GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED
ALLY Part 2: Everything is
broken By Axel Brot
German assistance could make a
difference in encouraging contact between official
Israel and chosen Palestinian interlocutors .
Under Green neoconservative foreign
minister Fischer, though, not only context had
changed. He threw the principle of differentiation
out of the window. He chose himself as the main
propagandist of Israeli claims that Palestinian
violence had nothing to do with the
occupation but with the
failure of Palestinian leadership and
institutions, with foreign instigation (led by
Iran and Syria), and that Israel is under
"existential threat" by a tide of anti-semitism
rooted in cultural and political retardation. As
rumor has it, he even forbade any in-house
discussion that went counter to his view of the
world, valuing Israeli (or US) instruction much
higher than the briefings of his desk officers.
At any rate, "unconditional support" came
to mean no more in-house dissonances in analysis
or judgment from the "solitary" interpretation of
Israeli policies, motivations, and their
consequences. The Merkel government then screwed
tight Fischer´s proactive approach towards
unconditionality - not only in supporting audibly
and energetically last year's efforts to destroy
Hezbollah, but working up toward military
involvement on the Israeli side; its precise
meaning will become much clearer with the next
round of war.
The direction of Germany´s
involvement, though, is unambiguous: Germany
colluded avidly in preventing an early end to the
Israeli campaign (during the Rome Conference) and
left no doubt about its underwriting the Israeli
right to kill and kidnap in Lebanon at will. In
addition, in a gauche effort to rally public
support for intervention on the Israeli side,
Merkel dubbed Germany´s naval detachment in
Lebanese waters (as well as the expanded United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon's presence on the
ground) as an "Israel Protection Force". It goes
without saying that Germany's assistance for
Israeli operations in Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan,
and Iran (in all three Germany has a heavy
intelligence presence) has grown in scope and
risk.
Now, support for Israeli projects
appears not any longer to be limited to
coordinating policies and information, or
providing German passports for Israeli undercover
work in Iran (as had been reported in Der
Spiegel), or a pipeline to agents in Lebanese
General Security (tracking Hezbollah leaders) or,
for that matter, to taking the lead in poisoning
the initial investigations into the assassination
of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (which was
not the beginning but a second spike in a series
of assassinations - the first one being the 2002
bombing of former Lebanese militia leader and
Syrian politician Eli Hobeika, who allegedly
intended to testify in Brussels against Ariel
Sharon concerning the 1982 Sabra and Shatila
massacre). Germany seems to have jumped with both
feet into the sectarian violence game, not (yet?)
with hits but by slaving at different levels of
regional engagements to the commands of Israeli
and, to a more limited extent, to American
operations.
If Israel's ambassador in
Berlin, Shimon Stein, had not reckoned with the
domestic constraints on official Germany's
solidarity with Israel, he could claim for Germany
what Justice Minister Haim Ramon and Daniel
Ayalon, Israel's ambassador in Washington,
asserted blandly for the US last year: "… even if
our army should commit a 'mass massacre', the
United States will still support us" (quoted in Le
Monde Diplomatique).
In fact, in earlier
days official Germany would have looked discreetly
away or apologized "off the record" for the
Israeli penchant for atrocities such as the Kfar
Qana massacre in south Lebanon - which Israel
never made a real effort to hide under its
peculiar doctrine of deterrence. As General Motta
Gur said as long ago as 1978: "... the Israeli
army has always struck civilian populations
purposely and consciously … the army … has never
distinguished civilian [from military] targets"
(quoted in Haaretz). Now Israel is demanding that
official Germany demonstrate the correct attitude
against "terrorist populations" - and it does, in
the name of the "struggle against terrorism" and
of preventing (!) "a war of civilizations".
For obvious reasons, Germany's original
economic support for Israel could never have been
considered leverage. But over the decades, its
dimension and its aggregate impact contributed
decisively to the fact that Israel had never to
make hard choices; it subsidized the built-in
maximalism in Israel's approach toward its
neighborhood and the pretension that its wars of
choice were wars for survival.
Separate
from the meager individual recompensations,
restitutions, etc, as managed (very badly for the
destitute) by the Jewish Claims Conference or the
Israeli state, German transfers up to now amount
to at least 140 billion euros (US$193.2 billion)
from the federal government in cash, goods,
weapons and patents, another 20 to 30 billion
euros in public-private partnership arrangements,
plus billions more via EU mechanisms.
It
is not surprising, therefore, that there is an
uneasy awareness of German co-responsibility in
fostering the combination of economic dependence,
foreign funded militarism and the peculiar and
exceedingly corrupt nature of the Israeli
Praetorian state. The permanent state of siege and
its steadily more powerful racist undercurrents
have become the source of its cohesion and define
its relationship to the world. As anyone knows who
is acquainted with the Israeli debate, the old
mantra that Israel will make the "concessions
necessary for peace" if it feels sufficiently
secure and supported, is good for public
consumption and perhaps self-hypnosis, but nothing
else.
Since Israel managed to persuade the
Western political classes (the most fragile and
corrupt Arab regimes need no convincing) that
Palestinians' aspirations - as well as their
rights under the Geneva Conventions - are
unrealistic and therefore basically illegitimate,
they have become a sideshow. Especially Europe
appears resolved to stabilize it in limbo with lip
service and sporadic shows of activism - but with
hard support, of course, for those Israeli
measures designed to break the last strands of
Palestinian political and social cohesion.
