U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told ABC television the U.S. could not "dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do".On ABC's current affairs programme “This Week”, host George Stephanopoulos asked Mr Biden whether the Israeli position was the right approach.
The vice-president replied: "Israel can determine for itself – it's a sovereign nation – what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else." Perhaps to please Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Biden added that this was the case, "whether we agree or not" with the Israeli view.
Making thoughtless statements like these utterly defies both logic and sensibility. Using the same logic, he could have said the same thing about Iran.
Why doesn't he say "Iran can determine for itself – it's a sovereign nation – what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Israel and anyone else?" With the same logic and lack of sensibility, Biden might have said, "Iran can develop nuclear weapons whether we agree or not with their view."
With this kind of senseless thinking, it’s a wonder that Biden ever managed to hold the leading Democratic position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, except that he is a self-declared Zionist with a 36-year Senate record of pro-Israel leadership.
While in his non-interference state of mind, Biden recently questioned the legitimacy of Mahmud Ahmadinejad's victory in Iran's presidential elections. He commented that officials "just don't know enough" about how they were conducted.
What if they were conducted like elections in other countries that have clearly been rigged but have gone unnoticed by Biden? This is a perfect demonstration of America’s foreign policy hypocrisy.
There's also the insensibility of maintaining double standards about international issues. "The president will not allow Iran to go nuclear," says Biden.
About North Korea's tests of long-range missiles, Biden says: "If the country is proliferating nuclear weapons or missiles, then it is a serious danger and a threat to the world..."
With North Korea, which withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it's a question of how quickly the missiles and nuclear weapons are being developed. Iran, on the other hand, remains a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which seeks to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Iran has made it clear that they want only to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Meanwhile, as Israel and America focus on the potential of Iran to become a nuclear power, Israel carries on with its never-ending land grab on the West Bank and its terrorist slaughter and mayhem in Gaza.
Commenting on the growing settlements in the West Bank, Sandy Tolan writes: "So dense had the Israeli West Bank presence become by 2009, so fragmented is Palestinian life – both physically and politically – that it now requires death-defying mental gymnastics to imagine how a two-state solution could ever be implemented."
The “logical” comments by Joe Biden should bring scathing criticism of the way Israel spends American taxpayers’ money to support its continuing ruthless inhumanity to indigenous Palestinians.
Haaretz reports: "Israeli officials told U.S. envoy George Mitchell in recent weeks that Jerusalem is willing to temporarily freeze settlement construction, but that the move would be conditioned on substantive steps from the Arab side, as well as guarantees from the United States." What an abomination!
Break into my house with guns. Lock me in a small room; and when a neighbour complains, agree to set me free if I agree to let you keep much of the stolen loot.
This is the twisted logic of Joe Biden's Israel-American politics, using Iran as a distraction.
George W Bush and his overzealous friends might have signed off but their shenanigans during their eight years in power continue to emerge, fascinating the world. Last week, Robert Draper revealed in Gentleman’s Quarterly how Donald Rumsfeld sent top-secret, intelligence briefings to Bush covered with photographs of Americans at war abroad and ‘relevant’ Biblical verses.
In one such briefing, above a huddle of U.S. soldiers, appears the question famously put by God, “Whom shall I send and who will go for Us?” The answer is right here. This line from Isaiah appears over the photograph of a group of U.S. soldiers apparently headed to Iraq: “Here I am, Lord. Send me.”
And look at this promise from Proverbs to those promoting Bush’s mission of ‘freedom and human dignity’ around the world: “Commit to the Lord, whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.” Another briefing cover, according to Draper, shows Isaiah-inspired U.S. tanks with the command: “Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter.”
One Nation Under God! The Righteous Nation on a divine mission from God! This wasn’t part of a Doomsday cult’s literature or something that appeared in a Dan Brown thriller.
They had been part of the U.S. government’s briefings and were exchanged at the highest level of chain of command of the world’s most powerful army. This is why all this is so disturbing. Many in the U.S. media have tried to underplay these revelations as barmy manifestations of Rumsfeld’s overactive imagination. I am not so sure though.
