| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:53 pm Post subject: Losing Feith, by Jim Lobe |
| Losing Feith, by Jim Lobe
<>Losing Feith
Jim Lobe
The departure by mid-2005 of the number-three man at the Defence Department, announced by the Pentagon Wednesday, marks the latest hint that Pres. George W. Bush is moving foreign policy in a more centrist direction.
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (IPS) - Combined with several other personnel shifts, as well as a concerted effort to reassure the public and U.S. allies abroad that last week's messianic inaugural address did not portend any dramatic new foreign-policy departures, the resignation of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith suggests that the administration is deliberately shedding its sharper and more radical edges.
The fact that the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, who had hoped to be promoted to Deputy Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice, has still not been assigned a new job has contributed to that impression.
Like Feith, Bolton, the administration's most outspoken exponent of unilateralism, has generally been regarded as an extremist on key issues, such as Iraq, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and Iran and other nuclear proliferation issues, that have wreaked havoc on U.S. ties with its European allies.
With a number of senior posts, including Feith's, still unfilled, however, it is too soon to conclude that Bush's second term will tack to the centre.
While Rice's decision to appoint Trade Representative Robert Zoellick as her deputy and to rely on career diplomats -- rather than political appointees as urged by Cheney and the neo-conservatives -- for other top spots suggests strongly that the State Department will remain a realist redoubt in Bush's second term, other key vacancies remain up in the air.
Speculation about who may replace Feith includes Bolton, I. Lewis Libby, another neo-conservative hard-liner and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and Richard Lawless, the more pragmatic, if hawkish, deputy assistant secretary of defence for Asia.
But Elliott Abrams, Rice's former Middle East advisor, is considered the inside pick. Although neo-conservative, Abrams is considered more flexible -- and far more diplomatic -- than either Feith or Bolton.
While Feith's hard-line neo-conservative backers, including his mentor, former Defence Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, insisted that his decision to leave the administration was taken solely for "personal and family reasons" -- Feith, 51, has four children at home -- as stated in the Pentagon the announcement, many analysts dismissed that explanation, citing his well-known ideological zeal.
"I think they decided to get rid him of long ago but were afraid that doing so would have been seen as a tacit admission that Bush screwed up in Iraq," said one administration official who asked not to be identified.
He added that Feith's authority over policy had been gradually reduced over the past 18 months due to complaints about his performance from Congress, the uniformed military, and Washington's coalition partners in Iraq -- particularly British Prime Minister Tony Blair who, according to one source, had asked Bush to remove Feith well over a year ago.
As undersecretary, Feith played a critical role in the run-up to the Iraq war for which he was a major pre-war booster. Two offices established under his authority, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans (OSP) became particularly controversial.
The former reportedly reviewed "raw intelligence" gathered by the official intelligence agencies and Iraqi exiles in order to try to establish the existence of links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that could be cited by the administration in its case for going to war.
The resulting product -- which was subsequently leaked to the neo-conservative Weekly Standard -- was then "stovepiped" to Cheney's office and from there into the White House, thus circumventing review by professional analysts.
The OSP, which became the administration's lead agency for preparing both the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation, was widely criticised for excluding regional specialists from its work, often employing outside "consultants" considered ideologically compatible with Feith's own extreme right-wing Likudist and anti-Arab views.
Many blame Washington's total failure to anticipate the Iraq's insurgency on Feith's work, although his superiors, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Cheney's office and the White House, clearly shared the same assumptions that U.S. troops would be greeted as "liberators", rather than occupiers.
Feith's competence -- both with regard to his assumptions about the region and his strategic knowledge -- was also repeatedly questioned by the uniformed military. In Washington Post reporter Bill Woodward's book about the Iraqi war, "Plan of Attack", Lt. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the operation, famously called Feith the "dumbest f****** guy on the planet".
As the Iraq occupation started going bad in the summer of 2003, Feith began losing influence. By that fall, Rice created an Iraq Strategy Group (ISG) based in the White House and led by Robert Blackwill to essentially wrest control of occupation policy from Feith and the Pentagon, a process that took many months.
