| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 1:06 am Post subject: Pending Draft Legislation Targeted for Spring 2005 |
| Commentary - Nov 15, 2004
- The Draft will Start in June 2005
by Strait Gate Ministries
Pending Draft Legislation Targeted for Spring 2005
There is pending legislation in the House and Senate (twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation so the draft can begin at early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004 presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention has been on the elections, so our action on this is needed immediately.
$28 million has been added to the 2004 Selective Service System (SSS) budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is ready for activation. Please see website: www.sss.gov/perfplan_fy2004.html to view the sss annual performance plan - fiscal year 2004.
The Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan [and a permanent state of war on "terrorism"] proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft.
Congress brought twin bills, S. 89 and HR 163 forward this year, http://www.hslda.org/legislation/na...s89/default.asp entitled the Universal National Service Act of 2003, "to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons [age 18 -26] in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills currently sit in the committee on armed services.
Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam era.
College and Canada will not be options. In December 2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements, among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.
Even those voters who currently support US actions abroad may still object to this move, knowing their own children or grandchildren will not have a say about whether to fight. Not that it should make a difference, but this plan, among other things, eliminates higher education as a shelter and includes women in the draft.
The public has a right to air their opinions about such an important decision.
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Forwarded:
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 1:32 PM
Subject: Fw: March 31: Selective Service ready to bring back the draft
> As expected!
>
>
> Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 8:27 PM
> Subject: March 31: Selective Service ready to bring back the draft
>
>
> > Stop the Draft before it starts:
> >
> > http://www.NoDraftNoWay.org
> >
> > On March 31, the Selective Service System will report to
> > President Bush that it is ready to implement a draft
> > within 75 days. We have to organize now to stop the draft
> > before it starts.
> >
> > Despite what politicians say, there is a high probability
> > that the Bush Administration will attempt to reinstate the
> > draft.
> >
> > The U.S. military is in a quagmire in Iraq, facing a
> > national popular uprising against the occupation. Soldiers
> > are dying every day. A report issued in January 2004 by
> > Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War
> > College, said the Army is "near the breaking point." The
> > Pentagon has been forced to issue repeated "stop loss"
> > orders and recall soldiers who
> > had retired or otherwise returned to civilian life.
> >
> > Out of 10 Army Divisions, part or all of 9 of them are
> > either deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Twenty-one out of
> > 33 regular combat brigades are on active duty in Iraq,
> > Afghanistan, South Korea, or the Balkans. That's 63% of
> > the Army's combat strength. This means the Army is
> > extremely overextended. The Bush Administration has been
> > trying to fill the gap with Reserve and National Guard
> > troops, but this is a temporary fix at best. The head of
> > the Army Reserves has recently written a memo saying that
> > the readiness of his forces has been drastically reduced
> > through over-deployment and is "degenerating into a broken
> > force."
> >
> > Meanwhile, official U.S. foreign policy is now the
> > doctrine of "pre-emptive war" and "regime change" wherever
> > a leader runs afoul of U.S. corporate interests. An
> > invasion of Iran, Syria, Korea, or Cuba -- all of whom are
> > on Washington and Wall Street's list of targets -- would
> > require tens or hundreds of thousands of new soldiers.
> >
> > Enlistment rates not even able to maintain current force
> > levels, much less provide troops for new invasions and
> > occupations. All four services missed their enlistment
> > quotas last year, and enlistments in the Reserves,
> > National Guard, and regular military are at a 30-year low.
> > Many current members of the armed forces plan to get out
> > as soon as their current enlistment ends. According to a
> > poll conducted by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes,
> > 49% of soldiers stationed in Iraq do not plan to
> > re-enlist.
> >
> > The President has given the Selective Service System a set
> > of readiness goals to be implemented by March 31, 2005. As
> > part of these performance goals, the System must be ready
> > to be fully operational within 75 days. This means we can
> > look for the Draft to be in operation as early as June 15,
> > 2005.
> >
> > March 19 is the second anniversary of the war. On the
> > weekend of March 19-20, activists all over the globe will
> > take to the streets to demand and end to the war and
> > occupation. No Draft No Way will be mobilizing to take
> > part in these demonstrations, which will take place just a
> > few days before the Selective Service System reports to
> > President Bush that it is ready to go. We must be in the
> > streets to let them know that we oppose the draft and will
> > not be used as cannon fodder in Iraq or in any new war.
> >
> >
> >
> > Let's Organize NOW to Stop the Draft:
> >
> > 1) Come to NYC for the March 19 Troops Out Now
> > demonstration. Join the No Draft No Way! contingent in
> > the march. http://www.troopsoutnow.org. Or join the
> > march and rally in Fayetteville, NC, outside Fort
> > Bragg--for more information, see
> > http://www.ncpeacejustice.org.
> >
> > 2) Organize an anti-draft meeting at your school, church
> > or mosque, union hall, etc. Contact us at 212-633-6646 for
> > help and speakers.
> >
> > 3) Organize protests outside the selective service office
> > in your area.
> >
> > 4) Donate to help build a network of educators, activists,
> > and resisters to fight the draft--before it returns.
> > http://nodraftnoway.org/donate-new.shtml
> >
> > 5) Sign the No Draft Petition.
> > http://nodraftnoway.org/petition.shtml
> >
> >
> > http://www.NoDraftNoWay.org
> >
> >
> > March 19
> > Troops Out Now!
> > March on Central Park in NYC!
> > Regional Demonstrations Across the U.S. & Worldwide
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The Return of the Draft
By Tim Dickinson
Rolling Stone
Thursday 27 January 2005
With the army desperate for recruits, should college students be packing their bags for Canada?
Uncle Sam wants you. He needs you. He'll bribe you to sign up. He'll strong-arm you to re-enlist. And if that's not enough, he's got a plan to draft you.
In the three decades since the Vietnam War, the "all-volunteer Army" has become a bedrock principle of the American military. "It's a magnificent force," Vice President Dick Cheney declared during the election campaign last fall, "because those serving are ones who signed up to serve." But with the Army and Marines perilously overextended by the war in Iraq, that volunteer foundation is starting to crack. The "weekend warriors" of the Army Reserve and the National Guard now make up almost half the fighting force on the front lines, and young officers in the Reserve are retiring in droves. The Pentagon, which can barely attract enough recruits to maintain current troop levels, has involuntarily extended the enlistments of as many as 100,000 soldiers. Desperate for troops, the Army has lowered its standards to let in twenty-five percent more high school dropouts, and the Marines are now offering as much as $30,000 to anyone who re-enlists. To understand the scope of the crisis, consider this: The United States is pouring nearly as much money into incentives for new recruits - almost $300 million - as it is into international tsunami relief.
"The Army's maxed out here," says retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who served as Air Force chief of staff under the first President Bush. "The Defense Department and the president seem to be still operating off the rosy scenario that this will be over soon, that this pain is temporary and therefore we'll just grit our teeth, hunker down and get out on the other side of this. That's a bad assumption." The Bush administration has sworn up and down that it will never reinstate a draft. During the campaign last year, the president dismissed the idea as nothing more than "rumors on the Internets" and declared, "We're not going to have a draft - period." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in an Op-Ed blaming "conspiracy mongers" for "attempting to scare and mislead young Americans," insisted that "the idea of reinstating the draft has never been debated, endorsed, discussed, theorized, pondered or even whispered by anyone in the Bush administration."
That assertion is demonstrably false. According to an internal Selective Service memo made public under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency's acting director met with two of Rumsfeld's undersecretaries in February 2003 precisely to debate, discuss and ponder a return to the draft. The memo duly notes the administration's aversion to a draft but adds, "Defense manpower officials concede there are critical shortages of military personnel with certain special skills, such as medical personnel, linguists, computer network engineers, etc." The potentially prohibitive cost of "attracting and retaining such personnel for military service," the memo adds, has led "some officials to conclude that, while a conventional draft may never be needed, a draft of men and women possessing these critical skills may be warranted in a future crisis." This new draft, it suggests, could be invoked to meet the needs of both the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.
