| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 8:15 pm Post subject: NY TIMES/Zionist Extremist Jew Safire Push Neocon Line |
| Before you read the www.salon.com article about Safire which is included after the following, be sure to read about the Safire 65 in this article from the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper:
Bush's domestic politics and the pro-Israeli tilt
By James O. Goldsborough
San Diego Union-Tribune
April 25, 2002
How are Americans to understand President Bush's kowtowing to
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?
Told to withdraw Israeli forces from the West Bank "without delay,"
Sharon refused. As Israel reduced the Jenin refugee camp to rubble
using U.S.-supplied arms, Bush praised him as a "man of peace." The
man of peace now wants to dictate the composition of a U.N.
fact-finding mission, approved with U.S. support, into Jenin.
As former President Carter pointed out Sunday, presidents don't just
spin their wheels. Presidents have power levers. In the case of
Israel, said Carter, the levers are two: We provide $10 million per
day in aid to Israel; we supply Israel weapons for defensive
purposes only, not for attacks on refugees.
Bush is having a rocky time. He rides high approval ratings because
of Sept. 11, but faced with the complexity of Middle East politics,
he is at sea. A man of domestic politics, he founders in the world
arena, where America has the reputation of being a superpower.
Bush's instinct from the beginning was to pull back from world
affairs. Just as he would be the anti-Clinton, he would be the
anti-Bush I. Those two presidents were too involved in the world,
too busy with alliances, agencies, treaties and all those things
that tie a good Texan down.
Bush wanted to "park" the Mideast. Last fall, when the White House
finally issued a few tepid words of caution about Israel's
bulldozing of Palestinian homes, Sharon accused Bush of Munich-style
"appeasement." To this gross insult to a nation that took no part in
Munich, the White House tut-tutted, asking Sharon to make friendlier
comments, which he did.
This month, however, as Israeli troops invaded the West Bank, Bush
said, "stop." Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the Middle
East to secure a troop withdrawal.
Bush was likely pushed into the Powell trip by his father and Brent
Scowcroft, who are said to have his ear. Neither John Ashcroft, the
fundamentalist zealot who is attorney general, nor Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld expressed support. Tom DeLay, the rabid House whip,
urged fellow born-again Christian Bush to eliminate Yasser Arafat,
not talk to him.
It took some moxie for Bush to "unpark" the Middle East, but then he
collapsed. There's no way to pretty this up. Sharon told him to take
a jump, and he did. Is there a precedent for a presidential mission
coming up so empty? Marshall's trip to Moscow in 1947? Kissinger and
Le Duc Tho in Paris in 1972? James Baker in Geneva with Tariq Aziz
in 1991?
In each of those cases, America reacted decisively. There is a price
to be paid for opposing our interests. That's what power politics is
all about.
Foreign policy can't be driven by parochial interests. A nation that
aspires to leadership must have more to its policy than local
politics. In the Middle East, U.S. leadership is accepted because we
are viewed as an honest broker. Many administrations have kept it
that way. We don't kowtow.
The Bush administration is different. It appears to care more about
political support from American Jews than about a fair Mideast peace
accord. When Bush I and Baker stopped Israel in 1991 from using U.S.
money to build illegal settlements on Arab land, they were attacked
by the pro-Israel lobby. Said Baker: "---- the Jews, they don't vote
for us anyway."
Bush II doesn't accept that. He believes in political realignment.
He thinks he can win the Hispanic vote, which is 75 percent
Democratic. If Hispanics, why not Jews, who voted 4-1 for Democrats
in 2000? It's not just that the Jewish vote in a state such as
Florida might be crucial in 2004, but that being pro-Israel helps
him with conservatives, religious fundamentalists, the South and the
media.
U.S. media are strongly pro-Israel. One criticizes Israel at the
risk of being called anti-Semitic. New York Times columnist William
Safire, who acts as the official media spokesman for Israel, lashes
out at the "ridicule of liberal pundits" like Mary McGrory to Mark
Shields who dare to criticize Israel. All two of them.
Eric Alterman, who writes for The Nation, recently compiled a list
of commentators who write on the Middle East. Sixty-five were listed
as supporting Israel, right or wrong. Five were listed as willing to
criticize both Israel and the Palestinians. Another five, only one
of them writing for the national press, was listed as anti-Israel.
