| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 9:32 am Post subject: Bush OK's Israel Attack on Iran |
| Bush OK's Israel Attack on Iran
Forwarded:
Carol wrote:
Bush OK's Israel Attack on Iran
That's the best way to read this...and he's already said US would go to
war to protect Israel if it was attacked, or counterattacked. Of
course, maybe he'll just let Israel send 20 -30 nukes over there. Wonder
what Russia will do...
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1162378311136&pagename=JPost/JPArticl\
e/ShowFull
Nov. 2, 2006 10:46 | Updated Nov. 2, 2006 14:38
Bush 'would understand' attack on Iran
By JTA
President Bush reportedly said he would "understand" a preemptive
Israeli strike against Iran s nuclear sites.
Maariv, citing diplomatic sources, reported Thursday that French
President Jacques Chirac discussed Iran s nuclear program with Bush on
the sidelines of the recent UN summit.
Iran test-fires long-range Shihab-3
Asked by Chirac if Israel could attack Iran to prevent it getting the
bomb, Bush reportedly said: "We cannot rule this out. And if it were to
happen, I would understand it."
The report could not be independently confirmed.
Israel endorses US-led efforts to curb Iran s atomic ambitions through
the threat of UN Security Council sanctions but, like Washington, has
hinted that military action could be a last resort.
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Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 4:29 pm Post subject: |
| Seems like that the rogue state will attack Iran knowing that the US would be there to back them up against any counterattack by Iran... Bet the JINSA/PNAC Neocons have been arranging such a scenario with their friends in Israel:
Israel Official: Strike on Iran Possible
By AMY TEIBEL
.c The Associated Press
JERUSALEM (AP) - The deputy defense minister suggested Friday that Israel might be forced to launch a military strike against Iran's disputed nuclear program - the clearest statement yet of such a possibility from a high-ranking official.
``I am not advocating an Israeli pre-emptive military action against Iran and I am aware of its possible repercussions,'' Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, a former general, said in comments published Friday in The Jerusalem Post. ``I consider it a last resort. But even the last resort is sometimes the only resort.''
Sneh's comments did not necessarily reflect the view of Israel's government or of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said government spokeswoman Miri Eisin.
Olmert, who was arriving in Washington on Sunday, said he was confident in the U.S. handling of the international standoff over Iran's nuclear program. The Bush administration and other nations say is a cover for developing atomic weapons, but Tehran says the program is peaceful.
``I have enormous respect for President Bush. He is absolutely committed,'' Olmert said in an interview on NBC's ``Today'' show. ``I know that America will not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons because this is a danger to the whole Western world.''
The United States and its European allies have proposed a raft of sanctions to try to curb the country's nuclear development.
Israel sees Iran as the greatest threat to its survival. Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel's destruction, and Israelis do not believe his claims that Iran's nuclear program is meant to develop energy, not arms.
Israel crippled Iraq's atomic program 25 years ago with an airstrike on its unfinished nuclear reactor. Experts say Iran has learned from Iraq's mistakes, scattering its nuclear facilities and building some underground.
Sneh's tough talk is the boldest to date by a high-ranking Israeli official. Olmert and other Israeli leaders frequently discuss the Iranian threat in grave terms, but stop short of threatening military action.
Years of diplomacy have failed to persuade Iran to modify its nuclear program so it can't develop weapons.
11/10/06 09:01 EST
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The second Lind article included below was by Michael Lind who is a former neocon:
Iraq disaster warning
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15568.htm
By WILLIAM S. LIND
UPI Outside View Commentator
11/10/06 -- - WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- The third and final act in
the U.S. national tragedy that is the Bush administration may soon
play itself out.
Sources indicate increasing indications of "something big" happening
between the Nov. 7 congressional election and Christmas. That could
be the long-planned attack on Iran.
An attack on Iran will not be an invasion with ground troops. We
don't have enough of those left to invade Ruritania. It will be
a "package" of air and missile strikes, by U.S. forces or Israel.
That this would constitute folly piled on top of folly is no
deterrent to the Bush administration. Like the French Bourbons, it
forgets nothing and it learns nothing. It takes pride in not
adapting. Or did you somehow miss President George W. Bush's
declaration of Presidential Infallibility? It followed shortly after
his May 1, 2003 visit to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln
with the "Mission Accomplished" sign.
