Unspeakable Narrative: Review of William A. Cook’s Tracking Deception
By Edward Jayne

Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy
By William A. Cook
Publisher: Dandelion Books, LLC (September 16, 2005)
ISBN-10: 1893302830

Tracking Deception, by William A. Cook, offers a sustained diatribe against Israel and the United States, comprising forty-three articles published between September, 2002, and April, 2005, when the two governments were escalating hostilities against their respective enemies of choice. Not more than thirty-two months transpired, but Cook’s articles went into print on the average once every three weeks for this entire period. The result is something more than a book.

Most histories relax somewhat to let the story tell itself, as may be seen, for example, in the impressive investigative books about Iraq by such authors as Thomas Ricks, Bob Woodward, and Chalmers Johnson that were published at about the same time. In contrast, Cook’s admixture of data and acrimony was persistent in all his articles and therefore throughout his text as a whole. Dates, laws, quotes, sources, and fascinating lists of names and transgressions abound to illustrate and justify his sense of outrage. Granted, his “hard” information is now and again incorrect (usually on the short side of the truth), but this is typical during warfare, and in retrospect it is obvious that Cook’s distortions were far more accurate than most of the reportage in the respectable press at the time.

Apparent toward the end of 2002, when the book begins, was that a major invasion was imminent in Iraq and that Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon had been doing everything he could to intensify the conflict with Palestinians since he came to power eighteen months earlier, most notably by having scuttled negotiations both at Taba and in response to the generous Saudi Peace Plan. By spring, 2005, when Cook’s diatribe ends, the invasion of Iraq had degenerated into outright warfare that culminated in the siege and total destruction of Fallujah once Bush was reelected. Meanwhile, Israeli troops had isolated Arafat in his Ramallah compound, where he would be “contained” until his death, and Sharon had refused to negotiate with his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, despite his generous peace plan that began with a unilateral ceasefire.

Predictably, American activists were outraged by the development of events, if with far more concern about Iraq than Israel. Cook’s articles, most of them published by CounterPunch, rectify this imbalance by focusing on the tactics of Israel as well as its enlarged dependence on the United States since 1948. Most of them discuss the two in combination with an emphasis on Israel’s tactics. Obviously, Cook was willing to risk displeasure from the predictable chorus of angry Zionist apologists who go after anybody who dares to criticize Israel.

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Tracking Deception’s final essay, “The Destructive Power of Myth,” at least double the length of any of the rest, turns out to have been written in response to the 9-11 catastrophe a full year later. It seems intended as an appendix providing a final overview of Cook’s historic perspective, but it can also be appreciated as a theoretical introduction that clarifies his effort throughout the text to challenge the merits of public mythology exemplified by both Zionist ideology and the misbegotten patriotic support of Bush’s foreign policy shared by the vast majority of the American people. Contrary to Marxist base-superstructure assumptions, Cook features the paramount impact of ideology at the expense of economics, but then traces chauvinistic enthusiasm in both Israel and the United States to the highly successful effort of relatively small but powerful minorities in distorting this shared consciousness to meet their own needs. Crucial to their success, he argues, is their ability to manipulate relatively simple myths to serve this purpose. Such myths, he argues, usually put to use the perceived virtues of the community at large (e.g., a nation’s presumably unique dedication to freedom or its right to occupy its ancient “homeland”) as well as the need to take action now and again in defense of these virtues.

Cook also suggests that these collective myths can be political, religious, or both in combination, and remarks that they seem best promoted by a hierarchical structure (a priesthood, for example, or a political party) to “codify, justify, and implement” their enactment. (pp. 344-45) Obviously Cook tailors this definition of myth to apply equally to the American obsession with freedom inclusive of the laissez faire and Israel’s even greater obsession with its unique status as a “chosen people” deserving of a theocratic state of its own.

