Speaking of Condi Rice, I am reading the superb new biography, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, by Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post. On page 242, in describing Rice’s shifting rationales for engagement in the Middle East, Kessler states the following:
The invasion of Iraq had been promoted in part as a way to bring democracy to the region and help Israel. Now she argued that because the turmoil in Iraq had led to the rise of Iran, the collective fear of the Sunni world would make Arabs more willing to strike a deal with Israel…
This is shocking. If the Iraq war was seen as a way to help Israel, as I believe its neocon architects constructed and sold it in the back rooms of thinktanks, this program was never made public to the American people. If it was "promoted" as such, as Kessler asserts, it was promoted in quiet and oblique ways, or by hints, or in code (for instance when Tom Friedman said it was a good thing to stop the suicide bombers in Tel Aviv pizzerias, or when Tom Lantos likened Saddam to Hitler). If Iraq had been "promoted" to the American people in that fashion, they surely wouldn’t have wanted their sons and daughters risking their lives to prevent suicide bombers in the Jewish state, let alone spending billions on the effort.
Kessler’s statement is most telling about Washington journalism. Journalists all know that what Kessler is saying is the case, but they cannot explore this "promotion" openly. There should be lengthy investigations of this agenda, and massive exposes. But of course no newspaper will go near it, in part because they are themselves implicated in the catastrophe of judgment, and Walt and Mearsheimer are tarred in the Post and the Times and the New Yorker for saying this was how the war went forward. This is in the end a journalistic tragedy. Journalists license politicians; if an idea is in the news, a politician feels safe picking it up. And so the most important debate a democracy can undertake–a presidential campaign–hums along without a mention of the scandal.
From the original LRB Mearsheimer/Walt Israel Lobby essay:
"According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
In other words, the whole Iraq war was a scam perpetrated against the American people by the new Pharisees: The Washington Establishment and the Israel lobby. Some things never change.
Phil, you want to sink Obama's campaign?
This man is already hated by the Israel-firsters, and any news where he does not grovel towards AIPAC and shows a spark of even-handedness and fairness MUST be stomped out immediately.
I foresee Obama making a marketing blitz of pro-Israel and pro-AIPAC activities, with speeches, appearances etc etc.
"If the Iraq war was seen as a way to help Israel, as I believe its neocon architects constructed and sold it in the back rooms of thinktanks, this program was never made public to the American people."
The whole sentence above, except take out the first word: "if".
I was toying with writing a blog post that the whole Iraq war (as is the whole "lets get Iran" hullabaloo now) is all about what's good for Israel, but never could get to it.
To me it is blatantly obvious, as the Office of Special Plans and Feith were actively working hand in hand with Israeli Mossad:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
"The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship with Michael Grogan and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party"
The Israeli agents of influence in the American government gave each government agency what it wanted to hear. So, the non-Jewish neocons got the fairy tale that Iraq after liberation will be a free market paradise, the Colin Powell's of the world got the "we are the liberators and besides, they have WMD" spiel, etc etc.
The net effect of the war was to tie USA, and following that country's example NATO member countries, on the side of Israel against worldwide moslems in a "clash of civilization" – look at UK, Poland, etc etc.
It was basically to involve USA in the global Israel (Jewish) vs the (worldwide) moslem political forces.
It is so blatant, so obvious, that it simply boggles the mind that there is no article on a mainstream blog/newspaper that has touched it.
The "war on terror", in which the USA (and less and less other countries as time goes on) are stuck in, fighting Arabs and moslem interests around the world, is AIPAC's greatest success.
I will now get my conspiracy on – feel free to laugh at this post/delete it; whatever.
Remember the Madrid bombing in March 2004? They happened 3 days before Spain's general elections. The election was between a party that supported the Spanish participation in the "war on terror", the Partido Popular and its rivals, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party.
To help the Spanish voters vote for the war party, a bombing was staged in Madrid to massacre Spanish civilians, blamed on Al Kaida, and the hope was that the Spaniards would be even more tightly bound to the whole "war on terror" and "clash of civilizations".
In fact, the opposite has happened, and PP – the war party – lost the election.
I firmly believe that al Kaida had nothing whatsoever to do with the 2004 Madrid bombings, and it was a desperation driven black op to spur public opinion against the al Kaida et al and keep them in the war.
