The Central Global Threat of Violence

Edward S. Herman

With Israel engaged once again in a major war of aggression in Lebanon, and protected once again from any effective global response by U.S. power and veto, it becomes clearer than ever that the central global problem of organized violence and lawlessness in the early 21st century lies in the aims, collaboration and power of the U.S.-Israeli axis. These partners in aggression and state terrorism reinforce one another’s projections of power, the out-of-control superpower protecting its regional client’s ultra-ethnic cleansing, while the Israeli lobby within the United States supports the violent projection of power by the United States, which provides further cover for Israel’s escalating regional violence. What is most remarkable, however, is the feeble resistance to–and sometimes positive support of –the ATDD axis’s violence by the European countries and “international community” more broadly.

Free to Aggress

Consider that the United States has carried out three wars of aggression in violation of the UN Charter just over the last seven years (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq), and that without having digested its Iraq aggression–now universally recognized as having been based on lies and a cynical abuse of UN processes, as well as being the “supreme crime”–it has actually begun a fourth aggression, against Iran, once again under the cynical cover of the UN (see Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Fourth U.S. ‘Supreme International Crime’ in Seven Years Is Already Underway, With the Support of the Free Press and ‘International Community’,” Counterpunch, May 11, 2006). Furthermore, the United States was the main driver of the “sanctions of mass destruction” against Iraq throughout the 1990s which resulted in the deaths of perhaps a million Iraqi civilians, possibly the greatest genocide of the post-World War II era (with only the Congo and Rwanda serious rivals), a project also carried out by the cynical misuse of the UN.

Instead of resisting these aggressions and genocidal operations, the G-8 and international community have appeased the aggressor and genocidist, never condemning its aggressions or imposing sanctions in response to its major crimes, but even collaborating with it, and in the case of Iraq giving it ex post approval and support for the deadly occupation. The UN, created specifically to prevent “the scourge of war,” has failed to pose any serious constraining force on the serial aggressions by the United States, or those of its Israeli client. This failure, and the global crisis that it reflects, has hardly been recognized in the Western media and intellectual circles, for the same reasons that underlie the appeasement and collaboration—the military power of the superpower, fear of the economic and political consequences of opposition to the United States’ and its client’s rampaging, some sense of solidarity and support for U.S. and Israeli objectives and policies on the part of global elites and media, and cowardice and lack of moral fortitude.

Israel as well as the United States has been free over several decades to aggress, ignore any UN resolutions or rulings, ignore international law governing the behavior of an occupying power, and steadily “redeem the land” of Palestine by ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. It carried out a major invasion of Lebanon back in 1982, with no penalty for this aggression, no penalty for a lengthy illegal occupation, or for periodic Iron Fist bombing and ground attacks on Lebanon, or for its lengthy maintenance of a terrorist proxy army on Lebanese soil. Its fresh major aggression in Lebanon in July and August 2006 is also being carried out without any UN or other international penalty or sanctions, again as in 1982 with the protection of the U.S. veto and U.S. power, and Israel is currently threatening Iran and Syria without any apparent U.S. or international community constraint.

Torture Centers

In addition to preeminence in aggression, the U.S.-Israel axis has long been important in sponsoring and using torture. The U.S. use of water-boarding goes back to the war against Philippine “niggers” in 1900; its use of electronic methods of torture was extensive during the Vietnam war, along with “Tiger Cages;” and this country was the principal sponsor of regimes of torture in the 1960s and 1970s as U.S. leaders struggled against nationalist-populist upheavals in the Third World. Many premier torturers learned their lessons in the School of the Americas in those years. Abu Ghraib, Bagram and the rendition gulag are not a break from the past or contrary to “American values,” they are built on a solid tradition. (Chapter 2 of Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection, published back in 1979, was entitled “The Pentagon-CIA Archipeligo.”)

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