The memo then proposes, in detail, that the Selective Service be "re-engineered" to cover all Americans - "men and (for the first time) women" - ages eighteen to thirty-four. In addition to name, date of birth and Social Security number, young adults would have to provide the agency with details of their specialized skills on an ongoing basis until they passed out of draft jeopardy at age thirty-five. Testifying before Congress two weeks after the meeting, acting director of Selective Service Lewis Brodsky acknowledged that "consultations with senior Defense manpower officials" have spurred the agency to shift its preparations away from a full-scale, Vietnam-style draft of untrained men "to a draft of smaller numbers of critical-skills personnel."
Richard Flahavan, spokesman for Selective Service, tells Rolling Stone that preparing for a skills-based draft is "in fact what we have been doing." For starters, the agency has updated a plan to draft nurses and doctors. But that's not all. "Our thinking was that if we could run a health-care draft in the future," Flahavan says, "then with some very slight tinkering we could change that skill to plumbers or linguists or electrical engineers or whatever the military was short." In other words, if Uncle Sam decides he needs people with your skills, Selective Service has the means to draft you - and quick.
But experts on military manpower say the focus on drafting personnel with special skills misses the larger point. The Army needs more soldiers, not just more doctors and linguists. "What you've got now is a real shortage of grunts - guys who can actually carry bayonets," says McPeak. A wholesale draft may be necessary, he adds, "to deal with the situation we've got ourselves into. We've got to have a bigger Army."
Michael O'Hanlon, a military-manpower scholar at the Brookings Institute, believes a return to a full-blown draft will become "unavoidable" if the United States is forced into another war. "Let's say North Korea strikes a deal with Al Qaeda to sell them a nuclear weapon or something," he says. "I frankly don't see how you could fight two wars at the same time with the all-volunteer approach." If a second Korean War should break out, the United States has reportedly committed to deploying a force of nearly 700,000 to defend South Korea - almost half of America's entire military.
The politics of the draft are radioactive: Polls show that less than twenty percent of Americans favor forced military service. But conscription has some unlikely champions, including veterans and critics of the administration who are opposed to Bush's war in Iraq. Reinstating the draft, they say, would force every level of society to participate in military service, rather than placing a disproportionate burden on minorities and the working class. African-Americans, who make up roughly thirteen percent of the civilian population, account for twenty-two percent of the armed forces. And the Defense Department acknowledges that recruits are drawn "primarily from families in the middle and lower-middle socioeconomic strata."
A societywide draft would also make it more difficult for politicians to commit troops to battle without popular approval. "The folks making the decisions are committing other people's lives to a war effort that they're not making any sacrifices for," says Charles Sheehan-Miles, who fought in the first Gulf War and now serves as director of Veterans for Common Sense. Under the current all-volunteer system, fewer than a dozen members of Congress have children in the military.
Charlie Moskos, a professor of military sociology at Northwestern University, says the volunteer system also limits the political fallout of unpopular wars. "Without a draft, there's really no antiwar movement," Moskos says. Nearly sixty percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, he notes, but they have no immediate self-interest in taking to the streets because "we're willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn't reflect very well on the character of our society."
Even military recruiters agree that the only way to persuade average Americans to make long-term sacrifices in war is for the children of the elite to put their lives on the line. In a recent meeting with military recruiters, Moskos discussed the crisis in enlistment. "I asked them would they prefer to have their advertising budget tripled or have Jenna Bush join the Army," he says. "They unanimously chose the Jenna option."
One of the few politicians willing to openly advocate a return to the draft is Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, who argues that the current system places an immoral burden on America's underprivileged. "It shouldn't be just the poor and the working poor who find their way into harm's way," he says. In the days leading up to the Iraq war, Rangel introduced a bill to reinstate the draft - with absolutely no deferments. "If the kids and grandkids of the president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to Iraq, we never would have gone - no question in my mind," he says. "The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we'll be out of Iraq."
But instead of exploring how to share the burden more fairly, the military is cooking up new ways to take advantage of the economically disadvantaged. Rangel says military recruiters have confided in him that they're targeting inner cities and rural areas with high unemployment. In December, the National Guard nearly doubled its enlistment bonus to $10,000, and the Army is trying to attract urban youth with a marketing campaign called "Taking It to the Streets," which features a pimped-out yellow Hummer and a basketball exhibition replete with free throwback jerseys. President Bush has also signed an executive order allowing legal immigrants to apply for citizenship immediately - rather than wait five years - if they volunteer for active duty.
"It's so completely unethical and immoral to induce people that have limited education and limited job ability to have to put themselves in harm's way for ten, twenty or thirty thousand dollars," Rangel says. "Just how broke do you have to be to take advantage of these incentives?" Seducing soldiers with cold cash also unnerves military commanders. "We must consider the point at which we confuse 'volunteer to become an American soldier' with 'mercenary,' " Lt. Gen. James Helmly, the commander of the Army Reserve, wrote in a memo to senior Army leadership in December.
The Reserve, Helmly warns, "is rapidly degenerating into a broken force." The Army National Guard is also in trouble: It missed its recruitment goals of 56,000 by more than 5,000 in fiscal year 2004 and is already 2,000 soldiers short in fiscal 2005. To keep enough boots on the ground, the Pentagon has stopped asking volunteer soldiers to extend their service - and started demanding it. Using a little-known provision called "stop loss," the military is forcing reservists and guardsmen to remain on active duty indefinitely. "This is an 'all-volunteer Army' with footnotes," says McPeak. "And it's the footnotes that are being held in Iraq against their wishes. If that's not a back-door draft, tell me what is."
David Qualls, who joined the Arkansas National Guard for a year, is one of 40,000 troops in Iraq who have been informed that their enlistment has been extended until December 24th, 2031. "I've served five months past my one-year obligation," says Qualls, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the military with breach of contract. "It's time to let me go back to my life. It's a question of fairness, and not only for myself. This is for the thousands of other people that are involuntarily extended in Iraq. Let us go home."
The Army insists that most "stop-lossed" soldiers will be held on the front lines for no longer than eighteen months. But Jules Lobel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing eight National Guardsmen in a lawsuit challenging the extensions, says the 2031 date is being used to strong-arm volunteers into re-enlisting. According to Lobel, the military is telling soldiers, "We're giving you a chance to voluntarily re-enlist - and if you don't do it, we'll screw you. And the first way we'll screw you is to put you in until 2031."
But threatening volunteers, military experts warn, could be the quickest way to ensure a return to the draft. According to O'Hanlon at the Brookings Institute, such "callousness" may make it impossible to recruit new soldiers - no matter how much money you throw at them. And if bigger sign-up bonuses and more aggressive recruitment tactics don't do the trick, says Helmly of the Army Reserve, it could "force the nation into an argument" about reinstating the draft.
In the end, it may simply come down to a matter of math. In January, Bush told America's soldiers that "much more will be asked of you" in his second term, even as he openly threatened Iran with military action. Another war, critics warn, would push the all-volunteer force to its breaking point. "This damn thing is just an explosion that's about to happen," says Rangel. Bush officials "can say all they want that they don't want the draft, but there's not going to be that many more buttons to push."
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More Cannon Fodder, Please, by Jim Lobe
POLITICS-U.S.:
More Cannon Fodder, Please
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 1 (IPS) - Amid rising concern about the over-extension of U.S. military forces and the growing budget deficit, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative group whose past foreign policy recommendations have often been followed by President George W. Bush, is urging Congress to add 25,000 new soldiers to U.S. ground forces each year over the next several years.
The appeal, which comes on the eve of Bush's State of the Union address, is certain to fuel the growing debate over whether Washington can afford the interventionist vision long espoused by PNAC and its highly influential founders -- that of a global ”Pax Americana” in which the U.S. military acts as the effective guarantor of international peace and security.
”The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume,” said the open letter addressed to the Congressional leadership and signed by 34 defence and foreign policy analysts, mostly prominent neo-conservatives but also a smattering of retired generals and, significantly, several national defence alumni of Bill Clinton's administration.