Feith's position was also undermined last summer when it was disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was investigating whether one of his analysts had given classified material -- specifically, a sensitive document on U.S. Iran policy -- to an Israeli diplomat via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobby group. A grand jury in the case has since been empanelled and AIPAC's offices subjected to two searches.
While Feith himself has not been implicated in the case, his close ties to Israel have long raised eyebrows, even at times within the Bush administration.
In 2003, when Feith, who was standing in for Rumsfeld at an inter-agency 'Principals' Meeting' on the Middle East, concluded his remarks on behalf of the Pentagon, according to the Washington insider newsletter, the Nelson Report, Rice said, "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador".
According to investigative journalist Stephen Green, Feith was summarily removed from his post as a Middle East analyst in the National Security Council under former President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), in 1983 because he had been the object of a FBI inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli embassy.
Feith, who was immediately hired by Perle when the latter was assistant secretary of defence, has long been associated with extreme views on the Arab-Israeli conflict. His former law partner, Marc Zell, has served as a spokesman for the Israeli settler movement, and he publicly and prolifically opposed the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In 1996, he joined with Perle and four other prominent hard-line neo-conservatives, including David Wurmser, Cheney's Middle East advisor since October 2003, as part of a study group sponsored by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.
The result was a paper drafted by Wurmser and submitted to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm", which called on Israel to work "closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilise, and roll back" regional threats, strike Syrian targets in Lebanon and possibly Syria itself, and work to overthrow Saddam Hussein as the key to permanently transforming the regional balance of power and dictating peace terms to the Palestinians.
At the same time, Feith was active in several U.S. groups considered close to the Israeli far right, including the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), the Middle East Forum (MEF), OneJerusalem.org, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Zionist Organisation of America.
Significantly, CSP and ZOA have expressed strong reservations about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans, which are strongly backed by Abrams and the White House, to remove all Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and four from the West Bank as part of a "disengagement" process that could renew an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. (END/2005)
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=27207 | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:56 pm Post subject: Zionist (Israel first) Neocon Feith Resigns from Pentagon |
| Zionist (Israel first) Neocon Feith Resigns from Pentagon:
You can see this Zionist Neocon 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.
It is obvious that Feith conveyed instructions for the torture to Stephen Cambone (who then conveyed them to General Boykin who then conveyed them to General Geoffrey Miller at GITMO in Cuba) after reading the 'Implausible Denial I' and 'Implausibel Denial 2' articles linked in the right margin at the following URL:
www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest
Zionists and Torture in Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/09/the-zionists-and-torture-in-iraq.php
Last edited by Alpha on Fri Jan 28, 2005 2:03 pm; edited 3 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 12:59 pm Post subject: Feith May Be Charged With Leaking Intelligence |
| http://rense.com/general62/deith.htm
Feith May Be Charged
With Leaking Intelligence
Good Riddance, Douglas Feith
By Kurt Nimmo
1-27-5
Reuters reported last night that undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, the third ranked civilian in the Pentagon, has announced his resignation, not due immediately, unfortunately. "Douglas Feith, the Defense Department's top policy officer and an architect of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, announced Wednesday that he would leave his job this summer for personal and family reasons," reports Reuters. "Before the Iraq war, Feith oversaw Defense Department officials accused of selectively using uncorroborated intelligence reports to build what turned out to be the false case that President Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of banned deadly weapons."
But here's what Reuters failed to mention: Feith may end up in the hoosegow "for leaking classified information to The Weekly Standard," according to Karen Kwiatkowski, who once had the misfortunate of working with the "arrogant" Strausscon. The memo, dated October 27, 2003, alleges Osama and Saddam were buddies, an accusation we know is pure horse feathers. Laura Rozen, writing for the American Prospect, however, believes it is "unlikely that Feith will face time for the leaked memo. But he may well be forced to look for a new job soon. As he knows all too well, regime change isn't pretty."
And so it appears this is what has finally happened. Naturally, when a politico is booted out because he is a political liability, it is politely described as a departure for "personal and family reasons."
