| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:04 am Post subject: The Pentagon neocons who brought you the war in Iraq |
| this article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1114/
Is Iran Next?
The Pentagon neocons who brought you the war in Iraq have a new target
By Tom Barry September 28, 2004
Shortly after 9/11, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith began coordinating Pentagon planning for an invasion of Iraq. The challenge facing Feith, the No. 3 civilian in the Defense Department, was to establish a policy rationale for the attack. At the same time, Feith’s ideological cohorts in the Pentagon began planning to take the administration’s “global war on terrorism,” not only to Baghdad, but also to Damascus and Tehran.
In August it was revealed that one of Feith’s Middle East policy wonks, Lawrence Franklin, shared classified documents—including a draft National Security Presidential Directive formulated in Feith’s office that outlines a more aggressive U.S. national security strategy regarding Iran—with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Israeli officials. The FBI is investigating the document transfer as a case of espionage.
This spy scandal raises two concerns for U.S. diplomats and foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum. One, that U.S. Middle East policy is being directed by neoconservative ideologues variously employed, coordinated or sanctioned by Feith’s Pentagon office. And two, that U.S. Middle East policy is too closely aligned with that of Israeli hardliners close to U.S. neoconservatives.
Feith is joined in reshaping a U.S. foreign Middle East policy—one that mirrors or complements the policies of the hardliners in Israel—by a web of neoconservative policy institutes, pressure groups and think tanks. These include the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), Center for Security Policy (CSP) and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA)—all groups with which Feith has been or still is closely associated.
First Iraq, now Iran
In the months after 9/11, rather than relying on the CIA, State Department or the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency for intelligence about Iraq’s ties to international terrorists and its development of weapons of mass destruction, neoconservatives in the Pentagon set up a special intelligence shop called the Office of Special Plans (OSP). The founders, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith, are fervent advocates of a regional restructuring in the Middle East that includes regime change in Iran, Syria and, ultimately, Saudi Arabia.
Not having its own intelligence-gathering infrastructure, Feith’s office relied on fabricated information supplied by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate who led the Iraqi National Congress (INC). In 1998, Chalabi’s group was funded by the Iraq Liberation Act, a congressional initiative that was backed by neoconservative institutions such as AIPAC, CSP, Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
At the same time that Chalabi and other INC militants were visiting Feith’s office, so were Israeli officials, including generals, according to Lt. Col Karen Kwiakowski, who formerly worked in the Near East and South Asia office under Feith’s supervision. Like the neoconservatives in the United States, Israeli hardliners believe that Israel’s long-term security can best be ensured by a radical makeover of Middle East politics enforced by the superior military power of the United States and Israel.
It now appears that Feith’s Office of Policy, which was creating dubious intelligence rationales for the Iraq war, was also establishing a covert national security strategy for regime change in Iran—most likely through a combination of preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents.
Covert operators
This covert operation is now the subject of an FBI espionage investigation and inquiries by the House Judiciary Committee and Select Senate Intelligence Committee—inquiries that have been postponed until after the election.
Without notifying the State Department or the CIA, Feith’s office has been involved in back channel operations that have included a series of secret meetings in Washington, Rome and Paris over the last three years. These meetings have brought together Office of Policy officials and consultants (Franklin, Harold Rhode and Michael Ledeen), an expatriate Iranian arms dealer (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian and Israeli intelligence officers, among others.
Franklin, an Iran expert who was pulled into Feith’s policy shop from the Defense Intelligence Agency, met repeatedly with Naor Gilon, the head of the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington. According to U.S. intelligence officials, during one of those meetings, Franklin offered to hand over the National Security Presidential Directive on Iran. For more than two years, an FBI counterintelligence operation has been monitoring Washington meetings between AIPAC, Franklin and Israeli officials. Investigators suspect that the draft security document was passed to Israel through an intermediary, likely AIPAC.
Franklin, who is known to be close to militant Iranian and Iranian-American dissidents, is the common link to another series of meetings in Rome and Paris involving Ledeen (an American Enterprise Institute scholar who was a special consultant to Feith), Harold Rhode (a cohort of Ledeen’s from the Iran-Contra days, who is currently employed by Feith to prepare regime-change strategy plans for Middle Eastern countries on the neoconservatives’ hit list), and Ghorbanifar (an arms dealer who claims to speak for the Iranian opposition). These meetings addressed, among other things, strategies for organizing Iranians who would be willing to cooperate with a U.S.-spearheaded regime change agenda for Iran.
Echoes of Iran-Contra
This cast of characters indicates that U.S. Middle East policy involves covert and illegal operations that resemble the Iran-Contra operations in the ’80s. Not only are the neoconservatives once again the leading actors, these new covert operations involve at least two Iran-Contra conspirators: Ledeen, who has repeatedly complained that the Bush administration has let its regime-change plans for Iran and Syria “gather mold in the bowels of the bureaucracy”; and Ghorbanifar, who the CIA considers a “serial fabricator” with whom the agency prohibits its agents from having any association
During the Iran-Contra operation, Israel served as a conduit for U.S. arms sales to Iran. The proceeds went largely to fund the Nicaraguan Contras despite a congressional ban on military support to the counterrevolutionaries. This time around, however, the apparent aim of these back channel dealings is to move U.S.-Iran relations beyond the reach of State Department diplomats and into the domain of the Pentagon ideologues. Ledeen, the neoconservative point man in the Iran regime-change campaign, wrote in the National Review Online that too many U.S. government officials “prefer to schmooze with the mullahs” rather than promote “democratic revolution in Iran.”
In early 2002, Leeden, along with Morris Amitay, a former AIPAC executive director as well as a CSP adviser, founded the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI) to build congressional and administration support for Iran regime change. AIPAC and CDI helped ensure passage of recent House and Senate resolutions that condemn Iran, call for tighter sanctions and express support for Iranian dissidents.
The CDI includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs (WINEA)—an off-shoot of AIPAC—and Frank Gaffney, president of CSP. In the ’90s, Feith served as the board chairman of CSP, whose slogan is “peace through strength,” and where Woolsey currently serves as co-chairman of the advisory committee. Other neoconservative organizations represented in the coalition by more than one member include AEI and Freedom House.
Rob Sobhani, an Iranian-American, who like Ledeen and other neoconservatives is a friend of the Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, is also a CDI member. CDI expresses the common neoconservative position that constructive engagement with the Iranian government—even with the democratic reformists—is merely appeasement. Instead, the United States should proceed immediately to a regime change strategy working closely with the “Iranian people.” Representatives of the Iranian people that could be the front men for a regime change strategy, according to the neoconservatives, include, the Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi (who has also cultivated close ties with the Likud Party in Israel), the Iraq-based guerrilla group Mujahadin-E Khalq (MEK), and expatriate arms dealer Ghorbanifar.
The CDI’s Ledeen, Amitay and Sobhani were featured speakers at a May 2003 forum on “the future of Iran,” sponsored by AEI, the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The forum, chaired by the Hudson Institute’s Meyrav Wurmser, the Israeli-born wife of David Wurmser (he serves as Cheney’s leading expert on Iran and Syria), included a presentation by Uri Lubrani of Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Summarizing the sentiment of neoconservative ideologues and strategists, Meyrav Wurmser said: “Our fight against Iraq was only a battle in a long war. It would be ill-conceived to think we can deal with Iraq alone. We must move on, and faster.”
JINSA, a neoconservative organization established in 1976 that fosters closer strategic and military ties between the United States and Israel, also has its sights on Iran. At a JINSA policy forum in April 2003 titled “Time to Focus on Iran—The Mother of Modern Terrorism,” Ledeen declared, “The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon.”
JINSA, along with CSP, serves as one of the main institutional links to the military-industrial complex for neoconservatives. Ledeen served as JINSA’s first executive director and was JINSA’s “Godfather,” according to Amitay. Amitay is a JINSA vice chair. JINSA board members or advisers also include former CIA director James Woolsey, former Rep. Jack Kemp and the AEI’s Joshua Muravchik. After he joined the administration, Feith resigned from JINSA’s board of advisers, as did Vice President Dick Cheney and Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Like other neoconservatives, Feith sees Israel and the United States sharing common national-security concerns in the Middle East. In 1996, Feith was a member of a study team organized by IASPS and led by Richard Perle that also included representatives from JINSA, the AIPAC-related WINEA, and Meyrav and David Wurmser.
The resulting report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, advised Israeli Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu to “work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize and roll back” regional threats, to help overthrow Saddam Hussein, and to strike Syrian military targets in Lebanon and possibly in Syria proper. It recommended that Israel forge a foreign and domestic policy based on a “new intellectual foundation” that “provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.”
Ideology alone does not explain Feith’s close connections to Israel. His old law firm Feith & Zell, which has an office in Israel, specialized in representing arms dealers and missile defense contractors. The firm has boasted of its role in facilitating technology transfers between U.S. and Israel military contractors.
Zionism runs deep
Feith’s right-wing Zionism typifies neoconservatism. The Pentagon’s advocacy of an invasion of Iraq and, more recently, its hard-line postures with respect to Iran and Syria, must be considered in light of the Zionist convictions and Likud Party connections of those shaping the administration’s Middle East policy.
Through the early ’70s anti-totalitarianism was the core political tenet that united neoconservatives and their forerunners. In this Manichean political worldview, the forces of good and democracy led by the United States were under constant threat by the forces of evil as embodied in communism and fascism. At home, the “present danger” came in the form of appeasers, pro-détente advocates, isolationists and peace activists who shied away from direct and preemptive military confrontation with the totalitarian empire builders.
Although the early neoconservatives were largely Jewish, most were not Zionists. In the ’50s and through most of the ’60s, neocons such as Irving Kristol—widely known as the father of neoconservatism—regarded Israel more as a key Cold War ally than as the biblically ordained homeland of God’s chosen people.
After the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Jewish neoconservatives embraced their Judaic roots and incorporated Zionism into their worldview. Anti-totalitarianism remains a core neoconservative foreign policy principle. Since the end of the Cold War, neoconservatism has focused on the Muslim world and to a lesser extent China—but is now tied to the ideological and political imperatives of right-wing Zionism.
Feith’s own Zionism is rooted in his family. In 1997, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) honored Dalck Feith and his son Douglas at its annual dinner, describing the Feiths as “noted Jewish philanthropists and pro-Israel activists.” The father was awarded the group’s special Centennial Award “for his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people,” while Douglas received the “prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award.”
Dalck Feith was a militant in Betar, a Zionist youth movement founded in Riga, Lativia in 1923, by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. Betar, whose members spouted militaristic slogans modeled after fascistic movements, was associated with the Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland to become the Herut Party, the forerunner of the Likud Party.
