The Crisis in Pakistan

Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation, August 1, 2008

Here’s a choice for would be foreign policy makers: is the solution to the current crisis in Pakistan (a) a comprehensive Pakistan-India accord, with full Iranian and Russian support, to strengthen Pakistan’s civilian government and assert civilian control over Pakistan’s rogue ISI intelligence agency, or (b) stepped-up US military intervention in Afghanistan, unilateral US strikes into Pakistan’s lawless border areas in the northwest, and thuggish American threats aimed at Pakistan’s fledging regime?

If you picked (a), good for you. If you picked (b), well, the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain might offer you a job.

Recent revelations in the New York Times about Pakistan’s ISI and its ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, including reports that the ISI was indeed responsible for the deadly bombing at India’s embassy in Afghanistan, have pushed the Afghan-Pakistan-India nexus to the very front of the news.

But greater US attacks and more US troops in Afghanistan aren’t the answer.

The answer lies in talks between India and Pakistan. India’s Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s Yousuf Raza Gilani, the two leaders, held the first meeting between leaders of the two countries in fifteen months this week, and Pakistan’s foreign minister was optimistic, saying that the talks had helped “clear the air” between the two nuclear-armed rivals which have fought three wars, two over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. “A lot of steam had been let out of the pressure cooker. The dish we’re going to cook is going to be for the betterment of the region,” he said.

Trudy Rubin, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, described the comments of Pakistan’s foreign minister on the importance of improving India-Pakistan ties:

Better relations with India “are a top priority,” Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi told guests, emphatically, at a recent private dinner in Villanova, organized by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. Speaking the elegant English of a Cambridge University graduate, he insisted: “There is a large constituency on both sides that wants normalization. There may be hiccups, but we will forge ahead.”

This policy–if Pakistan’s new civilian government really pursues it–is of crucial importance to the United States and the wider world.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Quereshi said here on Thursday that Islamabad’s response to a blast outside the Pakistan consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, was “measured” and it adopted the same attitude towards the blast outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

“We believe charges and counter-charges would not help. It is easy to indulge in blame game. What we need is solutions to resolve issues,” he told journalists.

Of course, the problems between India and Pakistan aren’t just hiccups. The United States, Afghanistan, and India have all accused Pakistan’s ISI of supporting the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other anti-Indian terrorist groups in a campaign of violence against India. And Pakistan, not without some justification, has accused India and Afghanistan of supporting terrorists against Pakistan in that country’s Baluchistan province and elsewhere:

Ruling Pakistan People’s Party leader Rehman Malik, who functions as the interior minister and is a confidant of party chief Asif Ali Zardari, appealed to Pakistan’s western allies, including the US, to stop India and Afghanistan’s alleged activities.

“India wants to destabilise FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). What India and (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai are doing must stop. They must stop this,” he told reporters in Washington yesterday. …

Though Pakistan has always blamed foreign hands for stirring trouble in Balochistan and the North West Frontier Province, this is the first time since the February 18 election that a senior government official has blamed India for fomenting unrest in the country.

Pakistan has seen the Islamists are critical to securing Islamabad’s control of Afghanistan since the 1970s, and it sees controlling Afghanistan as a way of countering Indian influence in the region. India, for its part, has worked closely with Iran and Russia over the years against Pakistan and the Taliban, and India used its ties to the non-Islamist, non-Pashtun Northern Alliance in Afghanistan as a way of weakening Pakistani influence in Iran and central Asia. (For most of the years after the 1970s, the United States supported Pakistan, the Islamists, and even the Taliban.)

It ain’t beanbag when two nuclear powers start accusing each other of close-to-war actions. Is this the kind of situation in which the United States wants to go into, guns blazing? I hope not. The remote chance that some nutball Islamists in Al Qaeda might do something nasty to the United States pales in significance against the real-world threats to the people of Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan posed by Islamic fundamentalists and other extremists, including Hindu fanatics.

In fact, the United States is singularly ill-equipped to go bungling into that part of the world like some drunken sheriff. Last time we did, post-1979, when we supported the Afghan warlords and Islamist crazies against the USSR, we helped create the very problem we’re trying to solve now. Many of the extremists holed up in Quetta, the Northwest Frontier Province, and the tribal agencies are people America armed and trained a generation ago.

