Hamas is Not Iran's Puppet
New America Media, Commentary, William O. Beeman, Posted: Dec 31, 2008
Editor’s Note: The popular wisdom that Iran is pulling the strings behind
Hamas doesn’t take into account the geography of Gaza argues William O.
Beeman. Beeman is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at
the University of Minnesota and past-president of the Middle East Section
of the American Anthropological Association. He is the author of “The
‘Great Satan’ vs. the ‘Mad Mullahs’: How the United States and Iran
Demonize Each Other,” published by the University of Chicago Press
(2008).
________________________
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is not a proxy war between Israel and
Iran. This is a myth that has grown up during the Bush administration, and
is now widely promulgated with little or no support.
Iran has, it is true, been sympathetic to the Hamas situation, particularly
since the U.S.-endorsed Palestinian elections of 2006, when Hamas won a
plurality of votes, allowing it to form a government. Subsequently, the new
Palestinian government was rejected by Israel and the United States, and an
economic embargo plunged the Palestinians into economic chaos. At that
point Iran provided substantial humanitarian aid.
In the present conflict, Iran is also sending two ships to provide
humanitarian assistance.
However, American and Israeli analysts would have the world believe that
Hamas could not carry out any actions against Israel if they were not
directed by Iran. As George Joffee of the Cambridge Centre of International
Studies maintained in 2006 in an interview with U.S.-based Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty, “The Israeli government has alleged that
indirectly through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran is engaged in trying to
control the events inside the Occupied Territories and there have been
allegations with no proof at all, of involvement in some of the more
violent activities there. Those links I suspect are largely Israeli
propaganda and don't really carry water.”
The same is true today.
No one promulgating the theory that Hamas’s attacks on Israel are
directed by Iran bothers to think much about geography. Hamas has been
effectively sealed off from the world by Israel, and by Egypt. The Israelis
have essentially controlled the import of food and medical supplies. The
idea of Iran shipping arms to Hamas under these conditions is patently
absurd. The rockets launched against Israel that started the current
conflict were clearly homemade, low-level weapons, not sophisticated arms.
A parallel claim is that Iranians are providing training to Hamas. Given
the rhetoric, one would imagine that this is being done on a massive scale.
However, on March 9, 2008 the Times of London reported that 150 Hamas
fighters were being trained in Tehran. Hamas itself claims to have 15,000
fighters, and Israel has millions of potential fighters at its command.
Thus training for a team of 150, if the facts are correct, is hardly much
of a threat to Israel.
Hezbollah in Lebanon is sometimes cited as an Iranian cat’s-paw in the
region, but Hezbollah has no geographical access to Gaza. Therefore they
are limited to leading protests in Lebanon. Timur Goksel, former adviser to
U.N. Peacekeepers in Lebanon, told Reuters News Agency on Dec. 30, “With
all their rhetoric about Palestine, there is not much [Hezbollah] can do
about Gaza, short of getting Lebanon involved in another disaster. So they
are leading the popular reaction.”
Egypt is not a conduit for Iranian arms either. President Hosni Mubarak is
caught in a dilemma with regard to Gaza. He receives aid from the United
States, and has a long-standing peace treaty with Israel. Moreover, his
secular government is desperately afraid of Islamic extremism, which they
see as a threat. Because Hamas has a religious base, not a secular one like
Fatah, its rival for power in the Palestinian community, they are seen as
dangerous. For this reason, Egypt has kept the border crossing to Gaza
firmly closed except for humanitarian emergencies.
Why then does the myth of Iranian military support persist? One reason is
that it has been a long-standing American foreign policy belief that
resistance movements cannot exist without state support. Before Iran was
targeted as the source for support, Libya was the U.S. bogeyman. It is
instructive to look at rhetoric against Libya from the 1980s and see that
exactly the same accusations that were leveled at Libya then are being
hurled at Iran today.
Finally, Iran does not help matters. The rhetoric of the original Iranian
revolution is still alive and well in some segments of Iranian political
life. Iran ousted a Western-supported leader, the Shah, and tried in the
early days of the revolution to promulgate this action elsewhere in the
Middle East. Hezbollah and Hamas were sympathetic rhetorical partners. Iran
supported Hezbollah in its early days, but no longer controls its
operations. Iran had nothing to do with the founding of Hamas, but sees its
conflict with Israel as sympathetic with its revolutionary ideals. This
does not mean that Iran is controlling the action.
The more apoplectic visions of Iranian involvement see Iran developing
nuclear weapons and supplying them to both Hezbollah and Hamas. However,
not only is there no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program; the
simple logistics of transfer of such weapons to a place like Gaza are
virtually impossible.