Politicians and the media feed off each other. If a politician dares
speak out against Israel, he is pilloried by the Safire 65, and soon
has Jews shouting charges of anti-Semitism at him.
A former California member of Congress told me this story: A
colleague was running for the Senate. AIPAC, the Jewish lobby,
approached him. AIPAC would organize fund-raisers for him in five
cities, each with a guaranteed take of $100,000.
AIPAC asked for only one thing in return: If he won, he would commit
to vote in favor of the $3.5 billion in aid Israel receives annually
from America.
I get my share of anti-Semitic charges. To my accusers, I ask: Why
wasn't I anti-Semitic between 1993 and 2001, during the Oslo peace
process? With Sharon, Israel will never have peace. You confuse
anti-Semitism with anti-Sharonism.
To the latter, I plead guilty. But then, so do many of my Jewish
friends.
http://www.fair.org/counterspin/030504.html
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/2004/02/001704.html
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/02/21/safire/
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By Barry Lando
Feb. 21, 2004 |
With daily revelations of how the White House made use of faulty intelligence to bolster its political agenda, the media is also beginning to examine its own role in the affair. There's plenty to examine: Take, for instance, William Safire and the New York Times, frequently cited as a conduit for official disinformation.
A recent example was his trumpeting of the sensational charges published last November in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. The article proved, according to Safire, "that Saddam Hussein's spy agency and top al-Qaida operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks." Those charges were based on the leak of a secret memorandum from Douglas Feith (who is a JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremist associated with fellow JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremist warmonger Richard Perle as you can see both at www.nowarforisrael.com ), a senior Pentagon official, to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.
Safire had been pounding on the Prague connection since November 2001, two months after the 9/11 terror attacks. Fired anew by the Weekly Standard's story, he fired off two imperious columns of his own, demanding action from FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. "I'd also assign new agents to follow up leads in Prague," he advised.
"Intrepid journalists," Safire assured his readers, "will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light. In the meantime, the F.B.I. should stop treating 9/11 as a cold case."
Sounds pretty sensational indeed, except for the fact that the Pentagon immediately issued an unusual statement declaring that reports claiming that the new information proved there had been contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq "are inaccurate."
Further, the Pentagon continued, the leak "was deplorable and may be illegal."
The memo consists mainly of 50 excerpts drawn from raw intelligence reports from four U.S. agencies from 1990 to 2003. They are vague, mostly unsourced and far from conclusive. Indeed, according to several retired intelligence officers, the memo represents the same kind of ideological cherry-picking of intelligence that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place.
In short, the original headline-making conclusions are now seen by most to be threadbare. But not to Safire, who has made no mention of the Pentagon denials and remains incredulous that anyone might doubt the charges.
That, of course, is vintage Safire. Which might be fine if he were writing for a small town paper in Northern Maine. But the fact is that, whether Times editors like it or not, for most readers, Safire's charges also carry the weighty validation of the planet's most important newspaper of record. It's a problem the Times has yet to face.
I speak from the experience of looking into three Safire columns attacking France.
Countries cannot sue for libel. Otherwise, France would have quite a case against Safire and the Times. Safire's wild charges in a three-column barrage last year helped to deepen the war-related alienation between the U.S. and France. And though erroneous, they have entered the realm of historical verity -- and remain there to this day, thanks to the Times.
What is particularly outrageous is that Safire and his sources were allowed to continue their campaign using the Times and the International Herald Tribune as their podium -- even though the editors of both papers had been advised that the charges didn't hold water.
Further, according to Times policy, neither Safire nor his editors are under any obligation whatsoever to correct those errors.
Safire's main accusation was that French companies, with the knowledge of French intelligence services, helped supply vital rocket fuel components to Saddam.
As a former producer for 30 years with CBS' "60 Minutes," I looked into Safire's claim. I concluded that his story was based more on Francophobia than fact, built on flimsy evidence and biased reporting.