In 1999, Douglas Feith contributed an essay to a book titled The Dangers of a Palestinian State, published by the ZOA. That same year, Feith spoke to a 150-member ZOA lobbying mission to Congress that called for “U.S. action against Palestinian Arab killers of Americans” and for moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The ZOA lobbying group also criticized the Clinton administration for its “refusal to criticize illegal Palestinian Arab construction in Jerusalem and the territories, which is far more extensive than Israeli construction there.”
In addition to his close ties with the right-wing ZOA, before assuming his current position at the Pentagon Feith co-founded One Jerusalem, a group whose objective is “saving a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.” Other cofounders of this Jerusalem-based organization are David Steinmann, chairman of JINSA, board member of the CSP and chairman of the executive committee of the Middle East Forum; Dore Gold, a top adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; and Natan Sharansky, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and current chairman of One Jerusalem.
One Jerusalem actively courts the involvement of Christian Zionists. In May 2003, One Jerusalem hosted the Interfaith Zionist Summit in Washington, DC, that brought together Christian Zionists such as Gary Bauer of American Values and Roberta Combs of the Christian Coalition with Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum and Mort Klein of the ZOA.
Dual agendas
The Israeli government and AIPAC have denied that they engaged in any criminal operations involving classified Pentagon documents about Iran. Sharansky said, “There are absolutely no attempts to involve any member of the Jewish community and any general American citizens to spy for Israel against the United States.” He observed that the investigation of the Pentagon’s Office of Policy staff most likely stemmed from an inter-agency rivalry within the U.S. government.
For his part, Ledeen told Newsweek that the espionage allegations against Franklin, his close friend, were “nonsensical.” Ledeen and other neoconservatives see the investigations as instigated by the State Department and the CIA to undermine the credibility of neoconservatives and to obstruct their Middle East restructuring agenda, particularly regime change in Iran.
Given the depth of congressional bipartisan support for Israel and close ties with right-wing Israeli lobbying groups like AIPAC, it’s unlikely that the investigations will provide the much-needed public scrutiny of the dual and complementary agendas that unite U.S. and Israeli hardliners. Feith’s policymaking fiefdom inside and outside of government continues to drive U.S. policy in the Middle East with no evidence that these radical policies are increasing the national security and welfare of either the United States or Israel.
Iran rumbles
Meanwhile tensions with Iran deepen—which suits the Iran war party just fine. “Stability,” Michael Ledeen once said, “gives me the heebee jeebies.”
On September 21, Iran’s President Mohammed Khatami warned that Iran may withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if Washington and the International Atomic Energy Commission demand that the country desist from plans to enrich uranium. The Iranian government says that it has no plans to develop nuclear weapons, and international inspectors have not determined otherwise. However, if Iran does proceed with its plans to enrich nearly 40 tons of uranium, which it says will be used to generate electricity, it is commonly acknowledged that in a few years it could produce several nuclear bombs.
But it’s not only the possibility that Iran could emerge as the Middle East’s second nuclear power that worries the United States and Israel. At the same time that Washington was demanding that the Iranian case be sent to the Security Council, the Iranian army was test-firing its long-range (810 miles) missile—a demonstration of its commitment to an effective deterrent capacity.
From the point of view of the Middle East restructurers, Iran represents an increasing threat to regional stability. Not only does it already have long-range missiles, and might be developing nuclear weapons, its close ties with the Shiite majority in Iraq do not bode well for the type of political and economic restructuring the Bush administration planned for Iraq. Moreover, neoconservatives and Israelis have long complained that Iran backs the Hezbollah militias in Lebanon and is fueling the Shiite rebels in Iraq.
Effectively, Washington has already declared war on Iran. Being named by President Bush as part of the “Axis of Evil” triad targeted in the global war on terrorism and the new U.S. strategy of preemptive war has made Iran increasingly nervous.
Iran—itself a victim of a 1953 British and U.S.-engineered regime change that installed the Shah—has seen the United States implement regime change in Iraq to its west and Afghanistan to its east. Moreover, the U.S. government has for the first time solidly allied itself with the military hardliners in Israel—the region’s only nation with nuclear warheads and one of the few nations that has refused to sign the nonproliferation treaty.
Back in 1996, Feith was busy representing the armament industries in Israel and the United States while at the same time preparing a policy briefing for the Israeli government. In A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Feith et al. recommended “a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership … based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength”—a “clean break” policy that is currently being dually implemented by the Bush and Sharon administrations. The next demonstration of strength may well be with Iran.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Barry is policy director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center of Silver City, New Mexico, http://www.irc-online.org, and director of its Right Web project.
Losing Feith, by Jim Lobe
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/01/28/losing-feith-by-jim-lobe.php
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Jan 28, 2005 2:01 pm; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:30 pm Post subject: Israeli Fanatic is "Bush's Brain" |
| Israeli Fanatic is "Bush's Brain"
By Michael Collins Piper
Author of Final Judgment and The High Priests of War
Supporters of Israel were delighted to learn that President George
W. Bush's recent call in his much-heralded inaugural address for
worldwide democratic revolution was based on the philosophy of Israeli
cabinet minister Anatoly "Natan" Sharansky.
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 8:37 AM
Subject: Israeli Extremist is Bush's Brain
Israeli Fanatic is "Bush's Brain"
By Michael Collins Piper
Author of Final Judgment and The High Priests of War
Supporters of Israel were delighted to learn that President George
W. Bush's recent call in his much-heralded inaugural address for
worldwide democratic revolution was based on the philosophy of
Israeli
cabinet minister Anatoly "Natan" Sharansky.
Although a recent popular documentary, Bush's Brain, suggested that
Karl Rove, the president's political advisor, was the mastermind
who tells the president what to think, it is now clear-based on
solid
evidence-that Sharansky is the one who actually has bragging rights
to that title.
Although he gainedworldwide attention in the 1970s as a Soviet
dissident and "human rights activist," Sharansky emigrated to
Israel and soon emerged as one Israel's most outspoken hard-line
extremist leaders who damns even Israel's heavy-handed Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon as being "too soft" on the
Palestinian Christians and Muslims.
The role of Sharansky in guiding Bush's thinking is no "conspiracy
theory." Instead, recent disclosures from the White House
itself-published, although not prominently, in the mainstream
media-demonstrate that not only did Sharansky personally consult
with the president in drafting the now-controversial inaugural
address,
but that-in addition-at least two of Sharansky's key
neo-conservative
American publicists, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, were
among those brought in to compose Bush's revolutionary
proclamation.
Bush himself told The Washington Times in an interview published on
January 12-even prior to his inauguration: "If you want a glimpse
of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's book,
The Case for Democracy. It's a great book."
Buried in the very last paragraph of a very lengthy article
published on January 22, The New York Times reported that "The
president was given[Sharansky's] book and asked Mr. Sharansky
to meet with him in the Oval office . . . Mr. Bush also gave the
book
to several aides, urging them to read it as well. Mr. Sharansky
visited
the White House last November."
The Times did not say who gave the book to the president in the
first place, the determination of which would be no doubt very
telling indeed.
Affirming the Times' disclosure, The Washington Post likewise
revealed on January 22 (although, again, in the closing paragraphs
of an extended analysis) that an administration official said that
planning for Bush's address began immediately after the November
election and that Bush himself had invited Sharansky to the
White House to consult with him and that, in the Post's words,
"Sharansky also helped shape the speech with his book."
It was the Post which revealed that two well-known hard-line
"neo-conservative" supporters of Israel-William Kristol, publisher
of billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard magazine, and
psychiatrist-turned-pundit Charles Krauthammer, a strident advocate
for harsh U.S. military and economic warfare against the Arab
and Muslim worlds-were also among those brought in to help draft
the president's address.
Kristol-in particular-and Krauthammer are generally acknowledged
even in the mainstream media in America as being among those dubbed
by AFP as "the high priests of war" who were instrumental in
orchestrating the U.S. war against Iraq, which was a measure
high-up on Israel's "want list" for the Bush administration.
It is no coincidence that the individual on the White House staff
whom the Post says helped set up the planning conferences to direct
Bush's thinking was one Peter Wehner who is director of the White
House
Office of Strategic Initiatives. Wehner-it just so happens-is a
Kristol protégé, having been his deputy when Kristol was chief of
staff for
former Reagan administration Education Secretary William Bennett
who was himself a protégé of Kristol's father, famed
"ex-Trotskyite"
communist-turned-neo-conservative, Irving Kristol.
Considering Kristol's wide-ranging input, shaping Bush's mindset,
it is thus no surprise that, as the Post put it, "Bush's grand
ambitions excited his neoconservative supporters who see his call
to
put the United States in the forefront of the battle to spread
democracy
as noble and necessary."
Meanwhile, for his own part, William Kristol chimed in with an
editorial in The Weekly Standard on January 24 declaring that "it's
good news that the president is so enthusiastic about Sharansky's
work. It suggests that, despite all the criticism, and the
difficulties, the
president remains determined to continue to lead the nation along
the basic foreign policy lines he laid down in his first term."
The BBC News noted on January 22 that Sharansky "has in fact been
moving in American conservative circles for some time."
As far back as July 2002-just prior to the time Bush delivered a
hotly-debated speech calling for "democratization" of the Arab
world-neo-conservative Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was
in attendance at a conference addressed by Sharansky during which
the Israeli leader put forth the same demand.
Shortly thereafter, when Bush gave his own speech, echoing
Sharansky, the Israeli hard-liner "provided an important bit of
last minute affirmation," according to American neo-conservative
Richard Perle, who-between stints in government, during which
time he was suspected of espionage on behalf of Israel-peddled
weapons for an Israeli arms manufacturer.
Although the news of Sharansky's profound influence is not widely
known among grassroots Americans outside official Washington, it is
big news in Israel where The Jerusalem Post headlined a story
declaring
"White House takes a page out of Sharansky's democracy playbook."
In
fact, the Israeli newspaper actually went so far as to say on
January 20 that Bush is "doing [Sharansky's book] promotion free of
charge," pointing out that the president hyped Sharansky's book
in an interview on CNN.
But it's not only Bush who is relying on Sharansky. On January 20,
Scotland's independent-minded newspaper, The Scotsman noted that
"Mr. Sharansky's influence on the way Washington now sees the world
was
clear this week when Condoleeza Rice quoted him during her Senate
confirmation hearings," confirming that the Israeli hard-liner is
very much the brains behind Bush policy.
The fact that Sharansky happens to be in charge of "diaspora
affairs" in the Israeli cabinet is significant indeed. The term
"diaspora" refers to all Jews living outside the borders of Israel
and the "mission statement" of Sharansky's cabinet office says it
places its
"emphasis on Israel, Zionism, Jerusalem and the interdependence
of Jews worldwide. In essence, this translates into a single,
general
aim: securing the existence and the future of the Jewish people
wherever they are." In short, Sharansky is no less than a powerful
spokesman for the worldwide Zionist movement. And now,
beyond any question, his views are directing George Bush's
worldview.
