| Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 8:24 pm Post subject: Commentary: Dogs of war |
| Subject: Commentary: Dogs of war
Date: Monday, July 23, 2007
Commentary: Dogs of war
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON , July 23 (UPI) -- Republican candidate for the presidency Rudy Giuliani, the leading hawk among presidential hopefuls, has appointed Norman Podhoretz senior adviser for foreign policy.
A founding member of the neo-con movement, Podhoretz, in the June issue of Commentary magazine, called for an immediate attack on Iran . Either we bomb Iran now, or "we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin , Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then." The geopolitical label for the process is the "Islamization" of Europe, which neo-cons say is a rerun of Hitler's conquest of Europe in the 1930s and 40s.
Giuliani's eight-member foreign policy team also includes Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American expert on Shia Islam at Harvard and a fellow with both the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center ("for the development of Zionist thought"). Kramer once said the tendency by American Middle Eastern academics to neglect radical Islam as an issue was partly to blame for the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Giuliani clearly sets store in the counsel of a man who calls for "bombs away" over Iran ASAP. The Economist, arguably the world's most prestigious weekly publication, worries about those who believe -- as Podhoretz does -- "contrary to what many people assume, that (Bush) will order the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities before he leaves office 18 months hence."
John McCain's campaign is stalled with a flat tire and no spare in the trunk, but should it ever get under way again, he also has prominent neo-con support: William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, and columnist Robert Kagan. One of McCain's advisers, a former ranking member of president Reagan's administration, told this writer privately, "if we had any guts we'd nuke Iran ."
Israel 's once and possibly future prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, says "the Iranian regime is basically a messianic apocalyptic cult," and if he's right, the Economist writes in this week's cover story, "the world is teetering on the edge of a terrifying crisis. It is vital to understand that this third finale is not a nightmare dreamt up by editorial writers (and this columnist)."
"After the false intelligence that led America into Iraq ... it may seem hard to believe that America or Israel are pondering an attack on a much bigger Muslim country," says the Economist. "But they are -- and they are not mad. This time, after all, there is no question of false intelligence: The world's fears are based on capabilities that Iran itself boasts about openly. Nor would there be another invasion: This would be an attack from the air, aimed at disabling or destroying Iran 's nuclear sites. From a technical point of view, launching such an attack is well within America 's capabilities ( America has lately reinforced its carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf) and perhaps within Israel 's, too."
U.S. allies, bar Israel , dismiss such a scenario as so many bats in Uncle Sam's belfry. Iran 's retaliatory capabilities are formidable. Most of Iran 's nuclear sites are close to population centers and the first video of dead women and children would set the Middle East ablaze and unite Shia and Sunni Muslims against the United States and Israel .
Shia minorities in eastern Saudi Arabia sabotaging oil production nerve centers; a Shia majority in Bahrain, headquarters for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, turning on its Sunni royal family; thousands of Iranian rockets and missiles fired by Hezbollah into Israel; Iranian mines in the Hormuz Strait (sending oil to $200 a barrel); the activation of thousands of Iranian agents in Iraq and Afghanistan against U.S. forces; the denunciation of the Bush administration by the Iraqi government; Iraqi forces turning against their embedded U.S. advisers -- all that and a good deal more would be triggered by U.S. and/or Israeli bombs on Iran.
On the other hand, Iran 's nuclear weapons program is an existential threat to Israel . For most Israelis, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the embodiment of a second holocaust. He may not have said he wants to wipe Israel off the map, but his numerous necrological predictions about Israel 's demise, soon to be relegated to the history books, are made of the same shroud. Nikita Khrushchev also pledged to bury the West, but the Soviet leadership was deterred by America 's nuclear arsenal that would have consigned his country to oblivion. Ahmadinejad and some of the elder clerics who supervise him may not be deterred by widespread destruction. Isn't that the kind of global wrack and ruin they believe will beset the world before the 12th Imam returns to Earth to lead the world, free of apostate vermin, to peace and plenty under the banner of Islam?
Could there still be any doubt about Iran 's nuclear intentions? Does anyone really believe that a country with the world's second largest oil reserves, with production slated to increase from 2 million to 4 million barrels a day, has spent the past 22 years, with the help of Pakistan's Dr. A.Q. Khan and his black market in nuclear know-how, simply building peaceful nuclear energy capability? It taxes credulity.
The Economist still believes that "for Israel containment of a nuclear Iran would be less awful than a risky pre-emptive attack that would probably cause mayhem, strengthen the regime and merely delay the day Iran gets a bomb. Yet the whole world still has a huge interest in preventing that day from coming."
It is equally clear that once Iran goes nuclear, other regional players -- Saudi Arabia , Egypt , Turkey -- will feel compelled to follow suit "thereby entangling the Middle East in a cat's cradle of nuclear tripwires."
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Copyright 2007 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
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Rudy Giuliani named top Jewish neo-conservatives as foreign policy advisers
http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103138.html
Giuliani names Podhoretz, Kramer as advisers
Published: 07/20/2007
Rudy Giuliani named top Jewish neo-conservatives as foreign policy advisers.
The campaign for Giuliani, the former New York mayor and currently the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, distributed an article appearing this week in the Forward.
The article names as advisers Norman Podhoretz, the former Commentary editor and a hard-liner on Iran, and Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American expert on Shi'ism who stirred controversy a few years ago when he said the tendency by American Middle East academics to neglect radical Islam as an issue was in part to blame for the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Others named by Kramer on his website include Stephen Rosen, a Harvard University national security professor, and Peter Berkowitz, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia.
