“Oh what a tangled web he weaved when at first he practiced
to deceive."
In this C-SPAN interview from April 15th, 1994 Dick
Cheney reveals the reasons why invading Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein's
regime wouldn't be a great idea because it would have caused a regional
quagmire by breaking up Iraq into three pieces, with Kurdistan threatening the
territorial integrity of Turkey, Shia Iraq falling prey to the Iranians, and
Western Iraq going to the Syrians.
He also stipulates that "not very many" American soldiers' lives were worth losing to take out Saddam during the Gulf War.
It's a shame that Cheney's 1994 words couldn't have been thrown in his face in 2002 and '03, before the invasion. Forcing him to explain why he no longer believed the war would lead to a quagmire would have been a useful exercise and why, when he became Vice President, appointed neocon Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby as his Chief of Staff. It's nice that it's come out now, but at this late date it only confirms what most Americans believe about a vice president they detest and a war they no longer support.
Of course, the Neocons simply claimed that "9/11
changed everything".
What and who is a neocon you may ask? The in depth study/report below is the result of many hours of research in an attempt to answer the question.
The following is the result
of research done on the internet, reading periodicals and books, viewing C-SPAN
etc. which began one year prior to the invasion of Iraq. In doing the research it became apparently clear that
a group of individuals within and outside of the U.S. government were
influencing the direction of our foreign policy not to our benefit but for the
benefit of a foreign country. Some allegedly profited
from the war. Many of these individuals had dual
loyalties, one to the U.S.(weak) and the other to a foreign
nation (strong).
The
irony of it all is that these individuals have not been brought to account for
their complicity in taking us to war. Instead, they have either
resigned from their government positions (Douglas
Feith , Richard
Perle) or been appointed to a new job such as the head of the World
Bank(Paul
Wolfowitz). Some have taken on a low profile while others, now
that the U.S. pre-emptive invasion of Iraq has met with insurmountable
obstacles, are still appearing on TV
talk shows, C-SPAN, writing Op-Ed pieces etc. trying to justify
their positions on the invasion of Iraq and
casting
the blame for the failure on our military leaders. They cannot save
their discredited and bloodstained ideology; they can only try saving certain
individuals(Lewis
Scooter Libby) from spending a good deal of time behind
bars where they belong. If they succeed then justice will not have been served.
As one radio talk show host
stated that these neocons should be held liable for their mistakes similar to a
surgeon who recommends an operation and due to his incompetence makes a mistake
and the patient either dies or is crippled for life. These neocons should be
tried for
dereliction of duty, malfeasance
in office and manslaughter
in the second degree .
Read
the following and decide for yourself if what I have found does or does not
support my thesis.
The
genesis of the war on Iraq
Or
How
the neocons hijacked the “war on terror”
Last
update 5 / 22 / 08
The war against Iraq has
polarized Americans before the first shot was fired. And as the war was brought
home with nonstop frontline images, the lines between pro- and anti-war have
solidified, especially as U.S. and coalition forces began to take casualties in
the “post war insurrection”.
Polls show the sharpest
dividing line between those who support U.S. policy in Iraq and those who
oppose it is between Republicans and Democrats. The war
in Iraq has divided America like nothing since Vietnam, and that the hate
we once reserved for terrorists we are now spewing at one another.
We have spent a fortune attacking a
country that had done us no harm, killing tens of thousands of its people
and giving the United States a black eye as an aggressor that starts wars on
the basis of lies and disinformation. Two years (3/20/2003) after the
invasion of Iraq, discontent
with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished.
In an
article in USA
Today James Webb, a Marine platoon and company commander
in Vietnam whom Ronald Reagan named as his secretary of the Navy wrote –“ Bush arguably has committed the greatest
strategic blunder in modern memory. To put it bluntly, he attacked the wrong
target. While he boasts of removing Saddam Hussein from power, he did far more
than that. He decapitated the government of a country that was not directly
threatening the United States and, in so doing, bogged down a huge percentage
of our military in a region that never has known peace.”
And with criticism mounting as
the conflict became more bloody, President Bush has found himself defending,
time and again, on how the war on terror led to Baghdad.
The question is often raised as
to-
Q: What role should U.S. citizens play?
A: It's really essential that Americans take an
interest in learning about how this war began. That's really their
citizenship duty; otherwise they may see their sons and daughters coming home
in pine boxes. At the end of the day, though, it's the November elections that
will determine the course of the war.
Hopefully those of you who take the time
to read this web page will gain some insight as to who, what and why led this
nation to war.
In tracing the roots of America's war in Iraq I
decided to do some research on the Internet to try to learn the truth as to why
and how president Bush and his administration arrived at making the decision to
invade Iraq. I focused on a very influential group of individuals who were
brought in to the administration by V.P. Dick Cheney who are often referred to
as neoconservatives
or “neocons”. They said that the invasion would be a “cakewalk”
and the Iraqis
would greet our troops with flowers. How could such a small group of
individuals wield so much power in influencing U.S. foreign policy?
Individuals, many of whom, had as one of their primary reasons for the invasion, which was to protect the ally
Israel, and not because Iraq was a threat to the U.S.
18. The wars’
aftermath. Civil War or Civil Society?
19. Neocon whitewash?
20. The Generals Speak Out
21. Where Is the Exit Strategy?
22. The truth is finally being told. (Reporters with gullions!)
23. The "Israel Lobby" and its
influence on U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel
24. Post-war Iraq.
25. Postscript .
26. The Real Iraq We Knew .
27. Last Goodbye: US Soldiers from Iraq War .
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/tonkin-g.htm
http://www.luminet.net/~tgort/tonkin.htm
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html
The 1991 Gulf war
U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie’s response to Saddam Hussein
It is possible to ague, however (and many have done so), that Glaspie's
statements that "We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts"
and that "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America" were
interpreted by Saddam as giving tacit approval of his annexation of Kuwait.
Since it is not now possible to know what was in Saddam's mind, this matter cannot
be resolved. Saddam was a dictator who had never visited a western country, and
who lived a in a world where disputes were routinely resolved by force. It is
therefore quite possible that he wrongly interpreted Glaspie's remarks.
It seems unlikely that Saddam would have invaded Kuwait had he been given
an explicit warning that such an invasion would be met with force by the United
States, but Glaspie can only be criticised for not giving such a warning if it
can be established that she knew that Saddam was planning an invasion. There is
nothing in the transcripts to suggest this.
The most that can be argued is that, given the Iraqi troop build-up in the
Kuwait border area, she should have been instructed by the State Department to
give Saddam an explicit warning. Glaspie later testified that she had
given Saddam such a warning, but no mention of this appears in the published
transcripts. This is hardly surprising since these transcripts were released to
further Iraq's ends.
Edward Mortimer wrote in the New York Review of Books in September
1991:
"It seems [likely] that Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion
because he believed the US would not react with anything more than verbal
condemnation. That was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting
with US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State
Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly disavowing any US
security commitments to Kuwait."
Iraq,
Iran, and September 11: A Chronology
by
Jacob G. Hornberger,
December 19, 2002
Glaspie
had given Saddam a green light
The Iraqi Government still
insists that April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein in 1990 before his invasion
of Kuwait. Glaspie "...was informed of Iraq's plans and gave her de facto
approval." America and April Glaspie flatly deny this accusation:
"Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were
going to take all of Kuwait. -- Former Ambassador April Glaspie, in response to
accusations that the U.S. invited Saddam Hussein to take Kuwait" 4
In a May 27, 1999 Christian
Science Monitor article, Carleton Cole writes, "...from a translation
of Iraq's transcript of the meeting, released that September, press and pundits
concluded that Ms. Glaspie had (in effect) given Saddam a green light to
invade."
"We have no opinion on your
Arab-Arab conflicts," the transcript reports Glaspie saying, "...such
as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me
to emphasize the instruction...that Kuwait is not associated with
America."
U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - We
have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with
Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the
instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not
associated with America. (Saddam smiles)
On August 2, 1990 four days
later, Saddam's massed troops invade and occupy Kuwait. _____
http://www..whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html
In war, some
facts less factual
Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious.
| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
September 06, 2002
More recently, in the fall
of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful
testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah.
In the girl's testimony
before a congressional caucus, well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second
Front" and elsewhere, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait
maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the
incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die."
Seven US Senators later
referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five
votes In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked
the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were
like "Hitler revisited."
But just weeks before the
US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise
questions about the validity of the incubator tale.
Later, it was learned that
Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and
had no connection to the Kuwait hospital.
She had been coached – along with the handful of others who would
"corroborate" the story –
by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR
firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the
Kuwaitis to make the case for war.
"We didn't know it
wasn't true at the time," Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security
adviser, said of the incubator story in a 1995 interview with the London-based
Guardian newspaper. He acknowledged "it was useful in mobilizing public
opinion."
How the public relations industry
sold the Gulf War to the U.S. -- The mother of all clients
US
Congressman Jimmy Hayes of Louisiana -- a conservative Democrat who supported
the Gulf War -- later estimated that the government of Kuwait funded as many as
20 PR, law and lobby firms in its campaign to mobilize US opinion and force
against Hussein.4 Participating firms included the Rendon Group, which received
a retainer of $100,000 per month for media work, and Neill & Co., which
received $50,000 per month for lobbying Congress.
Hill
& Knowlton (H&K), then the world's largest PR firm, served as
mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. It's activities alone would have
constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating
American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should
have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice
Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into
Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill &
Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" (CFK) a classic
PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its
collusion with the Bush administration. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti
government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose
only other funding totaled $17,862 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's
budget -- $10.8 million -- went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees.6
http://www.counterpunch.org/tristam1016.html
October 16, 2002
It's been about 40 years since a
president's speeches didn't sound like infomercials. So George W. Bush's prime
time sales pitch last week on slapping a "New Ownership" sign on Iraq
was not surprising for sweating the manipulative bullets of sales pitches --
exaggerations, inflated sincerity, half-truths, outright lies. This isn't a
Bush family specialty. Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Lyndon
Johnson were terrific salesmen, each more or less made for television's blind
spot for hucksters. But for sheer breadth of deception and implications to
thousands of human lives, the Bush performance for a resolution authorizing
Gulf War II can only be compared with Johnson's fabrication 38 years ago that
uselessly condemned 57,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese -- the
Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
The
Iraq war resolution Congress approved with a mob-like majority last week is the
Tonkin of our day. Like Bush with Iraq today, Johnson back then didn't have the
facts to back up his demand for war on North Vietnam. So he invented them.
We are now faced with another
administration urging another congressional resolution that will be used to
authorize war. There will be many opportunities for "interpreting"
alleged violations of agreements concerning disarmament inspections. And there
will be many ways for the Bush administration to exaggerate, dramatize and
publicize what may or may not be attempts to conceal weapons of mass
destruction.
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/pgsd/people/staffpubs/Gar-Tonkin.htm
Former
Pentagon insider: 'When we lie about stuff,' people perish
A
former Pentagon insider talks about Iraq propaganda
http://www.freelancestar.com/News/FLS/2004/042004/04092004/1324501
“But then the
Sept. 11 attacks occurred, and certain people saw a chance to turn a crisis
into an opportunity. Specifically, neoconservative ideologues inside the
administration--Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and others--could taste
their dream of invading Iraq, but the existing intelligence didn't lend much
support for a Mesopotamian adventure.
Enter
the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. Conceived by Wolfowitz, the office grew
out of the Near East South Asia directorate's Iraq desk and was officially
launched in the summer of 2002--just as the administration was readying its big
sales pitch for war.”
This guy is a modern-day Hitler
The following is
an excerpt from Norman Solomon's new book, War
Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, just
published by John Wiley & Sons.
Iraq II: The Comparison Fits Like an Old Shoe
When the second Bush administration returned
Saddam Hussein to the center stage of U.S. foreign policy, it was time to
reprise countless stories about his evilness, while again eliding the cozy
relationship that Hussein had long enjoyed with Washington. (When I accompanied
former U.N. assistant secretary-general Denis Halliday to a private meeting in
Baghdad with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz in late January 2003, Aziz
glanced at the latest Time magazine, which Halliday had just given to him.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the cover. "Rumsfeld has
become quite a warmonger," Aziz said. "He did not seem so when he
came and visited us in the 1980s.") The Iraqi dictator had not ordered an
attack on another country since 1990, and his military capabilities had
obviously diminished -- but comparing him to Hitler fit like an old shoe.
One of many politicians eager to keep putting it
on was "moderate Republican" Christopher Shays, who repeatedly
invoked memories of the Third Reich to justify an invasion of Iraq. Days before
Congress passed the war resolution in October 2002, Shays went on MSNBC and
used the Hitler analogy as part of a slick repertoire about Saddam.
After more than two decades of representing a
San Francisco area district in Congress, Tom Lantos was the ranking Democrat on
the House International Relations Committee by the time an invasion of Iraq was
on the near horizon. He was not to be outdone at conflating Baathist Iraq with
the Third Reich, as though Saddam's forces were somehow comparable to Germany's
Wehrmacht. In early October 2002, Lantos pulled out all the stops on Capitol
Hill as he proclaimed: "Had Hitler's regime been taken out in a timely
fashion, the 51 million innocent people who lost their lives during the Second
World War would have been able to finish their normal life cycles. Mr.
Chairman, if we appease Saddam Hussein, we will stand humiliated before both
humanity and history."
(Iraq responsible for 9/11? Weapons of mass destruction. Neocons)
The real issue is how this administration manipulated the intelligence to make a case for war against Iraq and sold it to an ignorant public with the acquiescence of Congress. Senator Robert Byrd in his Senate remarks of Feb. 12, 2003 said
"To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of
human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the
brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors
of war.
Yet,
this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully
silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the
nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing."
Iraq was not
responsible for 9/11. There were a number of individuals who would lead you to
believe that it was, such as Laurie
Mylroie, William Kristol and the rest of the so called
neoconservatives who were advising the president. These individuals set the
stage for invading Iraq by writing books and op ed pieces in newspapers, making
presentations on the subject at seminars sponsored by think tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute.
As a C-SPAN junkie I
remember when Mylroie appeared on C-SPAN's Book Notes to talk about her book Study
of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a book
published by AEI in 2000. At
the time I did not give it much thought but individuals such as Peter
Bergen who referred to her as the neocons favorite conspiracy theorist
was able to piece things together. Bergen wrote-
"Historians will
be debating that question for years, but an important part of the reason has to
do with someone the average American may well have never heard of: Laurie
Mylroie. Mylroie has an impressive array of credentials that
certify her as an expert on the Middle East, national security, and, above all,
Iraq. She has held faculty positions at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College
and worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as well as serving
as an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. During the
1980s, Mylroie was an apologist for Saddam's regime, but reversed her position
upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and, with the zeal of the academic
spurned, became rabidly anti-Saddam. In the run up to the first Gulf War, Mylroie
with New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote Saddam
Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller
translated into more than a dozen languages.
Until
this point, there was nothing controversial about Mylroie's career. This would
change with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the first act of
international terrorism within the United States, which would launch Mylroie on
a quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the most important source of
terrorism directed against this country. She laid out her case in Study
of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a
book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie and the neocon
hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the '93
Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John Bolton and
the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly
blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing." I.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of
staff, is thanked for his "generous and timely assistance." And it
appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis
of Study of Revenge: His
then-wife is credited with having "fundamentally shaped the book,"
while of Wolfowitz, she says: "At critical times, he provided
crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." Wolfowitz
having read the book became convinced that Saddam and Iraq were responsible for
9/11 and made the invasion his top priority.
Her
book was followed by books by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In the
book Present
Dangers Kristol and Kagan's basic
argument is that the US needs to exercise world domination, here spun as
"benevolent global hegemony" and that there are a number of external
obstacles which stand in the way and must be dealt with. These are Iraq,
Iran, North Korea, China, the Middle East peace process and an
independent Europe.
The
one distasteful aspect of the book is the attempt to wrap the entire endeavor
in the cloak of "American morality", understood as protecting
citizen's liberties. This is breathtaking stuff from accomplices in the most
extensive attempt to incinerate the Constitution in recent history.
In the
book The
War over Iraq
Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor at the New Republic,
cogently make the case for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Kristol is also
Chairman of the Project for the
New American Century, a non-profit think-tank established in 1997. As of May 20, 2008, The Project for the New American Century website was inoperable.
A message saying that the account has been suspended and to contact the billing department was put on the sites page.
Could it be that Kristol and his fellow NEOCONS are feeling the heat and are running scared?
In
it's Statement
of Principles the PNAC raises the question "Does the United States
have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American
principles and interests?" I'm of the opinion that in Kristol's mind he
substitutes the word Israel for American.
One of
the four consequences listed in the S of P is " we need to strengthen our
ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes
hostile to our interests and values". Again substitute Israel
for democratic allies and Iraq, Iran, Syria for regimes.
Another
book is The
Threatening Storm by Kenneth Pollack. Pollack's chapter in which he justifies a
U.S. invasion of Iraq is highly flawed, for a very important reason. Having
stated convincingly why continued sanctions, and even strong inspections, would
not be enough to topple Saddam, and having made the case that he must be
toppled before he can truly menace the world, Pollack concludes that no course
remained but a U.S. invasion.
Philip Zelikow is of the type of whom it is customarily
said: "He has impeccable establishment credentials". He served as
executive director of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Between 2001
and 2003 he served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
(PFIAB), which reports directly to the president. Before his appointment to
PFIAB he was part of the Bush transition team in January 2001. And in 1995 he
co-authored a book with Condoleezza Rice.
It's recently been revealed that
in 2002 he publicly stated that a prime motive for the upcoming invasion of
Iraq was to eliminate a threat to Israel.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and
David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from
power" as an "Israeli strategic objective." Perle,
Feith,
Wurmser
were all on Bush's foreign policy team on 9-11.
In 1998, eight members of
Bush's future team, including Perle,
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that
"should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein.
On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser
called for U.S.-Israeli attacks "to broaden the (Middle East)
conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli,
Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting with either the
United States or Israel is suicidal." "Crises can be
opportunities," added Wurmser.” Moreover,
the majority of those in and out of government who were Middle East experts had
grave concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq and serious doubts about
claims that Saddam's regime posed an urgent threat to American security. What,
then, gave neoconservatives like Wolfowitz
and Perle such abiding faith in their own positions?
Another
person is revisionist historian Stephen Sniegoski. This is what
he says about Laurie Mylroie and the Iraq war-
"The
real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism
orchestrated by Saddam. In the meeting, says Richard A.
Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie,
a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate
conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The Mylroie
reference is very interesting. Mylroie is a neocon, and
other neocons have picked up and trumpeted her Iraq-involvement thesis.
While Saddam was still in power she claimed that al Qaeda was a front for
Iraqi intelligence. And she emphasized Saddam's purported weapons of mass
destruction. Her book was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute,
a leading neocon think tank. Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins,
released the book in paperback. HarperCollins is owned by pro-neocon/pro-Zionist
Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox News Channel, which, in turn,
booked Mylroie as an Iraq expert during the build-up to the war. Fox
News was the leading media cheerleader for the war, and Mylroie's
commentary served the same war-propaganda purposes as Ahmed Chalabi's bogus
intelligence.” (See "Osama, Saddam, and the Bombs" by David
Plotz, Slate, September 28, 2001.)
"The
Republican attack machine is trying to paint Clarke as some kind of partisan
Democrat — an unlikely characterization of a 30-year career in
government at the highest levels, starting out in the Reagan administration.
What we are witnessing here is yet the latest episode in an extraordinary
series of whistle-blowing accounts by government insiders: Ambassador Joe
Wilson, Lt. Col. Karen
Kwiatkowski, and now Clarke, all patriotic Americans
pointing to a dangerous vulnerability."
During the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq
Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a hearing hosted by the House Committee on
Government Reform on 12 September
2002. C-SPAN televised his remarks. He spoke about Conflict
with Iraq - An Israeli Perspective. This was another example of
Israel’s complicity in support of the U.S. Iraq invasion.
The following is an excerpt from his talk.
“History’s judgment should inform our own judgment today.
Did Israel launch that preemptive strike because Saddam had committed a
specific act of terror against us? Did we coordinate our actions with the
international community? Did we condition that operation on the approval of the
United Nations?
No, Israel acted because we understood that a nuclear-armed Sadaam would place
our very survival at risk. Today, the United States must destroy that same
regime because a nuclear-armed Sadaam will place the security of our entire
world at risk.”
Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz's war on Iraq began before 1998 - now it's official.
http://wwwonlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=1499
Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz undertook a full-fledged lobbying
campaign in 1998 to get former President Bill Clinton to start a war with Iraq
and topple Saddam Hussein's regime. They claimed that the country posed a
threat to the United States, according to documents obtained from a former
Clinton aide.
This new information begs the
question: what is really driving the Bush Administration's desire to start a
war with Iraq if two of Bush's future top defense officials were already
planting the seeds for an attack five years ago?
In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
were working in the private sector. Both were involved with the right-wing
think tank Project for a New
American Century, which was established in 1997 by William Kristol, editor
of the Weekly Standard, to
promote global leadership and dictate American foreign policy.
While Clinton was dealing with
the worldwide threat from al Qa'ida and Osama Bin Laden, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
wrote to
Clinton urging him to use military force against Iraq and remove Hussein
from power because the country posed a threat to the United States due to its
alleged ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Jan 26, 1998 letter
sent to Clinton from the Project for the New American Century said a war with
Iraq should be initiated even if the United States could not muster support
from its allies in the United Nations. Kristol also signed the letter.
"We are writing you
because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding,
and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we
have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union
Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for
meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a
new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and
allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of
Saddam Hussein's regime from power."
"We urge you to turn your
Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's
regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political
and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties
in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far
greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to
take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital
interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be
crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security
Council."
Because the letters were written in 1998 it proves that this war was planned well before 9-11 and casts further doubt on the claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
Bush
Advisers Planned Iraq War Since 1990s
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100102_bush_advisors.html
The George W. Bush Administration's
intentions of removing Saddam Hussein from power are not a recent development
by any stretch of the imagination. Top White House officials affiliated with
conservative think tanks and past administrations have been developing
strategies for removing the Iraqi leader since the 1990s.
The president's
real goal in Iraq
Among the architects of this would-be
American Empire are a group of brilliant and powerful people who now hold key
positions in the Bush administration: They envision the creation and
enforcement of what they call a worldwide "Pax
Americana," or American peace. But so far, the American people have
not appreciated the true extent of that ambition.
How We Got Into
This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer
The "outsiders"
from PNAC were now powerful "insiders," placed in
important positions from which they could exert maximum pressure on U.S.
policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is
Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's Chief of Staff,
Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security
Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton is
Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory
board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on that panel as
well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of Rupert
Murdoch's The Weekly Standard.) In short, PNAC had a lock on military
policy-creation in the Bush Administration.
Beyond Osama: The Pentagon’s
Battle With Powell Heats Up
Saddam in the Crosshairs
by
Jason Vest
November 21 - 27, 2001
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0147/vest.php
WASHINGTON,
D.C.—The simmering conflict within the Bush
administration over how to prosecute the next phase of the "war on
terrorism" suddenly flared up last week as the Taliban fled Kabul.
"Where to go next and how big it should be is what's being argued right
now—and Baghdad is what's being debated at
the moment," said a senior Pentagon official. "This is both an
internal discussion at the Pentagon, and one between departments. Our policy
guys are thinking Iraq.
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Matters
have not been helped by the evident, if unstated, endorsement by President Bush
of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's notions of how to deal with both the
Palestinians and the region as a whole The European press has commented more
widely than the U.S. press on the striking similarity between current U.S.
policies in the Middle East and the recommendations prepared in 1996 by several
American admirers of Israel's Likud Party for the then-prime minister, Binyamin
Netanyahu.
That
these admirers are now occupying positions of influence in the
administration is seen as the reason the United States is so eager to
wage war against Iraq, so willing to accept the scuttling of the Oslo peace
process between Israel and the Palestinians and so abrupt in rejecting European
urgings for joint U.S.-European initiatives to promote peace between Israel and
the Palestinians.
THE NEW PENTAGON PAPERS
Will
Americans hold U.S. policymakers accountable?
Karen Kwiatkowski –
A high-ranking military
officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted
the truth to drive the country to war.
In the spring of 2002, I was a
cynical but willing staff officer, almost two years into my three-year tour at
the office of the secretary of defense, undersecretary for policy, sub-Saharan
Africa. In April, a call for volunteers went out for the Near East South Asia
directorate (NESA). None materialized By May, the call transmogrified into a
posthaste demand for any staff officer, and I was "volunteered" to
enter what would be a well-appointed den of iniquity
The education I would receive there was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie -- intense, fascinating and frightening. While the people were very much alive, I saw a dead philosophy -- Cold War anti- communism and neo-imperialism -- walking the corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the clothing of counterterrorism and spoke the language of a holy war between good and evil. The evil was recognized by the leadership to be resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by Islamic clerics and radicals. But there were other enemies within, anyone who dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni.
From May 2002 until February
2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special
Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the
policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure
of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us
working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be
little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed
policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate
and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the
Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative
agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments,
and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what
were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the
president.
While this commandeering of a
narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy
matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of
the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals
alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been
openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a
fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the
country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a
war one year later Americans do not really understand. That is why I have gone
public with my account.
The following report is worthwhile reading since it offers
another point of view about our invasion of Iraq from an Indian perspective.
Note month and year.
Behind the Invasion of Iraq
The Real Reasons for the US
Invasion of Iraq—and Beyond
Nos. 33
& 34, December 2002
The United States’ current strategic agenda is of staggering proportions. It is not secret: rather, it is being discussed openly in the American press and academia; various documents reflecting it, official and semi-official, are in circulation; and the US is implementing that agenda at breakneck speed. By the time this article is published, the US will have begun its bombing and invasion of Iraq, the second third world country to be attacked in less than two years.
Given the massive imbalance of forces, the immediate military success of the current US mission is not in doubt. But its medium and long term prospects hinge not only on the US’s unrivalled military strength, but on three other factors: the US’s own underlying economic condition, which is weakening; the position of other imperialist powers, which is tenuously balanced and may turn into active opposition; and the stance of the world’s people — growing conscious opposition in the advanced world and, crucially, popular explosions and resistance battles in the targeted third world.
The Issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction
Weapons
of Mass Destruction in the Middle East (Iraq was not alone)
http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/
Israel’s
Dimona nuclear facility
. Israel started the construction work at the Dimona site sometimes in early 1958, but it took the United States intelligence community almost three long years to "discover" the site for what it was, namely, a nuclear site under construction.
Vanunu spent 18 years in an
Israeli prison—11 and a half of them in solitary
confinement—for providing evidence of Israel’s
nuclear arsenal to a British newspaper in 1986. “I acted
on behalf of all citizens and all of humanity,” said
Vanunu.
In October 1986, Vanunu, a
nuclear technician who had worked at the Dimona Nuclear Power Plant in the
Negev Desert for 10 years, traveled to London and gave photographic evidence to
The Sunday Times that Israel was secretly developing nuclear weapons.
Two months earlier he had converted to Christianity while traveling in
Australia.
Iraq and Weapons of Mass
Destruction
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/
Subsequent
to George W. Bush's assumption of the presidency in January 2001, the U.S. made
it clear that it would not accept what had become the status quo with respect
to Iraq - a country ruled by Saddam Hussein and free to attempt to reconstitute
its assorted weapons of mass destruction programs. As part of their campaign
against the status quo, which included the clear threat of the eventual use of
military force against the Iraqi regime, the U.S. and Britain published
documents and provided briefings detailing their conclusions concerning Iraq's
WMD programs and its attempts to deceive other nations about those programs.
Where
really are the weapons of mass destruction?
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/2/10/195028.shtml
WMDs were weapons of mass deception that became the pretext for
the grand design. As was a much ballyhooed, and later discredited, park bench
meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the
September 11, 2001, Saudi kamikaze
The amateur strategists in the neo-con camp knew
a lot more about Israel and its need for peace than they did about the
law of unintended consequences, writ large in Iraq, and in the Arab world
beyond.
President
Bush's Statements On Iraq's Weapons Of Mass Destruction
http://writ.news..findlaw.com/dean/20030606.html
Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said about
weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't. Thus, I have compiled these
statements below. In reviewing them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as
explicit and declarative as I had recalled.
Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that
were used for the production of biological weapons."
United Nations Address
September 12, 2002
"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is
rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently
authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons
the dictator tells us he does not have."
Radio Address
October 5, 2002
"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and
biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of
chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a
growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to
disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned
that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the
United States."
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its
nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi
nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his
nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding
facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past.
Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment
needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear
weapons."
Cincinnati, Ohio Speech
October 7, 2002
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had
the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve
agent."
State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves
no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most
lethal weapons ever devised."
Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003
US news media admits
promoting lies about Iraq's WMD
Two of America's most respected newspapers
have admitted that their editors knowingly "resisted" publishing
information that challenged the official excuse for invading Iraq.
There was no evidence to support the allies' claims that Iraq possessed
stockpiles of WMD. Meanwhile, there was ample evidence to prove that the
politicians were lying, and clear ulterior motives to explain why. The
Washington Post concedes: "We should have warned readers we had
information that the basis for this was shakier". The New York Times
confess that their coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have
been".
How the 'Washington Post'
Promoted a War
Editors now admit its news coverage during the run-up to the attack on Iraq
was terribly one-sided. But the editorial page was even worse.
By Greg
Mitchell
By the paper's own admission, in the months before the war, it ran more than
140 stories on its front page promoting the war, while contrary information
"got lost," as one Post staffer told Howard Kurtz.
Paul
Wolfowitz: Not just any optimist
Nov.
17, 2002
Trudy Rubin writes the Worldview column for the Philadelphia Inquirer
This week I had the chance to sit
down with someone who's an optimist about Iraq.
Not just any optimist. I refer
to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's most
persistent advocate of ousting Saddam Hussein.
Wolfowitz' worldview helps clarify the thinking
behind the administration's obsession with the Iraqi leader. (At this delicate
moment in the Iraq saga, with the administration currently committed to U.N.
arms inspections rather than military action, much of our conversation was on
deep background.)
Yes, the administration worries
about Saddam's biological and chemical weapons, the possibility he may get
nukes, and the chance he might pass them off to terrorists. But the goal of
changing the Iraqi regime is part of a much larger project - and I don't mean
grabbing oil or protecting Israel.
The creation of a new Iraq is
central to the administration's vision of the role America should play in the
post-9/11 world.
Back in 1992,
then-Undersecretary of Defense Wolfowitz (who served under Reagan and Bush père)
supervised the draft of an ambitious new defense doctrine. It proposed that the
United States should prevent the rise of any new superpower that could rival
U.S. primacy around the world. The United States would convince would-be
competitors that its dominance was so beneficial it wasn't worth challenging.
When news of the doctrine leaked
to the press, it was watered down. But its essence has become the core of the
Bush administration's new national security doctrine. And Wolfowitz is the
administration's pre-eminent intellectual.
Where does Iraq fit into the
doctrine? Post 9/11, the challenge to U.S. supremacy comes not so much from
states as from international terrorists - and states who aid them. The biggest
threat originates in Muslim countries, including the Mideast.