The Democrats taking either or both Houses of Congress, if it
happens, will not make any difference. They would rather have the
Republicans start and lose another war than prevent a national
disaster. Politics comes first and the country second.
Many of the consequences of a war with Iran are easy to imagine. Oil
would soar to at least $200 per barrel if we could get it. Gas
shortages would bring back the gas lines of 1973 and 1979. Our
European alliances would be stretched to the breaking point if not
beyond it. Most people outside the Bush bubble can see all this
coming.
What I fear no one forsees is a substantial danger that we could
lose the American army now deployed in Iraq. I have mentioned this
in previous columns, but I want to go into it here in more detail
because the scenario may soon go live.
Well before the second Iraq war started, I warned in a piece in The
American Conservative that the structure of our position in Iraq
could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement.
That is precisely the danger if we go to war with Iran.
The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of
supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up
from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line
is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to
get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and
though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil
products. Unlike German World War Gen. Heinz Guderian's army on its
way to the Channel coast in 1940, we could not just fuel up at local
gas stations.
There are two ways our supply lines from the south could be cut if
we attack Iran. The first is by Shiite militias including the Mahdi
Army and the Badr Brigades, possibly supported by a general Shiite
uprising and, of course, Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- The same
guys who trained Hezbollah so well.
The second danger is that regular Iranian Army divisions will roll
into Iraq, cut our supply lines and attempt to pocket us in and
around Baghdad. Washington relies on American air power to prevent
this, but bad weather can shut most of that air power down.
Unfortunately, no one in Washington and few people in the U.S.
military will even consider this possibility. Why? Because we have
fallen victim to our own propaganda. Over and over the U.S. military
tells itself, "We're the greatest! We're number one! No one can
defeat us. No one can even fight us. We're the greatest military in
all of history!"
It's wrong. The U.S. armed forces are technically well-trained,
lavishly resourced Second Generation militaries. They are being
fought and defeated by Fourth Generation opponents in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third Generation enemies
who can observe, orient, decide and act more quickly than can
America's vast, process-ridden, Powerpoint-enslaved military
headquarters. They can be defeated by strategy, by stratagem, by
surprise and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like
unsinkable ships. They are unsinkable until someone or something
sinks them.
If the United States were to lose the army it has in Iraq, to Iraqi
militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both (the most
likely event), the world would change. It would be our Adrianople,
our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never
recover.
One of the few people who does see this danger is the doyenne of
American foreign policy columnists, Georgie Anne Geyer. In her
column of Oct. 28 in The Washington Times, she wrote, "The worst has
not, by any means, yet happened. When I think of abandoning a
battleground, I think of (the 1840s), when thousands of Brits were
trying to leave Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and all were
killed by tribesmen except one man, left to tell the story."
Our men and women in Iraq are in isolated compounds, not easy even
to retreat from, were that decision made. Time is truly running out.
Iran: The Next War (for Israel):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/28/iran-the-next-war-for-israel.php
AIPAC and the Neocon (War for Israel) agenda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rf16XjbOUs
ISRAELI SPY RING PROBE WIDENS :
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/11/187362.php
How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington and Launched a War
by Michael Lind
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html
April 10, 2003
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies such as the selection rather than election of George W. Bush, and Sept. 11 the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protιgι who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neocons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots odd as it seems in the British Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox television network. His magazine, the Weekly Standard edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice president, 1989-1993) acts as a mouthpiece for defense intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-1994) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung Moon which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghostwriter for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, and its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favorite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.
How did the neocon defense intellectuals a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neocons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and vice president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a northeastern moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to Southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the Southern culture.
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: Last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the U.N.
It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with U.S. attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the U.S. The neocons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far greater problem.
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of the Rev. Ian Paisley, extreme Euroskeptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chalmers Johnson (author of 'Blowback' and 'The Sorrows and Empire') was recently interviewed by Ian Masters as well (see www.ianmasters.org) as the interview with Michael Lind will be added there to archive in the future:
Dr. Chalmers Johnson on the rise of a militaristic Japanese leadership, supported by American neocons, and what he views as a crisis of American democracy with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Dr. Chalmers is an author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, two essential examinations of the consequences of American empire, Blowback: the costs and consequences of American empire and The Sorrows of Empire: militarism, secrecy and the end of the republic. Blowback won an American Book Award in 2001, and was re-issued in an updated version in 2004. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment. Johnson was centrally featured in the Eugene Jarecki-directed film Why We Fight, which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His forthcoming book is "Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic."