So let’s let India and the new government of Pakistan handle their own problems. They’ll need immense diplomatic support from the rest of the world, including the UN and the US, but also including Iran, Russia, China, and others. Pakistan is fragile. Its new government, having already lost one major coalition partner, is trying to bring ISI under civilian control at the same time they are trying to force General Pervez Musharraf out of office and reorganize the corrupt, pro-Islamist army command. For my part, I believe they’ll do better without heavy-handed US threats, which only aid extremists and ultranationalists.

Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan).

© 2008 The Nation

To Provoke War

Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them

By Faiz | Think Progress, July 31, 2008

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney’s office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

Watch it:

Hersh argued that one of the things the Bush administration learned during the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz was that, “if you get the right incident, the American public will support” it.

“Look, is it high school? Yeah,” Hersh said. “Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.”

Transcript:

HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.

But the point is jejune, if you know what that means. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we’re into it.

…What happened in the Gulf was, in the Straits, in early January, the President was just about to go to the Middle East for a visit. So that was one reason they wanted to gin it up. Get it going.

Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We’re playing, you know, who’s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran.

UpdateKevin Drum adds:

If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In one of David Manning’s famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

In the end, of course, we didn’t do this. We just didn’t bother with any pretext at all.

Correspondence exchanged with the International Criminal Court in The Hague

By Robert Thompson | Axis of Logic, July 31, 2008

To Mr Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court

Dear Mr Moreno-Ocampo,

For over fifty years I have been a lawyer (now in retirement), and during that time I have had practical hands-on experience of international law at the highest level and criminal law (among other disciplines) at all levels. My experience has also caused me in many fields to work under two very different judicial systems, namely that in operation in England and Wales and that applied in France.

I was greatly upset to hear on the radio that you had decided to seek an arrest warrant against Mr Omar el-Basheer, the current President of Sudan, for his alleged personal responsibility for crimes committed in Darfour, but that you had no desire to initiate proceedings against either Mr George Walker Bush, the current President of the United States of America, or Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for their admitted personal responsibility for crimes affecting Iraq.

To an experienced lawyer such as I am this seems an extraordinary attitude on your part, since it would seem normal to act first in cases where the accused person admits (and even boasts of) extremely serious breaches of the Nuremberg Principles, as well as provisions of certain Geneva Conventions.

It also seems to me that there is a difference of scale in the offences which either apply or could apply to the facts. The thousands of victims of repression in Darfour are much fewer in number than the victims of the actions of Mr Bush and Mr Blair (and many of those to whom they gave orders) when they decided to wage war against the people of Iraq and subsequently to occupy that country.

It seems to me that you, as Chief Prosecutor at the I.C.C., have an absolute duty to pursue those who admit that they have acted in ways which are so seriously in breach of international criminal law.

If you take the trouble to re-read the Nuremberg Principles, you will find in Principle VI extremely clear definitions of Crimes against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, and Principle VII adds that complicity in any one or more of these crimes set out in Principle VI is also a crime under international law.

If you consider these simply definitions, it seems impossible for you not to draw the conclusion that these two men (and many of their advisers and servants) are clearly guilty of Crimes against Peace and also appear to have been complicit in both War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity.

A summary of these three forms of criminality under Principle VI can be made as follows:

a) Crimes against Peace, in that they planned, prepared, initiated and waged a war of aggression against Iraq in direct violation of the international agreement set out in clearly worded United Nations Security Council Resolutions;

b) War Crimes, in that they were party to the ill-treatment and deportation of civilians, and prisoners of war, such as those who were sent to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and also in the destruction of cities, towns and villages in Iraq (there have also been the use of torture on prisoners);

c) Crimes against Humanity, in that they were involved in the murder and extermination of civilians (as in Fallujah) and the deportation of civilians to Guantanamo Bay.

Under Principle VII things look even worse for both men, since they have been complicit in many crimes committed in many countries including those already mentioned.

