Minoru, I think I understand the point you are trying to make now, but I do not think it is right.
First of all, the development of nuclear weapons really has nothing to do with immigration. For example, Germany developed long-range rockets during WWII as a new weapon. Does that say anything about Germany as a country or society? I doubt it. The first thing the US and USSR did once these weapons were developed was to follow suit (and in fact the US used German scientists captured during the war to help in this, for example Werner von Braun). It seems to me that the real issue is that countries will try to acquire devastating weapons to have the upper hand in international competition. This is an old story, and is hardly limited to the US. Now as far as Israel is concerned..... Well, it is true that Truman supported the creation of the state of Israel, and it is likely the UN resolution would have failed without US support (there was considerable US pressure on its client states over this vote; for example, the Philippine ambassador to the UN railed in open session in the UN against the creation of Israel, but then had both arms twisted into pretzels by Truman and Acheson and wound up voting ion favor of the partition resolution). Truman's motivation had little to do with the fact that the fledging state was a settler state, however; it appears to have been based on a mixture of motives, including the feeling that such a state was necessary as a refuge for the world's Jewry following the horrors of the Shoah. And though it is often forgotten, relations between the US and Israel were actually very cold during Eishenhower's presidency. There were two major reasons for this. The first was that the founders of the state of Israel were mostly secular East European Jews who were dedicated to some form of socialism, and this offended conservatives like Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had strong moral objections to any fence-sitting or pinkish hues when it came to the fight against Godless communism. The second is that Israel committed the blunder of teaming up with the British and French in the 1956 Suez War, and Eisenhower responded by forcing these three countries to withdraw their forces from conquered Egyptian territory. Relations between the US and Israel did not become genuinely close until the Kennedy administration. It is further true that for a couple of decades after Israel was established, American Jews were lukewarm at best to the Jewish state, and this only changed with the 1967 War, at which time there was a huge surge of support and sympathy for Israel that led to the creation of the "Israel Lobby" (the subject of a recent and quite vehement debate sparked by an article and then book by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt). There is a larger backdrop to the US-Israeli relationship, namely the oil issue. This has always been the most important US interest in the region, since the famous meeting of FDR and King Ibn Saud more than 60 years ago, and was deepened by the US stake gained in Iran in 1953, when it overthrew the nationalist government of Massadegh and restored the deposed Shah to the Peacock Throne. If you look at the map of the Middle East in say 1950, what do you see? The following: 1. Turkey (hated by the Arabs, because of the Ottoman legacy) 2. Iran (which hates the Arabs, for various reasons like its belief in its own cultural superiority, but also because it is the chief home of Shi'ism) 3. An unstable republic in Syria 4. A pro-Western Maronite regime in Lebanon 5. A series of kingdoms and emirates and the like, including of course Saudi Arabia, but also Libya, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq. 6. Israel To protect its access to Middle East oil in the post-WWII world, the US looked around for local allies that would enable it to project influence and potentially military force in the region in order to ensure that there was no change in the pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which sit on top of the majority of the oil. Things have gone fairly well for the US with Turkey and then Israel from the early 1960s, but otherwise the results have been suboptimal. The unstable republic in Syria collapsed despite the efforts of the CIA to keep a pro-Western government in power there (detailed in "Ropes of Sand" a memoir by former CIA agent William Eveland), and an anti-Western military dictatorship under the Ba'ath Party took power. The complex confessional system in Lebanon collapsed in a civil war in the mid-1970s, and despite years of trying the US has been unable to reinstall a reliable pro-US ally there. And four of the monarchies - Libya, Egypt, Iraq and Iran - fell to military coups or revolution between the 1950s and the late 1970s. The first major challenge to US policy was Nasser's regime in Egypt. While rhetorically populist, it was basically a repressive military regime (and harshly put down Islamist forces, just as the Assad regime in Syria and the Hussein regime in Iraq did). Nasser's dream - and the dream of subsequent would-be Saladins like Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein - has been to unite the Middle East under the rule of one strongman, and particularly to wrest control of the supply of Gulf oil to the West from the so-called "moderate Arab states" (another verbal fiction for the reactionary monarchies in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and the oil-less but still pro-US Hashemite monarchy in Jordan). The military ties forged between Egypt, Syria, etc. and the Soviet Union were further cause for lost sleep in Washington DC. And this was of course a nightmare scenario for Israel, which from the 1970s on was directly challenged by the secular, nationalist PLO. Ultimately none of these challengers - Nasser, Assad, Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein - was successful in creating a pan-Arabist movement and state under his control. These regimes never developed a successful economic strategy, and despite all the populist and pan-Arabist rhetoric had too narrow a social base. Iraq was a partial exception; there was some genuine economic development there based on its oil revenues, but unfortunately most of the gains were lost due to several decades of warfare starting in the early 1980s. And LIbya has always been too much of an outlier to be a real player. It has a small population, and does not have the geographic and cultural centrality of say Egypt or Iraq. A sign of the failure of such regimes was Sadat's separate peace with Israel and alliance with the US in the late 1970s. The crisis of secular, nationalist, military regimes has led to a search for alternatives in Arab countries, and one model - the one that troubles the US the most - has been the Iranian revolution. This has obviously been important for the Shi'ite populations in Iraq and Lebanon, but it also excited the imaginations of Sunni religious radicals, including Osama bin Laden. The patron saint of al-Qaeda is in fact Sayyid al-Qutb, a Islamist intellectual jailed and eventually hung by Nasser. And the idea of an Islamic republic is also a source of inspiration for Hamas. And consequently, there has been a shift in the US from concern about pro-USSR, anti-Western, secular, pan-Arabist populist caudillos like Nasser, to worry about the prospect of Islamic revolutions along the lines of the Iranian model. And that is why the US is so closely allied with Israel on the Hamas problem, Minoru. It reflects a common interest in fighting the joint enemy of the day. But it is important to realize that the goal is different. For Israel, it is to destroy a militant, rejectionist segment of the Palestinian national movement. For the US, it is to prevent such Islamic regimes from taking power in Saudi Arabia and the like, and cutting off the flow of Arabian oil. And of course, these goals can be contradictory, and Israel's aggressive pursuit of its aims, in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and UN and the rest, often creates huge problems for the US elsewhere in the region, with its so-called "moderate" friends. It will be interesting to see what happens to the US-Israel relationship when the oil finally runs dry in a few more decades. Israel has not exactly been a loyal ally (it has repeatedly spied on the US, for example the Pollard case, it knowingly bombed and destroyed an American intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, in 1967 with considerable loss of American life, etc.) when it felt its own interests were paramount. It may find that the same will be true of the US when the oil magnet vanishes, and AIPAC and the rest of the Israel Lobby may not ultimately be powerful enough to maintain the American supply of dollars and weapons to it any longer. John M. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
