[Here, from a recent talk by Chomsky, is the first of two selections on US support for Israel; apologies that they're so long and detailed, but it seems to me a corrective's needed for some simplistic (and propagandistic) accounts that have appeared on this list. --CGE]
...By the time of the Second World War the US had become the overwhelmingly dominant world power and was plainly going to take over Middle East energy resources - no question about that. France was removed unceremoniously. And Britain reluctantly came to accept its role as a "junior partner," in the rueful words of a Foreign Office official, its role gradually decreasing over time by normal power relations. By now Britain has become sort of like a US attack dog - an important but secondary role in world affairs. I should add that the United States controlled most of the oil of the western hemisphere. North America remained the largest producer for about another 25 years. It controlled western hemisphere oil particularly effectively after the Wilson administration had kicked the British out of Venezuela, which is the major producer.
The US took over the British framework - the basic principle remained. The basic principle is that the West (that means primarily the United States) must control what happens there. Furthermore the wealth of the region must flow to the West. That means to the US and Britain primarily: their energy corporations, investors, the US treasury which has been heavily dependent on recycled petrodollars, exporters, construction firms, and so on. That's the essential point. The profits have to flow to the West and the power has to remain in the West, primarily Washington, insofar as possible. That's the basic principle.
That raises all sorts of problems. One problem is that the people of the region are backward and uneducated and have never been able to comprehend the logic of these arrangements or their essential justice. They can't seem to get it through their heads somehow that the wealth of the region should flow to the West, not to poor and suffering people right there. And it continually takes force to make them understand these simple and obvious principles-a constant problem with backward people.
A conservative nationalist government tried to extricate Iran from the system in 1953. That was quickly reversed with a military coup sponsored by the US and Britain which restored the Shah. In the course of that the US edged Britain largely out of control over Iran.
Right after that, Nasser became an influential figure and was soon considered a major threat. He was a symbol of independent nationalism - he didn't have oil - but he was a symbol of independent nationalism and that's the threat. He was considered what's called a "virus" that might "infect others" - the virus of independent nationalism. That's conventional terminology and a fundamental feature of international planning-not just there.
At that point the United States was developing a doctrine that modified and extended the British system of an Arab facade with British force behind it - namely it was establishing a cordon of peripheral states which would be what the Nixon administration later called "local cops on the beat." Police headquarters are in Washington, but you have local cops on the beat. The two main ones at that time were Turkey, a big military force, and Iran under the Shah.
By 1958, the CIA advised, I'm quoting, that "a logical corollary" of opposition to Arab nationalism "would be to support Israel as the only reliable pro-Western power left in the Middle East." According to this reasoning, Israel could become a major base for US power in the region. Now that was proposed but not yet implemented. It was implemented after 1967. In 1967, Israel performed a major service to the United States - namely, it destroyed Nasser, destroyed the virus. And also smashed up the Arab armies and left US power in the ascendance. And at this point essentially a tripartite alliance was established - Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia technically was at war with Iran and Israel but that makes no difference. Saudi Arabia has the oil - Iran and Israel (and Turkey is taken for granted) were the military force; that's Iran under the Shah, remember. Pakistan was part of the system too at that time.
That was very clearly recognized-both by US intelligence specialists, who wrote about it, and also by the leading figures in planning. So for example Henry Jackson who was the Senate's major specialist on the Middle East and oil - he pointed out that Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia "inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab states, who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal sources of petroleum in the Middle East" (meaning, as he knew, primarily profit flow and a lever of world control). Saudi Arabia does it just by funding, and by holding the greatest petroleum reserves by a good measure. Iran and Israel, with the help of Turkey and Pakistan, provided regional force. They're only the local "cops on the beat," remember. So if something really goes wrong, you call in the big guys - the United States and Britain.
Well, that's the picture. In 1979, a problem occurred - one of the pillars collapsed: Iran fell under the grip of independent nationalism. The Carter administration immediately tried to sponsor a military coup to restore the Shah. Carter sent a NATO general, but that didn't work. He couldn't gain the support of US allies in the Iranian military. Immediately afterward, Israel and Saudi Arabia, the remaining pillars, joined the US in an effort to bring about a coup that would restore the old arrangement by the usual means: sending arms. The facts and the purpose were exposed at once, but quickly suppressed. Bits and pieces reached the public later when it became impossible to suppress. It was then called an "arms for hostage" deal. That has a nice humanitarian sound, even if it was a "mistake": the Reaganites were seeking a way to release US hostages taken in Lebanon. What was actually happening was that the US was sending arms to Iran - meaning to specific military groupings in Iran - via Israel, which had close connections with the Iranian military, funded by Saudi Arabia. It couldn't have been an arms for hostage deal for a rather simple reason: there weren't any hostages. The first hostages in Lebanon were taken later (and they happened to be Iranian). In fact it was just normal operating procedure.
If any you decide to go into the diplomatic service and you want to know how to overthrow a civilian government, there's a straightforward answer. I suppose it must be taught in courses somewhere, though perhaps it's so obvious that no lessons are necessary. If you want to overthrow a civilian government, well, who's going to overthrow it? Elements of the military. So you establish connections with elements of the military, you fund them, you train them, you establish good relations, you convince them to overthrow the government, and then you've got it made. It's very reasonable and it usually works. Indonesia and Chile were two recent cases where it had worked very well - it didn't work very well for the hundreds of thousands massacred in Indonesia and the tortured corpses in Chile, but it worked pretty well for the people who count. And it was entirely reasonable to try the same policy in Iran.
