Commentary
by Joel Skousen
World Affairs Brief, December 7, 2001 Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.joelskousen.com).
The only thing that keeps saving Israel from another sellout in the US-brokered "peace process" is Yasser Arafat’s unwillingness and partial inability to provide the necessary lull in violence to consummate the inevitable, as far as the Powers That Be are concerned, the establishment of a permanent safe haven for terrorism in the form of a Palestinian State. PM Sharon was in Washington speaking to the various Jewish lobbies, preparing them for the inevitability of a Palestinian State, as per US demands, when Arafat unleashed a 12-hour period of terror Saturday night and early Sunday, leaving 26 Israelis dead and hundreds more wounded. His timing was crazy. The Americans were about to coax Israel into a major compromise of Israeli security and Arafat blew it (literally and figuratively). Why?
It can’t be because Arafat is completely ignorant of US secret sympathies for his cause. The US has been covering for him and excusing him for years--even in the face of explicit Israeli telephone intercepts, provided to US intelligence, proving Arafat’s direct involvement in targeting Americans. It’s obvious that Arafat has a sympathetic ear within the State Department. He knows that anytime the Israelis invade the Palestinian "autonomous areas" he can pick up the phone and call State and demand they put pressure on Israel to pull out--and it happens, every time, except now. This time Arafat made the call and State could not comply. Not that they didn’t want to--but Arafat’s attacks were so egregious and so ill timed (the terrorists even set off a car bomb next to the scene of the original attack in order to kill rescue workers that responded to the explosion on the city bus) that even his secret allies would not dare appear to support him.
I think the bottom line is that Arafat still works for the "continuing Soviets" (Chris Story’s term for the Russian "Mafia" leaders who faked the demise of the Soviet Union). Remember that Arafat was recruited, trained, financed and protected by the Russians from the beginning. The Russians still have a huge game plan in the Middle East, aimed at eventually instigating a regional war that will trigger the next world war. In any case, both the Russians and the Palestinians know that the US globalist leadership is only using the Arabs to justify future UN intervention. The Arabs know the UN never intends to give them what they want, so Arafat is not playing along--except when he needs to save his skin--like now.
In the aftermath of Arafat’s attacks in Israel, neither Bush nor Sec. of State Powell are daring to mention the prospect of a Palestinian State. The Bush-Sharon meeting on Monday was cut short and Sharon quickly returned to Israel to prepare for the inevitable retaliation and hard line rhetoric. But, as I will shortly describe, all parties seem to be bending over backwards to preserve Arafat and give him one last chance. The US thinks they have finally gotten through to Arafat with the threat that they will eliminate him if he doesn’t start to play ball.
As soon as Sharon returned, he convened the full cabinet for an emergency defense strategy session. Arafat was officially declared an "entity that supports terrorism" (leveraging off of Bush’s disingenuous statement about prosecuting all national entities that harbor terrorism). Sharon then unleashed a huge wave of retaliation sufficient to send Arafat running to his deepest bunker, which they also hit. Palestinian areas were once again invaded, bunkers were targeted and the Israeli Air Force even destroyed Arafat’s two Soviet helicopters set aside for his personal use. But these were token hits meant to scare Arafat into compliance, nothing else. The IDF knows all too well that Arafat uses Jordanian helicopters to fly around Israel. Arafat knows the Israelis wouldn’t shoot down Jordanian assets, and he is righ--at least for nowt.
Lots of talk circulated about finally getting rid of Arafat, but that was mostly from the growing number of hard liners in the Israeli cabinet. The leftists in Sharon’s "unity government" who hold the key positions of power sing a different tune. Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer said Monday that "it is forbidden to shatter the vessels with the Palestinian Authority. We must institute a mixture of harsh Israeli military operations, with massive American pressure on Arafat to reach a cease-fire." Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was also overheard crowing that this is a "great opportunity to bring Arafat to a cease-fire." Clearly these top level Sharon ministers have no intention of replacing Arafat. They simply want to bring him to the "peace table" so that the American-brokered sellout of Israeli security can proceed. Peres admitted further that his contacts [actually, controllers] in Europe were joining in the pressure on Arafat to join in a cease-fire.
Almost immediately in response, Yasser Arafat moved to arrest a few token lower level terrorists within the Hamas organization. But Israel wasn’t buying this meager pretense of compliance. Sharon raised the stakes by sending Arafat a list of 36 top level terrorists he wanted arrested. Arafat telephoned Shimon Peres and complained that he couldn’t comply because of the Israeli attacks. Within a few minutes, Sharon had authorized a 12-hour grace period to allow Arafat to comply. Notice that the US has refused to give the Taliban a similar list with their demand for the latter to turn over "all" terrorists and their support personnel, knowing the Taliban could never comply without such a list. Obviously the US didn’t want them to be able to comply because the Taliban were earmarked for extinction.
