War Without End

Alpha

Notice how JINSA Zionist (Israel first) Jew Michael Ledeen (interviewed in the transcript below) admits to meddling with the Ukraine election as he can't wait to have the US go after Iran (for Israel as well) in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' agenda that James Bamford conveys on pages 261-284 of his 'A Pretext for War' book:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6941388/

'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Feb. 8
Read the transcript to the 7 p.m. ET showUpdated: 2:43 p.m. ET Feb. 9, 2005Guest: Jim Dwyer, Susan Molinari, Marie Cocco, Michael Ledeen, Wendy Sherman, Chuck Hagel, Jay Rockefeller

advertisement

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Israeli and Palestinian leaders declare a formal end to more than four years of violence. Will the cease-fire lead to peace in the Middle East? We‘ll talk to Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller.

And how is Karl Rove, the architect of President Bush‘s political campaigns, expanding and building up his own career at the White House?

Let‘s play HARDBALL.

Good evening. I‘m Chris Matthews.

After four years of bloodshed, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas have called for a cease-fire.

NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice if it will stick.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC CHIEF FOREIGN AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: After 10 cease-fires, why should this cease-fire be any different?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, SECRETARY OF STATE: You have a new Palestinian leadership that is devoted to a peaceful resolution of the conflict, that in fact believes the violent intifada is not the way forward for peace and has been categorical in saying that. You have the Israeli decision to withdraw from Gaza, which represents an opportunity to seize on Israelis‘ historic decision that they must give up land.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Will this be the course toward a permanent peace?

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator John D. Rockefeller, Jay Rockefeller, is vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Let start with you, Senator Hagel. Is this going to work?

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL ®, NEBRASKA: Well, we hope it will work.

I think Secretary Rice‘s point about the dynamics being changed significantly gives us some sense of renewed hope. But a lot of heavy lifting must occur here, not just with the Israelis and the Palestinians, but I think the United States and its quartet partners need to be engaged, continually, actively engaged.

MATTHEWS: Do we have any evidence that Arabs will kill Arabs who try to kill Israelis? Because if we don‘t, what are we talking about here? Will an Arab government say to fellow Arabs, if you try kill an Israeli, we catch you, we‘re going to kill you?

(CROSSTALK)

HAGEL: It is in the interests of all Arab people in that area who believe in any sense of security and stability that this work, this two-state solution work. Are there going to be tests? Of course.

Abbas cannot control all the violence. He can‘t control all the terrorist groups. And the first time that there is a terrorist attack in Israel—and there will be one—then we have got to make sure that we don‘t allow that dynamic to take control again. And then we disrupt the process and we‘re back to right where we are at the beginning.

But I think this new leader of the Palestinians, who I‘ve met with, many of us have, is as good a person for this job at this time as we could hope for.

MATTHEWS: OK, let me go to Senator Rockefeller.

Knowing Ariel Sharon as we all do all these years, he‘s a hard-liner. How much will he put one in terms of violence before he cuts the deal—breaks the deal, rather?

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER (D), WEST VIRGINIA: I think his big problem, Chris, is going to be in the Knesset, in the Israeli parliament, with the lands in the western territories. I really think that there are people there who could object to it with the idea of throwing up a roadblock.

They‘ve released prisoners. They‘ve cut out checkpoints. They‘re doing all kinds of things, the Israelis are. I think Abbas on his side is really sincere. He wants to go to Damascus to talk with the president up there about cutting off the violence and money of Hamas and others. I think they‘re both very sincere at this point.

But let‘s face it. They‘ve just come through a good meeting supported by the Jordanians and the Egyptians. And, as Chuck Hagel that, there‘s a long way to go. But I‘m more hopeful than I was yesterday.

MATTHEWS: Why do you think—it‘s a real question. Why do you think Hamas and the people who want to destroy Israel are playing ball with Mahmoud Abbas right now? They seem to be for a couple days here. What are they up to?

HAGEL: I‘m not sure we have all the pieces there, Chris, as to what is really going on, the various subplots and the various interests there. There are many.

You have got the Iranian piece in this, that we‘re not sure where they are and what their objectives are. But the fact is, we need to keep a wide-angle lens on this to get down the road with a larger objective. And it is going to be tough. We will be challenged. But we‘ve got to stay with it.

MATTHEWS: Well, Senator Rockefeller, can Hezbollah be restrained by Iran?

ROCKEFELLER: Yes, I think—oh, absolutely, I think it could be. And I think that is one of the main Iranian questions. And the Europeans and to some extent, but not much extent, us, are putting a lot of pressure on them for that.

But I think there really is a chance for a breakthrough here. Now, that‘s easy to say and it‘s also easily undone. But I think there is that chance. Abbas seems to be very sincere about stopping the violence. Sharon has said all the right things with regard to the releasing of 900 Palestinian prisoners, which is a lot, no more assassinations of Palestinians, etcetera, that kind of thing.

I think they both mean it. The question is, can they held the various constituencies together? In the case of Abbas, that would be Hamas and El Jihad. And in the case of Sharon, it would be the Knesset, which—

Knesset is going to be very tricky on this.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about this question of Iran and its nuclear capability. Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, said the other day that an attack on Iran is not on our agenda. That‘s a very interesting line. What did you make of it?

HAGEL: Well, I think it is probably exactly what she said.

MATTHEWS: But an attack on France is not on our agenda, too.

(LAUGHTER)

MATTHEWS: And on Ireland and South Africa.

HAGEL: Right.

MATTHEWS: What does it say to say, your country is not exactly on our agenda right now?

HAGEL: Well, it says to me that it doesn‘t mean it won‘t be. It doesn‘t mean that we would take that off the agenda option list.

MATTHEWS: Would you take it off?

HAGEL: Well, I don‘t think we are...

MATTHEWS: Do you think we should ever under any circumstances, short of them attacking us, attack Iran? Should we do to them what we did to Iraq?

HAGEL: I don‘t think you ever take any option off the table.

But I think you are careful and diplomatic in how you deal with these challenges. We have a problem with Iran. I think we are far better off to work with our European partners on this. I think, myself, the United States should be engaging more. I think it may well be that we‘re going to have to engage to some point more directly than we are with that European group.

MATTHEWS: Right.

HAGEL: But I think, at this point, any conversation or discussion about a military attack on Iran is irresponsible.

MATTHEWS: Do you think we should tell Israel not to do it? If they choose to do it, should we help them do it? Apparently, they need our help in targeting.

HAGEL: Well...

MATTHEWS: Should we help them if they decide to do it or tell them not to?

HAGEL: Israel is a sovereign nation. Obviously, if Israel would attack Iran, I think we all have some sense of the outcome of where that would put that region of the world. It would put it in a conflagration of chaos.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: You think the Arab nations would attack Israel?

(CROSSTALK)

HAGEL: Well, I think that most of those Arab nations would be under intense, incredible pressure to respond and to react. And that could blow up into an inferno.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Sure. Senator Rockefeller.

ROCKEFELLER: I think there‘s no way of understating the importance of the danger of Iran.

Pat Roberts, who is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and myself and our committee has decided to really go look at the Iranian situation, the state of our intelligence. We are—I think it is the most dangerous country in the world right now. And that includes North Korea, because I think it is far less stable politically than North Korea. We don‘t really have an idea about their nuclear weapons. It is a very hard country to penetrate.

And—but I will tell you this. We cannot be caught in that same situation we were with Iraq, where you‘re asking all the questions after the fact and not before the fact. We need to know what they‘ve got, where their nuclear capacity is or is developing. And we‘ve got to be very firm about that, because it‘s a very dangerous country which hates two peoples, the Americans and the Israelis.

MATTHEWS: Do we have anything like that capability right now, intel?

Do we have the intel to know where the nuclear facilities are?

ROCKEFELLER: That‘s not something that either Chuck, nor I are either particularly explicitly informed on or, if we were, could discuss.

And that will be one of the hard things. We‘re going to make a major push on Iran. Our staffs, both Republican and Democrat, which work together in a bipartisan fashion, are working on it very hard already. And we‘re going to—we‘re going to really go hard after the knowledge that we have and don‘t have about Iran, because that is not a country to fool with. It is not a country which is subject to blandishments. They‘ve handled the Europeans and pushed them off with threats of sanctions and all the rest of that. It has no effect on the Iranians.

They hate us going all the way back to 1953 and Premier Mossadegh, when the CIA took him out, and the shah and all the rest of it. This is a very, very bad history and a very serious country, much less sophisticated.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Could we have to be preemptive, Senator Rockefeller and then Senator Hagel? Should we—could we find a place where we have to be preemptive and attack whatever we can find over there in terms of nuclear capability if it gets close?

Senator Rockefeller.

ROCKEFELLER: Yes. If you‘re asking me, my answer would be no and that we‘re not anywhere near that point, because we‘re just in the process. We will be looking at a lot of intelligence. We will be then discussing with the agencies their understanding of what‘s going on there.

It is going to become something of an obsession for Chuck Hagel and Jay Rockefeller and all the other members of this committee.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Senator Hagel, I have got to ask you this. If you‘re president in four years...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Let me ask Senator Hagel this question very bluntly, because I asked it of Senator Rockefeller. He said don‘t take it off the table, but he can‘t see doing it now.

Can you see the United States attacking Iran by air and trying to hit its nuclear installations?

HAGEL: Well, first of all, we don‘t know where they are. And as Jay Rockefeller said, this is a very complicated piece of diplomacy. And this is a complicated relationship.

And I think Jay has framed it pretty well. And I don‘t think using a military option on this equation right now is anywhere in the universe.

MATTHEWS: OK.

HAGEL: But I would say this. I think there is some hope in Iran today. They have a very young nation.

MATTHEWS: Right.

HAGEL: The Internet is everywhere there. And there are a lot of things going on there that I think cut to our benefit, if we handle this right, if we‘re wise diplomatically.

MATTHEWS: Thank you very much, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

Coming up, much more on the issue of Iran and how long diplomacy will be used before the Bush administration starts putting on the heat.

You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Coming up, a top Iranian official says a military strike won‘t eliminate Iran‘s nuclear program. How should the Bush administration handle Iran?

HARDBALL returns after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

As European officials began a new round of talks with Iran over the permanent suspension of their nuclear program, Iran‘s top nuclear negotiator accused the U.S. of blocking effort to resolve their differences and he warned that a U.S. military strike would not destroy all of Iran‘s nuclear facilities.

Is the U.S. setting the stage for a military action against Iran? Michael Ledeen is with the American Enterprise Institute. And he wrote an op-ed on Iran in yesterday‘s “National Review” online. And Wendy Sherman served as State Department counselor during the Clinton administration.

Michael Ledeen, you‘ve been here so many times before, usually before a war. Are we become a war with Iran?

MICHAEL LEDEEN, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: No, I can‘t imagine.

MATTHEWS: Are you for invading Iran?

LEDEEN: No.

MATTHEWS: Are you for knocking out its nuclear facilities?

LEDEEN: I don‘t know if there‘s an option to knock out its nuclear facilities.

MATTHEWS: But if you could, you would?

LEDEEN: I would listen to it.

But, in principle, I‘m not in favor of military action against Iran.

MATTHEWS: It‘s been said that their nuclear facilities such as they have developed so far are diversified around the country and immune to air attack. Do you think that‘s true?

LEDEEN: I believe that. I don‘t know that they‘re immune, but some of them are buried inside some mountains. Others are deep underground and heavily armed and so forth. So it‘s certainly a hell of a lot more difficult than Osirak was for the Israelis.

MATTHEWS: And they were able—what, in 1981, was it?

LEDEEN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: When Israel destroyed its entire nuclear facility.

LEDEEN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Was there any retaliation at that time by the Iranians toward Israel?

LEDEEN: No.

MATTHEWS: They just took it on the chin.

WENDY SHERMAN, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT ADVISER: This was Iraq.

LEDEEN: The Iraqis.

MATTHEWS: Iraqis. They just took it.

LEDEEN: Yes. Well, they were already involved in military action of their own. So they really that didn‘t have a lot of energy left over for Israel. They had Iran to worry about.

MATTHEWS: Watching the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, say the other day that we have no—that we don‘t have an attack on Iran as a matter on our agenda, how did you read that?