It was in fact quite public. It's not that it was secret. So high Israeli officials, including the Israeli ambassador to the United States Moshe Arens, reported what was happening to the US media; he was quickly silenced. In an important and prominently presented BBC documentary, Uri Lubrani, who had been de facto Israeli ambassador to Iran under the Shah, said that if we can find someone who's willing to shoot down thousands of people in the streets, we can probably manage to restore the arrangement with the Shah. Former high Israeli and US intelligence officials reacted by saying that they didn't know for sure, but it seemed the natural way to proceed. Apparently, that's what the arms were for - there were, again no hostages. It was all public, except for the population in the US. The plans didn't work. The Iranian government discovered the plot, found the US-Israeli contacts in the military, and executed them. Then came another phase, that's the Oliver North phase that you have heard about, but there's good reason to suppose that that's just a continuation of the first phase. If so, and so it seems, then it is all quite reasonable and conventional, along with the virtual suppression of the crucial first phase, in which there is no possible "arms for hostage" justification.
At the same time, the United States was backing an Iraqi invasion of Iran - that is, supporting its friend Saddam Hussein in an Iraqi invasion of Iran, again for the same purpose-try to reverse the disaster of an independent, not Arab in this case, but independent oil producing state. Saddam's Iraq was also too independent for comfort, but Iran had been one of the firmest pillars of US policy in the region. Independently of that, Iran had committed the grave and unpardonable crime of reversing the US-backed military coup that had blocked the attempt to move towards independence 25 years before. That kind of disobedience cannot be tolerated, or "credibility" will be threatened.
Well that brings us up to the mid 80s. US support for the Iraqi invasion was taken extremely seriously. It was not just the support for Saddam Hussein throughout all the major atrocities, but much beyond that. So the United States began sending military vessels to patrol the Gulf to ensure that Iran would not be able to block Iraqi oil shipping. And that turned out to be a`verya very serious matter. The depth of US commitment to Saddam Hussein is illustrated by the fact that Iraq is the only country apart from Israel that has been granted the right to attack an American ship and kill in this case 37 sailors, with complete impunity. Not a lot of countries are allowed to get away with that. Israel did so in 1967 and Iraq in 1987, but there's no other case. That's an indication of the depth of commitment.
It went beyond that. The next year, in 1988, a US destroyer, the US Vincennes, shot down an Iranian commercial airliner, Iran Air 654, killing 290 people, in Iranian airspace. In fact the destroyer was in Iranian territorial waters; there's no serious dispute about the basic facts. Iran took that extremely seriously. They concluded the US was willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure that Saddam Hussein wins, and at that point they capitulated. It wasn't a minor event for them. It's a minor event here because that's just our atrocity, and by definition the powerful have no moral responsibilities and cannot commit crimes.
It's likely - let me emphasize that here I'm speculating - it's reasonable to assume that Pan Am 103 was blown up in retaliation. The immediate assumption of Western intelligence was that this is Iranian retaliation for the shooting down of Iran Air 654, and judging by what's happened since I think that remains a plausible speculation. The evidence that Libya was responsible remains very shaky. The strange judicial proceedings in the Hague, after the US and Britain finally agreed to allow the case to proceed (Libya had offered to permit it in a neutral venue years earlier), have only increased doubts among those who have followed the matter closely. But that's not going to be allowed to be discussed-we can be pretty sure that. It has, for example, apparently been deemed necessary to suppress entirely the "Report on the Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands" by the international observer nominated by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1192 (1998). His report, released a month ago, was a sharp condemnation of the proceedings. One may speculate, again, that if he had confirmed the official US-UK position, the report might have received some mention, probably headlines.
If Iran was responsible, it's quite likely that they would have sought "plausible deniability" - the kind of service that the CIA provides for the White House - and used agents, as the CIA apparently did when it arranged the worst act of international terrorism in Beirut in 1985, a car bombing outside a Mosque, timed for when people would be leaving, which killed 80 people and wounded unknown numbers of others - a US atrocity and therefore not a crime, by the usual conventions. Possibly Iran might have even chosen a Libyan agent. But this is all speculation. Probably we will never know, since these are not the kinds of topics that are appropriate for inquiry.
Well despite all of this, Iraq remained a kind of an anomaly. In 1958 Iraq had extricated itself from the US-dominated system. That was anomalous, and it was anomalous in another respect too. Iraq was using - however horrendous the regime may be, the fact of the matter was that it was using its resources for internal development. So there was substantial social and economic development internal to Iraq, and that's not the way the system's supposed to work - the wealth is supposed to flow to the West. So there were complicated and anomalous relations all along. There's no time to go into them. But that is over. Now the effect of the war and particularly the sanctions has been essentially to reverse these departures from good form. By the time that Iraq is permitted, as it almost surely will be, to reenter the international system under US control, at that point there will no longer be any serious danger of it using its resources internally. It will be lucky to survive and partially recover. So that problem is, perhaps, more or less over. One might argue about whether that's part of the purpose of the sanctions, but it's likely to be the consequence.
Well, all of this raises a question - what about our fabled commitment to human rights? How are human rights assigned to various actors in the Middle East? The answer is simplicity itself: rights are assigned in accord with the contribution to maintaining the system. The United States has rights by definition. Britain has rights as long as it is a loyal attack dog. The Arab facade has rights as long as it manages to control its own populations and ensure that the wealth flows to the West. The local cops on the beat have rights as long as they do their job.
What about the Palestinians? Well they don't have any wealth. They don't have any power. It therefore follows, by the most elementary principles of statecraft, that they don't have any rights. That's like adding two and two and getting four. In fact, they have negative rights. The reason is that their dispossession and their suffering elicits protest and opposition in the rest of the region, so they do not exactly count as zero but rather as harmful...
[Continued in second post. --CGE]