Olmert and the Baker Boys

An Excellent Piece

By Kurt Nimmo

"It’s a nightmare scenario for Olmert and the neocons. James Baker, the consiglieri of the Bush crime family, brings Syria and Iran to the table and they hammer out an understanding on Iraq and, horror stacked upon horror, “some kind of long-term Israeli-Arab diplomatic agreement,” as the Jerusalem Post puts it.

Of course, the folks who run Israel, and their neocon helpers, don’t want a diplomatic agreement, as they are viscerally opposed to such because a faux and temporary peace will push back, although not eliminate, the master plan of slicing and dicing the Arab and Islamic Middle East into malleable pieces. Moreover, it will give the Palestinians a glimmer of hope, something Olmert and crew abhor.

In order to undermine the Baker Boys, Olmert will rally AIPAC. “On his way home from Los Angeles, the prime minister ‘calmed’ … reporters—and perhaps even himself—by saying there is no danger of U.S. President George W. Bush accepting the expected recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton panel, and attempting to move Syria out of the axis of evil and into a coalition to extricate America from Iraq. The prime minister hopes the Jewish lobby can rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any diversion from the status quo on the Palestinians,” reports Haartez.

As we know, this “status quo” in regard to the Palestinians translates into more suffering. Earlier this week, the “Palestinian Ministry of Health issued a report … stating that the number of Gaza Strip residents killed by the Israeli army’s continuous attacks since the beginning of November 2006 stands at 101 residents,” reports the International Middle East Media Center. “Out of the 101 killed, 26… are children and 15… are women.”

In addition, the “status quo” translates into a free hand to steal Palestinian land, a process quite advanced, even mundane. “An Israeli peace group said Tuesday that it obtained government data showing that nearly 40 percent of land covered by Jewish settlements in the West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians, including big portions of blocs that Israel intends to keep under any future peace agreement,” explains the Chicago Tribune. “Activists from Peace Now said digital mapping data the organization obtained indirectly from a government source showed a wide-scale land theft by Israel, which has long asserted that it respects private land ownership in the West Bank.”

On the subject of Greater Israel, a topic near and dear to the Israeli government and their neocon helpers, Baker induces dread. As the Jerusalem Post notes, back in 1989, Baker told AIPAC that “now is the time to lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel. Israeli interests in the West Bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on [UN Security Council] Resolution 242. Forswear annexation; stop settlement activity; allow schools to reopen; reach out to the Palestinian as neighbors who deserve political rights.”

No doubt AIPAC members were sent reeling.

Naturally, in the wake of these comments, an effort was floated to portray Baker as an antisemite. Ed Koch, the former New York mayor and staunch defender of Israel, related a story in the New York Post in 1992 “in which he described a Republican campaign strategy session earlier that year where Baker replied to concerns that the Republicans would lose the Jewish vote by saying, ‘F— the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.’ Baker’s spokeswoman at the time, Margaret Tutweiler, put out an immediate denial,” although, of course, the damage was done.

It is common knowledge there is no love lost between Barker, the Israelis, and American Jews, or at least American Jews who support Israel. “Israelis and American Jews are not supposed to like Baker,” writes Bernard Avishai for the Los Angeles Times. It wasn’t Baker’s alleged antisemitic remark that bothers Jews, according to Avishai, but his stance on settlements. Baker is the “only U.S. secretary of state since the Camp David accords in 1979 to have taken credible action against the proliferation of Jewish settlements like Havat Maon. In 1991, he and the first President Bush got the Senate to hold up a program of American loan guarantees for Israel to help settle Russian-Jewish immigrants; he had tried, and failed, to elicit a promise from then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir not to use any of this money for expanding settlements.” For pro-Israel Jews, this is proof positive Baker is against Israel.

Former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general Eytan Bentsur, according to the Post, “does not deny that Baker was tough with Israel. Indeed, it was during the first Bush administration that the US conditioned $10 billion in loan guarantees on a cessation of new settlement activities in the West Bank,” an arrangement that is all but inconceivable now with the neocons and AIPAC driving U.S. foreign policy in the region.

As if to add insult to injury, Baker met with Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador, last week. “His account of the meetings … suggests the Iraq panel will recommend that President George W. Bush reverse current policy and engage in talks with the leadership in Damascus,” reports the International Herald Tribune, a move that likely caused motion sickness among Olmert’s crew and Israel First Americans.

Baker, a consummate CFR globalist—or, as the elitists like to call themselves, an “internationalist”—is no friend of the Arabs, however. “If the Baker Commission plan prevails,” writes Stephen Lendman, Iraq is “likely to be divided into several autonomous regions under nominal Iraqi regional and national rule but centrally controlled by a dominant US authority headquartered in the US Embassy in the fortress-like Green Zone using a US-directed satrap Iraqi army and police to enforce order for its master in charge of everything.”

This does not deviate from the neocon plan to a large degree. However, the neocons and the Israelis are not amenable to talking with the Syrians and Iranians, even with a back-stabbing dagger hidden away for the appropriate coup de grâce, a trick far too many Arabs have fallen for in the past. Instead, the neocons prefer to rush to judgment and unleash a withering shock and awe campaign against the Iranians and the Syrians, although rolling back Syria, described as a “regional challenger” in the neocon holy writ, the Clean Break document, will suffice for now.

It should be obvious Israel’s Mossad engineered the assassination of Pierre Gemayel in Lebanon as a response to the Baker Boys and the emerging recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. It was, in effect, a stone thrown to kill two birds—one, to sully Syria and thus make any accommodation proposed by Baker and Hamilton untenable and second to ratchet up ethnic and religious animosity in Lebanon, a process well underway in the wake of Pierre Gemayel’s timely murder. "