Posted on 03/15/2003 4:55:33 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London ... one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of ... Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate’s Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: “Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.”
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan’s own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. … These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
“If Stanley Hoffman can say this,” asks Kaus, “why can’t Chris Matthews?” Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and his Likud Party.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a “special closeness” to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon’s interest, is it in America’s interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.
The Neoconservatives
Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.
Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign. The heroes they invoke are Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).
All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.
Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power.
Beating the War Drums
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America’s rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic “rogue states” that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.
The War Party’s plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban, was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
Before introducing the script-writers of America’s future wars, consider the rapid and synchronized reaction of the neocons to what happened after that fateful day.
On Sept. 12, Americans were still in shock when Bill Bennett told CNN that we were in “a struggle between good and evil,” that the Congress must declare war on “militant Islam,” and that “overwhelming force” must be used. Bennett cited Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China as targets for attack. Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama’s terrorists. How did Bennett know which nations must be smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target list, calling for U.S. air strikes on “terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt.” Yet, not one of Bennett’s six countries, nor one of these five, had anything to do with 9/11.
On Sept. 15, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, “Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.” Why Iraq? Because, Wolfowitz argued in the War Cabinet, while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain … Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.”
On Sept. 20, forty neoconservatives sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol, and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signers’ support, the president was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam. Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush, “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror. Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done? Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.
President Bush had been warned. He was to exploit the attack of 9/11 to launch a series of wars on Arab regimes, none of which had attacked us. All, however, were enemies of Israel. “Bibi” Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, like some latter-day Citizen Genet, was ubiquitous on American television, calling for us to crush the “Empire of Terror.” The “Empire,” it turns out, consisted of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and “the Palestinian enclave.”
Nasty as some of these regimes and groups might be, what had they done to the United States?
The War Party seemed desperate to get a Middle East war going before America had second thoughts. Tom Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) called for an immediate invasion of Iraq. “Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. … [T]he larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over,” he wrote.
Donnelly was echoed by Jonah Goldberg of National Review: “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.”
Goldberg endorsed “the Ledeen Doctrine” of ex-Pentagon official Michael Ledeen, which Goldberg described thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” (When the French ambassador in London, at a dinner party, asked why we should risk World War III over some “shitty little country”—meaning Israel—Goldberg’s magazine was not amused.)
Ledeen, however, is less frivolous. In The War Against the Terror Masters, he identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia. … Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged. …We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution. … Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American mission,” Ledeen goes on to define America’s authentic “historic mission”:
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. … [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.
To the Weekly Standard, Ledeen’s enemies list was too restrictive. We must not only declare war on terror networks and states that harbor terrorists, said the Standard, we should launch wars on “any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon. The coming war “is going to spread and engulf a number of countries. … It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. … [I]t is possible that the demise of some ‘moderate’ Arab regimes may be just round the corner.”
Norman Podhoretz in Commentary even outdid Kristol’s Standard, rhapsodizing that we should embrace a war of civilizations, as it is George W. Bush’s mission “to fight World War IV—the war against militant Islam.” By his count, the regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘“friends” of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority. Bush must reject the “timorous counsels” of the “incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell,” wrote Podhoretz, and “find the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated” Islamic world. As the war against al-Qaeda required that we destroy the Taliban, Podhoretz wrote,
We may willy-nilly find ourselves forced … to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority). I can even [imagine] the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. … I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.
Podhoretz credits Eliot Cohen with the phrase “World War IV.” Bush was shortly thereafter seen carrying about a gift copy of Cohen’s book that celebrates civilian mastery of the military in times of war, as exhibited by such leaders as Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion.
A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction thus includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and “militant Islam.”
Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America. In February 2003, Sharon told a delegation of Congressmen that, after Saddam’s regime is destroyed, it is of “vital importance” that the United States disarm Iran, Syria, and Libya.
“We have a great interest in shaping the Middle East the day after” the war on Iraq, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. After U.S. troops enter Baghdad, the United States must generate “political, economic, diplomatic pressure” on Tehran, Mofaz admonished the American Jews.
Are the neoconservatives concerned about a war on Iraq bringing down friendly Arab governments? Not at all. They would welcome it.