Two down-the first being Richard Perle, who resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board due to "ethical problems" related to his shady dealings with Global Crossing, the bankrupt telecommunications company-and about half the Pentagon to go, or at least it's "civilians," who are almost exclusively Strausscons.
In the past, both Perle and Feith have been accused of passing classified information to Israel, a crime punishable by a firing squad in some countries. Due to his treachery, Feith was forced to leave the National Security Council, but he was soon back in government, his crimes apparently forgiven, or at least overlooked. In August, Feith's name was linked to Lawrence Franklin, who served in the military attaché's office in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in the late 1990s. Franklin is suspected of passing classified information about Iran to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and Israel. Fore more background on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal, see Juan Cole's Pentagon/Israel Spying Case Expands: Fomenting a War on Iran.
As an interesting side note, Cole cites Eric Margolis' research forging a connection between the Strausscons, in particular Michael Ledeen, and SISMI, the "notorious . far right, even neo-fascist" Italian military intelligence service, "deeply involved in numerous plots against Italy's democratic government, including the 1980 Bologna train station terrorist bombing that left 85 dead and 200 injured." It appears SISMI concocted the bogus Niger uranium documents Bush used in his effort to establish Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate and thus invade his country. Moreover, "Senior SISMI officers were in cahoots with celebrated swindler Roberto CalviFascism and the Republican Party.
Feith is a real piece of work-a Likudite Zionist, double-dealing spy, and war criminal. Under the direction of Rumsfeld, Feith and Paul Wolfowitz created the Office of Special Plans, a custom-tailored lie factory in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti. Abram Shulsky, "a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss," as described by Seymour Hersh, was the Director of the Office of Special Plans. "The office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus," writes Julian Borger. "In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees." It can be stated with a large degree of accuracy that, thanks to Feith and the OSP, the United States underestimated the Iraqi resistance, prompting Gen. Tommy Franks to call him "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," according to Bob Woodward.
In addition to being a war criminal, Feith is a war profiteer, probably one of the lowest professions imaginable, coming in right behind serial murder and slave trading. "In 1999, his firm Feith & Zell formed an alliance with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co., which resulted in the creation of the Fandz International Law Group," explains Disinfopedia. In fact, Feith & Zell changed its name to "Fandz International" after Feith wormed his way into the Bush administration, just so folks wouldn't get the wrong idea. Some of them did, regardless.
Disinfopedia continues:
According to Fandz's web site, the law group "has recently established a task force dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the recently ended war with Iraq. . and is assisting regional construction and logistics firms to collaborate with contractors from the United States and other coalition countries in implementing infrastructure and other reconstruction projects in Iraq." Remarked Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, "Interested parties can reach [Fandz] through its Web site, at www.fandz.com. Fandz.com? Hmmm. Rings a bell. Oh, yes, that was the Web site of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C., as in Douglas Feith [the] undersecretary of defense for policy and head of-what else?-reconstruction matters in Iraq. It would be impossible indeed to overestimate how perfect ZGC would be in "assisting American companies in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects."
"Feith is a self-proclaimed Zionist - not a Labor Zionist but a right-wing Zionist close to the Likud party and the Zionist Organization of America," explains Right Web. "The Middle East Information Center described Feith as an 'ideologue with an extreme anti-Arab bias,' remarking that 'during the Clinton years, Feith continued to oppose any agreement negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinians: Oslo, Hebron and Wye.'" So thankful was the Zionist Organization of America for the work of Feith and his father, Dalck Feith-who was a militant in Betar, a Zionist youth movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini-have done in the name of killing and impoverishing Palestinians, it bestowed the elder Feith with the Centennial Award "for his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people," while Douglas received the "prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award." In Bushzarro world-dominated by Zionists and admirers of Jabotinsky, Rabbi Moshe Levinger (founder of the right-wing ultranationalist, religio-political syndicate, Gush Emunim), Mussolini, and Machiavelli-awards are handed out for facilitating the murder of school children and blowing up mosques and homes, often with people inside.