It was published as the lead editorial in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, which is edited by William Kristol, PNAC's chairman and founder.
”(O)ur national security, global peace and stability, and the defence and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today,” the letter went on, adding, ”The [Bush] administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.”
PNAC itself consists of a handful of people besides Kristol and PNAC's director, Gary Schmitt. Since its creation in 1997, it has acted primarily as a platform from which prominent neo-conservatives could issue policy recommendations and invite influential analysts from other ideological currents to sign on.
Thus, its founding charter, which called for a ”Reaganite policy of military strength and moral quality,” was signed mostly by neo-conservatives, such as former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz; Vice President Dick Cheney's current chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; the current Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz; and the current director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, Elliott Abrams.
But several individuals more closely associated with an aggressive-nationalist position, notably the current Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney, and magazine magnate, Steve Forbes, also signed, as did Gary Bauer, a leader of the U.S. Christian Right.
The signers' make-up thus presaged the three-headed coalition of hawks -- neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists and the Christian Right -- that gained control of the Bush administration's foreign policy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
>From 1997 until Bush's election, PNAC issued a number of policy statements signed by the same or a similar cast of characters, as well as several longer reports and a book, ”Present Dangers”, that prescribed many of the policy initiatives the incoming Bush administration has since adopted.
PNAC first urged Washington to work for ”regime change” in Iraq in 1998, but, within nine days of the 9/11 attacks, the group called for a similar policy to be applied as well to the Palestinian National Authority, Syria, and Iran, if they failed to cooperate fully with the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
While strongly supportive of Bush, PNAC first began expressing some disappointment with the administration almost exactly two years ago for its failure to increase the proposed military budget from 3.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to something closer to 4 percent of GDP, which, it noted was still below the 4.8 percent Washington was spending in 1993, at the end of the Cold War.
Two months later, as U.S. forces launched their invasion, PNAC issued another letter expressing concern that the administration was unprepared to provide the stabilisation and reconstruction process in Iraq with enough military and economic resources.
That letter, which was widely construed as an attack on Rumsfeld, was signed mostly by neo-conservatives but also included for the first time since Bush had become president a number of former senior Clinton officials, such as his deputy national security adviser, James Steinberg; a former senior Pentagon official, Walter Slocombe, and several others.
PNAC has since indicated reservations about the administration's coziness with Russia and China -- two areas where the administration has generally spurned the hawkish advice of the neo-conservatives -- but the latest letter indicates a higher level of frustration.
It is the first addressed to Congress and thus appears as a more direct challenge to the administration's reluctance to increase the defence budget. Like the 2003 letter, the new one also includes the signatures of ”liberal hawks” -- mostly the same former Clinton officials who signed the 2003 letter -- as well as neo-conservatives.
The principal target appears to be Rumsfeld, who has strongly resisted suggestions that U.S. ground forces -- which currently include almost 500,000 active-duty Army troops, more than 175,000 Marines, and a roughly equal number of reservists -- are inadequate to the tasks they face.
Rumsfeld has argued that increasing the size of U.S. ground forces will delay the military's ”transformation” into a lighter, more lethal, and more hi-tech force capable of deploying overwhelming military power to any strategic hotspot within hours. Additional and unanticipated expenses for equipping, training, and maintaining an expanded ground force will take money away from the development and deployment of new technologies.
The only way to do both is to increase the defence budget, since the price-tag for just two new divisions, totaling 34,000 soldiers, is an estimated 20 billion dollars.
But with the budget bleeding red ink as far as the eye can see, Bush would have to find new sources of revenue -- either by cutting social programmes that have already been slashed, rolling back tax cuts, or imposing new taxes.
None of these alternatives is attractive, especially to many Republican lawmakers for whom the mushrooming deficit is seen increasingly as the Achilles heel of their party's current political dominance.
”We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops,” the letter reassures its readers. ”But the defence of the United States is the first priority of the government.” (END/2005)
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=27282
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:44 pm; edited 3 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 1:22 am Post subject: Parents, Bar the Door To Military Recruiters |
| http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese167.html
Parents, Bar the Door To Military Recruiters, by Charley Reese.
Say 'No' to Recruiters
by Charley Reese
February 21, 2005
Suppose a traveling salesman came to your door. He said he was representing a foreign country that had a bad government. He would like for your son to volunteer to overthrow that government and possibly get killed in the process.
What would you do? I'd slam the door in his face. There is no way I would allow my son or daughter to sacrifice his or her life for the benefit of some foreigners I don't even know.
You should keep that in mind if some military recruiter latches on to your son or daughter. Under the present circumstances, it's practically a certainty that the young men and women in the armed forces will not be used to defend the United States or Americans. They will be used as mercenaries to advance the interests of other countries and multinational corporations, but unlike the mercenaries in civilian clothes, they will be paid a pittance.
The politicians in Washington have turned patriotism into a racket. The last time we went to war in defense of our own freedom was in 1941. Since then, we've died for Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans and big corporate interests. The American people ought to say "Enough." One way to do that is to just say "no" to military recruiters. If some multinational corporation wants to exploit the resources of a foreign country, let it hire its own mercenaries. If Israel is afraid of Syria or Iran, let it declare war on that country. If the two Koreas want to contest who will control the Korean peninsula, let them have at it with their own soldiers, not ours.
I'm glad the American people are supporting the troops, rather than spitting on them and calling them names as they did during the Vietnam War. But Americans ought to make a distinction between supporting the soldiers and supporting the politicians and the policies that put the soldiers in harm's way for an unconstitutional purpose.
Despite the political baloney out of Washington about our troops being "the best-trained, the best-equipped in the world," these young people were sent into Iraq with insufficient body armor and with thin-skinned vehicles that made killing and maiming them a snap. Americans ought to be outraged that with all the billions of dollars spent on defense, soldiers had to scrounge in dumps, and parents and loved ones had to raise money to buy them personal equipment. They ought to be outraged that their sons and daughters are paid $1,200 a month to provide security while private mercenaries in Iraq are knocking down $100,000 a year.
Americans also ought to be outraged by politicians complaining that our Army is "stretched thin" by having 150,000 troops in Iraq. There are 1.3 million men and women in the U.S. armed forces. We ought to be asking why the National Guard and Reserve are being used when there are 69,000 active-duty people in Germany, 40,000 in Japan, 36,000 in Korea and thousands more scattered around the world. The wars with Germany, Japan and Korea have been over for a long time. The Cold War has been over for more than a decade.
In case you haven't guessed it already, the war on terrorism is as phony as the war on drugs. It's just an excuse for a perpetual expansion of government power and perpetual expenditures. The United States was attacked by one – I say again, one – organization: al-Qaeda, which has at most a few thousand adherents. We have enough special-operations people to wipe al-Qaeda off the map if the president were serious instead of using terrorism as an excuse to expand the empire.
Unfortunately, Americans are so incessantly bombarded with propaganda and lies, it's hard for many of them to see the elephant at the tea party. War is a racket. The common folks die and get maimed, and the big corporations and the politicians prosper. Don't let the liars in Washington abuse your children and their patriotism.
Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969–71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column which is carried on LewRockwell.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner. Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese167.html
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How to Protect Your Child from the Coming Draft, by How to Protect Your Child from the Coming Draft
by Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
"Fighting should be reserved for genuine self-defense in the face of imminent attack, when no other help is available. Preemptive strikes and aggression disguised as self-defense won't pass muster under the Golden Rule."
- Jesus on Parenting: 10 Essential Principles That Will Transform Your Family
Draft? What draft?
Yes, there's a draft going on right now. At the time of this writing it preys only on current members of the military: it's called the "stop-loss" order, which unilaterally breaks the original agreement – and the trust – between soldiers and the government.
The stop-loss draft is just the first step. As soon as Mr. Bush gets America's young people fighting two or more wars at once (you may have noticed that Iran is next), there simply won't be enough volunteer soldiers to go around. The draft is coming.