“Mubarak is no great shakes,” says Richard Perle of the President of Egypt. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq—which he predicted would be a “cakewalk”—might upend governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah Marshall of Washington Monthly, “All the better if you ask me.”
On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense Policy Board. In a briefing that startled Henry Kissinger, Murawiec named Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” of the United States.
Washington should give Riyadh an ultimatum, he said. Either you Saudis “prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including the Saudi intelligence services,” and end all propaganda against Israel, or we invade your country, seize your oil fields, and occupy Mecca.
In closing his PowerPoint presentation, Murawiec offered a “Grand Strategy for the Middle East.” “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize.” Leaked reports of Murawiec’s briefing did not indicate if anyone raised the question of how the Islamic world might respond to U.S. troops tramping around the grounds of the Great Mosque.
What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.
Washington Times editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave calls this the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine.” “Washington’s ‘Likudniks,’” he writes, “have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn into office.”
The neocons seek American empire, and Sharonites seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely. And though neocons insist that it was Sept. 11 that made the case for war on Iraq and militant Islam, the origins of their war plans go back far before.
“Securing the Realm”
The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop Jackson, who, in 1970, was overheard on a federal wiretap discussing classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli Embassy. In Jews and American Politics, published in 1974, Stephen D. Isaacs wrote, “Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests.” In 1983, the New York Times reported that Perle had taken substantial payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.
In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In it, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser urged Bibi to ditch the Oslo Accords of the assassinated Yitzak Rabin and adopt a new aggressive strategy:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.
In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish “the principle of preemption,” has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.
In his own 1997 paper, “A Strategy for Israel,” Feith pressed Israel to re-occupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control,” though “the price in blood would be high.”
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted joint war plans for Israel and the United States “to fatally strike the centers of radicalism in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should … broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a crisis, for as he wrote, “Crises can be opportunities.” Wurmser published his U.S.-Israeli war plan on Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9/11.
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes:
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the power and reputation of Israel.
Right down the smokestack.
Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, in late February,
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials … that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use military action because “diplomacy is failing.” Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged, they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. Four years before 9/11, the neocons had Baghdad on their minds.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, a startling document was leaked from the office of Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post called it a “classified blueprint intended to help ‘set the nation’s direction for the next century.’” The Wolfowitz Memo called for a permanent U.S. military presence on six continents to deter all “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Containment, the victorious strategy of the Cold War, was to give way to an ambitious new strategy designed to “establish and protect a new order.”
Though the Wolfowitz Memo was denounced and dismissed in 1992, it became American policy in the 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS) issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002. Washington Post reporter Tim Reich describes it as a “watershed in U.S. foreign policy” that “reverses the fundamental principles that have guided successive Presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, writes of the NSS that he marvels at “its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.”
In confronting America’s adversaries, the paper declares, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” It warns any nation that seeks to acquire power to rival the United States that it will be courting war with the United States:
[T]he president has no intention of allowing any nation to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.
America must reconcile herself to an era of “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy,” Robert Kagan instructs. But this Pax Americana the neocons envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes called “permanent war for permanent peace.”
The Munich Card
As President Bush was warned on Sept. 20, 2001, that he will be indicted for “a decisive surrender” in the war on terror should he fail to attack Iraq, he is also on notice that pressure on Israel is forbidden. For as the neoconservatives have played the anti-Semitic card, they will not hesitate to play the Munich card as well. A year ago, when Bush called on Sharon to pull out of the West Bank, Sharon fired back that he would not let anyone do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain had done to the Czechs. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy immediately backed up Ariel Sharon:
With each passing day, Washington appears to view its principal Middle Eastern ally’s conduct as inconvenient—in much the same way London and Paris came to see Czechoslovakia’s resistance to Hitler’s offers of peace in exchange for Czech lands.
When former U.S. NATO commander Gen. George Jouwlan said the United States may have to impose a peace on Israel and the Palestinians, he, too, faced the charge of appeasement. Wrote Gaffney,
They would, presumably, go beyond Britain and France’s sell-out of an ally at Munich in 1938. The “impose a peace” school is apparently prepared to have us play the role of Hitler’s Wehrmacht as well, seizing and turning over to Yasser Arafat the contemporary Sudetenland: the West Bank and Gaza Strip and perhaps part of Jerusalem as well.
