A famous saying in the English language goes this way: “If you cannot beat them, join them.” But the infamous Elliott Abrams of the Jewish lobby in America has invented a different version of the saying. It goes this way: “If you cannot beat them, join them to control them and fleece them.” This is what you see him advocate when you read the blog on the internet site of the Council on Foreign Relations, a blog he published under the title: “FTAs for Tunisia and Egypt” on October 17, 2011. Elliott Abrams did not become infamous now or because he distorted an English saying; he has been infamous ever since he entered public life which suggests that he came into this life already equipped with the qualities of infamy.
To understand what he is up to now we need to know something about FTA. This descriptor stands for Free Trade Agreement which is a compact that the nations of the world enter into either on a bilateral basis or a multilateral one. For example, the American Congress recently ratified and the President signed a bilateral Free Trade Agreement that was negotiated years ago with each of South Korea, Colombia and Panama. This is different from the multilateral agreement which regulates trade between the North American nations of the United States, Canada and Mexico, one that has been in force for several decades now. This compact is known by the acronym NAFTA which stands for North American Free Trade Agreement.
The essence of these agreements is that the signatories commit themselves to lowering or eliminating the custom duties they normally impose on the goods and/or services of each other while maintaining them on everyone else. The intent is to increase trade between the signatories as a way to treat each other like a “Most Favored Nation” or better. This is an American expression that is rarely used today but one that was used frequently in the past to designate the nations that America considered friendly and wished to reward. America did so by lowering the duties on their products without asking for reciprocity in most of the instances. It could be this generous because it was the acknowledged economic ocean of the world that commanded a big chunk of the international trade at a time when everyone else looked like a small creek seeking to unload their products on America's shores in exchange for the once mighty dollar.
Things have changed since then in the sense that where America used to be the creditor nation of the world, it is now the most indebted nation, a situation that logic says must have resulted from the generous policies that the country has pursued in the past. The immediate consequence of these policies has been that America stacked up trade deficits as large as the ocean and found itself unable to continue buying from foreigners without selling enough to them to pay for what it buys. Thus, there was the need to throw away the old notion of most favored nation and replace it with that of the free trade agreement whose intent is to “even out the playing field” between the American producers of goods and services and their foreign competitors.
While America has embraced the new policy of negotiating FTAs, the other nations of the world are doing the same thing but with a caveat in some cases. Nations in regions that are defined by geography such as Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Arab group and Asia have negotiated bilateral and multilateral agreements with one another and they continue to do so. Some even reach out to more distant nations and groupings to negotiate agreements with them too. But the level of enthusiasm to enter into free trade with other nations has always depended on the kind of economy that a nation has and the level of development its economy has reached. Therefore, while the appeal of free trade has remained universal, the level of enthusiasm for it is not always evenly shared by everyone.
At first, Egypt was reluctant to get into a trade agreement with other nations because of a number of reasons, some of which were economic and others political. Eventually, the country came around to opening its economy to the rest of the world, and slowly but surely the pendulum started to swing to the other side. By the time the twenty first century had rolled, the country was becoming promiscuous, so to speak, at signing free trade agreements left and right, near and far. The end result has been that Egypt now has FTAs with virtually everyone in the world except America with which it has a contrived monstrous creature instead. It is another one of those freakish distortions that only the American Congress is capable of creating after drinking a dose of the AIPAC Kool Aid.
That freakish distortion is called QIZ which stands for Qualified Industrial Zone. The story here began long ago when America set up a free trade agreement between it and Israel. What happened at the time was that Israel, which produces virtually nothing -- let alone produce what the Americans would want to buy -- sold to America goods and services that were produced in Europe and Asia by enterprises that were owned and/or operated by Jews and sometimes by non-Jews as well. To qualify for entry into America duty free, these products had to have a 35% component made in Israel. But the enterprises in Israel did not have the wherewithal to make finished products or components for them in the quantities and the variety that were called for in America. They only produced packaging, printed material and accessories that did not exceed in value the 5% level of the cost. And so, to comply with the terms of the free trade agreement with America, the Israeli enterprises were paid – at least on paper – the full 35% that was required.
The net effect of this diabolic scheme has been that under the umbrella of the free trade agreement negotiated with Israel, America has for several decades now been receiving goods and services produced in Europe and Asia duty free where they would normally have been subjected to a duty that ranges anywhere between 10% and 40% of the cost. And the result has been that in a game which is essentially a zero-sum game, America loses in a big way so that Israel may gain. And this makes it so that Europe and Asia also gain at the expense of America.
Now, given that a peace treaty was in effect between Egypt and Israel, the AIPAC people in America worked with the Israelis to setup a similar scheme that would drag Egypt into it. They saw the need to do this because the textile industry was expanding in Egypt at the time; and some of the production was being exported to America already. Also, the Israelis themselves were selling textile in America but the competition from Asia was killing them and they were told point blank by big stores such as Macy's and Bloomingdale's to set up factories in Egypt or lose their share of the American market. The trouble, however, was that the Egyptians who already enjoyed the status of most favored nation with America, and were negotiating a full fledged free trade agreement, would not agree to the Israel/AIPAC scheme. And the matter stood there for a while.
Then came the peace treaty between the Jordanians and the Israelis where the latter got the idea of setting up the scheme with the Jordanians. This time, they took another tack to avoid repeating the fiasco they had with the Egyptians. Not to be seen doing the work themselves, they approached the Jordanian business people who would gain the most from such a setup; and they showed them the way to the Washington maze by which to lobby the American Congress. And surprise, surprise, it did not take long to obtain the Congressional approval to setup a number of Qualified Industrial Zones in Jordan where goods would be manufactured for export to America duty free. The goods had to contain a 10% or so component made in Israel or in the occupied Palestinian territories.