A U.S. triumph in Iraq would
send a dramatic message. "If we can defeat a terrorist regime in Iraq, it
will be a defeat for terrorists globally," Wolfowitz said in a speech on
Oct. 16. Moreover, "[Saddam's] demise will open opportunities for governments
and institutions to emerge in the Muslim world that are respectful of
fundamental human dignity and freedom...."
In other words, Iraq not only
could become a democracy but could be the launch pad for transforming the
entire Mideast.
Only an a utopian dreamer
could put forward such a vision.
Wolfowitz has little patience
with arguments that war with Iraq could encourage Muslim jihadists. Not for him
the worry that Arab satellite television will inflame the masses with endless
scenes of dead Iraqi civilians and Palestinians suffering under Israeli curfew.
He has repeatedly waved aside fears that Saddam's fall from power will cause
instability in the region.
Part of his confidence stems
from the belief that TV cameras will show Iraqis dancing in the streets of
Baghdad on The Day After, as Afghans did in Kabul
"It is entirely possible
that in Iraq, you have the most pro-American population that can be found
anywhere in the Arab world," Wolfowitz told me, for quotation.
Iraqi opposition activists say
U.S. troops may indeed be welcomed right after they enter Iraqi cities
(provided a war is short and Iraqi civilian casualties aren't large). But
they also say that old suspicions and resentments linger - at past American
betrayals of Kurds and Shiites, and sanctions - and that the warmth may fade
quickly if the troops stay very long.
And then there is the danger
that Iraqis will collapse into struggles among tribes, ethnic groups and
religious confessions over who gets what share of power and oil. Wolfowitz
doubts the likelihood of such chaos. But, he says, "If there is a real
fear about what happens after Saddam goes, you would want the American army
there when he goes."
The problem here is that the
burdens for resolving the chaos would then fall on the shoulders of U.S. forces.
If you take over a country, you own it, unless you can hand off to locals
pretty fast.
To be fair, administration
officials, with some key exceptions, seem aware of the danger of long-term
occupation. They are familiar with the warnings of the noted Mideast scholar
Bernard Lewis, who cautions that Israelis were welcomed at first by local
Lebanese Shiites in South Lebanon. The Shiites were happy to see the departure
of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Israeli troops stayed on for
years and soon were viewed as occupiers. They were bloodied by guerrilla
attacks and ultimately pulled out.
Wolfowitz doesn't advocate the
Japan model of U.S. occupation (as some administration officials have done). In
Japan, a six-year U.S. presence and the proconsulship of General MacArthur
created a democracy in a non-European nation after World War II. This
definitely wouldn't work in Iraq.
Yet how else can one envision
the establishment of democracy in a country that has known only autocracy and
brutal dictatorship?
"If you're looking for a
historical analogy," the soft-spoken, professorial Pentagon official
suggested, "it's probably closer to post-liberation France [after World
War II]."
That one threw me for a bit, but
I think I get it. Led by Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the Free French were looked
down on when they were based in London, but the general became a hero-leader
when the war was over. The Wall Street Journal suggested a parallel this week
between de Gaulle and the exiled Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, of the
Iraqi National Congress.
The parallel is pretty dicey. De
Gaulle was a charismatic general directing organized resistance on the ground.
He came home after five years of exile to a mono-ethnic France untroubled by
interfering neighbors. Germany was prostrate, the United States was the
overlord of Europe. France, a European nation with (admittedly spotty)
experience of democracy, didn't need U.S. tutelage.
No Iraqi exile has anything
like de Gaulle's legitimacy at home.
Certainly not Chalabi, for all his capabilities. Once in Baghdad, U.S.
officials would have to mediate among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Turkmen,
Assyrians, secularists, Islamists, tribal leaders, leftover Baath party
officials, and Iraq's anxious neighbors who will want to intervene.
At best, we will be the
long-term referee behind the scenes, blamed for what goes wrong, suspected of
myriad conspiracies against Iraqis and their oil. Better than Saddam, no
doubt. But a democracy - before, at best, another two decades - is unlikely.
Call me a pessimist. But if the
rosy view of Iraq's potential as role model for the region is driving a desire
for an early war, it is very misguided. If we have to go after Saddam's
weapons, let's do it with eyes wide open.
Otherwise we may wind up like
Israel in Lebanon.
The above column by Trudy
Rubin was very prophetic indeed. In my search for a balanced view of the Iraq
war Rubin by far has been the most accurate of all the reporters writing for
major newspapers.
Willful
Blindness: The Bush Administration and Iraq
By
Trudy Rubin, Worldview Columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer
This
collection of Trudy
Rubin's columns on Iraq covers the period from July 2002 through June 2004.
Read back as her columns predicted with uncanny accuracy before the war what
would happen in Iraq if the Bush administration failed to plan for the real
Iraq as opposed to the Iraq of its imagination. Rubin's predictions were on the
mark. As the situation developed, she outlined steps that might ameliorate the
situation. Few have been taken. In the conclusion, Rubin looks at what must be
done to prevent Iraq from deteriorating into a terrorist haven and to enable
the United States to drawn down its troops.
This
book draws on the author's extensive knowledge of the Middle East based on
thirty years of covering the region, including six years stationed in
Jerusalem and Beirut as a foreign correspondent. Rubin has written continuously
on Iraq for the last two years and taken three lengthy trips to Iraq since the
fall of Baghdad. She has extensive contacts with members of the new Iraqi
government, Iraqi clerics and a broad range of ordinary Iraqis. Whether
familiar with Rubin's columns or not, this book is an excellent way to revisit
the events surrounding the Iraq war and to understand what our nation must do
to call the endeavor a success.
And
then when the WMD’s
were
not found the reason du jour to
invade became “Regime
Change”,”Freedom”,”Democracy”
Regime
Change and Introducing Democracy to Iraq
http://www.rense.com/general29/dbusw.htm
The neoconservatives around George Bush
are crazy. They actually believe the United States can run about the world,
overthrowing governments by force and establishing democracies in their
place.
The deceit
behind the Bush WMD "Investigation"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5618.htm
Mr. Bush is expected to announce
within days the make-up of the panel to investigate why intelligence on which
he said his administration based its claims about Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction did not match what has been found on the ground in Iraq. Brent
Scowcroft, who served as National Security Adviser in Mr. Bush's father's
administration, has been tipped to head the inquiry.
Mr. McGovern said that there was outrage among intelligence professionals that
they were being used as scapegoats. He said that intelligence provided by the
CIA and other intelligence agencies was used selectively by the administration
to support a political decision that it had already made to go to war with
Saddam.
"Especially earlier on, the intelligence they were getting was accurate:
[CIA director] George Tenet stood up to them. But after he was told that Bush
was going to war he caved in," Mr. McGovern said. "There is a sense
of outrage among analysts, at least the good ones. The good ones are leaving.
There are a lot of mid-level managers who are leaving."
What of the charge that It’s About Oil?
Well…
maybe
During
World War I (1914-18),
strategists for all the major powers increasingly perceived oil as a key
military asset, due to the adoption of oil-powered naval ships, new horseless
army vehicles such as trucks and tanks, and even military airplanes. Use of oil
during the war increased so rapidly that a severe shortage developed in
1917-18.
The
strategists also understood that oil would assume a rapidly-growing importance
in the civilian economy, making it a vital element in national and imperial
economic strength and a source of untold wealth to those who controlled it.
Already in the United States, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil
Company, was the world’s richest person.
The French
government was not satisfied with its secondary role in world oil, fearing
the might of the big British and US companies. In an effort to
strengthen and “liberate” France,
the government in Paris set up the Compagnie Francaise des Pétroles in 1924 to
take up the French share in Mesopotamia – now a
British colony(2)
renamed Iraq
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2002/1000history.htm
Oil, Currency and the
War on Iraq
It will not come as
news to anyone that the US dominates the world economically and militarily. But
the exact mechanisms by which American hegemony has been established and
maintained are perhaps less well understood than they might be. One tool used
to great effect has been the dollar, but its efficacy has recently been under
threat since Europe introduced the euro.
Oil
from Iraq : An Israeli pipedream?
16
April 2003
Israel
stands to benefit greatly from the US led war on Iraq, primarily by getting rid
of an implacable foe in President Saddam Hussein and the threat from the
weapons of mass destruction he was alleged to possess. But it seems the
Israelis have other things in mind
An intriguing pointer to one potentially significant benefit was a report by
Haaretz on 31 March that minister for national infrastructures Joseph
Paritzky was considering the possibility of reopening the long-defunct
oil pipeline from Mosul to the Mediterranean port of Haifa. With Israel lacking
energy resources of its own and depending on highly expensive oil from Russia,
reopening the pipeline would transform its economy.
Have
1,000 U.S. Souls Died for Oil?
September 13, 2004
Ivan Eland
The tragic milestone of 1,000
U.S. deaths in the Iraqi quagmire should cause introspection about why the
United States really went to war and whether it has been worth it. While the
Bush administration’s public justifications never really
added up, evidence exists that there was a hidden agenda behind the invasion of
Iraq: securing oil.
This unique volume compiles in one place a
history of US intervention against Iraq and the devastating consequences for
the people and the region. It shows the ways in which war today is a
continuation of that history, but also a radical leap to more direct military
control in Iraq and around the world. The “Bush Doctrine” is both built on our
imperial history and yet new and far more dangerous.
The
Real Reasons for the War With Iraq
Although completely unreported
by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet
shocking -- it is in large part an oil currency war. One of the core
reasons for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing
further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum
towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to
pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its
2nd largest proven oil reserves.
Iraq: The
Last Republican Hurrah
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/last_hurrah.htm
An
invasion of Iraq is likely the most thoughtless action in modern history. It
has the support of only two overlapping small groups: neoconservatives
infused with the spirit of 18th century French Jacobins who want to impose
American “exceptionalism”
on the rest of the world, and foreign policy advisers who believe that the primary aim
of U.S. foreign policy is to make the Middle East safe for Israel.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/2/3/170212.shtml
The
Bush neocons tried to connect Iraq to the 9/11
terrorism in order to justify an attack but couldn't get it done,
however much they kept implying that Saddam was complicit. When they failed,
they moved on to the
WMD lies. Their strenuous searching for a justification for attacking
Iraq indicates that their fallacious WMD claims were not the result of error.
In the end they got exactly the results they wanted. The neocons promoted
much of the most extreme WMD propaganda through their Office of Special Plans
and their touting of the deceptive Ahmed Chalabi. In short, all of the
"intelligence errors" enabled the neocon war party to mount
the attack on Iraq that they had so ardently sought for so long."
Neoconservatives a.k.a. neocons. Who are
they? Their influence on U.S foreign policy
The word neoconservative was a term that I was not
familiar with before delving into the issue of whether we were justified in
invading a sovereign country. The more I searched the more I became convinced
that many of these individuals by their actions appeared to show more
allegiance to a foreign country than they did to the U.S.A.
During the 2000 presidential election recount in
Florida one Democratic congressman seemed to monopolize the TV limelight. Robert Wexler
was on CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC 24/7 accusing the Republicans of manipulating and
stealing the election.
His opinion of
President Bush changed after 9/11 when he became a staunch supporter for
the invasion of Iraq. His turn about piqued my curiosity. Why would a died in
the wool Democrat be so supportive of the president’s foreign policy of
pre-emption? Was it because he was a Jewish/American who believed that invading
Iraq would eliminate a country which was more of a threat to Israel than to the
U.S.?
Wexler's Travels
South Florida's bellicose congressman carves up the
Middle East
BY BOB NORMAN
bob.norman@newtimesbpb.com
New
Times Broward-Palm Beach
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2002-10-24/news/norman.html
The
Democrat, whose district spreads from north Broward County to parts north of
West Palm Beach, has been one of the strongest supporters in Congress for
military action in Iraq.
To
really understand Wexler's motivations, though, you must know about
Turkey's relationship with Israel. Any friend of the Jewish state is a friend
of the 41-year-old Wexler's.
Because
of its own interests in the region, principally oil and Israel, America has
helped foster the Ankara-Jerusalem alliance. And, lest our politicians lose
interest, Israel is pushing its key supporters in Congress -- like Wexler --
to advocate for Turkish interests in the United States. Wexler has performed
dutifully in that respect, sponsoring and cosponsoring numerous pro-Turkey
bills. The American Jewish establishment is also doing its part: Just
this past December 18, nine major Jewish groups -- including the American
Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith International, and the Anti-Defamation League
-- wrote President Bush a letter asking that the administration provide Turkey
"debt forgiveness, trade concessions, and/or further International
Monetary Fund relief." In July, Congress authorized Bush to give the
country $228 million in aid.
Money
is one thing; propaganda is another. In July, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, another devout backer of Israel, traveled to Ankara and made
this amazing declaration: "I think a real test of whether a country is a
democracy is how it treats its minorities. And actually it's one of the things
that impresses me about Turkish history, the way Turkey treats its own
minorities."
Here Wolfowitz
proves he's not willing to let the truth get in the way of a good war. He
must be familiar with Turkey's early-20th-century oppression of the Jews. And
for the past 80 years, Turkey has repressed its 15 million Kurds in horrendous
ways, not the least of which has been to ban their language and culture. When
Kurdish rebels rose against the military in 1984, the Turks beat down the
uprising during the next 15 years, killing 30,000 Kurds, destroying more than
3,000 Kurdish villages, and leaving 3 million Kurds homeless, according to
generally accepted figures.
Wexler, in his bullish
bid to help Israel and the West dominate the Middle East, seems oblivious to
such realities. In May 2001, when the congressman traveled to Turkey on a
diplomatic mission, he had war on his mind. "As Iraq's northern
neighbor," he said, "there cannot be an anti-Saddam Hussein strategy
without the full involvement of Turkey."
In
July, the House International Relations Subcommittee on Europe passed a Wexler-sponsored
resolution to commend Turkey and Israel. Wexler hailed it in a press release,
in which he called upon the Middle East "to follow the example set by
these two nations in promoting democracy, peace, and tolerance."
Hawking for Israel
South Florida reps push for war. But who are they
pushing for?
BY BOB NORMAN
bob.norman@newtimesbpb.com
New
Times Broward-Palm Beach
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2002-09-26/news/norman.html
Wexler isn't a new
convert to Bush -- he's just an old loyalist to Israel, a country that, along
with a powerful Washington, DC., lobbying group called the American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is pushing the war on Iraq with a vengeance.
In essence, the Israeli lobby is urging big brother America to come out, flex
its military muscles, and make the Israel-American alliance the dominant power
in the Middle East.
An
orthodox Jew, Wexler has always been a Zionist hard-liner and has
received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel
interests during the past six years. And he's picked up a big stick for the
fight against Iraq. A member of the House committee on international relations,
lately he's been spending an inordinate amount of time traveling around the
country and the world promoting Israel and the war on Hussein.
So
last week, I asked Wexler the obvious question: Who, as you prepare to
send U.S. soldiers to war, are you really representing: South Florida or
Israel?
"Let's
get this straight," he answered. "I'm American. I'm 100 percent American.
I bleed American. Am I proud of my heritage? Yes. I support the state of Israel
and wholeheartedly support an unbreakable bond between the U.S. and Israel...
but there is nothing about my policy that is anything other than American. It
is not driven by Israel. At this point, it is supportive of President
Bush."
I too
believe in a strong alliance between the United States and Israel, but I also
believe that Israel's narrow interests have far too much influence on our
foreign policy. We need a balanced approach in the Middle East. If America
continues to tie itself almost solely to the tiny Jewish state as it thrashes
about in a sea of Muslim Arabs, we're asking for long and widespread warfare in
the region.
Unfortunately,
Wexler and several other Jewish Democrats in Congress, led by
Connecticut's Sen. Joe Lieberman and a gaggle of representatives from
California and New York, are spoiling for that fight. And because these same
politicians can usually be counted on to anchor the Democrats' opposition to
Bush, they have helped to destroy any hope of the party's reining in Dick
Cheney's dogs of war. Of course, a few Jewish members of Congress --
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chiefly -- have opposed the invasion.
Broward
County's own Jewish Democrat in Congress, Rep. Peter Deutsch, is another
near-fanatical, pro-Israel politician who expects to vote for military action
in Iraq and has publicly backed it. But he recently told me that Bush hasn't
yet met his "three-pronged test" for an invasion. Deutsch won't
support war until the president has proven that Saddam has nuclear weapons,
expects to use them on the United States, and is developing a delivery system
to carry out such an attack.
No
such proof has been disclosed, but Deutsch says he fully expects it will be
soon.
The
Washington, D.C.-based Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel has put both
Deutsch and Wexler in its "Hall of Shame" for their pro-Israel
voting records. Powerful lobbying groups like the American Jewish
Congress and AIPAC have "hijacked the agenda" with millions of
dollars in campaign contributions and powerful backers, alleges JPPI
founder Josh Ruebner, adding that politicians like Wexler are "representing
the government of Israel, absolutely. Most American Jewish members of Congress
are guilty of that."
And
it's a dangerous policy, according to Nidal Sakr, a Muslim political activist
from Miami Beach. Wexler and other liberal Jewish hawks are "clearly
serving foreign interests rather than the national interest they are supposed
to be serving," says Sakr, who runs a group called March for Justice.
"The U.S.-Israeli relationship is the largest threat to our national
security and the safety of our citizens. Our support for Israel and its crimes
against Palestinians that have been denounced again and again by the
international community and the United Nations fuels the anti-American
sentiments and feelings of hatred that are being compounded around the
world."
BY BOB NORMAN
bob.norman@newtimesbpb.com
New
Times Broward-Palm Beach
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2002-10-17/news/norman.html
The people don't want to attack Saddam, but our elected
representatives sure do
The
other two Democrats from Broward and Palm Beach counties, Peter Deutsch and
Robert Wexler, didn't surprise anyone when they supported the Toxic
Texan. Both are pro-Israeli hard-liners and high-flying hawks when it comes to
the Middle East (see "Hawking for Israel," September 26). They
weren't alone among Jewish House Democrats: a whopping 17 of 24 jumped on the
Bush-Cheney war machine.
Moran
Said Jews Are Pushing War
The Poisoning of
American Politics
Patrick J. Buchanan
March 17 2003
Moran Said Jews Are Pushing War,"
ran the headline on page one. "Apology denies Anti-Semitism" ran the
subhead on the story.
Even a glance at that Washington Post,
and one knew Jim Moran, bad boy Irish congressman from Alexandria – who has had
more than his share of brawls, personal and political – had stepped
into it, big time. But while the headline was stark, what Moran said and the
context in which he said it, seem far less inflammatory.
Apparently, at an antiwar gathering of
120 folks at St. Anne's Episcopal Church on March 3, a woman arose, identified
herself as Jewish, and noted that while Christian churches opposed to war on
Iraq were represented there, her own faith was not.
Why?
Moran picked up on that and responded,
"If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this
war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."
Now about this comment, it is, first,
wrong. We are going to war because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell are
convinced we must disarm Baghdad – and regime change is the only way to
effect it. Second, according to polls, the Jewish community is only about as
hawkish as the rest of the nation, with 59 percent supporting war.
But how was Moran's statement
"anti-Semitic"? According to my Webster's Seventh New
Collegiate Dictionary, an anti-Semite is "one who is hostile to or discriminates
against Jews." Moran says he answered as he did because the lady
identified herself as Jewish. Indeed, he went on to say to her, "The
leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change
the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."
An exaggeration, sure. But where is the
hatred or hostility toward the Jewish people in Moran's statement? Seeking
moral clarity, I waited for the Post's exegesis of Moran's remarks.
It did not disappoint. Rather than pour
oil on troubled waters, the Post editorial headline screamed, "Blaming the
Jews."
Moran is "unfit for office,"
ranted the Post, as he is "perpetuating a stereotype of Jews as a unified
bloc steering the world in its own interest and against everyone else's."
The Post then put Moran's moral atrocity into a larger historical context:
"Over the centuries anti-Semites
have used this libel to distract attention from their own failings and to
instigate violence and discrimination against Jews. Mr. Moran's comment will be
used to concentrate the poison of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world
where it remains virulent and dangerous."
Oh, come off it. What Moran said was
wrong and insensitive – and he has apologized repeatedly – but from
reading the Post, one would think he was over at St Anne's passing out the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and recruiting for the Black
Hundreds.
As with Trent Lott, it is pile-on time.
Moran's own Democratic leaders, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Tom Daschle, denounced
him. Six Democratic colleagues, all Jewish, have urged his defeat. Six
rabbis called for his resignation. Sophie Hoffman, president of the Jewish
Community Council of Washington, called his words, "reprehensible and
anti-Semitic." Rabbi Jack Moline of Alexandria accused Moran of echoing
"the most scandalous rhetoric of the last century."
Such remarks about any minority group in
America," roared Moline, "whether African-Americans, Hispanics,
Muslims or others, are beyond inappropriate in the rhetoric of a member of
Congress."
But hold on. Would it really be
outrageous to say that were it not for the Cuban community in Miami, America
would be easing the embargo on Cuba? Would it really be anti-Christian to say
that were it not for the Christian Right, the GOP would have abandoned its
pro-life and anti-cloning positions?
Is it really outrageous, reprehensible
and anti-Semitic to say that were it not for the power and influence of the
Israeli lobby and Jewish community, Israel would never have gotten $100 billion
in foreign aid in the last three decades?
The United States is about to launch a
pre-emptive war on a nation that has not attacked us, in accord with a
"doctrine" this president never declared while campaigning. This war
may lead to what its crazed enthusiasts are calling "World War IV,"
the "war on militant Islam."
The American people have a right to know,
before we are dragged into an Armageddon against Islam, who is pushing for this
war and what their motives, open or hidden, may be. And it is not Jim Moran who
is trying to stifle that debate It is a power elite who use smears like "anti-Semite"
to censor and blacklist anyone who stumbles too close to the truths they seek
to conceal.
Embattled
Rep. James Moran is apologizing for claiming that the Jewish community was
pushing the country into war. But the Virginia Democrat's apology failed to
allay the increasing fears in some circles that Jews will be blamed for a war
against Iraq.
Moran,
a seven-term congressman representing a heavily Muslim and Arab-American
district in Washington's northern Virginia suburbs, made his controversial
remark March 3 during a speech in front of 120 people. He was condemned by the
White House and several congressional Democratic leaders. Six area rabbis and a
Washington Post columnist called on him to resign.
The
controversy comes at a time when Jewish community leaders are increasingly
alarmed by the willingness of mainstream media pundits to discuss the influence
of Israel and American Jews on the White House's Iraq policy. In
particular, pundits have highlighted the key role played by several Jewish
hawks in the Bush administration, the lobbying activities of Jewish groups and
the president's strong relationship with Prime Minister Sharon.
AIPAC, the most influential pro-Israel group in
Washington, lobbied last fall in favor of Bush's successful efforts to obtain
congressional authorization to use force against Iraq. Several other Jewish
organizations, responding to press queries at the time, expressed support for
the president's efforts to obtain a United Nations Security Council resolution
authorizing military action to disarm Iraq. Still, staffers in several congressional
offices told the Forward that they had not heard recently from Jewish groups on
Iraq.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/12/185353.shtml
Edward I. Koch
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Yesterday,
I responded to an article in The Washington Post which reported that
Congressman James P. Moran, D-Va., had told his Virginia constituents he held
the Jews responsible for the impending war against Iraq. My letter to him and
to Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi follow. Anti-Semitism must be
crushed with all our energy and in the same way we seek to crush racism.
Senator
Hollings stands by his column
Hollings, who retires in
January after 38 years in the Senate can tell it like it is without fear of
being intimidated by AIPAC and ADL.
“Led by
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a
domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel's security is to
spread democracy in the area.
With
Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush's
policy to secure Israel.”
“U.S.
Sen. Fritz Hollings took to the Senate floor Thursday to defend himself against
charges he had written an anti-Semitic newspaper column.
“I
won’t apologize for this column; I want them to apologize to me,” the Charleston Democrat said of his critics. “Talking about ‘anti-Semitic.’ They’re not getting by with it.”
Hollings, who retires in
January after 38 years in the Senate, went on to blame President Bush for the
war in Iraq. He said U.S. policy in the Middle East had unfortunately put
Israel in “terrible jeopardy.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a
prominent Jewish civil rights group, had taken Hollings to task for writing
that Israel and President Bush’s
desire to court Jewish voters were the reasons for the war in Iraq.”
Gen.
Zinni: 'They've Screwed UP
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/21/60minutes/main618896.shtml
Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what
happened. “I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon
directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their
war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it
- certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating
their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the
responsibility,” he says.
Zinni is talking about a group of
policymakers within the administration known as "the
neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize
American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. They
include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas
Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle;
National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President
Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy
in Iraq.
“I think it's the
worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in
Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were
trying to do,” says Zinni.
“And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives
who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you
know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when
you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize
who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds
are. And I'm not interested.”
So
what is the story?
Magazine sparks outcry by
'outing' Jewish neo-cons
'Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?' article asks
By
Scott Stinson
National
Post
KALLE
Lasn insists he is not anti-Semitic. The editor-in-chief of Adbusters
says he knew an article that purports to "out" a large number of
leading U.S. neo-conservatives as Jewish would be provocative, but he did not
expect the "visceral" reaction that has seen the B.C.-based
anti-consumerism magazine deluged with demands to cancel subscriptions.
"This has made me feel like
I am the victim," Mr. Lasn said in an interview from his Fraser Valley
home, adding he has never seen "this level of threatening phone calls,
this level of swearing, this level of cancelled subscriptions" in his
risk-taking company's 15-year history.
The flashpoint for the anger is
an article Mr. Lasn wrote in the current issue of Adbusters. "Why
Won't Anyone Say They Are Jewish?" posits that a disproportionate number
of leading U.S. neoconservatives are Jewish, a fact Mr. Lasn says is relevant
because "neo-cons seem to have a special affinity for Israel that
influences their political thinking and consequently American foreign policy in
the Middle East."
The implication is the United States is pro-Israel because
many of Washington's policy-makers are Jewish. Readers and critics have taken
particular umbrage at an accompanying list of what Adbusters calls
"the 50 most influential neo-cons in the U.S.," such as
Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz (left, with flag).
Twenty-six, including Mr. Wolfowitz, have black dots next to their names to
denote they are Jewish.
"It's an old tactic,"
said Ed Morgan, the Ontario chairman of the Canadian
Jewish Congress (CJC). "They were counting the number of Jews in the
U.S. Communist party back in the '50s. But it's still startling to see a list
and see an asterisk next to Jewish names. "Jewishness and a particular
political position do not equate," Mr. Morgan said. "The point is to
address issues of policy on their merits. Ethnicity is beside the point."
Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai
Brith Canada, said Adbusters "must have been short of news to look at
that kind of a thesis." He noted the administration of former president Bill
Clinton had several Jews in positions of influence, yet that administration
"bent over backwards" to appease Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Mr. Lasn, however, is
unrepentant. The Adbusters Web site includes the original article, a selection
of positive and negative responses from the public and a follow-up piece from
the editor-in-chief that says if the list
"were a list of dentists or firefighters ... that would indeed be offensive",but because the neo-cons "are the most influential [sic] political/intellectual force in the world right now" it is "necessary to put them under a microscope."
Expanding on that theme over the
telephone, Mr. Lasn said the U.S. neo-cons "are the most powerful group of
people in the world. They are intellectual thugs who have the power to start
wars and stop wars. So because this group is so powerful, we decided it's OK to
point out ... how it's 50% Jews."
Daniel Pipes, (right) director of the U.S. think-tank
Middle East Forum, is on the Adbusters list, with an asterisk. He said
the magazine's project is absurd "because of the implication that religion
defines politics." "There are plenty of leading Jews against the war
in Iraq. There are plenty who are neo-cons. It's no guide whatsoever to a
person's political leanings."
He also said the list is inaccurate,
both in identifying neo-conservatives and Jews. Lists that point out
"dangerous" high-profile Jews are nothing new, Mr. Pipes said, adding
he has found his name on many such compilations posted on the Internet. But it
is unusual for a magazine with the profile of Adbusters, which boasts a
circulation of 120,000 copies monthly -- two-thirds in the United States -- to
undertake such an endeavor.
Mr. Dimant said he is
particularly concerned that Adbusters purports to have shed light on the
"Jewishness" of its subjective list of influential Americans -- a
notion reminiscent of decades-old hatemongering theories about secret Jewish
cabals that control the media and world governments. "It's very hard to
run the world banking system and the foreign press from my little office in
Toronto," he said. Mr. Lasn dismisses such talk. "We are not going to
censor ourselves. We are not going to worry about people comparing it to unsavory
things from the past. "Our goal was to launch a debate. We hope it gets
even bigger than it is now." Mr. Morgan said the CJC will have a formal
response, although, "we have not determined what course of action we're
going to take"
*******************
Dennis Prager
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31576
Some
Americans apparently believe that we are going to war with Iraq "because
of the Jews." Having written a book explaining anti-Semitism (Why the
Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism, Simon & Schuster , all I can do is
marvel at the durability of anti-Semitism and the eternality of the charge that
the Jews are responsible for everything anti-Semites fear.
In
all fairness, individuals such as Prager should be concerned since-
US Jews Could Pay High
Price for Iraq War
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0316-07.htm
by
Ira Chernus
No one
will ever know for sure whether these neo-cons (notably Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith) really promoted war with Iraq primarily
to help Israel. It is not very likely, as Keller say. If a war in Iraq
"goes bad," though, the truth will not matter. Americans will look
for scapegoats, and the organized Jewish community may be near the head of the
line.
It won't
be just the organizations who will be blamed; it will be "the Jews."
That is certainly unfair. The organizations and their leaders are more
conservative than the whole Jewish population, especially on Israel and the
Middle East. While nearly all the leaders support a war in Iraq, polls
show that 40% or more of U.S. Jews are hesitant, at best, about war. But
the organizations and leaders always claim to speak for all American Jews. Why
shouldn't most American non-Jews believe them and assume all Jews are to blame?
These
Jewish groups and leaders have struggled hard to gain their enormous influence
on Middle East policy. They have largely achieved their aim. They,
and the many Jews who do support them, have had a free ride. They wield
great clout without any noticeable increase in anti-Semitism. Here's the irony.
If we have the war they want, and it "goes bad," the Jewish community
might pay a steep price in rising anti-Semitism. Are U.S. Jews really willing
to take this risk?
Comment
on Ilana Mercer's 'Blame the Jews'
By Kevin MacDonald
There is nothing inherently
implausible about hypothesizing that minority activist movements like neo-conservatism
would be willing to recruit some majority group members. It makes excellent
marketing sense to have at least some spokespeople who resemble the target
audience.
Mercer also argues that the
elected and senior appointed Bush administration officials, in the main not
Jewish, ought to be held responsible for the "administration's
blunders." This is true, but it does not in the least delegitimize
consideration of what motivated the administration's neoconservative members
and friends – who generally are Jewish.
By
Alan Cooperman
Buchanan denies that his views are anti-Semitic and has not apologized
for them. "We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek
to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests.
. . . What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make
the world safe for Israel," Buchanan wrote in
the March 24 issue of the magazine he edits, the American Conservative.
Do
you know what they're saying already? That the war in Iraq is being planned by
a cabal of extremist Jews. That it is the first part of a Zionist conspiracy to
redraw the map of the Middle East. That Israel stands to be the prime
beneficiary of this war. And it's not just the marginalized skinheads who are
saying this either. It's also mainstream folks who would swear up and down that
they don't have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies.
Anti-Semite?
