�A Bright Shining Lie reveals the truth of the war in Vietnam as it unfolded before the eyes of John Paul Vann: the arrogance and professional corruption of the U.S. military system of the 1960s; the incompetence and venality of the South Vietnamese Army; the nightmare of death and destruction that began with the arrival of the American forces.�� Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Random House, 1988, inside front jacket. [Italics added]

�The 34A raids provoked the Tonkin Gulf incident. . . . Which Johnson used to trick the Senate into giving him an advance declaration of war for the higher level of force to bend Hanoi to his will. . . . McNamara and Dean Rusk helped him by deceiving the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the clandestine attacks in secret testimony before the committee.� -- ibid, page 379 [Italics added]

Hoaxes and pretexts are the tactical tools of the United States and Israel to alter by wars of aggression the geostrategic, demographic, religious, cultural, and political realities of the Middle East. The undeclared target is the direct or indirect colonialist conquest of the region by stages.

While hoaxes such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda, radical Islam, terrorism, etc. are the intermediate means to center that target, pretexts are the primary means leading to it. Hoaxes, if kept floating around long enough, would do another job: they keep the momentum for intervention uninterrupted by creating a predisposition to it through propaganda.

To discuss the American hoax of Zarqawi, let use begin in reverse order. That is, by addressing first the structural meaning of the present wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine, while Syria, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan are all still on the hit list. This order is important, because it will enable us to see the hoax as only a U.S. tactical need.

After the United States (with U.S. Zionism and Israel behind the planning) invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, a clear picture emerged on the long-term objectives of U.S. imperialism in Iraq and the Middle East region. These include:

One: undertake direct military interventions in accordance with the Bush Doctrine of �preemption� to overthrow the political systems of all Arab states -- one at a time.

Or, two: overthrow them by destabilizing their structure from within, as in the ongoing attempts to overthrow the governments of Egypt, and Syria. The U.S.-Israel axis has already achieved this objective in Lebanon, after it assassinated former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq al-Hariri. This form of intervention would bring to power domestic or expatriate figures with either existent ties to Washington and Tel Aviv, or willing to establish and abide by them. This is a long-term objective and could become a viable alternative to war, since the United States cannot even win in Iraq.

Three: rule the resulting entities by means of nominal local power made of compliant surrogates and Arab nationals with dual citizenship (mostly American or British), but with direct colonial supervision as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Four: continue with that modus operandi as an implicit expression of conquest.

If you noticed, I only included the U.S. and Israel as the engineers of the �new� Middle East. In my opinion, Britain is not an eminent factor in war or post war status. Despite the bray and antics of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain�s role in war decision-making was inconsequential. While Britain may have offered an added propaganda cover to Bush�s war; it could not have occupied -- not even a square inch -- of any Iraqi territory by itself. Despite its nuclear weapons, Britain neither possesses the military means nor logistical capabilities to accomplish such an enterprise. In the end, Britain�s token military participation in Afghanistan and Iraq is not more than a ghostly gasp from an empire that anti-colonial wars of liberation buried deep a long time ago

Another factor in the war against Iraq is the history of American-Israeli strategic alliance in the Middle East since Henry Kissinger firmly riveted the United States inside the Israeli and Zionist orbits. As a result, the intersection between hegemonic U.S. world policy and Israel�s regional ambitions underwent total alignment, specifically, when it concerns militant hostility against the Arabs. Figuratively, Israel and Zionism seem to have injected the American political body with a potent dose of anti-Arab venom from which the U.S. is unable, thus far, to find an antidote.

This explains four things: 1) why there had never been any attempt to resolve the Palestinian Question, 2) why the U.S. stands on the side of Israel regardless of objective or subjective conditions, 3) why the U.S. vetoed all U.N. resolutions that concern Israel, and 4) why the U.S. harbors such an intense enmity toward the Arab identity.

On the specific issue of the war on the Arab states and the occupation of Iraq, the objective behind the Israeli policy of the United States in the Middle East is evident: maintain the military pressure against all those states that still do not recognize Israel or oppose U.S. imperialist policies in the region.

