| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 1:12 am Post subject: "No American President Can Stand Up to Israel" |
| "Many Americans are convinced that military coercion serves our interest. They cite Libya, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now they are ready to bring Iran and Pakistan to heel with bombs."
August 15, 2007
The Peculiar Relationship
"No American President Can Stand Up to Israel"
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
"No American President can stand up to Israel."
These words came from feisty Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations (1967-1970) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1970-1974). Moorer was, perhaps, the last independent- minded American military leader.
Admiral Moorer knew what he was talking about. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the American intelligence ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 173. The Israelis even strafed the life rafts, machine-gunning the American sailors leaving the stricken ship.
Apparently, the USS Liberty had picked up Israeli communications that revealed Israel's responsibility for the Seven Day War. Even today, history books and the majority of Americans blame the conflict on the Arabs.
The United States Navy knew the truth, but the President of the United States took Israel's side against the American military and ordered the United States Navy to shut its mouth. President Lyndon Johnson said it was all just a mistake. Later in life, Admiral Moorer formed a commission and presented the unvarnished truth to Americans.
The power of the Israel Lobby over American foreign policy is considerable. In March 2006, two distinguished American scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, expressed concern in the London Review of Books that the power of the Israel Lobby was bending US foreign policy in directions that serve neither US nor Israeli interests. The two experts were hoping to start a debate that might rescue the US and Israel from unsuccessful policies of coercion that are intensifying Muslim hatred of Israel and America. The Israel lobby was opposed to any such reassessment, and attempted to close it off with epithets: "Jew-baiter, " "anti-Semitic, " and even "anti-American. " Today Israeli citizens who oppose Zionist plans for greater Israel are denounced as "anti-Semites. "
Many Americans are unaware of the influence of the Israel lobby. Instead they think of the US as "the world's sole superpower," a macho new Roman Empire whose orders are obeyed without question or the insolent nonentity is "bombed back to the stone age." Many Americans are convinced that military coercion serves our interest. They cite Libya, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now they are ready to bring Iran and Pakistan to heel with bombs.
This arrogance results in the murder of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children, a fate that many Americans seem to believe is appropriate for countries that do not accept US hegemony.
Coercion is what American foreign policy has become. Macho superpatriots love it. Many of these superpatriots derive vicarious pleasure from their delusions that America is "kicking those sand niggers' asses."
This is the America of the Bush Regime. If some of these superpatriots had their way every "unpatriotic, terrorist supporter" who dares to criticize the war against "the Islamofacists" would be sent to Gitmo, if not shot on the spot.
These Bush supporters have morphed the Republican Party into the Brownshirt Party. They cannot wait to attack Iran, preferably with nuclear weapons. Impatient for Armageddon, some are so full of hubris and self-righteousness that they actually believe that their support for evil means they will be "wafted up to heaven." [see
It has come as a crippling blow to Democrats that "their" political party is comfortable with Bush's America, and will do nothing to stop the Bush regime's aggression against the Iraqi people or to prevent the Bush regime's attack on Iran.
The Democrats could easily impeach both Bush and Cheney in the House, as impeachment only requires a majority vote. They could not convict in the Senate without Republican support, as conviction requires ratification by two-thirds of Senators present. Nevertheless, a House vote for impeachment would take the wind out of the sails of war, save countless lives and perhaps even save humanity from nuclear holocaust.
Various rationales or excuses have been constructed for the Democrats' complicity in aggression that does not serve America. Perhaps the most popular rationale is that the Democrats are letting the Republicans have all the rope they want with which to produce such a high disapproval rating that the Democrats will sweep the 2008 election.
It is doubtful that the Democrats would assume that men as cunning as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do not understand the electoral consequences of a low public approval rating and are walking blindly into an electoral wipeout. Rove's departure does not mean that no strategy is in place.
