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Whose War? (Israel’s “amen corner” has plans for America to fight many wars in the Middle East.)
The American Conservative ^ | March 24, 2003 | Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on 03/11/2003 1:14:12 PM PST by quidnunc

A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.

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.

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. …

<P(The entire article is available at bookstores.) 


TOPICS: Extended News; Israel; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: demagogue; finos; iran; israel; lebanon; paleo; paleocon; paleocons; paleocontruthfile; paleolib; paleolibs; paleolibtruthfile; paleos; patbuchanan; patbuchananhatesjews; patrickbuchanan; pitchforkpat; randsconcerntrolls; waronterror
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If paleo-conservatives of Pat Buchanan's ilk aren't crypto-quasi-fascists then by God they'll pass muster until the real thing comes along!
1 posted on 03/11/2003 1:14:12 PM PST by quidnunc
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To: quidnunc
Buchanan is full of himself and full of used food.
2 posted on 03/11/2003 1:15:26 PM PST by mhking (Stay on target....stay on target...)
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To: quidnunc
He sounds like Jim Moran.
3 posted on 03/11/2003 1:16:14 PM PST by Catspaw
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To: quidnunc
Buchanan has gone so far to the anti-Israel right that the American leftists will start embracing him.
4 posted on 03/11/2003 1:17:55 PM PST by Guyin4Os
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To: quidnunc
And here I thought that Pat had read his bible....or at least enough to know who is really in the cross-hairs of the spirit of antichrist.
5 posted on 03/11/2003 1:22:48 PM PST by anniegetyourgun
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To: Guyin4Os
Guyin4Os wrote: Buchanan has gone so far to the anti Israel right that the American leftists will start embracing him.

Buchanan went to Seattle during the anti-golbalization riots a couple of years or so ago and had some kind words for the anarchist/nihilist rioters.

6 posted on 03/11/2003 1:26:02 PM PST by quidnunc (Omnis Gaul delenda est)
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To: quidnunc
Same old same old, eh Quid?
7 posted on 03/11/2003 1:27:21 PM PST by veronica
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To: quidnunc
There is a great deal of plausible truth in what he says. If Israel is our true freind then why do they sell any technological secret we give them to the Chinese?
8 posted on 03/11/2003 1:27:25 PM PST by vishnu2
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To: quidnunc
How well I recall that. He was the darling of the rioters (and a few conservative kooks) for the day.
9 posted on 03/11/2003 1:27:29 PM PST by anniegetyourgun
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To: quidnunc
Uh huh. And we're fighting Israel's wars how and where exactly?
10 posted on 03/11/2003 1:28:24 PM PST by goldstategop
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To: quidnunc
Sorry, Pat, you're still an anti-semite.
11 posted on 03/11/2003 1:30:03 PM PST by Cinnamon Girl
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To: quidnunc
The simple fact is that America and Israel share common enemies and are fighting the same fight. For those to whom Sept 11th wasn't enough of a wake-up call, one can only assume it would take nuclear devastation to get the point. It is more than likely that Israel (Jews) will be, as always, the sacrificial lamb required to scare the world out of its stupor.
12 posted on 03/11/2003 1:31:59 PM PST by ConservativeConvert
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To: vishnu2
The same reason we sell it to them.
13 posted on 03/11/2003 1:32:33 PM PST by Jimmyclyde
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To: quidnunc
Pat Buchanan and "Douchbag" seem to cling together.

What a Jew-hating bastard he is!

14 posted on 03/11/2003 1:33:06 PM PST by Redleg Duke (Stir the pot...don't let anything settle to the bottom where the lawyers can feed off of it!)
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To: Redleg Duke
LOL
15 posted on 03/11/2003 1:33:59 PM PST by Jimmyclyde
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To: Cinnamon Girl
Sorry, Pat, you're still an anti-semite.

Yep.

16 posted on 03/11/2003 1:35:00 PM PST by Wphile (I'M SO SICK OF THE IRAQ DEBATE!)
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To: quidnunc
I knew from the headline alone that this came from the fetid pen of Mr. Patrick J. Shut-the-Buch-anan. Title and author say it all -- no point in reading after the byline. Sorry, pat.
17 posted on 03/11/2003 1:35:00 PM PST by r9etb
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To: dennisw
PING
18 posted on 03/11/2003 1:36:42 PM PST by Jimmyclyde
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To: quidnunc
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

Buchanan is blind. The clash is already here. It started in the early nineties--WTC, the Cole and 9/11. The Clintonistas resolutely ignored that it was here. Buchanan firmly sides with Clinton in wanting us to keep our head in the sand.

I have no particular attachment to Israel. It does not require one to see that the Clash of Civilizations is here. The only choice we have is when we respond to it. The longer Pat Buchanan can talk us into ignoring it, the worse it will be.

19 posted on 03/11/2003 1:36:50 PM PST by ModelBreaker
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To: Cinnamon Girl
pat's an angry dude (perhaps he's had to repress his true sexuality?)and for some reason he's made israel the repository of all his hate.
i always wondered why he and his darling shelley never had a child...or for that matter adopted.
20 posted on 03/11/2003 1:37:04 PM PST by contessa machiaveli
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