Considering all of this, it is no wonder that on January 22,
Korea's English-language media voice, Chosun Ilbo, went so far as
to describe Sharansky's philosophy as outlined in his book The Case
for
Democracy-now being touted by Bush-as "a blueprint for U.S. foreign
policy."
Bush the New Woodrow Wilson?
That propaganda line of Israeli hard-liner Natan Sharansky is the
foundation upon which President George W. Bush's second inaugural
address was based is virtually a complete turn-about from Bush's
rhetoric in the 2000 presidential campaign is a point
that-theoretically-should give pause to many Republicans who voted
for Bush the first time he ran for the presidency.
Enthusiastic proclaiming in a front-page analysis on January 21
that Bush's address laid the "groundwork for [a] global freedom
mission," The Washington Times-a leading "neo-conservative"
voice which advocates a hard-line globalist foreign policy in
sync with Israel's security demands-stated flat out that:
"President Bush's inaugural address sends the United States on a
new, expansionist and far more aggressive global mission to free
oppressed countries from dictators-a sharp departure from his 2000
campaign that warned against becoming the world's policeman . . .
an
ambitious, perhaps unprecedented internationalist doctrine that
could deploy U.S. military power far beyond America's present
commitments . . . ."
For its own part, the Times's daily counterpart, The Washington
Post, declared editorially on January 21 that Bush's address was
"more Wilsonian than conservative"-that is, recalling the messianic
internationalism of former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, hardly a
hero of American conservatives.
Effectively endorsing Bush's turnabout, the Post acknowledged. that
Bush's pronouncement "promised an aggressive internationalism, one
that if seriously pursued would transform relations with many
nations
around the world," saying that if Bush is serious, U.S. policy "is
on the verge of a historic change."
Sharansky a Hypocrite:
Human rights for some-but not for all.
Although the worldwide media hails President Bush's philosophical
mentor, Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, as some sort of "human
rights activist," there is much more to Sharansky's point of view
than the
media is saying.
Writing on January 9 in The Washington Post Book World-in response
to a review of Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy, published
on December 26-M. J. Rosenberg of Chevy Chase, Maryland laid out
Sharansky's hypocrisy in no uncertain terms:
"Sharansky advocates for human rights only when his own country,
Israel, is not involved. Throughout his post-Soviet-prison career,
he has used his celebrity to support human rights for
everyone-except
Palestinians. [Sharansky believes] that before Palestinians are
permitted a state and perhaps (just perhaps-he is a strong
supporter
of Israel's settler movement) an end to the Israeli occupation of
the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they must fulfill a host of
conditions.
For Palestinians, basic rights are conditional; for everyone else,
they are
fundamental."
Pointing out Sharansky's double-standard in proclaiming himself a
human rights activist, Rosenberg concluded,
"The test of whether one is a human rights activist or one who
simply uses the issue for political ends is that person's
willingness to apply the human rights measuring stick to his
own people. It is pretty easy to limit your calls for human rights
to nations other than your own. For Sharansky, concern for
Palestinians is the test of whether or not his claim to the mantle
of human rights activist is genuine. As [Sharansky's]
book demonstrates, he fails-big time."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jewish Neocons Laud Bush Speech without Disclosing Role
Kristol, Krauthammer lauded Bush inauguration speech without disclosing their role as consultants
http://mediamatters.org/items/200501240006
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol lauded President George W. Bush's inauguration speech as "powerful," "impressive," and "historic," both in an article for the January 31 print edition of The Weekly Standard and as a FOX News political contributor during FOX's live coverage of Inauguration Day. Washington Post columnist and FOX News contributor Charles Krauthammer, also during FOX News' live Inauguration Day coverage, called Bush's speech "revolutionary" and compared it to fomer President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address. But Kristol and Krauthammer were consultants for Bush's speech -- a fact that neither disclosed.
A January 22 Washington Post article, titled "Bush Speech Not a Sign of Policy Shift, Officials Say," quoted Kristol praising Bush's address as a "rare inaugural speech that will go down as a historic speech, I believe." The Post article then noted that Kristol and Krauthammer had contributed to planning Bush's speech. According to the Post:
The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.
One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House.
However, in his article for the January 31 Weekly Standard, Kristol praised Bush's speech without noting that he had been consulted in its creation:
Informed by [political philosopher Leo] Strauss and inspired by [American Revolution-era author Thomas] Paine, appealing to [Abraham] Lincoln and alluding to [Harry] Truman, beginning with the Constitution and ending with the Declaration, with Biblical phrases echoing throughout -- George W. Bush's Second Inaugural was a powerful and subtle speech. It will also prove to be a historic speech.
[...]
If the critics of the speech who have denounced it as simple-minded were to read it, they would find it sophisticated. They might even find it nuanced.
During FOX News' January 20 inauguration coverage, Kristol provided post-speech analysis as a member of a panel led by FOX News managing editor Brit Hume and also featuring Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Roll Call executive editor and FOX News contributor Morton M. Kondracke, and Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes. Kristol praised Bush's speech, described "the only sentence" of the speech he would have edited, and noted the "remarkable collaboration" between Bush and speechwriter Michael Gerson in crafting the address. But Kristol failed to disclose his own role in consulting for the speech.
From FOX News' January 20 live inauguration coverage:
KRISTOL: So I think it's actually a deep understanding of America's mission. A very eloquent speech, of course. Maybe one of the most powerful speeches, one of the most impressive speeches, I think I've seen an American president give.
[...]
If I were editing this speech, the only sentence I think maybe I would have changed which was to simply say we are ready to meet, perhaps, the examples of those of our forebears and our forefathers who fought so valiantly in the history of freedom and I think that will play into a sort of sophisticated criticism that "Gee, the president is susceptible to hubris and is too grandiose." But having said that, except for Lincoln, no speech is perfect, and I think he's entitled to a slight slip in one sentence.
[...]
I've seen Mike Gerson over the past couple of months, and he has been working very hard on this speech. But he has been working with the president on it, and it is a remarkable collaboration.
Also part of FOX News' January 20 inauguration coverage, Krauthammer praised Bush's speech. Like Kristol, Krauthammer neglected to disclose his involvement:
KRAUTHAMMER: It was a revolutionary speech in that sense [that American freedom is contingent upon the spread of freedom abroad] and the closest echo is to, really, John Kennedy's speech, his inaugural address where he talked about -- in fact, there's a phrase in this inaugural which is an allusion to a famous phrase in Kennedy's. Kennedy spoke of bearing any burden to assure the survival and success of liberty, and President Bush said that in order to ensure the survival of liberty at home, we have to have the success of liberty abroad, which was an interesting allusion to that speech. The idea is the same. Kennedy spoke in the Cold War and said, only if we stand for the liberty that we have at home ... stand for that abroad, will we succeed against communism and secure our liberty at home. And the president is saying in this struggle against another existential enemy, which is radical Islam and terrorism, we have to spread the democracy as the only realistic way of the changing the culture out of which a 9-11 emerged. And that's a very strong theme -- of course it had a lot of opposition at home and abroad. But it is extremely revolutionary. To speak, essentially, about the abolition of tyranny, which has been a constant in human history for thousands of years, can only be spoken of as radical.
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The Israeli 'Global Thinker' behind Bush's Speech:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/01/21/the-global-thinker-behind-bush-s-speech.php
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Jan 25, 2005 10:29 pm; edited 3 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:52 pm Post subject: NO MORE WAR FOR ISRAEL |
| Jewish Neocon Traitors Pushed Iraq War for Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/01/06/iraq-a-war-for-israel.php
US Planning to Attack Iran for Israel as Well:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/01/17/u-s-conducting-secret-missions-inside-iran.php
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Neoconservatism is a Jewish Movement
http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whose War?
http://www.amconmag.com
March 24, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Whose War?
A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interest.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we're in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It's just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London ... one finds Britain's finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of ... Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel's bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate's Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: “Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.”
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan's own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. … These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation's founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
“If Stanley Hoffman can say this,” asks Kaus, “why can't Chris Matthews?” Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and his Likud Party.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a “special closeness” to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon's interest, is it in America's interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America.
The Neoconservatives
Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism's long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.
Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign. The heroes they invoke are Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).
All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.
Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power.
Beating the War Drums
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America's rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic “rogue states” that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.
The War Party's plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban, was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
Before introducing the script-writers of America's future wars, consider the rapid and synchronized reaction of the neocons to what happened after that fateful day.
On Sept. 12, Americans were still in shock when Bill Bennett told CNN that we were in “a struggle between good and evil,” that the Congress must declare war on “militant Islam,” and that “overwhelming force” must be used. Bennett cited Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China as targets for attack. Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama's terrorists. How did Bennett know which nations must be smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target list, calling for U.S. air strikes on “terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt.” Yet, not one of Bennett's six countries, nor one of these five, had anything to do with 9/11.
On Sept. 15, according to Bob Woodward's Bush at War, “Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.” Why Iraq? Because, Wolfowitz argued in the War Cabinet, while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain … Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.”
On Sept. 20, forty neoconservatives sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol, and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signers’ support, the president was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam. Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush, “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror. Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done? Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.
President Bush had been warned. He was to exploit the attack of 9/11 to launch a series of wars on Arab regimes, none of which had attacked us. All, however, were enemies of Israel. “Bibi” Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, like some latter-day Citizen Genet, was ubiquitous on American television, calling for us to crush the “Empire of Terror.” The “Empire,” it turns out, consisted of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and “the Palestinian enclave.”
Nasty as some of these regimes and groups might be, what had they done to the United States?
The War Party seemed desperate to get a Middle East war going before America had second thoughts. Tom Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) called for an immediate invasion of Iraq. “Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. … [T]he larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over,” he wrote.
Donnelly was echoed by Jonah Goldberg of National Review: “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.”
Goldberg endorsed “the Ledeen Doctrine” of ex-Pentagon official Michael Ledeen, which Goldberg described thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” (When the French ambassador in London, at a dinner party, asked why we should risk World War III over some “shitty little country”—meaning Israel—Goldberg's magazine was not amused.)
Ledeen, however, is less frivolous. In The War Against the Terror Masters, he identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia. … Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged. …We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution. … Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American mission,” Ledeen goes on to define America's authentic “historic mission”:
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. … [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.
To the Weekly Standard, Ledeen's enemies list was too restrictive. We must not only declare war on terror networks and states that harbor terrorists, said the Standard, we should launch wars on “any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon. The coming war “is going to spread and engulf a number of countries. … It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. … [I]t is possible that the demise of some ‘moderate’ Arab regimes may be just round the corner.”
Norman Podhoretz in Commentary even outdid Kristol's Standard, rhapsodizing that we should embrace a war of civilizations, as it is George W. Bush's mission “to fight World War IV—the war against militant Islam.” By his count, the regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘“friends” of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority. Bush must reject the “timorous counsels” of the “incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell,” wrote Podhoretz, and “find the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated” Islamic world. As the war against al-Qaeda required that we destroy the Taliban, Podhoretz wrote,
We may willy-nilly find ourselves forced … to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority). I can even [imagine] the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. … I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.