So what does explain the complicity of the Democratic Party in a policy that the American public, and especially Democratic constituencies, reject? Perhaps a clue is offered from the Minneapolis- St. Paul Star Tribune news report (August 1, 2007) that Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison will spend a week in Israel on "a privately funded trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Federation. The AIEF--the charitable arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)--is sending 19 members of Congress to meet with Israeli leaders. The group, made up mostly of freshman Democrats, has plans to meet with Isreali Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and [puppet] Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The senior Democratic member on the trip is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has gone three times. . . . The trip to Israel is Ellison's second as a congressman. "
According to the Star-Tribune, a Republican group, which includes Rep. Michele Bachmann (R, Minn), led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va) is already in Israel. According to news reports, another 40 are following these two groups during the August recess, and "by the time the year is out every single member of Congress will have made their rounds in Israel." This claim is probably overstated, but it does show careful Israeli management of US policy in the Middle East.
Elsewhere on earth and especially among Muslims, the suspicion is rife that the reason the war against Iraq cannot end, and the reason Iran and Syria must be attacked, is that the US must destroy all Muslim opposition to Israel's theft of Palestine, turning an entire people into refugees driven from their homes and from the lands on which they have lived for many centuries. Americans might think that they are merely grabbing control over oil, keeping it out of the hands of terrorists, but that is not the way the rest of the world views the conflict.
Jimmy Carter was the last American president who stood up to Israel and demanded that US diplomacy be, at least officially if not in practice, even-handed in its approach to Israel and Palestine. Since Carter's presidency, even-handedness has slowly drained from US policy in the Middle East. The neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime has abandoned even the pretense of even-handedness.
This is unfortunate, because military coercion has proven to be unsuccessful. Exhausted from the conflict, the US military, according to former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, is "nearly broken." Demoralized elite West Point graduates are leaving the army at the fastest clip in 30 years. Desertions are rapidly rising. A friend, a US Marine officer who served in combat in Vietnam, recently wrote to me that his son's Marine unit, currently training for its third deployment to Iraq in September, is short 12-16 men in every platoon and expects to be hit with more AWOLs prior to deployment.
Instead of re-evaluating a failed policy, Bush's "war tsar," General Douglas Lute, has called for the reinstitution of the draft. Gen. Lute doesn't see why Americans should not be returned to military servitude in order to save the Bush administration the embarrassment of having to correct a mistaken Middle East policy that commits the US to more aggression and to debilitating long-term military conflict in the Middle East.
It is difficult to see how this policy serves any interest other than the very narrow one of the armaments industry. Apparently, nothing can be done to change this disastrous policy until the Israel Lobby comes to the realization that Israel's interest is not being served by the current policy of military coercion.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 14, 2007
'This One Is So Hot': The Censorship of Walt and Mearsheimer
I now have a copy of the letter John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt sent to the board of the Chicago Global Affairs Council after it cancelled their September appearance there under political pressure. The letter follows, below.
A couple of comments. This is a sad business. Two distinguished profs who have both spoken at the Council before are disinvited regretfully/squeamishly by a respected professional friend, and informed that they might only speak if someone else comes to counter their statements. The old "context" argument used against Rachel Corrie and everyone else. Your views are too toxic to be heard unless we "balance" them.
Walt and Mearsheimer point out that Michael Oren spoke at the Council earlier this year on Middle East matters without "context." Oren is a neoconservative who made aliyah to Israel in the 70s and who served as an officer in the Israeli army. John Mearsheimer served as an officer in the United States Air Force. Let us be very clear about this: A former officer in the Israeli Army who lives in Israel (and has lately served in the Israeli Reserves) may hold forth about our policy in the Middle East, but a former officer in our Air Force has no place to do the same. You don't have to be a nativist to find this mindboggling. Mearsheimer and Walt are all for Oren speaking, they just want to be able to speak too. And just compare the literary and analytical work of Oren and Mearsheimer; there is no comparison. Oren is a polemicist, Mearsheimer a serious student of American policy. Deeply dispiriting. Where is Alan Dershowitz, to decry the censorship?
