Wake Up

Juan Cole talks about the implications of the statement by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the woman who was in charge of the infamous Abu Ghuraib prison, that Israelis were involved in the torture that took place there:

That the US employed Israeli expertise in its torture of prisoners at Abu Ghuraib would, for most Arab observers, only underline American illegitimacy in the region and the true nature of its enterprise in Iraq–not bringing democracy and liberty but rather stealing sovereignty and rights, and visiting humiliation on locals.

The complete failure of the United States to act as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ever more rapacious demands of the ruling Likud Party in Israel for Lebensraum in the West Bank (at the least) are major engines of the terrorism directed toward the United States. Recent 9/11 Commission findings reported that Usama Bin Laden wanted to move the attack on the World Trade Towers up to May in order to respond more directly to the Israeli crushing of the Palestinians. (This finding was largely buried by the US press, since the standard–and wholly ridiculous–story in the US is that al-Qaeda doesn’t care about the Palestine issue.)

The Likud, with its racist attitudes toward Arabs, has dragged the US into one disaster after another in the Middle East, endangering the US homeland and helping create the long-term disaster at Abu Ghuraib.

This is, in my opinion, right on target. The refusal of the U.S. government to ever take any sort of punitive action to rein in the Israel penchant for mass human rights abuses in the name of self-defense has done nothing but give people in the Arab world more and more reasons to despise us, and therefore give al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups a continuing flow of propaganda to use in recruiting more followers.