Safire's case has two parts. The first is that a French trader, CIS Paris, was the key intermediary enabling a Chinese company, Qilo Chemicals, to ship a product known as HTPB to Iraq. HTPB is used as a "binder" for solid rocket propellants. His charge is based on quotes from an exchange of e-mails, leaked to Safire from "an Arab source." The most damning message was sent Sept. 4, 2002. In that e-mail, James Crown of Qilo Chemicals wrote, "Thank you for your order to our HTPB-III! We just have sent a 40' container to Tartous (Syria) last month."
According to Safire, the chemical was received there by a trading company that was an intermediary for the Iraqi missile industry, the end user. The HTPB was then trucked across Syria to Iraq. According to Safire, it was the French connection -- CIS Paris -- that made the whole deal possible.
CIS Paris president Jean-Pierre Pertriaux makes no secret of his long-term relationship with Iraq, including brokering materials destined for military ends, like HTPB. He also admits having contacted the Chinese company, Qilo Chemicals. Like many such brokers, he skirts the law. By acting only as a go-between, strictly speaking, he would not be breaking any French or European export regulations, if the HTPB were not exported from France.
But the key point is that, according to Pertriaux, he was never able to consummate the deal for HTPB. When contacted by phone, James Crown of Qilo also claimed he'd never completed the sale.
What about the e-mails cited by Safire?
Read in their entirety, they make no sense, one sentence contradicting the next. Indeed, carefully analyzed, the whole convoluted exchange of e-mails quoted by Safire doesn't hold together, which may be why Safire quotes sparingly from them.
Safire also noted that Pertriaux claimed the deal with Qilo Chemicals was never consummated, but there was no way that denial would blunt his attack.
His target wasn't a single French trader but the government of France. CIS Paris, he charged, would never have been able to pursue its trade without the knowledge of French intelligence. "French intelligence has long been aware of it," he wrote.
Safire was right on that point, but totally wrong on his conclusions. In July 2002, both the U.S. State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency warned France of CIS Paris' attempts to purchase various products for Iraq's arms industry. The French immediately investigated CIS's activities but found nothing illegal. They requested more information from the United States -- information that might permit France to intercept any eventual delivery.
The U.S. authorities never replied.
"We're still waiting," says a French source close to the investigation.
So why did the deal between Qilo Chemical and CIS Paris never go through? Because, despite the lack of response from the U.S., the French continued to monitor CIS Paris' activities and, in August 2002, when it looked as if CIS Paris was about to make a firm order, the authorities warned CIS Paris to back off. "There are many different ways to exert pressure," says the French source.
It wasn't just one private French broker involved with Saddam's rocket program, Safire continued, but firms controlled by the French government itself.
"I'm also told," he wrote, again with no attribution, "that a contract was signed last April in Paris for five tons of 99 percent unsymmetric dimethylhydrazine, another advanced missile fuel, which is produced by France's Societe Nationale des Poudre [sic] et Explosifs (SNPE). In addition, Iraqi attempts to buy an oxidizer for solid propellant missiles, ammonium perchlorate, were successful, at least on paper."
The Times' columnist concluded his vitriolic attack: "Perhaps a few intrepid members of the Chirac Adoration Society, formerly known as the French media, will ask France's lax export-control authorities about these shipments."
The French government immediately investigated Safire's charge. The conclusion: SNPE exported neither product to Iraq, nor to any Middle Eastern country -- other than the state of Israel.
I submitted an Op-Ed piece to the Times ticking off the many serious flaws in Safire's column. Within hours, editor David Shipley replied that under Times policy, the Op-Ed page did not run pieces that quarrelled with its own columnists. He didn't question the points I made in my article. He suggested I write a brief letter to the editor.
Fine, I thought, can't argue with New York Times policy, but at least they'd been advised of the errors in Safire's report. I also e-mailed Safire saying I'd found problems with his column and would like to talk with him. There was no reply.
Just a few hours later, though, the Times published another vitriolic Safire salvo, "French Connection II," continuing the same erroneous blather about the French and Saddam's rocket fuel, this time targeting President Chirac.
Now the Times, like most newspapers, maintains that pieces on its Op-Ed page represent the personal views of their columnists. Their relationship is with the publisher, Op-Ed editor David Shipley told me, not with the editors. They are not subject to the same meticulous checking as more mortal Times reporters.