Parents need to think ahead to protect their children from the armchair warriors in Washington, because avoiding the draft is a lot easier than avoiding combat after entering the military, whether by choice or by force. Consider Sgt. Kevin Benderman, who's already served in Bush's War of Terror and was so shaken by what he witnessed that he's risking seven years in prison to refuse orders to return to Iraq.
Soldiers who seek CO can't or won't adopt the common coping skill of callous indifference to human suffering. But they're punished for having a conscience: military lawyers often use this spurious argument to cast doubt on the soldier's sincerity: If you didn't already oppose war when you joined, then you can't possibly oppose it now.
This is like saying that a toddler who touches the stove and gets burned can't possibly change his mind and avoid touching stoves in the future. Human beings do learn – and change their minds and their hearts – from experience: That's what makes us intelligent and moral beings.
When spiritually wounded soldiers apply for conscientious objector (CO) status on moral or religious grounds, military chaplains are often no help; in fact, they can make matters worse with their contemptuous words and attitudes. After all, they're not paid to help our troops avoid committing atrocities or suffering debilitating nightmares and guilt.
Teach Your Child About the Immorality of Killing and War
As a parent surrounded with constant messages on TV, billboards, radio, and newspapers that the military is the best or only way for your child to be a "hero," it can be difficult to go against the popular grain by teaching that these messages are recruiting tools, not reality. To raise a moral, nonviolent child – and doesn't the world need more of these? – you must sacrifice the comfort of "fitting in" with today's violent American culture.
The first thing you need to do, if you haven't already, is talk with your child about the disconnect between what our society teaches through the schools – that physical conflict, bullying, and other forms of violence are wrong and counterproductive – and what our government and its media teach about the "glory," "heroism," and "nobility" of war.
You may wonder how to start – after all, you may not be one for talking about politics or war with anyone, let alone your child. Yet if you think about it, you've always taught your child about matters of right versus wrong, safety versus violence. From the day they begin to play with other children, you've taught your child how to handle conflict.
Do you encourage your child to hit others when he or she is angry? Do you advise your teenager to buy a gun and blow away classmates who bully or tease? Do you teach your child that might makes right, that it's okay to kill a few kids in order to "liberate" their siblings from tyrannical parents?
Over the years, you've instilled moral values that reflect your love, concern, and wisdom as a parent – values that the U.S. government, its military, and its media spokesmen have no business tinkering with or reversing.
So even if you haven't talked with your child about war and violence, begin today. Find popular books and movies that teach positive lessons about nonviolence; encourage him or her to consider the superior morality and intelligence required in the story for the main character to avoid using violence, even when provoked.
If you could only see what I've seen at Veterans Administration hospitals, you'd be fearful not only of what could happen to your child's body in war, but of what could happen to the mind and soul. PTSD is the diagnosis (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) assigned to veterans whose thoughts and emotions continue to be affected by traumatic memories of combat, but grief is the fate of parents who can never take away the night terrors, sweats, temper outbursts, or underachievement that linger on for years and years.
Once your child is wounded mentally through exposure to combat, he or she may require a long period, or even a lifetime, of psychological help and medications. A common pattern – and a misleading one – is joy and the appearance of normalcy when returning home from combat zones, followed by the gradual awakening of disturbing memories and a feeling of "unreality." That's when the trouble starts.
Document, Document, Document: Start a CO File for Your Child
This month's issue of Mothering (Jan.-Feb. 2005) gives you the information you need to protect your child from the coming draft. Unlike other parenting magazines, Mothering is solidly on the side of parents (notwithstanding its title, it's great for caring fathers, too), rather than big business advertisers.
If you can possibly get your hands on this issue (buy it or read it at the library), you'll find detailed instructions for helping your child establish conscientious objector (CO) status. "Help Your Peace-Loving Child Avoid the Draft" is the title of the article by Helen James; it lists the activities and materials you'll need to help your child legally avoid being forced into the combat.
Whatever your child's age, taking these steps now could also help protect him or her from the terror of being harassed and prosecuted by the military the way Sgt. Benderman has been since he applied for CO status so that he wouldn't have to be involved in U.S. aggression resulting in dead civilians, burned children, and the like.
The article notes that as a parent, you can help lay the foundation for future CO status, if and when your child is drafted (or forced back into combat in today's stop-loss draft) by documenting your child's opposition to war – all war.
As Ms. James points out, becoming a conscientious objector doesn't require that your child be a strict pacifist, nor does it require a belief in God: "If the draft is reinstated, under existing regulations a young conscript wanting to claim CO status will need to prove that he has a 'sincere' objection to all wars.… His belief … must be religious, moral, or ethical, not political or pragmatic."
What to document? There's not enough space here to cover all the pointers in the article, but in a nutshell, it suggests that you gather everything, in writing, that supports your child's opposition to war. Recently, recruiters started calling my daughter at home, having gotten her name and number from school (where kids used to be safe) through Bush's sneaky No Child Left Behind trick: She let them know that she was against war and that military recruiters were not to call her again. We'll document her response to that call.
Antiwar efforts by adult family members should also documented. For instance, I keep copies of my letters to the editor describing my religious and moral values that prohibit the killing of innocent people through this war, even the War of Terror that's advertised as "preventing terrorism," "finding WMD," "instilling liberty," or "spreading democracy." I will also keep a copy of the antiwar article you're reading right now.
From antiviolence pictures your child has drawn to antiwar protests he or she has attended, a variety of documents can go into your child's CO file. Ms. James gives an example involving her own son:
"One summer, when I picked Adam up from camp, his counselor reported that he'd happily hiked and participated in all the activities but wouldn't join in the break-time war games. Wondering why children were even doing that in the first place, I asked her to put what she'd just told me in writing, for his CO file. She wrote, 'Adam let the other children know that he was against war games and informed them that death was a very real consequence of war. I found him to be very strong in his attitude to promote nonviolence.'"
No matter how profusely politicians praise "our troops," the ugly fact remains that after the funeral with the military salute, your child will be quickly forgotten. The children of pro-war pundits and politicians, on the other hand, will stay safely at home, calling Mom and Dad, coming over for Christmas dinner, getting married, and having babies.
It isn't fair, and you shouldn't stand for it. My youngest child is 17, and my oldest daughter and her husband are 29 and 30, respectively, with a baby boy on the way. These individuals were not raised to kill, torture, or maim other human beings. And I wouldn't trade my living, breathing, beautiful kids for all the praise and popularity in the world. I don't want a graveside military salute, three-cornered flag, or computer-signed condolence card from Donald Rumsfeld, in exchange for the ones I love – they're not for sale.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/whitehurst.php?articleid=4789
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:39 pm; edited 2 times in total | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 1:49 am Post subject: Military Health Care an Ordeal for Injured Marine |
| This is what fighting a war for Israel ( http://www.nowarforisrael.com and http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html ) in Iraq gets a US soldier/marine in return:
Touching story of a dedicated Marine who has been thrown to the scrapheap.
Military Health Care an Ordeal for Injured Marine
Rehabilitation Is Interrupted Amid Conflicts Over the Extent of His Recovery and the Role of Military Hospitals vs. VA
By Amy Argetsinger
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 20, 2005; Page A03
PHOENIX -- When Marine Lance Cpl. Chris Shotwell developed dysentery in Iraq, the physicians attached to his unit were on the case immediately, giving him an IV for dehydration and ordering him to bed rest. Same thing when his elbow became infected from a desert bug bite. They fixed him up with antibiotics in no time.
So, months later, when he awoke in a hospital, stitches in his head and tubes in his arm, with no recollection of his Grand Am flipping end to end on the highway that led back to his California base, he expected the same level of attention. I'm a Marine, he remembers thinking. I'm going to get taken care of.
But when doctors declared he would need rehabilitation, Shotwell received a surprising response from base officials: Go get it at a veterans' hospital.
His days as a Marine, it turned out, were numbered, owing to memory problems and other brain damage from the accident that had left him unfit for duty. But the VA couldn't take him until he was officially out of the Marines. And that discharge wouldn't become official until more than nine months after his accident -- a period doctors say is most crucial for the long-term recovery of patients with brain trauma.