I have limited myself in this letter to specific crimes committed in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, but similar points can be made concerning both men (and their advisers and servants) regarding other lands, particularly the Lebanon and Palestine, under Principle VII, for having provided the aggressors with vast quantities of arms knowing full well that they would be used for unjustified aggression.

The obvious question is therefore why you do not immediately seek arrest warrants against Mr George Walker Bush and Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (and some of the others suggested above). The fact that the United States of America refuses to recognise the I.C.C. should not prevent your so doing, since these people could be arrested if and when they might dare to enter any country which does recognise the Court.

I would be very happy to hear from you, but I do not intend holding my breath while waiting, since your decision to act against Mr Omar el-Basheer seems to be a sign both of shocking partiality against such a man while failing to act against much worse offenders and of an unwillingness to act against persons for the sole reason that they are powerful.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Thompson

Avocat Honoraire au Barreau de Boulogne-sur-Mer

22 rue de l’Eglise

62990 RIMBOVAL

FRANCE

-o-o-o-

Reply received:

Our reference: OTP-CR-302/08

The Hague, 28 July 2008

Dear Sir, Madam,

The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court acknowledges receipt of your documents/letter.

This communication has been duly entered in the Correspondence Register of the Office. We will give consideration to this communication, as appropriate, in accordance with the provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

As soon as a decision is reached, we will inform you, in writing, and provide you with reasons for this decision.

Yours sincerely,

Head of Information & Evidence Unit

Office of the Prosecutor

-o-o-o-

Further letter from Robert Thompson:

Rimboval, 31st July 2008

Your reference : OTP-CR-302/08

Dear Sirs,

I thank you for your letter of 28th July 2008, and note the situation, and I await with interest receiving the decision which will be taken on the subject of the crimes committed by the person whom I named - i.e. Mr George Walker Bush and Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair - under the terms of Principles VI and VII of the Nuremberg Principles.

Yours faithfully,

Robert Thompson

Bush in the dock? Don't count on it

But that doesn't mean the next president can't hold this administration accountable.

Rosa Brooks | Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2008

Even war criminals have fan clubs. On Tuesday, 15,000 people in Belgrade, Serbia, protested the transfer of indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Karadzic is implicated in torture, rape, murder and genocide, but to some self-styled Serbian patriots, these are mere details. "Long Live Radovan!" chanted the protesters.

For the many Americans who read of Karadzic's arrest but wondered, "Yes, great -- and when will George W. Bush and Dick Cheney face trial for war crimes?" this is something to keep in mind. Karadzic was the leader of a small, unrecognized rogue republic and presided over a genocide -- but he evaded justice for more than a decade and still keeps a loyal fan base.

Bush and Cheney are the leaders of the most powerful state in the world, and their misdeeds, though egregious, aren't on the same level as Karadzic's. (Unless -- ahem -- you count the Iraq war, on the "it was all a tissue of lies" theory. But for the sake of the argument, let's give them the benefit of the doubt.) So no one should be surprised that there's still a Bush fan club (albeit a small one) or that the prospects of criminal proceedings against the president and his henchmen are virtually nonexistent.

It's not that Bush, Cheney and Co. don't deserve to end up in the dock. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who was commissioned by the Pentagon in 2004 to investigate the abuses at Abu Ghraib, recently concluded that "the commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. ... A government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. ... There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes."

The human cost of those crimes? It's hard to say for sure, given the administration's penchant for secrecy (understandable, because the president was warned as early as January 2002 of "the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" by his then-chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales). But when the nongovernmental Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project examined thousands of pages of internal government records, it documented more than 330 cases "in which U.S. military and civilian personnel are credibly alleged to have abused or killed detainees" at "U.S. facilities throughout Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay."

A McClatchy Newspaper Group report released a few weeks ago came to a similar conclusion, finding that brutal mistreatment of prisoners was routine in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, even though in many cases the abused detainees had no ties to Al Qaeda.

Did all this violate U.S. and international law? You betcha. The U.S. is party to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and torture is also a federal crime. At the time most of the abuses were committed, the War Crimes Act also criminalized violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity." And under the doctrine of "command responsibility," senior civilian and military leaders could all face criminal liability for authorizing or tolerating the abuses.