That lack of editorial oversight may make for provocative columns, but most readers don't recognize such fine distinctions, which is understandable. Particularly when, as in the case of those Safire columns, we were not presented with opinion but opinion disguised as investigative reporting -- in reality a pretense, a caricature of investigative reporting. One would expect such explosive charges to be subject to the Times' famous editorial checks and balances.
But one would be wrong.
With the imprimatur of his august paper, Safire's charges were picked up by newspapers and Internet sites around the globe, and consecrated as fact "reported in the New York Times." They fueled the firestorm against the French -- and they continue to do so.
I wrote a rebuttal that was published in Le Monde and by Tompaine.com. The Times bureau in Paris immediately asked for a translation of the Le Monde article and I thought that ended the matter. I had demonstrated that Safire's charges were seriously flawed, if not completely false. At the very least, I had given the Times editors the specific facts behind my charge that they were giving Safire's wild fiction a totally undeserved platform. No one from the Times contacted me or questioned my article.
Incredibly -- at least as I saw it -- a few days later, the Times published yet another column by Safire, continuing his same fabricated charge; this time, he challenged the CIA to reveal what it knew about France's role in shipping rocket fuel to Iraq. (Why won't the CIA tell all? Aha, another government coverup!)
The next day, Safire's column ran in the International Herald Tribune, as had the first two Safire attacks against France. The editors there also knew Safire's charges had gaping holes, but they had no choice in the matter. Since the paper is owned by the Times, its editors are required to republish the Times' star columnists without question.
As Walter Wells, the managing editor of the IHT wrote me: "It's apparent that Safire -- like Krugman or Friedman -- has free rein in his columns, even when he's dead wrong."
This is not the first time William Safire has been accused of mistaking fiction for fact, floating charges based on information leaked by unnamed high-level sources. After the World Trade Center attack, it was Safire who claimed as "undisputed fact" that, just five months prior to 9/11, Mohamed Atta had met secretly in Prague with a top-ranking Iraqi intelligence officer. In the supercharged months following 9/11, that accusation was the journalistic equivalent of tossing a lighted match into a powder keg, bolstering the case of those pushing for the U.S. to topple Saddam.
Over the following months, however, other more serious reporters found that Safire's reporting was, once again, flimsy at best. It was based on erroneous information from Czech intelligence, and was finally denied by Czech President Vaclav Havel himself. But the best evidence of Safire's ongoing error was that Colin Powell, desperate to demonstrate even the shakiest link between al-Qaida and Saddam, made no mention of that supposed Prague meeting to build the U.S. case before the United Nations
Safire, typically, has never backed down, inventing one conspiracy after another to explain away the Czech denials. The truth about Atta, Safire promised -- and the French rocket fuel companies -- would be uncovered once U.S. forces had taken Baghdad and had access to all those secret files and Iraqi officials. Well, the U.S. forces have been there now for months, and we're still waiting. Now, he announces, he's found proof of the Atta-Iraq connection in the memo leaked to the Weekly Standard. The memo, you'll recall, that the Pentagon called inaccurate.
And this is the New York Times, mind you, a paper that regularly runs a "Corrections Box" to fess up to the most picayune of inaccuracies, from an incorrect middle initial to the misspelling of a company name -- but not to innuendo and error on its Op-Ed page.
Recently, editor David Shipley wrote a piece attempting to explain the makeup of the Times Op-Ed page. I thought that was an ideal opening to submit another article. Using the Safire anti-French diatribes as case in point, I suggested it was a bit too much to expect the average reader to comprehend that while the Times stands behind the facts on its news pages, it can set a much lower standard for the "facts" presented by its columnists.
Shipley suggested I send the piece instead to Times ombudsman, Dan Okrent. Okrent, in reply, said I raised some interesting points which, one day, he might deal with.
On Feb. 15, in an astonishing admission, Okrent wrote that one issue that has attracted his attention is "whether columnists should be free, as they are now, to decide whether and when to publish corrections of their own mistakes."
