3 - 2008 - Antiwar.com Blog

In Defense of Non-Violence

I’m writing this in response to an article in last week’s Haaretz entitled ‘Palestinians’ doomsday weapon, non-violence, fails test’. It’s a better article than the title might lead one to believe and accepts an important underlying premise: that non-violence from the Gaza Strip would be a serious blow to the Israeli government. However, the article does make a couple of significant errors which I hope to correct now:

The article wrongly suggests that the increased rocket fire out of Gaza last week was in response to the non-violent protest at the border. In fact Israel’s General Yadlin has pointed out that rather it was a direct result of assassinations of several key Hamas military experts
The theme of the article is that we have no clue what the Israeli military strategy to counter non-violence is, and that they probably don’t even have one

It is this later claim that I wish to discuss, because it is this later claim which misinterprets the entire strategy of non-violence and leads to the article’s false conclusion that non-violence has simply failed of its own accord.

Rather, we know precisely what strategy the Israeli military employs in response to non-violence, because it is the only strategy available to it. Indeed it is the only strategy militaries ever employ in response to non-violence, and we saw it clearly this weekend.

Escalation.

Seeing the path of non-violence to its necessary conclusion is not easy for precisely this reason: that every act of non-violence defiance is met with an act of increasingly disproportionate violence in the hopes of realizing a violent response and vindicating the claim that the posture of non-violence is an insincere one.

Today, Israeli ground forces begin their pullout from the Gaza Strip. The mainstream press treats this as a response to international condemnation for the large civilian death toll. Hamas sees it as vindication of their violent resistance and claims ‘victory’. But both of these are mistaken. Israeli troops are leaving the Gaza strip because they achieved their goal: they provoked a response.

It takes a very special brand of determination to see non-violence through in the face of attacks on soccer-playing children and troops marching through suburbs killing civilians. Yet it is precisely this determination which must follow, if those deaths are not to be in vain.

The people of the Gaza Strip must hold firm in their resolve for non-violence. They must make it clear to the Israeli military that they will not be swayed, nor will they respond violently. They must leave the Israeli government with only two choices: acquiescence or committing genocide. And despite what Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister or anyone else may say, they must remain confident that Israel cannot choose the latter.

This weekend may have been a setback for non-violence, but it is nothing resembling failure. Non-violence remains not just an option for the Palestinians in the face of occupation, but at the end of the day, the only one.

The No-Fly Zone Was Not Over Nebraska

Via Daniel Larison, the latest telling of what must be the biggest whopper of the 21st century:

Well, we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and look what happened.

That’s Karl Rove, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Of course, there’s no reason to pick on Fox. Do you think anyone would have contradicted Rove on one of the non-Murdoch networks?

The Bush Doctrine in Embryo

The independent National Security Archive has just published recently declassified documents regarding the birth and evolution of the infamous Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) that was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post in early 1992 and that later became the inspiration for the Project for the New American Century in 1997 and eventually codified in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America in September 2002 â€” the codification of the so-called â€œBush Doctrine.â€ The document, which Sen. Joseph Biden, among others, denounced as a â€œPax Americanaâ€ at the time, called, among other things, for a global strategy based on U.S. military pre-eminence, pre-emption of rogue states and possible rivals, and coalitions of the willing (which it called â€œad hoc assembliesâ€). The 15 documents featured by the Archive was drafted between June 5, 1991 â€” just after the first Gulf War â€” and January 1993 when then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney released an official, if euphemistic, version of the controversial document. Most of the documents, however, are heavily redacted.

Among other things, the document illustrates the important role played by Scooter Libby, as well as Paul Wolfowitz (who is generally given credit or blame for the document) in coordinating the project, an additional piece of evidence that Libby, rather than Wolfowitz or Elliott Abrams, was probably the most important and influential neo-conservative in the current administration. Itâ€™s increasingly clear that Libbyâ€™s demise in October 2005 marked a heavy blow to neo-conservative hopes of retaining decisive influence in the administration. Unmentioned, however, is the informal role played by Albert Wohlstetter and Richard Perle, among others, in helping to shape the outcome through Abram Shulsky, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, and Libby.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly, I think I was among the first â€” if not the first (according to Nexis) â€” to write about the relationship between the leaked DPG and the strategy pursued by the Bush administration after 9/11 â€” for IPS in â€˜Pax Americanaâ€™ All Over Again, December 27, 2001; and for Alternet in Bushâ€™s Foreign Policy Blueprint: A Grand Global Plan, March 26, 2002.

Unfortunately, I havenâ€™t had the time to study the documents in any detail, but this primary source material will obviously be extremely important for those who wish to piece together the evolution of the Bush Doctrine and the antecedents of the radical trajectory on which U.S. foreign policy embarked after 9/11.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Madness

Mother Night

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

“The Nukes of October“:

Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon’s plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it’s clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the “madman theory”: Nixon’s notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.

Nixon’s madman pose and Giant Lance were based on game theory, a branch of mathematics that uses simple calculations and rigorous logic to help understand how people make choices â€” like whether to surge ahead in traffic or whether to respond to a military provocation with a strike of one’s own.

The madman theory was an extension of that doctrine.
The sudden conclusion reinforced the madman pose.

Denying that there was ever a madman theory in operation, he emphasized that Giant Lance was designed to be a warning, not a provocation to war.