Podhoretz agreed Sharon was right in the substance of what he said but called it politically unwise to use the Munich analogy.
President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservatives allies inside his own Big Tent.
Yet, if Bush cannot deliver Sharon there can be no peace. And if there is no peace in the Mideast there is no security for us, ever—for there will be no end to terror. As most every diplomat and journalist who travels to the region will relate, America’s failure to be even-handed, our failure to rein in Sharon, our failure to condemn Israel’s excesses, and our moral complicity in Israel’s looting of Palestinian lands and denial of their right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
Let us conclude. The Israeli people are America’s friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help them secure these rights. As a nation, we have made a moral commitment, endorsed by half a dozen presidents, which Americans wish to honor, not to permit these people who have suffered much to see their country overrun and destroyed. And we must honor this commitment.
But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, U.S. interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the Sharon regime as “America’s best friend.”
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behavior of the Israeli regime has been Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad, had agents in Egypt blow up U.S. installations to make it appear the work of Cairo, to destroy U.S. relations with the new Nasser government. During the Six Day War, Israel ordered repeated attacks on the undefended USS Liberty that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 and included the machine-gunning of life rafts. This massacre was neither investigated nor punished by the U.S. government in an act of national cravenness.
Though we have given Israel $20,000 for every Jewish citizen, Israel refuses to stop building the settlements that are the cause of the Palestinian intifada. Likud has dragged our good name through the mud and blood of Ramallah, ignored Bush’s requests to restrain itself, and sold U.S. weapons technology to China, including the Patriot, the Phoenix air-to-air missile, and the Lavi fighter, which is based on F-16 technology. Only direct U.S. intervention blocked Israel’s sale of our AWACS system.
Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back to Israel as a national hero.
Do the Brits, our closest allies, behave like this?
Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives’ agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect.
There's no quicker way to turn conservatives into a bunch of snarling wolves than to mention his name.
Whatever he wrote is immediately tossed out the window, attacks & insults follow shortly thereafter.
I still remember some of the primary battle flamewars surrounding him. Man alive, I have never seen such hate for anyone as I have towards Pat Buchannan.
He rivals Bill Clinton in this department.
Have you talked to any Iraqi refugees lately? They've been begging us to do this for 6 years. What do you think got Clinton involved in 1998? Either way, though, when a dictator kills 2 million of his own people, invades two neighbors, shoots at US planes enforcing safe-zones, defies every order to stand down, and uses revenues specifically ear-marked for food and medicine to build palaces and forbidden weapons, we don't have to wait to hear their tortured pleas for mercy. We have substantial certainty that they are screaming from their cells. (Or do you wait to extinguish a neighbor's burning home until after you hear his kids crying for help?)
Stability in the Middle East? We're infidels; we're going to attack muslims, in a muslim country, surrounded by muslim countries, we're going to bomb and kill muslims, muslim women, muslim children, we're going send our infidel military to occupy muslim cities and villages and (you can not convince them otherwise) muslim mosques, and they have no doubt we are going to impose our infidel values and morals on muslims.
Gee, we liberated Kuwait, and they cheereed. We liberated the Afghani people from the Taliban, and they cheered. We've been feeding the starving of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, and they are happy to get it... and they see who really cares about them. When your child is starving before your eyes, and some jack-ass says it's Allah's will while his enemy gives your child food, who do you really want to lead you?
A lowered threat of access to WMDs by terrorists regimes? Negligable. Hussein would have supplied these weapons already if he had wanted to.
True, but we might as well get whatever's left, to minimize the number, and make it a finite supply.
Assinate Hussein and nobody will care, but war on Iraq and the whole region will feel that lash.
*BIG smile* Why, yes, that would be the case, now wouldn't it? HMPH! Whatever shall we do about THAT?!?