Is all of this old history? Not really. Just Google "Safire" and "France." You'll find scores of sites around the world that still carry Safire's venomous opinions as indisputable fact, backed by the credibility of the New York Times. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 8:41 pm Post subject: Neocons With Dual Agendas and Divided Loyalties |
| Neocons With Dual Agendas and Divided Loyalties
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=40235&d=28&m=2&y=2004
Saturday, 28, February, 2004
Neocons With Dual Agendas and Divided Loyalties
Michael Saba, Special to Arab News —
WASHINGTON, 28 February 2004 — Stephen Green, the author featured in last week’s story, “The Article That Almost Wasn’t” wrote in the foreword to “The Armageddon Network” 20 years ago, “What you are about to read is first a spy story. It involves, in the classic pattern, the apparent misappropriation of highly classified documents belonging to the US Department of Defense and unauthorized dissemination of these materials to a foreign government.”
Green went on to say, “Those that are involved in the affair are still ‘at large’ and in fact currently hold senior positions in the Pentagon....” and also states, “this is an unfinished story of a possible cover-up and effort to abort the normal investigating and prosecutorial processes...” Green is still pursuing some of the same individuals who were featured in “The Armageddon Network” two decades ago but many other American journalists and media outlets refuse to confront this issue because even though it deals with illicit activities with a foreign country, that country is America’s “sacred cow” — Israel.
Last week we noted that over 20 major publications had rejected Green’s current article titled “The Pentagon’s Internal Security Problem: Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Ledeen” featured in the online CounterPunch weekend edition of Feb. 28-29 entitled “Serving Two Flags”.
Green’s article begins by pointing out that neoconservatives in the Bush administration have effectively “gutted” traditional American foreign and security policy. He states that notable features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use of unilateral force and the undermining of the principal instruments and institutions of international law including the UN all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security.
Green adds that some feel that the underlying agenda of the neocons is the alignment of US foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing.
Green asks whether the neocons, many of whom are senior officials in the Defense Department, National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President, had dual agendas while professing to work for the security of the United States against its terrorist enemies. He then proceeds to review the internal security backgrounds of some of the most prominent neocons and concludes that by looking at their security backgrounds, one can answer the questions that he poses in the article.
The individuals named in Green’s article include Stephen Bryen, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Let’s take a closer look at these individuals and how Green compiled the information on each of them.
Stephen Bryen and Michael Ledeen currently serve on the United States-China Economic Security and Review Commission. Both were appointed by the Republican congressional leaders in early 2001. Ledeen also serves as vice chairman of this China Commission. Additionally, according to Green, with the support of Department of Defense (DOD) Undersecretary Doulas Feith, Ledeen was employed as a consultant to the now infamous Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the DOD. Much has been written about the OSP and how major intelligence that led the US into the most recent war with Iraq was “cooked” in the OSP.
Green states that when a former senior FBI counterintelligence official heard of Bryen’s appointment to the China Commission, he said “My God, that must mean he has a ‘Q’ clearance. “ A “Q” clearance, which must be approved by the Department of Energy, is the designation for Top Secret codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.
Ledeen serving on both the China Commission and in the OSP would have access to classified materials and therefore would require high level security clearance.
Bryen and Ledeen have both been investigated by the US government extensively for improperly passing information to Israel.
In April of 1979 Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Stephen Bryen, a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee undergo a Grand Jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution of Bryen of espionage for Israel. The investigation conducted over a year had over 1000 pages of information documenting many issues regarding Bryan’s relationship with Israel and leaking information to Israel.
In Green’s article he points out that after Bryen was appointed by Richard Perle to a high level DOD position during the Reagan administration and received another security clearance, he was confronted various times by his colleagues and superiors including current Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage about his overzealous attempts to help export restricted technology to Israel.
Michael Ledeen was hired by the DOD as a consultant on terrorism in 1983 and his immediate superior was Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch. Koch told Green that Ledeen had somehow obtained classified information that he should not have been allowed to see. Koch then informed his executive assistant that Ledeen was to be denied classified materials in the future.