For Israel, and the world, blaming Iran for its troubles with Hamas does
not advance the peace process. Nor would attacking Iran mitigate in any way
the tensions that exist between Israel and its neighbors.
(Note: Please consult the original article for links to references and footnotes to quoted sources)
Showing posts with label Hezbullah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hezbullah. Show all posts
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Monday, July 21, 2008
William O. Beeman--Playing Games with Iran--(Foreign Policy in Focus)
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5387
Playing Games with Iran
William O. Beeman | July 21, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
By now the structure of the U.S. game with Iran is clear. In the first move, the United States and Iran make some small progress toward improved relations. In the counter move, hardliners in the United States and Israel launch attacks against Iran in order to sabotage these improving relations.
In the latest iteration of this game, the U.S. State Department has made an interesting gambit. It announced that Undersecretary of State William Burns would sit at the table on July 20 as members of the European Union entered into talks with Iran over its nuclear program. At the same time, the United States has been reported to be considering opening a formal American Interests Section in Tehran. These two actions will be the first serious public diplomatic activities between the two nations in nearly three decades. (Three earlier meetings in Baghdad between U.S. Iraqi Envoy Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi focused on security in Iraq).
The counter-moves came fast and furious. First, former UN ambassador and prominent neoconservative John Bolton launched a jeremiad against the U.S. government on July 15 in the Wall Street Journal. Criticizing the administration for failing to act militarily against Iran, Bolton placed his hopes on Israel to carry out the military attack that he fervently desires. “Instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran,” he wrote.
Following closely on Bolton’s editorial, The New York Times printed another attack against Iran on Friday, July 18, just one day before the opening of the European talks, by Benny Morris, an historian at Ben-Gurion University. Like Bolton, Morris presents an Iranian nuclear weapons program as an established fact, implies that Iran would make a first-strike attack on Israel, and thus justifies pre-emptive military action on Israel’s part.
Both Bolton and Morris base their attacks on false premises. Diplomatic dealings with Iran have, in fact, succeeded on the few occasions they have been tried. There is no proof anywhere that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program at present, a fact underscored by the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007. In fact, Iran’s nuclear experiments are still at a primitive level, far from any possibility of manufacturing weapons. Iran has never directly threatened Israel and is not likely considering a first strike against Israel.
Such attacks have followed every minuscule improvement in U.S-Iranian relations during the Bush administration. Every first move in a warming trend – such as Iranian support for the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, U.S. aid to Iran during the Bam earthquake in 2003, and Iran’s formal offer to enter into comprehensive negotiations with the United States in 2003 – has been followed by sharp criticism from both inside and outside of the Brush administration. Detractors have countered these advances with accusations of Iranian support for Hezbullah and Hamas, and support for “special groups” attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. True to form, the U.S. military announced the launching of a new crackdown on weapons smuggling from Iran to coincide with the Saturday talks,
None of these accusations, along with the Iranian weapons program and plot to launch a first-strike against Israel, has ever been proven. The most memorable of these attacks was the labeling of Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” in President George Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, just as Iran’s military aid to the United States was beginning to create a climate of trust between the two nations.
Bolton, Morris, and their ilk may represent the last, weak gasp of the hawks who would embroil the United States and Israel in a disastrous confrontation with Iran. Indeed, for the time being, it seems that cooler heads are prevailing. Though Western commentators described the talks at the one-shot Saturday meeting negatively as a “deadlock,” William Burns’ official presence at the table was an important benchmark. Iran did not accept the Western proposals on the spot, but was given two weeks to respond. The Iranians appeared pleased. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, called the negotiating process a “very beautiful endeavor.”
Despite this progress, the power of the American and Israeli extremists should not be underestimated. They still have the ear of Vice President Dick Cheney and a dwindling coterie of his supporters in the Department of Defense. A group of Israeli politicians, including Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, have arrived in Washington, according to Mother Jones magazine, presumably to convince the Bush administration to allow them to carry out their attack.
Hostile rhetoric against Iran also plays into the U.S. electoral process. For American politicians, Iran is a universal bogeyman, useful in an election year as a device to show elected officials as tough on foreign miscreants. Indeed, since the Iranian Revolution U.S.-Iranian relations have been a centerpiece in election debates. Conspiracy theorists believe fervently that the Republican Party engineered an “October Surprise” in 1980 with Iranian officials – delaying the release of the American Hostages until after the U.S. Presidential election – and thus denied Jimmy Carter a second term. The purported event -- true or not -- has supplied a permanent political term for American elections.
In every presidential election since, U.S.-Iranian relations have been featured in presidential debates and campaign ads, with universal negativity toward Iran. This year is no exception with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain all expressing hostile attitudes toward Iran. And this year’s October Surprise is the rumor that the Bush administration will bomb Iran just before the election to give a boost to John McCain. Unless the Israeli hawks get there first.
Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) contributor William O. Beeman is professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and the author, most recently, of The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
Playing Games with Iran
William O. Beeman | July 21, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
By now the structure of the U.S. game with Iran is clear. In the first move, the United States and Iran make some small progress toward improved relations. In the counter move, hardliners in the United States and Israel launch attacks against Iran in order to sabotage these improving relations.
In the latest iteration of this game, the U.S. State Department has made an interesting gambit. It announced that Undersecretary of State William Burns would sit at the table on July 20 as members of the European Union entered into talks with Iran over its nuclear program. At the same time, the United States has been reported to be considering opening a formal American Interests Section in Tehran. These two actions will be the first serious public diplomatic activities between the two nations in nearly three decades. (Three earlier meetings in Baghdad between U.S. Iraqi Envoy Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi focused on security in Iraq).
The counter-moves came fast and furious. First, former UN ambassador and prominent neoconservative John Bolton launched a jeremiad against the U.S. government on July 15 in the Wall Street Journal. Criticizing the administration for failing to act militarily against Iran, Bolton placed his hopes on Israel to carry out the military attack that he fervently desires. “Instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran,” he wrote.
Following closely on Bolton’s editorial, The New York Times printed another attack against Iran on Friday, July 18, just one day before the opening of the European talks, by Benny Morris, an historian at Ben-Gurion University. Like Bolton, Morris presents an Iranian nuclear weapons program as an established fact, implies that Iran would make a first-strike attack on Israel, and thus justifies pre-emptive military action on Israel’s part.
Both Bolton and Morris base their attacks on false premises. Diplomatic dealings with Iran have, in fact, succeeded on the few occasions they have been tried. There is no proof anywhere that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program at present, a fact underscored by the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007. In fact, Iran’s nuclear experiments are still at a primitive level, far from any possibility of manufacturing weapons. Iran has never directly threatened Israel and is not likely considering a first strike against Israel.
Such attacks have followed every minuscule improvement in U.S-Iranian relations during the Bush administration. Every first move in a warming trend – such as Iranian support for the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, U.S. aid to Iran during the Bam earthquake in 2003, and Iran’s formal offer to enter into comprehensive negotiations with the United States in 2003 – has been followed by sharp criticism from both inside and outside of the Brush administration. Detractors have countered these advances with accusations of Iranian support for Hezbullah and Hamas, and support for “special groups” attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. True to form, the U.S. military announced the launching of a new crackdown on weapons smuggling from Iran to coincide with the Saturday talks,
None of these accusations, along with the Iranian weapons program and plot to launch a first-strike against Israel, has ever been proven. The most memorable of these attacks was the labeling of Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” in President George Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, just as Iran’s military aid to the United States was beginning to create a climate of trust between the two nations.
Bolton, Morris, and their ilk may represent the last, weak gasp of the hawks who would embroil the United States and Israel in a disastrous confrontation with Iran. Indeed, for the time being, it seems that cooler heads are prevailing. Though Western commentators described the talks at the one-shot Saturday meeting negatively as a “deadlock,” William Burns’ official presence at the table was an important benchmark. Iran did not accept the Western proposals on the spot, but was given two weeks to respond. The Iranians appeared pleased. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, called the negotiating process a “very beautiful endeavor.”
Despite this progress, the power of the American and Israeli extremists should not be underestimated. They still have the ear of Vice President Dick Cheney and a dwindling coterie of his supporters in the Department of Defense. A group of Israeli politicians, including Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, have arrived in Washington, according to Mother Jones magazine, presumably to convince the Bush administration to allow them to carry out their attack.
Hostile rhetoric against Iran also plays into the U.S. electoral process. For American politicians, Iran is a universal bogeyman, useful in an election year as a device to show elected officials as tough on foreign miscreants. Indeed, since the Iranian Revolution U.S.-Iranian relations have been a centerpiece in election debates. Conspiracy theorists believe fervently that the Republican Party engineered an “October Surprise” in 1980 with Iranian officials – delaying the release of the American Hostages until after the U.S. Presidential election – and thus denied Jimmy Carter a second term. The purported event -- true or not -- has supplied a permanent political term for American elections.
In every presidential election since, U.S.-Iranian relations have been featured in presidential debates and campaign ads, with universal negativity toward Iran. This year is no exception with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain all expressing hostile attitudes toward Iran. And this year’s October Surprise is the rumor that the Bush administration will bomb Iran just before the election to give a boost to John McCain. Unless the Israeli hawks get there first.
Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) contributor William O. Beeman is professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and the author, most recently, of The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
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