Feith's former law partner, Marc Zell, an Israeli citizen, is a supporter of the rabid and murderous Israeli settler movement. "American-born Mr. Zell, 50, became interested in Zionism in the mid-1980s and made several trips to Israel-one of them sponsored by the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, which claims the territories occupied in 1967 were given to Israel by God," writes Brian Whitaker for the Guardian. "In 1988, at the start of the first Palestinian uprising, Mr. Zell moved with his family to the Jewish settlement of Alon Shevut on the West Bank, acquiring Israeli nationality."
As noted in yesterday's entry here, Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky, the Israeli minister of social and diaspora affairs and leader of Yisra'el Ba'aliyah, the Russian immigrants' party in Israel, and Bush's new-found bosom buddy, hates it when British newspapers report these sort of things, declaring it anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitism. But then the truth hurts, doesn't it, Anatoly?
Finally, the case history Douglas Feith, who reached the upper echelon of the Pentagon and Bush administration, reveals just how far the Zionists have penetrated the United States government. Bush's foreign policy-indeed, the invasion of Iraq and the so-called "war on terrorism" -are all Likudite contrivances designed to benefit Israel at the expense of the American people, who have paid Israel billions of dollars over the years to kill Palestinians and stir up trouble with their Arab and Islamic neighbors. Douglas Feith and the Strausscons are directly responsible for killing 100,000 Iraqis, a crime of Hitlerian dimension.
If we were not caught in a Bushzarro reality warp, Douglas Feith-and Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Elliott Abrams, to name but a few of the more prominent Strausscons-would be arrested and packed off to the Hague to face prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Unfortunately, Douglas Feith will likely end up writing policy papers and giving speeches for one of a handful of Strausscon "think tanks" in Washington, pulling down a handsome salary. So it is in America, where war criminals such as Henry Kissinger-and former presidents such as Bill Clinton and Bush Senior-are allowed to walk free, considered "elder statesmen," create law firms and consulting services, write best selling books, are interviewed and pampered, and have libraries built in their names. If excusing and ignoring these crimes-indeed, often celebrating them-demonstrates anything, it is that America is suffering from a dangerous and what will likely sooner or later prove to be fatal pathology. For as Germany learned, sooner or later the rest of the world will respond to this murderous pathology and put and end to it for good, more than likely economically since the United States military, at least in a conventional warfare sense, is unbeatable, mostly due to its fearsome stockpile of nukes and other marvels of high-tech mass murder and destruction. Of course, this will also mean the destruction of the tiny outlaw state of Israel, since it cannot exist without remaining a dependent suckling parasitically fleecing the American taxpayer.
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=514 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 9:53 pm Post subject: Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations |
| http://www.juancole.com
Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations
Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Pentagon who went there
from the pro-Likud Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
(JINSA) and the Project for a New American Century, will leave the
Pentagon as of this summer. Feith's office is the subject of an FBI
investigation as well as two Congressional investigations, one by
the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feith helped set up an Office of
Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia desk of the Pentagon
to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence and create a case for Iraq having
weapons of mass destruction and having operational links with al-
Qaeda. At one point, contrary to Federal law, Feith's people
actually briefed officials in the Executive on intelligence. Feith
sent David Wurmser from the Office of Special Plans, once its work
was well under way, over to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney,
so that he could stove pipe OSP analyses into the VP's office and
thence directly to the president, doing an end run around the CIA
and the State Department Intelligence and Research division.
Having a Likudnik as the number three man in the Pentagon is a
nightmare for American national security, since Feith could never be
trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel Sharon. In the build-
up to the Iraq War, Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting
him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they
sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of
a US war against Iraq, who "put pressure" on Washington about it.
(If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn't he fight it himself
instead of pushing it off on American boys?)
Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by
one of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn passed them
to the Israeli embassy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also
investigating Feith. There seems little doubt that he operated in
the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and
misleading "intelligence," that he created an entirely false
impression of Iraqi weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaeda, and
that he is among the chief facilitators of the US war in Iraq.
Feith is clearly resigning ahead of the possible breaking of major
scandals concerning his tenure at the Department of Defense, which
is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the
American people in American history.
