Original source URL: http://williambowles.info/ini/2006/0806/ini-0444.html Woof-Woof! The bite is far worse than the bark US imperial strategies and the so-called Jewish lobby by William Bowles * Tuesday, 8 August, 2006 Consider if you will that the US has, for the past 100 years pursued a policy that would enable it to ensure global dominance through the ownership and control of vital energy supplies and as a result enable it to dominate the world's economy to the benefit of its own capitalist class. This policy has resulted in innumerable wars and coup d'etats and even the deliberate destruction of entire countries through its control of world trade and innumerable foreign governments. In pursuit of these objectives it utilises a variety of tactics, tactics that include murder, subversion, bribes and blackmail, the overthrow of governments, election fixing as well as the more obvious propaganda campaigns it wages through the corporate press, whose interests are of course identical with those who govern. The handful of media/communications corporations who wage this war of words are global in scope enabling them to push the same message no matter the language or the location. This process has accelerated and intensified as a result of mergers and acquisitions and the convergence of the technological processes involved. Thus the corporations that own the media and communications are also the same corporations that manufacture weapons, develop surveillance and social control systems. In turn, these corporations are owned through the stock portfolios of a small handful of global banking, investment and insurance corporations. Leading the pack of wolves are perhaps four or five giant energy corporations which includes Exxon and Shell, corporations that through cross-ownership, shared directorships are also linked to a handful of weapons corporations such as Lockheed, Grumman, Martin-Marietta, Raytheon. Ensuring that this unholy alliance maintains its dominance and control, the same individuals who sit on the boards of this handful of corporations are also the same people who occupy key positions in government, indeed it is virtually impossible to separate the two and it has been so for the past century, regardless of which political party is in power. There is a literal open door between government and business, a relationship that extends to the governments of foreign countries such as the UK and Israel. It is not too far-fetched to talk of an emerging global capitalist class, but one led by the US, whose interests transcend those of the nation-state, though this relationship is by no means smooth or complete, witness the competing interests of rival capitalist powers such as France, Germany or Japan. Moreover, the tensions between national and corporate interests manifest themselves in complex and often contradictory ways, thus we see the occasional 'spat' such as the one between France and the US over the invasion of Iraq and once more over the invasion of Lebanon. But overall the overwhelming military and economic power of the US guarantees that by hook or by crook, it generally gets its way and does so through its control of vital energy supplies, and its related control of the global circuit of capital, greased by the US dollar. Rock the US boat and be assured that others will undoubtedly sink, thus national interests are circumscribed by the reality of the need to survive. The evidence for this is overwhelming having been documented by dozens if not hundreds of writers and researchers over the years, some of whom have been referred to here over and over again. In the final analysis, those who object to this interpretation of events are people either ignorant of the facts, or who believe that the interests of these corporate gangsters and their own are identical even if it means their own (but more likely, someone else's) destruction. Which brings me to the issue that I refer to as the 'tail wagging the dog' hypothesis, which persists in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, evidence which I have been asked to present. Now you may ask why it is so important a subject to consider yet again. Firstly, my interest is not, as some on the 'left' advance, the alleged danger of an increase in anti-semitism as a result of Israeli actions, after all, why don't these self-same individuals get as worked up about the role of racism as applied to our brown-skinned brothers and sisters if they are so worried about the policies of the imperialists? The use of racism by the imperialist powers to divide and conquer and to justify wholesale slaughter is of infinitely greater importance than the alleged danger of an increase in anti-semitism. If there is a rise in anti-semitism better they tackle the issue of the existence of Israel as an extremist fundamentalist, religious state, which is after all, the source. But of far more importance is the fact that by advancing the hypothesis that a 'cabal' of Jews controls the most powerful nation on the planet, obscures the real issues. No doubt some of the leading capitalists and their representatives in government in the US call themselves Jews and publicly ally themselves with the state of Israel, after all, their interests coincide. But by the same token, many more call themselves Christian and thus, by applying the same logic one could argue there exists a 'cabal' of Presbyterians (or Anglicans, or Evangelicals or Seventh Day Adventists for that matter) controlling America. Just as important it is vital to recognise the fact that the Zionist state of Israel is made up of white European settlers or their descendants, who have an identical view to those of their US and European counterparts (search in vain for a brown-skinned, Moroccan/African Jew in the government of Israel). That they profess to following the teachings of the Old Testament is neither