SHERMAN: I read it as cautionary, that, at some point in time, we might have it on our agenda. And I think that Europe is waiting to see what President Bush is going to do when he comes, because they‘re totally confused now on where we really stand on Iran and whether in fact it is, as David Kay said in the papers the other day, a prelude to another attack.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, is there a way to—first of all, why are we afraid of a nuclear capability by Iran? And why is it in our interests to prevent it?

LEDEEN: Because it is a fanatical Islamic regime that has said, as soon as they get nuclear bombs, they will drop them on Israel.

MATTHEWS: They have said that?

LEDEEN: They‘ve said that.

MATTHEWS: If we had it—well, let me give you speculative running room here. Do you think, if they had a democratic government, they could have nuclear weapons without that fear?

LEDEEN: Yes. I think that a freely elected government in Iran would not be hostile to its neighbors and would be pro-Western and peace-loving.

MATTHEWS: Is that a matter of belief by you, a religious belief, almost, that countries are democratically elected are not sort of institutionally warlike?

LEDEEN: No. I don‘t automatically believe that. It‘s certainly true that freely elected governments are less warlike than tyrannies. Tyrannies are the most warlike historically.

MATTHEWS: Because?

LEDEEN: Because it is in their nature, because they‘re the most insecure, because tyranny is the least stable form of government.

MATTHEWS: And it unites the country.

LEDEEN: So they‘re always doing things, yes.

MATTHEWS: It tends to unite the country.

LEDEEN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Like Cuba, for example.

Let me ask you, Wendy, what do you think we can do to prevent—should we be in a position of saying, no way can you have a nuclear capability; we will not permit it? That seems to be the position of Israel. It certainly is Israel‘s position. It‘s this government‘s position, I believe. Should it be our position?

SHERMAN: I think our position has to be that we want to make sure that nuclear weapons do not fall into the hands of terrorists. We have to make sure that states like Iran that are state sponsors of terrorism do not have nuclear weapons. And it is quite critical to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons, much like we should stop North Korea from having nuclear weapons.

That said, the United States has really taken a fatherly hands-off approach. We‘re happy to have Europe go forward and try to negotiate and put incentives on the tables. We‘re going to play the bad cop and the tough guy, but we really have to enter into this negotiation. So far, we haven‘t been willing to do it.

MATTHEWS: Should we do what is necessarily to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon? I hate to use the phrase from “Body Heat,” but should we do what is necessary or not?

SHERMAN: We should keep military options on the table. But it would be...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: If it is the only way to stop them from building a deliverable nuclear weapon, should we take action?

SHERMAN: I think we won‘t be able to do that until we have proved that we‘ve negotiated the hell of the situation and tried to solve it through diplomacy.

MATTHEWS: But I‘m asking you a question of policy. Will—should the United States, if it was a Democratic administration right now, permit ultimately the completion of a nuclear delivery system by the Iranian government we have now?

SHERMAN: I think it would go to the world community. And I think everyone would not want Iran to have nuclear weapons.

MATTHEWS: Would you support at that point as the ultimate prevention measure an attack?

SHERMAN: I think it is something people would have to consider, yes.

MATTHEWS: Really?

SHERMAN: Have to consider, maybe not do, because I agree with Michael. It is very difficult to do.

MATTHEWS: You sound like you‘re very similar to the administration on this issue.

(CROSSTALK)

SHERMAN: No. Where I‘m different with the administration is, military action needs to be on the table.

But as Shirin Ebadi, the nuclear—the Nobel Prize Winner from Iran, said in an op-ed in “The New York Times” today, a military attack would blow up human rights in Iran. And so it is a terrible problem. It is not a good option.

MATTHEWS: We‘ve got to come back with Wendy Sherman and Michael Ledeen. We‘ll talk more about Iran, also about the Middle East. It‘s looking good over there right now.

And later, NBC‘s David Gregory on Karl Rove‘s new duties at the White House. The‘s interesting. He‘s got a real job now. It‘s called government.

You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTHEWS: We‘re back with Michael Ledeen and Wendy Sherman.

This is a powerful statement. It was in the president‘s State of the Union. It was a powerful speech in itself. “To the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”

Does that mean we‘re for regime change, that we will back them if there‘s a revolt?

LEDEEN: Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: And what would that mean?

LEDEEN: I think he‘s a revolutionary. I think he‘s...

MATTHEWS: But what would it mean? Would we say—would it be like Hungary in 1956, only, in this case, we would go in and help the insurgents?

LEDEEN: Well, let‘s hope not. Let‘s hope that it is like the Ukraine in 2005.

MATTHEWS: Well, we didn‘t do much if...

(CROSSTALK)

LEDEEN: I don‘t think you have to do much.

MATTHEWS: What did we do in Ukraine...

(CROSSTALK)

LEDEEN: We gave them some money. We gave them training in nonviolent resistance, which is very important, how to do it. We have a long tradition of that. Communication, so that people in various different locations know what‘s going on elsewhere.

MATTHEWS: Well, we had access to getting into Ukraine. Could we do the same thing in Iran today, given that—would they let us in there to help democratize?

LEDEEN: No.

SHERMAN: I think, right now, one of the things we have is laws on our book that don‘t allow us to even give funding to do civil society, to groups, to do exchanges, to do training. And we need to change some of that.

I think the other flaw here, we all have to be careful.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: But you think we should be proactive here?

SHERMAN: But reform will not necessarily take care of the nuclear problem. On this, I disagree with Michael, in that even many of the reformers in Iran believe Iran must have nuclear weapons to protect themselves in the neighborhood.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: He said they wouldn‘t be dangerous if they had...

SHERMAN: Well, I‘m not sure—they would want them.

MATTHEWS: That‘s not what he said.

You said you would not be as—you wouldn‘t be concerned about a democratic government in Iran that possessed nuclear weapons.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: But the question I would ask is, does anybody challenge the notion that there‘s a nationalistic pride in that part of the world to be able to balance the weapons of your regional rivals?

SHERMAN: There is absolutely a nationalistic pride to have nuclear weapons.

MATTHEWS: Just like the Pakistanis.

SHERMAN: And I think the question is, is, if Iran gets nuclear weapon with whatever government, really, where‘s the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? Do we need to revise the whole thing? Where are we? Won‘t it say to governments all over the world, they can get nuclear weapons, too? It‘s a point of pride.

MATTHEWS: Any chance Israel would give up its nuclear weapons?

LEDEEN: No, not in that neighborhood.

MATTHEWS: In the interest of a deal where Iran and everybody else agreed to in that region?

LEDEEN: Well, it would be the end of the world. It would be universal peace and happiness. Under those circumstances, sure.

MATTHEWS: Yes. Do you think they‘re always going to need that gun under the bed?

LEDEEN: No, but can I..

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Is that a fair question, that they always need that gun under the bed?

LEDEEN: Right now they do. And they think they do.

SHERMAN: It‘s not a...

(CROSSTALK)

SHERMAN: ... neighborhood.

LEDEEN: Bad place to live. You would want one, too, if you lived in a bad neighborhood.

But let me come back to...

MATTHEWS: At least a baseball bat.

LEDEEN: Why don‘t we come back to your two questions.

MATTHEWS: How about a shotgun?

(LAUGHTER)

LEDEEN: I don‘t know and I don‘t think anybody knows what a freely elected government of Iran would want in the way of nuclear weapons.

MATTHEWS: But it is not an oxymoron? You can imagine a freely elected Iranian government?

LEDEEN: I can. And I think that we don‘t have to do all that much in a country where we know that more than 70 percent of the people hate the regime and want to see it go.

MATTHEWS: Right.

LEDEEN: Or to support them. They will do it.

MATTHEWS: You‘re still an optimist?

LEDEEN: It‘s the history of Iran. The whole 20th century, every change of government was a revolution. They excel at revolutions.

MATTHEWS: But you‘re looking—you‘re looking—are you more optimistic...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Are you more optimistic about that region because of what happened two Sundays ago?

SHERMAN: I think it is wonderful what happened in Iraq. I think the rest of the story is yet to be told. I certainly hope for a positive outcome. Whether it means that it will create flowering democracies all over the Middle East, I think it is a long way from here to there.

MATTHEWS: OK. Thank you very much. Thank you. It‘s great having you. Please come back together. You‘re so well informed. And you occasionally agree, Michael Ledeen and Wendy Sherman.

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Thu Feb 10, 2005 2:33 pm; edited 1 time in total

Michael Ledeen and others mentioned above are associated with JINSA and PNAC as PNAC would like to take on Russia and China sooner rather than later (more about PNAC can be found via the links at the top of www.informationclearinghouse.info and at www.whatreallyhappened.com, as well):

The Men From JINSA and CSP
by JASON VEST

[from the September 2, 2002 issue]

Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power.

Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, 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 last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.

For example, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--chaired by JINSA/CSP adviser and former Reagan Administration Defense Department official Richard Perle, and stacked with advisers from both groups--recently made news by listening to a briefing that cast Saudi Arabia as an enemy to be brought to heel through a number of potential mechanisms, many of which mirror JINSA's recommendations, and which reflect the JINSA/CSP crowd's preoccupation with Egypt. (The final slide of the Defense Policy Board presentation proposed that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] Egypt as the prize.") Ledeen has been leading the charge for regime change in Iran, while old comrades like Andrew Marshall and Harold Rhode in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment actively tinker with ways to re-engineer both the Iranian and Saudi governments. JINSA is also cheering the US military on as it tries to secure basing rights in the strategic Red Sea country of Eritrea, happily failing to mention that the once-promising secular regime of President Isaiais Afewerki continues to slide into the kind of repressive authoritarianism practiced by the "axis of evil" and its adjuncts.

Indeed, there are some in military and intelligence circles who have taken to using "axis of evil" in reference to JINSA and CSP, along with venerable repositories of hawkish thinking like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, as well as defense contractors, conservative foundations and public relations entities underwritten by far-right American Zionists (all of which help to underwrite JINSA and CSP). It's a milieu where ideology and money seamlessly blend: "Whenever you see someone identified in print or on TV as being with the Center for Security Policy or JINSA championing a position on the grounds of ideology or principle--which they are unquestionably doing with conviction--you are, nonetheless, not informed that they're also providing a sort of cover for other ideologues who just happen to stand to profit from hewing to the Likudnik and Pax Americana lines," says a veteran intelligence officer. He notes that while the United States has begun a phaseout of civilian aid to Israel that will end by 2007, government policy is to increase military aid by half the amount of civilian aid that's cut each year--which is not only a boon to both the US and Israeli weapons industries but is also crucial to realizing the far right's vision for missile defense and the Middle East.

Founded in 1976 by neoconservatives concerned that the United States might not be able to provide Israel with adequate military supplies in the event of another Arab-Israeli war, over the past twenty-five years JINSA has gone from a loose-knit proto-group to a $1.4-million-a-year operation with a formidable array of Washington power players on its rolls. Until the beginning of the current Bush Administration, JINSA's board of advisers included such heavy hitters as Dick Cheney, John Bolton (now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control) and Douglas Feith, the third-highest-ranking executive in the Pentagon. Both Perle and former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, two of the loudest voices in the attack-Iraq chorus, are still on the board, as are such Reagan-era relics as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow and Ledeen--Oliver North's Iran/contra liaison with the Israelis.
According to its website, JINSA exists to "educate the American public about the importance of an effective US defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded" and to "inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." In practice, this translates into its members producing a steady stream of op-eds and reports that have been good indicators of what the Pentagon's civilian leadership is thinking.

JINSA relishes denouncing virtually any type of contact between the US government and Syria and finding new ways to demonize the Palestinians. To give but one example (and one that kills two birds with one stone): According to JINSA, not only is Yasir Arafat in control of all violence in the occupied territories, but he orchestrates the violence solely "to protect Saddam.... Saddam is at the moment Arafat's only real financial supporter.... [Arafat] has no incentive to stop the violence against Israel and allow the West to turn its attention to his mentor and paymaster." And if there's a way to advance other aspects of the far-right agenda by intertwining them with Israeli interests, JINSA doesn't hesitate there, either. A recent report contends that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must be tapped because "the Arab oil-producing states" are countries "with interests inimical to ours," but Israel "stand[s] with us when we need [Israel]," and a US policy of tapping oil under ANWR will "limit [the Arabs'] ability to do damage to either of us."