There are several downsides to Feith's departure, as welcome as it
is for anyone who cares about US security in particular. The first
is that now we probably have to see him forever on cable news
channels as one of those dreary neocon talking heads flogged by the
American Enterprise Institute, a far rightwing "think tank" funded
by cranky rich people to obscure the truth. Another is that his
departure now may help keep Bush from being blamed for his shady
dealings in intelligence "analysis."
It is important to note that what is objectionable about Feith is a)
his playing fast and loose with the truth, producing poor
intelligence analysis that has been shown to be completely false and
b) his doing so on behalf of not only American nationalist
aspirations but also on behalf of a non-American political party,
the Likud coalition of Israel, which desired to destroy the Oslo
peace process initiated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (and which
was therefore on the same side of this issue as the fanatic who
assassinated Rabin). There is no objection to Americans having
multiple identities or love for more than one country. Someone of
Serbian heritage would make a perfectly good Pentagon administrator.
But you wouldn't want a vehement supporter of Slobodon Milosevic as
the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological dual loyalty
that is dangerous. Mere sentiment based on multiple ethnic
identities is not dual loyalty, and hyphenated Americans mostly have
other countries they wish well (and rightly so).
It is also important to underline that only a small minority of
American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a
majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the
problematic nature of Feith's tenure at the Department of Defense
must not be made an excuse for any kind of bigotry.
posted by Juan @ 1/28/2005 06:29:58 AM
--- End forwarded message --- | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 11:39 am Post subject: Juan Cole vs. Christopher Hitchens on Iraq |
| Juan Cole vs. Christopher Hitchens on Iraq
by Charles H. Featherston
January 29, 2005
Juan Cole is the closest thing Middle East Studies in the United States has to a star. At least since John Esposito of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim and Christian Understanding started penning popular tomes attempting to demystify Islam some years ago.
And arguably since Bernard Lewis, a dour, dried-up man and, I'm sorry to say, the dean of Islamic and Arab studies in this country. While also the author of many books (more than I will ever write, that's fairly certain), Lewis unfortunately made his name by dispensing bad advice to presidents and their administrations over the last five decades like laetrile at a Tijuana cancer clinic.
Cole is an unlikely star. A small man, he is also an awkward speaker at first, though after he gets warmed up, he's thoughtful and quick-witted. He has to be. He has a lot of detractors. Most of whom know little about the Middle East, its people, it history, and its religions, and have even less respect for them.
The path Cole, who teaches at the University of Michigan, took to "stardom" is relatively unknown and fairly new for academics. He bypassed institutions of power completely, started a blog, branded himself as JuanCole.com (I try to read his site every day) and by being incessant and insightful, got himself noticed outside academia without having to prostrate before government or the media, without trying to curry favor of influence policy (though he's been teaching and writing on the Middle East and Islam for 20 years, what Cole did before he pitched his tent on the high plains of Blogistan I do not know). Now the media, and even government, come to him, to hear what he has to say.
Cole spoke Thursday at Georgetown University's Intercultural Center as part of an annual lecture series sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (Full disclosure: I earned an MA in Arab Studies from the center in 1999). The Intercultural Center, which houses Georgetown's infamous (at least in my view) School of Foreign Service, is what you get when Jesuits discover that Department of Energy grants can be got to build whole buildings, so long as the nebulous concepts of "conservation" and "efficiency" are somehow addressed, even in the most abstract of ways. So they built a giant, prism-shaped brick building with a south-facing roof completely covered with solar panels. (Yes, in case you are wondering, the power has, at times, failed completely in this building, leaving a building partly powered by solar cells completely without electricity. Completely in the dark.)
(And an aside, I discovered during my two years at Georgetown that the best place to escape from people at a Jesuit university was ... the chapel. Any chapel. Because they were almost always empty.)
Anyway, Cole spoke to an auditorium full of graduate students, Iraqi exiles, a few professors from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, a collection of assorted gummint types and probably a few journalists too. Most of the Iraqis appeared to be vocal supporters of the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and did not appear inclined to support Cole's criticisms of the Bush administration. (One young Iraqi, who said he was attending a college in New Hampshire but had come to Washington to vote in the election, even thanked Americans and their government for invading his country.)
