[lbo-talk] Is Syria next?

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Jul 26 19:27:05 PDT 2003


On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 Ulhas Joglekar cited Charles Glass's article in the London Review of Books:


> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n14/glas01_.html

Which is very good and I recommend it in its entirety; it's full of important details you don't get elsewhere. Three points in passing.

1. Minor footnote for those who don't already know: if anyone has earned the right to say that Hezbollah is a legitimate resistance organization who shouldn't be demonized, it's Charles Glass. He was kidnapped by them and held for 2 months in the 80s. It wasn't fun, and if he hadn't escaped, he could well be dead now.

2. One more piece of evidence for the Anyone But Lieberman brigade. To quote Glass:

<quote>

After Bush's election in 2000, a Presidential Study Group

published 'Navigating through Turbulence: America and the Middle

East in a New Century'. 'The two main targets,' the group advised

the incoming President, 'should be Syria and Iraq.' The authors of

the report were 'guided', they said, 'by the wisdom and insight of

a distinguished Steering Group that included . . . Alexander Haig

Jr, Max Kampelman, Anthony Lake, Samuel Lewis, Joseph Lieberman,

Paul Wolfowitz and Mortimer Zuckerman'.

<unquote>

In other words, it's not that Lieberman listens to neo-conservative advice. He *gives* neo-conservative advice. He is a neo-conservative. Put him in office and he'll be worse than Bush is as far as crazy foreign policy in the middle east is concerned. That's no joke and no exaggeration.

If you're interested in the entire Washington Institute (the group who sponsors the quadrennial Presidential Study Group) report, it's at:

URL: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/psg/psg.htm

3. Glass's last paragraph is worth citing in full:

<quote>

Does the United States really want democracy for Syria and the

rest of the Arab world? Should it? Since 1949, when the CIA staged

the first of the Arab world's many military coups in Syria,

America has helped to suppress democratic movements throughout the

Middle East. I remember interviewing one of the founders of the

Syrian Baath, a former Cabinet minister who had long since left

the Party and gone into silent opposition. Dr Hafiz Jemalli was in

his eighties when we met fifteen years ago in Damascus. 'If we are

democratic,' he said, 'we will be unified.' He was thinking of

pre-colonial Syria, which the British and French turned into the

statelets of little Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel/Palestine.

'If we are unified, we will be a danger to Israel.' Perle,

Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the rest of the coterie who gave America

its Iraq war are not interested in changing regimes only to see

them become a danger to Israel. Will the US really allow Arab

electorates to choose to resist Israel's colonisation of

territories occupied in 1967, American control of their oil and

the imposition of American military bases in their countries? Or

will American rule in the Middle East founder on the contradiction

of a 'democratisation' that ignores the people?

<unquote>

Michael



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