This has worked rather well in the UK for a while, when London was bombed by "parties unknown". It did not work in Spain, and I believe the operation was undertaken because the polls showed the war party going to a HUGE defeat anyway, so why not try to keep Spain in Iraq and an active participant in the "war on terror" by an "al Kaida" bombing. It was worth a shot.
Again, feel free to laugh about it, delete this post – whatever. It is simply what I believe happened.
I'll try to scrounge up a blog post about this issue later, hopefully with more resources lending some credence to my theory.
"And so the most important debate a democracy can undertake–a presidential campaign–hums along without a mention of the scandal."
In the 2004 presidential campaign America had just seen the most powerful lobby in Washington indicted for espionage following a five-year FBI investigation. It was not mentioned once in any of the debates or at any time in the campaign by either candidate. In fact, attendance by all our politicians at AIPAC's annual convention that year was as strong as ever. The only thing that changed that year was that reportedly "Hatikva" was not sung at its closing.
(I don't know what has happened at the more recent conventions, but I assume they've gone back to the old custom now that the smoke has cleared.)
It sure doesn't say much for the majority goy population of the USA, not for the fourth estate and the USA's vaunted First Amendment.
As George W. Bush heads into his last, lame-duck year as president, the postmortems have already begun. And in the eyes of most of the pundits who have already begun shoveling dirt on the legacy of the 43rd president, there's little doubt about the chief culprits for the disasters of the last years: the neoconservatives.
Regardless of its origins, the term is now an all-purpose term of art to describe a group of advocates of an aggressive policy against Islamist terrorism and support for the State of Israel. Their supposedly nefarious influence on the Bush administration is an article of faith for those who see them as authors of all that is wrong about American foreign policy.
Indeed, the dust jacket of Jacob Heilbrunn's recent book on them, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, screams that they are "the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history" and a "tight-knit cabal that ensnared the Bush administration." The text of Heilbrunn's scathing tome doesn't quite live up to that level of hysteria, but the fact that the publishers felt free to throw such words around show how widely reviled anyone who can be labeled a "neocon" is these days.
INDEED, A founding father of neoconservatism who is still an active force on the scene, former Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz, has gotten a full measure of scorn from most of the chattering classes for his recent book World War IV. In the view of his many critics, Podhoretz merely follows the logic of past neocon blunders in the Middle East and calls for an all-out Western effort to combat "Islamofascism." But the chorus of neocon-bashers see the attempt on the part of Podhoretz to confront Iran and to preempt its effort to attain nuclear weapons as nothing short of insane. The recent release of the US government's dubious National Intelligence Estimate, which appeared to debunk the idea that Iran is pursuing nukes merely adds to the sense among those who write about the movement that the obsessions of the neocons are based on fantasies.
Heilbrunn goes into great detail about the Jewish intellectual origins of the movement. The fact that many of the most famous and most influential neocons, such as senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick or William Bennett, were not Jewish is merely a detail.
For the author, as well as other even more extreme commentators on the subject, neoconservatism is an idea rooted in Jewish insecurity left over from the Holocaust, which seeks to impose a moral clarity on a world more aptly illustrated in shades of gray than in the stark black-and-white of the neocons.
Indeed, for writers like Slate. com's Timothy Noah, who wrote in The New York Times recently that "to be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler," the obsession with avoiding a repeat of Munich is an absurdity.
Thus, even Heilbrunn cannot escape from an obsession with America's Israel policy. While he concedes that neoconservatives, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, see the interests of the two democracies as largely congruent, their devotion to Israel's survival is, in his view, a fatal flaw that's leading us astray. As Heilbrunn writes, "none of the Democratic candidates [for president in 2008] have uttered even a mild word of criticism of Israel." He adds ruefully that "this, too, must be counted as neoconservative success."
The point of the anti-neocon narrative is that the verdict of history, as written in the dust of the quagmire in Iraq, is that the neocons were wrong – wrong about Iraq; wrong about Iran; wrong about the nature of the threat from the Islamists; wrong about identifying Israel's interests with those of America; wrong even about their earlier warnings about the Soviets.
YET EVEN when we discard the allegations of conspiracies that have been put about by foes of Israel, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the authors of The Israel Lobby, the problem with these critiques is that the verdict of history is by no means as definitive as the neocon critics would have us believe.