Also not inclined to support Cole was a sneering, hissing, self-righteous Christopher Hitchens, every Republican's favorite Commie, who was ready to criticize Cole for almost everything, from how he "deliberately ignored" the connection between the Revolutionary Islam of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government to citing al-Jazeera's crawler as a source.
And when heckling Cole, Hitchens would slur the word "professor" as if he were a drunken New Zealander who'd had his head stomped on a time too many during a muddy rugby match in the pouring rain.
(I know what Hitchens ought to do with all his self-righteous rage. He ought to enlist in something, and not as a staff weenie ensconced safely in one of the many wings or wedges of the Pentagon writing pretty speeches for CENTCOM four-stars, nor penning clever dialogue for vehicle maintenance comics, but as an Army cavalry scout or a Marine Corps sniper. If he thinks this cause is such a good one, one worth killing for, then he ought to go kill for it himself. He may find he likes it. He may find that he's good at it. On the other hand, he may find that humping a ruck, carrying a rifle and getting dirty and staying that way for days on end are hard work and not all that fun, no matter how noble the cause.)
Cole's main point – something that bears emphasizing and something I was thinking of writing about on my own last week – is that a Shia-run government is truly a revolutionary state of affairs in the mashreq (the eastern part of the Arab world). Shia Arabs have never ever run anything, not in the 500 some-odd year of official Twelver Shiism following its adoption as the official religion of Safavid Persia. (Hitchens, of course, felt the need to point out that this would not be happening without the invasion, that there would be "no elections without the occupation.") This is something all of the Sunni Arab regimes of the region (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) and militantly secular regimes (Syria, though the ruling elite there is drawn heavily from a splinter Shia sect called the Allawis that many Shia do not view as even properly Muslim) are not going to like but are going to have to adjust to.
"A Shia government is truly an upheaval," he said.
My thoughts on the matter are that while this new Iraqi government is not going to be particularly pro-American (and will probably ask for a withdrawal timetable), it is going to be heavily dependent on the United States because it will have so few friends in the region and so much instability at home. And no other regime like it anywhere else in the world. (As far as I know, there has not been a Shia Arab regime outside the mountains of Yemen since the Fatimids ruled Egypt between the 10th and 12th centuries.) And so, overall, if it isn't Jeffersonian democracy or even very pretty and stable and gives us a government that will eventually opt for some form of Islamic law, the Bush administration is probably not all that unhappy with the emerging outcome in Iraq.
Anyway, Cole went on to explain that the Shia politics emerging in Iraq – and that will likely run the country after Sunday's elections – really came into being in the 1990s, when the ideology of secular nationalism was completely discredited and Shia religious parties were the only political entities left standing inside Saddam's Iraq.
Iraq was a "smoldering, sullen place of failed revolutions waiting to happen in the 1990s" – Shia Islamic revolutions, largely – Cole explained.
The country's religiously motivated Shia political parties were created in the late 1950s – about the time Hashemites were deposed and slaughtered – as an alternative to the inroads Iraq's Communist and Ba'ath parties were making among the urban Shia, mainly in Baghdad. According to Cole, the Communists, with their class-based organization, saw a unified Iraq of workers where ethnicity or religion did not matter, while the Ba'ath saw an Iraq made up entirely of Arabs, Shia and Sunni.
In response, al-Da'wa (The Call) was founded as an explicitly Shia political party with a "quietist" ideology calling for Islamic law but no clerical rule (veleyat-e-faqih, rule of the jurists, an idea foreign to Twelver Shiism until Ayat'allah Ruhollah Khomeini invented it in the 1960s and 70s).
The Communists and the Shia-dominated military wing of the Ba'ath would go on to kill each other with giddy abandon during the short-lived Ba'ath government of 1963. Leaving the largely Sunni Arab civilian wing of the Iraqi Ba'ath Regional Command in charge when they seized power in 1968. (Saddam tried mightily after invading Iran in 1979 to craft an Iraqi national identity of Kurd, Arab and Shia, reaching back to the Assyrians, Sumerians and the Babylonians to help create that shared identity. But as Cole noted, the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath of Saddam Hussein was brutally anti-Shia and anti-Kurd for nearly the entire period of its rule.)