As any undergraduate in coercive social
engineering knows, destroying the social and
economic infrastructure of a society to the extent
that there are no more sources of independent
social authority that could regenerate organized
resistance, leaves the field to the broken, the
cynics, the corrupt, the self-haters, the
fantasists, and the criminals - and inflicts them
on a dispirited, disposable mass of humanity.
The Iranian ascendancy, in contrast, is
billed as the main show. And it was Fischer (ably
assisted by France and Great Britain) who took the
lead in navigating the European negotiating
position between the American-Israeli push for war
and the need to avoid it in view of the
to-be-expected domestic repercussions; between the
resolve to deny the Iranian right to close the
nuclear fuel cycle and to hide the bad faith of
their negotiating approach. Fischer made the issue
repeatedly clear: the Iranian nuclear program
signals the will to achieve "regional hegemony" to
the detriment of the Israeli - and for him, the
only legitimate one - claim to regional
predominance.
When the government of
then-Iranian president Mohammad Khatami offered in
2003, practically hat-in-hand, to negotiate with
the US all outstanding bilateral problems - only
to be refused, as he was part of the "axis of
evil" - this was absorbed in a European proposal,
that offered vague promises and no security
guarantees, for the dismantling of the whole
Iranian nuclear complex (including the courses and
training in advanced nuclear engineering), plus
the hobbling of its missile program.
Through the subterfuges and permutations
of these negotiations, the German commitment to a
peaceful resolution was always highly conditional,
and Israel acquired something like a
behind-the-scenes veto on the limits of the German
position. It could (and can) well appreciate that
for Germany - praised by Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert as the best Israeli ally - to join a
war against Iran would at that time have destroyed
Fischer´s Green Party as well as the government
(and it still might do so now); not to join it
would have created another trans-Atlantic rift,
much deeper than the one caused by the Iraq war.
Such rifts have a logic of their own and the
potential to deeply fracture the German (and
European) political landscape.
The German
political class is hamstrung and duly embarrassed
over the lack of martial spirit in its population.
But under the banner of "anything but war (now)",
it maneuvers and waits for the right constellation
that frees its hand: a Western uproar over a Gulf
of Tonkin-type incident, a major terrorist event
in the US or Germany, which will have nothing to
do with Iran but could create the right popular
mood. It compensates in the meantime with German
overt and covert involvement for Israel's
willingness not to put quite yet German domestic
politics to the test. Nevertheless, after so many
aborted moves toward war, the "war now" party in
the US may any time push the Bush administration
over the brink and tell the Germans to deal with
it or even make it a test of the Merkel
government´s survivability and pro-American
stance.
Discontent with the seeding of
future conflicts Paul Wolfowitz noted with
satisfaction in 1999 (in The National Interest)
that his Lone-Ranger position of 1992 had turned
into the bi-partisan consensus of US grand
strategy: never to permit again a power, or
combination of powers, on the Eurasian landmass to
achieve the capacity to act as a "peer challenger"
to US interests. And it is this principle that the
European political elites are about to underwrite,
too. Its apologetics are tried out in working- and
study-groups: democracy and free markets can only
take root when the Russian state is deprived of
the economic, social, and demographic resources
for its reconstitution as a viable ("imperial")
power; and China, for the same reasons, has to be
dissected into five independent states. And all of
this by the right combination of applying hard
(overwhelming military) and soft (dissolving elite
and regime cohesion) power.
These are, of
course, just fond hopes or selling points. In
reality, it is a prescription for decades of chaos
and violence, with a deep impact on Europe and
Asia. But even these - one might call them Plan B
- prospects may have much to recommend themselves
from the American perspective, and they offer even
an absolutely convincing, though difficult to
pitch, strategic rationale for developing a global
ballistic missile defense network.
It is
this consensus, nevertheless, that provides the
only reliable guide to the course of US policies
towards Russia and China - and insight into the
nature of the "hedges" against the worsening of
relations be it with Russia, be it with China, or
both. Since being tougher on national security
than the next guy (or girl) or the sitting
administration, is the coin of national strategy
debates between Republicans and Democrats as well
as the ultimate arbiter of the career prospects
for elected office, "hedging" has not much to do
with taking out insurance. It has, instead,
everything to do with being able to initiate
confrontations.
"Hedging" with regard to
China highlights this approach. The massive
building of depth into the American military
dispositions in the Western Pacific, the pressures
upon Taiwan to get on with its US$12-18 billion
arms buying program, the success in integrating
the Taiwanese as well as the increasingly
offensive Japanese posture into American
operations plans, enticing India into sharpening
its strategic profile against China, are sold as
measures for Asian stability. This is, however,
everything that the hawks of the "confront-China"
lobby ever demanded, minus the damage to
US-Chinese economic relations.
These
"hedges" are not designed to work as an insurance
mechanism but as the rock slide overhanging
China's continuously narrowing path between a
sheer cliff face and the abyss. More prosaically,
whenever America's internal bargaining comes up
with the ace of spades for China, "full spectrum
dominance" should be in place. Or so one might
think. The
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