The bulk of JINSA's modest annual budget is spent on taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates meetings between Israeli officials and the still-influential US flag officers, who, upon their return to the States, happily write op-eds and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line. (Sowing seeds for the future, JINSA also takes US service academy cadets to Israel each summer and sponsors a lecture series at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies.) In one such statement, issued soon after the outbreak of the latest intifada, twenty-six JINSAns of retired flag rank, including many from the advisory board, struck a moralizing tone, characterizing Palestinian violence as a "perversion of military ethics" and holding that "America's role as facilitator in this process should never yield to America's responsibility as a friend to Israel," as "friends don't leave friends on the battlefield."

However high-minded this might sound, the postservice associations of the letter's signatories--which are almost always left off the organization's website and communiqués--ought to require that the phrase be amended to say "friends don't leave friends on the battlefield, especially when there's business to be done and bucks to be made." Almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA's board of advisers or has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA letter works or has worked with military contractors who do business with the Pentagon and Israel. While some keep a low profile as self-employed "consultants" and avoid mention of their clients, others are less shy about their associations, including with the private mercenary firm Military Professional Resources International, weapons broker and military consultancy Cypress International and SY Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, which oversees several ongoing joint projects with Israel.

The behemoths of military contracting are also well represented in JINSA's ranks. For example, JINSA advisory board members Adm. Leon Edney, Adm. David Jeremiah and Lieut. Gen. Charles May, all retired, have served Northrop Grumman or its subsidiaries as either consultants or board members. Northrop Grumman has built ships for the Israeli Navy and sold F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to the Israeli Air Force (as well as the Longbow radar system to the Israeli army for use in its attack helicopters). It also works with Tamam, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft Industries, to produce an unmanned aerial vehicle. Lockheed Martin has sold more than $2 billion worth of F-16s to Israel since 1999, as well as flight simulators, multiple-launch rocket systems and Seahawk heavyweight torpedoes. At one time or another, General May, retired Lieut. Gen. Paul Cerjan and retired Adm. Carlisle Trost have labored in LockMart's vineyards. Trost has also sat on the board of General Dynamics, whose Gulfstream subsidiary has a $206 million contract to supply planes to Israel to be used for "special electronics missions."

By far the most profitably diversified of the JINSAns is retired Adm. David Jeremiah. President and partner of Technology Strategies & Alliances Corporation (described as a "strategic advisory firm and investment banking firm engaged primarily in the aerospace, defense, telecommunications and electronics industries"), Jeremiah also sits on the boards of Northrop Grumman's Litton subsidiary and of defense giant Alliant Techsystems, which--in partnership with Israel's TAAS--does a brisk business in rubber bullets. And he has a seat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle.

About the only major defense contractor without a presence on JINSA's advisory board is Boeing, which has had a relationship with Israeli Aircraft Industries for thirty years. (Boeing also sells F-15s to Israel and, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Apache attack helicopters, a ubiquitous weapon in the occupied territories.) But take a look at JINSA's kindred spirit in things pro-Likud and pro-Star Wars, the Center for Security Policy, and there on its national security advisory council are Stanley Ebner, a former Boeing executive; Andrew Ellis, vice president for government relations; and Carl Smith, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who, as a lawyer in private practice, has counted Boeing among his clients. "JINSA and CSP," says a veteran Pentagon analyst, "may as well be one and the same."

Not a hard sell: There's always been considerable overlap beween the JINSA and CSP rosters--JINSA advisers Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Phyllis Kaminsky also serve on CSP's advisory council; current JINSA advisory board chairman David Steinmann sits on CSP's board of directors; and before returning to the Pentagon Douglas Feith served as the board's chair. At this writing, twenty-two CSP advisers--including additional Reagan-era remnants like Elliott Abrams, Ken deGraffenreid, Paula Dobriansky, Sven Kraemer, Robert Joseph, Robert Andrews and J.D. Crouch--have reoccupied key positions in the national security establishment, as have other true believers of more recent vintage.

While CSP boasts an impressive advisory list of hawkish luminaries, its star is Frank Gaffney, its founder, president and CEO. A protégé of Perle going back to their days as staffers for the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (a k a the Senator from Boeing, and the Senate's most zealous champion of Israel in his day), Gaffney later joined Perle at the Pentagon, only to be shown the door by Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1987, not long after Perle left. Gaffney then reconstituted the latest incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger. Beyond compiling an A-list of influential conservative hawks, Gaffney has been prolific over the past fifteen years, churning out a constant stream of reports (as well as regular columns for the Washington Times) making the case that the gravest threats to US national security are China, Iraq, still-undeveloped ballistic missiles launched by rogue states, and the passage of or adherence to virtually any form of arms control treaty.

Gaffney and CSP's prescriptions for national security have been fairly simple: Gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed (such as the V-22 Osprey), give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go full steam ahead on just about every national missile defense program. (CSP was heavily represented on the late-1990s Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which was instrumental in keeping the program alive during the Clinton years.)

Looking at the center's affiliates, it's not hard to see why: Not only are makers of the Osprey (Boeing) well represented on the CSP's board of advisers but so too is Lockheed Martin (by vice president for space and strategic missiles Charles Kupperman and director of defense systems Douglas Graham). Former TRW executive Amoretta Hoeber is also a CSP adviser, as is former Congressman and Raytheon lobbyist Robert Livingston. Ball Aerospace & Technologies--a major manufacturer of NASA and Pentagon satellites--is represented by former Navy Secretary John Lehman, while missile-defense computer systems maker Hewlett-Packard is represented by George Keyworth, who is on its board of directors. And the Congressional Missile Defense Caucus and Osprey (or "tilt rotor") caucus are represented by Representative Curt Weldon and Senator Jon Kyl.
CSP was instrumental in developing the arguments against the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Largely ignored or derided at the time, a 1995 CSP memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from the ABM treaty has essentially become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court. But perhaps the most insightful window on the JINSA/CSP policy worldview comes in the form of a paper Perle and Feith collaborated on in 1996 with six others under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Essentially an advice letter to ascendant Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" makes for insightful reading as a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto.

The paper's first prescription was for an Israeli rightward economic shift, with tax cuts and a selloff of public lands and enterprises--moves that would also engender support from a "broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders." But beyond economics, the paper essentially reads like a blueprint for a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes, destabilization and containment. Indeed, it even goes so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with missile-defense advocacy. "Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state," it reads. "Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel's survival, but it would broaden Israel's base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense"--something that has the added benefit of being "helpful in the effort to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem."
Recent months in Washington have shown just how influential the notions propagated by JINSA and CSP are--and how disturbingly zealous their advocates are. In early March Feith vainly attempted to get the CIA to keep former intelligence officers Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson from accepting an invitation to an Afghanistan-related meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon--not because of what the two might say about Afghanistan, according to sources familiar with the incident, but likely out of fear that Anderson, a veteran Arabist and former chief of the CIA's Near East division, would proffer his views on Iraq (opposed to invading) and Israel-Palestine (a fan of neither Arafat nor Sharon). In late June, after United Press International reported on a US Muslim civil liberties group's lambasting of Gaffney for his attacks on the American Muslim Council, Gaffney, according to a fellow traveler, "went berserk," launching a stream of invective about the UPI scribe who reported the item.

It's incidents like this, say knowledgeable observers and participants, that highlight an interesting dynamic among right-wing hawks at the moment. Though the general agenda put forth by JINSA and CSP continues to be reflected in councils of war, even some of the hawks (including Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz) are growing increasingly leery of Israel's settlements policy and Gaffney's relentless support for it. Indeed, his personal stock in Bush Administration circles is low. "Gaffney has worn out his welcome by being an overbearing gadfly rather than a serious contributor to policy," says a senior Pentagon political official. Since earlier this year, White House political adviser Karl Rove has been casting about for someone to start a new, more mainstream defense group that would counter the influence of CSP. According to those who have communicated with Rove on the matter, his quiet efforts are in response to complaints from many conservative activists who feel let down by Gaffney, or feel he's too hard on President Bush. "A lot of us have taken [Gaffney] at face value over the years," one influential conservative says. "Yet we now know he's pushed for some of the most flawed missile defense and conventional systems. He considered Cuba a 'classic asymmetric threat' but not Al Qaeda. And since 9/11, he's been less concerned with the threat to America than to Israel."

Gaffney's operation has always been a small one, about $1 million annually--funded largely by a series of grants from the conservative Olin, Bradley and various Scaife foundations, as well as some defense contractor money--but he's recently been able to underwrite a TV and print ad campaign holding that the Palestinians should be Enemy Number One in the War on Terror, still obsessed with the destruction of Israel. It's here that one sees the influence not of defense contractor money but of far-right Zionist dollars, including some from Irving Moskowitz, the California bingo magnate. A donor to both CSP and JINSA (as well as a JINSA director), Moskowitz not only sends millions of dollars a year to far-right Israeli settler groups like Ateret Cohanim but he has also funded the construction of settlements, having bought land for development in key Arab areas around Jerusalem. Moskowitz ponied up the money that enabled the 1996 reopening of a tunnel under the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, which resulted in seventy deaths due to rioting. Also financing Gaffney's efforts is New York investment banker Lawrence Kadish. A valued and valuable patron of both the Republican National Committee and George W. Bush, Kadish helps underwrite CSP as well as Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, an offshoot of conservative activist William Bennett's Empower America, on which he and Gaffney serve as "senior advisers" in the service of identifying "external" and "internal" post-9/11 threats to America. (The "internal" threats, as articulated by AVOT, include former President Jimmy Carter, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and Representative Maxine Waters.) Another of Gaffney's backers is Poju Zabludowicz, heir to a formidable diversified international empire that includes arms manufacturer Soltam--which once employed Perle--and benefactor of the recently established Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre, a London-based group that appears to equate reportage or commentary uncomplimentary to Zionism with anti-Semitism.

While a small but growing number of conservatives are voicing concerns about various aspects of foreign and defense policy--ranging from fear of overreach to lack of Congressional debate--the hawks seem to be ruling the roost. Beginning in October, hard-line American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin (to Rubin, outgoing UN human rights chief Mary Robinson is an abettor of terrorism) arrives at the Pentagon to take over the Defense Department's Iran-Iraq account, adding another voice to the Pentagon section of Ledeen's "total war" chorus. Colin Powell's State Department continues to take a beating from outside and inside--including Bolton and his special assistant David Wurmser. (An AEI scholar and far-right Zionist who's married to Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute--recently the subject of a critical investigation by London Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker--Wurmser played a key role in crafting the "Arafat must go" policy that many career specialists see as a problematic sop to Ariel Sharon.)

As for Rumsfeld, based on comments made at a Pentagon "town hall" meeting on August 6, there seems to be little doubt as to whose comments are resonating most with him--and not just on missile defense and overseas adventures: After fielding a question about Israeli-Palestinian issues, he repeatedly referred to the "so-called occupied territories" and casually characterized the Israeli policy of building Jewish-only enclaves on Palestinian land as "mak[ing] some settlement in various parts of the so-called occupied area," with which Israel can do whatever it wants, as it has "won" all its wars with various Arab entities--essentially an echo of JINSA's stated position that "there is no Israeli occupation." Ominously, Rumsfeld's riff gave a ranking Administration official something of a chill: "I realized at that point," he said, "that on settlements--where there are cleavages on the right--Wolfowitz may be to the left of Rumsfeld."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above 'Men from JINSA and CSP' article (from 'The Nation' by Jason Vest) is the one that Fisk refers to in the following article about JINSA that intially appeared in the London Independent (and is where I first learned about JINSA- Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs ):

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 Feb 10, 2005 9:59 am Post subject:

And those lying Zionist Jew neocons were having Bush say that there were no plans to invade/occupy Iraq as troops and tanks were heading to Kuwait.. Sure that Ledeen will say that for now... But it is all part of the plan.. Allow the EU talks with Iran to fail and then have the US military (which is basically Israel's proxy military like it is in Iraq) bomb Iran as well in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' agenda of the Zionist neocons which James Bamford conveys in his 'A Pretext for War' book.. One can also read about this 'A Clean Break' agenda in Pat Buchanan's 'Whose War?' article which is linked near the bottom of the middle column at:

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

More info at http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html

This email from a contact says it all:

From: Susan
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:11:32 EST
Subject: iranian dissidents

I was in Georgetown in Washington, DC today -- streets were full of Iranian protesters demanding regime change in Iran -- saying "war now!" "no dialogue with terrorists" "bring democracy to Iran."

I am sure these protests are being encouraged and organized by neocons in DC.