A few years passed and several events converged to force the Egyptians into a similar QIZ scheme with America and Israel. What happened was that first, a number of new nations started to industrialize; and in the race to the bottom competed to win a share of the textile market by lowering their prices. The fight was so ferocious that even the Egyptians who have enormous advantages in the sector felt jostled and pushed into a corner. Second, a new world trade agreement that would substantially drop the tariff on textiles was coming into effect thus threatened to undo the advantage of most favored status that Egypt had with America. Third, the Americans in charge of the preliminary FTA negotiations with Egypt started to throw the monkey wrench into the negotiations in a naked attempt to force the Egyptians to take the QIZ route and thus benefit Israel in the process. Having no other choice, the Egyptians studied the Jordanian experience, learned from it and negotiated the best QIZ deal they could.
The world then changed again and the Egyptians saw that they can be better off without the QIZ because opportunities were opening to them like never before. Thanks to globalization, they began to realize that they will do better not only in the matter of exporting textile but in all the manufacturing and service sectors of their industries. As to the Americans, they looked at the multitude of FTAs that Egypt has with the rest of the world, and they too came to that same conclusion. Thus, to avoid being left out of a lucrative market in the making, they began to revive the old idea of negotiating an FTA with Egypt. What prompted them to see the new reality were several factors. First, there is the demographic makeup of the Egyptian population which is large, young and moving into the middle class. Second, there is the fact that Egypt is located at the crossroads of three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia to where the action is migrating. Third, there is the center of economic gravity that is shifting from the North Atlantic to Central Asia, a location that is closer to where Egypt is situated. Fourth, all of this is happening at a time when Egypt is fast becoming a factory for the region.
The Americans began to understand this and so did Elliott Abrams. But being someone who cannot stop wallowing in the pool of his intellectual waste, he remains deep in it and refuses to come out. Thus, the prudent thing for everyone to do is to read his blog with this reality in mind. Indeed, after a short introduction, he gets into the sort of history which he regularly fabricates, spins and blends to bake what you might call the Elliott Abrams shit pie, something a hungry dog would not have for breakfast. And this is what he feeds to the innocent readers who suspect nothing about him but read him as if he were a normal human creature.
Watch him belabor his latest version of history in the last two paragraphs of the blog. He concocts in them a fictitious narrative without once mentioning Israel knowing full well that America never negotiates Middle Eastern matters without “consulting” with Israel and working things to benefit that foreign country at its own expense if need be. And he chooses to keep quiet about Israel to avoid revealing that FTA negotiations between Egypt and America were underway in earnest at one time but that AIPAC pressured the Americans to throw the monkey wrench into the talks as a way to force Egypt to take the infamous QIZ deal instead.
As you read those two paragraphs, you become dizzy by the tricks he employs to swing you from one idea to its opposite and back again. Look at the first of the two paragraphs and remove the fillings you encounter in it. When you do this, you find that it reads as follows: “In 2005 the United States considered an FTA with Egypt … But there was little enthusiasm among [American] trade officials anyway … There was a widespread view … that Mubarak did not really want an FTA … and that is what we did not wish to give him.” Abrams wrote the blog in this dizzying Judeo-Yiddish style to avoid saying that Egypt and America wanted an FTA between them; that Egypt wanted to have it with America only but that AIPAC and the Jewish lobby – which includes Abrams -- wanted to bring Israel into it. Why telling the truth in this instance would have bothered Abrams should not be a mystery to anyone.
And he goes on to hit you with the next paragraph which is the last of his blog. Here too, you can strip the fillings and read the passage as follows: “Mubarak would not have wanted an FTA, it was argued, because an FTA creates ... pressure for a freer economy, the rule of law, more open markets and less corruption. This is precisely why negotiating FTAs should begin now ... There will be many pressures to maintain corrupt, anti-market practices ... An FTA will push in the other direction ... There are few things we can do to nudge both countries in a positive direction that would have greater effect than FTAs...” Well, instead of allowing this thing to make us sick, let us have fun parsing it instead.
He makes those points because he says “it was argued” but he does not specifically say who it was that made the arguments. And so we take the trouble of assuming that it was him and the other AIPAC characters. This is not what he wants you to believe, however, because he wants to make it look like it was a genuine American decision. And this is what prompts you to ask: If an FTA is “precisely” what is needed to fix the corrupt Egyptians and to lead them onto the righteous path of a Bernie Madoff, a Conrad Black or the characters at Enron, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, why did the Americans not negotiate one when they had the opportunity instead of throwing the monkey wrench into the talks as they did?
In the absence of an answer, you are forced to conclude that Abrams must have something else in mind. It must be that he is predicting the QIZ is about to die a natural death. He and AIPAC are therefore looking for a way to use America's desire to benefit from what Egypt is becoming to benefit Israel instead knowing that this can only happen at the expense of the American people, many of whom are unemployed and waiting desperately for a break in their luck. But watch Abrams and AIPAC betray them, and do so in the most treasonous of ways – stealthily and with a fake smile on their faces.
To succeed in his new scheme, he must first devise a system by which the Jewish organizations will be able to control the situation after the FTAs are concluded. To this end, he believes that it would be better for Israel if America negotiated two separate bilateral FTAs; one between America and Egypt, and one between America and Tunisia -- rather than negotiate a multilateral FTA that would combine all three nations on the NAFTA model. And his new scheme, my friend, is a variation on an old concept whose modern incarnation goes like this: divide, bind, rule, exploit, fleece and then cut and run.
Well, if you want to know what this is all about; it is another one of those Elliott Abrams shit pies from which no one sane should take a bite, and certainly not wash it down with the AIPAC Kool Aid. Don't even try to smell the thing because it stinks like hell and you could seriously damage your nostrils. Just throw it in the garbage and say to yourself never again.