-Caveat Lector-
"The Reagan Plan"
Mid-East Realities - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - 6 June 2004:
The seeds for the Intifada and for Israel's increasingly aggressive escalating
occupation of and dispossession of the Palestinian people were sown in the years
of the Reagan Presidency. Indeed it was Ronald Reagan who first brought what we
today call the "neocons" to power in Washington, and the right-wing Republicans
who forged such a close alliance with the Israeli Likud of Menachem Begin,
Yitzhak Shamir, and Ariel Sharon which had come to power in Israel in 1977 for
the first time.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had personally promised Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978 that all Israeli settlements would
be ended and a real Palestinian State established in his second term. That
political fact, coupled with the billions yearly in what became a kind of "bribe
money", was what got the Egyptians to sign the peace agreement with Israel
against considerable opposition including the resignation of the Egyptian
Foreign Minister. At that time, with only 40,000 settlers and far less of an
apartheid-structure in place, a real Palestinian State, however limited in
territory from the original boundaries of Palestine, was possible, unlike today.
But instead of the plan envisioned but not seriously pursued by Carter,
when Reagan came to power the Israelis greatly escalated the settlements, Anwar
Sadat was assassinated, and the Israeli/American invasion of Lebanon ensued.
The 1982 invasion/occupation of Lebanon led in fact to the rise of
Hezbollah, the phenomena of suicide bombers, and then to the Palestinian
Intifada. In those years, few now remember, Iraq, with Saddam Hussein already
in charge, was being financed and armed by the United States. Indeed it was
Israel along with the Saudis and Kuwaitis who pushed the Americans to instigate
the Iraqi attack on Iran in a major attempt to remake the Middle East region at
that time by installing pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli regimes in Iran and Lebanon.
Though this gambit in the end failed, "Iran-Contra", the "arms for
hostages" scandal of that era, almost brought about the downfall of the Reagan
regime at the time. And it was the policies pursued in those years that then
led to the first Gulf War, to Israel's escalating attempts to surround and
barricade the Palestinian population areas, to sanctions against Iraq as it
attempted to arm against Israel and regional enemies, and eventually to the
greatly more destructive Intifada II and the U.S. invasion/occupation of Iraq in
the neo-Reagan years now presided over by the son of Reagan's Vice-President.
The "Reagan Plan" for the Middle East was heralded by much secret
manuevering highlighted by this public speech on 1 September 1982. Soon to
follow were the historic massacres in the Lebanon refugee camps, overseen by
non-other-than General Ariel Sharon, the assassination of the Bashir Gemayal,
Israel's choice as the new President of Lebanon, naval shelling of Lebanon by
the U.S. fleet, and the suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine Corps
barracks which led to the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon and the abortion
of the attempt to remake Lebanon as a U.S./Israeli client-regime and
protectorate.
Reagan's speech in 1982, as these excerpts make evident, was double-talk
and cover-up then, just as so much that has followed from Washington, including
during the Clinton years. In this important sense, little has changed in
Washington. But in the Middle East itself, the seeds of despair, hatred, and
double-cross sown at that time are continuing to grow.
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