Makes me sick. How dare anyone come into our country and demand that we use our taxpayer money to bring democracy anywhere -- especially when our elderly face poverty, our schools are failing, health care is beyond reach to manny...

And here these people come in..saying we should risk the blood of our own youths to give them democracy and wealth. I felt sickened....we have created a world of people who think and expect us to push ourselves further into depth to support their politicla quests. Why don't they force transition in their own countries? Why do we have to do it?

Can China demand we decapitate its leadership? What about Latin America? What about Libya..? What about Africa? Do we just drop bombs and throw our money all over the world? This is such madness....

Alpha · Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2005 10:01 am Post subject:

Alpha · Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2005 10:17 am Post subject: Whose War?

Read Bob Woodward's 'Plan of Attack' book to see that Wolfowitz and the other Israel first neoconservatives couldn't wait to invade attack as the plan was in the works well before 9/11 (which happened because of US support of Israel as James Bamford conveys on pages 138-144 of his 'A Pretext for War' book - one can also read about the 'A Clean Break' agenda on pages 261-284 as Pat Buchanan also discusses 'A Clean Break' in the following 'Whose War?' article):

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

Alpha

http://desip.igc.org/1-27-05talk.html

The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the spread of Empire and Desolation

A talk presented at the Friends Peace Center

San Jose, Costa Rica,

January 27, 2005

by Ronald Bleier[i]

Good evening. My name is Ronald Bleier. I'd like to begin with a few words about my background. I was born during the Second World War, in November 1942, on a tiny island called Lopud off the Croatian coastline near Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, while my parents were escaping from the Nazis. Fifteen months later, my brother was born in February 1944 on yet another of these islands called Vis, as my parents continued their escape. In due course, we made it safely to a refugee camp in Italy from where were fortunate to find passage along with about 1,000 mostly Jewish refugees who were granted temporary asylum in the United States by President Roosevelt during the war. About a year after the war, our entire group was granted permanent residency leading to citizenship by an act of Congress during the Truman presidency. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York where I attended yeshiva elementary and high school and where I was indoctrinated in Zionism, an ideology that I didn't question for many years. After graduating from Brooklyn College, I spent two years with the Peace Corps in Iran.

It was only in the aftermath of the 1967 war when it became clear to me that the Israelis did not intend to withdraw from the territories they captured, and were bent on an indefinite military occupation, that my views slowly changed. In the fullness of time I was to meet with a series of disillusionments that culminated in my present anti-Zionist views. The horrific Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 made me understand some of the depths of the savagery and the ruthlessness of Israeli policy. The first Palestinian uprising in December 1987 sparked tremendous interest and activism on the Palestinian issue and roughly coincided with the publication of several revisionist histories by such writers as Simcha Flapan, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Avi Schlaim and others which opened my eyes to the myths surrounding the birth of Israel. It was then that I learned that Israel was born out of the expulsion of the Palestinian people, and that cruelty and oppression was required in order to retain control of a second class population. Around that time, I realized that I needed to determine for myself the meaning of Zionism. I deduced that it meant the ideology that a Jewish state should replace the former Palestine. From this I concluded that Zionism is manifestly racist in theory and in practice since it treats only Jews as first class citizens.

In my yeshivas we were taught ethical, universal Judaism. We learned about the Torah, the Law of Moses and the Talmudic tradition. I was imbued by my rabbis with the notion of Judaism as a religion embodying justice and human rights. Only much later did I begin to recognize the reality of Israel as a state like other states, engaging in the very worst atrocities of which it was capable in order to further its political goals. And later still I began to recognize the special, terrible way Israel was different from other states since it acted with the full diplomatic, economic and military support of the United States.

My next great disillusionment was to find that I was alone among my family and friends in taking an objective and critical view of Israeli policy. I can still recall the moment in the early 80s when I broached my new views of Israel with my father, a dedicated Zionist. We were in a restaurant and his first reaction was to laugh at my ignorance and naiveté. He couldn't believe that his son would take the side of the Arabs – that's how he saw it. His second reaction was to ask me to lower my voice lest others overhear my outlandish views. My father and I very quickly had to agree to disagree on the issue.

I underwent another disillusionment with regard to the role of the media. I had already been something of a critic of the press, not to mention TV news, but it was a completely new world to learn of the power of the “friends of Israel” lobby to obscure the reality of the crimes of Israel. As it happened, my first publications appeared in the now unfortunately defunct magazine, Lies of Our Times. The rumor going around when the magazine died was that its forthright stand on the Israeli Arab issue doomed its funding in the post Oslo period. On the power of the Israeli lobby to ruin careers, to stifle dissent and to procure political support and scores of billions of dollars in military and economic aid for Israel, I read Paul Findley, Moshe Menuhin, Donald Neff, Jeffrey Blankfort, Alfred Lilienthal and others who pointed to the dramatic and rigid control by Zionists and their supporters over the media and over Congress and the administration on Middle East Policy.

The Widening Gyre

Until the advent of the current Bush administration and the terrible events of 9/11, it may have been possible even for those sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, to view events in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, as confined to that area of the world, with relatively minimal effects on daily life elsewhere. Needless to say there was more than an element of denial in such a view as we had to put to one side the corruption of our national discourse and the censorship of information coming out of the Middle East, not to mention the raiding of the U.S. Treasury of $3-6 billion a year or more to satisfy Israeli demands.

But today, in the wake of 9/11 and the reinstallation of George W. Bush for a second term as president, once again, many believe through fraudulent means, we are confronted with an energized and radical neo conservative movement with nowhere to go but onward and down. I think my father said it best a few months before he died a year and a half ago, “they don't do anything good.” He was absolutely right. They are bent on an ideological destruction of the mission of government which is supposed to be by, for, and of the people.

One way to get some perspective on what is happening to the Palestinians and their prospects is to examine in some detail Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza Disengagement plan which was published in the Israeli papers April 16, 2004.[ii] The disengagement plan appeared at the height of the corruption scandal that engulfed Sharon and his sons and served to deflect domestic criticism as well as growing international opposition to Israel's construction of the Wall on Palestinian territory. Sharon's plan provided President George W. Bush with sufficient cover to reverse long-standing U.S. policy relating to the Palestinians. In particular, Bush brushed aside the critical principle, often reiterated at the U.N., of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory conquered by force. In his dramatic joint press conference in Washington with Sharon on April 14, 2004, President Bush, bowing, as he put it, to “new realities on the ground,” declared that Israel could permanently keep major settlements in the West Bank. Bush also rejected the Palestinian right of return to Israeli territory and froze the Palestinian leadership out of negotiations. At the same time, Bush effectively gave carte blanche to the continued Israeli construction of the Wall albeit with the meaningless reservation that it was to be regarded as a temporary structure. In June 2004, both houses of Congress, by lop sided majorities, followed up with resolutions unreservedly endorsing President Bush's giveaway to Sharon.

The disengagement plan provided Sharon with cover on the military front. A succession of ruthlessly brutal intensive major Israeli Defense Forces operations followed the March 2004 assassination of wheelchair bound Hamas political leader Sheik Yassin in Gaza and continued the next month with the murder of his successor, Dr. Abd al- Rantisi. This was only the beginning for Gaza residents as operations followed from May 2004 through October. Typical of the brutality, in a two-week period during Operation Rainbow in southern Gaza in May, at least 60 Palestinians were killed, almost 300 Palestinian homes demolished, and close to 4,000 people made homeless. Throughout these operations, large amounts of Palestinian farmland and property including olive groves were confiscated and bulldozed.

One reason that Sharon has continued to get a free ride on the strength of his disengagement plan, despite his long history as a tireless and powerful opponent of Palestinian national rights, is that many cannot believe that he would be so reckless as to propose the unilateral removal of Jewish settlements in Gaza without the intention of following through. But such a view of Sharon fails to take into consideration his willingness to take unprecedented risks, as well as his shrewd calculation of both the domestic and international political landscape. In Israel, there is no opposition to speak of. In the United States, Bush and his radical, pro Israeli neocon team is firmly in place for a second term and wholly supportive of Sharon's goals and vicious tactics. Moreover, as a veteran of more than 50 years on the Middle East scene, Sharon understands that pretexts can always be found to break, postpone and put off indefinitely agreements and treaties with the Arabs.

Thus far only a few lonely voices in Israel have pointed to the counterintuitive nature of the disengagement plan and have openly questioned Sharon's intention to remove the Gaza settlements. Israeli author and academic Tanya Reinhart has gone further than anyone else, providing invaluable documentation demonstrating the lack of any practical steps Israel is taking that would indicate a serious intent to remove the settlers. Despite the absence of such evidence, the media and the international community largely continue to take Sharon's disengagement plan seriously. Meanwhile Israel continues to pour resources into the settlements, suggesting that so far from evicting Jewish settlers from Gaza, the plan is to maintain them over the long term. In that case, it's not the Israeli settlers who will be leaving, but rather a million Palestinians who will be forced from Gaza.

As part of her expose, Tanya Reinhart also reveals that compensation to settlers willing to leave Gaza is to be postponed indefinitely. She explains that if the Israeli government were seriously interested in removing settlements, they would begin to compensate those willing to leave in order to isolate the remaining hardcore. Many believed that the compensation plan was approved by the Knesset in November. However, upon closer examination we find that the required 2nd and 3rd readings of the bill “will take place only after the government decides on actual evacuation, in March 2005 or later. Till then no one will be compensated.” [iii] Meanwhile, the Israeli press reported that in December, 11 more families moved into a Gaza settlement. [iv]

Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst who has been following Middle East issues for three decades, in a recent article, summarized some of the bitter reality Palestinians confront under the current regime. The picture she paints is important because it is evidence that Sharon is in the midst of a campaign to make civil life impossible for the Palestinian community. The current dimension of the situation, she writes, goes back to the April 2002 siege of the West Bank when

Israeli forces rampaged through the territory, destroying the entire infrastructure of Palestinian civil society: Israeli soldiers laid waste Palestinian civil ministries for education and health and agriculture; smeared feces throughout the Ministry of Culture; destroyed computers and hard disks and, with them, the entire written record of Palestinian society; ransacked Palestinian businesses and banks; bulldozed whole housing blocks; destroyed land registry maps and census records, as if to erase all trace of Palestinian existence. …

Gaza is largely in ruins, a Middle Eastern Dresden, thanks to repeated Israeli air and bulldozer assaults. Nearly two thousand homes have been demolished in Gaza since the [September 2000] intifada began, leaving many more thousands of innocent civilians homeless, and Israeli helicopter gunship attacks and assassination operations have wrought still more destruction.

Israel's separation wall has destroyed prime Palestinian agricultural land, bulldozed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian olive trees, destroyed or more often appropriated for Israeli use most Palestinian water wells, destroyed Palestinian markets [and] homes. Israeli closure policies have prevented most Palestinians from working inside Israel since the beginning of the peace process a dozen years ago. Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank impede movement and halt commerce. …Yet the West wonders why the Palestinian economy is not thriving.

Israel has reduced every Palestinian security headquarters throughout the West Bank and in Gaza to rubble. These structures, which served…as security headquarters [and also] as the center of municipal governance, with mayor's offices, jails, and health clinics [are] now mere heaps of concrete.[v]

Arafat's sudden illness and death in November [2004] briefly put a halt to some of Israel's most high profile deadly and destructive military operations. Yet, only a month later in mid December, using the pretext of rockets fired by the military wing of Hamas, Israel resumed its pitiless assaults in a two-day operation that killed 11 Palestinians in Khan Yunus in Gaza.[vi] Confiscations of Palestinian land also resumed. In early January, Dr. James Zogby appeared on BBC TV news, pointing out that in the previous two weeks, Israel had appropriated 3,000-4,000 acres of Palestinian land. [vii]

Arafat's death and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as new president of the Palestinian Authority spurred hopes that we might be entering a new period of reconciliation and movement toward a meaningful peace process. However, even the mildly positive atmospherics did not last beyond a week or two after the election as Sharon used a predictable “terror” incident as a pretext to “temporarily” end such discussions as had been envisioned. Nor is this a surprise since Sharon is dead set against giving up anything to the Palestinians in negotiations since he holds all the political and military cards. Sharon's immediate plan is to destroy any and all remnants of Palestinian resistance. He is embarked on a campaign to make civil life more and more impossible for the Palestinian community as he pursues the logic of Zionism, which foresees a land of Israel for Jews only. Such a plan would involve ethnic cleansing on a massive scale – the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people similar in scope to the events of 1948 when upwards of 750,000 Palestinians were expelled.

