Apartheid

were neutral as well as ignored countries. Now, there are none. The US president, George W.
Bush, let the world know on November 6, 2001, that there is no neutral option in this war:
‘You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.’ 154 The influential former US
Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, also known as the ‘architect of the Iraq War’,
and now head of the World Bank, has even prepared the US (and implicitly the world) for
greater sacrifices than those made during the 20 th century: ‘Our struggle against these people
[fanatical terrorists] will be a struggle perhaps even longer than the Cold War. It will test our
resolve perhaps even more than the conflicts of World War II’. 155
Not only is the USA by far the largest seller of weapons, its government is also by far
the largest buyer of them. Furthermore, it has larger numbers of troops abroad than any other
country. To say that US foreign policy is based on warfare is therefore no exaggeration. War,
or the threat of war, is how it imposes its will on most of the rest of the world. Its diplomacy
also seems to be firmly based on this principle. Moreover, its power is augmented by the US
economy, the largest in the world. Extremely high levels of profit (sometimes ruthlessly
acquired by means of neo-colonialism and similar methods), high-level production and
consumtion contribute to make the USA the only superpower in existence today.
Indeed, the power and influence of the USA is so great, and it has been for so long,
that both the sovereign states of Ireland and Israel have been called ‘consequences of
American fancies’ 156 , brought about by ethnic and ethnicist lobbies (respectively) in the USA,
with ignorance, arrogance and little realization of the havoc and unnecessary suffering they
would cause across the oceans. From the point of view of the US weapons industry, the main
share of US aid to Israel is military, and that must be motivated somehow, at best (for the US
and Israeli elites) if Israel stays embroiled in armed conflicts by means of aggressive
expansionist policies (to which neither Israel nor the USA will ever admit), remaining ahead
of its numerous foes in terms of military capability at all times. No less than 75 per cent of US
federal military aid to Israel must, according to US stipulations, be spent on US-made
weapons. 157
Quite frankly, I do not believe that the Israeli and US elites are interested in peace,
neither in the sense of an end to apartheid, nor in the wider sense of an end to armed hostilities
in the Middle East region. The only partial exceptions to that are the Israeli and US civilian
business elites (i.e. outside the privately-owned Israeli and US war industries), which would
obviously prefer an end to hostilities, with a flourishing tourist industry and a docile
Palestinian labor force in their stead. 158 The two countries’ elites in general, though, appear to
feel that they have too much to lose from a just and enduring peace. I am far from alone with
this opinion, as the following recent quote from a dissident Israeli Jew testifies: ‘The U.S. is
154 Quoted in N.N.: ‘You Are either with Us or against Us’, November 6, 2001
155 Wolfowitz: “Breadth of Vision”, 2004: 51
156 Bernal, personal communication, October 18, 2001. Of course I do not support British rule in Ireland (and
neither does Bernal). I do, however, object to the post-World War I settlement, which prolonged the overdue
British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. On US military presence within 131 supposedly and allegedly
independent and sovereign countries, see Said: Israel, Iraq, and the US, 2002. On the USA and Ireland, South
Africa, Israel, respectively, see also Chapter III.5, below.
157 See N.N: France World’s Third Biggest Arms Exporter in ’99, December 13, 2000; Shalal-Esa: Global Arms
Sales Down Sharply in 2001, 2002 (the article states that worldwide weapons demand and supply were generally
expected to rise sharply again in the coming years); El-Azar: One into Four, 2002; Baroud: Your Duplicity is
Killing Us, 2002; N.N.: Mandela Calls U.S. a “Threat to World Peace”, September 12, 2002; Parko: The Truth
about Terrorism, 2006. See also Chapter II.9.3, below.
158 This is not a powerless elite, and it might well have been the driving force in bringing about the resumption of
high-level peace talks, centering on the so-called ‘Middle East Roadmap to Peace’ between the Israelis,
Americans, Palestinians and others in June 2003, after nearly 3 years of Intifada and economic recessions in both
Israel and Palestine linked to it. See Scheer: Analysis: Road Map OK May Show Way Out of Israel Recession,
2003; Scheer: Israel Defence Budget to Be Slashed-FinMin, 2003. At this time, Israel’s budget for warfare and
defense amounted to more than a third of the entire state budget. As it turned out, though, no peace was
achieved.
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