Rethinking some of the political causes of the Syrian Accountability Act (SAA)

By Bechir Saadé
lundi 11 octobre 2004.

As of Thursday of May the 13th 2004, SAA is alive and kicking as part of the Greater Middle East Project in line with American initiatives. But little is known about the people behind this act and their political connections in Washington. Unfortunately, the presses in general, the Lebanese and Arabic in particular, have failed to cover to whom this Act owes its existence. Lebanese, eager to perceive some hope in their political aspirations have either welcomed the act or remained puzzled as to what it really meant. Those behind the thinking process pointed their fingers on one single man : Michel Aoun. The latter according to the main Arab current seems to have united with the ‘Zionist forces’, and as for his supporters, the man has done a great job for the sake of Lebanese independence. The deepness of the analysis stops there. No media organ, or for that matter Lebanese praised pundits (for their political analyses) could understand that Aoun was merely a figurant on stage, someone who just happened to have serious issues digesting a failed battle and someone who begged the same people he fought a couple of years ago. By the time Aoun entered the stage, most of the work was already done.

Ironically, it is the American press and some opposition intellectual currents in the US that could seriously uncover the political bargaining that led to the signing of the SAA. We can fairly say that the majority of the people that have followed the lobbying part acknowledge the existence of an advocacy group : the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL). Mirroring the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, sponsored by Ahmad Chalabi (JINSA), USCFL owes its existence to Ziad Abdelnour (MEIB) a New York based banker, son of the Lebanese former MP Khalil Abdelnour. A host of other Lebanese American offshoots are part of USCFL such as Joseph Farah (ACPP), Nadim Akda, Joseph Boohaker, Samir Bustany, Nabil El Hage, and Joseph Hakim, to name but a few (guess what ? They’re all Christians). USCFL lists former president Amine Gemayel as a core supporter.

But the real source of political power comes from their closeness to neoconservative circles as Elliot Abrams (MEF), Eleana Benador (MEF), Paula Dobriansky (PNAC), Eliot Engel, Douglas Feith (JINSA, CSP, MEF, IASPS , USIP), Frank Gaffney (CSP), Gary Gambill, Jeane Kirkpatrick (JINSA), Michael Ledeen (JINSA, AEI), Richard Perle (JINSA, AEI, IASPS), Daniel Pipes (USIP, MEF), Michael Rubin, David Steinmann (JINSA), and David Wurmser are all part of this lobby, and are the main source that keeps it financially healthy and politically striving. They represent what pundits today call the “Golden Circle” of Neoconservatives. Without dwelling much on the infamously impressive record of these individuals, readers would have noticed that next to some of the name is typed an abbreviation. Check out the endnotes to know what that means.

These are but a few of the main organs that ended up expressing the different patterns of today’s American foreign policy at least at the ideological level. Due to the lack of space, we will only look at some of the figures present at USCFL.

The now famous Douglas Feith along with Richard Perle and David Wurmser wrote “A Clean Break : A New strategy for securing the Realm (1996) under the auspice of the (Israeli) IASPS, that was addressed to Netanyahu (then prime minister) and which virtually advocated the most hawkish policies that would make the “road map” blush. Some of the proposals did eventually materialize and to the sole benefit of Israel : the paper included a call “for ousting Saddam Hussein as a means to transform the balance of power in the Middle East in such a way that Israel could ignore pressure to trade ’’land for peace’’ with the Palestinians or Syria”. Douglas Feith is described as an “ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias” remarking that “during the Clington year, Feith continued to oppose any agreement negotiated between the Palestinians : Oslo, Hebron and Wye.” Feith “defined Oslo as, “one-sided Israeli concessions, inflated Palestinians expectations, broken Palestinian solemn understandings, Palestinian violence... and American rewards for Palestinian recalcitrance”. Well, rhetoric is not as important as business connections one would say. Before joining the administration as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Feith was founding member of the CSP (who’s founder is Frank Gaffney), and chairman of JINSA (in 1992) and between these two organizations lays the nexus of the Military-Industrial complex of the US. JINSA’s mission is to educate American leadership figures on the vital strategic relationship between the US & Israel, and invite with the assistance of the Pentagon and the US Department of State, retired US senior military officers to Israel and Jordan, to assist in seminars, conferences, training, etc. JINSA advocates (and this if from their website) : National ballistic missile defense systems for the US, the curbing of regional ballistic missile development and production worldwide, supporting joint US-Israeli training and weapons development programs and a rejection of any peace process with the Palestinians that is not prefaced by a full ‘renunciation of terrorism’. The CSP in a similar vein tries to dismantle all arms treaties that pose restrictions on American hegemony. As the journalist Jason Vest observes : “Gaffney and CSP’s prescriptions for national security have been fairly simple : gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed... give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go full steam ahead on just about every national missile defense program”. The CSP and JINSA are inextricably linked thanks to the military interests they commonly represent and Israel is the prefect ally when ideology and business interests meet. JINSA and the CSP have a lot of past military industry CEO and retired Generals and Lieutenants on their respective boards. Vest has done a terrific job by clarifying this link. To take one example, military industrial companies such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin (to name but a few) have both traded and worked with Israel to produce the majority of their defense apparatus thanks to JINSA’s efforts. Last but not least, Feith seems to have something to do with the Iraqi prison abuses of Abu Ghraib. A part from being behind the phony “intelligence” gathered on the alleged WMD of Saddam, and behind the supporting of Ahmad Chalabi, it was Feith’s office who “housed the future undersecretary for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, who facilitated the transfer of Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that houses suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, to Abu Ghraib prison in the interests of extracting more intelligence from detainees” .