Turning now to US foreign policy and the origins of the Iraq war we see evidence of Israeli influence on US actions –what one writer called “The Fatal Embrace.” First I'd like to tackle the question of whether the Iraq war was fought for oil. I have always believed that the issue of US control over Iraqi oil was subsidiary to ideological goals. Now that we see oil prices near $50 with no apparent prospect of returning below $30, some are beginning to realize that if regime change in Iraq was about oil, it hasn't succeeded. Had the Administration's purpose been about providing US drivers with a steady and cheap supply of Middle East oil, the last thing they would have done was go to war against Iraq. Rather, I argue, war against Iraq was driven by a coterie of neoconservatives who have a long record of supporting a Likudnik agenda of destabilizing and fragmenting all of Israel's potential enemies.[viii] Those like Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Eliot Abrams and others in senior government positions are interested in extending U.S. military power abroad not in the interests of democracy as they claim, but in order to sow chaos, confusion, and violent conflict.

They aim to maintain and grow the military budget and starve domestic social spending. In order to maintain an aggressive posture and ensure maximum freedom of action they are determined to subvert the international order that has been the foundation of the stability that has allowed the US and many other nations to grow and prosper over the last century. They eschew conflict resolution and diplomacy because that would threaten to bring peace, which is their anathema. Their modus operandi is to create desolation and call it democracy.

We are confronted in the age of George W. Bush with the enormous success of the neocon program. Many of the neocons were former Democrats in the 70s who were opposed to the liberal agenda of demilitarization, social spending and criticism of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. From relatively modest beginnings we find today that they have achieved their goal of regime change in Iraq against the best advice of major elements of the Republican Party including George H.W. Bush, the father of the president. They have pursued the Iraq war against the greatest outpouring of protest in the US and the rest of the world since the Vietnam War, and against common sense and the best interests of the security of the United States. So the question becomes how did they pull it off? One part of the answer that concerns us tonight is the assistance provided by the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States. The ability of the Israeli lobby to smooth the way for war was highlighted by the furor over Virginia Congressman Jim Moran's response in early March 2003 to a constituent question during a town hall meeting.[ix] He said: that "if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should."

Congressman Moran was correct and extraordinarily courageous in pointing to the leadership of the major Jewish organizations, suggesting that they could have blocked the war. As a 13-year veteran member of the House, Jim Moran has been around long enough to understand how political power on Middle East issues operates in Congress. War against Iraq has so isolated the United States and made so little sense that were it not perceived as good for Israel, in all likelihood it would not have gained sufficient traction in the media or in Congress.

It's probably not possible to reconcile opposing sides on the question of whether Tel Aviv or Washington drives US Mideast policy, but one element of this issue may be worth emphasizing. I would stress the difference between Prime Minister Sharon's brutal and ruthless pragmatism as he drives forward toward his goal of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and the Arab nation. From a Zionist perspective, it is a zero sum game with winners and losers. On the other hand, the Washington neocons, are bent on war for the sake of war, with tragedy, and death the only winners. Fallujah today is an excellent example of the desolation that the public relations people call democracy. Another example of the new dark age are the ruins of the Museum in Baghdad, the destroyed Baghdad Library, the ravaged Iraqi universities and archeological sites, the murder of scores of the cream of the Iraqi academic, professional and diplomatic classes, not to mention the deaths of a 100,000 and counting ordinary Iraqis.

The Dimensions of the present problem
There is no point in attempting to soften our description of the nature of the current crisis that we face with the reinstallation of George W. Bush for another four years. With the results of the election in place, the most radical of the neocons are entrenched and empowered to forward their extremist agenda. No doubt there are many like me in tonight's audience who first read George Orwell's 1984, awakened but at the same time confident that we would never live to see a US administration that could embody such evil. Lo and behold, we are now confronted with an administration bent on the continual creation of enemies and fighting endless war.

The current devastation and horror that Bush has made of Iraq while not exactly a PR bonanza, is not necessarily perceived by them as a total defeat. For example, if Iraq should wind up fragmented into its three main groups, that would play into neocon and Israeli hands since a potential area counterforce will have been eliminated. Moreover the anarchic climate in Iraq, a perfect breeding ground for terrorism suits their purpose by fomenting real, imagined and created enemies against whom the US leadership can rally and unify the populace, stifle dissent, and push through the most extreme of their radical domestic and international agenda.

The next target on the Bush-Cheney neocon agenda is Iran, now Israel's strongest enemy. On January 20th, the same day that George W. Bush was sworn in for a second term, Vice President Cheney with astonishing chutzpah, gave Israel the green light to attack Iran. In a radio interview, he said that Iran is “right at the top of the list” of the world's trouble spots and given that “Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.” The naked irresponsibility and recklessness of such a statement is staggering. For added measure we learn from articles in current issues of the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh that plans have already been made for attacking Iran and reconnaissance for such an attack has already begun including on the ground infiltration of commando forces. (As an aside it may be interesting to speculate that US government leaks to Hersh were intended as a trial balloon in order to measure domestic US reaction as well as to spread confusion in Iran.)

One measure of the contretemps we are in is that there is no one in sight with the stature or courage to challenge Cheney's characterization of Iran's posture which is essentially defensive. If there was one thing that the Bush-Cheney wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have taught Iran and North Korea and the rest of the world it is that weak countries including those without a nuclear deterrent are vulnerable to threats from the US and/or Israel. Iran would be “crazy,” as one analyst elegantly put it,[x] if it did not seek a nuclear deterrent against threatening superpowers. Meanwhile, in Western circles, Israel's nuclear monopoly is ignored while Iran's nuclear potential is characterized as a threat to peace. [xi] Israel and the US neocon Likudniks are determined to maintain the nuclear status quo in the Middle East because an Iranian nuclear capability might serve as a brake to Israeli and US aggression.

One question raised by US-Israeli threats is whether an attack against Iran would lead to a wider Middle East war. But it is difficult to see who would be or could be waging war against the two superpowers. The military balance in the Middle East is not comparable to that of Europe for example of the 20th and earlier centuries where the various states worked to achieve balance through alliances and détentes. Especially now with Iraq effectively out of the picture, there is no foreseeable combination of Middle Eastern powers that could stand up to an Israel backed by the US. Moreover the latest version of Iran's Shebab 3 medium range missile, rumored to be able to reach Israel, carries no nuclear warhead and so its deterrent capability is strategically limited. Moreover, Iranian missile strikes against Israel, while doing relatively little damage would serve as pretexts for Israel's disproportionate retaliations, exactly as we see today in the Occupied Territories. Some analysts have pointed out that Israel's potential air attacks against Iran may originate in US controlled airbases in Iraq. Thus Israel's continued nuclear monopoly means that Iran is virtually defenseless against Israeli aggression. [xii]

Would an Israeli/US attack on Iran lead to a wider war? One radical faction, led by veteran neoconservative Michael Ledeen who heads the Coalition for Democracy in Iran seems bent on regime change in Saudi Arabia, but it is hard to see how such a change would benefit the US. A destabilized Saudi Arabia would put much of the world oil supply at risk and have nightmare ramifications for the international economy. The Bush-Cheney administration which has longstanding business and personal relations with the Saudi leadership seems to be resisting the concept of regime change there since such plans seem to pass the line of recklessness into pure stupidity. But since the administration seems determined to attack Iran (and Syria for some of the same reasons) we may be in a situation where events are in the saddle and pressures may build to the point where a shaky Saudi monarchy is toppled.

But here we are approaching the horizon of foreseeable events. Suffice it to say for now that the world faces a challenge similar to 1939 with the US and Israel bent on regime change, destabilization, tension, chaos, and endless war.

On the other hand, it may be useful to pull back and remind ourselves that the US is mired in a quagmire in Iraq and that neither the US or Israel have the forces to invade or occupy Iran. Perhaps just as important, on the economic front the US has become a debtor nation big time, no better than a banana republic. Even worse, the Bush Cheney regime shows every evident intention to apply foot to the pedal and drive the US further into bankruptcy by spending endlessly on the Iraq war, and on their military toys, spy satellites and Star Wars programs. Similarly on the domestic front they appear to be determined to continue destroying the economy, with more tax cuts for the wealthy and the huge costs involved in “strengthening” social security. Is it possible that such policies can be sustained another four years? Who knows?

One interesting historical footnote takes us back to the 1956 Suez war when France, England and Israel combined to attack Egypt and Gaza. At the time President Eisenhower – the only US president until Jimmy Carter to stand up to Israel -- was enraged and was able to reverse the tripartite attack by applying pressure on England which at the time was deeply in the US debt for World War Two costs. Is it possible that economically based constraints can save us from the most extreme military daydreams of the current gang in Washington? But even in that least worst case scenario, there will be much desolation, despair and suffering for hundreds of millions of people everywhere.

Solutions

How do we speak of solutions confronted as we are with the magnitude of the current challenges to peace and democracy? My own instincts are to begin by looking the devil – that is to say, reality – in the eye. Our job is first to describe and understand the situation we face as best and as clearly as we are able. That is exactly our purpose this evening. Our next step is to find ways to struggle for our visions and our dreams and our futures. One way to do this is to build community and that is the essential second element of our purpose tonight. From small local beginnings we can try to work to forge the unity and the leadership that we require to survive and prevail. There are certainly no easy answers and no single answer. There is only a difficult and puzzling and impossible process and we need to find ways to plug into that process and to make it happen. And for that task we are armed only with the hope that day will follow night and that we can toil our way toward a better future than the one we seem headed towards now.

The End

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] Ronald Bleier is a freelance writer based in NYC. He edits DESIP, an environmental and security website.

[ii] Uri Avnery, December 18, 2004. “The Mountain and the Mouse. Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon's disengagement” from Gaza,” March 30, 2004 and “What kind of state deserves to exist, Yediot Aharonot, April 20, 2004.

[iii] Tanya Reinhart, “Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!” November 2004. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3331.shtml

[iv] Ha'aretz, December 17, 2004. Nadav Shraga, “11 new families settle in Gaza's Nissanit.”

[v] Kathleen Christison, January 3, 2005, “Patronizing the Palestinians: The Trouble with Optimism” http://www.counterpunch.org/christison01032005.html

[vi] Al Jazeera, December 19, 2004, “Israeli helicopters strike Gaza towns.”

[vii] BBC TV news, January 10, 2005.

[viii] Here and in some of the analysis below I am indebted to Stephen J. Sniegoski, “The Future of the Global War on Terrorism,” Current Concerns , September 3-5, 2004.

[ix] Others like Philip Zelikow, the Executive director of the 9/11 Commission, outgoing Senator Ernest “Fritz’ Hollings, Patrick Buchanan, Justin Raimondo and others have expressed similar views but Moran's case seemed to attract more media attention in part because, as a result of his remarks he was seen as vulnerable.

[x] Israeli military historian, Martin Van Creveld, International Herald Tribune, August 21, 2004. Cited in Khalid Amayreh, “Israel to U.S.: Now for Iran,” August 29, 2004.

[xi] Sniegoski, op.cit.

[xii] Based on 2004 analysis by Andrew Cordesman

Alpha

From: "Peter Myers"

Subject: Yushchenko appoints Zionist PM; Bush invites wanted Jewish Oligarchs to Breakfast

Yushchenko appoints Zionist PM; Bush invites wanted Jewish Oligarchs to
Breakfast

Please note my new address & phone#. My email stays the same.

(1) Ukraine - Yushchenko appoints Zionist PM, & Zionists in charge of
Media &
Defense
(2) White House Invites Jewish Oligarchs wanted in Russia, for
Breakfast with
Bush
(3) Ex-Congressman Paul Findley with "Great Balls of Fire"

(1) Ukraine - Yushchenko appoints Zionist PM, & Zionists in charge of
Media &
Defense

Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 08:25:57 +1100 From:
news-report-owner@wiretapped.net

Ukraine - Yushchenko Reveals Why Israel Backed Him

Zionists Already Put In Charge Of Media And Defense. New Prime Minister
Is Also
A Zionist

BBC News 2-5-5

http://www.rense.com/general62/iuk.htm

The new President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, has appointed
multi-millionaire
"dual citizen" Yevgeny Chervonenko communications minister. The
45-year-old
holds an Israeli passport and is vice president of the All-Ukraine
Jewish
Congress. As communications minister he will exercise complete control
over the
development of Ukraine's media. His department will issue all
operational and
frequency licenses for radio, television, Internet and satellite
communications.

