If this is what they do, then he wants to be a neocon, too

The late comedian Jim Samuels once said, "The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody, and still nobody likes him."

I started reading the newspaper during the Munich Olympics. Since then, this is what I see when America goes out into the world: No matter how much cocaine we give away, we are weak, we are humiliated, and we are despised.

In Paris on Jan. 23, 1973, we surrendered the Vietnam War even though we had never lost on the battlefield. Mostly we were defeated by our own reporters — the "nattering nabobs of negativism," as they were aptly labeled by Vice President Spiro Agnew in September 1970.

On Nov. 4, 1979, nutcase Iranians seized 60 members of our Tehran embassy staff and held them for more than a year. On April 11, 1980, the feeble President Carter finally worked up the courage for a rescue mission. It failed, killing eight of our servicemen. The Iranians reveled gleefully at our impotence.

On Oct. 23, 1983, Hezbollah blew up 241 of our peacekeeper Marines as they slept in their barracks in Beirut. Soon thereafter, President Reagan pulled us out of Lebanon.

In the Clinton era, the president allowed the Chinese to steal the secrets to our neutron bomb while he played doctor with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.

Then came 9-11. The attack was bad enough. Worse were the politicians and "intellectuals" — George Galloway, Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag, to name three — who saw this as our comeuppance. Too bad about the dead people, they said. But America had it coming.

Not only I saw America as spineless. So did our enemies. Osama bin-Laden watched our response to terror in the 1980s and '90s and decided we were a "weak horse." Then he plotted 9-11.

Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down," says our withdrawal from Somalia in October 1993 taught the world's thugs that "killing a few American soldiers, even at a cost of more than 500 of your own fighters, is enough to spook Uncle Sam."

But now, with the successful invasion of Iraq, President Bush has destroyed the pattern. Now when the bully attacks, America hits back. And so the next time some thug gets the idea to kill a few of us, he's going to think twice, wondering what ever did happen to Saddam anyway.

In short, we are no longer a nation of cowards. This gives me immense satisfaction.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, a lot of people out there think I don't know what I believe. I'm really just a dupe of the cabal of suspicious Jewish neoconservatives who have taken over Bush's empty head.

The crackpot theory goes like this: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice — they don't run our foreign policy. The neocons do. And they run it for the benefit of Israel. The fall of the Twin Towers was their lucky break: their chance to commence the conquest of the entire Middle East.

Who are these men? The conspiracy theorists have ferreted out the names: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Eliot Abrams, David Wurmser, among others.

Two months after 9-11, the French ambassador to London, Daniel Bernard, blamed the scary state of the world on the "(expletive) little country" of Israel. "Why should we be in danger of World War III because of these people?" he complained.

This year National Public Radio asked a New York City councilman, Robert Jackson, why an anti-war resolution had stalled in the city council. He replied: "New York City is the home away from home for most Jews, and (the resolution) is not in the best interest of Israel."

Warming the heart of Pat Buchanan, newsman Tim Russert asked Mr. Perle on network TV: "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?"

A sign at an anti-war rally in March in San Francisco read: "I want YOU to die for Israel. Israel sings, 'Onward, Christian Soldiers.' "

In the same month, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, told fellow French politicians, "The hawks in the U.S. administration are in the hands of (Ariel) Sharon."

U.S. Rep. James Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, recently complained: "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this."

Let me explain something to the Morans (and morons) of the world. There is a reason America and Israel are on the same side. It's not that hard to figure out. The same people who hate Israel also hate America. And the same people who hate America also hate Israel.

Who do they hate us? Because we are successful and they are not. It's simply the most powerful of all human emotions at work: resentment.

What is the proper response to this hatred? It is to do what the neocons have advised for years: Stay strong. Hit back. Stop apologizing for being free and successful.

Thus, rather than resent the neocons, I am indebted to them. They have done a wonderful service to the country. I say, "Great work, guys!"

In fact, I want to do more than congratulate these men — I want to join them. Seriously. I want to be a Jewish neocon too. Why would I not?

Now the neocons have had their chance. And in just 575 days — the period from 9-11 to the fall of Saddam's statue on April 9 — they have made us strong and proud again.

This is why I want to join the cabal. There is a hitch, though. I cannot pass the faith test. So as soon as I am done here, I will write to Mr. Perle. I'm hoping there are membership provisions for people of varying religious status.

Michael Bowers is a member of The Star's universal copy desk. He can be reached via e-mail at mbowers@starnewspapers.com.

I found a nice compilation of Buchanan quotes, and everyone can judge from those whether proudly self-described paleocons share values with them, and with the GOP. I'm not making any of these up:

2003: "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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction 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."

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"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."

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"The principal draftsman is Richard Perle....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 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."