Exactly what happened in Shotwell's case is in dispute. Navy medical officials say their tests indicated the Marine did not need further rehabilitation, though reports from both his civilian therapists and a military neuropsychologist recommended it.
Federal officials and veterans' advocates say that the case may represent a bureaucratic glitch but one that is nonetheless worrisome in a system that will soon have to help move thousands of badly wounded veterans into civilian life.
"There's no excuse to let anyone fall through the cracks," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group. "There are protocols for taking care of people when they are injured. Whether it's systemic or an individual [error], the effect on this Marine is devastating and there's no excuse for it."
The transition from military to civilian life is receiving renewed attention from lawmakers and the Pentagon now that more than 10,000 troops have been wounded or injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them badly enough to end their careers in uniform.
A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that some wounded veterans may be missing out on vocational rehabilitation and job training programs offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The report called for closer working relationships between the major military hospitals where wounded troops receive their first stateside care and the VA centers that treat them after their discharge.
The report, though, pointed to a roadblock to closer collaboration between the agencies: If the VA reaches out to injured service members whose discharge decisions are still up in the air, those efforts could clash with the Pentagon's attempts to boost retention.
Congressional aides and others said they have heard stories about service members seeing some disruption in their health care as they move from the Pentagon's roster to the VA's. Still, they said Shotwell's case stands apart. "No service member should have to wait for care," said Peter Gaytan, director of the veterans affairs and rehabilitation division of the American Legion.
Shotwell, 23, an Ohio native, joined the Marines in 2002 after flailing through two years of college. "Life-wise, best decision I ever made," he said. In February 2003, his unit shipped to the Middle East and became one of the first to move into Iraq. After spending most of their time in Najaf, they returned home in October of that year.
He had been back in the United States for six months, awaiting another deployment to Iraq, when the April 4 accident occurred. He and a fellow Marine were returning to their base, at Twentynine Palms, Calif., from a weekend trip to Phoenix to see Shotwell's new girlfriend. Shotwell was asleep in the passenger seat of his own car while his friend drove. Near the California state line, his friend tried to pass a semi and struck the median instead.
Shotwell was comatose when he was airlifted to a Phoenix hospital. According to medical records provided by his family, tests showed bleeding and other trauma in his brain; later exams suggested a possible spinal cord injury. Shotwell's friend suffered minor injuries.
Shotwell emerged from his coma within a day but spent the next week in a fog. And though the initial signs were encouraging, his family and friends soon realized that things weren't quite right.
"We'd tell him the story of what had happened" in the accident, said his then-girlfriend Stacy Horvath, whom he married seven months later. "By the time we'd get to the end of the story, he wouldn't remember the beginning." Shotwell himself noticed as soon as he tried to move around that he had trouble with tasks requiring fine motor skills, such as lighting a cigarette or buttoning his cuffs. His left side was wobbly, his right side plagued by a pins-and-needles sensation. Tests soon showed he had lost big patches of his peripheral vision.
Shotwell spent nearly three months in outpatient rehab, showing some slow improvement, according to his family and medical records. In late July, Shotwell was ordered to report back to base and told he could continue his treatment at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. His rehab team in Phoenix recommended that he continue with physical, occupational and speech therapy, and undergo testing to determine what kind of neuropsychological therapy he needed for his memory and cognitive problems.
After Shotwell had spent a few weeks at the San Diego hospital, his mother, Teresa Haddix, became concerned that he had not received rehabilitation; most of the tests he underwent there, she said, seemed only gauged to determine his fitness for duty.
In mid-September, Navy specialists completed a report recommending that Shotwell be discharged based on his memory, motor skills and sensory problems -- a decision validated two months later by a military panel in Washington that reviewed his records. Haddix, who had claimed power of attorney over her son, tried to get him transferred to a suitable military hospital for rehabilitation.
She said a Twentynine Palms medical official turned them down flatly, directing them to the VA instead. Four more months would pass, however, before Shotwell's military discharge would come through, on Jan. 31. "Once they got that letter showing he would not be able to carry a gun, they were done with him," Haddix said.
Navy medical officials at Twentynine Palms and San Diego, however, dispute the family's account. They noted that Shotwell had made substantial progress in civilian care before he was sent to San Diego. There, they said, he was seen by a dozen specialists who determined he did not need any more therapy at the time.
"He has received the best treatment that one could reasonably expect given the injuries he sustained in this motor vehicle accident," said Capt. Robert J. Engelhart, commanding officer of the Twentynine Palms naval hospital. Officials also noted that by getting permission to move to Phoenix while awaiting his discharge, Shotwell removed himself from the continuing medical services he could have received on base.
The report from the Navy neuropsychologist who deemed him unfit for duty stated that Shotwell "would likely benefit from further follow-up and rehabilitation services," according to the records provided by his family. The report also recommended counseling.
But Capt. Lisa L. Arnold, head of patient relations at the San Diego hospital, said those statements were intended solely as "a foot in the door" to guarantee that Shotwell's disabilities be closely considered when his discharge is reviewed by future medical panels, which could recall him to service if they determine he has sufficiently recovered from the accident.
Now that he has entered the VA system, Shotwell said he has been referred to vocational and physical rehab; he is still awaiting an appointment to determine whether he needs more rehabilitation for his memory problems, which his family believes have worsened since he left therapy. Meanwhile, he remains concerned about his career options after leaving the Marines. His lingering cognitive difficulties could make office work or school impossible, while his coordination problems could rule out manual labor. He's still hoping that rehab, however late, will improve his prospects.
"I don't want to live off the government all my life," he said. "The Marine Corps may have given up on me, but I haven't given up on the Marine Corps." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 2:32 am Post subject: Army Having Difficulty Meeting Goals In Recruiting |
| Just saw the following at http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
washingtonpost.com
Army Having Difficulty Meeting Goals In Recruiting
Fewer Enlistees Are in Pipeline; Many Being Rushed Into Service
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A01
The active-duty Army is in danger of failing to meet its recruiting goals, and is beginning to suffer from manpower strains like those that have dropped the National Guard and Reserves below full strength, according to Army figures and interviews with senior officers .
For the first time since 2001, the Army began the fiscal year in October with only 18.4 percent of the year's target of 80,000 active-duty recruits already in the pipeline. That amounts to less than half of last year's figure and falls well below the Army's goal of 25 percent.
Meanwhile, the Army is rushing incoming recruits into training as quickly as it can. Compared with last year, it has cut by 50 percent the average number of days between the time a recruit signs up and enters boot camp. It is adding more than 800 active-duty recruiters to the 5,201 who were on the job last year, as attracting each enlistee requires more effort and monetary incentives.
Driving the manpower crunch is the Army's goal of boosting the number of combat brigades needed to rotate into Iraq and handle other global contingencies. Yet Army officials see worrisome signs that young American men and women -- and their parents -- are growing wary of military service, largely because of the Iraq conflict.
"Very frankly, in a couple of places our recruiting pool is getting soft," said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief. "We're hearing things like, 'Well, let's wait and see how this thing settles out in Iraq,' " he said in an interview. "For the active duty for '05 it's going to be tough to meet our goal, but I think we can. I think the telling year for us is going to be '06."
Other senior military officers have voiced similar concerns in recent days. "I anticipate that fiscal year '05 will be very challenging for both active and reserve component recruiting," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a House Appropriations subcommittee Feb. 17. The Marine Corps fell short of its monthly recruiting quota in January for the first time in nearly a decade.
Because the Army is the main U.S. military ground force, its ability to draw recruits is critical to the nation's preparedness to fight current and future wars. The Army can sustain its ranks through retaining more experienced soldiers -- and indeed retention in 2004 was 107 percent -- but if too few young recruits sign up, the force will begin to age. Moreover, higher retention in the active-duty Army translates into a dwindling stream of recruits for the already troubled Army Guard and Reserve.
Army officials say the challenge is not yet a crisis. As of Jan. 31, the Army tallied 22,246 active-duty recruits for fiscal 2005, exceeding the year-to-date mission by more than 100.