After all, neoconservatism gained notice in the 1970s specifically because the neocon rejection of the notion that appeasement of Soviet communism was either effective or sensible in the long run was entirely correct. Neocon intellectuals helped rouse an America mired in memories of Vietnam to reject the détentist policies of the "realists" of that era.
Similarly, are the neocons today wrong about the threat from the Islamists, and the need to spread support for democracy in the Arab and Islamic world? If some perceive would-be Hitlers – like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Hamas allies, as well as al-Qaida operatives in Iraq and elsewhere – as being a clear and present danger to the West, can it be credibly asserted that this characterization is false?
It is a fact that the execution of Bush's goals in Iraq was often as incompetent as its response to Hurricane Katrina. The goal of transforming the region via democracy was surely too ambitious. But that didn't mean the stakes there were not worth fighting for. Indeed, the recent improvement in Iraq – once better military leadership and strategies were substituted for faulty ones – shows that defeat is nowhere near as certain as some thought a few months ago.
Moreover, what exactly do the critics of the neocons offer as an alternative to dealing with the threat of the Islamists? Their answer is a combination of a return to the old "realism" that dominated the failed policies of previous administrations, which left America stuck backing unpopular authoritarian Arab regimes, appeasing Iran, and trying to force a peace between Israel and the Palestinians that the Arabs don't want.
With the "realists" now taking back control of foreign policy in Bush's last months, does anyone really believe that more pressure on the Israelis or a rapprochement with the mullahs in Iran would yield peace or security for anyone?
BUSH'S SUCCESSORS may well continue this shift. But they won't be able to avoid the conflict with Islamism that neocons worry about. Nor can any of them chart a course that won't require the sort of US resolve the neocons have preached. Podhoretz ends his latest call to arms by asking whether Americans are capable of "beating back the 'implacable challenge' of Islamofascism" as their forebears defeated Nazism. Writing at a time when he conceded the prospects for victory were "bleak," his answer was still yes.
In that sense, Jacob Heilbrunn's right when he concludes by warning that the neoconservatives are far from done. Podhoretz's optimism will ultimately be vindicated, if only because the alternatives to his views are simply implausible.
Like it or not – and notwithstanding the mistakes that were made in the last eight years – America is still locked in a worldwide struggle with Islamists that can't be wished away by blaming it all on the neocons.
Donald wrote:
"America is still locked in a worldwide struggle with Islamists that can't be wished away by blaming it all on the neocons."
Gee, given that Islamists have been around for oh, 1300 years or so, I wonder how the West has survived as long as it has.
The only thing that has changed between the end of the Cold War and now is that Washington has gotten ever more bold in collaborating with Arab authoritarians against the Islamic masses; the Jewish Zionists have consolidated ever more power in America and consequently Washington has granted Israel a freer hand to persecute Palestinians and hammer its neighbors; and the Neocons have wormed their way into positions of institutional power and been granted a free hand to experiment with their diabolical programs (ie the Iraq war).
All of this has resulted in an Islamic backlash. People tend to get angry when you poke fingers in their eyes.
America and the West will be perfectly fine if they approach the Islamic "threat" with a little more common sense and a lot more incredulity towards the Zionists.
On the other hand, if they continue to listen to Zionists and other apocalyptic-minded forces attempting to simultaneously prove their manhood and get rich off of a "showdown" with the Islamic world, we are headed for a centuries long conflict, because Islam is a religion and a way of life practiced by a couple billion people and it isn't going to collapse and disappear like the Soviet Union, which was a counterfeit ideology and an unsustainable political/economic system, did. In short, the Muslims aren’t going anywhere, and if we try to police them using authoritarian, Soviet-like tactics, as the Neocons envision, we will be the ones who end up collapsing.
So these are our chocies: dump the Zionists or enter into a centuries long conflict with the Muslims. It should be a no brainier. If Americas politicians weren't so bought off, dumbed down, and politically correct, it would be.
Mccain: Reward the Zionists AND enter into a centuries long conflict with the Muslims.
Hillary: Reward the Zionists AND I will be the first female prez.
Obama: Reward the Zionists AND I will be the first black prez.
Rommey: Reward the Zionists AND I will be the first Mormon prez.
Huckabee: Reward the Zionists AND I will fulfill biblical prophecy.
Paul: I'm happy because more people are looking at my ideas and reasoning regarding the roots of our predicament.
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