In the mid-1990s Ledeen left the DOD and joined the National Security Council (NSC) as a consultant. In that capacity, Ledeen became a major player in the “Iran-Contra” scandal. Ledeen was noted for carrying messages to then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Ledeen had his NSC security clearance downgraded while in that position. He moved downward from Top Secret to Secret. Also in Iran-Contra document Oliver North recommended that Ledeen “be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations”. Noel Koch testified that he was suspicious of Ledeen because he learned that Ledeen was negotiating the sale of US basic TOW missiles for $2500 each when the normal cost to another foreign government was $6800 per missile. Throughout their governmental careers, Bryen and Ledeen have consistently been promoted to high-level defense and security positions by their fellow neocons; former Defense Advisory Board Chairman Richard Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Journalist Sy Hersh has reported that in 1970 while Richard Perle was working for Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington, Perle was caught by an FBI wiretap discussing classified information with an official at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. And according to the New York Times, in 1978 CIA Director Stansfield Turner asked Sen. Jackson to fire Perle after Perle was named as a recipient of an unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Perle is currently embroiled in various other scandals including an investigation into his business dealings with Conrad Black and the Hollinger Corporation. Perle serves on the board of Hollinger and allegedly received a multimillion dollar unreported payment which potentially violates the law.
Paul Wolfowitz was brought into the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in 1973. He was known, according to Green, for his “strong attachment to Israel’s security”. In 1978 an investigation was conducted after, according to Green, Wolfowitz was “found to have provided a classified document on the proposed sale of US arms to an Israeli official through an AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) intermediary.
Also, according to Green, in 1990 when Wolfowitz was undersecretary for policy in the DOD under then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, an investigation was conducted that indicated “Wolfowitz had been internally promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM 9-M air-to-air missles” which were a restricted security item.
Douglas Feith has long been a major supporter of Israel. In 1982 Feith was a Middle East analyst for the NSC initially working under NSC head Richard Allen in the Reagan administration. When Allen was replaced by Judge William Clark, he fired nine staff members including Feith. According to Green, Feith was fired because he had been the subject of an FBI inquiry into whether, without authorization, he had provided classified information to a representative of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Stephen Green cites credible individuals and substantive documents in his article on these five current (as this article was being written Richard Perle announced his resignation from the Defense Policy Advisory Board) US government and government-related organizations. Though some of the 22 media outlets that rejected his article claimed there was “nothing new” in his piece, there is, in fact, much new and previously unreported public information in his commentary. That new information includes the 1978 inquiry on Paul Wolfowitz, the circumstances behind the Feith firing in 1982, the 1988 incidents concerning Bryen and the information on Ledeen provided by Noel Koch.
The most important point in the article is not just the interconnections of these five neocons. Perle hired Bryen 1981 to work at DOD. Wolfowitz hired Ledeen in 1981 as a special adviser. In 2001 Feith at DOD hired Ledeen as a consultant in the OSP.
Nor is it the assistance this group has given each other over the years. In 1973 Perle used his influence to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the ACDA. In 1982 Perle assisted in hiring Feith at the DOD. In 2001 Wolfowitz helped Feith get his appointment at DOD and Feith appointed Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Advisory Board.
And whatever sympathies these officials have to Israel is their own personal choice to which they have a right. Rather though, it is much more important that despite extensive investigations and files that exist on these individuals concerning leaking information to a foreign government, they continue to receive top level government positions and the highest level security clearances. It is not necessarily what is in these files that determines whether they receive security clearances, it is who does the hiring or appointing and whether the appointer feels that the appointee should receive the security clearance. And in the cases of Bryen, Ledeen, Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith, they each have usually managed to be the official that makes the decision about each other.
Former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Aikens in reviewing “The Armageddon Network” in 1984 said, “(The Armageddon Network) describes how high-placed American government officials have confused their loyalties; the story is a frightening one. Even more frightening is the failure of the American government to determine what damage has been done to the United States through their misguided action. The book is an instructive lesson on how the American government can be manipulated.”
Sound familiar?
— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.
Additional material related to what is mentioned above appears at the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/02/29/neo-cons-israel-and-the-bush-administration.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 12:08 am Post subject: Buchanan and the US Commitment to Israeli Security |
| After reading what JINSA/PNAC Jewish Zionist extremist warmonger Richard Perle mentions about France in the article included below, no wonder fellow Jewish Zionist extremist Safire was going after France like did..
Subj: Buchanan and the US Commitment to Israeli Security
Date: 2/21/04 11:20:26 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Friends,
Buchanan and the US Commitment to Israeli Security
Pat Buchanan has been courageous in presenting the truth about the neocons and the war, while many other critics of the neocons skirt the taboo areas. In the following piece Buchanan dares to point to the ethnic motivation for neocon policy. "If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from ‘American empire’ to ‘benevolent global hegemony’ to ‘a Pax Americana’ to ‘world democratic revolution’ have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?"