In case you hadn't noticed, it isn't only Iraq's leadership who has been organizing "Death to America" rallies, subsidizing terrorists, giving terrorists cover from prosecution, giving terrorists cover for training, executing/arresting/burning Christians/Jews/Hindus, and starving their own people. If we have to make a few more moves while we happen to have the tools in place, so be it! Iran's mullahs should fall easily, since half of the nation has been marching and protesting their rule for years. Syria's leadership will be easy to topple, and the infestations of terrorist camps are numerous (and this will also free Lebanon, now occupied for 25 years against UN resolutions). Saudi Arabia and Egypt... I can only hope they attack us, because they are the sources of most terrorists (including all 19 WTC mass murderers), but they are usually slick enough to make the just right diplomatic moves to stay alive. Jordan has been reasonable and non-offensive for years, and would be a great candidate for providing a ruling structure for the region. Turkey has been struggling with a mostly-Muslim population in a mostly-Western geo-political region, and should be left to continue that path. Pakistan... Muslim and nuclear... I'd sleep easier if they weren't in The Club, but they've shown that they are not willing to use or sell them thus far, which is all that can be asked of any member.
Wait until a month after the war, then see if you can say that. Early indications from the Spanish are that there is proof.
has never used WMD's on any but his own.
He used them on Iranian troops in their war.
Old "Uncle Adolph" possessed the finest military machine in the known world at that time
No, it wasn't "known at the time", and the League of Nations was bent on keeping it from being so.
Saddam has nothing that could compare, and is a threat to the Middle East, which has not our vital interests at stake.
Oil is a nationally critical resource.
Get Osama? You bet! But Saddam is the wrong move at the wrong time. This little venture will end up costing us more than we can imagine.
Exactly how would it cost more than going after Osama? The Iraqi troops are not going to inflict any great losses. The terrorists are the only wildcards to worry about, and they would respond the same if we went after Osama alone.
Just look to antiquity to see what fate befalls every empire that attempted to enforce it's will upon the globe.
Gee, a few hundred years or peace, and then they're gone. What a horrible fate.
As far as Israel is concerned, isn't $3 billion in aid yearly enough? Do we have to bleed our selves' white for them also?
Bleed ourselves white?? Desert Storm took less then 400 of our troops. Apparently, you don't have much of a clue what true national sacrifice is. In WWII, we lost 300,000 (out of 150 million), and nobody dared to say that we "bled ourselves white" (especially with similarly-populated Russia sacrificing 25 million total lives, 9 million military personnel, and a siginifcant part of that number just to stop Hitler at Stalingrad)
Either Pat Buchanan has not read the history of Charles Lindbergh's involvement with America First -- and of that organization -- or he has read it but failed to pay attention.
The same comment, of course, applies to you. There are dozens of books on the subject of the America Firsters. For that matter, such information can be obtained on the Internet with a few clicks of a mouse.
Well Billybob, as you should know, PJB is extremely well versed in American history. So I'm sure he's quite familiar with Charles Lindberg and the America First Committee. But just so that others may know of your biases, the libertarians at The Future of Freedom Foundation have provided a fairly objective analysis of that organization's role in our history.
The America First Committee
by Sheldon Richman, April 1995One of the most remarkable episodes in American history was the spontaneous and widespread opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's obvious attempts to embroil the United States in the European war that broke out in 1939. That opposition was centered in the America First Committee. In modern accounts of the war period, the committee is either ignored or maligned as a pro-fascist, anti-Semitic organization. It was nothing of the kind.
The America First Committee had its origins at Yale University Law School in 1940, where R. Douglas Stuart Jr. and other students began circulating a petition with the intention of establishing a national organization of college students opposed to intervention in the European war. (This account is based on historian Justus D. Doenecke's highly valuable book, In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-Interventionist Movement of 1940-1941 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee , Hoover Institution, 1990.) As an undergraduate student at Princeton, Stuart had concluded that America's intervention in World War I had cost the nation dearly. He did not want the mistake repeated. In his initial organizing efforts, he was joined by Gerald R. Ford, who would become president of the United States in 1974, and Potter Stewart, who would be named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958. (Before long, Ford would resign from the committee for fear of losing his job as assistant football coach at Yale.) The petition was their response to President Roosevelt's series of actions that violated America's neutrality. "We demand that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat," the petition stated.
What had Roosevelt done to this point? When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 and Britain and France declared war, Roosevelt affirmed America's neutrality. "Within three weeks, however," writes Doenecke, "he urged Congress to remove an arms embargo that had been one of the linchpins of U.S. neutrality legislation." Congress acceded. That erosion of neutrality spurred the Yale students, who quickly sought supporters outside the ranks of college students.