Podhoretz credits Eliot Cohen with the phrase “World War IV.” Bush was shortly thereafter seen carrying about a gift copy of Cohen's book that celebrates civilian mastery of the military in times of war, as exhibited by such leaders as Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion.
A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction thus includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and “militant Islam.”
Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America. In February 2003, Sharon told a delegation of Congressmen that, after Saddam's regime is destroyed, it is of “vital importance” that the United States disarm Iran, Syria, and Libya.
“We have a great interest in shaping the Middle East the day after” the war on Iraq, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. After U.S. troops enter Baghdad, the United States must generate “political, economic, diplomatic pressure” on Tehran, Mofaz admonished the American Jews.
Are the neoconservatives concerned about a war on Iraq bringing down friendly Arab governments? Not at all. They would welcome it.
“Mubarak is no great shakes,” says Richard Perle of the President of Egypt. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq—which he predicted would be a “cakewalk”—might upend governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah Marshall of Washington Monthly, “All the better if you ask me.”
On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense Policy Board. In a briefing that startled Henry Kissinger, Murawiec named Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” of the United States.
Washington should give Riyadh an ultimatum, he said. Either you Saudis “prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including the Saudi intelligence services,” and end all propaganda against Israel, or we invade your country, seize your oil fields, and occupy Mecca.
In closing his PowerPoint presentation, Murawiec offered a “Grand Strategy for the Middle East.” “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize.” Leaked reports of Murawiec's briefing did not indicate if anyone raised the question of how the Islamic world might respond to U.S. troops tramping around the grounds of the Great Mosque.
What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.
Washington Times editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave calls this the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine.” “Washington's ‘Likudniks,’” he writes, “have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn into office.”
The neocons seek American empire, and Sharonites seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely. And though neocons insist that it was Sept. 11 that made the case for war on Iraq and militant Islam, the origins of their war plans go back far before.
“Securing the Realm”
The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop Jackson, who, in 1970, was overheard on a federal wiretap discussing classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli Embassy. In Jews and American Politics, published in 1974, Stephen D. Isaacs wrote, “Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests.” In 1983, the New York Times reported that Perle had taken substantial payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.
In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In it, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser urged Bibi to ditch the Oslo Accords of the assassinated Yitzak Rabin and adopt a new aggressive strategy:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.
In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel's enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish “the principle of preemption,” has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.
In his own 1997 paper, “A Strategy for Israel,” Feith pressed Israel to re-occupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control,” though “the price in blood would be high.”
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted joint war plans for Israel and the United States “to fatally strike the centers of radicalism in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should … broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a crisis, for as he wrote, “Crises can be opportunities.” Wurmser published his U.S.-Israeli war plan on Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9/11.
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes:
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the power and reputation of Israel.
Right down the smokestack.
Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, in late February,
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials … that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein's regime the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use military action because “diplomacy is failing.” Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged, they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. Four years before 9/11, the neocons had Baghdad on their minds.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, a startling document was leaked from the office of Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post called it a “classified blueprint intended to help ‘set the nation's direction for the next century.’” The Wolfowitz Memo called for a permanent U.S. military presence on six continents to deter all “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Containment, the victorious strategy of the Cold War, was to give way to an ambitious new strategy designed to “establish and protect a new order.”
Though the Wolfowitz Memo was denounced and dismissed in 1992, it became American policy in the 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS) issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002. Washington Post reporter Tim Reich describes it as a “watershed in U.S. foreign policy” that “reverses the fundamental principles that have guided successive Presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, writes of the NSS that he marvels at “its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.”
In confronting America's adversaries, the paper declares, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” It warns any nation that seeks to acquire power to rival the United States that it will be courting war with the United States:
[T]he president has no intention of allowing any nation to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.
America must reconcile herself to an era of “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy,” Robert Kagan instructs. But this Pax Americana the neocons envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes called “permanent war for permanent peace.”
The Munich Card
As President Bush was warned on Sept. 20, 2001, that he will be indicted for “a decisive surrender” in the war on terror should he fail to attack Iraq, he is also on notice that pressure on Israel is forbidden. For as the neoconservatives have played the anti-Semitic card, they will not hesitate to play the Munich card as well. A year ago, when Bush called on Sharon to pull out of the West Bank, Sharon fired back that he would not let anyone do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain had done to the Czechs. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy immediately backed up Ariel Sharon:
With each passing day, Washington appears to view its principal Middle Eastern ally's conduct as inconvenient—in much the same way London and Paris came to see Czechoslovakia's resistance to Hitler's offers of peace in exchange for Czech lands.
When former U.S. NATO commander Gen. George Jouwlan said the United States may have to impose a peace on Israel and the Palestinians, he, too, faced the charge of appeasement. Wrote Gaffney,
They would, presumably, go beyond Britain and France's sell-out of an ally at Munich in 1938. The “impose a peace” school is apparently prepared to have us play the role of Hitler's Wehrmacht as well, seizing and turning over to Yasser Arafat the contemporary Sudetenland: the West Bank and Gaza Strip and perhaps part of Jerusalem as well.
Podhoretz agreed Sharon was right in the substance of what he said but called it politically unwise to use the Munich analogy.
President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservatives allies inside his own Big Tent.
Yet, if Bush cannot deliver Sharon there can be no peace. And if there is no peace in the Mideast there is no security for us, ever—for there will be no end to terror. As most every diplomat and journalist who travels to the region will relate, America's failure to be even-handed, our failure to rein in Sharon, our failure to condemn Israel's excesses, and our moral complicity in Israel's looting of Palestinian lands and denial of their right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
Let us conclude. The Israeli people are America's friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help them secure these rights. As a nation, we have made a moral commitment, endorsed by half a dozen presidents, which Americans wish to honor, not to permit these people who have suffered much to see their country overrun and destroyed. And we must honor this commitment.
But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, U.S. interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the Sharon regime as “America's best friend.”
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behavior of the Israeli regime has been Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad, had agents in Egypt blow up U.S. installations to make it appear the work of Cairo, to destroy U.S. relations with the new Nasser government. During the Six Day War, Israel ordered repeated attacks on the undefended USS Liberty that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 and included the machine-gunning of life rafts. This massacre was neither investigated nor punished by the U.S. government in an act of national cravenness.
Though we have given Israel $20,000 for every Jewish citizen, Israel refuses to stop building the settlements that are the cause of the Palestinian intifada. Likud has dragged our good name through the mud and blood of Ramallah, ignored Bush's requests to restrain itself, and sold U.S. weapons technology to China, including the Patriot, the Phoenix air-to-air missile, and the Lavi fighter, which is based on F-16 technology. Only direct U.S. intervention blocked Israel's sale of our AWACS system.
Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back to Israel as a national hero.
Do the Brits, our closest allies, behave like this?
Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives’ agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect.
March 24, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Last edited by Alpha on Tue Jan 25, 2005 10:55 am; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 8:38 pm Post subject: Iraq: A War For Israel? |
| Iraq: A War For Israel?
By Mark Weber
The United States Invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003, and the occupation of the country since then, has cost more than a thousand American lives and many tens of billions of dollars, and has brought death to many thousands of Iraqis.
Why did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was it launched?
In the months leading up to the attack, President Bush and other high-ranking US officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to the US and world by the Baghdad regime was so grave and imminent that the United States had to act quickly to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq.
On September 28, 2002, for example, he said: "The danger to our country is grave and it is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given... This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year."
On March 6, 2003, President Bush declared: "Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to all free people... I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people. I believe he's a threat to the neighborhood in which he lives. And I've got good evidence to believe that. He has weapons of mass destruction... The American people know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."
These claims were untrue. As the world now knows, Iraq had no dangerous "weapons of mass destruction," and posed no threat to the US. Moreover, alarmist suggestions that the Baghdad regime was working with the al-Qaeda terror network likewise proved to be without foundation.
So if the official reasons given for the war were untrue, why did the United States attack?
Whatever the secondary reasons for the Iraq war, the crucial factor in President Bush's decision to attack was to help Israel. With support from Israel and America's Jewish-Zionist lobby, and prodded by Jewish "neo-conservatives" holding high-level positions in his administration, President Bush — who was already fervently committed to Israel — resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel's chief regional enemies.
This is so widely understood in Washington that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the US invaded Iraq "to secure Israel," and "everybody" knows it. He also identified three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in Washington who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer, columnist and author. [1]
Hollings referred to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to acknowledge this truth openly, saying that "nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on." Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically support Israel and its policies.
Some months before the invasion, retired four-star US Army General and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark said in an interview:
"Those who favor this attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." [2]
Fervently Pro-Israel
President Bush's fervent support for Israel and its hardline premier is well known. He reaffirmed it, for example, in June 2002 in a major speech on the Middle East. In the view of "leading Israeli commentators," the London Times reported, the address was "so pro-Israel that it might have been written by Ariel Sharon." [3]
Condoleeza Rice, Bush's National Security Advisor, echoed the President's outlook in a May 2003 interview, saying that the "security of Israel is the key to security of the world." [4]
In an address to pro-Israel activists at the 2004 convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Bush said: "The United States is strongly committed, and I am strongly committed, to the security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state." He also told the gathering: "By defending the freedom and prosperity and security of Israel, you're also serving the cause of America." [5]
Long Range Plans
Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years.
In mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the Middle East. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was written under the auspices of an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Specifically, it called for an "effort [that] can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right..." [6]
The authors of "A Clean Break" included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three influential Jews who later held high-level positions in the Bush administration, 2001-2004: Perle as chair of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser as special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control.
The role played by Bush administration officials who are associated with two major pro-Zionist "neoconservative" research centers has come under scrutiny from The Nation, the influential public affairs weekly. [7]
The author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), detailing the ties between these groups and various politicians, arms merchants, military men, wealthy pro-Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential administrations.
JINSA and CSP members, notes Vest, "have ascended to powerful government posts, where... they've managed to weave a number of issues — support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general — into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core... On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war — not just with Iraq, but 'total war,' as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it... For this crew, 'regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative."
Samuel Francis, author, editor and columnist, has also looked into the "neo-conservative" role in fomenting war. [8]
"My own answer," he wrote, "is that the lie [that a massively-armed Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and its interests and who wanted the United States to smash Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to Israel in the region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it until after Sept. 11, 2001...
"What has been happening inside the Bush administration is no less a nest of treason than the Soviet spy rings of the New Deal era, and if political reality doesn't demand its exposure, simple loyalty to the United States does."
In the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently pro-Zionist "neo-conservatives" in the Bush administration — who for years had sought a Middle East war to bolster Israel's security in the region — exploited the tragedy to press their agenda. In this they were backed by the Israeli government, which also pressured the White House to strike Iraq.
The Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, the respected British daily, reported in August 2002: "Israel signalled its decision yesterday to put public pressure on President George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq, even though it believes Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel." [9]
Three months before the US invasion, the well-informed Washington journalist Robert Novak reported that Israeli prime minister Sharon was telling American political leaders that "the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime." Moreover, added Novak, "that view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war." [10]
Israel's spy agencies were a "full partner" with the US and Britain in producing greatly exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq's ability to wage war, a former senior Israeli military intelligence official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a brigadier general in the Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a major Israeli think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a significant role in supporting the US and British case for making war. Israeli intelligence agencies, he said, "badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons [of mass destruction] existed." [11]
For some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort to install Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of Israel, has been for years editor of Commentary, the influential Zionist monthly. In the Sept. 2002 issue he wrote: "The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil [Iraq, Iran, North Korea]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as 'friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen."
Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known writer and commentator, and former White House Communications director, has been blunt in identifying those who pushed for war: [12]
"We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging US relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity...
"Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
"Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."
Uri Avnery — an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a three-time member of Israel's parliament — sees the Iraq war as an expression of immense Jewish influence and power. In an essay written some weeks after the US invasion, he wrote: [13]
"Who are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers... The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican party. ...Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power."
In Britain, a veteran member of Britain's House of Commons bluntly declared in May 2003 that Jews had taken control of America's foreign policy, and had succeeded in pushing the US into war. "A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians," said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House member. "There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States," he added. [14]
Summary
For many years now, American presidents of both parties have been staunchly committed to Israel and its security. This entrenched policy is an expression of the Jewish-Zionist grip on America's political and cultural life. It was fervent support for Israel — shared by President Bush, high-ranking administration officials and nearly the entire US Congress — that proved crucial in the decision to invade and subdue one of Israel's greatest regional enemies.
While the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq may have helped Israel, just as those who wanted and planned for the war had hoped, it has been a calamity for America and the world. It has cost tens of thousands of lives and many tens of billions of dollars. Around the world, it has generated unmatched distrust and hostility toward the US. In Arab and Muslim countries, it has fueled intense hatred of the United States, and has brought many new recruits to the ranks of anti-American terrorists.
Americans have already paid a high price for their nation's commitment to Israel. We will pay an ever higher price — not just in dollars or international prestige, but in the lives of young men squandered for the interests of a foreign state — until the Jewish-Zionist hold on US political life is finally broken.
Notes
Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May 20, 2004. Congressional Record — Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925.
The Guardian (London), August 20, 2002.
R. Dunn, "Sharon Could Have Written Speech," The Times (London), June 26, 2002.
A. S. Lewin, "Israel's Security is Key to Security of Rest of World," Jewish Press (Brooklyn, NY), May 14, 2003. Rice's interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharnonot is quoted.
Bush address to AIPAC convention, Washington, DC, May 18, 2004.
Text posted at: www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm See also: B. Whitaker, "Playing Skittles with Saddam," The Guardian (London), Sept. 3, 2002.
J. Vest, "The Men From JINSA and CSP," The Nation, Sept. 2, 2002.
S. Francis, "Weapons of Mass Deception: Somebody Lied," column of Feb. 6, 2004.
Jonathan Steele, "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq," The Guardian (London), August 17, 2002.
Robert Novak, "Sharon's War?," column of Dec. 26, 2002.
L. King, "Ex-General Says Israel Inflated Iraqi Threat," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 2003.
P. J. Buchanan, "Whose War?," The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
Uri Avnery, "The Night After," CounterPunch, April 10, 2003.
F. Nelson, "Anger Over Dalyell's 'Jewish Cabal' Slur," The Scotsman (Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, "Dalyell Steps Up Attack On Levy," The Guardian (London), May 6, 2003.
#2018 December 2004
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About the author
Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977). For nine years he served as editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review.
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P.O. Box 2739 — Newport Beach, CA 92659 — USA | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2005 10:23 pm Post subject: Richard Curtis, the Neocons, and The Power of Nightmares |
| Forwarded:
Richard Curtis, the Neocons, and The Power of Nightmares.
By far and away the best documentary on british terrestrial television about the so-called war on terror is Adam Curtis's three part series ‘The Power of Nightmares’. Curtis's thesis is that the two groups responsible for the war on terror are mirror images of each other - the american neoconservatives and the radical islamists. Both were triggered by political theorists who, in the 1950s, disdained american liberal democracy. Since then both movements have been trying to increase their political power by conjuring up dire political nightmares to frighten people into supporting them.
This article does not present a critique of curtis's work: suffice it to say that although curtis is virtually the only documentary maker who talks about the american neocons, his series is marred by two striking deficiencies: firstly, the failure to mention that most of the american neocons are israelis and, secondly, his sidelining of the palestinian-zionist conflict. He focuses almost solely on the neocons’ domestic policies when it is precisely their foreign policies which distinguishes them from all other types of conservatives.
The major achievement of curtis's work is his analysis of the emergence of the neocons in the early 1970s. He reinterprets the past in a way that many compassionate people might find shocking. For those of a compassionate nature who lived through the vietnam war and its aftermath it is shocking to discover that the people we used to condemn turn out to be relatively benign in comparison to the evil spirits growing up in their shadows. How many of us used to condemn henry kissinger and the cia as being forces of evil in the world? How many of us realized at the time that both kissinger and the cia were acting, at least as far as the soviet union was concerned, pragmatically and were willing to compromise in order to maintain a stable world order? How many of us realized at the time that there were people who regarded both kissinger and the cia as being too soft on what they deemed to be the forces of evil? How many of us realized that these people were powerful enough to eventually defeat both kissinger and the cia? How many of us realized that these people were the neocons – the same israeli traitors who are driving the bush administration towards armageddon?
The great shock of curtis's series is the discovery that the neocons didn't just appear out of nowhere during the bush administration to push america into the needless invasion of iraq. In fact they had been formulating reactionary american foreign policies since the mid 1970s. What curtis makes obvious, without actually stating the idea, is that ronald reagan's neocon inspired attacks on russia in the 1980s were almost a full dress rehearsal for bush's neocon inspired attacks on saddam in 2000. The neoconservatives’ nightmarish tactics to force reagan into attacking russia were almost exactly the same tactics they used to push bush into attacking iraq. The same lies; the same nightmarish fantasies, the same empty fears, the same political battles with the cia, the reality based community. These revelations make curtis's work far more politically relevant than the political sideshow produced by that shabbat goy, michael moore.
If you know little about the neocons’ history the following transcript of the first episode of ‘The Power of Nightmares’ should prove to be a revelation.
"In the early seventies, irving kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected intellectuals in washington. They were determined to understand why the optimistic liberal policies had failed. They found the answer in the theories of leo strauss. As the movement grew, many young students who had studied strauss's ideas came to washington to join this group. This group became known as the neo-conservatives. (The group included paul wolfowitz and william kristol. Most members of this group were jews all of whom were absolutely committed to the survival of the zionist state. Curtis focuses solely on their analysis of american society but it is utterly inconceivable that these zionists would formulate policies than were irrelevant to the zionist state in palestine. On the contrary, they perceived the foreign policies of the zionist state and sought to use america to promote these policies – in other to make america's foreign policies compatible with those of the zionist state. This is crystal clear as regards russia. During the 1970s russia's economy and military were in an advanced stage of decay. It was basically a third world country with superpower nuclear weapons. Russia did not pose any military threat to america – except under those circumstances where it was prepared to accept its own annihilation. However, russia did pose a terrible threat to the zionist state. Russia could obliterate the zionist state in a matter of minutes. The zionist neocons knew all too well that the zionist state would never be safe militarily until the soviet union and even russia itself had been dismantled along with its nuclear threat).
"The neoconservatives were idealists. Their aim was to try and stop the social disintegration they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed. They wanted to find a way of uniting the people and giving them a shared purpose. One of their great influences in doing this would be the theories of leo strauss. They would set out to recreate the myth of america as a unique nation whose destiny was to battle against evil in the world. In this the source of evil would be america's cold war enemy, the soviet union. And by doing this they believed that they would not only give new meaning and purpose to people's lives but they would spread the good of democracy around the world." (Once again curtis focuses on the neocons domestic policies. In reality, the neocons had to transform america's foreign policies so that it would defend the zionist state by attacking the zionist state's main enemies i.e. russia and the arab/moslem world. The concept of america's unique destiny is simple a zionist code for persuading americans to lay down their lives, their resources, and their future, for the good of the zionist state in palestine).
(In june 1972 richard nixon, with the aid of henry kissinger, concluded a peace treaty with russia over nuclear weapons that ushered in a period of détente between the two countries that should have brought about the end of the cold war. Nixon proclaimed he had helped to create a world with less fear). "But a world without fear was not what the neoconservatives needed to pursue their project. They now set out to destroy henry kissinger's vision. What gave them their opportunity was the growing collapse of american political power both abroad and at home. The defeat in vietnam and the resignation of nixon over watergate led to a crisis of confidence in america's political class. The neoconservatives seized their moment. They allied themselves with two right wingers in the new administration of gerald ford. One was donald rumsveld, the new secretary of defence. The other was dick cheney, the president's chief of staff. Rumsveld began to make speeches alleging that the soviets were ignoring kissinger's treaties and secretly building up their weapons with the intention of attacking america. (Rumsveld's speeches consisted of a string of lies about russia's non-existent build up of non-existent super weapons which is remarkably similar to his speeches about saddam's non-existent build up of non-existent super weapons. In both cases rumsveld was lying through his socks. It is important to appreciate that rumsveld was either paranoid or working for the american military industrial complex whereas the israeli neocons experienced real nightmares in the sense that russia was an exterminatory threat to the zionist state. Such allegations of russia's increasing military power were just political fictions to americans who didn't care what happened to the zionist state. The only people for whom these were real nightmares were those who believed it was important to protect the zionist state. The zionist neocons prove they are israeli traitors by expressing their fear of russia because americans needn't experience such fears).
"The CIA and other agencies who watched the soviet union continuously for any sign of threat said that this was a complete fiction. There was no truth in rumsveld's allegations. (This was the cia's first battle with the zionists over their fears for the zionist state in palestine. These battles were to persist for the next thirty years. It is no wonder that bush, at the start of his second term of office, decided that if he was to work flat out for the zionist state in palestine he had to neuter the cia by shifting many of its functions to the pentagon which was dominated by neocons).
"But rumsveld used his position to persuade president ford to set up an independent enquiry. He said it would prove that there was a hidden threat to america and the enquiry would be run by a group of neoconservatives one of whom was paul wolfowitz. The aim was to change the way that america saw the soviet union."