Relevant to the collective mythology dominant in the United States, Cook warns of the ability of capitalistic enterprise to distort public opinion, and here Marxist assumptions come to the fore:

And what are these goals in the United States today? It seems, as Cook insists, that a very small elite imposes “useful” beliefs on the public at large. But useful to exactly whom? Relevant to our nation’s economy since World War II, this lucrative mythology has featured the defense of American democracy and the American way of life against predators both at home and abroad. Beneficiaries include all who either directly or indirectly support themselves through their participation in what seems best and most accurately described as Keynesian militarism. These individuals extend from the very wealthiest investors to the employees of contractors and sub-contractors as well as the multitude of local stores and services that provide their needs. This turns out to be a very huge chunk of our present economy, as illustrated by the total financial costs incurred by the military establishment since the thirties.

President Clinton sought a better and more acceptable alternative by featuring globalization, but it wasn’t enough. President Bush added two wars to the recipe, and, lo, the affluence of the nineties extended well into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Our nation’s economic prosperity turns out to have been the most important byproduct of its military status abroad combined with the high costs involved – a double benefit difficult to ignore. Low taxes and deregulation could be thrown in for good measure. And look at America today!

Unfortunately, this financial benefit dependent on military aggression abroad is hardly admirable and needs a credible mythology to gloss over its disreputable imperfections. No problem at all. The appropriate collective narrative rooted in the robust defense of universal freedom enjoys widespread acceptance promoted by books, movies, magazines, newspapers, the popular media, and of course the round-the-clock news coverage on cable TV and the radio. As to be expected, the public has fully taken to heart this collective myth ultimately epitomized by President Reagan’s notion of American democracy as a shining city on the hill, indeed a beacon of hope for oppressed people across the world.

More Americans resonate to this myth than anybody wants to acknowledge among educated friends. The Republican Party in fact seems to depend on it. The real story, of course (if such exists), is far more complicated, and with an abundance of ramifications that too often fail to reflect positively on our nation’s accomplishments. For anybody interested in pursuing a more adequate narrative, a variety of standard one-volume U.S. histories may be suggested here: by Charles Beard, Samuel Eliot Morrison, Howard Zinn, Paul Johnson, Walter McDougall, and/or William Appleman Williams, among many others.

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Cook’s Preface begins with the blatant warning, “The life-blood of Democracy is truth, and Bush has murdered truth” (p. ix). Can the truth be murdered, strictly speaking? Perhaps not, but Cook obviously thinks Bush came as close to doing this as anybody in recent history. Cook then becomes more specific relevant to the Iraq invasion:

In Chapter 1 (Sept. 8, 2002), Cook complains of Bush’s Manichaean assumption that America “represents the forces of good fighting against the forces of evil,” supposedly justifying our nation’s unilateral world domination. “You are either with us or against us,” Bush explained to announce the so-called Bush doctrine of universal war against terrorists, necessitating preemptive attacks wherever this seemed needed. And of course our nation’s principal ally in this holy cause was Prime Minister Sharon’s government in Israel. As others have argued, however, it seems the tail just might have been wagging the dog, for Sharon actually boasted to the Knesset on one occasion, “Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel; we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it” (Cook, p. 65).

Cook ridicules Bush’s effort to obtain the support of the U.N. for the attack on Iraq by pointing out its earlier refusal to abide by Resolutions 686, 687, and 688. However, Cook discloses that in doing so Bush conveniently ignored the more than 55 UN sanctions that Israel had defied back to 1948 (in later pieces Cook increased this number to 155 violations), not to mention the UN Security Council resolutions, 242, 338, 262, 267, 446, and 465. Obviously a double standard was in play.