here nor there. Calling themselves the 'Chosen People' is no different than the European colonialists who claimed their 'right' to colonise by virtue of being Christian and 'civilised' as opposed to the 'pagans' they enslaved and whose land and resources they stole. In both instances, religion and 'race' were used to justify oppression and expropriation on the basis of a fictional 'right', one by 'race', the other by religion. Which came first, the 'Jewish lobby' or US imperialism? Indeed, the concept of the 'Jewish Homeland' was an invention of British colonialism in the first place, created initially to ensure continued control of the vital supply line to Britain's colonial possessions in India and the East and subsequently the discovery of oil as well as a means of suppressing the rising tide of Arab nationalism. The fulcrum of that control was Palestine which by virtue of nothing other than its geographical location close by the Suez Canal was selected as the 'homeland' by Lord Balfour in 1917. Be assured that if the interests of the state of Israel and those of US imperialism diverge (as they did for example, when Britain and Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 or more recently when Israel tried to sell weapons to China) then the real relationship between the two is revealed, that of master and servant. No doubt there will still be some who argue that it is the 'Jewish Lobby' that has somehow forced the US to bankroll the settler state but I argue that US bankrolling of Israel is no different than the host of other client states the US bankrolls from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. It does so purely out of national/corporate interests, thus if it transpired that Israeli policy was to diverge to the detriment of US interests then surely as night follows day, Israel would no longer be the darling of corporate America no matter how much the 'Jewish lobby' howled. Just look at how the US has treated other 'allies' who, once no longer useful, have been dumped, from Manuel Noreiga in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Jonas Savimbi in Angola. That Israel is by far the biggest recipient of US aid only points to the vital importance of Israel/Palestine in US strategic planning, just as it did when Britain was the leader of the (wolf) pack in the Middle East. It should surely come as no surprise that just as in 1917 it was oil that was central to British strategy, so too today it is still oil, which is the reason Israel figures so highly in US planning. In a comment here, Lance Thruster asks "If I am reading you correctly, Israel serves the US agenda and not the other way around. If that was the case, why would the Israel lobby be so successful in punishing US politicians that aren't sufficiently pro-Zionist?" I'm not sure what you mean by punish, but the political class of the US state is not entirely homogenous. Some, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, an arch-imperialist, argues that pursuing the current policy is NOT in the long term interests of US capitalism, thus we read "These neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well." - Zbigniew Brzezinski And there are others who also see the dangers inherent in the current US administration's policy. Unfortunately, they are in a minority. If there is a 'cabal' controlling current US foreign policy it is one led by Big Oil, whose interests appear to override the national interest. I say appear because the outcome of the present crisis will determine the future of US capitalism and I contend that what is being played out here is one, gigantic gamble that with Israel as US proxy, a client regime will be installed in Lebanon thus consolidating US control of its vital oil interests in the region. Should they fail then just as Brzezinski says, it could spell the end of the existing state of Israel and US plans for the region. And it should be obvious that a US success is also an Israeli success but not necessarily vice versa. The US hasn't poured billions of dollars into Israel merely because of some demented religious fundamentalists nor because of a desire to counter anti-semitism. Don't forget that it's not so long ago that Jews in the US were discriminated against, not on the scale of the discrimination against black Americans, but they were barred from particular clubs and schools and so forth and anti-semitism still exists in the US as it does elsewhere. And let us not forget that US funding of Israel predates the current administration by some decades. Those who argue that the 'tail wags the dog' are saying that ever since the establishment of the state of Israel, it was initiated and supported by a lobby, which is patently nonsense. Not only is it nonsense, it's dangerous nonsense as it serves only those who seek to obscure the real issues by making it an issue of 'race' as opposed to class interests, just as the US/Israeli propaganda machine tries to make out that it is the survival of the Jewish state which is at stake here. Ultimately, what we are witnessing here are not the narrow, sectarian interests of this or that 'cabal' being played out but the future of US capitalism as it is presently constituted, which is why I argue against the 'woof-woofs' of this world. -- -------------------------------------------------------- Escaping the Matrix website http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website http://cyberjournal.org subscribe cyberjournal list mailto:•••@••.••• Posting archives http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/ Blogs: cyberjournal forum http://cyberjournal-rkm.blogspot.com/ Achieving real democracy http://harmonization.blogspot.com/ for readers of ETM http://matrixreaders.blogspot.com/ Community Empowerment http://empowermentinitiatives.blogspot.com/ Blogger made easy http://quaylargo.com/help/ezblogger.html