"The neoconservatives chose as the enquiry chairman a well known critic and historian of the soviet union called richard pipes. Pipes was convinced that whatever the soviets said publicly, secretly they still intended to attack and conquer america. This was their hidden mindset. The enquiry was called Team B and the other leading member was paul wolfowitz. (In other words, rumsveld persuaded gerald ford to set up an independent agency to look into the soviet threat and then chose two israelis, richard pipes and paul wolfowitz, suffering from political nightmares about russia's threat to the zionist state in palestine, to examine the evidence!).
"Team B began examining all the cia data on the soviet union but however closely they looked there was little evidence of the dangerous weapons or defence systems they claimed the soviets were developing. Rather than accept that this meant that the systems did not exist Team B made an assumption that the soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated they were undetectable. For example, they could find no evidence that the soviet submarine fleet had an acoustic defence system. But what this meant, Team B said, was that the soviets had actually invented a new non-acoustic system which was impossible to detect. This meant that the whole of the american submarine fleet was at risk from an invisible threat that was there even though there was no evidence for it." (These are of course exactly the same tactics that the neocons would use two decades later to fabricate the rationale for america to invade iraq. To an outsider, it might seem a little odd that richard pipes and paul wolfowitz always suspected the existence of non-existent weapons but never seemed to notice the real weapons owned by the zionist state in palestine. In reality, however, neither of these israeli traitors would have been able to motivate america to fight for the zionist state without such lies. The so-called noble lie that leo strauss promoted was not the platonic lie necessary to keep law and order within a particular society, but the motivativation for one country to sacrifice itself for the sake of another country).
"What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the soviet union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn't found but they were wrong about many of those they could observe such as the soviet air defences. The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse reflecting the growing economic chaos in the soviet union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the soviet regime. The air defence system worked perfectly but the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official soviet training manual which proudly asserted that their air defence system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world." (The zionist neocons had no other option if they wanted to curb russia's threat to the zionist state in palestine, than deceiving america into taking action against the russians).
"The neoconservatives set up a lobby group to publicize the findings of Team B. It was called ‘the committee on the present danger’ and a growing number of politicians joined including a presidential hopeful called ronald reagan. Through films and television the committee portrayed a world in which america was under threat from hidden forces that could strike at any time. Forces that america must conquer to survive." (The neocons then relied on zionist financiers to produce these anti-american zionist policies and the zionist owned media for all the necessary publicity).
"This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth that leo strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay. It might not be true but it was necessary to re-engage the public in a grand vision of america's destiny that would give meaning and purpose to their lives. The neoconservatives were succeeding in creating a simplistic fiction. A vision of the soviet union as the centre of all evil in the world and america as the only country that could rescue them. And this nightmarish vision was beginning to give the neoconservatives great power and influence." (To zionists around the world and to the zionist state, the soviet union was the centre of all evil because it could obliterate the country in one fell swoop. However, the more that the zionists could zionize the american people, the more they too would interpret russia from a zionist perspective and see it as the centre of evil).
"And at this very same moment (late seventies-early eighties) religion was being mobilized politically in america but for a very different purpose and those encouraging this were the neoconservatives. Many neoconservatives had become advisors to the presidential campaign of ronald reagan and as they became more involved with the republican party they had forged an alliance with the religious wing of the party because it shared their aim of the moral regeneration of america."
"By the late seventies there were millions of fundamentalist christians in america but their preachers had always told them not to vote. It would mean compromising with a doomed and immoral society. But the neoconservatives and their new republican allies made an alliance with a number of powerful preachers who told their followers to become involved in politics for the first time." (The zionist neocons realized they needed to win mass support for the republican party to win presidential elections if a republican president was going to implement foreign policies which would protect and defend the zionist state in palestine. They also realized that the more they could drum up support for the zionist state amongst republicans and christians, the more support there would be for american foreign policies defending the zionist state. The neoconservatives alliance with what at the time was known as the moral majority was undoubtedly one of their most astute political tactics and one of their greatest political successes. It might still have been possible for the neocons to transform america's foreign policies but it would have been much more difficult electing republican presidents to implement such policies. The conversion of fundamentalist christians who believed in the god of love to dechristianized zionists who believed in the zionist god of wrath is surely one of the most bizarre mass conversions in history – almost on a par with the zionist oligarchs ability in russia to persuade people to vote for a vodka soaked corpse – who suffered a heart attack the day after his election and never took any further part in politics). See http://www.geocities.com/carbonomics/MCtfirm/10tf24/10tf24r.html
"And at the beginning of 1981 ronald reagan took power in america. The religious vote was crucial in his election because many millions of fundamentalists voted for the first time. And as they had hoped, many neoconservatives were given power in the new administration. Paul wolfowitz became head of the state department policy staff. While his close friend, richard perle, became the assistant secretary of defence. The head of Team B, richard pipes, became one of reagan's chief advisers. The neoconservatives believed that they now had the chance to implement their vision of america's revolutionary destiny. To use the country's power aggressively as a force for good in the world in an epic battle to defeat the soviet union. It was a vision that they shared with millions of their new religious allies." (In reality, america's unique vision is basically to demilitarize all possible threats to the long term survival of the zionist state in palestine no matter how much this might generate anti-american hatred).
"To persuade the president, the neoconservatives set out to prove that the soviet threat was far greater than anyone, even Team B, had previously shown. They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and revolutionary movements around the world were actually part of a secret network co-ordinated by moscow to take over the world." (This is presumably the same non-existent network that saddam took over after the collapse of the soviet union. In reality the only global network of terrorists were the zionists manipulating america into believing that russia was a threat to america).
"The main proponent of this theory was a leading neoconservative who was the special adviser to the secretary of state. His name was michael ledeen and he had been influenced by a best selling book called ‘The Terror Network’. It alleged that terrorism was not the fragmented phenomenon that it appeared to be. In reality all terrorist groups from the plo to the bader-meinhof group in germany and the provisional ira, all of them were part of a coordinated strategy of terror run by the soviet union. But the CIA completely disagreed. They said this was just another neoconservative fantasy." (One has to commiserate with the reality-based community that it had to put up with these israeli traitors who were prepared to do anything, lie, cheat, and steal, for the noble purpose of protecting the zionist state in palestine).
"But the neconservatives had a powerful ally. He was william casey and he was the new head of the cia. Casey was sympathetic to the neoconservative view and when he read the terror network book he was convinced. He called a meeting of the cia's soviet analysts at their headquarters and told them to produce a report for the president that proved this hidden network existed. But the analysts told him this would be impossible because much of the information in the book came from black propaganda the cia themselves had invented to smear the soviet union. They knew that the terror network didn't exist because they themselves had made it up." (It didn't matter at all to these zionist traitors how many of their lies were exposed as long as they could provide a steady torrent of lies which could be publicized by the zionist owned media. By the time that one lie had been exposed and disseminated throughout society, two or three others had taken its place to maintain people's support for these zionist policies).
"In the end, Casey found a university professor who described himself as a terror expert and he produced a dossier that confirmed that the hidden terror network did in fact exist. Under such intense lobbying, reagan agreed to give the neoconservatives what they wanted and in 1983 he signed a secret document that fundamentally changed american foreign policy. The country would now fight covert wars to push back the hidden soviet threat around the world. It was a triumph for the neoconservatives. America was now setting out to do battle against the forces of evil in the world. But what had started out as the kind of myth that leo strauss had said was necessary for the american people, increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neoconservatives. They began to believe their own fiction. They had become what they called democratic revolutionaries who were going to use force to change the world." (The neocons are not ‘democratic revolutionaries’. If they were concerned about democracy they would support palestinian rights in palestine. They are israeli traitors manipulating america into wars that are of no benefit to america but of critical importance to the survival of the zionist state in palestine).
The rest as they say is history.
Researchers on ‘The Power of Nightmares’ were satiyesh manoharajah and hossam al-hamalawy | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 10:36 am Post subject: Cheney Gives Israel Green Light to Attack Iran |
| Bush Plugs the Window-Dressing, Cheney the Nitty-Gritty
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=27127
Analysis by Jim Lobe
Two very different messages about the future of U.S. foreign policy
were
broadcast to the world on Inaugural Day Thursday, and listeners
everywhere could
be forgiven for feeling confused about their import.
WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (IPS) - On the one hand, George W. Bush's lofty
rhetoric
about his administration's commitment to bring democracy, liberty and
freedom to
every country where tyrants rule naturally grabbed the most attention;
after
all, he is the president.
Even as the speech was much criticised by normally friendly critics --
probably
more than the White House had anticipated -- as being hopelessly
ambitious and
unrealistic, the idealism that it expressed was widely praised and
unquestioned.
On the other hand, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney's dark words of warning
against Iran
on MSNBC's ”Imus in the Morning” television show conveyed something
altogether
different, both in tone and substance, even if they were relegated to
the inside
pages.
”You look around the world at potential trouble spots, (and) Iran is
right at
the top of the list,” the vice president intoned, noting that
Washington's chief
concern with Teheran had less to do with democracy or even terrorism
but rather
with its ”fairly robust new nuclear programme”.
And while Cheney stressed that Washington still hoped Europe's efforts
to
persuade Teheran to abandon any ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon
would
succeed, he grimly observed that Israel might well decide to attack
Iran's
nuclear facilities, presumably before the Bush administration, ”and let
the rest
of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards”.
”We don't want a war in the Middle East, if we can avoid it,” he
concluded as
cheerfully as he could -- at least until he was caught up short by the
cowboy-hatted Imus, who reminded him that the U.S. already has a war
there.
To former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cheney's
remarks
sounded ”like a justification or even an encouragement for the
Israelis” to
carry out an attack.
He noted that, coinciding with Bush's idealistic address, they
underlined that
the administration was ”really very unclear regarding its genuine
strategic
doctrine”.
For neo-conservatives, who have long used the velvet glove of
pro-democracy
rhetoric to hide the steel fist of what has consistently been a U.S.-
and
Israel-centred Machtpolitik, Cheney's warning came as the perfect
topper to
Bush's inaugural speech, much of which was borrowed from right-wing
Israeli
leader Natan Sharansky's new book, ”The Case for Democracy”.
After biting their tongue about making Iran the next target of U.S.
military
power after Iraq through most of 2004 so as not to jeopardise Bush's
re-election, they have been noisily pushing Teheran as the chief
candidate for
Public Enemy Number One in Bush's second term.
Just the day before the inaugural, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol,
who
doubles as chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
had told
an audience at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute that the
administration
considered Iran to be a much bigger threat than North Korea.
”I don't think George W. Bush thinks he got re-elected to preside over
the
theocratic regime getting nuclear weapons,” he confidently asserted,
although he
also admitted that there were ”big practical questions” as to how to
stop it.
Both Cheney's and Kristol's remarks followed the publication earlier in
the week
of a much-noted article in the New Yorker magazine by prize-winning
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, which maintained that Washington
has been
infiltrating Special Operations Forces (SOFs) into Iran from Iraq and
Pakistan
since last summer precisely to seek out Teheran's secret nuclear
facilities and
other weapons targets in preparation for possible combined air and
ground
strikes.