I'm upset. I tell myself that this just shows how afraid the other side is of the truth, but face it, they're winning. Last night my wife said at dinner that I am "paying a price" for my views on the Middle East. I have a long career as a journalist. I lost a blog-job earlier this year over these issues, I can't get paying assignments to write about these matters; and they are all that I care about, as my country fumbles through the aftermath of 9/11 and Iraq. I sense some of that same sorrow in the Walt and Mearsheimer letter that follows. At the peaks of their careers, they have devoted themselves to these policy issues out of some sense of duty; and they're not being allowed to speak. It appears from the letter that a friendship has ended: the authors' with Marshall Bouton. How long before the country wakes up from this madness?
August 5, 2007
[Addressed, individually, to board members of the Council, and to members of Council committees]
We are writing to bring to your attention a troubling incident involving the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. We do so reluctantly, as we have both enjoyed our prior associations with the Council and we have great respect for its aims and accomplishments. Nonetheless, we felt this was an episode that should not pass without comment.
On September 4, 2007, our book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the most highly respected publishers in the United States. Through our publisher, the Council issued an invitation for both of us to speak at a session on September 27, 2007. We were delighted to accept, as each of us had spoken at the Council on several occasions in the past and knew we would attract a diverse and well-informed audience that would engage us in a lively and productive discussion.
On July 19, while discussing the details of our visit with Sharon Houtkamp, who was handling the arrangements at the Council, we learned that the Council had already received a number of communications protesting our appearance. We were not particularly surprised by this news, as we had seen a similar pattern of behavior after our original article on "The Israel Lobby" appeared in the London Review of Books in March 2006. We were still looking forward to the event, however, especially because it gave us an opportunity to engage these issues in an open forum.
Then, on July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was cancelling the event. He said he felt "extremely uncomfortable making this call" and that his decision did not reflect his personal views on the subject of our book. Instead, he explained that his decision was based on the need "to protect the institution." He said that he had a serious "political problem," because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the Council. "This one is so hot," Marshall maintained, that he could not present it at a Council session unless someone from "the other side"—such as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League—was on stage with us. At the very least, he needed to present "contending viewpoints." But he said it was too late to try to change the format, as the fall schedule was being finalized and there would not be sufficient time to arrange an alternate date. He showed little interest in doing anything with us in 2008 or beyond.
Several comments are in order regarding this situation.
First, since the publication of our original article on the Israel lobby, we have appeared either singly or together at a number of different venues, including Brown University, the Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia University, Cornell University, Emerson College, the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Georgetown University, the National Press Club, the Nieman Fellows Program at Harvard University, the University of Montana, the Jewish Community Center in Newton, Massachusetts, and Congregation Kam Isaiah Israel in Chicago. In all but one of these venues we appeared on our own, i.e., without someone from the "other side." As one would expect, we often faced vigorous questions from members of the audience, which invariably included individuals who disagreed in fundamental ways with some of our arguments. Nevertheless, the back-and-forth at each of these events was always civil, and quite a few participants said that they benefited from listening to us and to our interlocutors.
Second, the Council has recently welcomed speakers who do represent a "contending viewpoint," and they have appeared on their own. Consider the case of Michael Oren, an Israeli-American author, who appeared at the Council on February 8, 2007, to talk about "The Middle East and the United States: A Long and Complicated Relationship." Oren has a different view of U.S. Middle East policy than we do; indeed, he gave a keynote address at AIPAC's annual policy conference this past spring that directly challenged our perspective. We believe it was entirely appropriate for the Council to have invited him to speak, and without having a representative from an opposing group there to debate him. The Council has also welcomed a number of other speakers on this general topic in recent years, such as Dennis Ross, Max Boot and Rashid Khalidi, and none of their appearances included someone representing a "contending view."