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Last edited by Alpha on Sun Nov 12, 2006 4:23 am; edited 1 time in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 4:37 pm Post subject: |
| Bet that the Israeli occupied US Congress will fall all over themselves to support such an attack as I just read that the Zion first Jew Tom Lantos will be chairing the House Foreign Relations Committee - get ready for more war for Israel sooner rather than later:
From: Cbrad4334
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:13:39 EST
Subject: WATCH OUT FOR PELOSI, A DEMOCRAT BUT PRO-ISRAEL!
Now the third most important person after the President and Vice President- Chair of the Senate!! Yet another staunch Zionist Jew at the helm of American biased and blinded Policies.
Democrats=Republicans- NO CHANGE
Subject: With Hand on Heart: Pelosi Admits Israel Comes First
With Hand on Heart: Pelosi Admits Israel Comes First
May 31, 2005
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jfrank.php?articleid=6157
by Joshua Frank
I think it is finally time we stood up and thanked Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the darling Democrat from the Bay Area who leads her party in the House. Pelosi's recent speech to the Israel-American lobby AIPAC, the second largest lobby in Washington , was monumental truly unparalleled in its candor.
Despite the fact that AIPAC was recently busted for spying on the United States , Pelosi, along with many other top bureaucrats from Washington , gushed effusions of praise on the foreign power. "There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel 's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza ," Pelosi said as she rallied AIPAC loyalists. "This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist."
Apparently Pelosi has never asked Palestinians what they think of Israel 's brutality. Not that she hasn't witnessed the occupation firsthand; Pelosi is just not concerned in the least with the Palestinian resistance.
"This spring, I was in Israel as part of a congressional trip that also took us to Egypt , Lebanon , Jordan , and Iraq ," said Pelosi. "One of the most powerful experiences was taking a helicopter toward Gaza , over the path of the security fence. We set down in a field that belonged to a local kibbutz. It was a cool but sunny day, and the field was starting to bloom with mustard. Mustard is a crop that grows in California , and it felt at that moment as if I were home. And then we were told that the reason we had to land in that field, as opposed to our actual destination, was because there had been an infiltration that morning, and they weren't sure how secure the area was. And that point alone brought us back to the daily reality of Israel : even moments of peace and beauty are haunted by the specter of violence."
Pelosi, like so many other Democrats and Republicans in D.C., does not appreciate the asymmetry of the conflict. She cannot understand that Palestinians are faced with violence every day as their livelihoods and homes are uprooted to make way for new Israeli settlements. Never mind that the farm collective where Pelosi landed in her fancy helicopter was at one time operated by Palestinian farmers. For the land, according to Pelosi, has always belonged to the state of Israel .
"One thing, however is unchanged," Pelosi added. " America 's commitment to the safety and security of the state of Israel is unwavering. America and Israel share an unbreakable bond: in peace and war; and in prosperity and in hardship."
Sadly, Palestinians don't figure into Pelosi's lopsided equation; those darn Arabs just don't matter. And when Pelosi speaks of "safety and security," it's only Israelis she's talking about. While Pelosi ignored Israel 's vast arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weaponry, along with the numerous UN resolutions the country has broken, she still had the audacity to lash out at the latest troublemaker in the Middle East: Iran .
"The greatest threat to Israel 's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran . For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology."
So, three cheers for Pelosi! Her honesty has been crudely insightful. Especially given the fact that two AIPAC staffers have just been indicted for espionage by the U.S. government. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 4:57 pm Post subject: Olmert warns against hasty U.S. withdrawal from Iraq |
| w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
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Last update - 03:14 10/11/2006
Olmert warns against hasty U.S. withdrawal from Iraq
By Aluf Benn
For the first time yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed in public the possibility that the United States may withdraw its forces from Iraq following the victory of the Democratic Party in the mid-term congressional elections. Olmert warned against a hasty withdrawal that may undermine the balance of power in the Middle East and endanger the moderate regimes in the region.
