By Anthony Hall



Whatsupic -- State subordination of the rule of law, both domestically and internationally, sets the stage for Police State legislation in Canada and the United States, and pre-emptive invasions abroad. International Law is increasingly seen as an obstacle to overcome, rather than a guarantor of peace and prosperity. – Mark Taliano

Photo:Businessinsider

Part 5

The career of Frum’s co-author, Daniel Perle, is emblematic of the importance of US-Israeli ties in both the pre-9/11 genesis and post-9/11 conduct of the Global War on Terror. One of the defining expressions of this exercise of US military muscle was the decision in 2003 to expand the 9/11 Wars beyond Afghanistan to Iraq.

Like other Israel First members of the Bush war cabinet including Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Dov Zakheim, and David Wursmer, Perle was deeply involved in the decision by the President George W. Bush to remove from power the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, a former favoured ally of the United States. The important role of what they refer to as the Israel Lobby in this decision, one entailing an enormous investment of military, political and financial capital, has been adeptly demonstrated by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their classic text.

Richard Perle was instrumental in helping to lay out the groundwork for the US invasion of Iraq in an important position paper written for the Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle was the lead author of this document written specifically for Netanyahu and his inner circle as he took power as Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. Perle and his co-authors proposed that Netanyahu make a “Clean Break” with the past, and particularly with the socialistic heritage of the Labour Zionism that had dominated Israel’s politics since its inception as a sovereign state in 1947. In particular Perle et. al. proposed that Netanyahu’s government “transcend” the kind of land-for-peace negotiations attempted in the Oslo Accords negotiated with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Significantly the Clean Break document promoted a core concept of the Global War on Terror, namely “pre-emptive wars” to be applied initially in changing the governing regimes of Syria, Iraq and Iran. From the instituting of the Patriot Act within weeks of 9/11 to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the introduction of the Harper government’s Bill C-51 in 2015, concepts of pre-emption provide a key to understanding the underlying strategies of the Global War on Terror in all its many continuing iterations.

Make sure you have read the previous parts:

1.On the Need to Re-Establish Sensible Diplomatic Relations Between Canada and the Islamic Republic of Iran

2.David Frum, George Bush, Alberta Report and the Axis of Evil Speech

3.The Cold War and the Seemingly Never Ending Global War on Terror

4.The Political Use of Religion

The far-ranging applications of the pre-emptive concept overturn the legal outgrowths of generation upon generation of evolution in the juridical construction of the rule of law. With 9/11 as the stimulus, the rules of national governance and international relations have been radially altered. There is no end in sight of the erasure of core principles of due process, the necessity of showing evidence and the need to assume innocence until guilt has been proven in a court of law. As a result individuals, groups, governments and transnational organizations all over the world have been subjected to the coercive force of pre-emptive interventions. They have faced punishments and constraints not for what they have done, but rather for what it is predicted they might do.

There is of course huge subjectivity in the decisions of those empowered to make pre-emptive predictions and then act on them, often destroying lives in the process. These decisions are often made by the same national security agencies that are know to have abused their powers in the Cold War to disguise criminal activities including drug dealing and insider trading. The architects of the Global War on Terror have enormously expanded and extended the powers of national security agencies in the Cold War to engage in gross violations of human rights with impunity.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Neoconservatism and the Global War on Terror

Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged as one of the world’s most outspoken advocates of subordinating the rule of law to the principles of pre-emptive war and pre-emptive police intervention. Again and again Netanyahu highlights Iran as the most menacing polity in the world, as a potential and likely nuclear predator that must be subjected to the massive pre-emptive intervention.

Since 2012 the policy of the Canadian government towards Iran is pretty much based on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s articulation of Israel’s orientation to Iran. As in so many fields of Canadian foreign policy, the Harper government’s position on Iran extends the policies of Likudnik-dominated Israel. The underlying understanding on which these policies are based is that the Islamic structure of Iran’s Shia constitution must be overturned by encouraging, fomenting and assisting dissidence from within. Failing that, Iran must be invaded, disassembled and remade to suit the interests of the Western powers in much the same fashion as was the case during the imposed governance of the Shah.

