by Paul Craig Roberts
In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the
government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Last week Netanyahu called for "crippling sanctions" against Iran.
The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel
has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the US
and NATO.
Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran?
Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian
infrastructure?
No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the US.
Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied for centuries and
herding them into ghettoes?
No, that's what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years.
What is Iran doing?
Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran's nuclear energy program is subject to
inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which
consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched
uranium to a weapons program.
The position taken by Israel, and by Israel's puppet in Washington, is that
Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might
divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.
In other words, Israel and the US claim the right to abrogate Iran's right
to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/US position has no basis in
international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the
United States.
The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation
Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far
as we know, US help.
As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical
government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be
applied to Israel to force it to disarm.
Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an
apartheid state, as former US President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
The US led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South
Africa's apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to
hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse
form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel
maintains that it is "anti-semitic" to criticize Israel for a practice that
the world regards as abhorrent.
What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel
consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals,
schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one
ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints.
The Israeli government's explanation for its gross violation of human rights
comprises the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the
exception of American "christian zionists," believes one word of it.
The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the US is
over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the US
Congress, the US public, the UN and NATO, the US government invaded
Afghanistan and Iraq and used the "war on terror" that Washington
orchestrated to overturn US civil liberties enshrined in the US
Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America's
crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in
ruins, and Iraq's professional elites, necessary to a modern organized
society, are dead or dispersed. The US government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran
qualifies for sanctions, the US qualifies a thousand times over.
No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered
by the US in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against
the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the US military, an
American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman
of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military
situation in Afghanistan is "serious and deteriorating."
Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the
rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are
reduced in order to free up funds for the US armaments industry. Bush/Cheney
and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the
United States.
What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after
his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not.
Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new
one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has
sent 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan and already the US commander in
Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more.
Obama is escalating America's war of aggression against the Afghanistan
people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American
public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.
Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against
Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American
public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday
for Israel's military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to
become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen,
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele
Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on
the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral
Mullen declared that the US will always stand with Israel. No matter how
many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel
murders. No many how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes,
villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the
United States and Israel.
Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions
more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health
care. Yet, the US government continues to squander hundreds of billions of
dollars on wars that serve no US purpose. President Obama and General
McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public
be damned.
It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and
the US military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and
international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions
against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a
brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and
deception.
Many governments are complicit in America's war crimes. With Obama's budget
deep in the red, Washington's wars of naked aggression are dependent on
financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans,
Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of
American war crimes stops, America's wars of aggression against Muslims
stop.
The US is not a forever "superpower" that can indefinitely ignore its own
laws and international law. The US will eventually fall as a result of its
hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire
collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes
court?
ORIGINAL
Paul Craig Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the
University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford
University where he was a member of Merton College. Dr. Roberts has held
numerous academic appointments, including Senior Research Fellow, Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair, Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. Dr. Roberts
served in the Congressional Staff in the House and Senate and was appointed
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury by President Ronald Reagan. He was
awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1987. Dr. Roberts is author of
'Alienation and the Soviet Economy' and 'The Supply-Side Revolution'. He is
coauthor with Matthew Stephenson of 'Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation,
and Crisis'. He is coauthor with Karen LaFollette Araujo of 'Meltdown:
Inside the Soviet Economy and The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America'.
He is coauthor with Lawrence Stratton of 'The New Color Line and The Tyranny
of Good Intentions'. His latest book, 'How The Economy Was Lost', will be
published by CounterPunch in October 2009. Dr. Roberts is a columnist for
Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.
"US-Iran: A New Age of Diplomacy?,"
The Wisdom Fund, April 1, 2009
["This dangerous decision opens the ICC to accusations of political bias and
is inconsistent with the independence of the ICC," added Marek Marczynski,
Head of Amnesty International's International Justice campaign.
"It also breaches the Rome Statute which clearly states that such matters
should be considered by the institution's judges," Marczynski added.--"ICC's Israel war crimes probe halted pending
UN decision," Agence France-Presse, April 3, 2012]