@@ Dual Disloyalty: Douglas Feith @@
Arash
August 19, 2005
Dual Disloyalty: Douglas Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq
Douglas Feith pushed hard for both. Others are paying the price in blood.
By Ward Harkavy
bushbeat AT villagevoice.com
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/images/israel-map-enlarged-legend.jpg
An official map of Israel from the U.S. government. This is not the map of Israel
favored by the likes of Douglas Feith.
During the Gaza "disengagement" saga — Jon Stewart calls it "The Jew Carry Show" — a
lot of people are showing their true colors. But as the strange sight of fanatical
young acidic Jews fighting other Jews proves, the color orange, for one, means
different things in different contexts.
In Ukraine, orange was the color of a democratic revolution. In Israel, orange is the
color of the reactionaries, the colonists who won't let go of the land they say God
told them they could have.
However, in all the stories about places like Kfar Darom, as in the recounting of the
current misery in Baghdead, one reactionary gets little notice. No one is mentioning
Douglas Feith (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Douglas_Jay_Feith), who has
been mostly successful in hiding his true colors as a right-wing Zionist while
carrying out his fanatical wing's aims in Iraq.
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000922.php
The erstwhile Pentagon official is a key player in not only the disastrous occupation
of Iraq but in trying to make sure Israel clung to the disastrous occupation of Gaza.
Douglas Feith (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith_body.html) is such a
radical that he won't even refer to the West Bank as the West Bank — he uses the
biblical names Judea and Samaria. And he doesn't even like to say "occupied
territories", even though they are.
In fact, our own government officially refers to them as "occupied" and freely uses
the term "West Bank". Just look at the CIA map of Israel above, and you'll see that
Gaza and the West Bank are separate from Israel, and each carries an asterisk.
But there's no asterisk attached to Douglas Feith's version of Israel
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Feith). The son of a founder of Likud (Dalck
Feith), he has pursued a radical Zionist policy at the expense of Israel's own Jews,
a majority of whom don't favor the settlers.
His behavior as a Pentagon official toward the Arabs in Iraq is one of the shameful
legacies of our unjustified invasion. We know quite a lot — although not enough —
about Feith's role in propelling the U.S. into war and beyond.
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000248.php
As one of the most prominent neocons, he hammered away at the need for regime change.
And of course, he was one of the key Pentagon officials who didn't plan for the
aftermath. He was in charge, however, of figuring out how to handle our Arab
prisoners. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
Bad idea. He's almost as anti-Arab as the fanatical anti-Semites over in the Arab
camp are anti-Jewish.
Does Douglas Feith have divided loyalties? That's a common allegation leveled against
those neocons and others who seem to put Israel's interests before those of the
United States. It's clear, though, that Feith doesn't. His loyalty belongs to Israel
and to its extremist politicians like Bibi Netanyahu
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netanyahu), for whom he was an adviser.
Maybe the details of Douglas Feith's loyalties will emerge in the unfolding of the
AIPAC spy scandal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIPAC_espionage_scandal).
One of Douglas Feith's direct subordinates, Larry Franklin
(http://groups.google.ca/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/18110417d275a311?hl=en), has
already been charged with leaking U.S. secrets to Israel, and two major AIPAC
officials: Steven Rosen, and Keith Weissman (fired only after the scandal broke) have
also been indicted. http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/001141.php
Dick Cheney had his business reasons—you go where the oil is—for trying to take over
Iraq. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000267.php
No one has feasted off the 9-11 tragedy like the old cold warriors Cheney and Don
Rumsfeld, who wound up agreeing, for different reasons, with the aims of Douglas
Feith's radical wing of Zionism, which wanted to take out Saddam, the most direct
threat to Israel's security.
Before you accuse me of being a self-hating Jew, please understand that, like Larry
David, I hate myself but it has nothing to do with my being Jewish.
More importantly, you can't lump all Zionists with Douglas Feith's wing, which is off
the scale as a radical group.
A decade ago, Douglas Feith took his hammer and helped destroy hopes for peace — if
there are any left — in Israel's occupied territories.
In the fall of 1993, for example, in the prime neocon journal "The National
Interest", Douglas Feith wrote "A Mandate for Israel"
(http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n33/ai_14538698/print). Blasting
the recently concluded Oslo accords, Feith laid out a typically long-winded screed
justifying Israel's permanent, perpetual, God-given, ultimate, and final claim to
Gaza and the West Bank.
The funniest part of his argument is that Feith actually talked about the Geneva
conventions. You'll recall that he was one of the leaders in the Pentagon's active
flouting of those conventions when it came to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
As Jim Lobe reminds us, Douglas Feith ran the office that ran Abu Ghraib, and even
our military lawyers strenuously objected to the loosening of interrogation
standards.
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines04/0520-02.htm
Here's Douglas Feith, in his own 1993 article, talking about the Geneva rules — as
they apply (or don't apply) to Gaza:
Contrary to the refrain of various United Nations resolutions, the 1949 Fourth
Geneva Convention does not render Jewish settlement in these territories unlawful.
By "these territories", Feith means "Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip". He goes
back to the Balfour Declaration as his authority, saying:
It can also be argued that Article 49 of the Convention, which provides that an
occupying power "shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population
into the territory it occupies", is not applicable to the case at hand. …
Even if one assumes Article 49's applicability to Israel's authority as military
occupant, however, the Jewish people do not thereby lose their Mandate-recognized
rights in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. If the Fourth Geneva Convention
applies, Israel is constrained solely in its capacity as an occupying power. The
Convention does not address or affect the rights or authority of the Jewish people in
their capacity as beneficiaries of the Mandate. In other words, Jewish rights there
do not derive from Israel's capture of the territories in 1967. So any limitations
imposed by the laws of war on Israel with respect to the military occupation of the
territories cannot negate those independent, pre-existing rights.
This is the radical who wound up running a large part of our war effort in Iraq. No
wonder we're fucked.
Let's recall what Feith told Congress on February 11, 2003, when he was, as he put
it, "pleased to have this opportunity to talk with you today about efforts underway
in the Defense Department and the U.S. Government to plan for Iraq in the
post-conflict period, should war become necessary".
In his testimony, called "Post-War Planning", Feith listed five "objectives".
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=papers&code=071
Let's run through them and see what has happened:
* First, demonstrate to the Iraqi people and the world that the United States
aspires to liberate, not occupy or control them or their economic resources.
Mission not accomplished.
* Second, eliminate Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, its nuclear program,
the related delivery systems, and the related research and production facilities.
This will be a complex, dangerous and expensive task.
There weren't any. It wasn't.
* Third, eliminate likewise Iraq's terrorist infrastructure. A key element of
U.S. strategy in the global war on terrorism is exploiting the information about
terrorist networks that the coalition acquires through our military and law
enforcement actions.
There was no "terrorist infrastructure" until we invaded. The "terrorist
infrastructure" was in Afghanistan, from where we diverted resources and manpower so
we could invade Iraq.
* Fourth, safeguard the territorial unity of Iraq. The United States does not
support Iraq's disintegration or dismemberment.
How many Iraqis have been disintegrated or dismembered? Oh, I forgot. We don't do
body counts.
* Fifth, begin the process of economic and political reconstruction, working to
put Iraq on a path to become a prosperous and free country. The U.S. government
shares with many Iraqis the hope that their country will enjoy the rule of law and
other institutions of democracy under a broad-based government that represents the
various parts of Iraqi society.
How about starting by turning on the fucking electricity? It's 120 degrees in
Baghdad, and even hotter when buses and cars explode.
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/001097.php
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/001182.php