"From our point of view every withdrawal needs to be carefully planned," Olmert said, "in order not to undermine the very delicate balance of moderate countries and emirates in the Middle East. This is the main consideration, and America will be very careful before it makes a step that will endanger the very delicate balance in this region of the world - which is important to the stability of much larger regions of the world."
The Prime Minister believes that U.S. policy will not change in a hurry.
"President George Bush is a hundred percent loyal to his principles, and I do not think there will be any dramatic change as long as he is in power," Olmert said.
"This does not mean that there will be no new thinking about the timing of the American withdrawal from Iraq, but it is too early to say [what the outcome will be]," the prime minister added.
Olmert made these statements in an interview with Adam Bolton, a correspondent for Sky News, a British satellite television program, while attending the Prime Minister's Conference, an international event organized to promote trade and Israeli exports in Tel Aviv yesterday.
Regarding Syria, Olmert said, "Bashar Assad wants to eat his cake and have it, too. We cannot accept that. He cannot back Hezbollah, Khaled Meshal and terror actions throughout the Middle East, be a partner with Iran that calls for the destruction of Israel - and also appear to be a moderate in contacts with Israel."
Commenting on the election results in the United States, Olmert, who is due to depart for a visit to Washington on Saturday, said: "I do not wish to go into American politics. I will only say that Bush is the American President, and one should not write him off just yet. The [Democratic] majority in the Senate is small, 50 to 49, and we should remember that the two best years of [Bill] Clinton in power took place when the poor man lost the majority in Congress." On Monday Olmert will meet with Bush in the White House. Blocking the Iranian threat will top the agenda. Other topics that will be discussed will be efforts to calm the Palestinian front, finding a diplomatic breakthrough, and the enforcement of the cease-fire in Lebanon.
From Washington Olmert will travel to Los Angeles, where he will address the annual conference of the United Jewish Communities General Assembly (GA).
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/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=786195 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 5:18 pm Post subject: |
| How Rahm Emanuel (who is an ardent Jewish Zionist Israel firster son of Israeli immigrants) Has Rigged a Pro-War Congress - Election 2006: The Fix is Already In
By JOHN WALSH
"In 1964 Barry Goldwater declared: 'Elect me president, and I will bomb the cities of Vietnam, defoliate the jungles, herd the population into concentration camps and turn the country into a wasteland.' But Lyndon Johnson said: 'No! No! No! Don't you dare do that. Let ME do it.'"
Characterization (paraphrased) of the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson presidential race by Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost Authority."
"Democrats Split Over Timetable For Troops; In Close Races, Most Reject Rapid Pullout," the headline atop page one of the Sunday Washington Post informed us as the election season got underway (8/27). Stories like this abound these days, and they should all be prefaced with the single word, "betrayal." Only 17% of rank and file Democrats are for "staying the course," 53% want immediate withdrawal and another 25% are for gradual withdrawal. Among all voters, only 30% want to stay the course, 37% want immediate withdrawal and 26% a "gradual withdrawal (Gallup poll - 9/24/06). According to recent Pew Polls, 52% of voters want a timetable for withdrawal while only 41% oppose setting a timetable.
In contrast to voters' sentiment, 64% of the Democratic candidates in the 45 closely contested House Congressional races oppose a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Note carefully: not only do these Democrat worthies oppose the Murtha or McGovern bills for rapid withdrawal or defunding the war; they oppose so much as a timetable. (The number of Dem candidates supporting the Murtha or McGovern proposals is vanishingly small.) The position of these Dem candidates is indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush. How did this betrayal of the Democratic rank and file come about? Who chose these Democratic candidates that oppose rank and file Dems on the number one question on voters' minds, the war on Iraq? How could such candidates get elected in the primaries? Two primary campaigns, now largely forgotten, give us the answer. They are near perfect case studies, and they deserve some reflection although the Dem establishment would dearly like us to forget them.
The first case is the Democratic primary race between Christine Cegelis and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois's 6th CD, a Republican District, which has elected the disgusting Henry Hyde from time immemorial. Then in 2004 Christine Cegelis, who is only mildly antiwar (1), ran as the Democrat with a grass roots campaign and polled a remarkable 44% against the hideous Hyde in her first run. It was not too long before Hyde decided to retire, and the field seemed to be open for Cegelis in 2006.
