What do YOU propose? And to accomplish what goals?

"What do YOU propose? And to accomplish what goals?"

Okay, hers's a specific, serious answer. In March 2005, an investigation into the faulty Iraq War intelligence ended with the publication of the Silberman-Robb report. It concluded that “U.S. intelligence agencies were `dead wrong’ in their belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, but the analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.”

Incredibly, the Silberman-Robb report did not even mention the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith, to supply senior Bush administration officials with raw intelligence pertaining to Iraq.

Within weeks, the Silberman-Robb report was exposed as a ridiculous whitewash when the UK Sunday Times published the Downing Street memos on May 1, 2005. A note-taker for the British PM observed that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

This smoking gun, which directly contradicted the conclusions of the Silberman-Robb report, should have led to a fresh Congressional investigation. But it did not and has not.

It is STILL important to investigate the serious crimes of falsifying intelligence, espionage and treason, even now. After all, it appears to be happening again in regard to Iran. The purpose is to root out subversion of the U.S. government by those promoting the interests of a foreign power.

Not that "J Street" is likely to take up this neglected cause. But they should.

Interestingly we see quite some efforts at soul seraching in US Jewish communities.
But shouldn't we expect the same kind of soul searching on the side of the GOP generally? Or on the side of the Democratic Leadership Council of which Hillary is the most prominent representative? (I am assuming the DLC supported the Iraq war strongly.]

Watching the AlJazeera interviews twice again, I find my reactions shifting every time I do. What makes Mearsheimer's arguments feel more forceful? Is it since he represents the standard image of the learned scholar better than Norman does? Someone who carefully leaves escape routes open? [simply stop pushing and "we will brush it all under the carpet", as we Germans say. Were it gets out of side and public attention.]

Let me paraphrase a couple of Normans statements, that I consider important:

*The did expect it to be a calk walk.*

This is the most important statement of the whole interview. Try to imagine it had turned out as expected. [we wouldn't have witnessed the complicated scenario or line blurring between Iraq war critics $ and Iraq war execution critics mirrored in a Wikipedia category]

Another one of his sentences I like a lot again paraphrased is:

**When 911 happened, after feigning a little consternation, they (the administration) looked at each other and said: Wow! What a big chance!*

Now is this the mainstream scholarly way of expressing things? Definitively not. Mearsheimer treads the lines of the provable very carefully. And that is a standard we are much more trained to except, and that is why he is not given publicity over here. He is very convincing.

But Norman comes closer to my cynical view of power politics as business as usual.

As Philip shows us all the time there is a huge cross-fertilization between Jewish and non-Jewish elites how can the Iraq war be a specific Jewish guilt then?

David Addington, chief Juridical architect.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2008/04/jackson-circle.html

The Hidden Power.The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror. by Jane Mayer

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/03/060703fa_fact1?currentPage=all

Conventional wisdom holds that September 11th changed everything, including the thinking of Cheney and Addington. Brent Scowcroft, the former national-security adviser, has said of Cheney that he barely recognizes the reasonable politician he knew in the past. But a close look at the twenty-year collaboration between Cheney and Addington suggests that in fact their ideology has not changed much. It seems clear that Addington was able to promote vast executive powers after September 11th in part because he and Cheney had been laying the political groundwork for years. “This preceded 9/11,” Fein, who has known both men professionally for decades, said. “I’m not saying that warrantless surveillance did. But the idea of reducing Congress to a cipher was already in play. It was Cheney and Addington’s political agenda.”

The time-space-relation has changed much lately.

In the linked Salon article, after bemoaning the "taboo" on criticizing Israel, author Gary Kamiya writes:

"But because of the highly sensitive nature of the subject, American Jews must lead the way."

How incredibly patronizing! This isn't true for any other issue. For instance, in opposing the disastrous tax-subsidized ethanol industry, no one says that "because of the highly sensitive nature of the subject, the ethanol industry must lead the way." Israel is only "sensitive" because Jews go off like crazed badgers on anybody who intrudes into their lucrative little tax-funded franchise.

So, Kamiya counsels that the gentile majority needs to delegate Jeremy Ben-Ami, a son of Israeli parents who has lived in Israel, as their proxy on U.S. policy toward Israel. It's way too sensitive to be handled by their clumsy gentile mitts, Kamiya opines. Mooo-oo-ooo … we cattle who are about to be slaughtered, salute you!

Generally, proponents of a two-state solution are either ignorant of the geography of Israel-Palestine, or simply want to stall for time to build more settlements, by holding out the carrot of a solution which will somehow remain just out of the Palestinians' grasp. Having lived in Israel, Ben-Ami knows better than provincial Americans that Jewish and Palestinian settlements are entwined in a way which makes two viable, contiguous states almost impossible. Yet he continues to advocate "a two-state solution with a broad-based land for peace agreement."

Thus, I can only reluctantly conclude that Ben-Ami belongs to the latter group. Recognizing that hardline Zionism is in crisis as younger Jews recoil from it, Ben-Ami wants to offer a smoother, gentler, Richard Witty-style Zionism, which prattles about "even-handedness" for U.S. consumption, while the settlements expand and the IDF goes on annihilating women and children.

Ben-Ami, the son of Israelis who's going to give Americans back their country? HA HA HA. That's funny; tell me another one!

More than that actually. At one point he uses a standard PR technique. He starts out with a positive: the administration may indeed have believed, there were WMD. This gives the listeners the comfortable feeling, that the admin simply may have misjudged things. Interestingly this term was used all over the place for the charge of the looming atomic cloud. But this charge he later denies carefully avoiding using the term again in this context.

Come to think of it. This is how Phil deals with Norman Finkelstein. In a nutshell:

He is a brilliant scholar, but he is vicious.

Without even asking him, why did you use "imbecile" here? The answer might have led to a more interesting article.

His insult (Aaron David Miller = imbecile) clearly sticks out in the larger context of his Znet interview and thus has a signal function.

Is the "polite put down" maybe not a British but a Harvard virus after ali?

While we are at it: What gives you the impression that Norman only recently came over to the camp that supports the one state solution?

Is the base positive mirroring? Is it since you yourself basically support the one state solution at least as an ideal?