Australia, Canada Join U.S. and Puppet Reefs in Backing Israel-centric Agenda

By Ian Williams


	An UNRWA official shows EU Commissioner Louis Michel (c) homes in the Gaza Strip’s Rafah refugee camp destroyed by the Israeli military. In Gaza City earlier that day, Nov. 30, Michel signed an agreement with UNRWA pledging 14 million euros to help the U.N. relief agency provide food, shelter and other emergency assistance to Palestinian refugees (AFP photo/Said Khatib).

AS THE end of the U.N.’s 60th anniversary loomed, it was déjà vu all over again in New York. After a few years in which the United States had broken with recent tradition and actually paid its dues, things were back to normal, with threats of withholding from John Bolton and his soul-mate, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL)—who does such good imitations of his alter ego, Dr. Jekyll.

And underlying everything—again—was the issue of the Palestinians. The original excuse for holding off payments was Washington’s refusal to fund the U.N.’s Palestinian programs, and now it is prominent on the agenda again. Looming in the congressional backwoods is the attempt to defund UNRWA, now that it has done its job of paying the welfare and education costs that, under the Geneva Convention, Israel should have borne when it was occupying Gaza, instead of turning it into a self-governing prison camp.

It is a measure of how battered the world community is that someone with as much blood on his hands as Ariel Sharon, with more forks in his tongue than a banquet table setting, should get so much international support. It was one thing for the few coral atolls paid for by the Congress to back the U.S. and Israel on General Assembly resolutions, but recent resolutions on the Palestinian programs revealed that Australia and Canada have been suborned into voting with Israel, while the European Union and associated states—a very significant bloc—abstains, mostly to avoid upsetting Washington. Sadly, upsetting Washington is the price a country pays for having a rational mind and foreign policy of its own.

Among the resolutions abstained on was one on the Golan Heights. The excuse given was that, “historically,” a different position had been taken by the EU’s two new members—a reference to new East European countries who recently have jumped to do what the U.S. wanted. There may even be a correlation between states which allow secret CIA prisons and those emasculating the EU position on international law in relation to the Middle East.

The U.S. and Australia, plus the usual puppet reefs, even voted against a resolution calling upon the Israelis not to appropriate the natural resources of the occupied territories, nor to destroy agricultural land and orchards. Since it was basically a restating of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the UK, on behalf of the EU, voted for the resolution. But then the U.S.-Israel bloc also voted against a resolution calling for a peaceful solution to the problem in accordance with the road map.

Washington Report readers are well aware that Ariel Sharon has ripped up the road map and used it for political toilet tissue, but we must remember that these diplomats are all swearing by it in order to avoid taking any action to force Israel to keep its promises. And then they watch its major proponents vote against it!

More Déjà Vu?

In 2002, some people thought this writer was alarmist because I said that the Bush administration had set its sights on invading Iraq. They did, of course. Vindication aside, like most people on the globe, I wish it had not happened.

Apart from the Bush rhetoric, I based my prophecy of doom on the steady attrition of leaks and briefings from the administration’s neocon corner. At least they could come up with a credible motive—taking out Iraq would be good for Israel. Apart from George W. Bush’s aside that Saddam Hussain had tried to assassinate his father, no one else really has come up with an excuse for the war that would hold water, let alone all the oil and blood that has been spilt.

So when in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion I began to see signs of a similar move on Syria, I warned about the impending invasion. My evidence was that there were demands for it from Israel, and if ever an administration has proved to be a tail-waggable canine, then this is it. There were also the leaks and briefings: the missing weapons of mass destruction had been seen heading across the border into Syria; the insurgent jihadists had been seen heading across the border from Syria; Damascus supported Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

At one point, George W. Bush famously even discovered that—shock, horror!—there were Ba’athists in Damascus. That the Ba’ath founder was a Christian, and that the party’s secular (albeit fascistic) programs made it a very unlikely supporter of al-Qaeda were mere technical details, quibbles from realists with no standing in faith-based circles.

True, the Syrians did support Hezbollah, whose successful long-term war of attrition against Israel had evicted the occupiers from Lebanon. This led to long-standing grudges against the regime in Damascus, compounded by Syrian ineptitude in keeping the Shaba Farms issue hot. Of course Syria’s ambivalent attitude to Lebanon did not help either.

However, my Cassandra-like prophesy of an attack on Syria did not come to pass—yet. The casualty rate in Iraq sapped any domestic enthusiasm for it in the U.S.

Like the end of the world, however, it is only postponed, not cancelled. Looking at the intensive activity over Lebanon at the United Nations, it is highly likely that the road to Damascus now goes through Beirut.

The pattern is the same as it was over Iraq, equally aided by the ineptitude of its rulers. Now Washington has the support of the French, who for their own reasons are interested in restoring Francophiles to power in Beirut, but who seem insouciantly unaware that they may be getting taken for a ride—to Damascus.

Of course it is possible that Washington is just concerned about Lebanese independence and sovereignty in the face of Syrian occupation. The test for such altruistic support for national boundaries would, of course, be strong U.S. resolutions against the occupiers of the West Bank, Golan and Western Sahara, or even pressure on Ethiopia to honor its commitments to the settlement of the border dispute with Eritrea.

In the absence of any such signs of concern from Washington, however, we can safely assume that regime change in Syria is indeed back on the agenda. Somewhere between Foggy Bottom and Capitol Hill, I am confident that there are planning groups working on the hypothesis that it would take hardly any troops at all to roll over Syria, and that the key to stemming the insurgency in Iraq is to do just that. All the previous excuses still apply. And, of course, a well-timed unequivocal victory in Syria—a pushover, they would say—may play well with the 2006 mid-term elections.

Between the gullibility of other U.N. members and the stupidity of the Syrians, it may even have some degree of U.N. approval!

Equally worrying, but meeting more resistance, are the signs that Iran is getting the same treatment. And the new government there seems equally cooperative in providing plausible excuses. But we should remember what it looks like to the reality-based world. John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador, who is on the record with profound skepticism about both the United Nations and international law, wants the U.N. Security Council to take action against Iran for alleged violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose strengthening he opposed the year before. It may be worth mentioning that Iran is not in violation of the treaty—but that the U.S. and UK are, while Israel, which is pushing for action against Iran, has not even signed it.

No matter, it may not be a full-scale invasion of Iran, since even the looniest neocon may balk at that. But they do think that some sort of regime change in Tehran is effectible and that, as in Iraq (and Syria), the masses are just waiting for their oppressive regimes to be gone to declare their undying love for George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon. In Iran, of course, the masses have just ditched the reformers, who were anyway scorned and isolated by the U.S., for a hard-liner they now have to deal with. He may not be nice, but neither is George Bush. And both were elected by their faith-based constituencies.

I really do not see why we need to waste money on NASA when we have a government that is so clearly mentally in orbit, and certainly looking at another planet when it makes its plans.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.