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Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 17:22:02 -0700
From: "Jeff Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net>
Subject: CP: Cockburn: Giuliani and the Dogs of War
"By publicly identifying Podhoretz as one of his foreign policy advisers, Giuliani is not only emphasizing his view that the United States should stay in Iraq for the long haul. He's saying that he esteems the counsel of a man who is calling for an immediate attack on Iran. In "The Case for Bombing Iran", an essay in the June edition of Commentary, Podhoretz trundled his mid-70s arsenal of calumny out of the museum, rehabbed for current conditions: "Looking at Europe today," he wailed, "we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization [a vintage neo-con slur from the Cold War years]: it has been called, rightly, Islamization." Podhoretz set for the choices in what he calls the Fourth World War. Either bomb Iran now, or "we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then."
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07212007.html
Weekend Edition
July 21 / 22, 2007
CounterPunch Diary
Giuliani and the Dogs of War
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Even as the Iraq war claims yet another casualty, in the form of Senator John McCain, another Republican sets himself up for political destruction by insisting that America, should persist in this unpopular enterprise. McCain, once hailed as his party's all-but-inevitable nominee for the presidency, is near the end, out of money and firing senior members of his campaign staff, who retaliate by denigrating those left on the sinking ship.
It's been obvious for months that the path to the White House in 2008 does not lie in endorsing Bush's disastrous enterprise. Yet McCain did so and is now having to pay the bill, voyaging to Iraq and insinuating from inside a vast security cordon, his venerable torso encased in body armor, that it was as safe to stroll around Baghdad and its suburbs as Phoenix, in his home state of Arizona. Most Americans scoffed with incredulity at this claim, one so obviously at odds with reality that CounterPunch coeditor Jeffrey St Clair speculated to me that McCain was setting the stage for a sudden turnaround on the war in the fall, saying that though he'd given Bush every chance, quitting time was here.
But, as often in life, satisfactory explanations from the pages of Machiavelli are no match for the bray of confident miscalculation. Flag-wagging isn't a vote-getter this campaign season, at least yet. Most Americans don't like the war, want the troops out, will vote for politicians who promise to get them home and punish those who don't. John McCain's treasury is empty. Money is flowing into the campaign accounts of the libertarian Republic peace candidate, Ron Paul, a remote outsider whose polling numbers shoot up on the rare occasions he can shoulder his way into the Republican debates.
Now, undeterred by McCain's impending political extinction as a the prime pro-war candidate, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is seizing the battle standard from the senator's stricken hand. Giuliani named his list of foreign policy advisers last week. This is an important political ritual, whereby political commentators can run their eyes down the list and assess at a glance what sort of headway the candidate is making in winning the support of the political establishment, starting with Henry Kissinger. Giuliani's list is heavily freighted with pro-war types, including the apex neo-con, Norman Podhoretz.
No candidate lofting tossing the name Podhoretz into the laptops of the press corps, is aiming at the peace vote. Podhoretz is former editor of the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine, the neocons' in-house journal. He's been touting war on Islam and pretty much everywhere on the planet else barring Israel ever since the mid-70s, when he worried that America would quit its support for Israel just as it slunk out of Vietnam. He denounced the Democrats as pro-Arab, pro-gay, pro-terror pinkoes and stumped for Reagan. His wife, Midge Decter, became a moving spirit in the Committee on the Present Danger, his so-in-law Elliot Abrams went to work for Reagan, plead guilty to lying to Congress about the US role in the Reagan-era shuttle of arms and money, labeled the Iran-Contras scandal. These days Elliot in the Bush White House and Norman is now at Giuliani's elbow.
By publicly identifying Podhoretz as one of his foreign policy advisers, Giuliani is not only emphasizing his view that the United States should stay in Iraq for the long haul. He's saying that he esteems the counsel of a man who is calling for an immediate attack on Iran. In "The Case for Bombing Iran", an essay in the June edition of Commentary, Podhoretz trundled his mid-70s arsenal of calumny out of the museum, rehabbed for current conditions: "Looking at Europe today," he wailed, "we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization [a vintage neo-con slur from the Cold War years]: it has been called, rightly, Islamization." Podhoretz set for the choices in what he calls the Fourth World War. Either bomb Iran now, or "we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then."
Given their track record it's not implausible to argue, as many do, that by attacking Iran at some point in the coming months Bush and Cheney will try to revive their administration's fortunes and the presently abysmal prospects of Republican candidates--not just the presidential candidate--in the 2008 elections. Even though the ordinary folk are not enthused, there's considerable bipartisan support for such an attack among the political elites.
The Israel lobby has been publicly pushing for it for over a year. Senator Joseph Lieberman recently put up a resolution in Congress stigmatizing Iran as the prime instigator of the deaths of US personnel in Iraq and such supposed Democratic liberals as California's two senators--Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--voted for it. Last week, around 70 Democrats let it be known they could not approve any plan for Iraq that didn't schedule an immediate start to withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Good for them, but that leaves two thirds of the Democrats in the House NOT supporting such a plan. Plus every Republican except Ron Paul, the only Republican in the House to vote with the 70-odd Democrats on this issue.
Giuliani--now vying with Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and the (to me) entirely unconvincing former Tennessee senator and actor Fred Thompson for the front-runner's spot on the Republican side for the presidential nomination--seems to have realised soon enough that waving the Iraqi battle standard isn't a vote-getter in the sticks. No sooner had he fronted Poddy as the Wise Man at his elbow than he also attacked Bush's strategy in Iraq, saying it was draining resources and attention from the true war on terror--which is the default option for Democratic contenders such as HRC. Staking his future on the war option, even as McCain's bier is hauled from the field, is a posture that may play well in New York and Washington, but probably not in the hinterlands of New Hampshire and Iowa, where Giuliani will have first to make his mark.
For much more click on http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07212007.html | |