In contrast, one clear indication that Arafat is not marked for extinction is that they gave him a list he could easily comply with.- It is obvious they want Arafat to redeem himself so that the Israeli government and establishment media can continue the sellout. Keep in mind that the "jail" awaiting these high level terrorist leaders is a penthouse apartment with telephones, TV and free and ready access to terrorist cell subordinate leaders so that the work of terrorism can go on unimpeded. In other words, even the hard liners in Hamas or Islamic Jihad don’t have to fear being locked up and put out of commission. They’ve been through this charade of jail before (although they may not ultimately trust Arafat to NOT betray them at some point, political whore that he is).
Now, permit me to show you why Israel’s latest retaliatory and security measures will not prove to be effective. They appear brutal and rigorous--but only in the absence of information about other more dangerous elements that are not being targeted. Israel can make lots of noise by shelling police stations and bulldozing terrorist houses, but nothing is really solved until the source of the violence is cleaned out. Hidden within bunkers and safe houses in the Palestinian autonomous areas (Areas "A" and sometimes "B") are caches of explosives, ammunitions, mortars and rockets. The PA also manufactures weapons, in contradiction to the Oslo Accords. There is even new intelligence indicating that the Palestinians are building indigenous short range missiles inside Israel. The Middle East Newsline (Dec. 3) reported that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas are already deploying the Kassam-1 short-range missile, with a range of 4-5 kilometers. The PA is reportedly developing longer-range versions as well, which will reach out to 10 kilometers. Undoubtedly Israeli intelligence knows of this too. To me, no amount of retaliation is meant to be effective unless it targets the terrorist’s ability to make war. Even targeting terrorist leaders, as necessary as that is, is not effective in the short-term when there are hundreds ready to take their place with free and unrestricted access to these large weapons caches.
TAIWAN APPEARS TO HARDEN STANCE FOR INDEPENDENCE
For the first time since Chang Kai-shek and his followers fled to Taiwan following the US-engineered victory of Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in mainland China, Chang’s ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party failed to win a majority in the nation’s parliament in the latest election. To understand the import of this, I need to give you some background on Chang and the KMT. Chang Kai-shek, though anti-Communist and pro-Western in outlook, took power by ruthless and forceful means in Taiwan--an island still under a semi-feudal relic institution that had roots in both the ancient Chinese war-lord culture and the Japanese occupation of WWII. The Mandarin language was imposed on the local populace and thousands of the native opposition were imprisoned or killed in Chang’s quest to consolidate control over the island.
Still, for all of Chang’s personal flaws and war-lord tendencies he faithfully defended his people against the growing Communist menace in Beijing and the deadly appeasement policies of US globalist leaders in favor of Red China. The Truman administration consistently sabotaged Chang’s plans to rebuild militarily and take back the mainland while Mao was weak. Ever hopeful, but perhaps never understanding why the Americans were secretly betraying him, Chang contented himself to build Taiwan into a secure defensive base. He mandated a semi-free market economy that allowed Taiwan to grow rapidly and prosper far beyond the oppressive statism of Mao’s revolutionary prison camp. An admirer of the West, Chang also established a parliamentary democracy, but was always looking over his shoulder for potential rivals. No real political opposition was allowed to rise for many years and the Kuomintang (meaning "Nationalist Party") ruled as a de facto one party state until Chang’s death in 1975, after which real opposition parties began to be tolerated.
Once the floodgates of free political speech were opened, the KMT began to lose members in the inevitable factionalizing process that most parliamentary systems fall prey to. Chang had kept the people’s minds continually unified in the face of the Communist threat, but now they were free to focus on internal problems and the increasingly socialist solutions that raw democracies fall prey to. The KMT and its successor leaders also had to contend with the pressures from the left-leaning US State Department to compromise Taiwan’s "one China--and we are it" policy and accommodate the reality of the powerful armed camp in Red China. There were plenty of Taiwanese businessmen who were also anxious to believe that coexistence with the Communists was possible. After all, there was a huge market on the mainland.
Within a decade after Chang’s death, the political focus of KMT defectors began to diverge slowly from reunification to independence. This shift was brought about by the realization that the US was only playing lip service to Taiwan’s interests and the US was beginning, in fact, to use the "one China" policy to favor Beijing. When the Nixon-Kissinger team engineered the ouster of Taiwan from the UN and its replacement by Beijing, some politicians in Taiwan began to realize that, at best, they had better prepare to declare independence.
The KMT tenaciously held to the "one China--and we are it" policy for much longer than it was realistically viable--hastening other defections from the Kuomintang to pro-independence movements. China was also active during the 1980s and 1990s in suborning Taiwanese businessmen with lucrative contracts and offers to do business in China. During the 90’s there were probably as many KMT defectors favoring appeasement with China as there were favoring a stand on independence, and so the KMT began to move left in order to stem the tide from the left--a politically unwise move given that the base within the party were still very much anti-Communist, on the right. Things came to a head in the late 90’s when the last KMT president, Lee Teng-hui, came out against independence and for accommodation with China. Lee was defeated over that stance and was replaced by the current president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who has made a strong case for independence.