On the other hand, most Shia (and at least a few Kurds, as you will soon see) were loyal Iraqis when the country was bogged down in its long and nasty war with Iran. During this time, Saddam banned al-Da'wa, killed as many of its leaders as he could find, and made it a capital crime to belong to the party. In response, al-Da'wa relocated to Tehran. Other Iraqi Shia in exile in Iran created the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an umbrella group of Khomeinists – Iraqis who accepted Khomeini's innovation of direct clerical rule. During the war, SCIRI accepted military assistance from Iran and staged attacks inside Iraq. And while SCIRI has a significant following in Iraq, Cole said many Iraqis also remember those attacks and that alliance with Tehran to this day. And hold it against SCIRI.
The Shia and Kurdish uprisings following the expulsion in early 1991 lead to the deaths of possibly 60,000 Iraqis and at least 200 senior and mid-level Shia clerics, and is the reason, according to Cole, all of the country's current Shia ayat'allahs and hojatalislams are either elderly or very young. Anyone who would be in their 40s and 50s today was killed in 1991.
Cole also pointed out that while American forces are not, so far as we know, firing missiles from helicopters directly into crowds of non-combatants, the methods used by the US armed forces and Saddam's army to bring the rebellious provinces under control are the same. And many of the results are the same too.
Now, I'm going to take a little editorial license and rearrange the events of Cole's speech to say at this point a number of the Iraqis started speaking up. They actually spoke up much later in the lecture, during the question and answer period, when another young Iraqi got angry with Cole. But speak up they did.
"Saddam Hussein killed millions," at least one of the Iraqis in the audience said. "Five thousand people in one day at Halabja."
I don't need inflated numbers, phony baby-incubator stories or tall tales of Uday's rape rooms to know that Ba'ath Iraq was governed brutally and miserably. When I was an aspiring young Muslim revolutionary and attending the Muslim Student Association masjid in Columbus, Ohio, in the early and mid-1990s, our community resettled a number of Iraqi refugees who refused to go home after the war. Most of them were Kurds in their thirties who had spent their entire adult lives in the Iraqi Army. I got to know a few of them.
There was Ibrahim, a Kurd from Khanaqin, in the southern reaches of Kurdistan near the Iranian border. He had been drafted at the age of 16 in 1979, and had spent nearly the entire 1980s in a trench in southern Iraq trying not to get killed. Demobilized in 1989, he was called up again in 1990 and spent that war in a trench in Kuwait trying not get killed. I helped him some with his English, he helped me some with my Arabic, and he taught me how to make yogurt and a new way to make coffee (brew it slowly in milk on the stove). He had been illiterate when he surrendered to the US Army in Kuwait, and only learned how to read Arabic while interred in Saudi Arabia after the war. And was grateful to the Saudis for that. He gave me a 25 dinar Iraqi bill when we first met. "You take. I don't need," he said.
There was Ahmed, whom I nicknamed "Abu Sayarah" ("father of the car," because he was always willing to give me a ride or let me use his car if I needed it). Ahmed had picked up passable Russian working with Soviet engineers and military advisors working in and around Basrah in the early 1980s (we'd make small talk in Russian, just so I could keep up). He had been shot five separate times during the war with Iran, and had massive scars on his abdomen, face, and legs to prove it. "This is where the bullet went in," he said matter-of-factly, groping for the big, rough dimple on his back as he lifted up his shirt. And turning around, pointing to a mess on his stomach that looked more like the surface of a distant, windswept moon than human skin, he said, "This is where it went out."
There was Salem, a cheerful Kurd and another life-long veteran of Saddam's army who I remember winning our masjid's hadith memorizing contest and was busy trying to organize a trip to the Anglo-American protected safe-haven of Zakho in northern Iraq to meet his parents and let them know he'd found a good Kurdish Muslim girl in America and was going to marry her.