After privatization, Chervonenko gained control of a variety of
businesses,
including two large bottling plants, supermarket chains and a
pharmaceutical
firm. In 2004, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he
complained
of "anti-Semites" in the opposition coalition, noting that he accosted
one of
them, Vassily Chervoni, in a washroom in the Parliament building.
Chervonenko
said, "I put his head in the sink and told him, 'One more bad word
about Israel
and I'll really mess you up.' " (Chervonenko was head of candidate
Yushchenko's
security detail, and bragged to the AP that he personally tasted all of
Yushchenko's food when asked about the alleged poisoning. He blamed the
poisoning on the "anti-Semitic" opposition who fed his man during a
private
government meeting to which he did not have access.)

Media mogul Pyotr Poroshenko, also a Jew, has been appointed secretary
of
National Security and Defense, despite having no experience whatsoever.
Not even
Ukraine's heavily Jewish Communist Party can believe it. After hearing
of
Poroshenko's appointment, they issued this statement: "When national
security
and the activities of law-enforcement are entrusted to a businessman
whose
actions have often contradicted the law, and who has been caught
falsifying
State budgets, one can hardly believe in pre-election promises that all
the
criminals would be jailed." Oligarch Poroshenko owns Channel 5, the
television
channel that during the "Orange Revolution" turned from a relatively
objective
news source into a fountain of opposition propaganda.

Billionaire Jew Julia Timoshenko, 44, has been appointed Prime
Minister, the
nation's second most powerful position, despite an international arrest
warrant.
Timoshenko is under criminal indictment in Russia for fraud and bribing
government officials. In 1996-97 Timoshenko sucked billions from the
Ukrainian
economy through the re-sale of gas under the protection of her
robber-baron
patron, former prime minister Pavel Lazarenko. (Pavel Lazarenko is
serving a
prison sentence in California after being convicted of extortion, money
laundering, conspiracy, fraud and the transportation of stolen
property.
Lazarenko was also convicted of money laundering in Switzerland and is
wanted
for murder in Ukraine. His American criminal defense lawyer is
well-known
television legal commentator Daniel Horowitz. During his San Francisco
trial,
Horowitz introduced secret recordings of former Ukrainian President
Leonid
Kuchma that include anti-Semitic cursing and rants against Lazarenko.
The idea
was to convince the jury that Lazarenko was the victim of an
anti-Semitic
political vendetta by Kuchma. It didn't work.)

The new prime minister's native language is Russian, not Ukrainian.
Timoshenko
admits she only learned the Ukrainian language in 1999. She has
absolutely
refused to provide a biography, and even her maiden name is a mystery.
However,
local Jews have repeatedly boasted of her Jewish ancestry.

(2) White House Invites Jewish Oligarchs wanted in Russia, for
Breakfast with
Bush

Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 08:25:57 +1100 From:
news-report-owner@wiretapped.net

White House Invites Wanted Jewish Oligarchs for Breakfast with Bush
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/02/04/043.html

4th February 2005

TWO wanted Jewish oligarchs will enjoy "prayer breakfast" with Bush.
Most
likely, they will pray that they never end up in the hands of the
Russians

Two of Russia's most wanted fugitives were invited to Washington for a
'prayer
breakfast' with President George Bush in defiance of international
arrest
warrants. The two Jewish oligarchs were promised by US officials that
they would
not be extradited to Russia. After being assured that they would not
face
Russian justice, Mikhail Brudon and Vladimir Dubov flew in from Israel
on
Wednesday.

Over a year ago, the two fled to Israel. They were wanted by Russian
prosecutors
for charges similar to those against Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsy, who
was sent
to prison in October 2003. Brudon and Dubov are both major shareholders
in the
company. Both oligarchs have been granted citizenship by Israel. They
were
invited to Washington by Republican Representative Tom Lantos, who is a
major
Russophobe in the capital.

Upset that Khodorkovsky couldn't make the breakfast due to 'prior
arrangements,'
Lantos decided that two lesser Jewish oligarchs could take the place of
Russia's
richest Jewish oligarch. Lenoid Nevzlin, another wanted Yukos
shareholder, was
also invited. Nevzlin, Brudno, and Dubov fled Russia after seeing the
writing on
the wall with Khodorkovsky's arrest.

Dubov and Brudno only agreed to bless President Bush with their
presence after
being assured that the US government would ignore the Interpol warrant
for their
arrests. When asked what he is going to do next, Brudno said that he
will return
'home' to Israel.

Other criminals wanted by Russia the 'West' refuses to hand over are
Vladimir
Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Chechen terrorist spokesman Akhmed
Zakyaev. All
three have been granted amnesty in order to protect them from Russian
justice.

(3) Ex-Congressman Paul Findley with "Great Balls of Fire"

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 19:18:06 EST From: RePorterNoteBook@aol.com

They Dare To Speak Out

Author: Paul Findley ©1985 Publisher: Lawrence Hill & Co. ISBN No.
0-88208-179-9

Book excerpts from a courageous United States Congressman, Paul
Findley, who
served from 1960-1982:

Page 1 -- Early Naivete

I had already begun to doubt the wisdom of United States policy in the
Middle
East when I first joined the subcommittee. For the most part, I kept
these
doubts private, but not because I feared the political consequences. In
fact I
naively assumed I could question our policy anywhere without getting
into
trouble. I did not realize how deeply the roots of Israeli interests
had
penetrated U.S. institutions.

Page 17 -- Personal Friend Could Not Ignore the Lobby

No event, before or since, disclosed to me so forcefully the hidden
leverage of
the Israeli lobby on the U.S. political scene. This great, kind,
generous Jewish
elder statesman, a personal friend for twenty years, could not ignore
the lobby
and say a public good word for my candidacy. I report this episode
because, when
a great man like Arthur Burns feels he must keep his views private,
lesser men
and women who would speak out face an enormous challenge.

Page 19 -- Bob Hope Backs Out

The "panic" even spread to Hollywood. Bob Hope, who never wavered under
enemy
fire on war fronts in World War II and Korea and withstood heavy
criticism for
his support of President Nixon's Vietnam policies, encountered a new
and more
devastating line of fire when he agreed to appear at a fund-raising
event for me
in Springfield. ...

... Coast-to-coast pressure quickly brought a change. Don Norton
recalls an
urgent telephone message he received from Hope's manager:

Grant told me that Hope was getting tremendous pressure from Jews and
non-Jews
all over the country. He said it's gone to the point where Hope's
lawyer of 35
years, who is Jewish, has threatened to quit. The pressure was beyond
belief,
like nothing they had ever experienced before, and Bob Hope just
couldn't come.

Page 20 -- Lobby Pressures Gerald Ford

Lobby pressure also intruded when former President Gerald R. Ford
agreed to
appear in my behalf, this time in Alton, Illinois.

The first sign of trouble was a call From Palm Springs in which Ford's
secretary
reported that the former president had to cancel his date because his
staff had
mistakenly booked him to speak at a meeting of the Michigan Bar
Association the
same day. There was no other time that Ford could help me, the caller
said,
before election day. To determine if some accommodation was possible,
my
assistant, Bob Wichser, called the Michigan Bar Association, only to
learn there
was no conflict - no event was scheduled.

Page 21 -- Emotion Drives Israel's American Supporters

When election time came around again two years later, I was unopposed
in the
primary, but a strong Democratic opponent, Richard Durbin, emerged in
the
general election. More experienced and popular, he quickly picked up
the
resources Robinson had amassed, including Robinson's list of nationwide
contributors. The Associated Press reported that: "Israel's American
supporters
again are pouring money into an emotional drive to unseat Central
Illinois
Representative Paul Findley.

Page 22 -- Puzzlement At Attitude of Pro-Israel Activists

After my twenty-two years in Congress, losing was, of course, a
disappointment.
But my main reaction was wonderment. I was puzzled by the behavior of
the
Pro-Israel activists. Why did they go to such trouble to eliminate me
from
Congress? Why did people from all over the country who did not know me
personally and very likely knew little of my record dig so deeply in
their own
pockets - many of them contributing $1,000 to my opponents? What
sustained this
commitment for a four-year period?

Page 23 -- Make an Example

... Surely they realized that I posed no serious threat. Could Israel's
supporters not tolerate even one lonely voice of dissent?

Or was the lobby's purpose to make an example of me in the Elizabethan
manner?
(According to legend, Queen Elizabeth occasionally hanged an admiral,
just as an
example to the others.) Was I chosen for a trip to the political
gallows to
discourage other Congressmen from speaking out?

Page 25 -- AIPAC the Preeminent Power in Washington Lobbying

Washington is a city of acronyms, and today one of the best-known in
Congress is
AIPAC. The mere mention of it brings a sober, if not furtive look, to
the face
of anyone on Capitol Hill who deals with Middle East policy. AIPAC -
the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee - is now the preeminent power
in
Washington lobbying.

Pages 25, 26 -- AIPAC Means Power

Almost without exception, House and Senate members do its bidding,
because most
of them consider AIPAC to be the direct Capitol Hill representative of
a
political force that can make or break their chances at election time.

Whether based on fact or fancy, the perception is what counts: AIPAC
mean power
- raw, intimidating power. Its promotional literature regularly cites a
tribute
published in the New York Times: "The most powerful, best-run and
effective
foreign policy interest group in Washington." A former Congressman,
Paul N.
"Pete" McCloskey puts it more directly: Congress is "terrorized" by
AIPAC. Other
Congressmen have not been so candid on the public record, but many
House and
Senate members privately agree.

Page 26, 27 -- Lobby Group 'Extension of Israeli Government'

In practice, the lobby groups function as an informal extension of the
Israeli
government. This was illustrated when AIPAC helped draft the official
statement
defending Israel's 1981 bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, then
issued it the
same hour as Israel's embassy.

No major Jewish organization ever publicly takes issue with positions
and
policies adopted by Israel. Thomas A. Dine, executive director of
AIPAC, spoke
warmly of President Reagan's peace plan when it was announced in
September 1982,
but as soon as Israel rejected the plan, Dine fell silent.

Page 27 -- Even the President Turns to AIPAC

Over the years the pro-Israel lobby has thoroughly penetrated this
nation's
governmental system, and the organization that has made the deepest
impact is
AIPAC, to whom even the president of the United States turns when he
has a
vexing political problem related to the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Page 35 -- AIPAC Publishes 'Enemies List'

AIPAC's outreach program is buttressed by a steady stream of
publications. In
addition to "Action Alerts" and the weekly Near East Report, it issues
position
papers and monographs designed to answer, or often discredit, critics,
and
advance Israel's objectives.

The most controversial publication of all is an "enemies list" issued
as a
"first edition" in the spring of 1983. A handsomely printed 154-page
paperback
entitled The Campaign to Discredit Israel, it provides a "directory of
the
actors": 21 organizations and 39 individuals AIPAC identified as
inimical to
Israeli interests.

Included are such distinguished public servants as former
Undersecretary of
State George W. Ball, retired ambassadors Talcott Seelye, Andrew
Kilgore, John
C. West and James Atkins, and former Senator James Abourezk. There are
also five
Jewish dissenters and several scholars on the list.

Seemingly unaware of the AIPAC project, the Anti-Defamation League of
B'nai
B'rith almost simultaneously issued its own "enemies list": Pro-Arab
Propaganda
in America: Vehicles and Voices. It too is identified as a "first
edition," and
lists 31 organizations and 34 individuals. These books are nothing more
than
blacklists, reminiscent of the worst tactics of the McCarthy era.

A similar "enemies list" is employed in AIPAC's extensive program at
colleges
and universities.

Page 36 -- Effectiveness of AIPAC

Paul Weyrich, who worked as a Senate aide before becoming a political
analyst,
details the effectiveness of AIPAC:

It's a remarkable system they have. If you vote with them, or make a
public
statement they like, they get the word out fast through their own
publications
and through editors around the country who are sympathetic to their
cause.

Of course it works in reverse as well. if you say something they don't
like, you
can be denounced or censured through the same network. That kind of
pressure is
bound to affect Senators' thinking, especially if they are wavering or
need
support.