Are
you an anti-Semite
if you criticize Israel or the U.S, policy towards Israel or point to the
connection of Jewish/American neocons with U.S. policy vis a vis Israel and
their support of the invasion of Iraq?
Let’s look at the example of former Illinois Congressman Paul
Findley who during the 1980’s
began to doubt the wisdom of United States policy in the Middle East. He tried
to broker an agreement between Yasser Arafat under which the PLO would live in
peace with Israel. For his attempts at seeking a peaceful settlement to the
Palestinian/Israeli problem he was branded a “practicing anti-Semite”
AIPAC,
the powerful Israeli lobby was instrumental in Findley’s defeat in the next election. Findley dared to speak out
and he paid with his political future.
They
Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby
by Paul Findley
Editorial
Reviews
The
Washington Post
"Straightforward
and valid."
Book
Description
Exposes the degree
to which pro-Israeli groups are able to suppress free debate, compromise
national secrets, and shape American foreign policy. Findley focuses on
individuals who have stood up to the pro-Israeli forces and brings out their
statements and observations on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy toward
Israel.
The
Holocaust is being invoked to squelch criticism of Israel and U.S. policy
towards Israel. The leading
Jewish/American neocons who promoted the Iraq war will eventually find
protection behind this façade (fence) as conditions in Iraq deteriorate.
Read
“The Holocaust Industry” Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
Professor Norman G. Finkelstein in an iconoclastic and controversial new
study moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy
in American culture to a disturbing examination of recent Holocaust
compensation agreements. It was not until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when
Israel's evident strength brought it into line with US foreign policy, that
memory of the Holocaust began to acquire the exceptional prominence it enjoys
today. Leaders of America's Jewish community were delighted that Israel was now
deemed a major strategic asset and, Finkelstein contends, exploited the
Holocaust to enhance this newfound status. Their subsequent interpretations
of the tragedy are often at variance with actual historical events and are
employed to deflect any criticism of Israel and its supporters.
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein1.html
http://www.serendipity.li/more/finkel.html
http://www.rense.com/general8/intv.htm
Edited
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
http://www.tidsskriftcentret.dk/index.php?id=357
"How did a term, once used
accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the
mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of
Palestinians? Edited by Cockburn and St. Clair, the print and online journal
Counterpunch has become a must read for hundreds of thousands a month who no
longer believe anything they read in the mainstream press beyond the sports
scores. And on the subject of Israel and Palestine, of the Israel lobby in the
US, the current middle east crisis, and its ramifications at home and abroad,
Counterpunch has been unrivalled. Herein you'll find 18 of the finest essays
and articles (from 9 Jews and 9 Gentiles!). A lot of the names will be familiar
- Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Norman Finkelstein, Lenni Brenner, Uri Avnery, plus
the editors. Then, there's former CIA analysts Bill and Kathy Christison, the
trenchant and witty philosopher Michael Neumann, seasoned Capitol Hill staffer
George Sutherland, Will Yeoman's path-breaking essay on Israel and divestment,
Shaheed Alam who became a target of the fanatical Daniel Pipes and Israeli
journalist Yigal Bronner. Plus Kurt Nimmo, Bruce Jackson, Jeffrey Blankfort and
more. This, the first in the new Counterpunch series from AK Press, is a timely
anthology on how silence and complicity in crimes against a betrayed people has
been enforced."
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h092903.html
Ran HaCohen
September
29, 2003
The eve of the Jewish New Year is an
excellent occasion for what Jewish tradition calls Kheshbon Nefesh, or
soul-searching on so-called "anti-Semitism", which has now
become the single most important element of Jewish identity. Jews may believe
in God or not, eat pork or not, live in Israel or not, but they are all united
by their unlimited belief in anti-Semitism.
The
rise of Jewish Anti-Semitism in Israel (I)
By
Steven Plaut
September 13, 2004
One of the great ironies of Jewish history is that the
secular Zionism of the nineteenth century was formulated precisely for the
purpose of offering an alternative to the assimilationism and Jewish
"self-hatred" of the Diaspora.
Zionism arose as a response to both assimilationism
and anti-Semitism. Who then could have dreamed that the fulfillment and
realization of Zionism would be accompanied by the emergence of the most
malignant manifestations of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism, this
in the state of Israel and the land of Zion.
My thesis that the invasion of Iraq was
supported, influenced and promoted by the neocons who had the interests of
Israel in mind should be looked at in the context of the Palestinian / Israeli
conflict and the role that Zionism and it’s
adherents have played in the years leading up to the founding of Israel and to
the present time.
(Unless
the Israel / Palestinian conflict is not resolved there will never be peace in
the Middle East. With the death of Yasser Arafat, Pres.
Bush has a golden opportunity to play an important role in the
peace process.)
Since
some of these neocons have Zionist
leanings it is important to learn something about Zionism in order to
understand what is happening in the Middle East and why we invaded Iraq. The
following links attempt to shed some light on the subject
Understanding
the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
http://www.is-pal.net/zionism.htm
This
site aims to provide authoritative information on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict without polemics. On the theory that less is more, we've scoured the
web and selected the best articles, maps and other materials. Links are
organized by subject and annotated, so you can find what you need quickly.
Middle
East > Politics > Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Has
Israel made an honest effort to seek peace with the Palestinians? The author of
the following book lists the many obstacles that the Israeli government has
placed in the way on the road to a peaceful settlement. Read the “Background”
excerpts. By all means buy the book if you are seeking the truth and the other
side of the story that the US media is afraid to tell.
Image
and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
by Norman
G. Finkelstein
“To resolve what was called the 'Jewish question' - i.e., the reciprocal challenges of
Gentile repulsion, or anti-Semitism, and Gentile attraction, or assimilation -
the Zionist movement sought in the late nineteenth century to create an
overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously, Jewish state in Palestine.! Once
the Zionist movement gained a foothold in Palestine through Great
Britain's issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the main obstacle to
realizing its goal was the indigenous Arab population. For, on the
eve of Zionist colonization, Palestine was overwhelmingly not Jewish
but Muslim and Christian Arab.
Across the mainstream Zionist spectrum, it was understood from the outset that Palestine's indigenous Arab population would not acquiesce in its dispossession. 'Contrary to the claim that is often made, Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine', Zeev Sternhell observes. 'If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking. In general both sides understood each other well and knew that the implementation of Zionism could be only at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.' Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) contemptuously dismissed the 'illusive hopes' of those who spoke about a "'mutual misunderstanding" between us and the Arabs, about "common interests" [and] about "the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples.'" 'There is no example in history', David Ben-Gurion declared, succinctly framing the core problem, 'that a nation opens the gates of its country, not because of necessity but because the nation which wants to come in has explained its desire to it.”
'The tragedy of Zionism', Walter Laqueur wrote in his
standard history, 'was that it appeared on the international scene when there were
no longer empty spaces on the world map.' This is not quite right. Rather
it was no longer politically tenable to create such spaces:
extermination had ceased to be an option of conquest. Basically the Zionist
movement could choose between only two strategic options to achieve its goal:
what Benny Morris has labeled 'the way of South Africa' - 'the establishment of an apartheid
state, with a settler minority lording it over a large, exploited native majority' - or the 'the way of transfer' -
'you could create a
homogenous Jewish state or at least a state with an overwhelming Jewish
majority by moving or transferring all or most of
the Arabs out.”
War and expulsion (transfer)
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_conc1.htm
Stephen
Sniegoski
To
understand why Israeli leaders would want a Middle East war, it is first
necessary to take a brief look at the history of the Zionist movement
and its goals. Despite public rhetoric to the contrary, the idea of
expelling (or, in the accepted euphemism, "transferring")
the indigenous Palestinian population was an integral part of the Zionist
effort to found a Jewish national state in Palestine. Historian Tom Segev
writes:
The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings, first appearing in Theodore Herzl's diary. In practice, the Zionists began executing a mini-transfer from the time they began purchasing the land and evacuating the Arab tenants.... "Disappearing" the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence.... With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer — or its morality.
However,
Segev continues, the Zionist leaders learned not to publicly proclaim
their plan of mass expulsion because "this would cause the Zionists to
lose the world's sympathy." [4]
The most monumental cover-up in media history may be the one I’m about to describe. In my entire experience with American journalism, I have never found anything as extreme, sustained, and omnipresent.
Three and a half years ago, when
the current Palestinian uprising began, I started to look into Israel and Palestine.
I had never paid much attention to this issue before and so –
unlike many people – I knew I was completely uninformed about
it. I had no idea that I was pulling a loose piece of thread that would
steadily unravel, until nothing would ever be quite as it had been before.
When I listened to news reports
on this issue, I noticed that I was hearing a great deal about Israelis and
very little about Palestinians. I decided to go to the Internet to see what
would turn up, and discovered international reports about Palestinian children
being killed daily, often shot in the head, hundreds being injured, eyes being
shot out. And yet little of all this was appearing in NPR reports, the New
York Times, or the San Francisco Chronicle.
There was also little historic
background and context in the stories, so this, too, I began to fill in for
myself, reading what has turned into a multitude of books on the history and
other aspects of the conflict. I attended presentations and read international
reports.
The more I looked into all this,
the more it seemed that I had stumbled onto a cover-up that quite possibly
dwarfed anything I had seen before. My former husband had been one of the
founders of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), an institution known
for its powerful exposés. He and CIR have won numerous well-deserved awards
from Project Censored from the very beginning of its creation.
Nevertheless, the duration and violence of the injustice I was discovering, and
the extent of its omission and misrepresentation – even in
Project Censored itself, seemed unparalleled.
Robin Miller,
a freelance writer in New Orleans, writes with integrity, clarity and passion
on issues of social justice. Visit his web page to learn more about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/3/5/201734.shtml
For many American Jews, anyone who writes disapprovingly of the policies of Ariel Sharon and of his Dionysian neo-conservative backers in Washington is evidence of "classic anti-Semitism." The mere reference to "neo-cons" is interpreted to mean an attack against a "Jewish cabal."
Zionism and Judaism –
Let Us (NETUREI KARTA) Define Our Terms
http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/Zionism/index.cfm
But
first we must ask a simple question. Why has the lie, which equates Judaism and
Zionism, triumphed? Why, has what is so demonstrably false, captured the
citadels of Western public opinion? And, in the end, what can we do about it?
History is invariably written by those who emerge victorious from its
struggles. In the case of the Zionist/Palestinian struggle of the past century
this factor immediately places the Israeli state, its
propagandists and international apologists, in the ideological driver’s
seat.
Second, the suffering of the Jewish people in the Second World War in Europe
created extraordinary sympathy among the peoples of the earth and it was this
sincere and commendable sympathy that has been
incessantly exploited by the Zionist propaganda machine since 1945.
Last, Zionist propagandists are always given to bullying tactics and
censorship. It is very helpful in this regard to read former Congressman
Findley’s book, They Dared to Speak Out. It is the sorry record of the immense
resources that the Zionist lobby invested in destroying the careers of
politicians all across the United States who had voiced some qualms about
this nation’s subservience to Israel.
So, let’s explore some
web pages on the
topic of
neocons so you can decide if the
evidence is anecdotal
or is it factual.
Harley
Sorensen, Special to SF Gate
September 13, 2004
And common
sense tells that we didn't attack Iraq because Saddam is a brutal dictator. He
was a brutal dictator back in the days when we played footsie with him as he
fought Iran. (Do a Google image search for Rumsfeld and Saddam, and you'll find
pictures of Rummy and Saddam shaking hands.)
Historically,
the United States has always been friendly with brutal dictators if it's to our
financial advantage. Currently, there are other dictators afoot; Saddam wasn't
the only one.
And anyone who
can read knows that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
So why did we
go to war with Iraq?
The short
answer is "oil." But that's not the whole story.
Briefly, we
went to war with Iraq because an influential group of conservatives (now known
as "neo-cons") convinced President George W. Bush that it was
in America's best interests to conquer Iraq as a first step toward dominating
the oil-producing nations in the Middle East and eventually the world.
Not
insignificantly, these same neo-cons wanted to eliminate Iraq as a threat to
their darling ally, Israel. Their plan is laid out in detail on the Web
at newamericancentury.org.
So we invaded
Iraq not to save ourselves from weapons of mass destruction, not to rid the
world of a brutal dictator and not to avenge the murders of Sept. 11. We
invaded Iraq because Bush and his pals think America should rule the world.
That's why we
can't win. The rest of the world isn't going to let us win. The rest of the
world might admire us, but they do not want to be dominated by us.
And that's why
we should get out of Iraq today. Not tomorrow, not next week, not a year from
now, but today.
Try as we may,
we are not going to turn Iraq into a model democracy. The Sunnis don't want
democracy. The Shiites don't want a democracy. The Kurds don't want a
democracy.
The Saudis do
not want a new democracy as a neighbor. Nor do the Kuwaitis. Nor do the Syrians.
None of the countries in that region with despotic rulers want us to succeed.
And don't think for a moment they're above slipping terrorists into Iraq to
kill Americans.
The plan to
conquer Iraq was half-baked from the start. Our troops were not properly
trained or equipped to do the job given them. (Sent to the desert in jungle
fatigues? Not given body armor? Completely untrained in handling prisoners?)
There was no
"exit plan" because we never intended to exit. The plan was, and is,
to build military bases in Iraq and stay there forever as cock of the walk in
the Middle East.
Many of our
European friends, who have a sense of history, knew better than to get involved
in such a fool's mission
Bush may be the
idealist other people think he is, but his grandiose plan for controlling the
world has at least one fatal flaw: it depends, childlike, on the good will of
all involved.
Yet, not even
the U.S., the alleged "good guy" in this mess, has demonstrated
purity. Our leaders see Iraq as a place to make money. So Bush & Co. have
set up their friends to cash in on the rebuilding of Iraq, a job that should be
done (for pay) by the people who built it in the first place: Iraqis.
We can't win in
Iraq. Hardly anybody wants us to. The longer we stay there, the more Iraqi
children end up maimed or dead, the more of our young men and women die.
Clearly, our
government lied to us, and to the world, to get us into this war. That alone
should tell us it's wrong.
More neocon background:
PNAC - Project for the New American Century. Neocon foreign and defense policy think tank. Includes: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, Abrams, and Podhoretz.
JINSA- The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs is committed to explaining the link between US. national security and Israel’s security. Served on Advisory Board: Cheney (1994), Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle.
Rumsfeld- Cheney’s pick for Secretary of Defense
Wolfowitz- Earliest critique of Bush I's decision to leave Saddam in Power. Time magazine's "godfather" of the 2nd Iraq war. Served under Cheney in first Iraq war.
Wurmser- Cheney’s Middle East advisor
Feith- Undersecretary of Defense (to Wolfowitz) for policy
Perle- Rumsfeld’s pick for chairman of Defense Policy Board. Forced to step down as chairman, but still on the Board.
Libby- Cheney’s Chief of Staff. Wrote controversial “Defense Planning Guidance” with Wolfowitz in 1992 for Cheney. Wolfowitz and Libby were upset that Bush 1 did not remove Saddam.
Abrams- Top Mideast advisor on the National Security Council. Author of Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America. Son-in-law of Podhoretz. Pled guilty to making false statements to Congress.
Podhoretz- Now retired editor of Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee. Received Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, Current focus is the war on terrorism. Calling it world war four, he predicts it will last for generations.
They are
specifically represented by Richard Perle, Bill Kristol &
Richard Brooks (WEEKLY STANDARD), Paul Wolfowitz, Fred Barnes, Morton
Kondracke, Charles Krauthammer, Frank Gaffney (former aid to Richard Perle
and WASHINGTON TIMES columnist), Robert Kagan (Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace), columnist Cal Thomas, a dispensationalist, and
others.
Most
neoconservative defense intellectuals
have their roots on the left, not the right
The weird men behind George W Bush's war
[Neocons]
are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyite movement of the 1930s
and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and
1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no
precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud
party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's
Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for
"democracy" They call their revolutionary ideology
"Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really
Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud
strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination
for people such as the Palestinians.
Serving Two Flags:
Neocons, Israel and the Bush Administration
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May_2004/0405020.html
Since
9/11, a small group of “neoconservatives” in the administration have
effectively gutted—they would say reformed—traditional American foreign and
security policy. Features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use
of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations and the
principle instruments and institutions of international law...all in the cause
of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security.
Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons’ past academic and professional associations,
writings and public utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is
the alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon
and the Israeli right wing. The administration’s
new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that, as
perhaps does the destruction, with U.S soldiers and funds, of the military
capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent neocon campaign against
the other two countries which constitute a remaining counterforce to Israeli
military hegemony in the region—Iran
and Syria.
One might
wonder how, with security histories like these, Messrs. Bryen and Ledeen have
managed to get second and third chances to return to government in highly
classified positions.
The explanation is that they,
along with other like-minded neoconservatives, have in the current Bush
administration friends in very high places. In particular, Bryen and Ledeen
have repeatedly been boosted into defense/security posts by former Defense
Policy Council member and chairman Richard Perle (who recently quietly resigned
his position), Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
As previously mentioned, in
1981 Perle, as DOD assistant secretary for international security policy (ISP),
hired Bryen as his deputy. That same year, Wolfowitz, then head of the State
Department Policy Planning Staff, hired Ledeen as a special adviser. In 2001
Douglas Feith, as DOD Under Secretary for Policy, hired or approved the hiring
of Ledeen as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans.
Pro-Israel
Lobby Has Strong Voice
It's
worse than you thought: pro-Israel influence on US policy
In 2003, the
organization reported spending $1.28 million on lobbying.
The Bush
Administration's Dual Loyalties
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison1213.html
by KATHLEEN and
BILL CHRISTISON
former CIA political analysts
"Dual loyalties" has
always been one of those red flags posted around the subject of Israel and the
Arab-Israeli conflict, something that induces horrified gasps and rapid
heartbeats because of its implication of Jewish disloyalty to the United States
and the common assumption that anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso
facto an anti-Semite. (We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term
in the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should be identical
and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to
Israel as they do to the United States. But this is clearly not the usual
reaction when the subject of dual loyalties arises.)
CYA –
Foxman using the “AS” words to hide behind when the issue of “Dual Loyalties”
is brought up.
Dual-loyalty bias worries US Jews
Some
Jewish officials are more concerned about the US authorities' apparent interest
in snaring two America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffers in an
alleged spy scandal than with the future of AIPAC or their own efforts in
Capitol Hill.
"There
are a lot of questions to ask: Why all this energy, all this effort?" said
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), relating
to the disclosures that Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin allegedly shared top
secret intelligence information with two high-level AIPAC staffers. "It's
a very broad investigation in terms of the persons interviewed. Why engage in a
sting vis- -vis Jewish institutions? There are a lot of questions
unanswered."
Foxman
suggested that the FBI's interest in AIPAC may point to underlying bias, and a
suspicion among US authorities that Jews in America are more loyal to Israel
than to the US. That is especially troubling to the ADL, because the
dual-loyalty charge carries with it anti-Semitic overtones for many American
Jews.
"One out of three Americans believes that American Jews
are more loyal to Israel than the United States. That's a classic anti-Semitic attitude," Foxman said.
"Washington is not immune."
Indeed,
Foxman and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations suggested, this might factor
into decisions to reject US Jews for foreign-service jobs –
something American Jews have complained about for some time.
Hoenlein
said he gets complaints all the time from Jews claiming they've been denied
access to security-sensitive posts because they are Jewish.
"There
have been reports of people being denied security clearance again, and whether
it's related to this or not we can't tell," Hoenlein said.
FBI
spokeswoman Debbie Weierman said the bureau had no comment.
When
AIPAC brought 5,000 supporters to its annual policy conference in Washington
three weeks ago, the organization sought to demonstrate publicly that its work
would not be hampered by the controversy surrounding the two ex-AIPAC officials
caught up in a spy scandal.
And
to all outward appearances, it seemed that the group was not suffering much
fallout from the disclosure that Franklin allegedly handed over intelligence
information to AIPAC research director Steven Rosen and Iran analyst Keith
Weissman.
AIPAC
moved quickly to fire the two, paid for lawyers to defend them against any
possible espionage charges and announced to conference delegates that, in the
words of executive director Howard Kohr, "Your presence here today sends a
message to every adversary of Israel, AIPAC and the Jewish community that we
are here and here to stay."
But
behind this veneer of strength, officials at Jewish groups that work with
Capitol Hill say they are monitoring closely a situation that could change if
Rosen and Weissman are indicted. There is some concern that if they are
criminally charged, a high-profile espionage trial, similar to the Jonathan
Pollard case, could stoke fears among some in America, including US officials,
that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US.
"Things
did not turn out exactly as predicted," said Neil Goldstein, executive
director of the American Jewish Congress. "They said there is nothing to
it; it'll all go away. Clearly, they've taken actions now that belie that, and
clearly there are things that are still going on."
"What
can I tell you? It has us all nervous," said David Zweibel, executive vice
president for government and public affairs at Agudath Israel of America.
"It
is in general a time of some nervousness about our relationships on Capitol
Hill and, more generally, in federal Washington," Zweibel said.
Nevertheless, he allowed, "There has not yet been any tangible sign of
pulling back or reluctance or anything in terms of ongoing relationships."
For
now, Jewish organizational officials insist that AIPAC's troubles have not
really affected them or their work.
"We
have not been impacted, to the best of our knowledge," said Foxman.
"Nothing has changed vis- -vis Congress. We meet on many issues, including
the Middle East."
Hoenlein
echoed that sentiment. "Operationally, I would say that it has not
impacted in any way that we can discern," he said. "I think the community
should stand by AIPAC and Rosen and Weissman, who have served the community and
made great contributions."
Even
if the two are indicted – which some news reports based on
anonymous sources have suggested is imminent – that
should not change anything, he said.
"Indictments
are not convictions," Hoenlein said. "From what we know, it would be
very hard to convict somebody for what has been said so far."
Underlying
Jewish groups' continued support for AIPAC is the conviction many share that
Rosen and Weissman were set up in an FBI sting operation that hinged upon the
cooperation of a Pentagon analyst who already was in trouble with the law for
disclosing top secret information related to America's national defense.
The
analyst, Franklin, was arrested in May, posted bond and had a preliminary
hearing in his case on Thursday.
He
is charged with leaking top secret information to two men –
said to be the AIPAC staffers – at an Arlington, Virginia restaurant on
June 26, 2003, as well as with breaking FBI rules on the handling of classified
documents. The information Franklin allegedly shared with the AIPAC staffers –
who are not mentioned by name in any of the indictments against Franklin –
related to potential attacks on US and Israeli agents in Iraq by Iranian-backed
forces.
While
Franklin, a 25-year veteran of the Department of Defense, seems to have broken
the law by disclosing classified information that could be used "to the
injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation," it
is not at all clear that Rosen and Weissman broke any laws by receiving it.
Even
though they reportedly relayed that information to an Israeli Embassy official –
so far, the most damning piece of information against them –
they also notified the White House and reportedly have said that they were
unaware the information was classified.
AIPAC
officials say they have been reassured that the organization is not being
investigated.
"It's been told
consistently it's not a target of this," said Nathan Lewin, the Washington
lawyer AIPAC hired to deal with the case. "Whatever the government does
with regard to this investigation, it is not directed at AIPAC."
************
The
word "neoconservative" originally referred to former liberals and
leftists who were dismayed by the countercultural movements of the 1960s and
the Great Society, and adopted conservative views, for example, against
government welfare programs, and in favor of interventionist foreign policies.
A group of today's "neocons" now hold key positions in the Pentagon
and in the White House and they even have a mole in the State Department.
It is really a conflict between the neoconservatives, who are largely responsible for getting us into the war against Iraq, and those they disparagingly call the "realists," who tend to be more cautious about the United States' efforts to remake the Middle East into a democratic region.
*********
In the context of
the United States, it refers to a right-wing movement of
former political leftists. As Michael Lind has observed,
"Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left,
not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of
the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into
anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind
of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or
political history.
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Neo-conservative
Jun 19th 2003
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1859009
A strange waltz involving George
Bush, ancient Greece and a dead German thinker
FROM the moment George Bush
moved into the White House, the search has been on for the man (or woman) who
is pulling his strings. Is the puppeteer Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld? Karl
Rove or Condoleezza Rice? Big Oil or old-time religion? Each has had their
spell in the spotlight. But now all are forgotten in the fuss about the most
surprising suspect of all: Leo
Strauss, a political philosopher who died in 1973 and wrote such
page-turners as “Xenophon's Socratic Discourse”.
Leo
Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
By Jim Lobe,
AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2003.
Many neoconservatives like Paul
Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use
deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.
What
would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence
agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A
follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get
the job done -- people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the
political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find
the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The
"right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests
Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective
Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP)
-- an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links
with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Leo
Strauss, Conservative Mastermind
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazinecom | May 31,
2002
IN
CONTEMPORARY American intellectual life, there is only one school of
conservative intellectuals that has taken root in academia as a movement. They
are the Straussians, followers of the late Leo Strauss (1899-1973). The hostile
New Republic referred to Straussians as "one of the top ten gangs of the
millennium." Strauss is an ambiguous, sometimes even troubling, figure,
but he is essential to the conservative revival of our time and he offers the
intellectual depth we are so desperately in need of.
Pentagon’s
Office of Special Plans
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/6-19-03/discussion.cgi.55.html
SELECTIVE
INTELLIGENCE
They
call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small
cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush
Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul
Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change
of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and
analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have
produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public
opinion and American policy toward Iraq.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:49247
Neocons' plans for global domination top the annual list of stories ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media.
The neoconservative blueprint for U.S. military domination is hardly a secret. A group called the Project for a New American Century--a think tank founded by hawks who now hold prominent jobs in the White House--released a version of it three years ago
None
of the major news media in this country have reported on this document or on
the fact that Bush is so closely following its script.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0910-01.htm
While many of the
hawks are under the wing of Wolfowitz, several conservatives hold
influential positions in Cheney's office and in the State Department. During
the Clinton administration, many of them served with far-right,
defense-oriented think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy and the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
Conservatives'
Uncivil War Over Iraq
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16764-2003Mar23?language=printer
Frum "repeatedly refers to his own Jewishness. It is hard to recall any previous presidential aide so engrossed with his own ethnic roots. Frum is more uncompromising in support of Israel than any other issue, raising the inescapable question of whether this was the real reason he entered the White House."
Invading Iraq: Converging
u.s. and Israeli Agendas
http://desip.igc.org/ConvergingAgendas.html
Key
people in Bush administration are on record as strong supporters of Israel and
of regime change in Iraq, among them: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of
Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith, Under Secretary, Arms
Control and International Security, John R. Bolton, senior director on Middle
Eastern affairs on the National Security Council, Eliot Abrams.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j032502.html
"Like
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, a pair of rightist factions in the Bush administration
are hoping to take the United States on the road to Baghdad. Unlike the beloved
Hope-Crosby 'road' pictures, however, the adventure in Iraq is not going to be
funny."
Were Neo-Conservatives’
1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/220.html
Years before
George W. Bush entered the White administration of House, and years before the
Sept. 11 attacks set the President George W. direction of his presidency, a
group of influential Bush. neo-conservatives hatched a plan to get Saddam
Hussein out of power.
The group, the
Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, was founded in 1997. Among its
supporters were three Republican former officials who were sitting out the
Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul
Wolfowitz.
In open letters to
Clinton and GOP congressional leaders the next year, the group called for the
removal of Saddam Hussein’s
regime from power and a shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle
East, including the use of force if necessary to unseat Saddam.
And in a report just before the
2000 election that would bring Bush to power, the group predicted that the
shift would come about slowly, unless there were some catastrophic and
catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.
Americas
Neoconservatives
Neoconservatives are former
liberals (which explains the "neo" prefix) who advocate an aggressive
unilateralist vision of U.S. global supremacy, which includes a close strategic
alliance with Israel. Let's start with one of the founding fathers of the
extended neocon clan: Irving Kristol. His extensive resume includes waging culture
wars for the CIA against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War
and calling for an American "imperial" role during the Vietnam War.
Papa Kristol, who has been credited with defining the major themes of
neoconservative thought, is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative
powerhouse on her own. Her studies of the Victorian era in Britain helped
inspire the men who sold Bush on the idea of "compassionate
conservatism."
Inter Press Neo - Con
Archives
The
overall IPS mission
Its main objective shall be to contribute to development by
promoting free communication and a professional flow of information to
reinforce technical and economic co-operation among developing countries.
http://tomweston.net/neocom.htm
Contrary
to appearances, the neoconservatives do not represent a political movement, but
a small, exclusive club with incestuous familial and personal connections.
What do William Kristol, Norman
Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, and Robert Kagan have in common? Yes, they are all
die-hard hawks who have gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11
attacks. But they are also part of one big neoconservative family -- an
extended clan of spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for
generations.
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html
The
U.S. Media…… Objective or Subjective in reporting the
news?
The complicity of the media in
supporting the neocon Iraq agenda can be understood in light of it’s
support of Israel in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the Middle East.
As can be seen from this list of lists, the entire anti-Israel contingent of the punditocracy does not add up to a single George Will or William Safire, much less a Wall Street Journal or US News. It remains to be seen whether unqualified support for all of Israel's actions is really in that tortured nation's best interest in the long run. Sometimes the bravest and most valuable advice a trusted friend can give is: "STOP."
The
Neocon line up
The
following names were entered in a GOOGLE search using key words “name
– neocon – Iraq –
war” or “name-neo
conservative”
You
will soon notice a pattern of association of these Jewish Americans with neocon
thought i.e.; invading Iraq and support of Israel. Granted, that some of the
Google search links are of a questionable source but select those that are not
considered extremist.
Click on the names
Jeffrey Bergner Eliot Cohen Midge Decter Aaron Friedberg
Jeffrey Gedmin Reuel Marc Gerecht Eli S. Jacobs Donald Kagan Robert Kagan Frederick Kagan Charles Krauthammer Martin Peretz Norman Podhoretz Randy Scheunemann Gary Schmitt William Schneider, Jr. Richard H. Shultz Henry Sokolski Stephen J. Solarz Leon Wieseltier David Frum Daniel Pipes Bernard Lewis
Phillip Zelikow Kenneth Adelman Elie Wiesel Judith Miller A number of Washington think tanks and organizations have been complicit in following an agenda in their support of invading Iraq.
Top
Neoconservative Think Tanks
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/spheresInfluence.html
Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA),
http://www.jinsa.org/home/homehtml
JINSA has a
Two-Fold Mandate:
1. To educate the American public about
the importance of an effective U.S. defense capability so that our vital
interests as Americans can be safeguarded; and
2. To inform the American defense and
foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in
bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=JINSA
JINSA Advisory Board Note the number of
ex US military brass
Lt. Gen. Anthony Burshnick, USAF (Ret.)
http://www.jinsa.org/about/adboard/adboard.html?documentid=712
General James
B. Davis, USAF (ret.)
http://www.jinsa.org/about/adboard/adboard.html?documentid=1344
Adm. Jerome Johnson, USN (Ret.)
http://www.jinsa.org/about/adboard/adboard.html?documentid=728
LTG Paul G.
Cerjan, USA (Ret)
http://www.jinsa.org/about/adboard/adboard.html?documentid=2047
David P. Steinmann, Chairman
http://www.jinsa..org/about/adboard/adboard.html
More on JINSA
(Disinfopedia)
http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientprofile.php?recipientID=19
http://www.aei.org/scholars/filter.all/scholar_byname.asp
Washington Institute for Near East
Policy
http://www.washingtoninstituteorg/
http://www.fpif.org/papers/02right/box1_body.html
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
The
Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
http://www.memri.org/aboutus.html
Although MEMRI's
viewpoint is pro-Israel, it is not the case that it contains no criticism of
Israel or is monolithically anti-Arab.
