----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: "mer" <•••@••.•••>
From: "MER - Mid-East Realities - MiddleEast.Org" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Conservative CIVIL WAR
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 08:55:19 -0400
CONSERVATIVE CIVIL WAR
US Flag-Waving Traditional Conservatives
Vs.
US/Israel Flag-Waving Neo-Cons + Fundamentalist Zionists
---<snip>---
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. Š 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 Š 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. Š
[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. Š Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and
Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain
engaged. ŠWe have to ensure the fulfillment of the
democratic revolution. Š 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. Š [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. Š It is going to resemble the clash of
civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. Š [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 Š 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. Š 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 Š 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 Š 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. Š 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. .
-------------------------------------
MiD-EasT RealitieS - http://www.MiddleEast.Org
Phone: (202) 362-5266
Fax: (815) 366-0800
Email: •••@••.•••
To start or stop receiving MER free and easy go to:
http://www.MiddleEast.Org/subscribe
--
============================================================================
For the movement, the relevant question is not, "Can we
work through the political system?", but rather, "Is
the political system one of the things that needs to be
fundamentally transformed?"
cyberjournal home page:
http://cyberjournal.org
"Zen of Global Transformation" home page:
http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/
QuayLargo discussion forum:
http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ShowChat/?ScreenName=ShowThreads
cj list archives:
http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=cj
newslog list archives:
http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=newslog
'Truthout' excellent news source:
http://www.truthout.org
subscribe addresses for cj list:
•••@••.•••
•••@••.•••
============================================================================
