Last night Chris Matthews said he was shocked by a suggestion McCain made in a speech that the Iraq war was waged for oil. Matthews commented, So this means it wasn’t about spreading democracy or defending Israel! Let’s hear this right: Matthews was saying that helping Israel was one of the stated reasons for the war.
Cuddly Michael Scheuer says the same thing in cleverly denouncing Douglas Feith’s book on antiwar.com:
[T]here seems to be a newly emerging iron law of history; to wit; everything the Neocons do in the name of helping Israel – such as hyping the threat from state sponsors of terrorism, invading Iraq, and urging war with Iran – digs Israel’s grave a bit faster and a bit deeper. There is more than a bit of poetic justice in that.
And Glenn Kessler said as much in his fine 2007 biography of Condi Rice:
The invasion of Iraq had been promoted in part as a way to bring democracy to the region and help Israel.
Well I’m sorry, I never got the memo. I was told it was about WMD, then about democracy. George Bush specifically said it wasn’t about Israel.
If it was about Israel–and I believe it was, in good part–the public should have been told. Bringing it in the back door now is irresponsible journalism. Acting as if it was true all along is a sly way of avoiding what we need here: open debate about whether Israel’s treatment of Arabs is in America’s interest. MSNBC and Kessler’s employer, the Washington Post, owe us that discussion.
P.S. McCain’s speech underlines the main reason that Obama, or Hillary, will clean his clock in the fall: he’s addlepated.
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"Well I'm sorry, I never got the memo. I was told it was about WMD, then about democracy. George Bush specifically said it wasn't about Israel."
I know that I heard George Bush state that an attack on Iraq would make the region safe for our allies in the region. I take it that he meant Israel, since the Arab states in the region were against the attack. From a State of the Union address that I remember:
"Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from
threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass
destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since
September the 11th, but we know their true nature."
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=2002_presidential_documents&docid=pd04fe02_txt-11
There are some gems in this one:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/print/20040518-1.html
Bush never really comes out and directly states that Israel is the sole ally (I'm not aware of any formal alliance for Israel's protection) that the war is being fought to protect and, by his logic, maybe it isn't. I don't think that there is much doubt about the logic of some of his advisors, though.
Who really expects politicians to state what they are doing and why they are doing it?
Is it not proper, indeed, maybe even patriotic, for a default American to question the collective impact of having Middle East diplomacy dominated by one particular ethnic group, even if the individuals are executing the policy of the elected president or president wannabe? Imagine what American Jews and Israelis would think if the current or wannabe team regime was made up very disproportionately or exclusively of Arab-Americans.
IDF soldiers in "The Zone" shoot to kill any moving human there, even if a little kid, or baby. I don't remember the Hollywood movie's name, but at one point an SS officer was asked why he allowed killing Jewish kids, even babies. The officer said, in effect, it was a form of premptive defense.
No other ethnic group in the USA fears the other's baby as a killer of his group, one day, in a future proved by past European history while the world looked on.
Rev Wright's view, I see as no different than what's lurking in the heart of America's playground Jews, even as they reel in the goodies in the land of their birth.
We've been enslaved since Egypt. Then gassed.
We've been enslaved since the first days of the slave ships.
Then Katrina.
They deprived us of Buffalo. Then came the orthodox to defraud us of all we had left, our casino money.
On and on.
We need a new model airplane.
Obama is the best available as a practical matter.
Just ask yourself this question, what do Richard Perle, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, David Frum, David Wurmser, Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, Steven Rosen, and Keith Weissman, all have in common?
PNAC flowered from the Israeli Clean Break papers out of Tel Aviv. Why are the co-authors Zionists Jews who have histories of spying for Israel such as Richard Perle and Doug Feith? How come AIPAC can be caught spying on the US and there is nearly NO mention of it in the media? It would ruin the theories that "Bush did it." And Bush did do it, but he was a puppet of his Zionist handlers because Bush is a Christian bigot and with a trust fund from Big Oil.
It is a war for Israel primarily and a war for profit, as is any war, secondarily. They all connect, the MIC, the Evangelical churches, the lobby, and the Zionists neocons who make up the OSP and wrote PNAC. No-bid contract works a la hidden communism and how we create state-assisted monopolies through everything from agribusiness subsidies to earmarked foreign aid.
Problem, how many average Americans have even heard of richard Perle? He is the nastiest of the nasty. In my mind he is The worst Neocon of them all. He has appropriately earned the nickname "The Prince of Darkness." Perle along with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser,(all three of them got jobs in the US defense department, Perle and Fieth have had to resign) authored the Israel's "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." While speaking to Wolf Blitzer from CNN, a former AIPAC employee, Perle said of Semour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre of Vietnam and later with the help of Joe Darby, broke the story about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly." And Perle is the author of at least 4 different IASPS papers.