One might argue that our views are too controversial to be presented on their own. However, they are seen as controversial only because some of the groups and individuals that we criticized in our original article have misrepresented what we said or leveled unjustified charges at us personally—such as the baseless claim that we (or our views) are anti-Semitic. The purpose of these charges, of course, is to discourage respected organizations like the Council from giving us an audience, or to create conditions where they feel compelled to include "contending views" in order to preserve "balance" and to insulate themselves from external criticism.
In fact, our views are not extreme. Our book does not question Israel's right to exist and does not portray pro-Israel groups in the United States as some sort of conspiracy to "control" U.S. foreign policy. Rather, it describes these groups and individuals—both Jewish and gentile—as simply an effective special interest group whose activities are not substantially different from groups like the NRA, the farm lobby, the AARP, or other ethnic lobbies. Its activities, in other words, are as American as apple pie, although we argue that its influence has helped produce policies that are not in the U.S. national interest. We also suggest that these policies have been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well, and that a different course of action would be better for both countries. It is not obvious to us why such views could not be included in the Council's schedule.
Although we find it somewhat unseemly to refer to our own careers, it is perhaps worth noting that we are both well-established figures with solid mainstream credentials. We are fortunate to occupy chaired professorships at distinguished universities, and to have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We have both held important leadership positions at Chicago or Harvard, each of us serves on the editorial boards of several leading foreign policy journals (such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy), and we have both done consulting work for U.S. government agencies. Given our backgrounds, the idea that it would be inappropriate for us to appear on our own at a Council session seems far-fetched.
Finally, and most importantly, we believe that the decision to cancel our appearance is antithetical to the principle of open discussion that underpins American democracy, and that is so essential for maximizing the prospects that our country pursues a wise foreign policy. In essence, we believe this is a case in which a handful of people who disagree with our views have used their influence to intimidate Marshall into rescinding the Council's invitation to us, so as to insure that interested members will not hear what we have to say about Israeli policy, the U.S. relationship with Israel, and the lobby itself. This is not the way we are supposed to address important issues of public policy in the United States, and it is surely not the way the Council normally conducts its business. This is undoubtedly why Marshall, who is a very smart and decent man, felt so uncomfortable calling us to say that the event had been cancelled. He knew this decision was contrary to everything that the Council is supposed to represent.
The Chicago Council is obviously under no obligation to grant us a venue, and we are not writing in an attempt to reverse this decision. But given the importance of the issues that are raised in our book, we are genuinely disappointed that we will not have the benefit of open exchange with the Council's members, including those who might want to challenge our arguments or conclusions. The United States and its allies—including Israel—face many challenging problems in the Middle East, and our country will not be able to address them intelligently if we cannot have an open and civilized discussion about U.S. interests in the region, and the various factors that shape American policy there. Regrettably, the decision to cancel our appearance has made that much-needed conversation more difficult.
Sincerely,
John J. Mearsheimer
R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago
Stephen M. Walt
Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs
Harvard
University
Posted at 08:37 AM in Politics, Culture, Religion, U.S. Policy in the Mideast
www.philipweiss.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Email to Chicago Council on Global Affairs re: ban of M/W
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/08/14/email-to-chicago-council-on-global-affairs-re-ban-of-m-w.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | |  | | Cowboy | | Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2007 6:19 am Post subject: |
| Gallup Poll. Feb. 1-4, 2007. N=1,007 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.
"In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?"
8/97-4/02 wording: "In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinian Arabs?"
Israelis 58%
Palestinians 20%
Both (vol.) 5%
Neither (vol.) 10%
Unsure 7% | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2007 7:01 am Post subject: |
| | Thanks Rabbi....typical AIPAC polls by a Zionist media...whoddathunkit? | | | | DanielDives | | Posted: Sun Aug 19, 2007 7:09 am Post subject: |
| And that for a guy who shrugs his shoulders when a poll doesn't serve his interest.
Anyway, the USS Liberty survivors want a day in an open court, you don't want them to have it. Why? | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