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"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 neoconservative allies inside his own Big Tent."

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"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."

-- "Whose War? The Loudest Clique Behind the President's Policy," The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.

2003: "Sharon was first elected on a pledge to ditch the Camp David and Barak plans. His new cabinet contains militant Zionists who consider the West Bank sacred Jewish land. They will not give it up. They will not permit Jerusalem to become the capital of a Palestinian state even if Bush, triumphant in Iraq, tells them it must be done. They will fight him as they fought his father. And they will have the War Party in their corner....

"Where will...President Bush go after Baghdad? If he seeks to pressure Israel into what the Israeli Right and the War Party think are premature and foolish negotiations, he will court a savage backlash in an election year, and fail. If he embraces the Sharon Doctrine and puts military pressure on Syria and Iran, he will do so without Tony Blair, without NATO and without U.N. backing, and he will be seen world wide as the leader of a rogue superpower."

--"After Baghdad, where do we go?" townhall.com, March 3, 2003.

2003: "Israel, recipient of $100 billion in U.S. aid, is demanding another $15 billion to hold our coat as we fight her war against Iraq."

--"With friends like these," townhall.com, February 24, 2003.

1999: "After World War II, Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders."

- A Republic, Not an Empire. P. 336.

1999: "I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first."

- Meet the Press Interview. September 12, 1999.

1991: "Even if his veto of the (loan) guarantees is overridden, he will have won high marks for his courage, and exposed congress for what it has become, a Parliament of Whores incapable of standing up for U.S. national interests, if AIPAC is on the other end of the line."

- Syndicated column, December 18, 1991

1990: In an August 25,1990, column, Buchanan criticized commentators urging military intervention in Iraq, naming Abe Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthamer and Henry Kissinger. On August 29th, he wrote the following:

"’The civilized world must win this fight,’ the editors thunder. But, if it comes to war, it will not be the ‘civilized world’ humping up that bloody road to Baghdad; it will be American kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown."

- Washington Times, August 29, 1990

1990: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

- The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990

1990: "Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory."

- McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990

1990: "That the United States would sit still for anything was brought home to the Israelis, long ago, on the third day of the Six-Day War, when Lyndon Johnson ordered a coverup of an Israeli rocket-and-machine gun attack on the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai, an attack costing the lives of 37 brave American soldiers.

When it suits them, our Israeli allies launch air strikes on Tunis, Baghdad or Beirut; they invade Lebanon; they even enlist U.S. traitors, like the Pollards, to loot the secrets of a nation that has manifested toward them an extraordinary indulgence."

- January, 1990

1999: "Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his career fighting communists, did nothing to their collaborators, sympathizers, and defenders to compare with what was done to the patriots of America First. But the acolytes of FDR won the great debate as decisively as America won the war. To this day, any who oppose U.S. commitments to fight wars in Europe or Asia, or new global entanglements, must first answer to the intimidating charge that they are nothing but ‘isolationists.’"

- A Republic, Not an Empire, P. 250

1990: "The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."

- NY Post, March 17, 1990 (from a column about the trial of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk)

1990: "Whatever Rudolph did during World War II, his quarter century of service to the United States entitles the old man to a public hearing before he goes to his grave."

- NY Post, July 14, 1990, on Arthur Rudolph, Nazi rocket scientist investigated by OSI who aided the American space program

1983: "Perhaps this endless search for Nazi war criminals, these endless re-enactments, on stage and screen, of Hitler’s concentration camps are good for the soul. To what end, however, all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime when there is scarcely a peep of protest over the prison camps, the labor camps, the concentration camps operating now in China and Siberia, in Cuba and Vietnam."

- Washington Times, August 24, 1983

1977: "Those of us in childhood during the war years were introduced to Hitler only as a caricature…Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him. But Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."

- St. Louis Globe – Democrat, Aug 25, 1977

1990: "In the late 1940’s and 1950’s…race was never a preoccupation with us, we rarely thought about it….There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The ‘Negroes’ of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."

- Right From the Beginning

1983: "Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism…The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is."

- Washington Times. November 18, 1983

1991: "David Duke is busy stealing from me. I have a mind to go down there and sue that dude for intellectual property theft."

- Manchester, NH Union Leader, December 15, 1991

1990: "Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country? Because that is our destiny if we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration rolling over our shores…..

"The Negroes of the ‘50s became the blacks of the ‘60’s; now, the ‘African-Americans’ of the 90’s demand racial quotas and set-asides, as the Democrats eagerly assent and a pandering GOP prepares to go along.

"Who speaks for the Euro-Americans, who founded the U.S.A.? …Is it not time to take America back?"

- NY Post, June 20, 1990

1991: "I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"

- This Week With David Brinkley, December 8, 1991

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