Ziad Abdelnour for his part restricts himself to ideological exercises. According to his articles listed on the USCFL website, Abdelnour advocates closer coordination between Israel, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon in order to contain and neutralize Syria, which the classical neoconservative argument. Abdelnour also argues in an article titled “Middle East Christian Power & the Role of Private Capital” that Christian Arabs should follow the path that Jews took to become powerful political brokers in the US. For him, it seems that Christians “are currently enduring great religious persecution based on the political ideology of militant Islam” in... Syria. In order to change this unfortunate fate, “Individualism and lack of community consciousness, fear of Arab Islamic political domination, refusal to work openly with the Jewish community and rejection of the alliance with Israel are traits that the Christian Arabs will have to completely discard if they ever wish to stop being treated like second class citizens”. Last but not least, Abdelnour has the best plan for nation and state building : “finding solutions and building real “SWAT” teams capable of taking over the country once Syria and the Hariri regime are out of the picture”. Moreover, as far as economic policies are concerned it is still a treat to see Lebanese chauvinism : “Syrian labor are not particularly skilled and can provide neither real vision nor value-added to Lebanon if the aim is to compete with Israel one day”.

Joseph Farah is a “contributing expert” at ACPP, an Israeli Thinktank. He is the founder, editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com that publishes articles that allegedly proves the presence of WMD in Syria and in Lebanon. Farah is/was a weekly columnist for the International Edition of the right-wing newspaper the Jerusalem Post and wrote for the ACPP an article entitled “How Islam Plays the Press”, were he virulently warns in a lump-summed way that “the Islamic world is playing and winning a sophisticated game of media manipulation in which powerful and wealthy police states and anti-democratic political movements are more often portrayed and perceived - at least in the context of the Arab-Jewish conflict - as victims rather than threatening oppressors”.

Michael Ledeen is the famous Iran-Contra ‘veteran’ who violated American national security for an arms deal with Iran against American hostages in Beirut in the 1980s. The proceeds of the deal went to finance death-squads in Latin America under the patronage of the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) that by the way are the guys that take care of mapping the Greater Middle East Initiative for us. Ledeen thoughts are deep and sometimes disturbing : “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business” . In brief, Ledeen is an advocator of “total war” as he states it : “Total war not only destroys the enemy’s military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends”, Ledeen writes. “The sparing of civilian lives cannot be the total war’s first priority ... The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people”. Ledeen was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s. In the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues. More recently, Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar (the medium between Oliver North and Iran in the Iran-Contra affair) in support of resistance efforts in Iran . In addition to his work with the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen has supported or co-founded a number of advocacy groups pushing for a radical transformation of the Middle East, including the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, JINSA, and of course, Ziad Abdelnour’s U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon.

Many observers were outraged when President Bush announced in early 2003 Daniel Pipe’s nomination to the USIP. Pipes is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, "a think tank" aimed at defining and promoting "American interests in the Middle East. ... The Forum holds that the United States has vital interests in the region ; in particular, it believes in strong ties with Israel, Turkey, and other democracies as they emerge ; works for human rights throughout the region ; seeks a stable supply and a low price of oil ; and promotes the peaceful settlement of regional and international disputes, as its website states”. While MEF is the tank that does the thinking, USCFL does the lobbying. However, Pipes does not restrict himself to writing virulently anti-Arab-Muslim-Palestinian articles that you can check on his website , he also founded Campus Watch that targets scholars on Middle Eastern studies that do not get in line with American national security, i.e. scholars who criticizes Israel. Edward Said was one of the first names on the hit list. Even more than that, Campus watch tries to lobby congress to set up a committee that will select the appropriate Middle Eastern studies programs to fund, of course along the above criteria.

Now if this is the way to work for reforms in Lebanon and Syria, we don’t think that Lebanese learned much of the civil war. USCFL was the prime mover behind the passing of the SAA and the most influential members were the neoconservatives, also called “Likudniks” (because of their indefectible support to the Likud party of Israel). The “Lebanese-Israeli link” is not even with moderate Israeli elements but with the most hawkish anti-Arab forces in the US and in Israel. Between the total war concept of Ledeen, the destruction of Oslo by Feith, Wurmser, and Perle, the anti-Muslim diatribe by Pipes, and the objective to enforce brutal regime change (Abdelnour’s SWAT teams for example) in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc. so as to secure Israel’s expansionist thirst, the Lebanese opposition should not appear any close. In order for us not to let the Iraqi scenario happen again, the public opinion and more crucially the opposition in place, should fully acknowledge the forces at stake and work constructively for a better future for Lebanese but also for the Syrians, because when push comes to shove, Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, and anyone close to the line of fire will probably be compromised if not wasted.

Working for the ‘Independence’ of Lebanon should not come at the expense of people’s life. If Syria has a certain grip on Lebanese affairs, this has to be resolved internally. The most important aspect of this relationship is that Syria finds a fertile ground to cultivate its unhealthy crops (and some are actually healthy). If Lebanese politician have distinctive attitudes of how best to serve ‘Lebanon’ or their own representation of Lebanon, immature opposition falls in the same category. Relying on the most hawkish elements present in the United States that embraces total war, empire, and other neo-colonial concepts is grossly speaking “playing with fire”. Well, it’s true that Lebanese did that since they got their state, but ending the civil war with an agreement that was supposed to call for temperance and moderation should come more as a lesson that nobody can really win or impose his view in Lebanon. Now, by inheriting a policeman (Syria) to carry through this task, things got messy, as would be expected in a country that has deficient institutions. Don’t blame it on the Syrian and don’t play with fire. Work things from the contradictions of your own society that you chose to live with. Maybe one should start by convincing a lot of Lebanese that yes indeed, we don’t need the Syrians anymore.