And Buchanan notes that by their very open exercise of power, the neocons have revealed themselves to the public—at least the observant public. "But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed."
This is an excellent article but with one significant, probably unavoidable, error. While Buchanan emphasizes that American foreign policy should pursue American national interest, he says it can be committed to protecting Israel’s security and survival.
"The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide."
Undoubtedly, in order to stay in the mainstream media it is necessary to pay homage to Israeli security. Buchanan obviously should be credited for having the courage of saying what he does. But how would one separate American commitment to Israeli security from the neocon policy that Buchanan decries. To Zionists, Likudniks and Laborites alike, the "security and survival" of Israel means the maintenance of an Israeli monopoly of power in the Middle East by weakening Israel’s neighbors and/or bringing them within Israel’s orbit. And since Israel by definition is a Jewish state—i.e., a Jewish supremacist state—the "security and survival" of Israel entails dealing with the Palestinian demographic threat to Jewish demographic superiority. The fact of the matter is that neocon/Likudnik positions have consisted of nothing else but efforts to enhance the "security and survival" of Israel.
Do the neocons understand Israel’s security needs? It would seem that they do. If Israel were a weak country, would the US really defend its existence, especially if the danger were something other than a direct military assault--a slow demographic threat combined with external terrorist attacks? During the 1970s the neocons made much of the fact that America was unable to defend its client states—Vietnam and Iran. It is because the Zionists don’t fully trust the US to advance their interests that Israel has made itself one of the greatest powers in the world. Without such overwhelming military power combined with influence in the US government (which impacts on the UN and other international bodies), it is unlikely that a Jewish supremacist state could survive in an Arab sea of people any more than white South Africa could survive amidst black Africans.
Demography is seen as the all-important problem to Israeli Jews. And this is simply because Israeli is a defined as a Jewish state. As Israeli commentator Uri Avnery put it in December 2002 [http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article215.html ]
"In reality, this is not a ‘Jewish democratic state’ but a ‘Jewish demographic state’. Demography overcomes democracy in all fields of action. An Arab citizen feels at every turn, since childhood, that he has no part in the state, that he is, at most, a tolerated resident. In every government office, police station or place of work, even in the Knesset, he is treated differently from a Jew, even in times of quiet. True, apart from the Law of Return, which gives a ‘Jew’ and his family (but not to Arab refugees) the absolute right to come to Israel, no law discriminates between a ‘Jew’ and a non-Jew. But this is only make-believe: numerous laws accord special privileges to persons ‘to whom the Law of Return applies’, without mentioning ‘Jews’ specifically.
"This is so self evident, that all state officials act accordingly without even being aware of it. The ‘Israel Land Authority’ distributes land to Jews, not to Arabs. All state development projects include Jews only. Among the hundreds of new towns and villages set up since the founding of Israel, not a single one was established for Arabs. There is no Arab minister in the Government, no Arab judge on the Supreme Court bench."
But the existence of the Jewish character of Israel is being threatened by the Palestinian population, with its burgeoning population. Without a predominantly Jewish population, the Jewish character of Israel would be eliminated—if the polity remained democratic, that is. Since the essence of Israel is its Jewishness, demographic changes would mean the end of Israel.
Thus, it is the demographic threat which poses the greatest danger to Israel. And this is clearly recognized by Israeli Jews.
Avnery continues: "The ‘demographic problem’ is being pondered in universities, talked about in the media, expounded by politicians and commentators.
"’Experts’ with computers are calculating what will be the percentage of Jews in Israel in 10, 25, 50 or a hundred years time. Will they be less than 78%? Or - God forbid! - only 75%? Will the womb of the orthodox Jewish woman, in addition to expected immigration, balance the production of the Arab uterus?" http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article215.html
But even if the population of Jews should increase the arid land simply could not hold that great number.. The dean of Israel's revisionist historians, Benny Morris, maintains that "This land is so small that there isn't room for two peoples. In fifty or a hundred years, there will only be one state between the sea and the Jordan. That state must be Israel." http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id128.htm
The fact that revisionist historian Morris would express such a view shows that the belief in the demographic threat to Israel exists not only among Likudniks but also on the Left
In short, for the US to defend Israel’s security means far more than to defend it from direct external military assault. It means to be committed to Jewish demographic dominance and ethnic supremacy. Now the Likud uses a more militant approach to achieve Israeli security, but Labor’s "peace process" was still intended to maintain Jewish demographic dominance in Israel and Israeli dominance in the Middle East. To maintain Israeli security, the "peace process" at most offered the Palestinians cut up, waterless bantustans.