The article, which the Pentagon said was ”riddled with errors” that it
declined
to further identify, also reported that Undersecretary of Defence
Douglas Feith,
whose Middle East views accord closely with Israel's extreme right and
whose
office is widely blamed for corrupting the intelligence process leading
up to
the Iraq war, has been working with Israeli planners and consultants on
a target
list.
It asserted that he and other hard-liners in the Pentagon, Cheney's
office and
the White House fervently believe that a major military blow against
Teheran
will topple the regime.
”The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is
shattered, and
with it the ability to hoodwink the West,” one unnamed Pentagon
consultant told
Hersh, ”the Iranian regime will collapse” like the regimes in Romania,
East
Germany and the Soviet Union because of popular hatred for the ruling
theocracy.
Hersh's article was greeted with unrestrained joy by neo-conservative
publications, such as the New York Sun, the New York Post and the
Jerusalem
Post, as evidence that the administration, hopelessly split over Iran
policy
during the Bush's first term largely because of the State Department's
and the
CIA's desire to gain Teheran's co-operation on Afghanistan and Iraq,
has finally
opted for confrontation.
For regional specialists, such as Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia
University, however, both the Hersh article and Cheney's grim
mutterings are
”deja vu all over again”.
”In Iraq, we listened to the exiles who said we'd be greeted with
flowers and
candies so it would be 'cakewalk', but it turned out not to be quite
that way,”
said Sick, who served on the National Security Council under former
President
Jimmy Carter and later wrote a book, 'All Fall Down', about U.S. policy
in Iran.
”I can't believe there are people who want to repeat that process now,”
he
added.
Sick and other regional specialists insist that the assumptions
apparently being
made by administration hawks about the nature of the government, its
goals in
Iraq, and how a U.S. or Israeli military strike would affect internal
Iranian
politics are all deeply flawed.
”The ramifications of a military strike are going to be all negative,”
according
to Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings
Institution, who
supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He said it would likely rally the
population behind the regime and provoke serious retaliation both in
Iraq and
beyond.
Even the ”big practical questions” acknowledged by Kristol represent
formidable
hurdles to ensuring the destruction of Iran's ability to build a bomb,
according
to Pollack. Anticipating Cheney, he asserted at a Council on Foreign
Relations
(CFR) forum last week that ”we would all like the Israelis to take care
of this
problem, (but) they can't.”
Central and eastern Iran, where most of the facilities are believed to
be
situated, is beyond the range of their fighter jets. So in order to
reach their
targets, the bombers would have to fly over U.S.-occupied Iraq, thus
making
Washington complicit.
Worse, ”(a)ny bombing raid that tries to take out so many sites will be
will be
of no value unless it's followed up on the ground,” Sick told IPS. ”My
guess is
that neither Cheney nor anyone around him really looks forward to
putting boots
on the ground in Iran.”
Moreover, while there is ”quite a lot of real respect for the United
States and
for Bush in Iran today, if there were an American attack, all of that
would just
vanish overnight,” he said, pressing a more hopeful view of Cheney's
and the
administration's intentions.
”I think this is actually a campaign to intimidate Iran,” he said.
”It's holding
out a palpable threat that if you don't co-operate this is what is
going to
happen to you.” (END/2005) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jan 26, 2005 11:47 pm Post subject: JINSA/PNAC Neocon Hack Cheney Preparing Us for War on Iran? |
| JINSA/PNAC Neocon Hack Cheney Preparing Us for War on Iran?
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/reining_in_cheney.php
Reining In Cheney
Ray McGovern
January 25, 2005
As long as the Bush administration continues to trot out the bogus claims of Iraq's WMD capacity, we will continue to challenge them. This time, Vice President Dick Cheney is basing his claim that Iran is a threat on Iraq's alleged nuclear capacity before we invaded. McGovern—who spent more than 20 years in the CIA—explains how outraged intelligence analysts are reacting to Cheney's most recent embellishment of the known facts.
Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, chairing estimates and briefing the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Quick! Anyone! Who can put the brakes on Vice President Dick Cheney before we have another war on our hands? Current and former intelligence analysts are reacting with wonderment and apprehension to his remarks last week in an interview with Don Imus. Cheney made questionable claims about Iran's nuclear program and resuscitated his spinning on why attacking Iraq was the prudent thing to do.
There he goes again, they say—trifling with the truth on Iraq and now taking off after Iran. Does he really have the temerity to reach into the same bag of tricks used to convince most Americans that Iraq was an immediate nuclear threat? Will his distinctive mix of truculence and contempt for the truth succeed in rationalizing attacks against Iran on grounds that U.S. intelligence may have underestimated the progress in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program 15 year ago?
At this point, the focus is no longer on the bogus WMD rationale used to promote the attack on Iraq, intelligence analysts say. It’s the claims the vice president is now making regarding Iran’s nuclear capability—and, given the deliberate distortions on Iraq, whether anyone should believe him.
Appearing January 20 on MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning , Cheney warned that Iran has “a fairly robust new nuclear program.” And besides, it sponsors terrorism. Sound familiar?
In a not-so-subtle attempt to raise the alarm on Iran, the vice president adduced his favorite analogy—the one he used in 2002 to beat intelligence analysts into submission in conjuring up phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Cheney continues to underscore his claim that before the Gulf War in 1991, U.S. intelligence had erred in assessing how close Iraq was to having a nuclear weapon:
“We found out after we got into Iraq [in 1991], in fact, that he [Saddam Hussein] probably was less than a year away from having a nuclear weapon...the intelligence community had underestimated how robust his nuclear program was.”
That “Robust” Word Again
Forget the fact that few nuclear engineers agree on that time frame. The question is what relevance Cheney's claim has for today. In view of the evolving debate on how “robust” Iran’s nuclear program is, we are sure to be hearing more from the vice president on this subject in the months ahead. How much credence are we to put in what he says?
With the final report on the search for Iraqi WMD now delivered, Cheney is still trying to exculpate himself from his false claims about Iraq’s nuclear capability by equating Iraq’s nuclear posture before 1991 with its much weaker capability in the months preceding the US/UK attack in March 2003.
Needed: Enriched Uranium
For Iraq to possess the nuclear weapons program Cheney claimed it had in March 2003, it needed—first and foremost—highly enriched uranium. But events in the 1990s had eviscerated its capacity to obtain it. After the 1991 Gulf War, all highly enriched uranium was removed from Iraq. UN inspectors destroyed Iraq’s centrifuge and isotope separation programs. And from 1991 on, Iraq was subjected to an intrusive arms embargo and sanctions regime, which made it much more difficult than during the pre-Gulf War years to import material for a nuclear weapons program.
Thus, for Cheney to invoke what Iraq may have been capable of doing in 1991 and apply that to the very different situation in Iraq in 2002 is, at best, disingenuous. There are huge differences between the situations in 1991 and 2002. In 2002, the Iraqis lacked highly enriched uranium and the necessary infrastructure. American inspectors working for the UN team knew that—and reported it—from their hands-on experience in early 2003.
Chutzpah, Confidence, Naiveté: A Noxious Mix
Cheney’s chutzpah on this key issue has been particularly striking. On March 16, 2003, just three days before the war, he zoomed far beyond the evidence in telling NBC’s Meet the Press , “We believe he [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” Asked about ElBaradei’s report just nine days before that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program, Cheney said, “I disagree...I think Mr. ElBaradei is frankly wrong.”
“How did they ever think they could get away with it—I mean using forgery, hyperbole, half-truth, malleable house-engineers, and carefully rehearsed émigrés?” asked a government scientist. Well, remember his March 16, 2003 remarks on NBC’s Meet the Press just before the war?
“We will be greeted as liberators...the people of Iraq will welcome us as liberators.”
The administration’s reasoning, it seems clear, went like this: We’ll use the forged documents on Iraq seeking uranium in Niger and the strained argument that those famous aluminum tubes were destined for centrifuge application, and that will be enough to get Congress to go along. The war will be a cakewalk. We’ll depose a hated dictator and be hailed as liberators. We’ll become the dominant world power in that part of the world and, with an infrastructure of permanent military bases in Iraq, we’ll be able to make our influence felt on the disposition of oil in the whole region. Not incidentally, we will be in position to prevent any possible threat to Israel. At that point, then, tell me: Who is going to make a ruckus over the fact that we used a little forgery, hyperbole, and half-truth along the way?
And so, our Congress was successfully conned into precipitous action to meet a non-existent threat. We deposed Saddam and occupied the country. Everything fell into place. But the Iraqis missed their cue and failed to welcome our troops as liberators. All this brings to mind the old saying, “There is no such thing as a perfect crime.”
Concern, Pressure From Abroad
At this point, British officials, who have had a front-row seat for all this, are worried that Cheney is now driving administration policy on Iran, according to a recent article in The Times of London. Adding to London’s concern is the fact that the Pentagon seems to be relying heavily on “alarmingly inconclusive” satellite imagery of Iranian installations.
(For those of you who missed it, please know that since 1996, analysis of satellite imagery has been performed in the Department of Defense, not by CIA analysts, as had been the case before. As you can imagine, this has made it much easier for the Pentagon to come up with the desired “supporting evidence” than was the case in the days when CIA had that portfolio and imagery analysts were encouraged to “tell it like it is.”)
Complicating the Iranian nuclear issue still more is Israel's hard-nosed attitude. Its defense minister has warned, “Under no circumstances would Israel be able to tolerate nuclear weapons in Iranian possession.”
The British are well advised to worry, given the appeal that preemption holds for our vice president and president. In his Aug. 26, 2002 speech, Cheney also became the first senior U.S. official publicly to refer approvingly to Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. (In a rare instance of U.S. willingness to criticize Israel at the UN, Washington had joined other Security Council members in unanimously condemning Israel’s preemptive attack. And, as far as I know, that remains the official U.S. position.)
Cheney And Israel
Cheney, nonetheless, has done little to disguise his admiration for Israel’s policy of pre-emption. Ten years after the attack on Osirak, then-Defense Secretary Cheney reportedly gave Israeli Maj. Gen. David Ivri, then the commander of the Israeli Air Force, a satellite photo of the Iraqi nuclear reactor destroyed by U.S.-built Israeli aircraft. On the photo Cheney penned, “Thanks for the outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981.”
Looking again at the Cheney-Imus dialogue last week, Cheney, after expressing deep concern over Iran’s “fairly robust new nuclear program,” repeated basically what Condoleezza Rice had said earlier in the week—“Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel.” Imus then brought up the subject of pre-empting Iran, asking, “Why don’t we make Israel do it?”
Cheney’s response should give all of us pause:
“Well, one of the concerns people have is that Israel might do it without being asked, that if, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had significant capability, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.”
The vice president’s nonchalance betrays the apparent equanimity with which he regards such a possibility. His words are bound to endear him further with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, but the tone, as well as the words, are poison to 1.3 billion Muslims.