Still, the recruiting difficulties reflect unprecedented demands on today's soldiers that are unlikely to let up soon. Never before has the all-volunteer Army deployed to war zones in such large numbers for multiple, yearlong tours. It is doing so with a total force cut by 300,000 troops -- from 28 active-duty and reserve divisions to 18 -- since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The Army is now working to add 30,000 soldiers by 2009, expanding the active-duty force from 482,000 to 512,000, as it builds 10 to 15 new combat brigades to add to divisions for overseas tours. But cultivating so many fresh recruits without lowering standards is a serious challenge, senior Army leaders say. "If you cut down 300,000 trees, you can do that pretty quick, but now grow 30,000 of them back," Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, told a House Armed Services committee hearing Feb. 9. "It takes time, as you know, to grow the quality soldier."
Time, however, is what the Army lacks.
Beyond replacing normal turnover each year, officials say the Army must accelerate recruitment to meet an aggressive timeline for filling out the new brigades of 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers each, as well as to expand and reorganize the 33 existing brigades.
Newly trained troops are essentially being rationed out -- a process Army officers call "turning on the faucet" -- a few months before the brigades are to deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. The military plans to keep about 120,000 troops in Iraq through 2006.
"The priority fill goes to deploying units to make sure they are at full strength before they go overseas," says Col. Joseph Anderson, who until this month served as chief of staff of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky.
Such demands have led the Army to deplete its reservoir of enlistees in the Delayed Entry Program (DEP). The DEP consists of people who have signed enlistment contracts but opt to delay their entry to training camps for up to a year. DEP numbers fell from 33,249 at the beginning of fiscal 2004 to 14,739 at the start of this fiscal year, according to U.S. Army Recruiting Command statistics.
As a result, while the Army began last year with 45.9 percent of its recruiting goal filled by the pool, this year it started with just 18.4 percent in the pool -- the lowest amount since 2001 and well below the 30 percent average for the past decade. That means the Army must redouble its efforts to meet this year's target.
"Would we like a deeper DEP, a greater number? Of course we would," Hagenbeck said. But despite his anticipation of an even tougher recruiting environment in 2006 -- resulting from an improving economy and public uncertainty over the Iraq war -- he said the overriding need to hasten recruits to units means there are no plans to replenish the DEP this year.
Meanwhile, netting each new recruit is proving more difficult and time-consuming, Hagenbeck said, requiring the Army to put hundreds more active-duty recruiters on the job.
"The youngsters that are joining us are spending more time with the recruiters before they raise their right hand," he said. Today, most prospective enlistees contact the Army via the Internet, he said, asking numerous questions that require more recruiters to answer online and follow up with phone calls.
But few candidates will join up before meeting a recruiter in person and spending significant amounts of time with one, he said. "They ultimately want to see a soldier, a recruiter, and talk to them eyeball to eyeball," he said. As a result, "the recruiter who could go out and recruit two people this week might be consumed with recruiting that one."
The average cost of signing up a recruit is also beginning to rise, from $15,265 in fiscal 2001 to $15,967 in fiscal 2004 -- the result of more recruiters, advertising, and increased enlistment bonuses. In January, the Army announced a new six-month advertising contract with Leo Burnett USA worth an estimated $100 million. The Army is offering bonuses of as much as $20,000 to enlist on active duty for four years, with special monetary incentives for candidates who have college degrees, sign up for high-priority jobs or agree to move quickly into training.
The Army is also paying more to retain active-duty soldiers, 50 percent of whom now receive reenlistment bonuses, compared with 39 percent in 2003, Army officials said.
"We may not get exactly the number of people we want, but we're not sacrificing quality," Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey told a House committee Feb. 9.
The Army is offering higher ranks to enlistees who have spent time in college or junior ROTC, and as a result is bringing in more recruits at ranks above private, or E-1.
Such policies could partly explain a shift in the Army's junior enlisted ranks that has perplexed military analysts. The number of privates (E-1 through E-3) in the active-duty Army has sharply declined from 126,100 in October 2001 to 107,500 in December 2004. Meanwhile, the number of corporals and specialists (E-4) has risen from 95,400 to 115,500.
Another explanation is that the active-duty Army is maintaining its force strength more through retention than recruitment, resulting in a subtle aging of the force -- a trend already evident in the Army Reserve, officials said. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 1:25 pm Post subject: |
| And how easily can a draft bill be reintroduced into the Congress by a
Congress that warmongering Bush is in control of... Very easily, I
would assume.. Especially after the bombs start falling on Iran and
Syria for Israel (and the Israel first neocons at the Pentagon in
association with their 'A Clean Break' agenda which esteemed
intelligence writer, James Bamford, conveys via the following URL from
his 'A Pretext for War' book):
'A Clean Break' (War for Israel) from James Bamford's 'A Pretext for
War':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
Buchanan also refers to the 'A Clean Break' (war for Israel) agenda in
the following 'Whose War?' article which every patriotic American needs
to read (of course the Israel firsters posting to this message thread
aren't going to like the truth of it very much):
http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
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
Additional material appears at the following URLs:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/index.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 5:02 pm Post subject: Fifteen Hundred (Americans Dead in Iraq for Israel) |
| Published on Friday, March 4, 2005 by The Progressive
Fifteen Hundred
by Matthew Rothschild
Fifteen hundred U.S. soldiers have now given their lives for George Bush's misbegotten war in Iraq.
Fifteen hundred families devastated, a pain that will never fully go away, a void now never to be filled.
Fifteen hundred soldiers, who leave mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands or wives, sons and daughters, all to grieve in their own personal ways for a tragedy born of a national disgrace.
And then there are the Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of Bush's war. At least ten times as many, maybe 70 times as many.
And our men and women are now dying at a rate of almost 100 a month, and are now being wounded at a rate of about 1,000 a month.
Meanwhile, Iraqi civilians are being chewed up by the US and by the insurgency, which shows no signs of abating, despite the much-ballyhooed elections.
That's why Allawi just extended martial law.
If anything, the insurgency is getting bolder, using ever-more destructive bombs.
Fifteen hundred U.S. soldiers.
When will Bush have had enough?
At 2,500?
At 3,500?
At 5,500?
He doesn't seem to care what the American people think.
He never has, except on November 2.
He's got his counterfeit mandate, he's got the word from God, so all those Iraqi civilians killed and all those 1,500 soldiers are a sacrifice he's perfectly willing to make.
© 2005 The Progressive
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Mar 05, 2005 7:53 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 5:04 pm Post subject: OVER 4,000 DEAD US SOLDIERS DEAD FROM IRAQ WAR |
| OVER 4,000 DEAD US SOLDIERS DEAD FROM IRAQ WAR (FIGHTING FOR ISRAEL):
http://www.corvusworld.com/getoutnow.htm
Maj. General Harry Upman (retired)
Why the U.S. Must Get Out of Iraq, Pronto
Let me say in no uncertain terms, we must get out of Iraq.
There is nothing to gain and everything to lose in Iraq. We have
lost over four thousand of our military, those who were killed in
Iraq and those who died in intransit from Iraq to our hospitals in
Germany and in Europe. We have had over 10,000 of our troops
wounded. According to a report I heard last night on Frontline on
PBS, 1 in 6 of our people coming home from Iraq need mental help.
What have we gained in Iraq? Absolutely nothing.
What have we lost? Our leadership in the world militarily, morally
and financially.
Frankly, Generals Franks and Abizaid have failed. Donald Rumsfeld
has failed, as have his top aides. As a former military leader, I am
appalled at the Pentagon leadership and the leadership in our
military. These men should be drummed out of the military with their
heads in shame for the needless loss of the lives of our young men
and women.
But that's not the worst of it. What business did they have calling
up our Reserves and National Guard to attack another country. These
troops are for emergencies and to protect our nation. I know the
law, that these troops can be called up.