The Palestinians and Israel’s Arab/Islamic neighbors will never accept the Israeli definition of its security unless they are beaten down into submission—altered into puppet states or powerless mini-states. For the US to pursue such a policy means that the US must pursue an endless war in the Middle East and become the major target for Islamic terrorists. For the US not to do this would show that it is not really committed to Israel’s security and survival.
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http://amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html
March 1, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post depiction of himself as the "intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy."
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, "There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust." "What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained" now menaces "our survival as a nation."
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
"[A] radical strain within Islam," says Perle, " ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws."
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to "overthrow our civilization" and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never "overthrow our civilization."
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, "[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never "the clear and present danger" the authors insist she was.
Calling their book a "manual for victory," they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
But no nation can "end evil." Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to "end" it? Nor can any nation "win the war on terror." Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can "end" it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and "immortality," will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: "We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not" [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a short list of priority targets: "The war on terror is not over, it has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder."
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn, "present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time."
"Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?" the authors demand. They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a "Western orientation"—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
"We don’t have much time," say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us "with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror," or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a "state sponsor of terror" 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. "The regime must go," say our authors, because Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to "toss dictators aside"? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. "We have no doubt how such a war would end," say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome.
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: "We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial."
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a "cakewalk," that we would be hailed as "liberators," that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, "What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass."
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003.
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the "INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis." The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that Saddam "is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons."
Naming Khidir Hamza, "one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam," as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. "Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them." Only "preemptive action" can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was imminent:
With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s "collaboration with terrorism is well documented," wrote Perle, "Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11 ringleader, is convincing."
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. "We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not."
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. "No war in ‘04" is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about "unipolar" moments and "American empire" aside, there are limits to American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his "axis-of-evil" rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, "We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire."
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, "One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind."
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls "the Firemen’s War" into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle concede, this is "our generation’s great cause."
"Who are those guys?" Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the "axis-of-evil" phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a "hot" book and got himself hired by National Review, where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen "Unpatriotic Conservatives" who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and "wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror."
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must, in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored "A Clean Break," a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings. The toxic charge of "Anti-Semite!" has become the last argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review’s response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having "blamed the Jews," he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word "neocon," he writes, the "con" stands for conservative and the "neo" stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: "This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth."
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from "American empire" to "benevolent global hegemony" to "a Pax Americana" to "world democratic revolution" have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid "permanent alliances," beware of "passionate attachments" to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. "The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism," Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an "ideological" nation, "like the Soviet Union of yesteryear." We and Israel are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
But this is nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France declared war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not "come to the defense of France and Britain." He delivered a fireside chat that night promising the nation America would stay out. There will be "no blackout of peace" here, FDR promised us.When France fell in May-June of 1940, pleading for planes, FDR sent words of encouragement. Not until 18 months after the fall of France did we declare war on Hitler and not until after Hitler declared war on us. Thus, we did not go to war to defend democracy in Britain or France. We went to war to smash the Japanese Empire that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Kristol is parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek, Salazar, Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and the Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, "A state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters."
India is democratic and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India’s wars with Pakistan, we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were allies, and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and Pakistan autocratic made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has America really given her $100 billion and taken her side in every Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony Judt. When this British historian proposed—given the impossibility of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank—that Israel annex the West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians equal rights, neocons went berserk.
Frum called Judt’s idea "genocidal liberalism" that would leave Jews exposed to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it "unthinkable" and "the definition of intellectual corruption." "[H]aughty and ugly," said the New Republic, which hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just solution to the South African problem was to abolish bantustans and create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not even a debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they are the "neo-Jacobins" of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint.
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’ fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing their plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how they had become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war drums, one of them bellowed, "We are all neoconservatives now!"
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one they’ve got right.
March 1, 2004 issue
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