As times passes, Benjamin Netanyahu is emerging more and more as the primary embodiment of contemporary neoconservatism, as the Napoleon of the Global War on War. An Israeli soldier, diplomat and politician who spent some of his formative years growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, Netanyahu’s staying power is formidable. Just days ago he demonstrated his political resilience in Israeli politics by emerging yet again from a national election as the Jewish sate’s prime minister

Netanyahu can be viewed as one of the inventors of the core paradigm in of the Global War on Terror. In 1979 and again in 1984 he put together conferences designed to advance the contention that international terrorism was becoming the most serious menace to the very survival of the group of countries he pictured as Western democracies. In 1982 Netanyahu first published the conference papers in an edited book he entitled, International Terrorism: Challenges and Responses. Then came in 1986, Terrorism: How the West Can Win.

Versions of these texts have been republished many times. In 1997 he featured more of his own words in an abbreviated text entitled, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists. This volume was republished in 2001 just days after the 9/11 debacle. The volume’s publisher, Macmillan, introduced the following advertising copy,

Netanyahu sees an even more potent threat from the new international terrorism which is increasingly the product of Islamic militants, who draw their inspiration and directives from Iran and its growing cadre of satellite states. The spread of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, coupled with the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, poses a more frightening threat from an adversary less rational and therefore less controllable than was Soviet Communism. How democracies can defend themselves against this new threat concludes this provocative book.

The direct connection drawn between what Netanyahu sees as a looming Iranian-based Islamic threat and the former Soviet-based communist threat is very telling. By introducing this comparison Netanyahu presents a way for the military and national security establishment inherited from the Cold War. He presented a justification for the United States to retain the predominance in its political economy of the military-industrial complex that it has built up ever since it responded to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by entering the Second World War.

Netanyahu’s leadership of the Likud Party in Israel continues into the present the ideological heritage of Revisionist Zionist, a stream of right-wing Jewish nationalism devoted to the creation and expansion of Eretz Yisrael, a term that is sometimes translated as Greater Israel. This particular stream of Zionist strategy and action originated in armed and militant opposition to any constrains on rapid Jewish immigration into Palestine when this region was subject to the governance of Great Britain.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky is the founder of Revisionist Zionism, the dominant root of the current Likud Party. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was for a time Jabotinsky’s personal secretary before becoming a university professor of history in the United States. Those who took up the mantle of Revisionist Zionism after the Second World War sought to dislodge the British imperial government from its governing role in Palestine. The militant military wing of this movement formed Irgun and the Stern Gang whose violent interventions including blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946. This hotel housed the headquarters of those administering the British mandate in Palestine.

Menachem Begin was one of those that took part in the bombing of the King David hotel, an episode that many consider a textbook example of terrorism as a calculated way of influencing international opinion and politics. Begin was instrumental in founding the Likud Party Party in 1973. Elected as Israeli Prime Minister in 1977, Begin’s adherence to the growth and expansion of a Greater Israel made him an especially avid proponent of the rapid construction of Jewish settlements on the west bank of the Jordon River.

The West Bank Lands lands had been seized by the Israeli Defense Force in the 1967 War. The spoils of military conquest, these lands have ever since tellingly named the Occupied Territories. The indigenous inhabitants of the Occupied Territories remain like the Palestinian inmates of Gaza an occupied people, stateless peoples held outside the legal frame of Israeli citizenship. Both Gaza and the West Bank were designated as the land base of an Arab country for the indigenous Palestinians. The instrument of this designation is UN Resolution 181, the enactment that initially invested the Israeli state with its primary claim to international legitimacy.

Benjamin Netanyahu inherited from Revisionist Zionism, from his father and from his mentor, Menachem Begin, the generally harsh perception that the success and expansion of the Jewish state necessitates some killing and ruthlessness in eliminating and clearing aside Arab people. The Likud viewpoint on the inevitability of this kind of violent intervention to make available more territory for the Jewish state of Israel has become an integral feature of neoconservatism.

In this thread you will read "Christian Zionism"

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the Whatsupic.