It is on this objective where the U.S. and Israel articulate a unified stance. One: they share military intelligence, weapon systems, treaties, and mutual understanding. Two: they use the same vocabulary and rhetorical references toward the Arabs. Three: they use the same pattern of warfare to inflict maximum civilian casualties and maximum destruction on cities and infrastructures of the countries they attack.

If we study the recent American-Israeli wars against the Arab states, it is inescapable to decree that their ideological origins are not due to convergence of intent but because they belong to the same matrix: U.S. Zionism. To be more specific, Israel cannot survive or function without input or support by American Zionists -- deprive Israel of American military, technological, diplomatic, and financial assistance, and Israel would collapse like a house of cards.

It is congruent to affirm that Israeli wars against the Arab states would have never succeeded without U.S. Zionism and its preponderant influence on American politics. Such wars included the war against Egypt Syria, and Jordan in 1967; against Egypt and Syria in 1973; the invasion of Lebanon in 1982; the war against Iraq in 1991; the sanctions and war of attrition against Iraq during the Clinton presidency; and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The military repression against the occupied Palestinian people is a chapter by itself.)

Despite reductionism, as in my statement that �U.S. and Israeli wars belong to the same ideological matrix," the charge is accurate. This is primarily due to the vast infiltration of Zionism inside the American state. Other forces such as, Christian fundamentalists, Pentagonists, and non-neocon advocates of Empire are significant co-players, but they are neither the primary decision makers nor the spiritual ideologues.

In view of U.S. confrontational foreign policy and aggressive cultural attitudes vis-�-vis the Arab nations, and taking notice of the fact that said policy and culture are an explicit reflection of the Zionist ideology, it is imperative to question the scope of the American-Israeli alliance. If we consider the history of the past 58 years (since the installation of Israel), there can be only one conclusion: the scope of that alliance is the dual imposition by military force, including nuclear blackmail, of 1) the Israeli order via the United States, and 2) the American order via Israel.

Accordingly, asserting that a war by Israel is automatically a war by the United States or vice versa is correct -- the second Israeli war against Lebanon is a small demonstration of this dialectical condition. In dissecting this condition, it should be easy to notice the connective points that hold the two-stage U.S.-Israeli project together. In the first stage, the target is attack, destroy, and occupy the strongest among Arab states. In the second, it is more ambitious: alter their demography, geography, religions, ethnicity, culture, and stratified millennial history to suite the objectives of the new order.

Within this framework, Clean Break by Richard Perle and the initiative for the Greater Middle East by the Bush Administration, and the Nazi idea of Birth Pangs of a New Middle East by Condoleezza Rice are the most recent known mechanism to achieve such a determined imperialist purpose. In reality though, the plan to re-conquer Arab lands and resources at one point in the future began in 1917 when the Briton, Arthur James Balfour, released his declaration to install a �homeland� for Europeans of Jewish faith on Arab lands in a letter he sent to the British Zionist Lionel Walter Rothschild. Wrote Balfour:

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely, Arthur James Balfour

With phrases such as, �Jewish Zionist aspirations," �submitted to, and, approved by,� �national home for the Jewish people,� etc., Britain seeded a permanent deadly situation in the heart of the Arab world and in the entire world.

But to invent a homeland for European Jews, Balfour had to come up with a new theory. He transformed the Palestinian people from an authentic product of their historical milieu to �existing non-Jewish communities.� This was a linguistic ruse with deep ideological ramifications.

First, because he used the word, �existing,� he then implied that the Palestinians existed only during the same time he existed. Consequently, he also implied that the Palestinians were accidental to the land since the word �existing� also presupposes and begs the question as to who existed before.

Second, he called the future Zionist colonists of Palestine with the name �Jewish people." But this term indicates homogeneity, whereas the correct denomination should have been, Jewish peoples, meaning diverse people sharing the same religion. Fundamentally, Balfour adopted the articles of Theodor Hertzel�s Zionist Manifesto.