Someone needs to tell Cheney that “diplomatic mess” trivializes the lasting damage to the United States that such an attack would inevitably bring. Not only can his attitude be read as a green light for Israeli pre-emption, but it would undoubtedly be read as proof of U.S. complicity, should the Israelis attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. And the queues at Al Qaeda recruiting stations—already lengthened by Abu Graib and Fallujah—would now stretch out longer than the lines at the polls in the minority precincts of Ohio.
Restraining Cheney?
And so we are back to the key question: Can anyone put the brakes on the vice president? It would normally be the job of CIA analysts to point out to the president and his senior advisors the manifold problems that would accrue from an Israeli attack (or, worse still) a U.S., or joint U.S.-Israeli, attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. But Seymour Hersh’s recent report that the White House is weeding out the apostates from the true believers among CIA analysts, together with the current dearth of courage in senior Agency ranks, suggest that those remaining analysts who still subscribe to the old Agency ethos of speaking truth to power will continue to choose to resign and look for honest work.
This will leave the field to the kind of “slam-dunk” sycophants who conjured up “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and then passed their reporting off as intelligence analysis. What can we expect of them this time on Iran? | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 1:06 am Post subject: More on JINSA/PNAC Hack Cheney |
| See the PNAC links at the top of www.informationclearinghouse.info as the following conveys how much of a JINSA hack Cheney is:
Bush is intent on painting allies and enemies in the Middle East as evil
By Robert Fisk - 10 September 2002
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=332011
Just as Americans are recovering from the harrowing television re-runs of the 11 September attacks, their President is going to launch the biggest reshaping of the Middle East since the British and French parcelled out the Arab lands after the 1914-18 war. When he addresses the United Nations on Thursday, George Bush will be threatening not only Iraq – which had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington – but Syria, Iran and, by extension, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The Syrian Accountability Act, which accuses Damascus of supporting "terrorism", will come into force as President Bush is speaking and will follow only days after the State Department branded the Lebanese Hizbollah as the "A-team of terrorism", more dangerous even than Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida. Like Iraq, the Hizbollah had nothing to do with the 11 September attacks – indeed, they were among the first to condemn them – but the White House now seems set on painting allies and enemies alike in the Middle East as a focus of evil.
Only The Nation among all of America's newspapers and magazines has dared to point out that a large number of former Israeli lobbyists are now working within the American administration and the Bush plans for the Middle East – which could cause a massive political upheaval in the Arab world – fit perfectly into Israel's own dreams for the region. The magazine listed Vice-President Dick Cheney – the arch-hawk in the US administration – and John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for Arms Control, with Douglas Feith, the third most senior executive at the Pentagon, as members of the advisory board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) before joining the Bush government. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is still an adviser on the institute, as is the former CIA director James Woolsey.
Michael Ledeen, described by The Nation as "one of the most influential 'Jinsans' in Washington" has been calling for "total war" against "terror" – with "regime change" for Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Mr Perle advises the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld – who refers to the West Bank and Gaza as "the so-called occupied territories" – and arranged the anti-Saudi "kernel of evil" briefing by Laurent Murawiec that so outraged the Saudi royal family last month. The Saudi regime may itself be in great danger as the princes of the House of Saud attempt to seize more power for themselves in advance of the depart-ure of the dying King Fahd.
Jinsa's website says it exists to "inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East". Next month, Michael Rubin of the right-wing and pro-Israeli American Enterprise Institute – who referred to the outgoing UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson as an abettor of "terrorism" – joins the US Defence Department as an Iran-Iraq "expert".
According to The Nation, Irving Moskovitz, the California bingo magnate who has funded settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories, is a donor as well as a director of Jinsa.
President Bush, of course, will not be talking about the influence of these pro-Israeli lobbyists when he presents his vision of the Middle East at the United Nations on Thursday.
Nor will he give the slightest indication that the region is, in the words of its own kings and dictators, a powder keg of resentment and anger. The tectonic plates of the Arab world are now grinding with increasing violence. Into this political earthquake zone, Mr Bush now seems intent on leading his country, with his loyal British ally.
Most of today's Arab nations were fashioned out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War – and Palestinians still blame Britain today for supporting the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Both European nations stationed tens of thousands of troops across the region, suppressing Arab revolts in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon – itself created by the French at the request of its Christian Maronite community. The whole colonial framework led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives before both the British and French retreated from the Middle East.
Now President Bush seems set on following the colonial powers into the region for another military and political adventure – ostensibly to spread "democracy" among those nations it most despises (Iraq, Palestine and Iran) but in fact more likely to increase American control of an increasingly anti-Western Arab world.
The Arabs themselves warn that this will lead to massive instability and widespread violence. The Israelis – and their allies in the US administration – are hell bent on the whole shebang.
go to top
http://www.robert-fisk.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 1:17 am Post subject: Re: More on JINSA/PNAC Hack Cheney |
| Here is the 'Men from JINSA and CSP' article (which appeared in 'The Nation' magazine) which Fisk mentioned in the article below (also read the 'Implausible Denial' articles linked in the right margin as the Zionist neocons ordered the torture at Abu Ghraib and in Gitmo in Cuba as well):
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest
| Alpha wrote: | See the PNAC links at the top of www.informationclearinghouse.info as the following conveys how much of a JINSA hack Cheney is:
Bush is intent on painting allies and enemies in the Middle East as evil
By Robert Fisk - 10 September 2002
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=332011
Just as Americans are recovering from the harrowing television re-runs of the 11 September attacks, their President is going to launch the biggest reshaping of the Middle East since the British and French parcelled out the Arab lands after the 1914-18 war. When he addresses the United Nations on Thursday, George Bush will be threatening not only Iraq – which had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington – but Syria, Iran and, by extension, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The Syrian Accountability Act, which accuses Damascus of supporting "terrorism", will come into force as President Bush is speaking and will follow only days after the State Department branded the Lebanese Hizbollah as the "A-team of terrorism", more dangerous even than Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida. Like Iraq, the Hizbollah had nothing to do with the 11 September attacks – indeed, they were among the first to condemn them – but the White House now seems set on painting allies and enemies alike in the Middle East as a focus of evil.
Only The Nation among all of America's newspapers and magazines has dared to point out that a large number of former Israeli lobbyists are now working within the American administration and the Bush plans for the Middle East – which could cause a massive political upheaval in the Arab world – fit perfectly into Israel's own dreams for the region. The magazine listed Vice-President Dick Cheney – the arch-hawk in the US administration – and John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for Arms Control, with Douglas Feith, the third most senior executive at the Pentagon, as members of the advisory board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) before joining the Bush government. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is still an adviser on the institute, as is the former CIA director James Woolsey.
Michael Ledeen, described by The Nation as "one of the most influential 'Jinsans' in Washington" has been calling for "total war" against "terror" – with "regime change" for Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Mr Perle advises the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld – who refers to the West Bank and Gaza as "the so-called occupied territories" – and arranged the anti-Saudi "kernel of evil" briefing by Laurent Murawiec that so outraged the Saudi royal family last month. The Saudi regime may itself be in great danger as the princes of the House of Saud attempt to seize more power for themselves in advance of the depart-ure of the dying King Fahd.
Jinsa's website says it exists to "inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East". Next month, Michael Rubin of the right-wing and pro-Israeli American Enterprise Institute – who referred to the outgoing UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson as an abettor of "terrorism" – joins the US Defence Department as an Iran-Iraq "expert".
According to The Nation, Irving Moskovitz, the California bingo magnate who has funded settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories, is a donor as well as a director of Jinsa.
President Bush, of course, will not be talking about the influence of these pro-Israeli lobbyists when he presents his vision of the Middle East at the United Nations on Thursday.
Nor will he give the slightest indication that the region is, in the words of its own kings and dictators, a powder keg of resentment and anger. The tectonic plates of the Arab world are now grinding with increasing violence. Into this political earthquake zone, Mr Bush now seems intent on leading his country, with his loyal British ally.
Most of today's Arab nations were fashioned out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War – and Palestinians still blame Britain today for supporting the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Both European nations stationed tens of thousands of troops across the region, suppressing Arab revolts in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon – itself created by the French at the request of its Christian Maronite community. The whole colonial framework led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives before both the British and French retreated from the Middle East.
Now President Bush seems set on following the colonial powers into the region for another military and political adventure – ostensibly to spread "democracy" among those nations it most despises (Iraq, Palestine and Iran) but in fact more likely to increase American control of an increasingly anti-Western Arab world.
The Arabs themselves warn that this will lead to massive instability and widespread violence. The Israelis – and their allies in the US administration – are hell bent on the whole shebang.
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http://www.robert-fisk.com | | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 3:08 am Post subject: Zionist (Israel first) Neocon Feith Resigns from Pentagon |
| Zionist (Israel first) Neocon Feith Resigns from Pentagon:
You can see this Zionist Neocon (Jew) traitor to America at the top of www.nowarforisrael.com (as he is the one wearing the glasses there):
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,145525,00.html
Pentagon's No. 3 Man, Doug Feith, Resigns
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
WASHINGTON — The No. 3 man at the Pentagon, Douglas J. Feith (search), undersecretary of defense for policy, is resigning his Pentagon position, FOX News learned Wednesday.
Feith's reasons for resigning are unclear, but Pentagon sources say the undersecretary will offer "family reasons" as his explanation. His last day will come at some point in the summer, the sources said.
Feith has not submitted a letter of resignation, but he verbally informed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of his intentions.
"He has had that discussion with me. I am hopeful he'll stay until we are able to find an appropriate successor, which we've not started looking for," Rumsfeld said in an evening press conference.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said Feith was weary of missing events in the lives of his children and wanted to spend more time with them.
"He feels good about this," DiRita said. "The up-before-the-kids and go to work, home-after-they-go-to-bed routine was getting old for him. He wants to participate more in their lives."
DiRita added that Feith had many tasks he wished to complete before his departure, including continued work on the Quadrennial Defense Review (search).
Feith, who follows Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in civilian authority at the Pentagon, has spearheaded a number of major policy initiatives during his four years at the Pentagon, including the QDR, which aims to reposition American troops around the world and could mean a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea and Germany.
But Feith has also taken a significant amount of heat over a number of issues, particularly since the beginning of the Iraq (search) war in March 2003. He has been criticized for his role in planning the Iraq war and for the administration's justifications for going to war.
Feith was in charge of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (search), which critics claim provided policymakers with uncorroborated prewar intelligence on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, including its alleged ties to the Al Qaeda terror network.
Pentagon officials have said the office was a small operation that provided fresh analysis on existing intelligence and was not in the intelligence-collection business.
Some groups have also pinned responsibility on Feith for cases of abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have both stated they plan to stay in their positions for the long haul.
FOX News' Bret Baier, Ian McCaleb and Nick Simeone and The Associated Press contributed to this report. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