Enter Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who dug up a pro-war candidate, Tammy Duckworth. Although she had both her legs blown off in Iraq, she has remained committed to "staying the course" in Iraq (2). Duckworth had no political experience and did not live in the 6th District, but Rahm Emanuel raised a million dollars for her and brought in Dem heavyweights Joe Lieberman, Barak Obama, John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton to support her. Despite all this help and with the Cegelis campaign virtually penniless, Duckworth barely managed to eke out a victory by a measly four percentage points. According to a recent Cook Report, Duckworth is not the smashing success that Rahm Emanuel had dreamed of; she remains tied at 41% of the vote with her rookie Republican Rival, Peter Roskam, the same percentage that Cegelis had against the entrenched Hyde in 2004! Recently (9/30), Duckworth was pushed onto the national scene to help her campaign, providing the "rebuttal" to Bush's weekly Saturday radio address. AP, in its story on the exchange where Duckworth was supposed to differ with W on Iraq, concluded thus: "She offered no proposal for an immediate withdrawal or a timetable for withdrawal."
But in one case, and sadly in only one of the 22 districts, which Emanuel selected for intervention, he did not prevail; but that is also instructive. The second case study is CA's 11th CD Dem primary where Emanuel poured in money, much of it apparently coming from his own district in Illinois, to bankroll Steve Filson, essentially a political unknown, who opposed immediate withdrawal from Iraq. But in this primary battle the grass roots prevailed and the strongly antiwar candidate, Jerry McNemey, who supports the Murtha bill for immediate withdrawal, defeated Emanuel's minion, Filson. It is noteworthy that McNemey, strongly antiwar, won, whereas Cegelis, weakly antiwar, lost. Now in the general election McNemey is pulling ahead of his pro-war Republican opponent by 48 to 46% in the most recent poll even though his opponent has outspent him by $1.6 million to $303,000! McNemey has raised a total of only $452,000 to his opponent's $2.5 million. Some cash from Rahm would ensure McNemey's victory it would appear, but it is not forthcoming. It seems that Rahm Emanuel is stanching the influx of money in this very competitive race.
Meanwhile, even though Duckworth has been the recipient of Rahm's largesse, to the tune of $1.8 million, the same amount as her Republican opponent, her campaign has not taken wing. You get the picture. If you toe the line for Rahm on the war, the money rains on you like manna from heaven and you are elevated to national celebrity status. But if you are anti-war, Rahm cuts you off at the wallet.
Note that in each of these two cases Emanuel did not pick candidates based on a proven ability to raise money. Nor did he pick them for their ability to win. In Duckworth's case she damned near lost despite the cash infusion, and McNirney did win despite the money that Emanuel funneled to his opponent. Emanuel is not choosing proven fundraisers or winning candidates; he is choosing pro-war candidates.
Rahm Emanuel's Stable.
To win the House, the Dems must win 15 seats from the Republicans. Here are the 22 candidates hand picked by Emanuel to run in open districts or districts with Republican incumbents, according to The Hill (4/27/06): Darcy Burner (WA), Phyllis Busansky (FL), Francine Busby (CA), Joe Courtney (CT), John Cranley (OH), Jill Derby (NV), Tammy Duckworth (IL), Brad Ellsworth (IN), Diane Farrell (CT), Steve Filson (CA) defeated in primary by Jerry McNirney (see above), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Tessa Hafen (NV), Baron Hill (IN), Mary Jo Kilroy (OH), Ron Klein (FL), Ken Lucas (KY), Patsy Madrid (NM), Harry Mitchell (AZ), Chris Murphy (CT), Lois Murphy (PA), Heath Shuler (NC), Peter Welch (VT).
If we group these 22 candidates by their positions, it is much worse than one might have imagined. Here it is:
U.S, must "win" in Iraq (9): John Cranely(OH); Jill Derby (NV); Tammy Duckworth (IL); Brad Ellsworth (IN): Teresa Hafen (NV); Baron Hill (IN);Ken Lucas (KY); Lois Murphy (PA); Heath Schuler (NC).
