[casi] Why not a Constitutional Monarchy for Iraq ?

["as-ilas" <as-ilas@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

"Former CIA director James Woolsey and Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis
penned an opinion article last week in The Wall Street ..." :

1)Woolsey Pushes Constitutional Monarchy for Iraq

While Woolsey is well known, his soulmate and horse-whisperer Bernhard Lewis
is only widely
believed to be well known.

Therefore some background info on the latter "grey eminence":

2) PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS

------------------------------

1)

http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.11.07/news3b.woolseyside.html

Woolsey Pushes Constitutional Monarchy for Iraq

11.11.2003


      NOVEMBER 7, 2003

      Former CIA director James Woolsey and Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis
penned an opinion article last week in The Wall Street Journal calling for
the temporary re-adoption of the 1925 Iraqi constitution until a permanent
constitution can be written.

      The article proposed the reinstatement, with some amendments and on an
interim basis, of a constitutional monarchy in which there would be an
elected parliament and a king would appoint the prime minister.

      While the piece did not specify any candidates for those positions,
some observers saw the proposal as a backhanded strategy to advance two
regional actors - former Jordanian Crown Prince Hassan and Iraqi National
Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi - who are longtime favorites of
neoconservative officials in the Bush administration.

      Lewis and Woolsey wrote that the king "should be a Hashemite prince
with political experience and no political obligations or commitments."
Hassan, who was the crown prince until a few weeks before the death of his
brother King Hussein, was touted as a possible ruler of Iraq by
neoconservatives before the war and appeared at a meeting of the Iraqi
opposition last spring.

      Further, they wrote that the king would appoint the prime minister,
who "should be a modern Shiite with a record of opposition to tyranny and
oppression," a description that would seem to fit Chalabi.

      Chalabi was convicted in absentia for bank fraud in Jordan, but
sources said Prince Hassan nonetheless maintains close relations with him.

      A person close to the debates over the shape of Iraq's future
government said the Woolsey-Lewis proposal was possibly a way for Chalabi to
gain more power in Iraq.

      But Woolsey told the Forward that he and Lewis do not endorse any
candidates.

      He added that in his personal judgment, however, Prince Hassan and
Chalabi "would be fine candidates."

      Woolsey sits on the Defense Policy Board, a body that advises the
Pentagon. Lewis, while he has generally steered clear of policymaking, is
known to be a major intellectual influence on figures such as Vice President
Dick Cheney.

      The adoption of the 1925 constitution would run counter to American
plans to promote democracy and retain overall authority until a constitution
is adopted and elections held, said Noah Feldman, a New York University law
professor who advised the U.S. administration in Iraq.

      "I am surprised by their proposal because the United States is
committed to democracy, and monarchy is not a good sign," Feldman told the
Forward, adding that it was wrong to assume that a Hashemite monarch would
be embraced by Iraqis. The Hashemite family ruled Iraq until 1958, when
Feisal II was overthrown by a military coup.

      ----------------

      2)

      http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2001/2846b_lewis_profile.html

            This article appears in the November 30, 2001 issue of Executive
Intelligence Review.

            PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS

            British Svengali Behind
            Clash Of Civilizations

            by Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg

            On Nov. 19, octogenarian British Orientalist spook Bernard Lewis
wrote an elaborate apologia for Osama bin Laden, a fervent pitch for the
inevitability of the "Clash of Civilizations," in the pages of New Yorker
magazine. Under the headline "The Revolt of Islam," Lewis lied that the
emergence of "Islamic terrorism" in the recent decades, is completely
consistent with mainstream Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of
the infidels to Islamic law. He went through 14 pages of a fractured
fairy-tale history of Islam, quoting bin Laden's Oct. 7, 2001 videotape,
where the Saudi expatriate spoke of Islam's "humiliation and disgrace ...
for more than 80 years"-a reference to the crushing of the Ottoman Empire by
Britain and France in 1918. Lewis invented a tradition of jihad, "bequeathed
to Muslims by the Prophet":

            "In principle," Lewis explained, "the world was divided into two
houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim
law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited
and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a
perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or
submitted to the rule of the Muslim state." Among all the different
"infidels" ruling the House of War, Lewis asserted, Christianity was singled
out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." Lewis
cited slogans painted on the walls of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock from the
Seventh Century, assailing Christianity.

            Lewis then claimed that the evolution of modern Islamic
terrorism, specifically the al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long proud history
within Islam, dating to the Assassins cult of the 11th-13th Centuries.
(Lewis wrote a 1967 book, The Assassins, extolling the virtues of this
secret society.) He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two regimes
legitimately singled out by the Islamic jihadists, for their corruption by
"modernism."

            He concluded, ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the
resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world, that began
in the Seventh Century.... If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to
accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies
ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related
groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam-Russia, China, India-who
may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against
Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations
and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the
part of it that embraces Islam."

