Who Rules the World? (27 page)

It was even more dangerous than that, as we learned in the fall of 2013, when the BBC reported that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia’s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States, sending its nuclear system onto the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. Fortunately, the officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not report the warnings to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. And thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re still alive to talk about it.
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The security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan administration planners than for their predecessors. And so it continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic nuclear accidents that have occurred over the years, many reviewed in Eric Schlosser’s chilling study
Command and Control
.
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In other words, it is hard to contest General Butler’s conclusions.

SURVIVAL IN THE POST–COLD WAR ERA

The record of post–Cold War actions and doctrines is hardly reassuring either. Every self-respecting president has to have a doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan “multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must.” In congressional testimony, the phrase “when we must” was explained more fully: the United States is entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”
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Meanwhile, STRATCOM in the Clinton era produced an important study entitled “Essentials of Post–Cold War Deterrence,” issued well after the Soviet Union had collapsed and Clinton was extending President George H. W. Bush’s program of expanding NATO to the east in violation of verbal promises to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev—with reverberations to the present.
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That study was concerned with “the role of nuclear weapons in the post–Cold War era.” A central conclusion: that the United States must maintain the right to launch a first strike, even against nonnuclear states. Furthermore, nuclear weapons must always be at the ready because they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.” They were, that is, constantly being used, just as you’re using a gun if you aim but don’t fire one while robbing a store (a point that Daniel Ellsberg has repeatedly stressed). STRATCOM went on to advise that “planners should not be too rational about determining … what the opponent values the most.” Anything is a possible target. “It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed … That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project.” It is “beneficial [for our strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control,’” thus posing a constant threat of nuclear attack—a severe violation of the UN Charter, if anyone cares.

Not much here about the noble goals constantly proclaimed—or, for that matter, the obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to make “good faith” efforts to eliminate this scourge of the earth. What resounds, rather, is an adaptation of Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet about the Maxim gun (to quote the great African historian Chinweizu):

Whatever happens, we have got

The Atom Bomb, and they have not.

After Clinton came, of course, George W. Bush, whose broad endorsement of preventive war easily encompasses Japan’s attack in December 1941 on military bases in two U.S. overseas possessions, at a time when Japanese militarists were well aware that B-17 Flying Fortresses were being rushed off assembly lines and deployed to those bases with the intent “to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.” That was how the prewar plans were described by their architect, Air Force General Claire Chennault, with the enthusiastic approval of President Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall.
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Then came Barack Obama, with pleasant words about working to abolish nuclear weapons—combined with plans to spend $1 trillion on the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next thirty years, a percentage of the military budget “comparable to spending for procurement of new strategic systems in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan,” according to a study by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
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Obama has also not hesitated to play with fire for political gain. Take for example the capture and assassination of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs. Obama brought it up with pride in an important speech on national security in May 2013. The speech was widely covered, but one crucial paragraph was ignored.
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Obama hailed the operation but added that it could not be the norm. The reason, he said, was that the risks “were immense.” The SEALs might have been “embroiled in an extended firefight.” Even though, by luck, that didn’t happen, “the cost to our relationship with Pakistan and the backlash among the Pakistani public over encroachment on their territory was … severe.”

Let us now add a few details. The SEALs were ordered to fight their way out if apprehended. They would not have been left to their fate if “embroiled in an extended firefight”; the full force of the U.S. military would have been used to extricate them. Pakistan has a powerful, well-trained military, highly protective of state sovereignty. It also has nuclear weapons, and Pakistani specialists are concerned about the possible penetration of their nuclear security system by jihadi elements. It is also no secret that the population has been embittered and radicalized by Washington’s drone terror campaign and other policies.

While the SEALs were still in the bin Laden compound, Pakistani Chief of Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was informed of the raid and ordered the military “to confront any unidentified aircraft,” which he assumed would be from India. Meanwhile, in Kabul, U.S. war commander General David Petraeus ordered “warplanes to respond” if the Pakistanis “scrambled their fighter jets.”
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As Obama said, by luck the worst didn’t happen, though it could have been quite ugly. But the risks were faced without noticeable concern. Or subsequent comment.

As General Butler observed, it is a near miracle that we have escaped destruction so far, and the longer we tempt fate, the less likely it is that we can hope for divine intervention to perpetuate the miracle.

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Cease-fires in Which Violations Never Cease

On August 26, 2014, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a cease-fire agreement after a fifty-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind. The agreement called for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that had strangled Gaza for many years.