A very influential organization with the
Center for Security Policy is the Center's National
Security Advisory Council, whose members hold senior positions with the
Bush administration.
Google
Search Results Keywords"Center For Security Policy"
Herman Kahn (1922 - 1983) was founder of the Hudson Institute.
Neo-Con
Invasion
by Samuel Francis
August 5, 1996
Not only at Commentary and The Public Interest,
but also at National Review, The American Spectator, The
Weekly Standard, The New Republic and the Wall
Street Journal editorial pages, as well as at the Heritage Foundation, the
American Enterprise Institute, and other leading conservative think-tanks,
neo-conservative influence became routine.
Neo-conservatives also began taking over
the tax-exempt foundations that had provided funding for most of the
conservative organizations. These foundations, smaller than the Establishment
liberal giants like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, had been established
by wealthy conservative families to serve philanthropic goals. But in the 1980s
neo-conservatives succeeded in taking over many of their administrative
functions, using their positions to re-direct the funds which the foundations dispensed
- turning off the spigot to conservative groups they deemed not
"credible" and turning it on for those they favored.
Pro
Israel lobby that has an inordinate amount of
influence on U.S. foreign policy vis a vis the Palestinian / Israeli
crisis.
President
Speaks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee AIPAC
May 18, 2004
AIPAC is doing
important work I hope you know that. In Washington and beyond, AIPAC is calling
attention to the great security challenges of our time. You're educating
Congress and the American people on the growing dangers of proliferation.
You've spoken out on the threat posed by Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
You've always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and
their networks. In a dangerous new century,
your work is more vital than ever.
More often than
not, the politician who tried to face down the American Israel Public Action
Committee came out the worse for it.
Speaking Out
Blow to
Pro-Israel Lobby in U.S. by
Paul Findley
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0397/9703016.htm
By anyone’s standard,
AIPAC is one of the most powerful and intimidating lobbies in Washington and certainly
the most influential in foreign policy. In practical terms, it exists for one
purpose: to assure the enactment of legislation favorable to Israel. To that
end, it helps elect supporters of Israel and defeat its critics. It is as
thoroughly political as Congress itself.
Pro-Israel
PAC Contributions to 2006 Congressional Candidates
2005-2006 Cycle
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May-June_2006/0605031.html
Iraq a historical perspective
The question has been asked why did the
president’s advisors fail to consult with
historians who specialized in Arabic studies to learn about the history of the
region before making the decision to invade. What is troubling is that Britain
had suffered a defeat in Iraq after world war one trying to bring peace to the
region. One would only have to GOOGLE key words to learn about Iraq such as was
done below.
Those
who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
http://hnn.us/articles/990.html
My son will be twelve on September 27. If
he had been born in 1964, the year of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he would
have turned eighteen in 1970, the height of US troop strength. My son, unlike
the son of George I, would have been drafted to fight in a war that most
recognize as illegitimate. Americans who fought bravely and died in the rice
patties of Southeast Asia were betrayed by the President, the Congress and the
People of the United States in 1964. All three had a patriotic duty to question
the lies of the day, but they sat by and did nothing.
I hope that Americans learn their
history. I do not want my son to die in an unjust quagmire without end.
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia..org/wiki/History_of_Iraq
Iraq: a
century of war and rebellion
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/iraqhtml
Since the state of Iraq was created early
this century, the working class in the area have suffered brutal exploitation
and repression at the hands of the rival ruling class groups competing for
power. As if dealing with these home grown gangsters wasn't enough, they have
also faced the bullets and bombs of the global capitalist powers (especially
Britain and America) seeking to control the oil wealth of this part of the
world.
Meanwhile opposition political organizations such as the Iraqi
Communist Party and the Kurdish Democratic Party have consistently made deals
with both Iraqi regimes and the global powers at the expense of those who they
claimed to be leading in resistance to the state. Despite all this, the working
class has shown itself a force to be reckoned with, toppling governments and
sabotaging war efforts. This brief chronology charts some of the key moments in
a century of war and rebellion.
The Great Iraqi
Revolution 1920
http://www.onwarcom/aced/data/india/iraq1920.htm
Local outbreaks
against British rule had occurred even before the news reached Iraq that the country
had been given only mandate status. Upon the death of an important Shia mujtahid
(religious scholar) in early May 1920, Sunni and Shia ulama temporarily put
aside their differences as the memorial services metamorphosed into political
rallies. Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, began later in that month; once
again, through nationalistic poetry and oratory, religious leaders exhorted the
people to throw off the bonds of imperialism. Violent demonstrations and
strikes followed the British arrest of several leaders.
Britain
Tried First. Iraq Was No Picnic Then.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/2003/0720britain.htm
The public, the distinguished military
analyst wrote from Baghdad, had been led "into a trap from which it will
be hard to escape with dignity and honor."
"They have been tricked into it by a
steady withholding of information," he said. "The Baghdad communiqués
are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have
been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows."
He added: "We are today not far from
a disaster." Sound familiar? That was T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia —
writing in The Sunday Times of London on Aug. 22, 1920, about the British
occupation of what was then called Mesopotamia. And he knew. For it was
Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence and the intrepid British adventuress Gertrude Bell
who, more than anyone else, were responsible for the creation of what was to
become Iraq. A fine mess they made of it, too.
Iraqi Whispers Mull
Repeat of 1920s Revolt déjà vu all
over again
Published on
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0127-08.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq -
Whispers of "revolution" are growing louder in Baghdad this month at
teahouses, public protests and tribal meetings as Iraqis point to the past as
an omen for the future.
Iraqis remember
1920 as one of the most glorious moments in modern history, one followed by
nearly eight decades of tumult. The bloody rebellion against British rule that
year is memorialized in schoolbooks, monuments and mass-produced tapestries
that hang in living rooms.
http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/index.html?page=/iraqinfo/sum/hist/history.html
The
territory of modern Iraq is roughly equivalent to that of ancient Mesopotamia,
which fostered a succession of early civilizations. The history of Mesopotamia
began with the civilization of the Sumerians,
who emigrated from the highlands of Iran and northern Anatolia in about 3000
BC. Two kingdoms, Sumer and Akkade, combined in about 2350 BC to form one
nation under King
Sargon of Agade. In about 2000 BC the Amorites
assumed control. Their king, Hammurabi,
made Babylon a famous city (see Babylonia),
though he is best known for his code of laws.
After his death came invasions by the Hittites and
then by the Kassites,
who formed the Kingdom of Assyria about 1350 BC. The Kassites originally had
their capital at Ashur, but they moved it in 720 BC to Nineveh, opposite the
modern city of Mosul.
http://www.msnbc.com/avantgo/839269.htm
Did Saudi Princess Give Money to
9/11 Hijackers?
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/19/195041.shtml
Since 1979, the Wahhabi
establishment has spent an estimated $70 billion on Islamist missionary work,
ranging from the funding of some 10,000 madrassas in Pakistan to the
construction of thousands of mosques and seminaries and community centers all
over the Muslim and Western worlds. Jihad, or holy war, against Western
heathens was the fundamentalist creed.
Israel – Ally, Friend or Foe?
A Revisionist Historian’s Thesis
The war on Iraq: Conceived
in Israel
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm
In the following essay The author
attempts to flesh out that thesis and show the link between the war position of
the neoconservatives and the long-time strategy of the Israeli Right, if not of
the Israeli mainstream itself. In brief, the idea of a Middle East war has been
bandied about in Israel for many years as a means of enhancing Israeli
security, which revolves around an ultimate solution to the Palestinian
problem.
Five Israelis were
seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11,
2001 ...
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1102-07.htm
THERE was ruin
and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of
men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men
celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it
played out before their eyes.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html
Prior to 9/11, the FBI had discovered the
presence of a massive spy ring inside the United States run by the government
of Israel. This seems a harsh gratitude from a nation which obtains 10% of its
annual budget from the American taxpayer, $3+ billion a year. Over the years,
American taxpayers have been required to send Israel more than four times what
the US spent to go to the moon.
Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
Millions
saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw
them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning
that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible
connection to Israeli intelligence.
Israel Is
Spying In And On The U.S.? Part 1
BRIT
HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the
Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty
to conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence. At first,
Israeli leaders claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took
responsibility for his work.
Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are
Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have
known things they didn't tell us before September 11. Fox News correspondent
Carl Cameron has details in the first of a four-part series.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm
Israel Is
Spying In And On The U.S.? Part 2
/SPAN>Tonight, in the second of four
reports on spying by Israelis in the U.S., we learn about an Israeli-based
private communications company, for whom a half-dozen of those 60 detained
suspects worked. American investigators fear information generated by this firm
may have fallen into the wrong hands and had the effect of impeded the Sept 11
terror inquiry. Here's Carl Cameron's second report.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7544.htm
Israel Is Spying
In And On The U.S.? Part 3
BRIT HUME, HOST: Last time we reported on
an Israeli-based company called Amdocs Ltd. that generates the computerized
records and billing data for nearly every phone call made in America. As Carl
Cameron reported, U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks
fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by
information leaking out of Amdocs.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6480.htm
Israel Is
Spying In And On The U.S.? Part 4
Carl Cameron has reported on a
longstanding government espionage investigation. Federal officials this year have
arrested or detained nearly 200 Israeli citizens suspected of belonging to an
"organized intelligence-gathering operation." The Bush administration
has deported most of those arrested after Sept. 11, although some are in
custody under the new anti-terrorism law.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5133.htm
After years of denials, Israel finally
admitted Pollard, a U.S. Navy civilian analyst, was not a "rogue
agent," as it originally claimed, but a spy for Israeli intelligence.
Pollard caused enormous damage to U.S.
national security. He gave Israel top-secret U.S. military intelligence and
diplomatic codes; names of nearly 100 U.S. agents in the Mideast, who were then
"turned" by Israel; NSA code-breaking techniques and targets;
intercepts of foreign communications; and U.S. war-fighting plans for the
Mideast.
According to CIA sources, Pollard
provided Israeli intelligence with names of important American agents inside
the former Soviet Union and Russia who had supplied information on East Bloc
weapons and war plans.
How the agents' names were linked to the
secrets they supplied - a major breach of basic intelligence security - remains
a mystery.
Juan Cole
J. Cole is
Professor of History at the University of Michigan
Here is my take on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal in the Pentagon.
It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in
the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States,
and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria
included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9/11 would give them
carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective
wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars
that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to
increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if
someone else's boys did the dying).
Lawrence
Franklin espionage scandal
Important new
details of the U.S.-Israeli espionage case involving Larry Franklin, the
alleged Pentagon spy, two officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee, and an intelligence official at the Embassy of Israel emerged last
week. Two AIPAC officials—who have left the organization—were indicted
along with Franklin on charges of "communicating national defense information
to persons not entitled to receive it." In plain English, if not
legal-speak, that means spying.
But as the full
text of the indictment makes clear, the conspiracy involved not just Franklin
and the AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, but at least several
other Pentagon officials who played intermediary roles, at least two other
Israeli officials, and one official at a "Washington, D.C. think
tank." It's an old-fashioned spy story involving the passing of secret
documents, hush-hush meetings and outright espionage, along with good-old-boy
networking.
By
SAM HUSSEINI
[This
survey of Israeli spying on the US was compiled in 1997.]
The Washington
Post reported in a front-page story on May 7th, 1997 that US intelligence had
intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the
possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State
Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the
Israelis had commented that they may get the letter from "Mega"--
apparently a codename for an Israeli agent within the US government.
"They Always Get What
They Want"
Sometimes the act is simple theft. One
official says, "Israelis were caught in the Pentagon with unauthorized
documents, sometimes scooping up the contents of 'in boxes' on desk tops."
He recalls that because of such activity a number of Israeli officials were
told to leave the country, No formal charges of espionage have ever been filed,
and Israel covered each such exit with an excuse such as family illness or some
other personal reason: "Our government never made a public issue of
it." He adds, "There is a much higher level of espionage by Israel
against our government than has ever been publicly admitted,"
The official recalls one day receiving a list
of military equipment Israel wanted to purchase, Noting that "the Pentagon
is Israel's 'stop- and-shop,'" he took it for granted that the Israelis
had obtained clearances. So he followed usual procedure by circulating it to
various Pentagon offices for routine review and evaluation:
One office instantly returned the list to me
with a note: 'One of these items is so highly classified you have no right to
know that it even exists.' I was instructed to destroy all copies of the
request and all references to the particular code numbers. I didn't know what
it was. It was some kind of electronic jamming equipment, top secret. Somehow
the Israelis knew about it and acquired its precise specifications, cost and
top secret code number. This meant they had penetrated our research and
development labs, our most sensitive facilities.
A
Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda
by Victor Ostrovsky
Chapter
27 tells about the propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein (p.247). Iraq
targeted Iranian cities using information from American satellites. Pages 250-1
tell how a reporter (who knew too much) was lured into a fatal mission. Then
there is the planted story of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction".
Page 259 tells of the safest sanctuary around - an airport! Chapter 30 tells of
President George Bush's visit to the Madrid peace talks, and the failed
assassination attempt. Chapter 31 explains Robert Maxwell's partnership with
the Mossad, and why he had to be silenced. It was not that he knew too much,
but that he began to talk too much under pressure of bankruptcy. Chapter 31
ends the book with his tour of Europe to promote his first novel A problem
occurred in Belgium; Victor knew of the corruption of the Belgian police force.
Victor then realized that his connection in the Mossad was no longer reliable
(p.290).
CYA
Spy-scandal
lobby blitz -AIPAC secures wide backing after secrets charges
This post has been
removed from "The Hill" web page.
Lobbyists for an
influential pro-Israel group launched into congressional overdrive when trails
of a Pentagon spy scandal led to their Washington office.
Soon after media outlets reported on the scandal late last
month, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists and their
political liaisons across the country asked Democratic and Republican lawmakers
to issue public statements in support of America’s premier pro-Israel
group.
Charging anti-Semitism,
lawmaker calls for new head of AIPAC spy probe
Guess who?
A
US lawmaker demanded that the FBI official heading a Pentagon spy probe be
replaced, alleging the agent has "a record of unfairly targeting
Jews."
Congressman
Robert Wexler made the charge in a letter to US President George W. Bush,
calling for a probe into alleged anti-Semitic acts by David Szady, a senior FBI
counterintelligence official leading the bureau's investigation of alleged
espionage by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). "I
urge you to investigate Mr. Szady's purported anti-Semitic record ... and
examine whether or not he should be leading this case," the letter
released by the Florida Democrat's office.
The USS Liberty, with 294 men aboard,
arrived near the Gaza Strip in the Eastern Mediterranean at 9:00 on the morning
of June 8, 1967. This was the fourth day of the Arab-Israeli war later to be
known as "The Six Day War."
http://home.cfl.rr.com/gidusko/liberty/
They do not want this matter investigated. They called me an
http://ussliberty.org/schneider.txt
Refusal to
Investigate Israel’s 1967 Attack on
USS Liberty a “No-Brainer”:One Legislator’s
Story
Attack on the
Liberty: Lifting the “Fog of War”
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/June_2004/0406026.html
The
bare bones are these: The intelligence ship Liberty, AGTR-5, on June 8,
1967 was describing a slow, dogleg pattern a little less than 13 miles off the
Egyptian coast in the Eastern Mediterranean. Without warning, rocket-firing
Israeli jets, followed after an interval by torpedo boats, pummeled her to
near-death; 821 separate holes would later be counted in the scorched
superstructure.
An
Israeli torpedo blew a 40-foot hole in the Liberty’s hull, devastating the cryptological spaces
below decks and killing 25 U.S. National Security Agency technicians. The spy
ship’s defensive armament comprised
a mere four machine guns. These had been judged adequate, insofar as she was a
noncombatant in international waters. The Israeli attack continued for an hour
and a quarter. When the smoke cleared, 34 Americans were dead, another 172 lay
wounded.
The
story of the intelligence ship in a sense resembles the Liberty herself:
both refuse to go down. The heartbreaking saga is kept afloat by mutually
antagonistic partisans—I
dub them the “deliberates” and the “accidentalists.”
Trying to win the war for the hearts and
minds of the Iraqi people let alone the Muslim nations will be very difficult
when they are exposed to web pages such as the one below. The Internet and
satellite TV have made it easy for the pro Muslim media to spread their
propaganda message. This is another problem that our chicken hawks did not
take into account when they made the decision to invade Iraq. Warning: Graphic
images of war.
http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage
Aljazeera has come a long
way since it was launched in November 1996.
Today the channel that sent shockwaves through
the whole Arab world from its very first day on air has become a global name
which people, governments, and decision-makers cannot afford to ignore.
http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml
The Electronic Intifada (EI), found at
electronicIntifada.net, publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference
materials about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian
perspective. EI is the leading Palestinian portal for information about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its depiction in the media.
by Joel Beinin
http://www.mediamonitors.net/joelbeinin1.html
“Why do they
hate us?” several reporters asked me in the days
following the horrifying, criminal attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
In fact, they — the great majority of Arabs and Muslims — do not hate
us, the American people. Americans who travel to the Arab or Muslim world are
usually welcomed and treated with great generosity
However, many
Arabs and Muslims who would never condone or commit acts of terror such as
those perpetrated on Sept. 11 have become increasingly angered by the foreign
policy of the United States government and its impact on the Middle East.
The criminal
and fanatic fringe of political Islam — elements like Osama Ben Laden and Al
Qaeda organization — has emerged from this broader anger,
which has been brewing for many years. Yet because most Americans know so
little about the Middle East, they do not know why our government's policies
are so disliked.
The longest
standing grievance is the Arab-Israeli conflict. This has been exacerbated by
Israel's disproportionate use of force in attempting to suppress the
Palestinian uprising over the last year, which has been extensively broadcast
on Arab television
Mubarak:
Arabs Hate U.S. More Than Ever
http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/239663|top|04-20-2004::09:25|reuters.html
Apr 20, 9:00 AM (ET)
PARIS (Reuters) - Arabs
in the Middle East hate the United States more than ever following the invasion
of Iraq and Israel's assassination of two Hamas leaders, Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak said in comments published Tuesday.
Mubarak, who
visited the United States last week, told French newspaper Le Monde that
Washington's actions had caused despair, frustration and a sense of injustice
in the Arab world.
"Today there
is hatred of the Americans like never before in the region," he said in an
interview given during a stay in France, where he met President Jacques Chirac
Monday.
He blamed the
hostility partly on U.S. support for Israel, which assassinated Hamas leader
Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi in a missile strike in the Gaza Strip Saturday weeks
after killing his predecessor, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
"At the
start some considered the Americans were helping them. There was no hatred of
the Americans. After what has happened in Iraq, there is unprecedented hatred
and the Americans know it," Mubarak said.
An
Issue Too Hot for Fahrenheit?
By Ciro Scotti
At
a Massachusetts political rally, Michael Moore leveled some well-deserved
zingers at the media, while ducking a key question
DOUBLE STANDARD. As already observed, the man has a
zinging wit. And mostly he's right about the media drinking the Administration
Kool-Aid on Iraq and being afraid to ask the tough questions. Many in the media
were shameful weenies on Iraq, and maybe we do have tunnel vision about the
electorate.
But Moore has a double standard about being duped about weapons of mass
destruction. He defends John Kerry's vote to invade Iraq because the Democratic
about-to-be-nominee like so many other Americans believed in the
Commander-in-Chief. The press doesn't get that same pathetic pass.
And despite Moore's brilliant use of humor and pathos to deliver a political
broadside, Fahrenheit is seriously flawed. A critic as tough as Michael Moore
could make the case that the great auteur has foisted on the country an
argument against U.S. involvement in Iraq that avoids the central reason behind
the invasion. Talk about being chicken-hearted and missing the big story.
The film goes on about filial revenge and oil, but it never ventures onto
really touchy turf -- namely the role of fiercely pro-Israel neocon hawks in
convincing Bush to go to war. The elephantine Mr. Moore conveniently fails to
mention that other pachyderm in the Democratic room. Why didn't Fahrenheit go
there, Mr. Moore?
( Could it be that Rahm Emmanuel, former Clinton adviser, current congressman from Illinois, staunch supporter of Israel, has a brother, Ari Emmanuel, who just happens to be Michael Moore's agent.)
Why Iraqis Rebel
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 13, 2004
Another neocon who was a proponent of
invading Iraq is Daniel Pipes. Read his comments as to why the Iraqi people are
against the “liberators”. Why
didn’t Pipes with his vast knowledge of Muslim history pose these same arguments in
opposing the invasion.
“Iraqis do not feel they must
accept guidance from the occupation forces. Rather, they immediately showed a
determination to shape their country’s future.”
“As a predominantly Muslim
people, Iraqis share in the powerful Muslim reluctance to being ruled by
non-Muslims. This reluctance results from the very nature of Islam, the most
public and political of religions.”
“This explains why one finds a
consistently strong resistance to rule by non-Muslims through fourteen
centuries of Muslim history. Europeans recognized this resistance and in their
post-crusades global expansion stayed largely away from majority-Muslim
territories, knowing these would awesomely resist their control.”
“This history suggests that
the coalition’s
grand aspirations for Iraq will not succeed. However constructive its
intentions to build democracy, the coalition cannot win the confidence of
Muslim Iraq nor win acceptance as its overlord. Even spending US$18 billion in
one year on economic development does not improve matters.”
“I therefore counsel the
occupying forces quickly to leave Iraqi cities and then, when feasible, to
leave Iraq as a whole.”
The wars’ aftermath.
Civil War or Civil Society?
What went
wrong.
The
testimony of Drs. Toby
Dodge and Juan
Cole
Committee on Foreign Relations
April 20, 2004
“The biggest US
failure in Iraq to date lay in American inability to understand the workings of
Iraqi society.”
“The
United States made a key strategic error in declining to post enough US troops
to Iraq in the post-war period to establish good security. A country the size
of Iraq probably required 400,000
to 500,000 troops to keep it orderly in the wake of the collapse of the
state.”
The Generals Speak Out
Gen. Joseph P.
Hoar (USMC-ret.), a four-star general, was Commander in Chief, U.S. Central
Command (1991-94), commanding the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf after the
1991 war. He also served in the Vietnam War, as a battalion and brigade advisor
with the Vietnamese Marines. He was interviewed by Jeffrey Steinberg on May 6,
2004.
EIR: I was at
an event, where both Gen. [Anthony] Zinni [USMC-ret.] and Chas Freeman, former
U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, spoke, and this was about eight months before
the outbreak of fighting, in March 2003, and they both basically thought that
the real troubles would begin after the "hot phase" of combat, when
American forces would be there as an occupying force. And they rejected the
neo-con and Cheney thesis, that this would be a cakewalk and we'd be greeted as
liberators.
What was your
sense of the neo-con vision of what was going to happen in Iraq?
Hoar: Well I
think that there were two problems: The first one was that they created a set
of circumstances that didn't exist on the ground, and they were aided and
abetted in this process by Ahmed Chalabi, who, to this day, is still on the U.S.
government payroll. And Chalabi is a fraud. He was in the early 1990s, when I
first came across him. Tony Zinni has spoken out against him, and got in a lot
of trouble with [Sen.] Trent Lott [R-Miss.], for fighting to prevent the
Congress from giving Chalabi's Iraqi Congress $94 million a few years ago.
Chalabi very
quickly realized that the neo-cons wanted to hear certain things, and he
obliged them, by giving them information, including planting erroneous
intelligence All of the stories, from dancing in the streets, to the locations
of weapons of mass destruction, were all fabrications. And the people in the
government bought into this, and there's some evidence that they even cooked
the books, with respect to intelligence information, so that they could
cherry-pick unrefined information that had come to the United States, through
intelligence sources, in order to make the case.
EIR: How
significant a linkage do you see, between the Israel/Palestine situation, and
the challenges on the ground in Iraq, and throughout the whole region?
Hoar: There's
enormous significance. And there are many people in government and elsewhere in
the United States that have attempted to decouple the inter-connectedness of
these two issues. They are connected, because 1.2 billion Muslims—worldwide, but
largely spread out between the Philippines and all the way across South Asia
and North Africa to Morocco—believe that the United States has
unjustly taken the part of Israel, in the Palestine/Israel
confrontation. Many of our activities in the region, including the invasion of
Iraq, are connected to our support for Israel.
And so, when
the President stands with Mr. Sharon, and makes statements that are patently
not in congruence with the work of the Quartet and the Road Map that had been
put together by the Quartet—namely, the United States, the EU,
Russia, and Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General—that that is immediately read as another
example of how the United States unjustly supports Israel. And in fact, the
timing of it could not have been worse, given the internal unrest that exists
right now in Iraq, and then, on top of that, the events of this maltreatment of
Iraqi prisoners.
So, I think
that the neo-conservatives had their day, by selling to the President the need
for invasion of Iraq. I think it's now time for a clean sweep—and it has been
for some time, in my judgment—to get rid of these people. And, to see
if we can put together a more coherent policy than has existed for the last
couple years.
Gen. Zinni: 'They've Screwed
Up'
(CBS) Retired General Anthony Zinni is one of the most respected and outspoken military
leaders of the past two decades.
From 1997 to 2000, he was commander-in-chief of the United States Central
Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East. That was the same
job held by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf before him, and Gen. Tommy Franks after.
Zinni spent
more than 40 years serving his country as a warrior and diplomat, rising from a
young lieutenant in Vietnam to four-star general with a reputation for candor.
Following his retirement from the Marine Corps, the Bush administration thought
so highly of Zinni that it appointed him to one of its highest diplomatic posts
-- special envoy to the Middle East.
But Zinni broke ranks with the administration over the war in Iraq, and now, in
his harshest criticism yet, he says senior officials at the Pentagon are guilty
of dereliction of duty -- and that the time has come for heads to roll.
“There has been
poor strategic thinking in this,” says Zinni. “There has been
poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are
going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over Niagara Falls.
I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody
responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure.”
Who specifically
is he talking about?
“Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of
defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that
planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for
the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and
everything else, then you bear responsibility,” says Zinni. “Certainly those
in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they
ought to be gone and replaced.”
Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known
as "the
neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of
Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel.
They include Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy
Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and
Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Zinni believes
they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy
in Iraq.
“I think it's
the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in
Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were
trying to do,” says Zinni.
“And one
article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who
describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic.
I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that
are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly
didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic
religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested.”
Adds Zinni: “I know what
strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they
have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don't
believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in
Washington that doesn't know where it came from.”
Zinni said he believed their strategy was to change the Middle East and
bring it into the 21st century.
Zinni, who now
teaches international relations at the College of William and Mary, says he
feels a responsibility to speak out, just as former Marine Corps Commandant
David Shoup voiced early concerns about the Vietnam war nearly 40 years ago
“It is part of your duty. Look, there
is one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea
that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put
troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and
troops were dying as a result,” says Zinni.
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Breaking ranks with the White House and his Republican leaders in
Congress, Rep. Doug Bereuter of Nebraska has said in a letter to constituents
the U.S. military action in Iraq was a mistake.
The
Iraq war was a "costly mess" with no quick way out, wrote Bereuter,
vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a senior member of the
House International Relations Committee.
"I've
reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence
and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it
was a mistake to launch that military action especially without a broad and
engaged international coalition," he said in the letter dated Aug. 6.
Republican
leaders in Congress have supported President Bush's decision to invade Iraq on
grounds that it had weapons of mass destruction that posed a danger to the
United States. No stockpiles of such weapons have been found.
But
Bereuter, who has resigned his seat in the House of Representatives to become
president of the Asia Foundation, expressed dismay over the decision to go to
war.
"The
cost in casualties is already large and growing, and the immediate and
long-term financial costs are incredible," he wrote, reflecting on his
2002 vote in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.
"Our
country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances
are weakened," he added.
"Now
we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess and there is no easy and quick way
to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in
the region and, in general, in the Muslim world."
The
White House had no comment on the letter.
In detailing
"the
conservative crack-up" over the Iraq war, E. J. Dionne writes:
"The
isolationist conservatives around Pat Buchanan cannot understand why we went to
war in the first place – and they opposed it from the beginning.
These conservatives speak explicitly about the 'costs of empire,' much as the
left does. They argue that globalism is really 'globaloney' and that being an
empire is incompatible with being a republic."
Actually,
that's not true. We "isolationists" – conservatives and libertarians alike – understand all
too well why we went to war. As Pat Buchanan put it
in the run-up to the invasion:
"We charge
that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in
a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with
colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We
charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the
Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a
homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies
all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and
bellicosity.
"… They charge us
with anti-Semitism – i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or
ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a 'passionate
attachment' to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the
interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow,
what's good for Israel is good for America."
Buchanan named
names, tracing the development of the "what's good for Israel is good for
America" doctrine to the influential sect known as neoconservatives:
ex-leftists who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and 1970s over
the Vietnam War, and wormed their way into top GOP policymaking circles,
eventually winding up in charge of George W. Bush's foreign policy.
Does Mr. Bush ever wonder if the neocons
duped him and hijacked his foreign policy? Some Middle East experts think some
of the neocons painted a rosy picture for the president of Arab states
blossoming with democracy when they really knew this could not be accomplished
so easily; they may have cynically suspected that it was far more likely that
the Middle East would fall into chaos and end up back in its pre-Ottoman Empire
state, Balkanized into a tapestry of rival fiefs — based
on tribal and ethnic identities, with no central government —
so busy fighting each other that they would be no threat to us, or Israel.
The administration is worried now about
Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the face of roiling radicalism.
Some veterans of Bush 41 think that the
neocons packaged their "inverted Trotskyism," as the writer John
Judis dubbed their rabid desire to export their "idealistic concept of
internationalism," so that it appealed to Bush 43's born-again sense of
divine mission and to the desire of Mr. Bush, Rummy and Mr. Cheney to achieve
immortality by transforming the Middle East and the military.
Post Iraq war
“Those
who have hoped that a U.S. military victory in Iraq would somehow bring about a
more peaceful world are in for a rude awakening. The final resolution of this
war and the U.S. occupation of Iraq will likely not be the end, rather, only
the prelude to a succession of future crises: in Kashmir, Syria, North Korea,
and Iran. This article will focus primarily on the latter case.”
The ominous backlash of
an attack against Iran
When
U.S. President George W. Bush first identified the two Middle East members of
his "axis of evil," Iran clearly ranked as a far more formidable
adversary than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
But
Bush went after the easier target instead. "Did we invade the wrong
country?" now asks leading American commentator Charles Krauthammer,
speaking for many neoconservative hawks as the U.S. refocuses on Iran. From
their standpoint, it must surely look as if they did. For the neocons,
overthrowing Saddam was to have been nothing if not regional in purpose, the
opening phase of a grand design to "transform"' the entire Middle East.
But such are the region's cross-border dynamics that success was never
going to be assured even in one country unless it embraced others too.
Is Israel planning to attack Iran?
Martin
van Creveld IHT
Friday, August 20, 2004
JERUSALEM
Ariel Sharon may be on the warpath again and the target is Iran. In the past,
the Israeli prime minister has focused attention on Iran by claiming that it
presents the greatest threat to Israel. More than once, defense officials in
Jerusalem have said that Israel might attack Iran's nuclear facilities. In response,
Iran's defense minister, Ali Shamkhani, warned that should Israel do so, his
country would wipe out Israel.