            Bernard Lewis Plan, Take II
            Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
Lewis has, not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous locations. After all,
the 85-year old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been London's point-man in
the United States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G. Wells' outpost at
Princeton University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure American
compliance with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East, the
Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.

            To put it bluntly: British intelligence senior operator Lewis is
the guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S. neo-conservative drive for a new
"Thirty Years War" in Eurasia. This drive is at the heart of the ongoing
coup d'état attempt against the George W. Bush Administration, which began
with the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks on New York City and Washington.

            Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after serving on the faculty of the
University of London's Middle East and Africa faculty (the repository of the
original India House files, long officially referred to as the Colonial
Department), coincided with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's
fomenting of the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to the present day, and
served as a laboratory for the later "Islamic revolution" in Iran.

            Lewis is no mere British quackademic. After obtaining his
doctorate in the history of Islam from the University of London School of
Oriental and African Studies, he joined the university faculty in 1938. From
1940-45, Lewis was, in his own understated words, "otherwise engaged," as a
wartime British Military Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British
Foreign Office. To this day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime
"engagements."

            Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis has been demonstrably
responsible for every piece of strategic folly and insanity into which the
United States has been suckered in Asia Minor. The Wellsian "method to his
madness" has been the persistent push to eliminate the nation-state system,
and launch murderous wars stretching across the Eurasian region.

            * During the Carter Administration, Lewis was the architect of
madman Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim
Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the
Soviet Union. The planned fostering of radical Islamist war provocations was
known, at the time, as "the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of this
Lewis-Brzezinski collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic
Revolution" in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the once-proud
center of the Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age; and the
1979-1988 Afghanistan War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979 launching of
covert support for Afghan mujahideen "Contras" inside Afghanistan-six months
prior to the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve invasion.

            As early as 1960, in a book-length study he prepared for the
Royal Institute for International Affairs, under the title The Emergence of
Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the modernizing, nation-building
legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He argued instead for the revival
of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a British geopolitical battering
ram against Russia and against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf-in
alliance with Israel.

            * It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the "Clash of
Civilizations"-in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of
Muslim Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel
Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, "The Clash Of
Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his subsequent book-length
treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis' more sophisticated
British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as engaged in a
14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington acknowledged that
Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of Civilizations."

            * In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis
celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations'
Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come
to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a
prolonged period of "Lebanonization"-i.e., degeneration into fratricidal,
parochialist violence and chaos.

            "The eclipse of pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic
fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that
there has to be something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept
tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from
outside." The Islamists represent "a network outside the control of the
state.... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to
fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists."

            He concluded the Foreign Affairs piece by forecasting the
"Lebanonization" of the entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of
the Middle East ... are of recent and artificial construction and are
vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened,
there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of
common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The
state then disintegrates-as happened in Lebanon-into a chaos of squabbling,
feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."

            * In 1998, it was Lewis who catapulted Osama bin Laden into
prominence with a November/December Foreign Affairs article, legitimizing
the Saudi black sheep as a serious proponent of mainstream, militant Islam.
Lewis' piece, "License To Kill: Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad,"
showered praise on bin Laden, pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus
Jews and Crusaders" "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic
Arabic prose ... which reveals a version of history that most Westerners
will find unfamiliar."

            Caught In The Act
            Osama bin Laden released his 1998 jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998,
six months before the truck bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in
Tanzania and Kenya. The very next day, Bernard Lewis' signature appeared on
a widely circulated Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, released by a
previously unheard-of entity called the Committee for Peace and Security in
the Gulf, demanding that the U.S. government throw its full support behind a
military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open Letter called for
carpet bombing Iraq, and for the United States to aggressively give
financial and military support for the Iraqi National Congress, yet another
corrupt and inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created by U.S. and British
intelligence elements, and based in London.

            In addition to Bernard Lewis, the Open Letter was endorsed by
former U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.), notorious Anglo-Israeli
propagandist and spy Richard Perle, convicted Iran-Contra criminal Elliott
Abrams, Jonathan Pollard fellow-traveller Steven Bryen, Frank Gaffney, New
Republic publisher and Al Gore mentor Martin Peretz, Paul Wolfowitz,
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) research director David
Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim.

            Lewis' public alliance at that time with the leading lights of
the "Mega" apparatus-now waging all-out war against the Bush
Administration's efforts to box in Israeli madman Ariel Sharon-is
noteworthy, but not surprising. Lewis is lionized inside Israel, and by the
Israeli Lobby in America as a geopolitical giant. On Feb. 19, 1996, Lewis
was feted in Jerusalem, where he delivered the ninth annual B'nai B'rith
World Center "Jerusalem Address" on "The Middle East Towards the Year 2000."
His son, Michael Lewis, is the director of the American-Israeli Public
Affairs Committee's super-secret "opposition research section." This is one
of the most important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation,
presently saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for
precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for
decades.








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