Meetings with some Chicago businessmen led to plans for a large-scale organization. In July 1940, General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck, agreed to become acting chairman. (Wood had earlier supported the New Deal, but then broke with Roosevelt. He was less anti-interventionist than others in the new committee.) In late August, the group adopted the name the America First Committee (AFC).
In its first public statement (September 4, 1940), the AFC enunciated four precepts:
- The United States must build an impregnable defense for America;
- No foreign powers, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America;
- American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war;
- "Aid short of war" weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.
The statement went on to specify four objectives. First, the AFC would "bring together all Americans, regardless of possible differences on other matters, who see eye-to-eye on these principles." Parenthetically it added, "This does not include Nazis, Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interests of any other nation above those of our own." Second, the AFC would "urge Americans to keep their heads amid the rising hysteria in times of crisis." Third, it would "provide sane leadership" for the majority of Americans who were opposed to intervention. Fourth, it would "register this opinion with the President and the majority of Congress."
The Committee attracted some prestigious members or sympathizers from business, journalism, politics, publishing, and the arts. Its best-known member was aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. (He was unfairly accused of anti-Semitism as a result.) They did not all agree on every issue. Some sympathizers would decline to join or were forced to resign, apparently under pressure from interventionists. AFC member and actress Lillian Gish said she was blacklisted from film and theater and offered a $65,000 movie contract if she resigned.
It seems that government snooping and the Hollywood blacklist did not begin as anticommunist tactics — Roosevelt had the FBI investigate the AFC.
Not everyone was welcome in the AFC. Among the national committee members who were ousted were builder and American Olympic Association president Avery Brundage, who was suspected of having Nazi sympathies, and Henry Ford, who had previously espoused anti-Semitism.
One of the most important members was John T. Flynn, chairman of the New York chapter and a national committeeman. Flynn was a prominent muckraking journalist who exposed big business's connections to the New Deal. For example, he demonstrated that the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (which began under Herbert Hoover) was little more than a bailout scheme for big banks and railroads. He was a columnist for the New Republic until it dropped him because of his anti-interventionist position. No one was more vigilant about keeping fascists out of the AFC than Flynn. At one huge public rally in New York City, he identified a local fascist in the crowd and told him he was not welcome.
The audience expressed such hostility to the man that the police surrounded him for his own protection. Despite Flynn's efforts, some fascists and anti-Semites managed to participate in the committee. Flynn went on to write an extremely important book, As We Go Marching , one of the best discussions of the nature of German and Italian fascism and its similarity to the New Deal.
In its day-to-day business, the AFC challenged Roosevelt's and the Congress's war-related measures (Lend-Lease, the destroyers-for-bases exchange with Britain, the occupation of Iceland, the Atlantic Charter, aid to the Soviet Union, the extension of the draft) and rebutted each argument made for direct or indirect involvement in the war. In pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and public meetings, AFC spokesmen rejected the interventionists' case that a German victory or Japan's conquests would put the United States at an economic disadvantage or lead to war later.
The AFC issued a series of talking points for its speakers bureau — short answers to common questions about America and the war. For example, to the question, "What, strictly on the basis of our own national interests, should our part [in the war] be?" AFC responded:
It is difficult, of course, to define our national interests, but it is always safe to assume that our chief national interest is the maintenance of our democracy and the well-being of our own American people. . . . Since experience has taught us that democracy vanishes in wartime, it would seem that the surest way to keep our form of government is to avoid involvement. We should also seek an adequate national defense to make sure that we can maintain our territorial integrity in the event we are attacked by a foreign power.
To the question (often asked today), "Isn't it part of our responsibility as a world power to take a hand in settling problems that menace world peace and security?" the AFC said:
We have no responsibilities that our people do not wish to undertake. We have no international commitments, agreed to by the people or their representatives, outside this hemisphere. Even if we did, it would not be a signal for going to war everytime [ sic ] there was one. Americans naturally wish security and peace for the rest of the world, but it is not entirely within their powers to bring these things about.