In Chapter 2 (Oct. 10, 2002), Cook uses the same comparison in response to Bush’s speech of September 12 that justified rushing to war against Iraq based on four arguments, all of which could more easily be applied to Israel: (1) that Iraq had once invaded and occupied Kuwait (quite aside from Israel’s occupation of 8 out of 9 principal cities in the Palestinian territory); (2) that Iraq had failed to comply with UN-imposed commitments in 1991 (quite aside from Israel having established over 30 settlements on the West Bank since Sharon became Prime Minister); (3) that Saddam had defied the UN by not complying with 16 UN resolutions (quite aside from the fact that Israel had defied the UN by not responding or complying with at least 68 resolutions); and (4) that Iraq had failed to return approximately 600 prisoners (quite aside from Israel having refused to allow the return of over one million Palestinian refugees).

In Chapter 24 (Feb. 28, 2004), titled “Israel: America’s Albatross,” Cook reports that more than 50% of Europe’s population considers Israel to be a threat to world peace. He also goes so far as to declare more sweepingly, “Israel and America are perceived by the vast majority of people around the world as true threats to world peace” (p. 158). Moreover, he insists that Israel cannot rightfully identify itself as a democracy, since it lacks a constitution after 60 years of existence. Instead, he argues, it abides by a system of laws that seems primarily derivative of the Torah (the first five books in the Old Testament). He also deplores Israel continued refusal to deny the recognition of the Palestinian minority despite UN Resolution 181 calling for this to be done.

Cook focuses on Ariel Sharon’s unique responsibility for having intensified hostilities against the Palestinians. He summarizes Sharon’s three most despicable crimes against Palestinians: (1) his responsibility in 1953 for the killing of 53 civilians in a refugee camp and soon afterwards 69 more in the village Qibya; (2) his responsibility for the destruction of Had’d Street after the 1967 war, culminating in the destruction of 2,000 homes, the displacement of 16,000 people, and the assassination of 104 suspected guerrillas, and (3) his role in the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, when 1,962 men, women, and children were massacred by Lebanese Falangists under the supervision of Israeli troops. Cook then compiles a more extended list of various other crimes and provocations by Sharon that have so effectively kept hostilities brewing against the Palestinians for almost half a century.

Cook also estimates the costs incurred by the U.S. for supporting Israel to have been in the range of $1.6 trillion since 1973, an excessive amount for a total Jewish population that increased from 2 million in 1958 to 7 million today. Cook specifies that 737,166 Palestinians were evicted from their nation in 1948 and another 69,000 in 1967, and he later supplements this data, declaring that in 1948 alone Palestinian families were driven from 418 towns and villages so all the houses and property could be destroyed and replaced by Israeli settlements (p. 202).

Cook culminates Chapter 24 by listing ten ways Israel has “repaid” the American taxpayer during this period (he proposes only nine, but the last can easily be subdivided): (1) its unwillingness to return any stolen lands whatsoever to the Palestinians; (2) its total defiance of more than 100 UN resolutions (on p. 277 he cites 155 UN resolutions); (3) its frequent use of spies in the U.S. exemplified by Jonathan Pollard (and later Larry Franklin); (4) its inexcusable attack on the US Liberty during the 1967 War; (5) its heavy dependence on neoconservative influence in Washington; (6) its countless atrocities illustrated by the attack on the Jenin refugee camp and the murder of international peace observers; (7) its encouragement of Evangelical Zionist Christians to incite hatred against Arabs in the United States; (8) its defiance of the Arms Export Control Act through its use of cluster bombs acquired from the U.S. without the needed permission; (9) its lucrative arrangement that obliges both U.S. and Israel military establishments to purchase military hardware from Israel instead of the United States; and (10) its sale of U.S. classified technology to such nations as Ethiopia, South Africa, Chile, Venezuela, and China despite prior agreements not to (pp. 164-66).