In the latest November elections, the PDD won the biggest share of the 225 seats in the legislature, ousting the KMT from its majority position. There were also further defections from the Kuomintang, leaving it weakened, though it is still the largest minority opposition party to the PDD. President Chen’s PDD must still build a ruling coalition with the help of other opposition parties in order to govern, so the KMT will still be a power to contend with. Keep in mind that Taiwan is deep into a chronic recession, not unlike Japan. Both countries’ long climb to economic prosperity has ushered in rising standards of living, making it difficult for these countries to compete with the cheap labor market of mainland China. Political analysts expected that the combination of the deep recession, US appeasement pressure, and China’s market allure would dissuade voters away from President Chen’s pro-independence stance. Superficially, it appears that pro-independence forces have won the day. I’m not convinced of that, however.
On closer analysis, although pro-independence forces increased slightly in the last elections, it was the KMT defections that were the most dramatic in their effect--and most of those defections favored some form of accommodation rather than full independence. Even President Chen has not followed through forcefully with his initial campaign towards independence. Granted, it is hard to survive politically when faced with the wall of pro-China forces that are constantly threatening from the US State Department. While I’m willing to give President Chen the benefit of the doubt for now, I suspect that he will not hold firm to his stated platform and will capitulate in the end. Chen has already made many concessions to China during his administration and even encouraged big business in Taiwan to take advantage of China’s lucrative offers of investment opportunities on the mainland. As in America, when dealing with pretensions by conservative leaders, one must watch what they do, not what they say.
ENRON GOES BANKRUPT
When I read the history of insider-connected corporations like Enron, or Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), or Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)--all of which collapse sooner or later, I’m amazed at the recklessness they demonstrate in their financial affairs. These corporations are havens for the rich and powerful. They generate millions in funds for black government operations, political payoffs, bribery, campaign contributions, and personal enrichment for insiders moving in and out of government service. But perhaps we should not be surprised. It is the fact that they have such confidence in the power of their connections in government that allows them to be so reckless. Fortunately, for conspiracy watchers, the subsequent cover-ups and protection of the principles within these corporations helps build a map of interconnected relationships within the dark side of public-private partnerships.
Enron corporation was America’s largest single broker of oil, gas and electricity supplies. It both created and controlled the lion’s share of the highly leveraged energy exchange markets in the last decade. It reaped billions in windfall profits from price manipulations in electricity last year in the wake of the California power debacle. Its mysterious sources of funding seemed so inexhaustible that market analysts consistently downplayed or disregarded the warning signs of its demise. This is typical, by the way, within establishment investment circles. The word gets out that certain corporations are untouchable, protected, favored, etc., and they get carte blanche treatment, with or without merit. Enron’s fall (Enron stock dropped from $84 to $0.26 in less than a year) was big enough to send shock waves throughout the commodity and stock markets, just as LTCM’s collapse did to the financial markets.
Enron’s filing for bankruptcy was particularly galling to creditors when it was learned this week that the company paid out $55 million in bonuses to 500 key individuals just prior to filing. That’s an average of $110,000 per person. In reality, a handful got millions and a few hundred others were thrown in the pot, receiving smaller amounts, just to make it look more legitimate. Like BCCI, the insiders stripped the corporation of its last liquid cash assets and paid off the important people, then left the bones to the public and private investors. As Rodney Stich has pointed out in his excellent chronicle on dark-side government operations, Defrauding America (www.defraudingamerica.com), the federal bankruptcy system is corrupt in key areas of the country, and systematically loots assets in bankruptcy proceedings by a system of kickbacks between interconnected judges and law firms serving the bankruptcy courts. It comes as little surprise that Enron’s attorneys have filed for change of venue for the bankruptcy proceedings to the Houston area, one such haven of corruption.
While a book could be written on insider connections to Enron, suffice it to say that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been up to their eyebrows in Enron dealings. In the 1980’s the junior Bush played a roll in twisting Argentina’s arm to allow Enron to undercut all other bidders in a pipeline deal to deliver Argentine gas supplies to Chile. Enron bid a mere 20% of the going rate and mysteriously got the bid.--with no prior experience in Latin America. When gas prices fell, Enron sold out to a subsidiary company partly controlled by former NSA director Brent Scowcroft--crony of Henry Kissinger and President George Bush Sr. Former Sec. of the Treasury James Baker has been a big player in Enron. Sen. Phil Gramm’s wife was a director of Enron....and the list goes on and on. For a more detailed overview check out this article by John Hoefle: http://www.differentvoices.com/article1037.html.
(Ed. Note: We thank Joel Skousen for allowing his insights to be reprinted in part at Web Today. For access to his complete weekly columns, available by subscription, we refer you to his homepage http://www.joelskousen.com)
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