More troops should be deployed in Iraq. (1): Diane Farrell (CT);
Bush (or Congress or Bush and Congress or someone other than the candidate) must develop a plan or timetable for exit. This means that the candidate does not offer a timetable or other withdrawal plan and amounts only to a partisan criticism of Bush without a plan offered by the candidate. (6): Francine Busby (CA); Joe Courtney (CT); Kirsten Gillibrand (NY); Mary Jo Kilroy (OH); Patricia Madrid (NM); Harry Mitchell (AZ).
Biden's 3-state solution. (1): Phyllis Busansky (FL).
No position. (1): Chris Murphy (CT).
Not for immediate withdrawal (3): Steve Filson (CA) (He lost Dem primary. See above.); Ron Klein (FL); Harry Mitchell (AZ);
Withdrawal in 2006. (1): Peter Welch (VT). (In VT, you could probably not get elected dog catcher without calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Still it is a bit mysterious why Rahm is backing Welch who for that reason probably deserves a bit of scrutiny. Perhaps something "worse" like a Green is waiting in the wings.)
So only one of Rahm's candidates is for prompt withdrawal from Iraq. And it is notweworthy that Rahm found prowar candidates in both red states and blue, like CT and CA. Check out these candidates for yourself. If you live in their districts, pressure them to change their positions and do so publicly with letters to the editor, withholding of funds and most importantly support for third party antiwar candidates where they are to be found no matter how slight the establishment media regards their prospects. Ask what UFPJ, The Nation and other branches of the peace and justice complex are doing to expose Emanuel's candidates.
The question arises. Who is Congressman Rahm Emanuel? From what does he derive his power? What are his thoughts on the future for the Dems? And where is The Nation in all this. More on that coming shortly.
John Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com
Notes
(1.) Cegelis was against the war on Iraq but only in a very timid way. She opposed it before it started, but it was only 4th out of 6 issues on her web site, and she was not for immediate withdrawal. Here is what she said on her web site at the time of the primary. "I have opposed this war from the start. But revisiting what brought us to this disastrous point does not solve the problem. It is time for us to bring our troops home. The Bush Administration must provide a comprehensive timetable for withdrawal of the majority of our combat troops at the earliest possible date. " Notice she does not say "Out Now," like Murtha or Lamont. She leaves it all up to Bush to set a timetable, which is the standard copout for pro-war Dems. Although good enough for PDA (!), it was too much for Rahm Emanuel and company.
(2.) Duckworth says of Iraq on her web site: "The fact is we are in Iraq now and we can't simply pull up stakes and create a security vacuum. It wouldn't be in our national interest to leave Iraq in chaos and risk allowing a country with unlimited oil wealth to become a base for terrorists." Not even a mention of a timetable.
@ http://www.counterpunch.org/walsh10142006.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 10:33 pm Post subject: |
| Jewish Political Power on the Rise
Jews, comprising some 3% or the U.S. population, continue to rise in national
political prominence and Party influence.
Witness the ascent of pro-war, pro-Zionist Democrats Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, not
to mention the growing stature of such 'liberal' stalwarts as Hillary Clinton, Charles Liebermann
and Chuck Schumer. Despite the fiasco known as the Iraq war, most of the
newly elected Dems are also aggressively pro-war. Why? Almost all of the
mega-donors to the Democratic Party are Jewish.
Ken Mehlman (also Jewish) is in charge of the Republican Party, even though
he presided over an election where the Republicans suffered their greatest
reversal in a generation. To make matters worse, with the essential help of
gentiles like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Will and O'Reilly, the Republican
party remains under strict neoconservative domination. Ant-war paleo-conservatives like Buchanan are invisible.
All the Repbulican Party
big shots (McCain, Specter, Warner etc.) are pro-war and
pro-intervention. Ever since Reagan (who most neo-cons revere, since they
slipped into Washington under his watch) the Republican party is
increasingly under Jewish management.
But the big news is this: notwithstanding the legitimate worry over the
huge shadow cast over Congress by AIPAC, in a broader sense, most Jewish
lobbying and influence is actually outside of AIPAC's sphere.
Jewish political pressure and cultural manipulation beyond AIPAC is
incalculable, untabulated and often cryptic. But it's undeniably immense.