Other publications refuted the claims that a victorious Hitler could fight a large-scale war against the United States in the Western Hemisphere and that the United States could be strangled by foreign control of raw materials. To that still often-heard allegation (consult the recent Persian Gulf War propaganda), the AFC noted that "since we are the greatest raw material market in the world, [Hitler] would only be cutting off his nose to spite his face if he successfully withheld raw materials from us."
On December 7, 1941, after prolonged U.S. economic warfare, Japan attacked the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet at Hawaii. On December 8, Congress declared war on Japan. On December 11, the national committee of the America First Committee voted to disband the organization. The statement issued to the public stated:
Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided. No good purpose can now be served by considering what might have been, had our objectives been attained.
The national committee expressed hope that prosecution of the war would not interfere with "the fundamental rights of American citizens" and that "secret treaties committing America to imperialistic aims or vast burden in other parts of the world shall be scrupulously avoided."
Its final words urged its followers to fully support the war effort: "The time for military action is here."
Sheldon Richman is senior editor at the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., and the author of Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families , published by The Future of Freedom Foundation.
OK, Billybob. At your suggestion, I've provided proof of your superficial ad hominem attack. Such tactics were practiced even back in the '30s by the Roosevelt New Deal Socialists, Communists, Trade Unionists and Wilsonian globalists. It's basicly the same smear tactics that's employed by the leftwing 'Rats of today, the Klintons, Daschles, Jesse Jacksons, etc. etc.
You've picked a filthy bed to sleep in, Billybob-bob.
But that was your choice.
The liberal smear machine is quite adept at character assassination and will attack anybody who threatens their agenda. They're doing their best to sink their fangs into Miguel Estrada right now, because he's not Hispanic enough for them. The "high-tech lynnching" of Clarence Thomas is also infamous, as was the demonization of Newt Gingrich.
The AFC favored strengthening of OUR OWN neglected military defense capabilities rather than financing the agenda of foreign nations.
Furthermore, by tactically aligning themselves with the progressive and communist anti-war movement, they strengthened and gave cover to these groups.
So called "progressives" and communists were aligned with Roosevelt. They were advocates of supplying foreign aid to the utopian workers paradise of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
But thanks for coming forth and demonstrating the absolute idiocy of liberal revisionism.
So called "progressives" and communists were aligned with Roosevelt. They were advocates of supplying foreign aid to the utopian workers paradise of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
Bald lie. Note the years, here. From 1939 until June 1941, the Nazis and Soviets were carving up Europe together. The Commies were vocal anti-war andti-military activists right up to the invasion of the Soviet Union.
As for Progressives, they were part of the reason that in 1939, our military was not in the top 5.
But, if you want to be the one engaging in revisionism because it makes you feel self-righteous, go ahread.
Southern Senators had a variety of reasons for opposing Roosevelt. After all, in addition to being a socialist, he was a yankee from New York. And with the country still in the grips of the Great Depression, they had no reason to support fiscally irresponsible expenditures that would primarily benefit the industrialized northern states.
From 1939 until June 1941, the Nazis and Soviets were carving up Europe together.
No, The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact stated that both countries would not start war with each other and that they would not join an alliance with each other. The part where Stalin and Hitler had agreed to "carve up Europe" was kept secret from the world, holding out hope for some that Stalin could be persuaded to enter the war against Germany.
As for Progressives, they were part of the reason that in 1939, our military was not in the top 5.
As mentioned previously, the United States was still in the grips of the Great Depression, and had suffered an economic downturn as recently as 1937. If anything, they would have favored allocation of resources to social welfare programs and were NOT alligned with AFC objectives to strengthen our domestic military defense.
Face the facts, international interventionism, socialism, welfare, etc. etc. are all concepts with roots in Wilson/Roosevelt northeast liberal elitism. There is absolutely no way you can spin the facts to deny that truth.
Also note that the first article of America First was that it would not include any "fascists, communists,..." or others whose first allegiance was to something "other than this nation." If you doubt that Nazis and communists were deeply involved in AF, together with their money, you haven't read your history of the time -- from a non-biased source.
If you want to stick up for America First, why not go whole hog and stick up for Adolf Hitler? As for being relevant to America in the 21st century, stick with reality, or stick with Pat. It's your choice.
Congressman Billybob
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.