June 2007 that that was the case. Unfortunately, it looks more and more as if we were right.

We will leave for another time the consideration of the motives for Western appeasement of Islamic fundamentalist Iran.
- - - - - - - - - - -

For previous articles on this issue on the Emet m'Tsiyon blog see here & here & here & here
- - - - - - - - - - -
UPDATINGS 1-12-2010 more links to articles on this issue: Jonathan Tobin on Commentary's Contentions blog [here]
Rick Richman follows up on Tobin [here]. So after more than six [6] years of missed "deadlines" or deadlines that never died, Obama and his partners in facilitating an Iranian bomb are still missing their own deadlines.
1-13-2010 Iranians believe that the Iranian regime murdered the recently assassinated Iranian physicist in Teheran, using some of their Hizbollah agents [here].
1-20-2010 The Saudis are worried about increasing Iranian hegemony in the Middle East, according to Lee Smith [He quotes the following words from a pre-Obama American official] : “'. . . what the Saudis were really concerned about. The number one issue in Riyadh is Iran.' . . .
'. . . the Saudi line,' the former [American] official said, 'was this: ‘Americans, are you going to do anything about our number one issue? If not, we will go our own road.’” [here]
Rick Richman [Commentary blog, 3-3-2010] points out the fatuousness of Obama's Iran bomb policy, guided perhaps by Zbig Brzezinski's mad dreams of "deterrence" of a bomb-equipped Iran [here]. Zbig of course wants the mad mullahs to have the bomb. Why not? He helped them take power as Carter's national insecurity advisor. When Carl Foreman's film, Dr Strangelove, came out in the early sixties, the character of Strangelove was widely believed to be based on Henry Kissinger. Actually, Zbig fits the bill just as well as Dr K does. He too loves the bomb.
3-4-2010 More good cheer from Washington and New York on the Iranian bomb threat, by Emmanuele Ottolenghi [here]
4-21-2010 Jennifer Rubin thinks that the Obama crowd is still procrastinating about The Iranian Bomb[here].