GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY Part 2: Everything is broken By Axel Brot
combatants any legal status, depriving others of the protections of the Hague
Conventions, and limiting the protection of civilians by the code of military
justice to the bare bones of maintaining combat discipline and preventing the
army from turning into a raping, looting, murdering mob (which it did anyway,
more often than not, especially after the expected short road to victory turned
into the long slog towards defeat).
Thus, classifying anyone as a terrorist who fights, or as a
supporter of terrorism who could harbor hostile intent against, or support
organizations judged hostile to Western interventions and interests, wards and
dependents, simply extends the German experience of how to create a perverted ius
in bello from Soviet Russia to the whole globe. It aims, of course, to
delegitimize all armed (and increasingly unarmed) resistance to Western
military expeditions and occupation, even trying to get international law to
proscribe it because there is a population in the way ("human shields") of
killing the terrorists. Less concerned with finding a way around the Geneva
Conventions or the jurisdiction of Nuremburg is the innovative Israeli concept
of "terrorist population". It just puts a new title over an old dictate:
"Exterminate with extreme prejudice."
In the meantime, getting around the Geneva Conventions provided a challenging
occupation for the lawyers of the Bush Administration. They decided the Taliban
were "unlawful combatants" - though they were the soldiers of a country the
Clinton administration exercised heavy pressure on Germany to recognize -
because Afghanistan was a "failed state". Even if Afghanistan under the Taliban
would justify the term "failed state", it is useful to keep in mind that the
West bears a heavy responsibility for making it thus. One has only to look at
the textbooks and instruction material provided to the mudjahedin by the US and
its co-workers in the 1980s.
Particularly disturbing, though, is the deliberately transparent hypocrisy that
does not cover but flaunts a kind of violence that elementary common sense (not
to mention a sense of shame) would keep sporadic and isolated. But there are
now tens of thousands of victims of the institutionalized global archipelago of
black torture prisons and camps. They have been subjected by a select and
trained force to the result of decades of research into techniques of torture
and sexual humiliation, as a way, one is led to believe, of "searing defeat
into their minds", to spread the message that there is no recourse, no redress,
no defense; any resistance will just hasten the transition to the violent
dissolution of society, of the underpinnings for a functional state.
Moreover, the right to kill at will outside this system in covert free fire
zones, to keep the subcontracting domestic security apparatus of dependent
states on torture and assassination standby, cannot but herald the willful
surrender of any credible claim by these governments to legitimacy or capacity
for creating order. The United States and its allies are setting the stage for
the kind of massive violence last seen in the "pacification" campaigns in
colonial Africa and Asia. This time, however, it is for everyone to see - and
for quite a number of its strategists, this seems to be part of the purpose.
The German political class and the media make all efforts to keep the scale and
ramifications of this system as far as possible from public debate and from
itself; if it deals with it at all, then it is as the unavoidable, though ugly,
battle scars on the face of Western values. The contortions involved in
refusing its connection to German military commitments and the ever more
drastic, networked security measures are nothing if not remarkable.
There is, nevertheless, a black thread connecting Germany to the explosion of
fundamentalist terrorism, buried in files and memories that reach back to the
late 1970s. At that time, Germany sought to assure the ascendancy of Islamist
right-wing organizations over its large Muslim community, to neutralize the
influence of left-wing organizations. The consequences of this kind of social
engineering are still in evidence today, and much bewailed by the political
class.
Germany hosted also a substantial emigre community of fundamentalists from
secular Arab countries - especially from Syria. Since Israeli intelligence had
the free run of Germany, and parts of German intelligence (as well as its
Bavarian godfathers) were at the beck and call of the Mossad, recruiting among
the Syrian Muslim Brothers in Germany for a terrorist campaign against the
government of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad could have been called a joint
operation. Co-financed by Saudi money, Israel and its South Lebanese
mercenaries trained them in camps in south Lebanon, advertized at that time as
the top-of-the-league graduate school offering instruction in all these
interesting techniques which make Western life now so thrilling.
This operation led, of course, to serious bloodletting in Syria. The survivors
either returned to Germany, possibly as recruiters for the anti-Soviet jihad in
Afghanistan, or transferred their talents directly to this new theater of
Western endeavors
Recruiting for subversion and terrorism requires screening, interrogation of
the bad apples and of the doubtful cases, and holding them for future use.
Germans helped in the screening but avoided the other procedures (at least, one
may hope so). The Khiam prison in south Lebanon was used for these purposes -
for torture and prisoner-breaking beyond the Israeli rule-book (high-value
kidnappees, though, are still kept in the "black wings" of Israeli prisons,
also designed to be beyond the reach of the already exceedingly permissive
rule-book).
The German connection to Israeli operations reached the awareness of some
senior German bureaucrats and exposed them to the meaning of "black prison" via
Khiam - which can be taken as one of the models for the American system. The
horror and revulsion of the susceptible ones had at least the effect of making
life difficult for former German foreign affairs minister Joschka Fischer when
he had to assert piously that there were "no violators of human rights" among
the 300 Lebanese torture- and rape-artists Germany accepted from Israel.