The
only country whose reaction to such a strike would carry great weight with
Israel is the United States. Because Iran is suspected of supporting at least
some of the insurgents in Iraq, many U.S officials might privately welcome an
Israeli strike on Iran, just as they welcomed Israel's destruction in 1981 of
the nuclear reactor that Saddam Hussein was building near Baghdad. With the
United States now in the midst of a hotly disputed election campaign, if Sharon
wanted to act, the time to do so would be between now and November.
by Carl Osgood
The entire
so-called "War on Terrorism," with its associated wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, is, as EIR has shown, the product of a deliberate policy of
perpetual war. That policy, formulated by a gang of neo-cons in the Bush
Administration, is intended to take the world back to the condition it was in,
prior to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which brought to an end nearly 150
years of destructive, bloody, religious warfare in Europe.
The present
policy was elaborated in the now-infamous "Clean Break"
document in 1996 written under the auspices of a Jerusalem-Washington think
tank, the Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Policy Studies (IASPS), for the just-elected
Jabotinskyite, Benjamin
Netanyahu, as prime minister of Israel. That document, authored by former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and a team of fellow neo-cons,
called for: 1) the destruction of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority,
blaming them for every act of Palestinian terrorism, including the attacks from
Hamas; 2) inducing the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq; 3)
launching war against Syria after Saddam is overthrown; 4) parlaying the
overthrow of the regimes in Syria and Iraq into the "democratization"
of the entire Muslim world, including further military actions against Iran,
Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt. In addition to Perle, the authors of "Clean
Break" included Douglas Feith, now Undersecretary of Defense for Policy;
David Wurmser, now an official in the office of Vice President Cheney;
Wurmser's wife, Meyrav, of the Hudson Institute; Charles Fairbanks, Jr., and
others.
It is no secret
that the "Clean Break" document is the strategic doctrine of both the
Bush 43 regime in the United States, and the Israeli government of Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon. Both have pursued it with glee, especially since the
Sept. 11, 2001, irregular warfare attacks on New York and Washington. Since the
Iraq invasion alone, in March 2003, Sharon has managed to completely sabotage
the tepid U.S. effort at finding a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians,
to the point where he is now openly threatening to assassinate Arafat (as he
already has done with numerous leaders of Hamas).
On the other
side of the Atlantic, the U.S. has stepped up its diplomatic warfare against
both Syria and Iran, with the passage and implementation of the Syria
Accountability Act and the campaign against Iran's nuclear program. A
pre-emptive strike on Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, cannot be ruled out
at this point, nor can an Israeli attack on Syria. That danger was underscored
on Sept. 20 by reports that the U.S. was preparing to transfer 5,000
air-dropped bombs to Israel, under its military aid program. Included among the
5,000 bombs are: five-hundred 2,000-pound BLU-109s, designed to penetrate more
than six feet of reinforced concrete, obviously ideal for attacking reactor
containment buildings, and other nuclear facilities.
Nor have the
neo-cons ignored Saudi Arabia, as shown by a Sept. 9 forum on that country at
the Hudson Institute, home of Meyrav Wurmser. A panel that included British
Arab Bureau agent Prof. Bernard Lewis, argued that the U.S. has to cut all ties
with Saudi Arabia, including cutting off oil imports. National Review editor
David Pryce-Jones, who, like Lewis is British, complained that "stability
means the continuation of tyranny," and said that the only way to destroy
tyranny is "through force of arms." Pryce-Jones praised the U.S.
intervention in Iraq as the way to the future, and warned, "If we're not
prepared to consider the occupation of Saudi Arabia or war on Iran, all of our
good intentions [sic!] may pave the road to Hell."
These perpetual
wars are not to be limited to Southwest Asia, either. They are to be spread to
North Korea, and China, and perhaps even to Russia. As EIR reported last week ("Neo-Cons
Knee Deep in Caucasus Provocations," by Jeffrey Steinberg), former Carter
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is involved up to his ears in the
ongoing provocations against Russia. Membership in Brzezinski's American Committee for Peace
in Chechnya includes many of the neo-con leading lights behind Cheney's
perpetual war policy: Perle and Fairbanks, as well as Michael Ledeen and Joshua
Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, Frank Gaffney of the Center for
Security Policy, and William Kristol, among many others. In a Sept. 20 op-ed in
the Wall Street Journal, in which he compared Russian President Vladimir Putin
to Mussolini, Brzezinski issued a veiled warning that Russia must get out of
the Caucasus and that the U.S. must help secure Russia's neighbors in order for
"democracy to thrive" in Russia.
How did he come to the attention of the
U.S. government officials?
Background
Tinker,
Banker, Neocon, Spy
Ahmed Chalabi's long
and winding road from (and to?) Baghdad
The Chalabi Lobby
Almost to a man, Washington's hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. "He's a rare
find," says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute.
"He's deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a
man of the West."
In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the
neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.
Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with
key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as
Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are
key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The
Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those
associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned
with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA). "Chalabi is the one that we know the best,"
says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has
been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997.
"He could be Iraq's national leader," says Patrick
Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli
luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
What
makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's
a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off
with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the
neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago
strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to
Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy
under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have
been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at
an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After:
Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in
AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National
Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years,"
Perle told me.
by JANE MAYER
Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war.
Can he survive the occupation?
Issue of 2004-06-07
Posted 2004-05-29
For
years, he had been America’s staunchest Iraqi ally, and he had helped the Bush
Administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the
notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and
chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power. Although Chalabi
developed enemies at the C.I.A. who disputed his intelligence data and
questioned his ethics, he forged a close bond with Vice-President Dick Cheney
and many of the top civilians at the Pentagon, such as Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and
Under-Secretary of Defense William
J. Luti. Yet now that the occupation of Iraq appeared to be headed toward
disaster, he said, many in the Administration had united in making him the
scapegoat.
How Ahmed Chalabi
Conned the Neocons
By John Dizard
May 4, 2004
Why did the neocons put such enormous
faith in Ahmed Chalabi, an exile with a shady past and no standing with Iraqis?
One word: Israel. They saw the invasion of Iraq as the precondition for a
reorganization of the Middle East that would solve Israel's strategic problems,
without the need for an accommodation with either the Palestinians or the
existing Arab states. Chalabi assured them that the Iraqi democracy he would
build would develop diplomatic and trade ties with Israel, and eschew Arab
nationalism.
Neocons Forced to Face Reality
July 26, 2004
by Christopher Preble and
Justin Logan
As American operations in
Iraq continue to lose support from both the American and Iraqi people, the
neoconservatives who engineered the war are on the defensive. There is a
pervasive fear among neoconservatives in Washington of the resurgence of
realism: a foreign policy that emphasizes the defense of vital national
security interests and rejects values-based foreign interventions.
Realists acknowledge that
other states can help us in the war on terrorism. But we hardly consider
international support a panacea. After 9/11, virtually the entire world saw its
interests converge into a united front against the type of terrorist attack
suffered by the U.S. If European opposition to the war in Iraq had obstructed
the pursuit of vital U.S. interests, realists would not have hesitated in
proceeding without their support. The problem is that invading and occupying
Iraq was never in America's interest. And why should we squander near-total
international support for the war on terrorism absent a vital need?
Neoconservatives, by
contrast, seem to revel in alienating historical allies. It is worth noting
that even after all of the invective slung across the Atlantic, France still
maintains troops in Afghanistan that are hunting for Osama bin Laden.
Donnelly and Serchuk claim
that the proper strategy would "leverage [U.S.] hegemony in favor of the
forces of political and economic liberalism in the greater Middle East."
Who are these forces? Ahmed Chalabi, the man who promised an oil pipeline to
Haifa and who now is alleged by the U.S. government to have betrayed U.S.
interests to Iran? The real forces of political and economic liberalism in Iraq
unfortunately lack the power and popular support to remake the country. The
development of liberal society requires more than a few good men and
institutions with familiar names, and even these cannot succeed when implanted
by force.
KEY FINDINGS
A Failed 'Transition' is the most
comprehensive accounting of the mounting costs of the Iraq war on the United
States, Iraq, and the world. Among its major findings are stark figures about
the escalation of costs in these most recent three months of
"transition" to Iraqi rule, a period that the Bush administration
claimed would be characterized by falling human and economic costs.
1. U.S. Military Casualties Have Been
Highest During the "Transition": U.S. military casualties (wounded
and killed) stand at a monthly average of 747 since the so-called
"transition" to Iraqi rule on June 28, 2004. This contrasts with a
monthly average of 482 U.S. military casualties during the invasion (March
20-May 1, 2003) and a monthly average of 415 during the occupation (May 2,
2003-June 28, 2004).
2. Non-Iraqi Contractor Deaths Have Also
Been Highest During the "Transition": There has also been a huge
increase in the average monthly deaths of U.S. and other non-Iraqi contractors
since the "transition." On average, 17.5 contractors have died each
month since the June 28 "transition," versus 7.6 contractor deaths
per month during the previous 14 months of occupation.
3. Estimated Strength of Iraqi Resistance
Skyrockets: Because the U.S. military occupation remains in place, the
"transition" has failed to win Iraqi support or diminish Iraqi
resistance to the occupation. According to Pentagon estimates, the number of
Iraqi resistance fighters has quadrupled between November of 2003 and early
September 2004, from 5,000 to 20,000. The Deputy Commander of Coalition forces
in Iraq, British Major General Andrew Graham, indicated to Time magazine in
early September that he thinks the 20,000 estimate is too low; he estimates
Iraqi resistance strength at 40,000-50,000. This rise is even starker when
juxtaposed to Brookings Institution estimates that an additional 24,000 Iraqi
resistance fighters have been detained or killed between May 2003 and August
2004.
4. U.S.- led Coalition Shrinks Further
After "Transition": The number of countries identified as members of
the Coalition backing the U.S.-led war started with 30 on March 18, 2003, then
grew in the early months of the war. Since then, eight countries have withdrawn
their troops and Costa Rica has demanded to be taken off the coalition list. At
the war's start, coalition countries represented 19.1 percent of the world's
population; today, the remaining countries with forces in Iraq represent only
13.6 percent of the world's population.
***********************************************
Take note as these neocons
begin to appear on TV (Richard Perle’s one hour interview on C-SPAN
05/09/04 followed by Robert Kagan, Ken Adelman and Laurie Mylroie three weeks later) and write
op-ed pieces trying to explain away their participation in the decision making
process and their influence in the media etc. in leading the U.S. to war.
Comments made
by the neocons now
that they were
wrong in sending
our men and
women to war.
a.k.a C.Y.A.
By Frederick W.
Kagan
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page B07
All these failures flowed from a greater
failure of understanding. This administration came to office with a belief that
war is all about destroying targets, that ground forces are unnecessary and
that technology is supreme. Much to our sorrow, we have experienced the fact
that none of those beliefs are true. Wars of regime change cannot be fought
mainly with missiles. Ground forces that can interact with people, perform
police functions and maintain order must be present in large numbers during and
after hostilities. Excessive haste in withdrawing the inadequate numbers of
troops the United States sent to Iraq has only exacerbated these problems.
The people to blame for Sept. 11 are
Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The people to blame for our failures since then
are Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration -- as well as the many critics
who have urged even greater defense reductions and those who seek to score
cheap political points rather than addressing the real issues.
Note: Not one mention of the names of
neocons who were the primary movers and shakers for the war.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/977ovnnr.asp
From the April 26,
2004 issue: Resolve alone won't bring success. We need a military and political
strategy that maximizes our odds of winning in Iraq.
by Robert Kagan and William Kristol
04/26/2004, Volume 009, Issue 31
Unfortunately, resolve alone won't bring
success. Neither will well-delivered statements by the president. The problem
in Iraq is not poor public relations, or a lack of will. Rather, it is the
failure of policymakers at the highest levels to fashion a military and
political strategy that maximizes the odds of success. That is what has been
missing ever since Saddam's statue fell a little over a year ago.
The mere fact that violence has increased
recently in Iraq is not by itself grounds for criticizing the administration's
handling of the war. No sensible person believed that the effort to build a
democratic Iraq would be without cost and dangers. No reasonable person
expected administration officials and military commanders, either in Washington
or in Baghdad, to be able to exercise unerring mastery over an inherently
complex and always explosive situation.
Nor is the news from Iraq all bad.
Several weeks ago we argued optimistically (perhaps too optimistically) that
things were looking better, and we still believe there is much in Iraq to be
gratified by: continued peaceful cooperation among Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish
leaders, despite many disagreements; an economy that seems to be improving; the
fact that a large majority of Iraqis, as documented in polls, say their future
is promising, reject political violence, and support an ongoing American
presence. And much of Iraq remains, at the moment, relatively peaceful. All
this is important progress.
Yet this progress can be undone. And
while we certainly do not hold the administration responsible for everything
that has gone wrong in Iraq, it is clear that there have been failures in
planning and in execution, failures that have been evident for most of the last
year. Serious errors have been made--and made, above all, by Donald Rumsfeld's
Pentagon. The recent violence in Iraq has confirmed that the level of American
military forces has been too low to accomplish the president's mission ever
since the invasion phase of the war ended last April.
On Thursday, the secretary of defense
announced a three-month extension in tours of duty for about 20,000 troops in
Iraq. This did not increase the number of troops on the ground, but it did undo
a planned drawdown in military strength from 135,000 to 115,000, thereby
maintaining current combat strength. But leaving 20,000 troops in Iraq for an
additional three months will almost certainly not be enough. Close observers of
the conflict in Iraq, civilian and military alike (military, of course,
speaking off the record), say that at least two additional divisions--at least
30,000 extra troops--are needed in Iraq just to deal with the current crisis.
Even more troops may well be needed to fully pacify the country. And it would
be useful to have as many of those troops as possible there sooner rather than
later.
By William Kristol
(Another example
of Neocon Chutzpa)
Wednesday,
December 15, 2004; Page A33
"As you know, you go to war with the
Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later
time."
-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in
a town hall meeting with soldiers at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, Dec. 8.
Actually, we have a pretty terrific Army.
It's performed a lot better in this war than the secretary of defense has.
President Bush has nonetheless decided to stick for now with the defense
secretary we have, perhaps because he doesn't want to make a change until after
the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. But surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense
secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term.
Contrast the magnificent performance of
our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld. Begin with the rest of
his answer to Spec. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard:
"Since the Iraq conflict began, the
Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they
believe -- it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a
rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this
moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army
and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle
has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that
they're working at it at a good clip."
So the Army is in charge.
"They" are working at it. Rumsfeld? He happens to hang out in the
same building: "I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people
who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. . . . And that is what the Army
has been working on." Not "that is what we have been working
on." Rather, "that is what the Army has been working on." The
buck stops with the Army.
by Trudy Rubin
December 5,
2004
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1205-02.htm
As fighting
continues in Iraq 20 months after the fall of Baghdad, with more U.S. troops en
route, some of the war's biggest proponents are putting out a new story line to
deflect blame.
Heaven forefend
that those responsible should accept the blame for the gross mismanagement of
postwar Iraq (and give us hope of wiser policies down the line). No, instead we
see a shameless passing of the buck.
Iraq's troubles
are the fault of Colin Powell, the State Department, and the CIA, says Richard
Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Review Board. Perle
is one of the most active of the neoconservatives whose thinking shaped the
handling of the postwar.
Last week Perle
told Fox television's Bill O'Reilly that Iraq's problems should be laid at
Powell's door.
I know you
thought that it was Powell who lost out in the battle with the Pentagon over
Iraq. So listen up to Perle's argument, which goes like this:
The United
States made a big mistake after Iraq was liberated by not handing the
"keys" over to Iraqis to run their own country. There was "an
umbrella group of opposition figures" to whom U.S. officials could have
handed power, meaning the group headed by the Pentagon's favorite exile leader,
Ahmed Chalabi.
"Instead,"
Perle says, "we embarked on what became an extended occupation. That was
fundamentally mistaken."
Whose fault was
this? "It was Secretary Powell and some others who wanted the extended
occupation," Perle insists.
There is more.
Perle says that
before the war, the Department of Defense wanted to "train thousands of
Iraqis to go in with us so that we wouldn't be the aggressor, we wouldn't be
the occupying power."
Those proposals
were blocked by the State Department and the CIA, and poor Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld was "never able to get approval for the political strategy
that might... have saved us from much of the subsequent misery."
Now for a
reality check.
Yes, it would
have been wise for the administration to midwife a transitional Iraqi
government before the election - provided that it left half of the seats open
for Iraqis inside the country.
I argued for
such a policy in my column and followed this story in Washington, London and
Iraqi Kurdistan, just before the war, where exile groups were meeting.
So why didn't
it happen?
It didn't
happen because Pentagon civilian leaders (Perle included) were interested only
in a transitional government headed by Chalabi. But Chalabi had alienated all
the other exile groups, including Kurds and Shiites, that had once been part of
his umbrella group.
The State
Department, the CIA, and key members of the National Security Council - which
means the White House - had all concluded by the autumn of 2002 that Chalabi
was an unreliable leader. Despite the illusions held by Pentagon officials (who
appear to hold them still), he had no base inside Iraq. There was no obvious
Iraqi exile to anoint as a transitional leader before the war, no parallel to
Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai.
But had the
Pentagon worked in tandem with State, had the White House devised a coherent
policy for the postwar period, the United States could have encouraged Iraqi
exile groups to agree on a transitional governing body that would have stepped
in after Baghdad's fall.
Instead,
Pentagon officials pursued their Chalabi illusion, airlifting him into Iraq
behind U.S. troops. Iraqis never welcomed him back, as anyone could have
predicted. With no Iraqi leadership in sight, U.S. officials had to step into
the vacuum.
Blame the
Pentagon or White House incoherence for the ensuing occupation and its
problems, not Powell.
As for the bit
about the Pentagon wanting to train "thousands of Iraqis" to take
over Iraqi security - this is outright baloney. Yes, the Pentagon did want to
train some Iraqis, and in fact some hundreds of exiles were assembled at a NATO
base in Hungary. But this was never meant to be, nor could it have been, a
fighting force.
These were
mostly overweight exiles, with no recent combat experience, who were meant to
play a limited role helping out U.S. troops. Few of them ever made it to Iraq.
When the
Pentagon airlifted Chalabi into southern Iraq, he did bring with him around 600
militiamen who proclaimed themselves the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF). But these
were mostly a pickup army he recruited in northern Iraq just before the war.
Once back in Baghdad, FIF fighters developed a reputation for stealing cars.
It was never
possible for the Pentagon to train an exile army from scratch just before the
war. This cannot serve as an excuse for the failure to send enough troops to
provide stability after the fall of Baghdad.
Perle is still
selling the same kind of illusions about Iraq that led the United States into
the current Iraq mess. We won't get out until there is a coherent White House
policy that focuses on real facts.
And the second
Bush team won't have Powell around to blame.
Neocons join the lynch mob for ‘arrogant’ Rumsfeld
November 28, 2004
THE American defense secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, should be sacked, according to a growing chorus of conservative
commentators who want him replaced by a figure with wider appeal.
In
a seemingly innocuous Thanksgiving message to readers last week, William
Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, slipped in
a surprise demand for Rumsfeld’s
dismissal.
“What remains to be done is to announce new leadership for the
department of defense,” wrote Kristol. “This, surely, would be an important opportunity for a strong,
Bush-doctrine-supporting outsider, someone who of course would be a team
player, but someone who could also work with the military and broaden support
for the president’s policy.”
Boiled
down, this meant: almost anybody but Rumsfeld, whose performance has not always
matched his swagger. His failure to install enough troops on the ground after
last year’s invasion of Iraq has upset
American generals and alienated supporters of the war.
I
am allergic to Rumsfeld,”
said Ralph Peters, a former lieutenant-colonel and robust media champion of the
war on terror. “We did a great thing in Iraq, but we
did it very badly.
“He is an extremely talented man but he has the tragic flaw of
hubris. His arrogance is unbearable. My friends in uniform just hate him.”
The
calls for Rumsfeld to be dismissed have intensified since the departure was
announced of his cabinet rival, Colin Powell, the secretary of state. With the
liberal-leaning Powell being the first to go, conservatives no longer see the
need to hold back their opinions.
The
defense secretary’s job security has not been enhanced
by allegations that he lobbied to scupper the intelligence bill in Congress
last week against President George W Bush’s
wishes. Rumsfeld made little secret of his opposition to the bill’s plan for the national intelligence director to be given sweeping
powers over the $40 billion intelligence budget, 80% of which is currently
controlled by the Pentagon.
Bush
and Vice-President Dick Cheney, who first worked with Rumsfeld in the 1970s,
are known to feel loyal to the architect of the swift military victories in
Afghanistan and — initially — in Iraq. There is a feeling that he deserves to remain in place
until after the Iraqi elections in January.
Unlike
Powell, Rumsfeld lacks an obvious replacement. Robert Novak, the right-wing
pundit, believes Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative deputy defense secretary,
is a “good possibility”
who has been subjected to a “healthy
dose of reality” about the limits of American power.
December 23,
2004
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
|
|
In the bowels
of the Pentagon, the colleagues and subordinates of Donald Rumsfeld were not
upset by Republican senators who were sniping at him. Instead, they complained
bitterly about a call for his removal by a private citizen with no political
leadership position: William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. His
position was, in effect, a declaration of war by the neoconservatives against
the secretary of defense.
The capital's
feeding frenzy over Rumsfeld's fate did not begin until Kristol's Dec. 12 op-ed
column in the Washington Post. While critical senators did not get to the point
of demanding Rumsfeld's removal, Kristol did. He said the troops in Iraq
''deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have.'' A firm declaration
by a prominent Republican activist turned journalist who is the clarion of neo-conservatism
counts for more than equivocation by U.S. senators.
Rumsfeld's
civilian colleagues at the Pentagon are furious because they consider Kristol a
manipulative political operative, critiquing the war in Iraq after years of
promoting it. But his criticism has a broader base. Kristol long has called for
big-government conservatism, which on the international sphere involves
proactively pursuing democracy around the world. He and the other neocons do
not want to be blamed for what has become a very unpopular venture in Iraq.
Thus, it is important to get the word out now that the war in Iraq has gone
awry because of the way Rumsfeld fought it.
Rumsfeld is
often bracketed with the neocons, but that is incorrect. In a long political
career that dates back to his election to Congress in 1962, he has not even
been associated with the traditional conservative movement. In the run-up to
the attack on Iraq, he was not aggressively pressing intervention by force of
arms, but instead was shaping a military response to fit President Bush's
command. >
Rumsfeld did
name Richard Perle, one of the foremost neocon voices calling for regime change
in Baghdad, as chairman of the part-time Defense Policy Board. Also named to
the board was Kenneth Adelman, an old friend of Rumsfeld's who is identified as
a neocon. Adelman gained notoriety by promising that the conquest of Iraq would
be a ''cakewalk.'' Indeed, rejoicing over the quick rout of Saddam Hussein's
army, Adelman wrote that cakewalk -- a word always rejected by Rumsfeld --
turned out to be a correct description.
With the bloody
occupation of Iraq under way, Adelman's demeanor changed in his frequent
appearances on CNN's ''Crossfire'' (where I often was a co-host). His mood
became more subdued. The garish, American flag necktie that Adelman wore as he
urged war on Iraq was retired, as he somberly began to criticize (while never
mentioning Rumsfeld by name).
On April 30,
Adelman said a ''miscalculation'' had been made in war planning because the
operation in Iraq ''has gone worse than we expected a year ago.'' On June 28,
he said ''there were failures,'' adding that the purge of Baath Party members
and ''the dismissal of the army was something that we could have done a lot
better.'' On Nov. 8, he said failure to clean insurgents out of Fallujah was
''a bad decision.''
Unlike Adelman,
Kristol pinned defects in war-fighting tactics directly on Rumsfeld. In a
Weekly Standard essay of Nov. 17, 2003 (written with his frequent collaborator,
Robert Kagan), Kristol assailed Rumsfeld for sending insufficient troops to
Iraq. ''Rumsfeld remains dogmatically committed to a smaller force,'' he wrote.
Thus, the
neocon message is that the war was no mistake but has been badly conducted.
While Adelman does not blame his friend Rumsfeld, the accountability of the
secretary of defense is implicit. Kristol's call for Rumsfeld's dismissal removes
culpability for those who beat the drums to go to war.
Getting rid of
Rumsfeld does not answer agonizing questions. Was the change of regime in
Baghdad worth going to war? Could Saddam have been removed from power by
other means? Is the use of U.S. military power to topple undemocratic regimes
good policy?
There are no
clear answers. To say simply that all would be well in Iraq, save for Don
Rumsfeld, only begs these questions.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtWar.jhtml?itemNo=280279&contrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=4
Source: Haaretz English edition.
Tue., May 11, 2004 Iyar 20, 5764 Israel Time: 15:57
Haaretz was founded in Jerusalem in 1919 by a group of Zionist immigrants,
mainly from Russia.
It is an independent daily newspaper with a broadly liberal outlook both on
domestic issues and on international affairs.
Read the op-ed by Shavit and note how he absolves the neocons of blame for their role in getting us into the
war and cites “American
combination of anxiety and hubris” as the primary reason why we went into Iraq.
What Chutzpah!
By Ari
Shavit
“The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative
intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change
the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles
Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not
part of the group), is skeptical.”
“In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged
in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated
by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish,
almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard
Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams,
Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another
and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.”
“Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the
war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the
neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11
came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the
masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you
the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block
radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year
and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened. Still, it's not all that
simple, Friedman retracts. It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented.
It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take such a great nation
into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and
another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis, what
fomented the war is America's over-reaction to September 11. The genuine sense
of anxiety that spread in America after September 11. It is not only the
neoconservatives who led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the
outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.”
Note that not one mention was made about the neocons role in
invading Iraq.
From the January 17, 2005 issue: What Rumsfeld's defenders don't
want to admit.
by Frederick W. Kagan
01/17/2005, Volume 010, Issue 17
CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN INCLINED TO
defend Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld because many of his critics oppose
him for executing a war they don't like, or because these critics' true target
is a president they despise. It is quite possible to support President Bush and
the war in Iraq and still find fault with Rumsfeld, however.
Indeed, some of us find fault with Rumsfeld precisely because we do support the
president and the war.
Rumsfeld has much to recommend him, to be
sure. He took firm control of a Pentagon that was largely drifting and gave it
clear direction. He focused on the importance of military transformation and
made it a going concern rather than a conversation piece, as it had been for
much of the Clinton presidency. When the nation was attacked, he oversaw two
successful military operations in response.
But Rumsfeld has much to answer for, as
well. Claims that there are no serious problems with military policy in Iraq
and Afghanistan, or with the equipment our soldiers have, or with the number of
troops available, are childish and damaging to efforts to identify and solve
real problems.
Rumsfeld's defenders are now deflecting
all criticism from him onto the Clinton administration, Congress, and the military
service chiefs. Take the most serious criticism leveled at Rumsfeld--that he
has refused to expand the American military in order to enable it to deal with
the strain the current missions are imposing upon our men and women in uniform.
The chief of the Army Reserve, in a December 20 memo leaked last week, warned
that the Reserve "is rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force."
Rumsfeld's defenders assure us he is not responsible. Only Congress can approve
an increase in military end-strength; Rumsfeld has never opposed increasing the
armed forces; more troops in Iraq wouldn't help anyway. These are the arguments
deployed in behalf of the secretary of defense.
Unfortunately, they are evasions. It is
of course true that the military underwent a dramatic reduction starting at the
end of the Cold War under the first President Bush. The pace of that reduction
accelerated during the Clinton years, and by the mid-1990s some of us were
already warning that it had gone too far. By 1996, the military had reached its
current size, a modest increment below the reduced strength Bush I had
originally called for.
George W. Bush took office declaring that
"help is on the way," however, and military observers hoped that
meant an increase in defense budgets and force sizes. Defense spending has
increased, to be sure, although the huge bulk of the increase went to paying
for transformation and for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There has been no
significant increase in the size of the military. According to the Department
of Defense Annual Report of 2004, the Active Army rose from 482,170 men and
women in 2000 to 488,640 in 2003, while the Total Army (including the National
Guard and Reserves) fell from 1,208,642 in 2000 to 1,176,223 in 2003. Although
the actual strength of the force is somewhat higher than these authorized
figures (there are perhaps around 500,000 in the Active Army today), that
increase is temporary and is due in part to a policy of preventing certain
soldiers and officers from leaving the force when they wish to do so. In no
sense can Rumsfeld claim to have rushed aid to the Army in any way that is
helpful in the current crisis.
He
has, in fact, consistently and vociferously opposed congressional attempts to
offer such aid. In February 2003, he declared, "we will come back and ask
for an end-strength increase at any moment that we believe it is in the
interests of the armed forces. At the present time we do not have evidence that
suggests that's the case." In October 2003, he discouraged Congress from
"going into the taxpayers' pockets for a 10,000-person increase, when
there's no analytical work that supports it." He added, "Those who
argue that the end-strength should be increased, I think, have an obligation to
say, 'Where do you want to take the money out of?' What are we going to take it
out of? If you increase the Army end-strength by 10,000, are you going to take
it out of the Navy or the Air Force or the Marines? Are we going to take it out
of research and development and our future? Are we going to take it out of the
future combat system or the helicopters or whatever?" In January 2004, he
explained, "A permanent increase in end-strength would require cuts
elsewhere in the defense budget . . . crowding out funding for various types of
transformational capabilities that can allow us to do more with the forces that
we currently have." In September 2004, he added, "We have not
supported an [increase] in permanent end-strength by statute. . . . And the
reason for that, very simply, is we don't need to do that."
In each case, Rumsfeld has added that he
would support an increase in end-strength if it were needed, but that he saw no
need for it. He has argued consistently that it would be better to
"rearrange" the active and reserve components of the Army, and he has
argued for increasing use of civilian contractors to free up soldiers for
combat duties. While claiming that a permanent increase in end-strength would
take too long to complete to be useful, he has admitted the obvious--that
"rearranging" the Army, active and reserve, is also a process that
takes many years. He has not admitted another obvious problem with this
approach--that the civilianization of military positions has increased the
number of contractors in a combat zone where the enemy specializes in
kidnapping and beheading people unable to defend themselves.
Congress has not been the problem here.
Nor is it fair to blame Clinton entirely for this problem. Clinton downsized
the military excessively, to be sure, and left an Army obviously too small for
the missions it faced. But Rumsfeld has been in office for four years. If he
had begun to address this problem four years ago, the Army could have been
considerably expanded by now.
Neither is it true that more troops would
not have helped the situation in Iraq. Victor Davis Hanson, the most eloquent
of Rumsfeld's defenders, claims that "offensive action, not troop numbers
alone, creates deterrence; mere patrolling and garrison duty will always create
an insatiable demand for ever more men and an enormously visible American
military bureaucracy." But troop numbers on the ground make offensive
action by some of them easier to order More significantly, the Iraqi insurgency
is so weak that the rebels dare not face our troops in open combat. They are not
centrally organized. Offensive action in the traditional sense, therefore, is
virtually impossible. Patrolling, garrison duty, and training Iraqi military
forces alone can win this conflict. This takes boots on the ground.
With more troops in Iraq during and
immediately after the war, we would have been able to do the following things
that we did not do:
* Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi
soldiers who were at that time still concentrated in combat units and had not
yet melted back into the countryside with their weapons and their skills.