Page 37 -- 'Our Access is Amazing'

... Encountered in a Capitol corridor one day, an AIPAC lobbyist said,
"Tomorrow
I will try to see five members of the House. I called this morning and
confirmed
every appointment, and I have no doubt I will get in promptly." Two
days later,
even he seemed somewhat awed by AIPAC's clout. He reported, "I made all
five. I
went right in to see each of them. There was no waiting. Our access is
amazing."

Page 43 -- NatPAC

The largest pro-Israel PAC is the national Political Action Committee
(NatPAC),
headquartered in New York with Marvin Josephson, head of a theatrical
and
literary talent agency, as chairman. Its Washington-based executive
director is
Richard Altman, who previously worked as political director of AIPAC.
It draws
money heavily from the entertainment industry and got off to a fast
start in
1982 when Woody Allen signed its first nationwide fund-raising appeal.
The
National Journal rates it as the nation's largest non-labor,
non-business
political action committee.

Page 49 AIPAC Relentless

An Ohio Congressman speaks of AIPAC with both awe and concern:

AIPAC is the most influential lobby on Capitol Hill. They are
relentless. They
know what they're doing. They have the people for financial resources.
They've
got a lot going for them. Their basic underlying cause is one that most
Americans sympathize with.

But what distresses me is the inability of American policy-makers,
because of
the influence of AIPAC, to distinguish between our national interest
and
Israel's national interest. When these converge - wonderful! But they
don't
always converge.

Page 54 -- B'nai B'rith Published Report 'A Complete Fabrication'

An article in the B'nai B'rith Messenger charged that McCloskey had
proposed
that all rabbis be required to register as foreign agents, declaring
that he had
made the proposal in a meeting with the editors of the Los Angeles
Times. The
author assured his readers that the tidbit came from a "very reliable
source,"
and the charge was published nationally. The charge was a complete
fabrication,
and the Times editor Tony Day was quick to back up McCloskey's denial.

The Messenger published a retraction a month later, but the accusation
lingered
on. Even the Washington office of the Israeli lobby did not get the
retraction
message. In an interview about McCloskey two years later, Douglas
Bloomfield,
legislative director for AIPAC, apparently unaware of the retraction,
repeated
the accusation as fact.

Page 57 -- McCloskey Hounded Through 'Tracking System'

A tracking system initiated by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
B'rith
assured that McCloskey would have no peace, even as a private citizen.
the group
distributed a memorandum containing details of his actions and speeches
to its
chapters around the country. According to the memo, it was designed to
"assist"
local ADL groups with "counteraction guidance" whenever McCloskey
appeared in
public.

Page 70, 71 Congressmen's Reaction to Israeli Pressure Groups

A veteran Ohio Congressman observes:

When [Stephen] Solarz and others press for more money for Israel,
nobody wants
to say "No." You don't need many examples of intimidation for
politicians to
realize what the potential is. The Jewish lobby is terrific. Anything
it wants,
it gets. Jews are educated, often have a lot of money, and vote on the
basis of
a single issue - Israel. They are unique in that respect. For example,
anti-abortion supporters are numerous but not that well educated, and
don't have
that much money. The Jewish lobbyists have it all, and they are
political
activists on top of it.

This Congressman divides his colleagues into four groups:

For the first group, it's rah, rah, give Israel anything it wants. The
second
group includes those with some misgivings, but they don't dare step out
of line;
they don't say anything. In the third group are Congressmen who have
deep
misgivings but who won't do more than try quietly to slow down the aid
to
Israel. Lee Hamilton is an example. The fourth groups consists of those
who
openly question U.S. policy in the Middle East and challenge what
Israel is
doing. Since Findley and McCloskey left, this group really doesn't
exist
anymore.

He puts himself in the third group: "I may vote against the bill
authorizing
foreign aid this year for the first time. If I do, I will not state my
reason."
Solarz has never wavered in his commitment to Israel.

Page 77 -- Many Jews Mistake Criticism of Israel for Anti-Semitism

"What is tragic is that so many Jewish people misconstrue criticism of
Israel as
anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic." He speaks admiringly of the open
criticism of
Israeli policy that often occurs within Israel itself: "It is easier to
criticize Israel in the Knesset [the Israeli parliament] than it is in
the U.S.
Congress, here in this land of free speech."

Pages 78, 79 -- AIPAC Caught Napping -- Fail To Detect Rebellion in
Congress

For once, both the House Democratic leadership and AIPAC were caught
napping.
Usually in complete control of all legislative activities which relate
to
Israel, AIPAC failed to detect the brewing rebellion. Concern over the
budget
deficit and controversial provisions in the bill for Central America
led these
freshman democrats to oppose their own leadership. unable to offer
amendments,
they quietly agreed among themselves to oppose the whole package.

When the roll was called the big electric board over the Speaker's desk
showed
defeat - the resolution was rejected, 206 to 203. Twenty-four
first-term
Democrats had deserted the leadership and voted no. Voting no did not
mean they
opposed Israeli aid. Some of them, concerned over the federal deficit,
viewed it
as a demand to the leadership to schedule a bill raising taxes. For
others, it
was simply a protest. But for Israel it was serious.

"The Jewish community went crazy," a Capitol Hill veteran recalls.
AIPAC's
professionals went to work. Placing calls from their offices just four
blocks
away, they activated key people in the districts of a selected list of
the
errant freshmen. They arranged for "quality calls" to individuals who
had played
a major role in the recent Congressional election. Each was to place an
urgent
call to his or her Congressman, insist on getting through personally
and use
this message:

Approval of the continuing resolution is very important. Without it,
Israel will
suffer. I am not criticizing your vote against it the first time. I am
su re you
had reasons. However, I have learned that the same question will come
up for
vote again, probably tomorrow. I speak for many of your friends and
supporters
in asking that you change your vote when the question comes up again.

... The urgent telephone messages from home carried the day. When the
roll was
called, 14 of the freshmen - a bit sheepishly - changed their votes.

... To give the freshmen an excuse they could use in explaining their
embarrassing shift, the leadership promised to bring up a tax bill.
Everyone
knew it was just a ploy: the tax bill had no chance to become law. But
the
excuse was helpful, and the resolution was approved, 224 to 189. the
flow of aid
to Israel continued without interruption.

Page 95 -- 'Israel Controls the Senate': Fullbright

Appearing on CBS television's "Face the Nation" in 1973, [Senator
William J.]
Fullbright declared that the Senate was "subservient to Israeli
policies which
were inimical to American interests. He said the United States bears "a
very
great share of the responsibility" for the continuation of Middle East
violence.
"It's quite obvious [that] without the all-out support by the United
States in
money and weapons and so on, the Israeli couldn't do what they've been
doing."

Fullbright said the United States failed to pressure Israel for a
negotiated
settlement because

The great majority of the Senate of the United States - somewhere
around 80
percent - are completely in support of Israel, anything Israel wants.
This has
been demonstrated time and time again, and this has made it difficult
for our
government.

The Senator claimed that "Israel controls the Senate," and warned, "We
should be
more concerned about the United States' interests."

Page 101 -- President Ford backs Down Under Pressure

... It was a historic proposal, the first time since Eisenhower that a
United
States president even hinted publicly that he might suspend aid to
Israel.

Israel's response came, not from its own capital, but from the United
States
Senate. Instead of relying on a direct protest to the White House,
Jerusalem
activated its lobby in the United States, which, in turn, signed up as
supporters of Israel's position more than three-fourths of the members
of the
United States Senate.

A more devastating - and intimidating - response could scarcely be
conceived.
The seventy-six signatures effectively told Ford he could not carry out
his
threatened "reappraisal." Israel's loyalists in the Senate - Democrats
and
republicans alike - were sufficient in number to reject any legislative
proposal
hostile to Israel that Ford might make, and perhaps even enact a
pro-Israeli
piece of legislation over a presidential veto.

The letter was a demonstration of impressive clout. Crafted and
circulated by
AIPAC, it had been endorsed overnight by a majority of the Senate
membership.
Several Senators who at first had said "No" quickly changed their
positions.
Senator John Culver admitted candidly, "The pressure was too great. I
caved." So
did President Ford. He backed down and never again challenged the
lobby.

Page 102 -- TV's 'Holocaust' Series 'Simplifies Lobbying'

The Israeli lobby pulled out all the stops. It coordinated a nationwide
public
relations campaign which revived, as never before, memories of the
genocidal
Nazi campaign against European Jews during World War II. In the wake of
the
highly publicized television series, "Holocaust," Capitol Hill was
flooded with
complimentary copies of the novel on which the TV series was based. The
books
were accompanied by a letter from AIPAC saying, "This chilling account
of the
extermination of six million Jews underscores Israel's concerns during
the
current negotiations for security without reliance on outside
guarantees."
Concerning the book distribution, AIPAC's Aaron Rosenbaum told the
Washington
Post: "We think, frankly, that it will affect a few votes here and
there, and
simplify lobbying."

Page 102, 103 -- AIPAC 'Demands 100 Percent' Loyalty

[William] Hathaway was one of the forty-four who stuck with AIPAC, but
this was
not sufficient when election time rolled around. AIPAC wanted a Senator
whose
signature - and vote - it could always count on. Searching for
unswerving
loyalty, the lobby switched to Cohen. Its decision came at the very
time
Hathaway was resisting pressures on the Saudi issue. The staff at the
Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee was outraged. One of them declared to a
visitor:
"AIPAC demands 100 percent. If a fine Senator like Hathaway fails to
cooperate
just once, they are ready to trade in his career." A staff member of a
Senate
committee declared: "To please AIPAC, you have to be more pure than
Ivory soap
â*" 99.44 percent purity is not good enough." Lacking the purity AIPAC
demanded,
Hathaway was defeated in 1978.

Page 106 -- Israeli Lobby Exerts 'More Constant Pressure'

[Charles] Mathias cited the Israeli lobby as the most powerful ethnic
pressuer
group, noting that it differs from others in that it focuses on vital
national
security interests and exerts "more constant pressure." Other lobbying
groups
"show up in a crisis and then disappear" and tend to deal with domestic
matters.
Mathias continued:

With the exception of the Eisenhower administration, which virtually
compelled
Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai after the 1956 war, American
presidents, and
to an even greater degree Senators and representatives, have been
subjected to
recurrent pressures from what has come to be known as the Israel lobby.

Page 114 -- JFK 'Insulted' by Jewish Offer

The night before, Kennedy had gone to dinner with a small group of
wealthy and
prominent Jews in New York. An episode of the evening had troubled him
deeply.
Describing it to Bartlett as an "amazing experience," he said one of
those at
the dinner party - he did not identify him by name - told him he knew
his
campaign was in financial difficulty and, speaking for the group,
offered "to
help and help significantly" if Kennedy as president "would allow them
to set
the course of Middle East policy over the next four years." It was an
astounding
proposition.

Kennedy told Bartlett he reacted less as a presidential candidate than
as a
citizen. "He said he felt insulted," Bartlett recalls, "that anybody
would make
that offer, particularly to a man who even had a slim chance to be
president.
..."

Page 119 -- No Protestant Support 'All We Get Is A Battering From the
Jews'

A determined president [Eisenhower] took his case to the American
people in a
televised address in the spring of 1957:

Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the
face of the
United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own
withdrawal? If we agreed that armed attack can properly achieve the
purposes of
the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of
international
order.

Letters and telegrams poured into the White House, but almost all of
the
communications came from Jews, 90 percent supporting Israel's position.
Dulles
complained, "It is impossible to hold the line because we get no
support from
the Protestant elements in the country. All we get is a battering from
the
Jews."

Page 127 -- Power From Willingness to Make Use of Charge of
Anti-Semitism

[George W.] Ball believes the lobby's instrument of greatest power is
its
willingness to make broad use of the charge of anti-Semitism. "They've
got one
great thing going for them. Most people are terribly concerned not to
be accused
of being anti-Semitic, and the lobby so often equates criticism of
Israel with
anti-Semitism. They keep pounding away at that theme, and people are
deterred
from speaking out."

In Ball's view, many Americans feel a "sense of guilt" over the
extermination of
Jews by Nazi Germany. The result of this guilt is that the fear of
being called
anti-Semitic is "much more effective in silencing candidates and public
officials than threats about campaign money or votes."

Page 180-- Making It 'Hot Enough' on Campus

In 1979 AIPAC established its Political Leadership Development Program,
which
trains student activists on how to increase pro-Israeli influence on
campus.
Coordinator Jonathan Kessler recently reported that in just four years
"AIPAC's
program has affiliated over 5,000 students on 350 campuses in all 50
states.