This was, however, just the most recent in a series of cease-fire agreements reached after each of Israel’s periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza. Throughout this period, the terms of these agreements remained essentially the same. The regular pattern has been for Israel to then disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, which is followed by even fiercer Israeli brutality. These escalations are often called “mowing the lawn” in Israeli parlance, though the 2014 Israeli operation was more accurately described by an appalled senior U.S. military officer as “removing the topsoil.”

The first of this series of truces was the Agreement on Movement and Access between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005. It called for the opening of a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people, the continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza for the import/export of goods and the transit of people, the reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, and the reopening of the airport in Gaza that Israeli bombing had demolished.

That agreement was reached shortly after Israel withdrew its settlers and military forces from Gaza. The motive for the withdrawal was explained with engaging cynicism by Dov Weisglass, a confidant of then prime minister Ariel Sharon, who was in charge of negotiating and implementing it. Summarizing the purpose of the operation, Weisglass explained that “the disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
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In the background, Israeli hawks recognized that instead of investing substantial resources in maintaining a few thousand settlers in illegal subsidized communities in devastated Gaza, it made more sense to transfer them to illegal subsidized communities in areas of the West Bank that Israel intended to keep.

The disengagement was depicted as a noble effort to pursue peace, but the reality was quite different. Israel never relinquished control of Gaza and is accordingly recognized as the occupying power by the United Nations, the United States, and other states (apart from Israel itself, of course). In their comprehensive history of settlement in the Occupied Territories, Israeli scholars Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar describe what actually happened when that country “disengaged”: the ruined territory was not released “for even a single day from Israel’s military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day.” After the disengagement, “Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might.”
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OPERATIONS CAST LEAD AND PILLAR OF DEFENSE

Israel soon had a pretext for violating the November Agreement more severely. In January 2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted “the wrong way” in carefully monitored free elections, placing the parliament in the hands of Hamas. Israel and the United States immediately imposed harsh sanctions, telling the world very clearly what they mean by “democracy promotion,” and soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas preempted the coup in 2007, the siege of Gaza grew far more severe, and regular Israeli military attacks commenced. Voting the wrong way in a free election was bad enough, but preempting a U.S.-planned military coup proved to be an unpardonable offense.

A new cease-fire agreement was reached in June 2008. It again called for opening the border crossings to “allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza.” Israel formally agreed, but immediately announced that it would not abide by the agreement until Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it held.

Israel itself has a long history of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and holding them for lengthy periods without credible charges, sometimes as hostages. Imprisoning civilians on dubious charges, or none at all, is also a regular practice in the territories Israel controls.

Israel not only maintained the siege in violation of the 2008 cease-fire agreement but did so with extreme rigor, even preventing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which cares for the huge number of official refugees in Gaza, from replenishing its stocks.
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On November 4, while the media were focused on the U.S. presidential election, Israeli troops entered Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. That elicited a Hamas missile response and an exchange of fire. (All the deaths were Palestinian.) In late December, Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. Israel considered the offer, but rejected it, preferring instead to launch Operation Cast Lead, a three-week incursion with the full power of the Israeli military into the Gaza Strip, resulting in atrocities well documented by international and Israeli human rights organizations.

On January 8, 2009, while Cast Lead was in full fury, the UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution (with the United States abstaining) calling for “an immediate cease-fire leading to a full Israeli withdrawal, unimpeded provision through Gaza of food, fuel, and medical treatment, and intensified international arrangements to prevent arms and ammunition smuggling.”
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A new cease-fire agreement was indeed reached, similar to the previous ones, but again was never really observed and broke down completely with the next major mowing-the-lawn episode, Operation Pillar of Defense, in November 2012. What happened in the interim can be illustrated by the casualty figures from January 2012 to the launching of that operation: one Israeli killed by fire from Gaza, seventy-eight Palestinians killed by Israeli fire.
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The first act of Operation Pillar of Defense was the murder of Ahmed Jabari, a high official of the military wing of Hamas. Aluf Benn, editor in chief of Israel’s leading newspaper,
Ha’aretz
, described Jabari as Israel’s “subcontractor” in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet there for more than five years. As always, there was a pretext for the assassination, but the likely reason was provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. He had been involved in direct negotiations with Jabari for years and reported that, hours before he was assassinated, Jabari “received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.”
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There is a long record of Israeli actions designed to deter the threat of a diplomatic settlement.