* Guard the scores of enormous ammunition
dumps from which the insurgents have drawn the vast majority of their weapons,
ammunition, and explosives.
* Secure critical oil and electrical
infrastructure that the insurgents subsequently attacked, setting back the
economic and political recovery of Iraq.
* Prevent the development of insurgent
safe havens in Najaf and Falluja, or at least disrupt them at a much earlier
stage of formation.
* Work to interdict the infiltration of
foreign fighters across Iraq's borders.
If the U.S. Army had begun expanding in
2001, we would have been able to:
* Establish reasonable rotation plans for
our soldiers that did not require repeatedly extending tours of duty beyond one
year.
* Avoid the need to activate reservists
involuntarily.
* Dramatically reduce the frequency with
which soldiers return from one year-long tour only to be sent immediately on
another.
* Let the troops that would still have
been overstrained know that help really was on the way.
The U.S. military did not do these things
because of Rumsfeld's choices. He chose to protect a military transformation
program that is designed to fight wars radically different from the one in
which we are engaged. He chose to protect Air Force and Navy programs that are
far less urgent and under far less strain during the current crisis rather than
augmenting the service carrying the lion's share of the load. He chose to focus
on high-tech weapons technologies that are virtually useless to the troops now
in Iraq rather than providing them sooner with the basic requirements of their
current mission--including armored Humvees, body armor, and a regular
complement of armored vehicles. Even the deployment of Stryker light armored
vehicles, which many now tout as a major contribution to the fighting in Iraq,
was not Rumsfeld's initiative, but that of General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki was
the Army chief of staff whom Rumsfeld drove out of office, partly for correctly
predicting that Operation Iraqi Freedom would require more than the handful of
units that Rumsfeld and his staff were willing to send.
It is not that Rumsfeld's decisions were
without a rationale. The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize
preparing America's military for future conventional conflict rather than for
the current mission. That position, based on the hope that the current mission
would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at
any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.
Hanson reminds us that American forces in
World War II, and in many other conflicts, had to fight with imperfect weapons
and under imperfect conditions. All quite true. But in no previous American war
has the chief of the military administration refused to focus on the war at
hand, preferring programs that could not help soldiers then in the fight to
survive and win. Even Robert McNamara, engaged in a "sideshow" war in
an otherwise irrelevant theater, did not imagine that he could focus his efforts
on preparing to meet the Red Army in the Fulda Gap at the expense of supporting
our troops in Indochina.
Rumsfeld's attitude has already led to a
series of mistakes that have made a difficult situation more difficult. It has
put the administration on the defensive about its conduct of a policy that is
vital to America's national interest. It has distracted attention from the
problem of winning the current war--our most important priority today bar none.
These problems don't result from the liberal media or the antiwar crowd making
a ruckus about nothing. They result from Rumsfeld's stubborn adherence to a
wrongheaded policy. Surely, with the election safely over, there is no longer
any need to protect the architect of these mistakes.
Frederick W. Kagan is a military
historian and coauthor of While America Sleeps.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/119jnign.asp
According to Prof. Freedman in the article below-
“Rumsfeld cannot complain that he was the victim of poor advice, because the only advice he appears to trust is his own.”
Freedman seems to contradict himself in the following statement-
“Rumsfeld's
deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, famously observed that he found it "hard to
conceive" that it would take "more forces to provide stability in a
post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the
surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army." He was sadly mistaken.
He and Rumsfeld accepted claims that the Iraqi people would welcome the
Americans as liberators and showed a remarkable lack of prudence or even
curiosity about the ways in which the invasion could turn sour.”
Rumsfeld's
Legacy: The Iraq Syndrome?
By Lawrence Freedman
Sunday, January 9, 2005; Page B04
Just as Vietnam became McNamara's War,
Iraq has become Rumsfeld's War.
From the outset, Secretary of Defense
Donald H. Rumsfeld has inserted himself in almost every aspect of the campaign,
from military strategy to postwar planning, and served as the war's public
face. In doing so, he's claimed that one of the advantages of such centralized
control was that there was a clear point of accountability.
Now he is being held to account and
facing a formidable indictment: rejecting a top general's advice on the force
levels that would be needed to restore order to Iraq after Saddam Hussein's
regime had been toppled; dismissing State Department advice and plans on
postwar reconstruction; failing to realize the seriousness of the early looting
and chaos; supporting the disbanding of the Iraqi army without regard to the
likely consequences of turning loose thousands of armed and angry unemployed
soldiers; and inviting a public relations disaster by circumventing the laws of
war to facilitate the indefinite holding and periodic torturing of prisoners.
More recently, Rumsfeld has been rebuked for his dismissive treatment of
soldiers anxious about inadequate equipment and for adding insult to injury by
having a machine sign his condolence letters to bereaved families.
In countering these charges, Rumsfeld
cannot complain that he was the victim of poor advice, because the only advice
he appears to trust is his own. This was evident from the moment he arrived at
the Pentagon and is one reason why comparisons with President Lyndon B.
Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, are apt and illuminating. And
just as McNamara left behind the "Vietnam syndrome," when Rumsfeld
departs, his bequest may well be an "Iraq syndrome."
At first glance there appears to be
little in common between McNamara -- the brash, relatively young,
number-crunching corporate manager of the 1960s -- and Rumsfeld, the relatively
old, former wrestler and veteran political bruiser of the 2000s. But they share
some traits: When it came to the defense budget, both were leery of military
advice, which they believed favored certain weapons programs for institutional
as much as strategic reasons. And they carried their suspicions forward into
operations, leading both to be accused of arrogance Air Force Gen. Thomas White
famously chastised McNamara's Pentagon for being full of "pipe-smoking,
tree-full-of-owls" defense intellectuals, much as uniformed officers today
disparage the intellectuals surrounding Rumsfeld.
The irony is that for three decades,
American interventionists like those surrounding Rumsfeld have been laboring to
overcome the Vietnam syndrome and its reluctance to get involved in overseas
wars. And now, in their hour of seeming triumph, having waged a
war that was largely supported by Americans despite the perils, these
interventionists have much to fear. That's because whenever Rumsfeld finally
packs up his office at the Pentagon, he will leave behind an even more
burdensome Iraq syndrome -- the renewed, nagging and sometimes paralyzing
belief that any large-scale U.S. military intervention abroad is doomed to
practical failure and moral iniquity.
In 1991, two days before the Persian Gulf
War ended, the first President Bush wrote in his diary: "It's surprising
how much I dwell on the end of the Vietnam syndrome." For the elder Bush
and others who saw the Vietnam syndrome acting as a drag on American foreign
and defense policy, the best remedy was to show that the country had learned
how to use force effectively. After U.S. forces had evicted Saddam Hussein's
invading army from Kuwait, the president said, "By God, we've kicked the
Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
The interventionists in the younger
Bush's administration couldn't have wished for a better proving ground than
another Iraq war, where they would demonstrate not only that the United States
would have no trouble sweeping aside a third-rate army but also that it could
use its military might to transform a country, not just contain it. This war
would pursue the most ambitious foreign policy goals, replacing a dangerous and
tyrannical regime with one that was both friendly and democratic.
Now, however, the optimism with which the
administration entered Iraq in March 2003 has been severely dented. At best,
current strategy promises to keep the lid on a grim situation, in the hope that
the enemy will get exhausted before the American people do. At worst, the
United States may be forced to withdraw, leaving a country embroiled in civil
war and a haven for terrorists. A new standard for foreign policy debacles will
then have been set, always to be invoked as the best argument for caution when
contemplating the use of force.
Unlike Vietnam, a war of containment,
Iraq was supposedly a war of preemption. So the Iraq syndrome poses an even
more serious challenge to U.S. policy than the Vietnam syndrome did, because it
calls into question not only the wisdom of intervention but the integrity of
U.S. intelligence and judgment about what poses a direct threat to U.S.
national security.
Particularly damaging for the Bush
administration is the allegation that it finds itself in the current mess
because it ignored the basic lesson drawn from Vietnam. McNamara (and the aides
Colin Powell once called the "slide-rule prodigies") came under
attack for failing to leave the conduct of any military campaign to the
generals. The conservative critique goes one step farther: Rather than accept
the brutal but compelling logic of overwhelming force, McNamara and his top
aides placed unwarranted confidence in rarefied academic concepts of graduated
response.
But this time, the meddler-in-chief is
Rumsfeld. As another Thomas White, fired by Rumsfeld as secretary of the Army
in May 2003, complained in an interview on PBS last August, Rumsfeld
"micromanages, over controls, can be intimidating, almost abusive. He tends
to stifle communication, overworks things that he ought to delegate."
But what should the role of the defense
secretary be? In a book called "Supreme Command," published just
before the Iraq war, Eliot Cohen, a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board
and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies,
challenged the post-Vietnam view that civilian leaders, once they define their
objectives, should step back and let the military professionals work out the
best way to meet them. Cohen argued that successful war requires civilian
leaders who are prepared to challenge military judgments. For civilian
interventionists, Cohen's book was refreshing, because during the 1990s it was
the uniformed officers, many of them Vietnam veterans like Secretary of State
Powell, who had become cautious about sending American soldiers off to war in
Somalia, the Balkans or the Middle East.
The principle of civilian participation
in operational decisions should really not be controversial. If it has become
so, it is because civilian-military relations have acquired an adversarial
character, for reasons that go deeper than Iraq.
With the Cold War at its most tense, the
Kennedy administration found military views as reckless as they were confused.
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK's generals dismissed all policies
other than an invasion of Cuba as tantamount to appeasement. To the civilians,
it seemed that the generals did not really want to accept responsibility for
military operations, because they always presented stark alternatives -- either
the massive use of force, if necessary including nuclear weapons, or nothing at
all. When they were urged by Kennedy to prepare for a more subtle
counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam, their enthusiasm was well contained.
They saw little point in a "hearts and minds" campaign and, when
given the chance, they reverted with some relief back to "search and
destroy."
After Vietnam, the military steered as
clear as possible from operations that depended in any way on winning over
local populations. If there were to be future wars, they insisted , only
overwhelming force should be used (a view that came to be associated with
Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Indeed in doctrine,
training and contingency planning, the military's dominant focus was major war.
The Persian Gulf War was taken as confirming the validity of this approach. By
contrast, the painful withdrawals from Beirut in 1984 and Somalia a decade
later were seen as demonstrating the folly of getting drawn into messy civil
wars.
These events, along with the wars in the
former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, encouraged the view that the best way to
keep popular support for operations was to keep casualties to a minimum. This
meant that force protection was the first priority in any operation, and this
could be achieved if the U.S. contribution was confined to air power. The Army
was for proper wars; lesser operations such as peacekeeping were best left to
allies or, in the case of counterterrorism, to the CIA.
When Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon, he
did not disagree with the Army's reluctance to get involved in nation-building,
but he was still exasperated During his first term as secretary of defense
under President Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s, he had been an early enthusiast
for what was called even then the "revolution in military affairs,"
looking to combine new information technologies with precision munitions as a
means of gaining a comparative edge in regular war. He was appalled to discover
how much the forces were still fixated on preparing for big wars and purchasing
high-profile weapons platforms rather than developing smaller, nimbler forces
geared to the actual contingencies he thought they were likely to face.
Rumsfeld's "transformation
agenda" put him on a collision course with the generals. Rumsfeld followed
his instincts and initially could claim vindication in the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. In both cases, the problems came as the wars took on a more irregular
character. In Afghanistan, much of the al Qaeda leadership, including Osama bin
Laden, managed to get away, and in Iraq a swift occupation gave way to a
protracted and bloody insurgency.
More troops on the ground would have
helped. For postwar Iraq, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki made
the case for a deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops. Rumsfeld's
deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, famously observed that he found it "hard to
conceive" that it would take "more forces to provide stability in a
post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the
surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army" He was sadly mistaken.
He and Rumsfeld accepted claims that the Iraqi people would welcome the
Americans as liberators and showed a remarkable lack of prudence or even
curiosity about the ways in which the invasion could turn sour.
Rumsfeld's management style has left him
with few supporters and vulnerable to the charge that everything that has gone
wrong in Iraq is because he ignored military advice.
Rumsfeld's fault lay less in his
readiness to challenge military views -- which often deserved challenging --
but in asking the wrong questions. It is certainly not the case that if only
military advice had been followed in Iraq, everything would have been well. In
reality the blame for the morass should be shared, for the fault also lies in
the U.S. military's insistence on preparing for wars they would prefer to fight
rather than those they might need to fight.
The shortage of troops, which meant that
they were spread too thinly, aggravated a problem that had deeper roots. U.S.
training and doctrine provided little preparation for the demands of irregular
war, and the importance of thinking through the local political consequences of
military engagements. Instead it was the domestic political consequences of
American casualties that made force protection such a priority and led to a
cavalier attitude toward Iraqi casualties.
The starting point for the American
troubles was that in the process of liberating the Iraqi people, U.S. forces
killed far too many of them. When combined with Abu Ghraib and Rumsfeld's
tendency to dismiss in an off-hand, "stuff happens" way any
criticisms of the developing mayhem in Iraq, it is not surprising that Arab
skepticism about U.S. intentions has grown.
Iraq is not an experiment that future
U.S. governments will care to repeat. For the moment, even this administration
is unable to repeat it, because there are no ground forces to spare for major
campaigns elsewhere. Unless it proves possible to gain the upper hand against
the insurgents, a bungled war will leave the United States weaker and not
stronger. The confidence in American power that led to war being initiated
without direct provocation has been shaken. Whenever the possible use of force
is raised again, assurances will be sought that this will not be "another
Iraq." And future interventionists will worry about how to shake off the
Iraq syndrome.
Lawrence Freedman, professor of war
studies at King's College London, is the author of "Kennedy's Wars:
Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam" (Oxford University Press).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58318-2005Jan8.html
President Bush just doesn’t get it!
“The president's still got a paper bag
over his head!”
“Mr.
Wolfowitz, who devised the debacle in Iraq, is kept on, while Brent Scowcroft,
Poppy Bush's lieutenant who warned Junior not to go into Iraq, is pushed out as
chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. That's the backward nature
of this beast: Deceive, you're golden; tell the truth, you're gone.”
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By MAUREEN DOWD
|
|
WASHINGTON
The president prides himself on being a
pig-headed guy. He is determined to win in Iraq even if he is not winning in
Iraq.
So get ready for a Mohammedan mountain of
spin defining victory down. Come what may - civil war over oil, Iranian-style
fatwas du jour or men on prayer rugs reciting the Koran all day on the Iraqi TV
network our own geniuses created - this administration will call it a triumph.
Even for a White House steeped in hooey,
it's a challenge. President Bush will have to emulate the parsing and
prevaricating he disdained in his predecessor: It depends on what the meaning
of the word "win" is.
The president's still got a paper bag
over his head, claiming that the daily horrors out of Iraq reflect just a few
soreheads standing in the way of a glorious democracy, even though his
commander of ground forces there concedes that the areas where more than half
of Iraqis live are not secure enough for them to vote - an acknowledgment that
the insurgency is resilient and growing. It's like saying Montana and North
Dakota are safe to vote, but New York, Philadelphia and L.A. are not. What's a
little disenfranchisement among friends?
"I know it's hard, but it's hard for
a reason," Mr. Bush said on Friday, a day after seven G.I.'s and two
marines died. "And the reason it's hard is because there are a handful of
folks who fear freedom." If it's just a handful, how come it's so hard?
Then the president added: "And I
look at the elections as a - as a - you know, as a - as - as a historical
marker for our Iraq policy."
Well, that's clear. Mr. Bush is huddled
in his bubble, but he's in a pickle. The administration that had no plan for
what to do with Iraq when it got it, now has no plan for getting out.
The mood in Washington about our
misadventure seemed to grow darker last week, maybe because lawmakers were back
after visiting with their increasingly worried constituents and - even more
alarming - visiting Iraq, where you still can't drive from the Baghdad airport
to the Green Zone without fearing for your life.
"It's going to be ugly," Joe
Biden told Charlie Rose about the election.
The arrogant Bush war council never
admits a mistake. Paul Wolfowitz, a walking mistake, said on Friday he's been
asked to remain in the administration. But the "idealists," as the
myopic dunderheads think of themselves, are obviously worried enough, now that
Mr. Bush is safely re-elected, to let a little reality seep in. Rummy tapped a
respected retired four-star general to go to Iraq this week for an open-ended
review of the entire military meshugas.
Mr. Wolfowitz, who devised the debacle in
Iraq, is kept on, while Brent Scowcroft, Poppy Bush's lieutenant who warned
Junior not to go into Iraq, is pushed out as chairman of the Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board. That's the backward nature of this beast: Deceive,
you're golden; tell the truth, you're gone.
Mr. Scowcroft was not deterred. Like
Banquo's ghost, he clanked around last week, disputing the president's absurdly
sunny forecasts for Iraq, and noting dryly that this administration had turned
the word "realist" into a "pejorative." He predicted that
the elections "have the great potential for deepening the conflict"
by exacerbating the divisions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. He worried that
there would be "an incipient civil war," and said the best chance for
the U.S. to avoid anarchy was to turn over the operation to the less
inflammatory U.N. or NATO.
Mr. Scowcroft appeared at the New America
Foundation with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser,
who declared the Iraq war a moral, political and military failure. If we can't
send 500,000 troops, spend $500 billion and agree to resume the draft, then the
conflict should be "terminated," he said, adding that far from the
Jeffersonian democracy Mr. Bush extols, the most we can hope for is a
Shiite-controlled theocracy.
The Iraqi election that was meant to be
the solution to the problem - like the installation of a new Iraqi government
and the transfer of sovereignty and all the other steps that were supposed to
make things better - may actually be making things worse. The election is going
to expand the control of the Shiite theocrats, even beyond what their numbers
would entitle them to have, because of the way the Bush team has set it up and
the danger that if you're a Sunni, the vote you cast may be your last.
It is a lesson never learned: Matters of
state and the heart that start with a lie rarely end well.
Jewish American
influence on U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel
The total
American population of Jewish/Americans is no more than 2.2% and perhaps less,
depending on how we define who is a Jew.
“While both Republican and Democratic members of
Congress have for decades engaged in an unseemly competition for
Jewish-American votes and contributions, usually by expressing their continual and blind
support for Israel, this past spring has seen them figuratively falling
all over each other to convincingly express their fealty to Israel and
commitment to causes seen as of interest to Jewish Americans. This is at least
partially because many political pundits see President George W. Bush’s abandonment of even a pretext of even-handedness in Arab-Israeli
matters as eroding Democrats’
traditional advantage in American Jewish electoral and financial support.
This premise is questionable, however, because—as
other pundits point out—many American Jews are drawn to the
Democratic Party because of issues unrelated to Israel, and many others do not
see the current Israeli government’s
policies as being in Israel’s
long-term interest.
AIPAC’s annual conference has long attracted large numbers of members of
Congress from both parties to express their undying support for Israel, but
this year’s meeting seemed to garner an even
greater outpouring of congressional support, with more than half the members of
Congress attending at least one function. Both House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
(R-TX) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) apparently bought into Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s
attempts to link the U.S. global campaign against terrorism with Israel’s attempts to crush the Palestinian people. They either do not see
or do not care that it is precisely this linkage between U.S. military actions
in the Middle East and Israeli actions in Palestine that cause most people in
the Middle East to be suspicious of American motives and objectives in the
region.”
When Sharon
Says Jump Bush Says How High?
http://www.juntosociety.com/guest/moore/jm_ssj022203.html
You may have heard that
Israel is calling the shots in Americas foreign policy, and have asked
yourself, why are there so many Jews in the Bush administration, and what are
they doing there?
http://www.theamericancause.org/pattheprisonerofsharon.htm
The president
must understand that what Sharon and the neoconservative War Party are
slavering for is what the latter call "World War IV," a war with
America and Israel on one side, and all the enemies of Israel in the Arab and
Islamic world on the other – a war that could bring down every
pro-American regime in the region and usher in the war of civilizations the
president has sought since Sept. 11 to avoid.
Professor Kevin MacDonald and Jewish
influence.
Beginning in the ancient world, Jewish
populations have repeatedly attained a position of power and influence within
Western societies. I will discuss Jewish background traits conducive to
influence: ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity,
aggressiveness, with most of the focus on ethnocentrism.
The history of Zionism illustrates a dynamic
within the Jewish community in which the most radical elements end up pulling
the entire community in their direction. Zionism began among the most
ethnocentric Eastern European Jews and had explicitly racialist and nationalist
overtones. However, Zionism was viewed as dangerous among the wider Jewish community,
especially the partially assimilated Jews in Western countries, because it
opened Jews up to charges of disloyalty and because the Zionists’ open
racialism and ethnocentric nationalism conflicted with the assimilationist
strategy then dominant among Western Jews.
Over the last year, there has been a torrent of
articles on neoconservatism raising (usually implicitly) some difficult
issues: Are neoconservatives different from other conservatives? Is
neoconservatism a Jewish movement? Is it “anti-Semitic” to say so?
Is the solution…..
by Paul Findley
http://www.mediamonitors.net/findley2.html
Nine-eleven would not have occurred if the U.S. government had refused to help Israel humiliate and destroy Palestinian society. Few express this conclusion publicly, but many believe it is the truth. I believe the catastrophe could have been prevented if any U.S. president during the past 35 years had had the courage and wisdom to suspend all U.S. aid until Israel withdrew from the Arab land seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The U.S. lobby for Israel is powerful and
intimidating, but any determined president-even President Bush this very
day-could prevail and win overwhelming public support for the suspension of aid
by laying these facts before the American people:
How far can the neocon’s influence succeed in gaining control of U.S. foreign
policy.
Let us look back in history for some
examples of Jewish influence –
How Jews played a prominent role in the
ideological formulation and actualization of two of the three political
movements of the twentieth century.
The Latest Link in the
Chain of Jewish Radicalism
“The Jews played a
prominent role in the ideological formulation and actualization of two of the
three main fascist movements of the twentieth century – Soviet Communism and
Italian Fascism. With Lenin’s death in January 1924, three Jews and a Georgian
took control of Russia: Lev Bronstein,
Grigory Radomilski, Lev
Rosenfeld, and Joseph Dzugashvilli. They are better known by their Soviet
names – respectively: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin. The heads of the
CHEKA, the NKVD, and up to the KGB were mostly Jews, from Moses
Solomonovitch Uritzky to Genrikh
Yagoda to Andropov. Yakov Ginzburg (Sverdlov), who supervised the expulsion
of the Czar’s family to Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and their slaying
there, as well as the commander of the unit that carried out the slaughter, who
shot the Czar in the forehead from a range of zero, one Yakov Yurovski – were
Jews.
The proportion of Jews
involved in the creation, planning, and management of the Gulag Archipelag and
forced-labor camps was much higher than their proportion in the Party elite,
where in any case they held a considerable part of the key positions. Names such
as Aron Solts, Yacov Rappoport, Lazar Kogan, Matvei Berman, and Naftaly Frenkel
still strike terror in the hearts of Gulag veterans. The role of Lazar
Kaganovitch in the organization of the camps for people who were kidnapped for
slave labor, and also in the “collectivization” process that brought the death
of millions, is among the most notorious.
Jews such as Angelica
Balabanoff had a decisive influence on the formation of the spiritual world of
Mussolini in his leftist-anarchist period. Another example is that of Margareta
Sarfatti (who edited Gierarchia, el Duce’s fascist organ). Five Jews (A. Finzi,
J. Pontremoli, A. Jarach, E. Jona, C. Sarfatti) were among the founders of the
fascist nucleus of the “War Organization” (Fasci di combattimento) in March 1919.
Those who formulated the socio-economic concept of Italian fascism – “the state
of corporations” – both on the ideological and practical levels, were
predominantly Jews. Thus, for example, Guido Jung, finance minister and a
senior member of the Supreme Fascist Council. Thus also Guido Arias, the senior
ideologue of the socio-economic concept of fascism; L. Toeplitz, the chief
banker of Italy; and Otto Herman Kahan, a great admirer of el Duce and one of
the pillars of banking and American philanthropy. The hard-core of Mussolini’s
economic advisers strictly consisted of three Jewish senators (H. Ancona, A.
Luria, T. Meyer). Indeed, not for nothing did Alfred Rosenberg call Mussolini
“Judenknecht” (Jewish lackey).
As one would expect, the
common denominator of all these groups was (and remains) a sweeping hostility
toward Zionism.”
(And this is where these
leftist’s differ from the present day neocons who as is reported here had their
roots in the left and are
supporters of Likudnik’s and Zionism’s
goal of transfer.)
However, the neocons approach in gaining
influence in the halls of government is somewhat similar to the leftist’s
mentioned in the Arieh Stav
editorial.
************************************************************
By Jim Lobe | July 21, 2004
Editor: John
Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center
Foreign Policy In Focus
A bipartisan group of 41 mainly
neoconservative foreign-policy hawks has launched the latest incarnation of the
Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), whose previous two incarnations
mobilized public support for rolling back Soviet-led communism but whose new
enemy will be “global terrorism.”
The new group, whose formation was
announced at a Capitol Hill press conference July 20, said its “single
mission” will be to “advocate
policies intended to win the war on global terrorism—terrorism
carried out by radical Islamists opposed to freedom and democracy.”
Neocon
Kenneth
M. Pollack is at it again , first
Iraq now Iran
The Conflict Between Iran and
America
by KENNETH
POLLACK
With
balanced tone and insight, Pollack explains how the United States and Iran
reached this impasse; why this relationship is critical to regional, global,
and U.S. interests; and what basic political choices are available as we deal
with this important but deeply troubled country.
The commissions
and the chaos have put the lie to the Bush administration's shifting rationales
for war. What the media are not asking, however, is if these aren't the
reasons, what are? TomPaine.com's Associate Editor Patrick Doherty says there
are three interconnected reasons: oil, Israel, and military transformation.
So just why did
Bush choose war?
From the
evidence before us today, there is no one single reason. Rather, there are
three converging and tightly interwoven reasons: oil, Israel and military
transformation. The Cheney energy strategy required Iraqi oil; AIPAC and the
Christian right wanted to weaken the Arab world to strengthen Israel; and Don
Rumsfeld wanted to expedite the transformation of the U.S. military.
A Neocon update
We are an isolated and
reviled nation. We are tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost
sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire
and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home.
The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. If we do not
confront our hubris and the lies told to justify the killing and mask the
destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral
corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and
violence to be our primary form of communication, we will not so much defeat
dictators like Saddam Hussein as become them.
*********************************
Remember the reason given to the American public for the invasion of
Iraq ?……. WMD!!!!!!
Search
for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month
Critical September Report to Be Final Word
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page A01
The hunt for biological, chemical and
nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President
Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter
is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
In interviews, officials who served with
the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of
new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who
led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that
contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush
administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will
stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and
other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March
2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and
biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it
might give such weapons to use against the United States.
Bush has expressed disappointment that no
weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant
to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out
of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the
intelligence official said that possibility is very small.
Duelfer is back in Washington, finishing
some addenda to his September report before it is reprinted.
"There's no particular news in them,
just some odds and ends," the intelligence official said. The Government
Printing Office will publish it in book form, the official said.
The CIA declined to authorize any
official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story.
The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the
hunt on the condition of anonymity. The agency did confirm that Duelfer is
wrapping up his work and will not be replaced in Baghdad.
The ISG, established to search for
weapons but now enmeshed in counterinsurgency work, remains under Pentagon
command and is being led by Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Joseph McMenamin.
Intelligence officials said there is
little left for the ISG to investigate because Duelfer's last report answered
as many outstanding questions as possible. The ISG has interviewed every person
it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and
every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by
insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons
hunt.
Satellite photos show that entire
facilities have been dismantled, possibly by scrap dealers who sold off parts
and equipment to buyers around the world.
"The September 30 report is really
pretty much the picture," the intelligence official said.
"We've talked to so many people that
someone would have said something. We received nothing that contradicts the
picture we've put forward. It's possible there is a supply someplace, but what
is much more likely is that [as time goes by] we will find a greater
substantiation of the picture that we've already put forward."
Congress allotted hundreds of millions of
dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the
money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the
entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.
Several hundred military translators and
document experts will continue to sift through millions of pages of documents
on paper and computer media sitting in a storeroom on a U.S. military base in
Qatar.
But their work is focused on material
that could support possible war crimes charges or shed light on the fate of
Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot who was shot down in an F/A-18
fighter over central Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991, the opening night of the Persian
Gulf War. Although he was initially reported as killed in action, Speicher's
status was changed to missing after evidence emerged that he had ejected alive
from his aircraft.
The work on documents is not connected to
weapons of mass destruction, officials said, and a small group of Iraqi
scientists still in U.S. military custody are not being held in connection with
weapons investigations, either.
Three people involved with the ISG said
the weapons teams made several pleas to the Pentagon to release the scientists,
who have been interviewed extensively. All three officials specifically
mentioned Gen. Amir Saadi, who was a liaison between Hussein's government and
U.N. inspectors; Rihab Taha, a biologist nicknamed "Dr. Germ" years
ago by U.N. inspectors; her husband, Amir Rashid, the former oil minister; and
Huda Amash, a biologist whose extensive dealings with U.N. inspectors earned
her the nickname "Mrs. Anthrax."
None of the scientists has been involved
in weapons programs since the 1991 Gulf War, the ISG determined more than a
year ago, and all have cooperated with investigators despite nearly two years
of jail time without charges. U.S. officials previously said they were being
held because their denials of ongoing weapons programs were presumed to be
lies; now, they say the scientists are being held in connection with the
possible war crimes trials of Iraqis.
It has been more than a year since any
Iraqi scientist was arrested in connection with weapons of mass destruction.
Many of those questioned and cleared have since left Iraq, one senior official
said, acknowledging for the first time that the "brain drain" that
has long been feared "is well underway."
"A lot of it is because of the
kidnapping industry" in Iraq, the official said. The State Department has
been trying to implement programs designed to keep Iraqi scientists from
seeking weapons-related work in neighboring countries, such as Syria and Iran.
Since March 2003, nearly a dozen people
working for or with the weapons hunt have lost their lives to the insurgency.
The most recent deaths came in November, when Duelfer's convoy was attacked
during a routine mission around Baghdad and two of his bodyguards were killed.
**********************
The Whole Truth
About The Iraq War
Robert Greenwald - 87
minutes: Windows Media
An impressive roster of experts is
assembled to provide a generally withering commentary on the quality of
evidence and possible motivations of the Neo-conservatives who provided the
momentum and muscle behind America's venture into preemptive war. Among them
are veteran CIA analysts and operatives, military officers, diplomats,
politicians, arms inspectors, and U.S. and British government officials. The
fig leaf of the possibility of an honest mistake on the matter of WMDs is
stripped away; what is left is the stark and disturbing anatomy of deliberate
deceit.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6423.htm
by Karen Kwiatkowski (Lt. Col. Retired)
The following is the text of a talk
originally given in November 2004 for the University of Virginia,
Charlottesville at a public event sponsored by the UVA Students for Individual Liberty.
Versions were also presented at public events sponsored by Libertarians at Virginia Tech
(September 2005) and the Appalachian School of Law (October 2005).