Here's 30-second tour of Jewish power in America:
On the conspicuous side, it goes from the Conference of Presidents of Major
Jewish Organizations to the ADL to the Congressional Jewish Caucus to the
American Jewish Committee and so on; and from there it fans out towards
countless Jewish federations and philanthropies and over to the openly
Jewish press to various 'secular' institutions like the ACLU or the Southern
Poverty Law Center, all of which interface with American governance.
After that, the Lobby gets more mysterious as we enter the major
universities and the banks and financial centers, then on to the many
Israeli-infiltrated think tanks like AEI, Hudson, Brookings, Aspen and
Washington Institute of Near East Studies. Rounding this out, you have all
the Jewish-dominated newspapers, radio and TV stations as well as movie
studios. This huge ethno-religious conglomeration, not merely AIPAC,
constitutes the full Jewish lobby. And much of this gargantuan and
unregulated association of powerful individuals and institutions is devoted
to serving the political interests of one foreign power that's continually
at war.
In scale, scope and influence, no other domestic 'lobby' comes even close to
what we see outlined above. And AIPAC is just one facet of this larger
lobby which now lords over our nation and thus, the world. -mg | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 6:23 pm Post subject: No cakewalk in the park? |
| The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No cakewalk in the park?
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published November 13, 2006
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"Ripley's Believe It Or Not" began in 1918 as a comic strip featuring unusual, hard-to-believe facts from around the world. Today it is a Web site for a global community that combs cyberspace for events so strange and unusual it is often hard to believe they are taking place. These days, you don't have to go further afield than Washington , D.C.
The neo-conservatives (neocons) who gave us the "cakewalk" prediction for Iraq before the war are now plugging "a walk in the park" in Iran -- i.e., a U.S. bombing campaign to consign the mullahs' nuclear ambitions to oblivion, or at least to retard the advent of an Iranian bomb for a few years, hoping that in the interim good democrats would rise up and send the clerics and their Revolutionary Guards packing.
Two Washington-based representatives of a global Fortune 100 company told their visiting senior executive this week a bombing campaign of Iran 's nuclear facilities "is inevitable while Mr. Bush is in the White House." The incredulous CEO thought his Washington eyes and ears were overstating the case. They assured him they were deadly serious.
Leading neocon Richard Perle, who led the intellectual charge for the ill-fated invasion of Iraq , believes two B-2 bombers, each with 16 independently targeted weapons systems, could punch out Iran 's nuclear lights. No Air Force expert we could find agreed. But the Pentagon's Air Force generals believe it can be done -- and successfully -- with a much larger operation, including five nights of bombing, some 400 aim points, 75 requiring deep penetration ordnance. Time magazine estimates 1,500 such aim points, or "viable targets," related to Iran 's widely scattered nuclear development complex. The Navy, with its carrier task forces and ship-launched cruise missiles, does not share the same degree of certainty.
No one has worked more assiduously for military action than Michael Ledeen, a neocon field marshal, who writes frequently about the "horrors" of Iran 's mullahocracy. His National Review Online commentary Nov. 1 was headlined "Delay." Mr. Ledeen has grown impatient over Mr. Bush's dangerous postponement of what he considers inevitable. "If the president knows Iran is waging war on us," wrote Mr. Ledeen, "he is obliged to respond; the only appropriate question is about the method, not the substance. If he does not know, then he should remove those officials who were obliged to tell him, and get some people who will tell the truth."
The truth has become an increasingly rare commodity in Washington . Mr. Ledeen concludes the president knows the truth, but thinks he may lack the political capital to directly challenge the mullahs. More likely, Mr. Bush's thinking has changed when confronted by the intelligence community's assessment of Iran 's retaliatory capabilities. They are described as "formidable." These include mining the Strait of Hormuz , the channel for two-fifths of the world's oil traffic, which would send oil prices skyrocketing to $200 per barrel almost overnight.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia 's ambassador to the U.S. , headed his country's intelligence service for 25 years. He warns that an attack against Iran would turn "the whole Persian Gulf into an inferno of exploding fuel tanks and shot-up facilities." Earlier this month, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards test-fired dozens of missiles, including the long-range Shahab-3 (1,242 miles), Shahab-2 (cluster warhead of 1,400 bomblets), solid-fuel Zalzals, Zolfaghar73, Z-3, and SCUD-Bs, all timed to follow by two days the completion of U.S.-led allied naval maneuvers in the Gulf that Tehran described as "adventurist." Warships from Australia , Britain , France , Italy , Bahrain and the U.S. participated.