They are systematically monitoring and comprehensively responding to
anti-Israeli groups on campus. They are involved in pro-Israel
legislative
efforts, in electoral campaign politics as well.

Page 239 -- Christian Affinity to Israel

Virtually all Christians approach the Middle East with at least a
subtle
affinity to Israel and an inclination to oppose or mistrust any
suggestion that
questions Israeli policy. The lobby has drawn widely upon this support
in
pressing its national programs. More important, fresh perspectives
which
challenge shibboleths and established prejudices regarding the Middle
East are
often denounced by both the lobby and many of its Christian allies as
politically extremist, anti-Semitic or even anti-Christian.

The religious convictions of many Americans have made them susceptible
to the
appeals of the Israeli lobby, with the result that free speech
concerning the
Middle East and U.S. policy in the region is frequently restricted
before it
begins. The combination of religious tradition and overt lobby activity
tends to
confine legitimate discussion within artificially narrow bounds.

Page 239 -- Conservative Christians Rally to the Cause

Fundamentalist and evangelical groups have been active in this campaign
to
narrow the bounds of free speech. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
proselytize
tirelessly for ever-increasing U.S. backing of Israel, citing
scriptural
passages as the basis for their arguments. As the membership of
conservative
Protestant churches and organizations has expanded over the last
decade, this
"Christian Zionist" approach to the Middle East has been espoused from
an
increasing variety of "pulpits": local churches, the broadcast media
and even
the halls of Congress.

Page 240 -- Jerry Falwell Embodies Christian-Zionist Connection

Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral majority, and a personal friend of
Menachem
Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, has been described by The Economist of London
as "the
silk-voiced ayatollah of Christian revivalism." Acclaimed in a
Conservative
Digest annual poll as the most-admired conservative outside of Congress
(with
President Reagan the runner-up). Falwell embodies the growing
Christian-Zionist
connection. He has declared: "I don't think America could turn its back
on the
people of Israel and survive. God deals with nations in relation to how
those
nations deal with the Jew." He has testified before Congressional
committees in
favor of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Falwell is
perhaps
the best known of the pro-Israel fundamentalist spokesmen, but he is by
no means
the only one.

Page 241 -- Televangelists Proclaim 'Sanctity of Israel'

Radio and television broadcasts by Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland,
Roberts,
Swaggart and others routinely proclaim the sanctity of Israel through
scriptural
quotations, usually from the Old Testament, and then reinforce it with
political
and strategic arguments supplied by the broadcaster.

Page 263 -- Catholic Nun Smeared by Jewish Publication

Sister Miriam Ward, a professor of humanities at Trinity College in
Vermont and
a Catholic nun, has a long record of humanitarian concern for
Palestinian
refugees. By her own description, her role in LaGrange II wasmodest. "I
had
doubts about whether i could justify the expense of going," she
recently
recalled. Sister Miriam moderated a panel discussion and received an
award for
her humanitarian endeavors. Like Mr. Wagner, she knew from experience
the price
of speaking out on Palestinian questions. Her activities had also
attracted hate
mail and personal innuendoes. Still, she was not prepared for the smear
which
resulted from her participation at LaGrange.

Sister Miriam was singled out for a personal attack in The Jewish
Week-American
Examiner, a prominent New York City Jewish publication. The June 21,
1981, issue
gave prominent coverage to a scheme to disrupt Israeli policy on the
occupied
West Bank which Sister Miriam had supposedly advanced at the
conference. The
article claimed that she had urged that "churches finance a project
with staff
in the U.S. and fieldworkers in Israel and the West Bank for the
purpose of
'spying on the Israelis.' " She was reported saying, "By the time the
Israelis
caught on to what was going on and expelled a fieldworker, they
[presumably
Sister Miriam and her co-conspirators] would have a replacement ready."
The
Jewish Week article added that "the proposal was accepted without
dissent, and
ways of obtaining church funds for it were discussed."

The report was a complete fabrication. No one at the LaGrange
Conference had
suggested such a plan, least of all Sister Miriam, and she was stunned
when
Wagner telephoned from Chicago informing her of the printed
allegations.

Page 265 -- American Jews Made to Feel Guilty

In its efforts to quell criticism of Israel, the pro-Israel community's
first
goal is to still Jewish critics. In this quest it receives strong
support from
the Israeli government. Every government of Israel gives high priority
to
maintaining unity among U.S. Jews. This unity is regarded as a main
line of
Israel's defense - second in importance only to the Israeli army - and
essential
to retaining the support Israel must have from the United States
government.

American Jews are made to feel guilty about enjoying safety and the
good life in
the United States while their fellow Jews in Israel hold the ramparts,
pay high
taxes, and fight wars.

Page 269 -- Noam Chomsky One of Few Able to Criticize Israel

In my 22 years in Congress, I can recall no entry in Congressional
Record
disclosing a speech critical of Israeli policy by a Jewish member of
the House
or Senate. Jewish members may voice discontent in private conversation
but never
on the public record. Only a few Jewish academicians, like Noam
Chomsky, a
distinguished linguist, have spoken out. Most, like Chomsky, are
protected in
their careers by tenure and thus are able to become controversial
without
jeopardizing their positions.

Page 284 -- 'One Word of Sympathy' Can Bring Jewish Hate Mail

Those who speak up pay a price, says Stone, noting that journalists
with long
records of championing Israeli causes are flooded with "Jewish hate
mail,
accusing them of anti-Semitism" if they dare express "one word of
sympathy for
Palestinian Arab refugees."

Page 287 -- Lobby Tentacles Reach Even to 'Main Street'

Efforts by the pro-Israel lobby to influence American opinion and
policy most
often focus on national institutions, particularly the federal
government. yet
the lobby in its various forms branches out widely into American life
beyond the
seat of government on the Potomac River. Local political leaders,
businesses,
organizations and private individuals in many fields experience unfair
criticism
and intimidation for becoming involved in the debate over Middle East
issues.
Many on "Main Street" have pad a price for speaking out. Particularly
distressing are instances of discrimination against Americans of Arab
ancestry.

Page 295, 296 -- Possible Accusation of Anti-Semitism Keeps Journalists
in Line

The Israeli lobby works diligently to keep journalists from rowing
against the
tide of pro-Israel orthodoxy. This mission is accomplished in part
through
carefully arranged, "spontaneous" public outcries designed to
intimidate.
Columnist Rowland Evans writes: "When we write what is perceived to be
an
anti-Israeli column, we get mail from all over the country with the
same points
and phrasing. there is a consistent pattern."

The ubiquitous cry of "anti-Semitism" is brought to bear on short
notice, and it
is this charge which has been most responsible for compelling
journalists to
give Israel better than equal treatment in coverage of Middle East
events.

Page 296 -- American Media 'Overwhelmed' by Lobby Pressure

Journalist Harold R. Piety observes that "the ugly cry of anti-Semitism
is the
bludgeon used by the Zionists to bully non-Jews into accepting the
Zionist view
of world events, or to keep silent." In late 1978, Piety, withholding
his
identity in order not to irritate his employer, wrote an article on
"Zionism and
the American Press" for Middle East International in which he decried
"the
inaccuracies , distortions and - perhaps worstâ*" inexcusable omission
of
significant news and background material by the American media in its
treatment
of the Arab-Israeli conflict."

Piety traces the deficiency of U.S. media in reporting on the Middle
East to
largely successful efforts by the pro-Israel lobby to "overwhelm the
American
media with a highly professional public relations campaign, to
intimidate the
media through various means and, finally, to impose censorship when the
media
are compliant and craven." He lists threats to editors and advertising
departments, orchestrated boycotts, sanders, campaigns of character
assassination, and personal vendettas among the weapons employed
against
balanced journalism.

Page 301 -- Radio Producer 'Terminated' For Trying to Balance Coverage

On a Saturday morning in 1977 producer Debbie Gage encountered peril of
a
different sort when she put on a one-hour program of interviews with
local
people of Palestinian origin on Minneapolis Public Radio. The station's
switchboard was promptly swamped with calls demanding equal time for
the Israeli
viewpoint. Gage demurred, responding that she had decided to do her
program
because of the heavy coverage being given to the Israeli view in the
local
press. She saw her broadcast as "simply a small attempt to redress that
imbalance."

The following Monday news director Gary Eichten informed Gage that her
job would
be terminated in three weeks and that a program devoted to pro-Israelt
views
would be aired the following Saturday. Eichten denied that he was
pressured into
doing the follow-up program, but, as station intern Yvonne Pearson
observes, "If
dozens of angry phone calls aren't pressure, I don't know what is."

Page 303 -- 'Army of Workers' Swamp Congressmen, Editors

Major national media have not escaped these pressures. Organized letter
campaigns are a favored tactic of pro-Israel groups. Lawrence Mosher, a
staff
correspondent for the National Journal, observes that such groups have
a
seemingly indefatigable army of workers who will generate hundreds or
thousands
of letters to Congressmen, to newspaper editors, etc., whenever the
occasion
seems to warrant it.

. . . Editors are sometimes weighed down by it in advance and inhibited
from
doing things they would normally do if they didn't know that an
onslaught of
letters, cables and telephone calls would follow if they write or show
such and
such.

Page 311, 312 -- Holocaust Museum Director Berenbaum (Former Lobbyist)
in the
Newsroom

Fairness in reporting Middle East events has been a special concern of
the
Washington Post over the last several years. Complaints from pro-Israel
groups
about its coverage of Lebanon - especially the nassacres at Sabra and
Shatila
â*" led to the unprecedented placement of a representative from a
pro-Israel
group as an observer in the Post newsroom.

The idea arose when Michael Berenbaum, executive director of the Jewish
Community Council of Greater Washington, council president Nathan
Lewin, and
Hyman Bookbinder, area representative of the American Jewish Committee,
met with
Post editors to inform them that the paper had "a Jewish problem." The
meeting
followed substantial correspondence between the Washington Post and
Jewish
community leaders. As an accommodation, executive editor Benjamin C.
Bradlee
agreed to have Berenbaum observe Post news operations for one week,
provided he
not lobby or "interfere with the editorial process in any way."

Page 313 -- Pressure to 'Stop the Ads'

Direct pressure to reject paid advertising unsympathetic to Israeli
interests
was applied beginning in late 1982 against major media in Maryland,
Pennsylvania
and the District of Columbia. The National Association of Arab
Americans (NAAA),
a Washington-based private membership organization, purchased radio air
time in
these areas for commercials questioning the U.S. government's decision
to
increase aid to Israel.

Typical of the messages was this one aired in Pennsylvania:

While there are more than 12 million Americans unemployed, with over
half a
million from Pennsylvania alone, Congress decided to give Israel two
billion,
485 million of your tax dollars. Senator Arlen Specter [D-PA] is on the
Senate
Appropriations Committee that wanted to give Israel even more. Is
funding for
Israel more important than funding for Pennsylvania? Call your senators
and ask
them if they voted to give your tax dollars to Israel."

Thirteen Pennsylvania stations contracted to carry the NAAA message,
but four of
these canceled the ads after only three days of an agreed-upon five-day
run.
Mike Kirtner, an ad salesman representing two stations in Allentown,
informed
the NAAA that its ads were being taken off the air because "they were
getting a
lot of calls, hate calls. and a lot of pressure was coming down on the
station
to stop the ads." Station management refused to comment on who was
pressuring
the station to take the ads off the air.

Mike George, salesman for an Erie station which canceled the ads, was
more
frank. He informed the NAAA that the station owner had been called by
"a group
of Jewish businessmen who told him that if he did not cancel the ads
immediately, they were going to cause his radio and television stations
to lose
hundreds of thousands of dollars."

--
Peter Myers

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers Mirror:
http://mailstar.net/index.html I

Alpha

Russian MPs Seek Ban on Jewish Groups (now you know why)

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/01/25/russian-mps-seek-ban-on-jewish-groups.php

Alpha · Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 5:34 pm Post subject: Russia's (Jewish) Robber Barons

Russia's (Jewish) Robber Barons

http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=4641

Neocons, Israeli Lobby Declare War on Putin

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/20/neo-cons-israeli-lobby-declare-war-on-putin.php

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

JINSA Neocon Ledeen Admits Ukraine Election Meddling