But don't hold your breath. As far back as 2001, administration lawyers were crafting legal opinions designed to shelter their bosses from any future criminal liability, and much evidence has since been hidden and destroyed. Then in 2006, the GOP-dominated Congress amended the War Crimes Act -- with retroactive effect -- to make future prosecutions almost impossible.

In any case, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the stomach for criminal proceedings against high-ranking current or former officials who still retain substantial public support. Meanwhile, no international tribunal is ever likely to have jurisdiction over the U.S. participants involved in the abuses.

But that doesn't mean we should give up on accountability. John McCain and Barack Obama should be urged to establish a high-level, nonpartisan "truth commission" with robust subpoena powers early in 2009. That commission should investigate, hold hearings and issue a public report on responsibility for torture, war crimes and other abuses committed during the Bush administration.

Such a panel wouldn't satisfy those who'd like to see Bush and Cheney in prison garb, but it would be a major step toward undoing the damage the administration did to our reputation as a nation committed to human rights. And as more incriminating details come out -- and they will -- some Bush-Cheney fan club members might even turn in their membership cards.

rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com

Nancy Pelosi Hasn’t Been Paying Attention

The Progressive, July 28, 2008

By Matthew Rothschild

Nancy Pelosi

There she was on The View on Monday, and Joy Behar, a good progressive, actually asked her a decent question on why she wasn’t pursuing impeachment.

Pelosi’s response was unbelievable: “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”

You’ve got to be kidding me!

For starters, Bush himself admitted that he wasn’t obeying the FISA law when he was spying on people without first getting a warrant from the FISA court as required explicitly in the statute.

Then there is the torture and kidnapping that he has countenanced. That violates U.S. statutes and treaties.

And what about the wholesale corrupting of the Justice Department, which pursued political prosecutions and illegally discriminated against prospective employees on the basis of their personal views?

Then there’s the outing of Valerie Plame, and the cover up of that outing.

And what greater crime can you commit than waging a war of aggression and lying a country into war?

The evidence on impeachment, as Dennis Kucinich has courageously and thoroughly demonstrated, is overwhelming. On Democracy Now, Kucinich responded to Pelosi’s claim.

And for a breakdown of the statutes, Constitutional articles, and treaties that Bush has violated, go to AfterDowningStreet.org, and in particular, to http://www.pubrecord.org/docs/vega/kucinich-bush-articles-of-impeachment-violations.pdf.

How much more does Nancy Pelosi need?

This is not a case of political tag or gotcha.

This is about the Constitution and the rule of law.

That Nancy Pelosi can fob it off so facilely just shows how derelict she is in her duties.

Strike On Iran Still Possible, US Tells Israel

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense chief, is visiting as Washington is perceived to be softening its stance toward Tehran.

By Paul Richter and Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 30, 2008

WASHINGTON — Bush administration officials reassured Israel’s defense minister this week that the United States has not abandoned all possibility of a military attack on Iran, despite widespread Israeli concern that Washington has begun softening its position toward Tehran.

In meetings Monday and Tuesday, administration officials told Defense Minister Ehud Barak that the option of attacking Iran over its nuclear program remains on the table, though U.S. officials are primarily seeking a diplomatic solution.

• 
• Ehud Barak
  

At the same time, U.S. officials acknowledged that there is a rare divergence in the U.S. and Israeli approaches, with Israelis emphasizing the possibility of a military response out of concern that Tehran may soon have the know-how for building a nuclear bomb.

“Is there a difference of emphasis? It certainly looks as though there is,” said a senior American Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the sensitive talks.

U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of building nuclear weapons.

Tehran says that it is engaged in a peaceful enrichment program for civilian energy purposes.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in an interview that U.S. officials have often made it clear to Israeli officials that Washington prefers to try to mitigate the threat from Tehran by applying economic pressure.

“The military option, although always available, is not our preferred route,” Morrell said.

“We have made that point clear to them and the world in our public statements and private meetings.”

Barak left Israel for Washington amid reports in the Israeli press that he would try to talk the Bush administration out of what many Israelis perceive as a more conciliatory policy toward Iran.

