Ayoon Wa Azan ( I Nominate Cheney )
Jihad el-Khazen Al-Hayat - 01/04/07//
The Arab leaders said what they had to say with moderation and responsibility. It remains to be seen whether US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be able to live up to the promises she made to the Arab officials in her last Middle East tour, and to respond to what she heard from them and what the Summit came up with.
I wish Condi had delivered what she promised us, and I trust her sincere intentions more than her ability. In addition to the old and remaining obstacles on the road toward a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is another enormous US difficulty. The Bush administration is now made up of two opposite groups. On the one hand, the extremists led by Vice President Dick Cheney are still an active team that is listened to, despite all the catastrophes their policy has brought to the US and the world. On the other, there are the 'realists', such as Dr. Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the professionals working in the Department of Defense and the CIA. The Arab leaders are working with a team, but they always have to remember that there is also the other one.
The war cabal is a group of professional criminals. They will try to thwart any progress or agreement in the Middle East, since they haven't yet given up dreaming of a US empire and putting Israel's interests before any others, including US ones.
I will not stray far, but today I'll just take some extracts from Cheney's speech at the annual conference of the official Jewish lobby, the AIPAC. Before doing so, however, I'd like to say that the US Vice President's presence in this conference is an insult to the US Constitution and the rule of law, since this lobby is accused of spying on the Americans in Israel's favor. In particular, this accusation is leveled at two of its (former) major staff: Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Cheney began his speech by flattering the lobby and its men and by welcoming the unnamed spies. I'll complete by quoting: 'members of AIPAC […] play a vital role in making the strategic moral case for America's friendship with Israel'.
The common moral case is the occupation of the Palestinian territories and Iraq, and the killing of Palestinian women and children, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Cheney reports President Bush's vision about the foundation of two States, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace and democracy. Then he mentions Ariel Sharon's assertion that a democratic State needs to protect its principles and itself if it wants to survive.
In my opinion, this is the democracy of murder and occupation, as testified by the very good Israelis. They are the ones who monitor the killing of civilians and record the daily psychological and physical agony at the barriers, while opposing their government's extremism.
Cheney says that the qualities of the American and Israeli peoples are tested every day by the war on terror. He talks about the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah and one by Hamas, links this to the global war on terror that is targeting the US, talks about Hezbollah's 'terrorists', and ends by intentionally mixing the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In my opinion, Hamas and Hezbollah are two national liberation movements facing Israel's terrorism. The number of Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli civilians killed show that the Israeli government is seven times a terrorist as all the Palestinian and Lebanese factions combined. Also, I won't forget to mention the role played by Cheney himself and the neoconservative cabal in and around the administration in encouraging Israel's terrorism against civilians.
I nominate Cheney for the award of the most impertinent person on Earth. He describes three elections and a referendum in Iraq last year as achievements, and then blames bin Laden and al-Qaeda, whose terrorists he was the one who brought to Iraq.
My question is: what's the use of three or 30 elections, if the country is being devastated and its people are being slaughtered every day? I question and accuse Cheney personally of trying to trigger an unjustified war against Iraq, during which more than 3000 US troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed so far, the midde class has been displaced, Iraq has been deprived of its intellectuals, and al-Qaeda has entered the country. In other words, Cheney himself is the one who let this organization in after lying on the eve of the war, when he claimed that there was a relationship between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaeda. He is also responsible for any infighting between Sunnis and Shiites, after the US administration created a sectarian regime that Iraq had never seen before.
In his speech, Cheney moves from impertinence to even more impertinence. He told his audience, made up of Israelis and spies, that there are some myths about the war on terror that must be refuted, first of all, that Iraq didn't have any relationship with global terrorism.
This Goebbels-style mass propaganda has been repeated so much that people have ended up believing it. Saddam Hussein's Iraq didn't have any relationship with global terrorism, even though Saddam Hussein himself was a monstrous criminal and deserved to be condemned.
Another myth is that it's possible to support US forces with no reinforcements. This would be true, if it weren't for the fact that these words are uttered by a person who deserted the military service and sacrifices others' lives instead of sending his two daughters to the frontline in Iraq.
The third myth is that the withdrawal from Iraq will strengthen the US' position in the war on terror. I personally don't know the answer, and I'm not as impudent as Cheney to talk about military matters. What I know for sure is that the US withdrawal from Iraq won't make the situation worse, since the war cabal has destroyed Iraq's future and it's not possible to do more than that.
Cheney closes his speech by being insolent again. He quotes one more time the war criminal Sharon, and says he is 'a man of courage and a man of peace who remains in our thoughts'.
They are both war criminals and a shame to their respective countries. America was a leading democracy and an example for us until people like Cheney came to power. As for the Jewish State, all opinion polls carried out there show that Israel would have achieved peace if it hadn't been for people like Sharon and Ehud Olmert.
Can Condoleezza Rice and her team make a peace offer in spite of Dick Cheney? I prefer to wait for the outcome and not express my opinion.
Finally, I tell the Arab leaders, whose morning I've spoilt by talking about Cheney, that tomorrow I'll complete my articles by talking about a man of peace: George Soros.
http://www.j-khazen.blogspot.com/
|