Regarding Sharon’s presumably conciliatory “liberation” of Gaza, Cook quotes Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s principal advisor, to the effect that the “ulterior motive behind Sharon’s unilateral decision to withdraw from the Gaza strip was not to further the peace process but to ‘freeze it’ in order to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state” (see chap. 35, p. 251). He had promised a full diplomatic settlement as a tradeoff for the American invasion of Iraq, but then reneged on his offer by substituting relatively minor concessions: the elimination of a couple of Israeli West Bank settlements as well as granting independence to Gaza. Apparently he justified this bait-and-switch arrangement with the argument that bigger concessions required by the Road Map would have been unacceptable to the Israeli public as demonstrated by one or two well-publicized demonstrations by Israeli settlers upset with the loss of their property on the West Bank. Afterwards (later than the publication of Cook’s account), Sharon nullified even these concessions by besieging Gaza and imposing a tight embargo to starve its population into submission.

The final observation buried earlier in the essay, “Israel: America’s Albatross,” is the risk taken by American politicians who dare to resist withholding their full support of Israel’s agenda. This was illustrated, Cook discloses, by the intense public relations effort against Howard Dean’s presidential campaign simply because he expressed his doubts about Israel’s status as a democracy. Of course he was not specifically attacked for this particular reason, but, whatever the declared reason (as much as anything his joking litany of new states to be visited), his campaign was strangled, as it were, because he lacked adequate sympathy with Israel. According to Cook, “The Israeli political forces launched a massive attack against Dean, as vicious as any mounted against Arafat, and he folded. Such is the power that controls America’s Democracy” (p. 159). Cook neglects to mention the earlier exposé by Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out, published in 1985, which mentions many other public figures – inclusive of Ball, Percy, and Fulbright – whose careers were terminated for the same reason.

Cook also devotes a couple chapters to the religious bigotry of American millenarian (”end-time”) fundamentalists and Arab fanatics as well as Zionist extremists obsessed with their status as God’s “chosen people.” Significantly, his choice of quotations by Zionists seems far more damning than for the other two. For example, he quotes Effi Eitam, the head of Israel’s National Religious Party, to the effect that Palestinians “are not ordinary people, but “uncircumcised,” “little people,” and “evil,” by contrast with the Jews who are ‘the blessed.’” He also quotes Gush Emunim rabbis, of another right-wing religious group, who insist that “Jews who kill Arabs should be free from all punishment,” and claim that “Arabs living in Palestine are thieves because the land was Jewish and belongs to them.” (p. 10).

Apparently these rabbis also find satisfaction in such Talmudic edicts such as, “those who read the New Testament will have no portion in the world to come” (Sandhedrin 90a); and “Jews must destroy the books of the Christians” (Shabbath 116a), and “Whosoever disobeys the rabbis deserves death and will be punished by being boiled in hot excrement in hell” (Erubin 21b). Of course the Talmud’s principal appeal is said to consist of its arguable contradictions. However, these particular examples seem at least excessive. According to Cook, once this kind of thinking is brought into play combined with the dogma of the Christian right, the result is “a virtual whirlpool of Zionist Christian fanaticism” (p. 293).

And thus Cook takes his argument to almost every aspect of the Near East crisis since the year 2001. He scrutinizes such concerns as torture, shock and awe, extra-judicial executions, the “fence” (or wall), the roadmap, green parrots [Ed: bombs intended to be used against children; Cook p. 276], the assault on Rafah, insufficient opposition in Israel, the spread of hostility into Syria, the decline of American democracy, the unfortunate 2004 Democratic Convention, the failed Kerry campaign, the failed Camp David negotiations, the ambiguous role of Osama bin Laden, the despicable Yassin assassination, and the flawed assumptions of Leo Strauss, Richard Perle, Alan Dershowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Charles Krauthammer as well as neoconservatives in general. Last but not least, he explores in depth the critique of supposedly anti-Semitic trends summarized by the State Department. Ironically, the State Department’s so-called “Country Report” almost entirely refrains from criticizing Israel in the main body of its text, but then launches into a full-scale assessment in its Appendix that is more or less in line with Cook’s arguments throughout his book. The government authors of the study seem to concur with much that Cook says, but with the typical prudence to limit their concerns to an appendix easily overlooked by readers.