On Tuesday, the Israeli Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Barak had told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that “a policy that consists of keeping all options on the table must be maintained.”

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Barak said that there remains time for “accelerated sanctions” to try to persuade Iran to abandon the nuclear program.

Israeli officials were concerned in December when a key U.S. intelligence report concluded that Iran had abandoned an effort to build a nuclear bomb. They also have noted with concern comments this month by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that an Israeli airstrike on Iran would further destabilize the Middle East and compound the strain on overworked U.S. forces.

Also this month, in a rare move toward engagement with Tehran, a senior U.S. diplomat took part in international talks in Geneva about the nuclear program.

And U.S. officials have floated a proposal for opening a low-level diplomatic office in Tehran.

These gestures have taken place at a time of intensifying discussion in Israel about the wisdom of an Israeli military attack on Iran before the Bush administration leaves office.

A senior State Department official said Tuesday that Israel “is a sovereign state and we understand that they view this as an existential threat. And we take the threat that’s posed by Iran seriously as well.”

But the official, who asked to remain unidentified in keeping with diplomatic rules, said the administration is “pursuing the strategy we believe is the right one.”

Gates, in an hourlong meeting with Barak, told the minister that the United States intends to consider providing radar to Israel that can detect ballistic missiles launched from Iran and supplying weapons to counter rocket attacks from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, according to a senior Defense official.

paul.richter@latimes.com

julian.barnes@latimes.com

MIDEAST: Arabs Despair of U.S. Even More

Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Jul 31 (IPS) - For decades, the U.S. has jealously guarded its role of sole arbiter of the Arab-Israeli dispute. In light of recent shows of support for Israel by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, however, many Arabs fear that Zionist influence on the U.S. body politic — across the political spectrum — has made the notion of ‘U.S. even-handedness’ a contradiction in terms.

“When it comes to the Middle East conflict, the Arabs no longer see any difference between Republicans and Democrats,” Ahmed Thabet, political science professor at Cairo University told IPS. “Both parties vie with one another in expressing total support for Israel.”

In a speech before Israeli parliament in May, U.S. President George W. Bush went further than any of his predecessors in voicing praise for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Referring to Israelis as a “chosen people”, Bush pledged Washington’s unwavering support against Israel’s traditional nemeses, including Iran and resistance parties Hamas and Hezbollah.

In statements heavy on “Judeo-Christian” religious references, Bush went on to describe Washington’s alliance with Israel as “unbreakable”.

Similar sentiments have been echoed by Bush’s would be Republican successor, Senator John McCain, who has also pledged “eternal” U.S. support for Israel.

“Israel and the U.S. must always stand together,” McCain declared before the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in early June. “We are the most natural of allies. And, like Israel itself, that alliance is for ever.”

Calling Israel “an inspiration to free nations everywhere,” McCain barely addressed longstanding Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Like Bush, he denounced regional actors opposed to Israel’s occupation of Arab land, referring to Hamas as “the terrorist-led group in charge of Gaza.”

Neither Bush nor McCain so much as mention — let alone criticise — Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinian populations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This treatment includes frequent military assaults often targeting civilians, the use of ‘targeted assassinations’, the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip (which has brought that territory to the brink of starvation), continued construction of Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and the forced removal of non-Jewish, Arab inhabitants from the city of Jerusalem.

Arab analysts, meanwhile, express little surprise at such blatant pro-Israel bias, coming as it does from a political party thoroughly influenced by the so-called “neo-conservative” movement, of which Israeli ascendancy is a central tenet.

More disturbing to Arab critics of U.S. policy is the fact that Democratic presidential contenders have shown just as much zeal for Israeli supremacy as their Republican rivals.

In his own speech to AIPAC in early June, Obama stressed the need for a “more nuanced” approach to U.S. Middle East peacemaking. He stunned many, however, when he went on to state that Jerusalem would “remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Although Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967, its claim to the city has never been recognised by the international community. Officially, the status of Jerusalem — which Palestinians also want as capital of their future state — is supposed to be determined in long-awaited “final status” negotiations.

Continued . . .