Dubbed "Great Prophet," Iran 's 10-day war games were designed "to show our deterrent and defensive power to trans-regional enemies, and we hope they will understand the message," said Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi.
Iran also has control over Hezbollah whose terrorist arm has already reached all the way to Argentina (in the mid-1990s) and whose sleeper cells, from Saudi Arabia's eastern oil fields where Shi'ites are the majority, to North America, are still feigning sleep.
Russia and China have made clear they will not be part of any tough sanction regime against Iran . They both have strong commercial ties to Iran . Tehran is paying Russia $700 million for 29 air defense missile systems. China signed a 10-year, $100 billion oil deal with Iran .
What the neocons dismiss as the "nervous nellies" of the intelligence community may have slipped in to President Bush's morning brief a subversive quote or two from conservative historian Paul Johnson, e.g., "Statesmen should never plunge into the future ... without first examining what guidance the past could supply?"
Mr. Ledeen, who acts as spokesman for Iran 's suppressed democratic forces, says, "The first step is to embrace the unpleasant fact that we are at war with Iran , and it is long past time to respond." The Iraqi debacle, along with the fading image of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower, as well as of Israel as the regional superpower, evidently persuaded President Bush to further disappoint the neocons. The Iraq Study Group's (ISG) James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton wanted neocon idol Donald Rumsfeld replaced as defense secretary before going public with their findings.
The new defense secretary, former CIA Director Robert M. Gates, a close friend of Mr. Baker, and also a member of ISG, has long favored direct talks with "Axis of Evil" charter member Iran . Mr. Baker, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Gates are now on the same wavelength. They believe bombing Iran would be an unmitigated disaster for U.S. interests the world over. The alternative is to explore a geopolitical deal with a country that has legitimate security interests.
The neocons' ideas for a walk in the Iranian park are still very much alive in Israel , whose very existence has been threatened by the mullahocracy. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will make clear to Mr. Bush today during a White House visit that Israel is not prepared to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 7:28 pm Post subject: |
| http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html
How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington and Launched a War
by Michael Lind
April 10, 2003
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon. Further, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who, in between stints in public life, would have used their connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas, or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans.
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies such as the selection rather than election of George W. Bush, and Sept. 11 the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protιgι who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neocons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots odd as it seems in the British Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox television network. His magazine, the Weekly Standard edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice president, 1989-1993) acts as a mouthpiece for defense intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-1994) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Rev. Sun Myung Moon which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghostwriter for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, and its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favorite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.
How did the neocon defense intellectuals a small group at odds with most of the U.S. foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neocons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and vice president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a northeastern moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to Southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the Southern culture.
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission in life other than following in his dad's footsteps. There are signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: Last year, veterans of the first Bush administration, including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the U.N.
It is not clear that George W fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe themselves. The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with U.S. attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than the U.S. The neocons urge war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the U.S., a far greater problem.
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaida attacks, any U.S. president would likely have gone to war to topple bin Laden's Taliban protectors in Afghanistan. But everything that the U.S. has done since then would have been different had America's 18th century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall controlled by followers of the Rev. Ian Paisley, extreme Euroskeptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish military types all determined, for a variety of strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it really is that weird.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chalmers Johnson (author of 'Blowback' and 'The Sorrows and Empire') was recently interviewed by Ian Masters as well (see www.ianmasters.org) as the interview with Michael Lind will be added there to archive in the future:
Dr. Chalmers Johnson on the rise of a militaristic Japanese leadership, supported by American neocons, and what he views as a crisis of American democracy with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Dr. Chalmers is an author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, two essential examinations of the consequences of American empire, Blowback: the costs and consequences of American empire and The Sorrows of Empire: militarism, secrecy and the end of the republic. Blowback won an American Book Award in 2001, and was re-issued in an updated version in 2004. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment. Johnson was centrally featured in the Eugene Jarecki-directed film Why We Fight, which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His forthcoming book is "Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic."
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http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html
March 24, 2003 issue
Whose War?
A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in Americas interest.
by Patrick J. Buchanan | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