There were others whose names I no longer remember. One well-educated Iraqi who'd lived his entire life in Kuwait and whose father, an employee of Kuwait's state oil company, probably died during the early hours of the Iraqi invasion, killed by his own countrymen. He'd never served in the Iraqi army and yet was swept up into a prisoner of war camp because ... he was an Iraqi national and Kuwait, the only home he'd ever really known, would not let him back in.
And there was the man with the stoop, the shuffle and a hollow look in his eye, a haunted look I remembered seeing on men I met at a Bosnian refugee center in Vienna, Austria. I only met him once or twice. He was reluctant to talk about Halabja, saying only that it was his home, he was there the day the gas came, and that he would never forget it. His hollow look said most of the rest.
So I won't criticize the Iraqis, their passion and their rage, even if it is impossible for Saddam's regime to have killed millions (unless you count the dead Iranians from the war, maybe). Nor do I doubt the honesty of their rage against Saddam, the Ba'ath, and the Sunnis who until two years ago ran the country. Most of my Kurdish acquaintances making new lives in Ohio said there was no way they were going back home until Saddam was gone (and most of them are probably settled here now, with families and property, so I suspect few are going home anyway).
But aside from the young man who survived the gas attack on Halabja, the worst that any could say about their former government was that it had stolen their young lives by drafting them as teenagers, put them at constant risk in two wars none of them wanted to fight, and never left them alone to live whatever lives they wanted to live. You will forgive me the comparison, but we can acknowledge the vast differences between the authoritarian Ba'ath Party of Saddam's Iraq and our own society – or an ideal society – while appreciating that stealing, putting life and liberty at risk and meddling are what all governments do best, including our own. In the pursuit of noble ends or base.
As the conversation in the auditorium threatened to become an argument over who had killed more Iraqis – Saddam or the Anglo-American occupiers – Cole asked everyone to remember that "we do not need to get into a numbers game" because that while there is a lot to be outraged about, outrage alone is not worth much and won't settle much either.
In careful language (and addressing Hitchens by name; I sensed the two have argued before), Cole reminded war supporters that "there is no unalloyed good thing on earth." In heaven, maybe, but not down here. And the invasion and occupation or Iraq "has some very bad aspects."
"Is the US military doing more harm than good?" as it bombs civilian neighborhoods, Cole asked. Yes, much of the targeting is careful and done "in good faith," he said, but as American jets bomb civilian neighborhoods, "innocent Iraqis are dying." If the only way the United States military can keep a lid on Iraq is to bomb cities, is that "really an optimal situation?"
"These are very serious questions," he said.
I believe they are. I doubt Cole shares my libertarian hostility to state power, whatever its motivations, though I do not know. Whether he shares my fairly absolutist belief that no ends, however noble, justifies wandering across the world to kill and injure people who never threatened or attacked you, I do not know either. His questions were couched in the greatest-good utilitarianism typical of the kinds of blithely ridiculous policy discussions people have in this town on matters diverse as cotton subsidies and nuclear war. Whatever Cole may have meant about discussing numbers, he reminded me a quote from Kierkegaard:
[I]t is a false deduction that one thousand human beings are worth more than one; that would be tantamount to regarding men as animals. The central point about being human is that the unit "1" is the highest; "1000" counts for less.
For the humanitarian interventionist, the question is always how many Ibrahims, Ahmeds and Salems will we let die before we do something? It is a view that many good people hold passionately and honestly. I once looked at the world that way myself.
But is it also equally important to ask: how many Ibrahims will we kill to save the Salems and the Ahmeds? Because that is what we will be doing – killing human beings no different from the ones we want to save. Having known all three, I could not make that choice. I do not believe any human being, no matter how rightly guided or divinely inspired, has that kind of wisdom.
And none should have that kind of power.
Charles H. Featherstone [send him mail] is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist specializing in energy, the Middle East, and Islam. He lives with his wife Jennifer in Alexandria, Virginia.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/featherstone/featherstone21.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 12:26 pm Post subject: Zionist (Israel first) Neocon Traitors Pushed Iraq War for I |
| Zionist (Israel first) 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
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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
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