For this has been more like a general pattern, rather than an exception. Rummy may be a fruitcake. But he knew what he was doing when he sent those memos and briefings dripping with evangelical fervor to the commander-in-chief. He knew they would make his Bible-thumping boss happy. After all, Bush took his mission as ‘savior of the world’ rather seriously. He actually once told Palestinian foreign minister he was on a ‘mission from God’ to save the world.
Recently, former French president Jacques Chirac revealed how in the run up to the Iraq invasion Bush called him up to warn that the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog (Yajuj and Majuj in the Quran, I think!) were at work in the Holy Land and why they must be defeated by the Coalition of the Willing.
According to Genesis and Ezekiel, Gog and Magog, the forces of Apocalypse, will come out of the north to attack the Children of Israel. Insisting end times were nigh, Bush reportedly told the French president: “This war is ordained by God, who wants to wipe out His people’s enemies.”
The story of this Bush-Chirac conversation was first revealed by Thomas Romer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne, in an article in Allez savoir, in 2007.
Romer had been consulted by a baffled Elysee Palace after Bush’s call. Chirac confirmed it recently in a new book by French author Jean Claude Maurice recalling how he was stupefied by Bush’s divine justification for the war on Iraq.
Bush sincerely believed the Iraq war was the fulfillment of Biblical prophesies and that he was the Chosen One for the divine mission. And I hardly need elaborate who, in his view, God’s people and their enemies were. Is it any wonder then the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen in the Muslim world as new crusades?
More than a million Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers have paid with their lives for Bush’s mission to protect Israel. So, it turns out, the Iraq war was after all driven by religious zealotry and the U.S. Right’s preoccupation with Israel, as long suspected by many in the Middle East. More alarmingly, while Bush and his cronies have retired to their ranches, the crusader’s mindset is still at work.
It is inappropriate to consider the question of national reconciliation in Iraq without first recognizing the unique nature of the challenge. The best path to redemption in Iraq remains dialogue between those in power, those in opposition, the forces of the occupation, international donors and of the many different antagonists.
The problems that have faced Iraqis since 2003, between supporters and adversaries of a political process under occupation, have merged with other challenges, splintering Iraqi actors and causing an unprecedented fragmentation of Iraqi society. What is needed therefore is not one sole initiative but rather a plethora of Iraqi reconciliations. These reconciliations require the acceptance of an inclusive political process that guarantees the participation of all Iraqis and builds a nation based on the principle of equal citizenship and a guarantee a diverse and just society for all.
The fragmentation of the Iraqi political scene has evolved in a climate of complete mistrust and the near-absolute absence of serious dialogue between the different actors.
Further, the regional and international environment is not making the resolution of Iraq’s problems any easier:
• The new American administration, while not acknowledging the complete failure of its predecessor in Iraq, is beginning a new, more timid approach that has not yet dared to suggest an alternative strategy for all Iraqis.
• Iran, which has assured itself of a relatively free hand on the Iraqi chessboard, cannot rest on its laurels; its regional situation remains critical.
• The alarming results of the Israeli election and internal Palestinian problems perpetuate tensions throughout the region, making any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unlikely.
Reconciliation in Iraq must be a voluntary act and cannot be imposed by any party. It will not be realized without a decisive and courageous commitment from all parties to move past hatred and renounce violence in order to recognize each other.
All reconciliation conferences that have been organized to date have been little more than red herrings. Some, such as the one that took place in Helsinki, have final documents signed only by Iraqi Members of Parliament: was it really necessary to travel all the way to Helsinki for such a document when the signatories see each other every day in the legislative assembly in Baghdad? Most of these documents continue to state “the impossibility of reconciling with those whose hands are stained with the blood of innocents” but we must ask ourselves: during the last 50 years in Iraq, whose hands are truly clean?
Political and institutional normalization must first advocate for a real “disarmament of the hearts” that will help Iraqis – all Iraqis – to understand that the stability and sustainability of their country must be achieved by their agreement. This type of agreement, in view of the complicated regional environment, is the only true guarantee of internal Iraqi stability.
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