On the other hand, they are to be used for short periods of time,
not for long periods of time as they have been abused in Iraq. I
note that the recruiters are having a hard time in the Reserves and
the National Guard. I can't blame the people for walking away. I
would if I'd been lied to this much.
As a man of three wars, from Korea to Viet Nam to Gulf War I, I am
embarrassed by such men as General Mattis. If he was under my
command, I'd have him disciplined for ignorance and leading his men
astray. No, it is not "fun" to kill people.
Killing is a serious business, not something you brag about to
businessmen or to the media about. We never told our men to kill for
the fun of it. You killed to save yourself and to achieve an
objective, never for the "fun of it."
I fear that we have hit the bottom in our military men and women.
Lower level officers are now afraid to report atrocities for fear
that they will lose their rank, men are afraid to admit they are
shot, women are afraid to report rape, when they report rape they
are told it was their fault!
What has this man's army come to? Have we totally lost our honor? To
be a military man in this army means to be immoral, a liar, to
accuse the innocent and to not grieve for killing women and children.
This is not the military or the country I served. The men running
our government at this time are either mad or totally immoral and
have not place in this world as leaders. That is why they must turn
out such people as Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Mattis and Abizaid and
bring in some new leadership who better represents what we are as a
nation.
In the process, they may as well take such fools as Bill O'Reilly
and let him put his body where his mouth is in terms of Iraq. Let
him go to Iraq and see how it feels, let him smell death and let him
dodge bullets the way our troops do in Iraq. I'd like to see how
much of a smart-ass he would be then. The same is true of that
falsely serious Richard Perle; I'd have him take his fat behind out
in the boot camp and work him until he learned to sweat. I'd do the
same with Paul Wolfowitz. Paul has never had the respect of
intelligent men, only men who thought Paul was intelligent. How they
were deceived. I've known Paul since he was a bootlicker in his
youth in Washington, DC.
Until we regain our moral stature and moral bearings, we shall
continue to be hated in this world for good reason. We no longer
defend freedom and liberty, we are the new British colonialists, we
are the new plunderers, we are the new imperialists. This makes me
ashamed of our country.
What do I hope for? I hope some of our military men, men of honor,
will stand up and call these immoral and ignorant men what they are.
If our military is to defend its honor, it must stand up now. If
not, then our military men are part of the problem, not part of the
solution. I am not advocating revolution, but I am advocating the
right to resist immoral duty and men who think that "killing is
fun," and men who think that bombing a city into the earth, as was
done in Fallougha, will make us more friends and fewer enemies.
We must get out of Iraq, pronto, before we lose more troops, make
more enemies and show our military vulnerability to the watching
world. We are not the formidable force the world thought we were,
our troops are exhausted and yet have not won a victory, and our
will to victory is fast disappearing. We should get out before we
needlessly kill more Iraqis as well. Killing over a hundred
thousand, 100,000, according to the Lancet in England is enough to
make me more ashamed than when we learned of Mi Lai in Viet Nam. We
killed more in Fallougha than in Mi Lai, and yet no one has
apologized to the dead or the men and women who survived the
devastation, the Dresden like bombing of Fallougha. Where has our
moral leadership that we taught at West Point gone to? What are they
doing in OCS these days? I dread finding out if the officers I've
seen in Iraq are a fair sample.
How low we have sunk.
General Upman is a pseudonym for a retired general who would rather
not reveal his name because of his former leadership positions in
the U.S. Staff Leadership and because he does not want to argue with
old friends at the officers clubs when he visits
March 2, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Treason at High Level: Pentagon Neoconservatives, AIPAC and Israel:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/08/treason-in-high-places-pentagon-zionists-aipac-and-israel.php
Last edited by Alpha on Sat Mar 05, 2005 7:55 pm; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:31 pm Post subject: U.S. struggles to find troops for Iraq, Afghanistan |
| U.S. struggles to find troops for Iraq, Afghanistan
By Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Army, which has been hard pressed to find enough soldiers to man the rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, may soon be faced with an urgent request to find another 5,000 to 7,000 troops to increase the number of boots on the ground in Iraq.
Commanders there have been quietly signaling an immediate need for at least that many more soldiers to add to the 138,000 Americans already there. This, they say, is the minimum number needed to allow them to pursue the offensive against the insurgents in the wake of the taking of Fallujah.
Far from breaking the back of the insurgency, the capture of Fallujah only served as a signal for the enemy to launch its own offensive in cities across the Sunni triangle and in Baghdad itself. The fighters and leaders who fled Fallujah before the Americans launched their attack simply moved to other cities and went straight to work sowing havoc.
The daily number of attacks and incidents in Iraq is now running more than 100 per day, or double what it was before the Fallujah offensive began.
Having taken Fallujah in a violent and bloody campaign that took the lives of more than 50 Americans and uncounted Iraqis and virtually destroyed a city where the insurgents and foreign fighters had had sanctuary and free reign for six months, the Americans now are obliged to rebuild what they destroyed.
The city and the reconstruction efforts both have to be secured against a return of the insurgents, thus tying down thousands of American soldiers and Marines when they are needed elsewhere to fight those who escaped Fallujah.
Commanders in Iraq are under pressure to take the war to the enemy and beat them into less of a threat so that the Jan. 30 first round of elections in that country can take place with minimal violence. Washington would love to see an election in Iraq that was something like the success of the Afghanistan voting last month.
Army planners are looking at a number of temporary stop-gap measures to boost the strength in Iraq during January, including extension of the tours of thousands of soldiers nearing the end of their 12-month combat assignment and speeding up the deployment of the 3rd Mech Infantry Division so more of them arrive before January.
They are also reportedly eyeing the ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division - which stands by at Fort Bragg for rapid deployment anywhere in the world in a crisis - as one way to boost temporarily troop strength in Iraq. Those troops, however, are light infantry and do not come equipped with the Bradley fighting vehicles and M1A2 Abrams tanks that are increasingly needed for urban combat in Iraq.
Finding the rest of the troops that commanders want may be difficult. Getting them to Iraq in time and properly equipped to fight in that dangerous environment may be even more difficult; Army and Marine commanders have already used up most of their bag of tricks to find troops for the usual rotations to Iraq.
The Baltimore Sun reports that the Army is hard pressed to find enough officers for staff jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan and will double the length of their tours in those countries from 179 days at present to a full 12 months.
Other extraordinary steps ordered or under consideration include pulling officers out of military schools or delaying entry into such programs. They could also curtail family-oriented programs such as the one that allows soldiers to extend their tours at a stateside base so their children can finish their senior year in high school.
The Army is struggling to fill hundreds of staff jobs for majors and lieutenant colonels in war zone headquarters and in the past month began stripping majors and lieutenant colonels from their Pentagon billets and ordering them to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although the Pentagon has counted on the rapidly growing Iraqi security forces to begin taking up some of the slack, their hopes may be misplaced in the immediate future. The Iraqi battalions in the field seem to function much better when they come in behind American troops, as in Samara and Fallujah.
Until they have a good deal more experience and develop both leadership and confidence they will remain too weak to go after insurgents and foreign fighters in the Sunni triangle.
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Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
Thu Nov 25, 7:55 AM ET Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Scott Gold Times Staff Writer
DOÑA ANA RANGE, N.M. — Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq (news - web sites) said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
They said they believed their treatment and training reflected an institutional bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation that Army commanders denied.
The 680 soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Doña Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 20 miles west of its large parent base, Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
Several soldiers have fled Doña Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40% of the troops in Iraq are either reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Ft. Bliss said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Doña Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cited went much deeper than culture shock.
And military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required dangerous and long-term deployments of both.
The concerns of the Guard troops at Doña Ana represent the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with their active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Ft. Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq.
Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad after arguing that the trucks they had been given were not armored for combat duty.
At Doña Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They said they had been told repeatedly that they could not be trusted because they were not active-duty soldiers — though many of them are former active-duty soldiers.
"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the soldiers, on condition of anonymity.
"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I believed in it, believed in the mission. But I have regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to war like this?"
Pentagon (news - web sites) and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or reserve troops were prepared for war differently than their active-duty counterparts.
"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little farther back — they have a little less training. But the goal is to get everybody the same."