WHY WE ARE IN IRAQ
February
27, 2006
Moment of Truth Neocons jump ship
Justin Raimondo
One has only to look at the headlines
coming out of Iraq to see that the moment of truth has arrived: the Iraqi
government is warning of an "endless civil war"; mosques across Iraq, including the "Golden Mosque" in Samarra, were
targeted in a wave of sectarian attacks, and 60 were killed in just one day, including two U.S. soldiers; and
the Pentagon is reporting that not a single Iraqi battalion can stand on
its own, while insurgent attacks are at an all-time high. Heck, even George W. Bush is admitting that everything is not coming up roses.
Not Bill Kristol, however: according to
the little
Lenin of the neocons,
And all this time you thought American
troops were fighting and dying in a deadly serious way. Alas, you were wrong,
because, you see, the Bush administration was never serious about implementing the
neocon agenda of "liberating"
the entire Middle East by force of arms. The fact that they are even talking
about getting out – standing down as the Iraqis stand up, as
the president puts it – is proof enough of that. The
neoconservatives' goal has never been to end the war, but to extend it.
All this time, they have been urging the administration "Faster, please!" – yet the
slowdown is perceptible, and, given the present brick
wall we have run up against, bound to become more noticeable. There is now
a bipartisan consensus that the war in Iraq – or at
least our direct involvement in it – must be
allowed to run down. Where the "debate" –
if it can be called that – takes place is around the question of
just how to accomplish that.
"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. … Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols."
The fabric of Iraqi society is crumbling
in the grip of America's iron fist, an eventuality predicted in this space and by anyone with even a perfunctory knowledge of the region. And
now that the inevitable has come to pass, all the former optimists, the beaters of the
war drums, are pounding out a different tune. The air is filled with their confessions, their disappointment, their regrets, melding with the anguished
cries of the wounded and dying on the battlefields of Iraq in a melody of
pain and remonstrance. Buckley consoles himself with the thought that a few
uniquely evil and powerful "ice men" are responsible for frustrating
the "latent" desire of the Iraqis to turn their country into a
replica of Kansas. After all, who could have known that what Buckley calls the
"postulates" wouldn't work in this case? As he puts it:
"One of these postulates, from the
beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would
suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political
structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.
"The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would
succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymakers to cope with insurgents
bent on violence.
The first postulate is based on – what? The answer is: nothing. Neither
the history of the region, nor the proximity of Iraq to Iran, is taken into
account by this axiom, which seems merely a projection of the American penchant
for normalcy. In universalizing characteristics that may perhaps be unique to
Americans, we have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of our hollow
"victory" and visited ruin upon our own interests
and prestige,
wrecking
an entire country in the process.
I question the reality of the second
postulate: according to various accounts of the internal policymaking debate
during the run-up to the invasion, no one in the government predicted the
insurgency, let alone
devised a plan for coping with it. They all thought it would be, as one neocon
apparatchik enthused, a "cakewalk." Since Buckley was complicit in that
delusion, and allowed his magazine to be taken over
by the devotees of this fever dream, he is in no position to recognize any of
this, and, besides, the question is now what to do about it:
"The administration has, now, to
cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent
reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin
America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us
to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It
does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the
postulates do not prevail – in the absence of interventionist
measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not
prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede
that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative
would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of
philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the
shrine of American idealism."
In short: keep the faith. The Democratist
faith, that is. Just because the Iraqi experiment in social engineering has
imploded into what one
American general calls the worst strategic disaster in our history is no
reason to abandon the interventionist dogma that we can and should export
"democracy" at gunpoint. Buckley's phraseology masks the real issue:
while the failure in Iraq doesn't prove that "violence and anti-democratic
movements always prevail," what it does prove is that interventionism leads to
unintended and potentially horrific consequences – and
that the "blowback" from our efforts is likely to prove deadlier
and far costlier than staying home and minding our own business in the first
place.
We are losing, avers Buckley, on account of our
humanitarianism, embodied in our reluctance to use such "interventionist
measures" as were deployed against Hitler and Hirohito: we are not quite
ready, in short, to punish those ungrateful and rebellious objects of our "liberation"
by duplicating the bombing of Dresden or the nuking
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kristol would call this faintheartedness, and the
lack of these sorts of measures lies behind his imputation of a lack of
"seriousness" on the part of the U.S. Buckley quails at such a
prospect, but Kristol doesn't
flinch from implicitly calling for mass murder. It is the main difference
between "mainstream" conservatism and its mutant offspring of the neoconservative persuasion.
Speaking of mutant offspring, the neocon
theoretician Francis
Fukuyama, whose famous thesis that capital-H History has "ended" was the
leitmotif of neoconservative thought in the early 1990s, has also defected from
the ranks of the War Party, albeit proclaiming his own innocence in the process. Without so
much as mentioning that his name adorned the various joint statements put out by the neocons
in the run-up to war, he now
seeks to separate himself from the implosion of the neoconservative vision
in Iraq and the disaster unfolding:
"As we approach the third
anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history
will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By
invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq
has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational
base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The
United States still has a chance of creating a Shi'ite-dominated democratic
Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting
power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors,
including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal
of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects
in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in
themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on
the project to this point."
The only proper reaction to this is: Now
he tells us?
Like Buckley, there is no acknowledgment
of his own personal error or responsibility, no apology for misleading his
readers and those who took – and still take –
him seriously. There is only an effort to save the "postulates" that
regulated their delusionary dogma.
Fukuyama stands in fear of a recent Pew poll that portends a return by the American people to
"isolationism,"
defined by the pollsters as a policy of "minding our own business."
Heaven forfend that such a commonsense
policy should ever prevail! The mere prospect has Buckley and Fukuyama on
the barricades, poised to defend the interventionist faith.
After
naming neoconservatism as the one political tendency most responsible for
leading us down the path to war – albeit not naming himself as prominent among
them – Fukuyama avers:
"The problem with neoconservatism's
agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in
the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What
American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism,
but rather the formulation of a 'realistic Wilsonianism' that better matches
means to ends. "
It is hard to see how one could
"overmilitarize" the invasion of Iraq: when Fukuyama signed
statements, including newspaper advertisements, calling for the U.S. to invade,
what, exactly, did he have in mind? That kind of excuse-making exudes the
isolation of these Deep Thinkers from the actual material reality of the
policies they recommend. This is what we mean by
"chickenhawks" – not necessarily those who, like Dick Cheney, "had
other priorities in the '60s than military service," but those who lack
the courage to face the reality of the policies they are advocating.
There is much more to be said of
Fukuyama's disingenuous and highly self-exculpatory non-confession, but that
will have to wait for another day. Let us cut to the chase, however, and
examine his own explanation for the split in the neoconservative ranks that has
now separated him from his erstwhile comrades. It all began, he writes, with a
misunderstanding and misapplication of his "End of History" thesis:
"'The
End of History,' … presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a
long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal
democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt,
the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was,
by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the
right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik
version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.
Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved
into something I can no longer support."
When Fukuyama published his
"endist" piece in The
National Interest, he was congratulated by, I think, Irving Kristol for
importing Hegel into the discussion of foreign policy. Now the neocons have
good reason to regret that particular innovation: it has given their schismatic
protégé the ideological cover he needs to slink away from the scene of the
crime, leaving them to take all the blame. The forces of capital-H History,
says Fukuyama, move with imperceptible slowness: the Leninist Kristol (Junior)
and his neocon cadre were too impatient, too militaristic, too Bolshevik in
their methods. Leave it to Fukuyama and more mild-mannered Mensheviks like
Buckley to cobble together a more "realistic Wilsonianism" that will
serve the War Party in its future endeavors.
The problem with neoconservatism – which is, today,
almost exclusively concerned with foreign policy issues – is not its means but
its ends. Aside from being doomed to failure, the very idea of America as a
"benevolent world hegemon" is inherently subversive of
the national character and our system of constitutional limited government. At this
point, the Buckley-Fukuyama project of saving neoconservatism from itself has
probably come too late to have any appreciable effect on the American peoples'
reconversion to the dreaded doctrine of "isolationism." The neocons
cannot save their discredited and bloodstained ideology; they can only save certain
individual neocons from spending a good deal of time behind bars. And I can see
that Fukuyama, at any rate, while renouncing neoconservatism, has joined the effort to save one of its chief practitioners –
one Scooter Libby – from
being sent from the White House to the Big House.
In the end, these guys are sticking together in the knowledge that if they don't, they will most certainly hang together.
The U.S.
administration be it Republican or Democrat should heed the words of our
founding father in dealing with Israel and other nations.
Observe good faith and
justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and
morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally
enjoin it . It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period,
a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a
people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that,
in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay
any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it ? Can
it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with
its virtue ? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which
ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?
In the execution of such a
plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies
against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be
excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all
should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual
hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its
animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray
from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another
disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight
causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or
trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate,
envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and
resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best
calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national
propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times
it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility
instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The
peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.
So likewise, a passionate
attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for
the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest
in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities
of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars
of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to
concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt
doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting
with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and
a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are
withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote
themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the
interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity;
gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable
deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or
foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
As avenues to foreign
influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to
the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they
afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to
mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an
attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the
former to be the satellite of the latter.
Against the insidious wiles
of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the
jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and
experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of
republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else
it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a
defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive
dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one
side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.
Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become
suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and
confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
The great rule of conduct for
us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to
have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have
already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here
let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a
very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the
causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it
must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary
vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of
her friendships or enmities.
Our detached and distant
situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one
people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may
defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude
as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously
respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making
acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when
we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
Why forego the advantages of
so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by
interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace
and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or
caprice?
It is our true policy to
steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so
far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as
capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no
less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the
best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their
genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to
extend them.
Taking care always to keep
ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may
safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.
Harmony, liberal intercourse
with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even
our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking
nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of
things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but
forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade
a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the
government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that
present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable
to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances
shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to
look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of
its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such
acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents
for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving
more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real
favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure,
which a just pride ought to discard.
**********************************************************************************
A warning to all
freedom loving Americans …. As long as US foreign policy favors and
aids Israel in its “war” against the Palestinians there will never be peace in the
Middle East. I have set forth my thesis that US foreign policy has been greatly
influenced by a group of neoconservatives to the detriment of our people.
Unless the American public wakes up to this fact and unless the Republicans and
Democrats throw off the yoke of the powerful Israeli lobby in this country we
will never have peace. We must be vigilant and as voters informed about these
neocons who seek to lead our great country along the path to destruction. As
one radio talk show host says…. LET’S BE HEARD!
I pray for the safety of our troops in Iraq. As members of the
military they serve under the Commander In Chief. I support them but not
the CIC's policies that put them in harms way. As a citizen of the USA I have
that freedom to do so unfortunately our troops do not.
Postscript
It is
regrettably clear that the American and British governments are preparing for
war, this time against Iran. It is equally clear that the American and British
people believe neither that their governments should start another war, nor
that this particular war would be in their nations' best interests. Moreover,
the public hasn't heard any serious debate about the reasons for and against
another war, so nothing like a national consensus exists. And it is unclear exactly
who is pushing us into this ill-advised war.
Nevertheless, we can surmise that five
major causal factors are pushing the Anglo-Americans toward war
against Iran: (a) Big Oil (e.g., Bush,
Cheney and Rice are former oil-company executives who know that Iran holds
10% of the world's known oil reserves, and that any pipeline from the new Central
Asian oilfields would have to run directly through Iran to be shipped from
the Mediterranean Sea to England and the eastern USA); (b) the American
military-industrial complex and its war-profiteering investors (e.g, Halliburton
and the Carlyle
Group); (c) the American
Religious Right (e.g., to satisy their evangelical pro-war, end-times
vision of a reconstituted "Greater Israel"); and (d) Israel
and its pro-Israel lobby in America (e.g., AIPAC
and JINSA, to satisfy their Zionist visions of Israeli dominance in the
region without any real concessions).
Contrastingly, Iran's "nuclear
weapons program" is NOT a major causal factor, but rather is a mere
pretext, for war. Every serious Middle Eastern analyst knows that: Bush and
Blair have presented no hard evidence whatsoever to prove that Iran is seeking
nuclear weapons; and even if the Iranians were doing so, they would be at least
10 years away from producing a single nuke. In short, there's ABSOLUTELY NO
EVIDENCE that Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons anytime in the foreseeable
future, and Iran definitely does NOT posses any nuclear weapons right now, so
it is UTTERLY INCAPABLE of using nukes to pose an imminent threat to the USA,
the UK, or any Mideastern nation.
Harvard University's JFK School Of
Government recently published a directly relevant research paper by Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Their 81-page
study concludes: that the USA's pro-Israel lobby exercises grossly
disproportionate influence on American foreign policy; and that the powerful
pro-Israel lobby was a major causal factor in persuading the Bush
administration to invade Iraq. Furthermore, there is substantial evidence that the
pro-Israel lobby is a significant causal factor that is pushing the USA
toward another war against Iran. It is noteworthy that the "pro-Israel
lobby" includes both causal factors (c) and (d) above (i.e., Christian
fundamentalists as well as Jewish
fundamentalists).
It's obvious that Americans need a free and
fair-minded national debate that addresses at least three crucial questions
(because they are NOT merely academic): (1) Is the pro-Israel lobby a major
causal factor in persuading the US government to attack Iran; (2) If not, what
are the major causal factors that are pushing the US government to attack Iran;
and (3) In either case, is it truly in America's national interests
- as opposed to Israel's national interests or the Corporatocracy's
war-profiteering interests - to unnecessarily commence an unjust and illegal
war of aggression against Iran?
Source: Countercurrents.org
For the past several decades, and
especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern
policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering
support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’
throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not
only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has
no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set
aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the
interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two
countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral
imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of
material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the
region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the
activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’.
Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby
has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest,
while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the
other country – in this case, Israel –
are essentially identical.
The
Storm over “the Israel Lobby"
By
JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT
We
wrote 'The Israel Lobby' in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had
become difficult to address openly in the United States (London Review of
Books, 23 March). We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we
are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters
or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive
responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary that has begun to
emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is clear that many
people--including Jews and Israelis--believe that it is time to have a candid
discussion of the US relationship with Israel. It is in that spirit that we
engage with the letters responding to our article. We confine ourselves here to
the most salient points of dispute.
One
of the most prominent charges against us is that we see the lobby as a
well-organized Jewish conspiracy. Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, for
example, begin by noting that 'accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes
are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism' (Letters, 6
April ). It is a tradition we deplore and that we explicitly rejected in our
article. Instead, we described the lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and
organizations without a central headquarters. It includes gentiles as well as
Jews, and many Jewish-Americans do not endorse its positions on some or all
issues. Most important, the Israel lobby is not a secret, clandestine cabal; on
the contrary, it is openly engaged in interest-group politics and there is
nothing conspiratorial or illicit about its behavior. Thus, we can easily
believe that Daniel Pipes has never 'taken orders' from the lobby, because the
Leninist caricature of the lobby depicted in his letter is one that we clearly
dismissed. Readers will also note that Pipes does not deny that his
organization, Campus Watch, was created in order to monitor what academics say,
write and teach, so as to discourage them from engaging in open discourse about
the Middle East.
Several
writers chide us for making mono-causal arguments, accusing us of saying that
Israel alone is responsible for anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world
(as one letter puts it, anti-Americanism 'would exist if Israel was not there')
or suggesting that the lobby bears sole responsibility for the Bush
administration's decision to invade Iraq. But that is not what we said. We
emphasized that US support for Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories is a
powerful source of anti-Americanism, the conclusion reached in several
scholarly studies and US government commissions (including the 9/11
Commission). But we also pointed out that support for Israel is hardly the only
reason America's standing in the Middle East is so low. Similarly, we clearly
stated that Osama bin Laden had other grievances against the United States
besides the Palestinian issue, but as the 9/11 Commission documents, this
matter was a major concern for him. We also explicitly stated that the lobby,
by itself, could not convince either the Clinton or the Bush administration to
invade Iraq. >b>Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that the
neo-conservatives and other groups within the lobby played a central role in
making the case for war.
At
least two of the letters complain that we 'catalogue Israel's moral flaws',
while paying little attention to the shortcomings of other states. We focused
on Israeli behavior, not because we have any animus towards Israel, but because
the United States gives it such high levels of material and diplomatic support.
Our aim was to determine whether Israel merits this special treatment either
because it is a unique strategic asset or because it behaves better than other
countries do. We argued that neither argument is convincing: Israel's strategic
value has declined since the end of the Cold War and Israel does not behave
significantly better than most other states.
Herf
and Markovits interpret us to be saying that Israel's 'continued survival'
should be of little concern to the United States. We made no such argument. In
fact, we emphasized that there is a powerful moral case for Israel's existence,
and we firmly believe that the United States should take action to ensure its
survival if it were in danger. Our criticism was directed at Israeli policy and
America's special relationship with Israel, not Israel's existence.
Another
recurring theme in the letters is that the lobby ultimately matters little
because Israel's 'values command genuine support among the American public'.
Thus, Herf and Markovits maintain that there is substantial support for Israel
in military and diplomatic circles within the United States. We agree that
there is strong public support for Israel in America, in part because it is
seen as compatible with America's Judaeo-Christian culture. But we believe this
popularity is substantially due to the lobby's success at portraying Israel in
a favorable light and effectively limiting public awareness and discussion of
Israel's less savory actions. Diplomats and military officers are also affected
by this distorted public discourse, but many of them can see through the
rhetoric. They keep silent, however, because they fear that groups like AIPAC
will damage their careers if they speak out. The fact is that if there were no
AIPAC, Americans would have a more critical view of Israel and US policy in the
Middle East would look different.
On
a related point, Michael Szanto contrasts the US-Israeli relationship with the
American military commitments to Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, to show
that the United States has given substantial support to other states besides
Israel (6 April). He does not mention, however, that these other relationships
did not depend on strong domestic lobbies. The reason is simple: these
countries did not need a lobby because close ties with each of them were in
America's strategic interest. By contrast, as Israel has become a strategic
burden for the US, its American backers have had to work even harder to
preserve the 'special relationship'.
Other
critics contend that we overstate the lobby's power because we overlook
countervailing forces, such as 'paleo-conservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy
groups . . . and the diplomatic establishment'. Such countervailing forces do
exist, but they are no match--either alone or in combination--for the lobby.
There are Arab-American political groups, for example, but they are weak,
divided, and wield far less influence than AIPAC and other organizations that
present a strong, consistent message from the lobby.
Probably
the most popular argument made about a countervailing force is Herf and
Markovits's claim that the centerpiece of US Middle East policy is oil, not
Israel. There is no question that access to that region's oil is a vital US strategic
interest. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting Israel. Thus, the
relevant question is, how does each of those interests affect US policy? We
maintain that US policy in the Middle East is driven primarily by the
commitment to Israel, not oil interests. If the oil companies or the
oil-producing countries were driving policy, Washington would be tempted to
favor the Palestinians instead of Israel. Moreover, the United States would
almost certainly not have gone to war against Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush
administration would not be threatening to use military force against Iran.
Although many claim that the Iraq war was all about oil, there is hardly any
evidence to support that supposition, and much evidence of the lobby's
influence. Oil is clearly an important concern for US policymakers, but with
the exception of episodes like the 1973 Opec oil embargo, the US commitment to
Israel has yet to threaten access to oil. It does, however, contribute to
America's terrorism problem, complicates its efforts to halt nuclear
proliferation, and helped get the United States involved in wars like Iraq.
Regrettably,
some of our critics have tried to smear us by linking us with overt racists,
thereby suggesting that we are racists or anti-Semites ourselves. Michael
Taylor, for example, notes that our article has been 'hailed' by Ku Klux Klan
leader David Duke (6 April). Alan Dershowitz implies that some of our material
was taken from neo-Nazi websites and other hate literature (20 April). We have
no control over who likes or dislikes our article, but we regret that Duke used
it to promote his racist agenda, which we utterly reject. Furthermore, nothing
in our piece is drawn from racist sources of any kind, and Dershowitz offers no
evidence to support this false claim. We provided a fully documented version of
the paper so that readers could see for themselves that we used reputable
sources.
Finally,
a few critics claim that some of our facts, references or quotations are
mistaken. For example, Dershowitz challenges our claim that Israel was
'explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle
of blood kinship'. Israel was founded as a Jewish state (a fact Dershowitz does
not challenge), and our reference to citizenship was obviously to Israel's
Jewish citizens, whose identity is ordinarily based on ancestry. We stated that
Israel has a sizeable number of non-Jewish citizens (primarily Arabs), and our
main point was that many of them are relegated to a second-class status in a predominantly
Jewish society.
We
also referred to Golda Meir's famous statement that 'there is no such thing as
a Palestinian,' and Jeremy Schreiber reads us as saying that Meir was denying
the existence of those people rather than simply denying Palestinian nationhood
(20 April). There is no disagreement here; we agree with Schreiber's
interpretation and we quoted Meir in a discussion of Israel's prolonged effort
'to deny the Palestinians' national ambitions'.
Dershowitz
challenges our claim that the Israelis did not offer the Palestinians a
contiguous state at Camp David in July 2000. As support, he cites a statement
by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and the memoirs of former US
negotiator Dennis Ross. There are a number of competing accounts of what
happened at Camp David, however, and many of them agree with our claim.
Moreover, Barak himself acknowledges that 'the Palestinians were promised a
continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge
running from Jerusalem . . . to the Jordan River' This wedge, which would
bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the
Jordan River Valley for another six to twenty years. Finally, and contrary to
Dershowitz's claim, there was no 'second map' or map of a 'final proposal at
Camp David'. Indeed, it is explicitly stated in a note beside the map published
in Ross's memoirs that 'no map was presented during the final rounds at Camp
David.' Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's foreign minister,
Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later admitted: 'If I
were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David as well.'
Dershowitz
also claims that we quote David Ben-Gurion 'out of context' and thus
misrepresented his views on the need to use force to build a Jewish state in
all of Palestine. Dershowitz is wrong. As a number of Israeli historians have
shown, Ben-Gurion made numerous statements about the need to use force (or the
threat of overwhelming force) to create a Jewish state in all of Palestine. In
October 1937, for example, he wrote to his son Amos that the future Jewish
state would have an 'outstanding army . . . so I am certain that we won't be
constrained from settling in the rest of the country, either by mutual agreement
and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or by some other way' (emphasis
added). Furthermore, common sense says that there was no other way to achieve
that goal, because the Palestinians were hardly likely to give up their
homeland voluntarily. Ben-Gurion was a consummate strategist and he understood
that it would be unwise for the Zionists to talk openly about the need for
'brutal compulsion'. We quote a memorandum Ben-Gurion wrote prior to the
Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942.
He wrote that 'it is impossible to imagine general evacuation' of the Arab
population of Palestine 'without compulsion, and brutal compulsion'. Dershowitz
claims that Ben-Gurion's subsequent statement--'we should in no way make it
part of our programme'--shows that he opposed the transfer of the Arab
population and the 'brutal compulsion' it would entail. But Ben-Gurion was not
rejecting this policy: he was simply noting that the Zionists should not openly
proclaim it. Indeed, he said that they should not 'discourage other people,
British or American, who favor transfer from advocating this course, but we
should in no way make it part of our programme'.
We
close with a final comment about the controversy surrounding our article.
Although we are not surprised by the hostility directed at us, we are still
disappointed that more attention has not been paid to the substance of the
piece. The fact remains that the United States is in deep trouble in the Middle
East, and it will not be able to develop effective policies if it is impossible
to have a civilized discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign
policy.
John
Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt University of Chicago & Harvard University.
This
letter originally appeared in the London Review of Books.
Submitted by David
Bloom on Thu, 05/18/2006 - 23:14.
More pendulum swings. Douglas
Feith, former no. 3 at the Pentagon, Richard Perle, who served on a Pentagon
Advisory board, and former undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have all
been the subject of investigations for their ties to Israel, according to
Stephen Green, writing in Counterpunch.
Even though the three were subject to repeated investigations, they continued
to get Defense Department jobs. The following may signal the proverbial
chickens coming home to roost. From the Jerusalem Post, May 18:
Israeli ties impair US
security clearance
US citizens who have ties to
Israel or an Israeli-American dual citizenship encounter difficulties in
obtaining security clearance from the Pentagon and are dealt with in a manner
similar to that of Americans who have ties with hostile nations.
A new study published last
month examines the decisions concerning clearance requests by Americans with
ties to Israel and finds that in many cases the applicants are questioned on
the issue of dual loyalty. The government, in at least three cases, cited the
Larry Franklin case, in which a Pentagon analyst allegedly gave classified
information to two former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) as a case that supports the claim that individuals with ties
to Israel cannot be trusted with security clearance.
The study was first reported
in the New York Sun this week.
Sheldon I. Cohen, a
Virginia-based lawyer who conducted the study said that he found that ties with
Israel are treated more severely then those with other countries which are
known to be allies of America.
"My impression," he
told The Jerusalem Post, "is that the government views Israel in a tougher
way than other non-hostile countries, such as Sweden, Britain or France, and in
a way which is similar to that of hostile countries like China."
Attorney David Schoen of
Atlanta, who is now representing a Lockheed-Martin employee who lost his
clearance due to ties with Israel, said he believes that Americans with Israeli
citizenship are singled out by the Pentagon on issues of security clearance
Schoen's client, a
53-year-old engineer who holds both US and Israeli citizenship and whose mother
and sister live in Israel, was informed that his clearance was revoked due to
"foreign preferences," since he holds an Israeli passport, and
"foreign vulnerability," because he has relatives in Israel. When
Schoen asked the government representative to see a list of countries in which
having family members would create a "foreign vulnerability," he was
told there is no such list.
The judge in the case refused
to enter as evidence the Franklin-AIPAC indictment and a decision is expected
next month. Meanwhile, the employee was fired by Lockheed-Martin.
According to the study, since
1996, the year in which the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA),
which adjudicates security clearance issues, began making its decisions public,
there were 47 cases involving Israel and 29 of them were denied clearance.
In the cases brought to the
appeals board, the government argued that ties of the applicant with Israel,
either by dual citizenship, holding an Israeli passport or having close family
members in Israel, should serve as a disqualifying factor due to "foreign
preference" or "foreign influence."
The government attorneys
raised, when the cases came to discussion, several references that would
portray Israel as a country trying to obtain American secrets, among them the
Jonathan Pollard case, a five-year-old report that puts Israel in a list of
countries that conduct industrial espionage in the US and lately also the
AIPAC-Franklin case.
The protocols of DOHA reveal
that Americans with dual Israeli citizenship are frequently asked questions
regarding their loyalties to the US and Israel. "The appeal board used the
hypothetical situation of an applicant being asked to
disclose classified information, not for the purpose of harming the United
States, but to either increase the security of Israel so his family in Israel
could live in peace and safety, or to reduce threats to the lives of Israeli
military personnel, which might include the applicant's sister and
brother," the report reads.
In one case, an applicant who
was born in Israel and later became a US citizen was asked hypothetically if he
would take up arms against Israel if the US would require him to do so. He said
he could not conceive of such a situation and could not see himself taking up
arms against Israel. The appeals board denied his request for clearance based
on "foreign preference."
Cohen said that from his
experience, Israel is the only country that these hypothetical questions are
asked about. "It's a dirty question. It's a catch-22 situation - whatever
you answer will be the wrong answer," he said.
Pentagon sources who are
aware of the issue confirmed that ties with Israel are seen as a problem when
requesting security clearance and that even elderly family members living in
Israel are seen at times as a reason to revoke or deny clearance.
In a recent community meeting
at a Washington synagogue, Baruch Weiss, an attorney representing Keith
Weissman, one of the AIPAC defendants, noted that the case is now being used to
deny clearances from people who have ties with Israel and said this is one of
the aspects of the case that should alarm the Jewish community.
Why did
president Bush commute the sentence of Lewis Libby?
Scooter
commutation is a neocon job
Three
explanations come to mind.
The first is that
Bush capitulated to intense pressure from the neoconservative commentariat led
by The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.
To these folks,
Scooter is no felon. Scooter is a hero. In the neocon network, Scooter was the
pivot man in the veep’s office moving the cherry-picked intel on Saddam’s WMD,
Saddam’s nukes, Saddam’s ties to 9/11 and al-Qaeda to a collaborationist press as
determined as he was to smash Iraq and Iran,
secure Israel
and control the Middle East.
So what if Scooter
lied to cover up the White House campaign to carve up Joe Wilson? If Scooter
did it, good Straussian that he is, he did it for the highest of motives in the
noblest of causes.
To the neocons, Scooter is, in Ahmed Chalabi’s phrase, “a hero in error,” one of the
boys. And as they saved him from the slammer, they will not stop until they
secure him a pardon - to which Bush has now opened the door.
Who is Lewis “Scooter” Libby?
What role did he
play in the run up to the Iraq war?
Read the
following Profile
Hudson
Institute: Former Senior Adviser
Project for the
New American Century: Founding Signatory
On March 6,
2007, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former
chief of staff, was convicted on charges of lying to government investigators
undertaking the probe into the leaking of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Libby was convicted on two counts of perjury, one count of making false
statements, and one of obstruction of justice.
Until October
2005, when he resigned after the announcement of the federal indictment against
him, Libby was Cheney's closest adviser and a key advocate of the
neoconservative line in U.S. foreign affairs within the Office of the Vice
President (OVP). Remarking on Libby's influence within the OVP, Bob Woodward
wrote in his 2006 book, State of Denial: "Cheney was lost without Libby,
many of the vice president's close associates felt. Libby had done so much of
the preparation for the vice president's meetings and events, and so much of
the hard work. He had been almost part of Cheney's brain."
Shortly after
his resignation, in January 2006, Libby joined the neoconservative-aligned Hudson Institute as a
senior adviser, focusing on Asia and the war on terror. As of mid-March 2007,
however, Libby's bio page was no longer available on the website, and his name
was not included on the organization's list of scholars.
Libby was
closely associated with the clique of hardline and neoconservative advisers
that was instrumental in shaping the foreign policy of the Bush administration
in the wake of 9/11. However, unlike many of his fellow neocons, who tend to be
prolific writers, the closest thing to a paper trail revealing Libby's views on
U.S. defense and foreign policy is the now-infamous 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance
(DPG), a controversial defense blueprint created by the few neoconservatives—including Libby—in the
administration of President George H.W. Bush. The draft DPG seems to have been
a major influence on the evolution of neoconservative thinking during the
1990s.
Like many other
neoconservatives who populated the administration of President George W. Bush,
Libby first entered government service during the Reagan years. While a student
at Yale, Libby studied under Paul Wolfowitz, who
became his political mentor and shepherded him into the ranks of the Republican
Party's foreign policy elite. In 1981 Libby joined the State Department, where
he worked under Wolfowitz on the Policy Planning Staff in the Office of the
Secretary. A year later, when Wolfowitz moved over to the State Department's
Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Libby also transferred, serving as
the bureau's director of special projects. During the Bush Senior
administration, Libby worked at the Pentagon under Wolfowitz and then-Secretary
of Defense Cheney. Libby became Vice President Cheney's chief of staff in 2001,
after the younger Bush took office.