The will to ignorance that dominates the German debate makes it all too easy to
sideline concerns about the myriad ways this system has begun to infest
Germany: via its special forces, trained in the US, Israel, and Great Britain;
or the officer exchange program with the US Army general staff college (where
its ideological underpinnings are taught in the writings of Israeli Arabist
Rafael Patai); via the busy network of itinerant torture specialists, bent
psychologists and MDs, interrogation trainers, and anthropologists. The
political principals are colluding with it behind the back of the less
controllable members of parliament, and frequently against the better judgment
of senior career officials.
What began in 2002 as a way to show solidarity with the Americans and went into
high gear in 2003 to rebuild bridges to the US, transmogrified the enthusiasm
of former Social Democratic interior secretary Otto Schily ("if they want
death, they can have it"), the cravenness of former foreign minister Joschka
Fischer, and Merkel´s impeccable "pro-American" credentials into an ideological
program to make Germany (and the EU) fit for eternal war against the enemies of
the West.
For decades, Germany, like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway, managed to be
regarded as more of a global social worker than as one of the closest American
allies. Its role was well served by keeping aloof from military interventions,
sticking scrupulously to its commitments, striving to coopt the modernizing
elites of developing countries into the Western system, even at the price of
high politics keeping itself ignorant of its netherworld's doings, and of
sometimes diverging from US policies. Germany´s good name was a net provider of
legitimacy for the West.
But under the new dispensation when the netherworld has become the main show
and the compensatory human rights rhetoric an ever more strident exercise in
hypocrisy, legitimacy seems to come from impunity. And the American political
class has no more patience with divergent interests, claims of independent
judgment, or "decent respect for the opinion of mankind".
The discontents with German-Israeli jointness
Last year, Germany inserted itself militarily into the Middle East's troubles
with a naval squadron off the Lebanese coast. Its mission: to prevent the
replenishment of Hezbollah armament stocks from the ocean. It has openly taken
sides, notwithstanding its sub rosa alliance with Israel for decades,
thus becoming part of a problem without a solution. Not only a majority of the
population refuses to support the German commitment; it is also accompanied by
the misgivings of quite a number of professionals - for good reasons.
One of them is rooted in the conviction that the pounding the US and Israel are
inflicting on the Middle East is locking the West into an unending cycle of
violence. Driving it is Israel's inability to consider peace more desirable
than keeping its conquests. Though it would be a real career killer to admit to
fears that Israel might use, or ignite itself, another conflagration in the
Middle East to resolve its Palestinian problem once and for all - and, at the
same time, to destroy all challenges to its hegemony - it is impossible not to
be aware of this prospect. It informs concerns about the impact of the "war of
civilizations" rhetoric that German (and European) opinion leaders are
spreading in the media; a rhetoric,that can turn any moment into a free ticket
for the Israeli leadership to get serious about what it has prepared its allies
to expect and what a majority of its population demands.
In fact, indicators that the Israelis might limit their ambition to
establishing a Bantustan-like system run by the Dahlan-Balusha goon squads of
Fatah appears to be taken by official Germany as testimony to admirable and
forward-looking Israeli restraint - to be encouraged, legitimized, and paid for
to keep the Israelis from "acts of desperation".
The use of the term "Bantustan" in this context has nothing to do with an
anti-semitic slur: when former South African premier and Nazi sympathizer John
Vorster visited Israel in 1976, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin,
Yitzhak Shamir , et al, lauded the South African system of
racial separation as a role model for dealing with "their kushims"
("niggers"). And the conservative part of the German political class
(especially in Bavaria, where the rather incestuous relationship between German
intelligence and the Christian Social Union had sired its own foreign policy
priorities) was deeply involved in the strategic cooperation between Israel and
South Africa. Examples include support for the Mozambican National Resistance
(Renamo) - also dubbed the "Khmer Noir" for starting the African plague of
recruiting small children by traumatization - to WMD research, to the illegal
transfer of blueprints for a new class of cruise-missile capable submarines. In
the 1990s, by the way, Germany donated several of these submarines to Israel.
During the 1970s and 1980s Israel and South Africa were joined at the hips in
their common fight against the kushims (and against the still numerous
Jewish communists, hated by the Israeli political class more than the remaining
German Nazis). And from some German conservative nooks and crannies, there was
always facilitation, scientific support, or co-financing available.
But the above-board German support for Israel has also a tradition of
unconditionality - since the 1970s especially - in co-financing the Israeli
ways of occupation and never holding Israel to its obligations under the Geneva
Conventions. During the Schmidt and Kohl governments it was tempered,
nevertheless, by their commitment "to facilitate dialogue". Much of the
reporting from the German embassy served to gauge where and when discrete
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