The Guard troops at Doña Ana were scheduled to train for six months before beginning a yearlong deployment. They recently learned, however, that the Army planned to send them overseas a month early — in January, most likely — as it speeds up troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.
Hubbard, the officer at Ft. Bliss, also said conditions at Doña Ana were designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers would take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez, commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th Regiment.
The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban to armed guards at the entrance to Doña Ana, Hubbard said.
"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to get used to it."
Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.
"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."
Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been "gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."
The Guard troops in New Mexico said they wanted more sophisticated training and better equipment. They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.
They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.
The soldiers said they had received little or no training for operations that they expected to undertake in Iraq, from convoy protection to guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.
Hubbard had said he would make two field commanders available on Tuesday to answer specific questions from the Los Angeles Times about the training, but that did not happen.
The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.
"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."
The soldiers at Doña Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.
The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.
Dominguez is a father of two — including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president — and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.
"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 8:32 pm Post subject: Syria: The Shadow of another Iraq |
| The Guardian - 4 March 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk
The shadow of another Iraq:
The upheaval in Lebanon and the pressure for Syria to withdraw now
threaten the survival of the Assad regime
by David Hirst in Damascus
A velvet revolution, Ukrainian style, that will set an example for
the whole Middle East? That is how Lebanon's so far peaceful
"democratic uprising" likes to see itself. Certainly, something
new and profound is under way.
Lebanon's strength - and weakness - was always the multiplicity of
religious sects on which its whole political system is based. When
the system worked, it did so far better than any of its
neighbours'; when it broke down, it did so disastrously. During
its 16-year civil war Walid Jumblatt, the same Druze chieftain who
now leads the opposition, warned the interfering Arabs: "One day
the fire will spread to you." It didn't. What he leads today has a
better chance of doing so.
It is, if anything, a triumph over confessionalism. Not complete,
not invulnerable. Thanks in part to Hizbullah, Syrian-backed but
domestically popular, it is the country's Shias who are chiefly
reticent. Yet, in impressive measure, the people now stand in one
trench, the regime in another. And that, not sectarian antagonism,
is the faultline that will principally define the course of
events.
If assassinations sometimes accelerate history, Rafiq Hariri's
brutal, spectacular but popularly unifying demise is surely one of
those. Many Syrians just don't believe their government was behind
it: it couldn't be so stupid. But diabolical plot, or massive
self-inflicted injury, the outcome is the same. For the Lebanese,
their Syrian overlord was instantly guilty until it proved itself
innocent.
At a stroke the assassination unleashed, in a great and public
torrent, all the anti-Syrian sentiment that had been
surreptitiously building down the years. "Our Lebanese brothers
have come to hate us," lamented a dissident intellectual. "Our
government never consulted us when, 29 years ago, it took the
fateful step of going in. It won't consult us when it leaves. And
leave it must."
But leaving is precisely what the Ba'athist regime is likely to
resist to the very end. Quite simply, because it fears that to do
so would be its own end, too. "Total defeat in Lebanon," said
another dissident, "is total defeat at home." First, that is
because of Lebanon the strategic asset. For historical,
geographical and political reasons Syria instinctively strives to
be a regional power greater than its own resources alone can make
it.
And today it is in a Syrian-controlled Lebanon that the last major
cards lie - such as Hizbullah - in an eroding regional hand, cards
by which its current rulers seek to secure their very survival in
any new, American-dominated Middle Eastern order. Their ultimate
trump is, perhaps, to withdraw. For if they did that, an
intelligence chief once explained, Lebanon would become a hotbed
of assorted militants, Islamic and Palestinian, in effect a kind
of Iraq. And the Americans and Israelis would soon come begging
them to return.
Second, there is the potential domino effect inside Syria itself,
of Lebanese "people power". After the example of elections,
however flawed, in occupied Iraq and Palestine, has come this new,
unscheduled outbreak of popular self-assertion in a country where
a sister Arab state, not an alien occupier, is in charge. It is a
manifestly authentic movement, greatly encouraged, no doubt, by
America and the west, but far from being inspired or engineered by
it.
It is a fundamental blow to all that historic Syria, as the
"beating heart" of Arabism, and all that Ba'athism and its
pan-Arab nationalist credo have ever stood for. For the leading
Lebanese columnist Samir Qassir, it means that "the Arab
nationalist cause has shrunk into the single aim of getting rid of
the regimes of terrorism and coups, and regaining the people's
freedom as a prelude to the new Arab renaissance. It buries the
lie that despotic systems can be the shield of nationalism. Beirut
has become the beating heart of a new Arab nationalism".
The Syrians aren't going to rise up like the Lebanese - not yet
anyway. Long repressed, they don't have the organised opposition,
the strong residue of democratic traditions that the
"Syrianisation" of Lebanon was gradually stifling.
What Lebanon has done is to add a whole new dimension to popular
discontent with all those long accumulating domestic woes - the
fruits of a decadent, outmoded, sclerotic ruling order - which
they have endured for the past 40 years. It has added to the
pressure for reform and democratisation, reform that is surely the
only way the regime can hope to survive. For Syria, indeed,
Lebanon is so intimate a neighbour that what happens there is
hardly a "foreign" issue at all. And everyone knows that those who
block reform in Syria - the so-called "old guard", shadowy centres
of power in the army and intelligence services - are the same
people who brought the Syrian presence in Lebanon to its current
pass.
It is a pass now suddenly made all the more threatening in that
the Lebanese "uprising" dovetails so nicely with President Bush's
crusade to bring "freedom and democracy" to the Middle East. This
is not to mention the fact that Syria has always loomed large in
the long-standing designs of the administration's pro-Israeli,
neoconservative hawks for "regime change" in the Middle East.
Hariri's murder could hardly have rendered them a greater service.
What now for a badly shaken regime? As graceful a retreat from
Lebanon as possible? Or more defiance, of both the Lebanese
opposition and its international friends? To President Assad it
must look like a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. He has
hinted at withdrawal in a few months. This is a far cry from the
immediate one the opposition demands, and even that would depend,
he said, on what happens in Lebanon. But what happens in Lebanon
still very much depends on what Syria - or those power centres
possibly beyond presidential control - make happen. Their last
trump: another Iraq?
[David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from
1963 to 2001]
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The above is right in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' (war for Israel) agenda which James Bamford conveys on pages 261-269 of his new book ('A Pretext for War') which one can read via the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
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http://www.lebaneselobby.org/News__index/news%202005/03%2005%2005%20Pentagon%20Favors%20Air%20Strikes%20on%20Syria%20to%20Overthrow%20Assad%20Free%20Lebanon.htm
Pentagon Favors Air Strikes on Syria to Overthrow Assad, Free Lebanon
The Pentagon is now convinced that air strikes on Syria have become necessary to overthrow the Assad regime, liberate Lebanon and stop support of insurgents waging a guerrilla war against American forces in Iraq as well as Palestinian militants against Israel, the U.S.-sponsored Al Hurra TV network says.
"Political action to deal with the problem of Syria's presence in Lebanon and its support of terrorism against Israel and Iraq is no longer deemed effective," Al Hurra quoted American intelligence sources as saying, according to slain ex-Premier Hariri's Al Mustaqbal newspaper on Friday.
"Diplomacy as a means to deal with countries supporting terrorism is over and out. The situation is now open to all eventualities as far as Syria is concerned," the sources were quoted as saying by the Arabic-language Al Hurra.
"Resolving problems with Syria now requires changing the Syrian regime or mounting air attacks similar to those staged against Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998 to wipe out terrorist centers once and for all," the U.S. intelligence sources were quoted as saying.
"The U.S. central command for Iraq and Afghanistan is closely following the situation in Lebanon and Syria and senior Pentagon officials are now convinced that hitting terrorist targets in Syria is necessary," Al Hurra said.
"The elimination of Syrian-supported terrorism groups is now deemed 'strategically vital' for stability in the Middle east, particularly Iraq, which is unattainable at present under the current Syrian regime," the station said. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