Third, he endowed European Jews with the power to form a state in Palestine but deprived the Palestinians from forming the same. This policy was in line with previous British colonialist experience, where the British and their American, Canadian, New Zealander, and Australian successors confined the Original Peoples to reservations. In the Palestinian case, refugee camps, mushroomed in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Not only that, but he employed Apartheid before the Afrikaners of South Africa invented it. How can one create an exclusive homeland (state) on a land, while excluding the original people who do not have a state of their own? In essence, he was seeking separate developments (apartheid) for the Jewish colonists and for the Palestinians, but from different positions on the superiority or inferiority scale. Of course, Zionist colonists had the primacy because the declaration was about them.

Balfour (and his handlers) was astute. To preempt a potential backlash because of the long-term implications of his declaration, he employed a ruse: he warned other nations (meaning the Arabs) not to infringe on the �rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Balfour, therefore, was seeking an impossible dual purpose: on one hand, he allowed the Zionists to take control of Palestine; on the other, he did not want his action to provoke reaction by those his declaration deprived of their natural right -- the ownership of their ancestral lands. It is redundant to state that in both instances he exclusively safeguarded the interests of the Zionist Movement.

In the end, notice how Balfour humbled himself to Zionism by writing that he �should be grateful� if Rothschild brings his [Balfour�s] �declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist federation," as if Rothschild were doing him a favor, and not the other way around. This indicated an already existing imbalance of power between subservient British power elite and Zionist controllers.

What was Balfour�s pretext to donate Palestine: land, people, churches, mosques, synagogues, culture, history, and olive trees to the Zionist Movement? Answer: there were no pretexts. Balfour gave Palestine to the Zionists based on one exclusive self-give right: colonialist privilege.

But, Balfour did not donate Palestine to European Zionists for love of Hertzel, Rothschild, the Psalms of Solomon, or the Torah. His core motive was about the financial fortunes of British colonialism. With oil emerging as a precious industrial commodity, implanting a foreign, militarized entity amidst the Arabs to destabilize and keep them under a continuous British rule, was the overriding motive -- it is possible that Balfour thought of the British Empire as a fixture in human history. In commenting on what the West calls the Arab-Israeli conflict, former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had once stated,� We did not create Israel inside Arab lands for nothing.�

To summarize, what the Arabs are facing today is an old long-term plan that goes beyond what Hitler planned for Germans of Jewish faith. In taking notice of the American and Israeli wars against Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, it is reasonable to state that what is taking place in that region is no longer an exclusive Arab predicament, but a problem of global proportion.

For instance, Iran is not Arab, yet it is under direct American-Israeli threat because it is a Muslim state with legitimate nuclear ambitions. Likewise, non-Arab but Muslim Pakistan is under threat because of its nuclear status. Yet, Venezuela, Haiti, and Zimbabwe are neither Arab nor Muslim, so why are they in the focus of Zionism and imperialism! Likewise, the U.S. has been threatening post-communist Russia and capitalist-communist China because of 1) competition for the control of world resources, and 2) for being the only nuclear powers that have the potential to stop the march of hyper-imperialism. (This despite the fact that Russia and China are now the tools of U.S. imperialism at the United Nations; as such, they are U.S. partners in the wars against the Arab nations)

With a few words, the Israeli-American project for world domination beginning with the Arab states is more threatening, more violent, and far-reaching than any other project in history. In fact, by its magnitude and scope, this project exceeds all what Caesars, emperors, rulers, conquerors, presidents, prime ministers, tyrants, fascists, strongmen, mass killers, and dictators could have fantasized

In strict terms though, such a project is more American Jewish Zionist than it is American traditional imperialist. How is this so? Simple: because the neocons are in charge of building the new American-Israeli Empire, typical Anglo-Saxon power elites who created the British and American empires have eclipsed to lower ranks where unconditional deference to Zionism is a rule. An elementary proof: could any American politician running for office if he or she criticizes Israel or Zionism, or did not pass the test of allegiance to Zionist causes first.

Nevertheless, American Zionism is one among three forces whose convergent aim is the violent overthrow of the political systems of the Arabs and the destruction of their civilization. Next, I shall give you an overview of these three forces.