In 1992, while
he was working under Cheney, Libby teamed up with Wolfowitz, with the
assistance of Zalmay
Khalilzad, to write the Pentagon's new DPG. The draft version of the
guidance, ordered by Cheney, laid out a military
strategy for global military dominance and preventive war. A version of it was
leaked to the press, and the DPG was toned down after the New York Times
published a story about the document's recommendations for a post-Cold War
defense posture. The draft DPG called for massive increases in defense
spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the
emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive—or preemptive—force, and the
idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn't suit U.S. interests. It called
for intervening in disputes throughout the globe, even when the disputes were
not directly related to U.S. interests, arguing that the United States should
"retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those
wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or
friends, or which could seriously disrupt international relations." The
United States must also "show the leadership necessary to establish and
protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors
that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture
to protect their legitimate interests."
After 9/11,
many of the ideas outlined in the draft DPG resonated with the Bush
administration. When the administration released the unclassified version of
President George W. Bush's National Security Strategy, observers remarked on
the many similarities between the draft guidance and the new so-called Bush
Doctrine, particularly their mutual call for a preemptive defense posture.
The guidance
also seems to have served as a template for the founding statement of
principles of the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC), which was signed by a who's who list
of foreign policy hardliners and neoconservatives who joined the George W. Bush
administration, including Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, and Peter Rodman. Libby,
along with other PNAC principals, was part of the team that also produced the
PNAC report, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for
a New Century, which prefigured the Bush administration's defense policy and
budget.
A lawyer by
training, arguably Libby's most famous client, whom he represented from the
mid-1980s to 2000, was Marc Rich, the billionaire financier convicted on
racketeering and tax fraud charges who was pardoned by President Bill Clinton
(CNN, March 2, 2001).
In 2001, Libby
returned to government service as chief of staff for Vice President Cheney, who
also named Libby as his assistant for National Security Affairs. From 2001 to
2005, the vice president's office became, along with Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld's top staff, one of the key hubs of influence over foreign and
military policy, sidelining the CIA and the State Department—government
agencies considered inimical to the policy agenda of the military hardliners
and neoconservatives.
Libby remained
out of the public limelight for much of George W. Bush's first term. Soon after
9/11, however, Libby's work came under increasing scrutiny. Observers accused
him of working with Cheney to bolster discredited allegations that had been
used to build the case for action against Iraq, including the assertion that an
agent of Saddam Hussein met with lead hijacker Mohamed Atta during the months
leading up to 9/11 (Washington Post, September 29, 2003).
It was not
until mid-2005, however, that Libby found himself subject to widespread media
attention, when his name increasingly appeared in news stories about the leak
of Plame's identity (U.S. News and World Report, October 31, 2005). Before
former State Department official Richard Armitage acknowledged in September
2006 that he was the source of the leak, both Libby and the president's Deputy
Chief of Staff Karl Rove
were frequently rumored to have been the initial source of the leak. As the Los
Angeles Times reported in October 2005, "Vice President Dick Cheney's
chief of staff [Libby] was so angry about the public statements of former Amb.
Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA
officer [Plame], that he monitored all of Wilson's
television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public
campaign against him, former aides say."
"While
other administration officials were maintaining a careful distance from Wilson
in 2004," reported the LA Times, "Libby ordered up a compendium of
information that could be used to rebut Wilson's claims that the administration
had 'twisted' intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq before the U.S.
invasion. Libby pressed the administration to publicly counter Wilson, sparking
a debate with other White House officials who thought the tactic would call
more attention to the former diplomat and his criticisms."
Those efforts
by Libby began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003,
but they continued well into 2004—after the Justice Department began
investigating whether administration officials had illegally disclosed Plame's
identity.
Libby testified
to a grand jury that he had met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller on
July 8, 2003 and mentioned Plame. Wilson had gone to Niger in 2002 to
investigate claims that uranium yellowcake was sold to Iraq; he determined that
the story was false. Miller, who in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion
uncritically reported claims by administration figures that Iraq possessed weapons
of mass destruction, spent three months in federal prison for refusing to
reveal the identity of her sources about Plame's identity. (Miller did not
write an article that named Plame, but was thought to have information
regarding the case.) She left jail and agreed to testify after receiving a
personal waiver from Libby, in which the beleaguered former insider wrote:
"Out West, where you vacation, the aspen will already be turning. They
turn in clusters because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life."
On October 28,
2005, a federal grand jury charged Libby with five felonies alleging
obstruction of justice, perjury to a grand jury, and making false statements to
FBI agents. Soon after the announcement of the indictment, Cheney accepted Libby's
resignation and named John
Hannah as his new national security adviser and David Addington as his
new chief of staff.
According to
the New Yorker , Libby's novel, The Apprentice, "tells the tale of Setsuo,
a courageous virgin innkeeper who finds himself on the brink of love and
war" (November 7, 2005). Describing the book as an "entry in the long
and distinguished annals of the right-wing dirty novel," the New Yorker
reports that it took Libby more than 20 years to write the book, which takes
place in a secluded Japanese province in the early 1900s. "The narrative
makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine,
'turds,' armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood
(regular and menstrual)," reports the New Yorker. "One passage goes,
'At length he walked around to the deer's head and, reaching into his pants,
struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the
snow just in front of the deer's nostrils.'" At some point, a character
asks "if they should f--- the deer." Retells the New Yorker:
"The answer, reader, is yes."
By 12 former
Army captains
Tuesday, October 16, 2007; 12:00 AM
Today marks five years since the authorization of
military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years
on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the
start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles.
As Army captains who served in Baghdad
and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division.
We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's
time to get out.
What does Iraq look like on the ground?
It's certainly far from being a modern, self-sustaining country. Many roads,
bridges, schools and hospitals are in deplorable condition. Fewer people have
access to drinking water or sewage systems than before the war.
And Baghdad is averaging less than eight hours of electricity
a day.
Iraq's institutional infrastructure, too,
is sorely wanting. Even if the Iraqis wanted to work together and accept the
national identity foisted upon them in 1920s,
the ministries do not have enough trained administrators or technicians
to coordinate themselves. At the local level, most communities are
still controlled by the same autocratic sheiks that ruled under Saddam.
There is no reliable postal system. No effective
banking system. No registration system to monitor the population and its needs.
The inability to govern is exacerbated at
all levels by widespread corruption. Transparency International
ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars
by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage
and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq's
oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq's reconstruction. Yet holding people
accountable has proved difficult. The first commissioner of a panel charged
with preventing and investigating corruption resigned last month, citing
pressure from the government and threats on his life.
Against this backdrop, the U.S. military has been trying in vain to hold the
country together. Even with "the surge," we simply do not have enough soldiers and marines to
meet the professed goals of clearing areas from insurgent control, holding them
securely and building sustainable institutions. Though
temporary reinforcing operations in places like Fallujah, An Najaf, Tal Afar,
and now Baghdad may brief well on
PowerPoint presentations, in practice they just push insurgents to another spot on the map
and often strengthen the insurgents' cause by harassing locals to a point of
swayed allegiances. Millions of Iraqis correctly recognize
these actions for what they are and vote
with their feet -- moving within Iraq or leaving the country entirely.
Still, our colonels and generals keep
holding on to flawed concepts.
U.S. forces,
responsible for too many objectives and too much "battle space," are
vulnerable targets.
The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks -- on U.S. troops,
civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt
get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.
Iraqi security forces
would not be able to salvage the situation. Even if all the Iraqi military and police were properly trained, equipped
and truly committed, their 346,000 personnel would be too few.
As it is, Iraqi soldiers quit at will.
The police are effectively controlled
by militias. And, again, corruption
is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very
elements that will battle each other after we're gone.
This is Operation
Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command.
This is either what did not get passed
on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore.
While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our
servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.
There is one way we might be able to
succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for
compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.
A scaled withdrawal
will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a
losing proposition.
America,
it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.
This column was written by 12 former Army
captains: Jason Blindauer served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005.
Elizabeth Bostwick served in Salah Ad Din and An Najaf in 2004. Jeffrey Bouldin
served in Al Anbar, Baghdad and Ninevah in 2006. Jason Bugajski served in
Diyala in 2004. Anton Kemps served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005.
Kristy (Luken) McCormick served in Ninevah in 2003. Luis Carlos Montalván
served in Anbar, Baghdad and Nineveh in 2003 and 2005. William Murphy served in
Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Josh Rizzo served in Baghdad in 2006.
William "Jamie" Ruehl served in Nineveh in 2004. Gregg Tharp served
in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Gary Williams served in Baghdad in 2003.
As American’s make their choice our “Decider” is listening to Norman Podhoretz and his band of Jewish Neocons are pushing for a pre-emptive attack on Iran as The Pentagon this week plans to alert at least seven National Guard units to be ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009 as the military's reserve forces are increasingly called upon to relieve the strain on active-duty troops, officials said yesterday.
The alert includes members of the New
Jersey Army National Guard who were told this week (10-15-07) they will
likely return to Iraq within a year.
In what would be
New Jersey's largest deployment since World War II, about 2,700 of the state's
6,000 soldiers will begin pre-deployment training in June and could be in the
combat zone by the end of next summer, state officials said.
So What About Iran?
It is no secret
that the Pro-Israel lobby and its allies - the (mostly Jewish) neo-cons and the
Christian Zionists - are pushing America into this war, just as they pushed it
into Iraq.
A
respected American paper posted a scoop this week: (29/09/07) Vice-President Dick Cheney, the King of
Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an attack on Iran. Its main
point: Israel will start by bombing an Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will
respond by launching missiles at Israel, and this will serve as a pretext for
an American attack on Iran.
Far-fetched?
Not really. It is rather like what happened in 1956. Then France, Israel and
Britain secretly planned to attack Egypt in order to topple Gamal Abd-al-Nasser
("regime change" in today's lingo.) It was agreed that Israeli
paratroops would be dropped near the Suez Canal, and that the resulting
conflict would serve as a pretext for the French and British to occupy the
canal area in order to "secure" the waterway. This plan was
implemented (and failed miserably).
What
would happen to us if we agreed to Cheney's plan? Our pilots would risk their
lives to bomb the heavily defended Iranian installations. Then, Iranian
missiles would rain down on Israel’s cities. Hundreds, perhaps thousands would
be killed. All this in order to supply the Americans with a pretext to go to
war.
Would
the pretext have stood up? In other words, is the US obliged to enter a war on
Israel’s side, even when that war is caused by Israel? In theory, the answer is
yes. The current agreements between the US and Israel say that America has to
come to Israel's aid in any war - whoever started it.
Is
there any substance to this leak? Hard to know. But it strengthens the
suspicion that an attack on Iran is more imminent than people imagine.
DO
BUSH, Cheney & Co. indeed intend to attack Iran?
I
don't know, but my suspicion that they might is getting stronger.
Why?
Because George Bush is nearing the end of his term of office. If it ends the
way things look now, he will be remembered as a very bad - if not the worst -
president in the annals of the republic. His term started with the Twin Towers
catastrophe, which reflected no great credit on the intelligence agencies, and
would come to a close with the grievous Iraq fiasco.
There
is only one year left to do something impressive and save his name in the
history books. In such situations, leaders tend to look for military
adventures. Taking into account the man's demonstrated character traits, the
war option suddenly seems quite frightening.
True,
the American army is pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even people like Bush
and Cheney could not dream, at this time, of invading a country four times
larger than Iraq, with three times the population.
But,
quite possibly the war-mongers
are whispering in Bush's ear: What are you worrying about? No need for an
invasion. Enough to bomb Iran, as we bombed Serbia and Afghanistan. We shall
use the smartest bombs and the most sophisticated missiles against the two
thousand or so targets, in order to destroy not only the Iranian nuclear sites
but also their military installations and government offices. "We shall
bomb them back into the stone age," as an American general once said about
Vietnam, or "turn their clock back 20 years," as the Israeli Air
Force general Dan Halutz said about Lebanon.
That's
a tempting idea. The US will only use its mighty Air Force, missiles of all
kinds and the powerful aircraft-carriers, which are already deployed in the
Persian/Arabian Gulf. All these can be sent into action at any time on short
notice. For a failed president approaching the end of his term, the idea of an
easy, short war must have an immense attraction. And this president has already
shown how hard it is for him to resist temptations of this kind.
WOULD
THIS indeed be such an easy operation, a "piece of cake" in American
parlance?
I
doubt it.
Even
"smart" bombs kill people. The Iranians are a proud, resolute and
highly motivated people. They point out that for two thousand years they have
never attacked another country, but during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war
they have amply proved their determination to defend their own when attacked.
Their
first reaction to an American attack would be to close the Straits of Hormuz,
the entrance to the Gulf. That would choke off a large part of the world's oil
supply and cause an unprecedented world-wide economic crisis. To open the
straits (if this is at all possible), the US army would have to capture and
hold large areas of Iranian territory.
The
short and easy war would turn into a long and hard war. What does that mean for
us in Israel?
There
can be little doubt that if attacked, Iran will respond as it has promised: by
bombarding us with the rockets it is preparing for this precise purpose. That
will not endanger Israel's existence, but it will not be pleasant either.
If
the American attack turns into a long war of attrition, and if the American
public comes to see it as a disaster (as is happening right now with the Iraqi
adventure), some will surely put the blame on Israel. It is no secret that the
Pro-Israel lobby and its allies - the (mostly Jewish) neo-cons and the
Christian Zionists - are pushing America into this war, just as they pushed it
into Iraq. For Israeli policy, the hoped-for gains of this war may turn into giant
losses - not only for Israel, but also for the American Jewish community.
IF
PRESIDENT Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, the Israeli government would have
had to invent him.
He
has got almost everything one could wish for in an enemy. He has a big mouth.
He is a braggart. He enjoys causing scandals. He is a Holocaust denier. He
prophesies that Israel will "vanish from the map" (though he did not
say, as falsely reported, the he would wipe Israel off the map.)
This
week, the pro-Israel lobby organized big demonstrations against his visit to
New York. They were a huge success - for Ahmadinejad. He has realized his dream
of becoming the center of world attention. He has been given the opportunity to
voice his arguments against Israel -- some outrageous, some valid - before a
world-wide audience.
But
Ahmadinejad is not
Iran. True, he has won popular elections, but Iran is like the orthodox
parties in Israel: it is not their
politicians who count, but their rabbis. The effective head
of Iran's political establishment is not the president, but rather the Supreme
Leader, who is a religious figure selected by an Assembly of Experts.
The
Shiite religious leadership makes the decisions and commands the armed forces,
and this body is neither boastful nor vociferous not scandal-mongering. It
exercises a lot of caution.
If
Iran was really so eager to obtain a nuclear bomb, it would have acted in
utmost silence and kept as low a profile as possible (as Israel did). The
swaggering of Ahmadinejad would hurt this effort more than any enemy of Iran
could.
It
is highly unpleasant to think about a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands (and,
indeed, in any hands.) I hope it can be avoided by offering inducements and/or
imposing sanctions. But even if this does not succeed, it would not be the end
of the world, nor the end of Israel. In this area, more than in any other,
Israel's deterrent power is immense. Even Ahmadinejad will not risk an exchange
of queens - the destruction of Iran for the destruction of Israel.
NAPOLEON
SAID that to understand a country's policy, one has only to look at the map.
If
we do this, we shall see that there is no objective reason for war between
Israel and Iran. On the contrary, for a long time it was believed in Jerusalem
that the two countries were natural allies.
David
Ben-Gurion advocated an "alliance of the periphery". He was
convinced that the entire Arab world is the natural enemy of Israel, and that,
therefore, allies should be sought on the fringes of the Arab world - Turkey,
Iran, Ethiopia, Chad etc. (He also looked for allies inside the Arab world -
communities that are not Sunni-Arab, such as the Maronites, the Copts, the
Kurds, the Shiites and others.)
At
the time of the Shah, very close connections existed between Iran and Israel,
some positive, some negative, some outright sinister. The Shah helped to build
a pipeline from Eilat to Askelon, in order to transport Iranian oil to the
Mediterranean, bypassing the Suez Canal. The Israel internal secret service (Shabak) trained its notorious
Iranian counterpart (Savak).
Israelis and Iranians acted together in Iraqi Kurdistan, helping the Kurds
against their Sunni-Arab oppressors.
The
Khomeini revolution did not, in the beginning, put an end to this alliance, it
only drove it underground. During the Iran-Iraq
war, Israel supplied Iran with arms, on the assumption that anyone fighting
Arabs is our friend. At the same time, the Americans supplied arms to Saddam
Hussein - one of the rare instances of a clear divergence between Washington
and Jerusalem. This was bridged in the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Americans
helped Israel to sell arms to the Ayatollahs.
Today,
an ideological struggle is raging between the two countries, but it is mainly
fought out on the rhetorical and demagogical level. I dare to say that
Ahmadinejad doesn't give a fig for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he only
uses it to make friends in the Arab world. If I were a Palestinian, I would not
rely on it. Sooner or later, geography will tell and Israeli-Iranian relations
will return to what they were - hopefully on a far more positive basis.
ONE
THING I am ready to predict with confidence: whoever pushes for war against
Iran will come to regret it.
Some
adventures are easy to get into but hard to get out of.
The
last one to find this out was Saddam Hussein. He thought that it would be a
cakewalk - after all, Khomeini had killed off most of the officers, and
especially the pilots, of the Shah's military. He believed that one quick Iraqi
blow would be enough to bring about the collapse of Iran. He had eight long
years of war to regret it.
Both
the Americans and we may soon be feeling that the Iraqi mud is like whipped
cream compared to the Iranian quagmire
Uri
Avnery
Nearly four years after President Bush
declared an end to combat in Iraq, the country is still fraught with daily
casualties, costly commitments, and an ongoing debate on how to end the
violence. How did it come to this?
NOW's David Brancaccio speaks
with two very different, but unforgettable men who allege that U.S. bungling
in Iraq created and fueled the deadly insurgency. Paul Hughes, a retired
Army colonel, was part of the transition team after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
He says key decisions were made that ignored the realities of Iraq. Omar
Fekeiki was a Washington Post reporter and translator who risked his life to
help U.S. journalists.
Both Hughes and Fekeiki are featured in a new
Sundance prize-winning documentary, "No End in Sight,"
which exposes what it calls "a chain of critical errors, denial, and
incompetence that has galvanized a violent quagmire." Fekeiki's identity
was hidden in the documentary for his protection, but he chose to appear
unmasked on NOW for the first time.
An
Update On the Pre-emptive Attack On Iran
The National
Intelligence Estimate NIE yesterday (12-4-07) reported that Iran abandoned its
nuclear weapons program in 2003. This blows to pieces the
Bush-Neoconservative case for war.
This change in my opinion was brought about by the steadfast opposition to a strike on Iran by two brave US Navy Admirals who dared to speak out.
Admiral
Michael Mullen Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Admiral William J.
Fallon CENTCOM commander who was quoted
as saying an attack on Iran
"will not happen on my watch”. "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back
in the box.".
Professor Juan Cole states that they may
well have cooperated with figures in the intelligence world to get this report
written and some of it released, especially since Congress had mandated that it
be completed and its findings conveyed to them by a date certain.
Farideh Farhi, at our group blog,
Global Affairs, says she listened to Bush's press conference on Tuesday --
which was full of implausible statements -- and now wants to
know what George W. Bush has been smoking. Uh, I don't think that substance
is typically smoked so much as snorted. Or maybe his current favorite is just a
stong bottle of beer.
The
Los Angeles Times notes a controversy over what the president knew and when
he knew it:
' Seven weeks ago, Bush said that in the interest of "avoiding World War
III" Iran should be prevented from gaining the knowledge needed to make a
nuclear weapon. That was roughly two months after J. Michael McConnell, the
director of national intelligence, reported to Bush that he had "some new
information" about Iran.
"He didn't tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going
to take awhile to analyze," the president said. He said he was not briefed
on the report until last week, and that in the interim no one had suggested
that he tone down his language.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, expressed
incredulity that Bush, "who gets briefed every morning, who is fixated on
Iran," had not sought details of the new assessment after learning of it
in August.
"I can't believe that," he said in a phone call with reporters. '
Washington insiders say that Director of National
Intelligence Mike McConnell would certainly have been kept in the loop by the
analysts producing this NIE. McConnell briefs Bush and said this summer he had
new evidence coming in.
At his press conference Bush reverted to his old ploy of declaring people and
things dangerous even when there is no objective measure of such things. He
used to say that Saddam Hussein had been "dangerous" even when it was
discovered that Saddam had no chemical, biological or nuclear research
facilities. Now Iran is intrinsically dangerous, regardless of whether it has a
weapons program or not. Does anyone still believe this sort of essentializing
and fear-mongering?
Bush's circle is like a medieval court with scheming courtiers. His
subordinates apparently routinely do things that he doesn't (and the other
courtiers don't) know about until later. Take for instance when then Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the Iraqi army dissolved, with Bush only
discovering it afterwards.
My guess is that Admiral William J. Fallon, the CENTCOM commander now,
and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, may well
have cooperated with figures in the intelligence world to get this report
written and some of it released, especially since Congress had mandated that it
be completed and its findings conveyed to them by a date certain.
Gareth Porter reported that
'A
source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation
hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack
on Iran "will not happen on my watch". Asked how he could be sure,
the source says, Fallon replied, "You know what choices I have. I'm a
professional." Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source,
adding, "There are several of us trying to put the
crazies back in the box." '
Mullen has worried
that the way the US military is bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq will
prevent Washington from replying decisively to any other foe or crisis.
Snow Bush with some occasional hints that the NIE has some new findings, sure
that he won't bother to ask for details or read any actual document (he seldom
does), then you could spring this thing on the Cheneyites and blindside them.
Cheney clearly was making a push for war on Iran this fall. The real puzzle is
how the NIE got past his team of plumbers, which still informally includes
convicted perjurer Scooter Libby. That's why I say there was moxie behind this
NIE, of the sort an admiral has, or better two admirals.
The following book review supports
my thesis that the neocons hijacked the war on terror. Books by professors Mearsheimer and Walt (The
Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy) and president Jimmy Carter (Peace
Not Apartheid) were labeled as anti-Semitic. Will the same a-S label be applied by these Israel apologists to
Heilbrun’s book and Weiss’ review or
another label that of self hating Jews?
The Long Fuse to the Iraq War
They Knew They Were Right:
The Rise of the Neocons,
Jacob Heilbrunn, Doubleday, 289 pages
by Philip Weiss
It is hard to imagine a title more
overdue than They Knew They Were Right: The
Rise of the Neocons. Ever since neoconservatism’s
chief contribution to world betterment, the Iraq War, began losing its luster,
its adherents have gone into a kind of hiding, and the media has given them
cover. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
and New York Times columnist David
Brooks, one or both of whom are neoconservatives,
have suggested that the word is an anti-Semitic epithet. Others try to avoid it
entirely: when Bill Kristol, who was definitely once a neoconservative,
was hired by the New York Times as a columnist, the paper called him a “conservative” and said
his father Irving Kristol, one of the movement’s founders, was a leader of
“modern conservatism.”
Jacob Heilbrunn asserts that neoconservatives have so far gotten away “scot-free” with planning the
greatest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam. And so his book will call them to account. Not quite.
Heilbrunn achieves one
important chore: a forthright social narrative of the neocons as a Jewish
movement. Tracing ideological
currents in the Jewish community from the 1940s to the 1970s, Heilbrunn, a
journalist who himself flirted with neoconservatism,
describes how the neocons were propelled by resentments against WASP elites—the men who
had ignored the Holocaust, they felt, and “frozen out” Jews from the
establishment. It would be hard to overemphasize Heilbrunn’s accomplishment.
There has been endless prevarication about the fact that neoconservatism
is an element of the Jewish
experience, even from liberal Jews. Yet Heilbrunn will have none of it. He says
that neoconservatism is “intimately linked with the memory of the Holocaust and the
allies’ failure to save the Jews during the war” and notes that a “peculiar
amalgam of intellectual rigor and ethnic resentment … lies at the heart of the
neoconservative outlook.”
And here’s the topper: a “lifelong
antipathy toward the patrician class among the neocons … prompted them to create their own parallel establishment.”
The sociological insights in his
story are often exciting. Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz had “the
classic Jewish experience with the WASP elite” but became a “social climber”
himself Heilbrunn says. The other godfather, Irving
Kristol didn’t at first take the late Allan
Bloom seriously. Bloom told Heilbrunn
that his relationship with Kristol got “easier” once Bloom, like Kristol, had
wealth. The neocons didn’t like Kissinger because he was hofjude, “a court jew of
the WASP foreign policy establishment.” They didn’t like Zbig Brzezinski
because he was Polish and the neocons suspected him of Pale-era anti-Semitism.
Boiling resentment meant very
little without a political program. The neocons
got that in the late 1960s. And
not surprisingly, the issues had a Jewish character. “With the trial of Adolph
Eichmann in Jerusalem, the 1967 war, and the rise of black anti-Semitism in the
United States, neoconservatism was born,” Heilbrunn writes. So now Brzezinski was resented
because he was against the Israeli
settlements in the West Bank,
and McGeorge Bundy
because he wanted to push Israel to make a peace
agreement with the Palestinians.
Neoconservative ideas might have been confined to small magazines, but the neocons stunned themselves in the 1970s by gaining
traction in American political life—through
the offices of Washington Sen. Henry Jackson (whom a Saudi ambassador called “more Jewish than the Jews”).
With Jackson’s support, the neocons staged their first great victory, pressuring the Soviet Union
to free Jews. After Daniel Patrick Moynihan won his New York Senate seat with
“strong Jewish support” in 1976, the neocons had a second home.
At that time, of course, they were
Democrats. Martin Peretz, the once leftwing editor of The New Republic, was so shaken by
the Left’s friendliness to the
Palestinians, that he provided access
in his pages to hawks, and became “a major force in the mainstreaming of neoconservative ideas.” Douglas Feith, an architect of the Iraq disaster, tells Heilbrunn, “I grew up in a liberal Democratic Jewish
household.” Again Israel was key. At the age of 15, two years into the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Feith wrote a precocious letter to the New York Times attacking the
State Department policy in the Middle East “It is appalling the State
Department can be so blind to historical precedent as to call for a withdrawal
from the captured area.” Captured, not occupied.
Israel-centrism made the neocons lousy wardheelers.
They turned against Jimmy Carter
on foreign policy, and so helped to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. Not one to
slight the power of his subjects, Heilbrunn says that had they not spurned
Carter, he might have been re-elected. Neocons
came back to the Dems in 1992, again
over Israel. George H.W. Bush—“a scion
of the WASP establishment”—was “acting like Jimmy Carter when it came to
Israel.” Knocking off the Soviet Union gave the neocons a sense of hubris that would doom their ideas about Iraq. Their
thinking was also damaged by the fact that the neocons overprized “filial piety”—and so their sons were enlisted in
their fathers’ battles without having to develop their own ideas.
Good stuff. Alas, the book’s
riches are set in the ancient past: the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Didn’t the neocons just wreck our image around the world? Heilbrunn doesn’t get to
9/11 till page 228. There are only 60 pages left, and the social insights that
have characterized the first half of the book disappear, giving way to a
stentorian, op-ed style. The neocons have “debauched” the idea of intervention. They were
“hopelessly naïve about the Arab predicament.”
I hoped that this book would do
for the parallel establishment what The Best and the Brightest did for the last
one in the wake of Vietnam. But Heilbrunn seems to have had only three or four
interviews with Iraq war planners and we learn little about their psyches. How do they feel about Israel? How much money do they make?
Do they think there is going to be another Holocaust? What was the importance
of Cheney’s American Enterprise Institute chapter (both he and his wife have been fellows at AEI) to his
inoculation with neocon doctrine?
Heilbrunn doesn’t provide answers.
There are two reasons for his
failure, the first vocational, the second far more worrisome. Heilbrunn was
evidently under a deadline, and having spent years working on the first part of
his book, he appears to have rushed the second half. His writing goes downhill.
In the galley, two sentences in a row have the verb “would end up.” Twice on
the same page former Sen. Bob Kerrey provides “important … cover” for the neocons.
The more troubling reason
is self-censorship. It is one thing to write
about the past with dispositive energy and quite another to render sharp
judgments about the present. Heilbrunn hints at great ideas without the ability
to follow through on them. He says the neocons’
obsession with radical Islam as another cold war was a self-delusion—did
they also confuse Palestinian suicide bombers with Nazis?
He talks about a parallel establishment and “an elite caste,” but
doesn’t do anything to explore the huge pots of money
available to the neocons and to politicians who stick by Israel. There is no follow through because
all these ideas are close to
anti-Semitic “canards,” the
word the pro-Israel crowd likes to use when anyone tries to address Jewish
influence in public life.
Heilbrunn is conscious of these tactics. He notes that Francis Fukuyama said
much more about the neocons’ love of Israel in an article than he did in his subsequent book and chalks the
scholar’s silence up to “the bullying tactics the
neoconservatives often employed to avert any criticism of Israel, however mild.” Well, Heilbrunn seems to have worried about the
same thing.
As for bullying, what are we to
make of Heilbrunn’s own vicious outbursts toward anybody who
has tried to change American policy toward the hateful Israeli occupation? Thus George Kennan worried about
“so-called ethnic lobbies.” Stephen Walt and John
Mearsheimer’s groundbreaking 2006 paper, “The Israel Lobby,” is
dismissed as an “addled essay”, without another word. Jimmy Carter is accused
of “crackpot moralism.” Edward Said was “a
smooth, urbane purveyor of much nonsense about the Middle East.”
Between these knifings, Heilbrunn
loses his own point of view. He tells us that Bush fell
“into the web that the neoconservatives had woven around him.” Sounds like a
conspiracy. Twice the author uses the word “cabal.” Harvard’s government
department “was the first academic neoconservative cabal.” Later there is
“the Pentagon cabal of neoconservatives.” Not even Walt and Mearsheimer used
the word, though maybe they
should have. Certainly, the neocons have often formed cells and have not been
transparent about their ideas or their aims.
The book’s promotional copy teases
the reader with that revelation. The
boldfaced paragraph on the back of the galley asserts that many believe that a
“cabal” of neocons launched a “war primarily on Israel’s behalf.” If Heilbrunn
doesn’t believe this, he ought to state why not. As it is the reader is left
with the shadowy sense that the neocons have a pro-Israel agenda that they are
not upfront about. But it isn’t a conspiracy,
Heilbrunn warns. The neocons
have convinced themselves that the U.S. and Israel have congruent interests.
“They just believe this stuff. They’re not agents,” an anonymous source tells
him, speaking of Cheney aide David Wurmser, who is married to an Israeli.
Jacob Heilbrunn’s book should be hailed as a
real sign of progress in assessing responsibility for the Iraq War, and yet the
real work remains undone.
I understand why there are inhibitions. Blaming
the neocons’ Israel-first worldview for the war raises deep fears among Jews.
The liberal Forward greeted Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper on the Israel lobby
with the bitter retort: “In Dark Times Blame the Jews.” We need to get past
this sort of defensiveness if we are going to understand our own democracy, let
alone the Middle East. What Heilbrunn rightly calls an “elite caste” could lose
status, yes. But others’ lives are at stake.
From:
January 28, 2008 Issue
The American Conservative
____________________________________
Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish
issues. He blogs at www.philip weiss.org/
About Philip Weiss
I'm
Philip Weiss. I'm 51 and live in New York State.
This blog is here because of 9/11, Iraq, and my progressive Jewish background.
I'm interested in: ideas, books, Jewish identity, pluralism, the political and
nationalist claims on American Jews by Israel, American foreign policy,
globalization, the struggle within Islam...
And I'm a luftmensch. That's Yiddish for a woolgatherer Though it's not a
culturally bound concept. There are lots of us everywhere Sometimes we have
good ideas.
weissphil@gmail.com
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