Pat Buchanan, the former US Presidential candidate and a prominent member of the US Republican Par- ty, has in an extraordinary article in the March 24, 2003 issue of the American Conservative expased what many of you will have suspect- ed: this war against irag has precious little to do with liberating the people of Irag from Saddam but a lot to do with securing the interests of Israel and its friends. (http:// www.amconmag.com/ 03_24 ¢ over himl anchor Whose War?). In a rare moment in US journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle:
“Can you assure American viewers. that we ‘are in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of lsrael?”
ISRAELI CONNECTION
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firelight, our neo- conservative (the name assumed by the Jewish lobby) 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 mainly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so. A passionate attachment to Israel is a key tenet of neo- conservatism. –
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”.
CRITICS CALLED ANTI-SEMITE
Since lsrael’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.
Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith are members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration, says 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 the Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites).
When the cold war ended, these neoconservatives (Neo-Cons) 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 US 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 scriptwriters of America’s future wars, consider the rapid and synchronized reaction of the Neo-Cons 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 Bennetti know which nations must be smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
ULTIMATUM TO BUSH
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target list. calling for US 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 Beb Woodward’s Bush at War, “Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify a US attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan”. Why Irag? Because, Wolfowitz argued in the war Cabinet, while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. Irag was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable”.
On Sept.20, 40 Neo-Cons sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennet, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick. Perle, Kristol and the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signer’s support, the president was told, he must – target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iraq 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 one 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.
PERLE AS THE CHIEF VILLAIN
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 TV, calling for us to crush the “empire of terror. The “empire” turns out, consisted of Hamas, Hezbollah, lran, Irag, and the Palestinian enslave.
Nasty as some of these regimes and —groups might be, what had they done to the US?
What these Neo-Cons 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.
The Neo-Cons seek American. empire and Sharonette’s seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely. And though Neo-Cons 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. The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop Jackson.
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 reestablish “”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 reoccupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control” though “the price in blood would be high.”
ANTI – SEMITIC CARD
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes: The radical zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small, 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-Cons is the power and reputation of Israel.
As the Neo-Cons 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.
If Bush cannot support 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 Palesiinian lands and denial of their right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
US and Israel interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, US interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the Sharon regime as “America’s best friend”.
INDIFADA
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behaviour of the Israeli regime has been Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad, had agents in Egypt blow up US installations to make it appear the work of Cairo, to destroy US 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 US 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 US 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 US intervention blocked Israel’s sale of our AWACS system.