Dual loyalty? Yes, it's a real issue. As is fairness and justice.
I think the attempt to protect Israel was in the mix.
The commitment to protect one's allies should be in the mix.
How much was it in the mix?
You got my list of prospective genuine goals of the decision makers. (Bush, Cheney, generals).
I'm amazed at the extent that Bush's behavior is somehow immune from criticims while those that provided him with opinions are subject to criticism.
We elect a president, and the president selects his/her advisors independantly and freely.
That makes the election of the president and his/her accountability that much more important. That is the person that is accountable. Lets hold him accountable.
Could not agree with you more, Witty. Impeach Bush/Chaney/Rummy et al.
They are nothing but modern day Feudal (Goy) lords of the manor. The Jews (except Phil & a handful of others) are just performing their usual feudal role, through the state mechanism
and indirect control of the Fourth Estate.
We won't look at the original communist revoution.
But it's the same.
Look at the real key players.
Some Americans actually believe that the controlling proposition
should be "all are created equal before the law."
It has it's problems in actual implementation.
Gimme Phil, not Witty or Sword.
Or their mirror-image, MacWhat'shis name or Duke.
"Well I'm sorry, I never got the memo."
LOL!!!!! Too good, Phil.
That memo must have been one of those self-destructing ones, like in the old kids cartoon "Inspector Gadget"… and only the media elites got to see it.
Wouldn't even be the first time Chris Matthews sold us out, would it?
I see Matthews sit down with Ralph Nader and I say to myself, holy shit, Phil's right, Matthews is a mensch!
Unfortunately the other 364 days a year he's chirping about George W. Bush's flightsuit.
Richard writes,
"I'm amazed at the extent that Bush's behavior is somehow immune from criticims while those that provided him with opinions are subject to criticism.
"We elect a president, and the president selects his/her advisors independantly and freely.
"That makes the election of the president and his/her accountability that much more important. That is the person that is accountable. Lets hold him accountable."
Of course, of course.
Just a couple of points I would try to inject somewhere in there:
1. By the previous standards of the last 224 years, Bush in 2000 was not actually "elected". And we the people do not actually elect the president, he is elected for us, in our name, by the electoral college.
2. The history really suggests to me at least that Cheney picked Bush more than Bush picked Cheney. Bush's record of non-accomplishments, his brief and relatively uncontroversial stint as governor, his inaccessible arrest record, his uneducated persona masking his elite origin, all made him the perfect 'yes man' for a guy like Cheney to send off on the campaign trail, with Niccolò Roviavelli keeping him on task.
3. Bush was not a signatory of the Project for the New American Century's famous Rebuilding America's Defenses document. Therein we find the crystalization of the two coalescing forces of militarist, right-wing American imperialism and militarist, right-wing Israeli zionism: Richard Perle and Doug Feith (ex-Clean Break) meet Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (Henry Kissinger's apprentices).
Oddly enough, reading about it recently, I was reminded that George W. Bush didn't sign the PNAC document, but Jeb Bush did. Make of that what you will.
You are right, MM. Bush is just a little goy boy, as weak as he sounds and looked on the deck of Mission Accomplished despite his codpiece–that ship was just sent over near Iran.
Phil,
You are really quoting anti-war.com?
They've got a catchy name.
Why don't you get into real policy discussion about the appropriate extent of US military involvement in the war?
Also, how about a truly insightful inquiry into the degree that military values have imposed on civilian culture?
Dual loyalty perhaps?
Charles, the poor sons of bitches. Daddies don't let your sons grow up to be soldiers? Never truer than now.
Keeping in mind addlepation is not a prohibitively disqualifying condition for that office these days. Much ridicule for GWBush early on – recall his near constant non sequitor streams and vocabularic lacunae, and yet, and yet…he made the office two times in a row.
Isn't that a ponder.
Roy i agree, but feel that gwb has obliterated all the charm in addlepation and in folksiness; that this time we will say, We need someone smarter as president. Isnt that a value? We need someone who knows the difference between sunni and shia
"We need someone smarter as president."
McCain graduated college ranked 894 out 899 students. I would think that would be enough to stop his candidacy before it even got off the ground. But we can't mis-underestimate the anti-intellectualism of the U.S.A.
Richard,
I'm wondering if you feel US Jews are more like Arendars or Magnates. I think Phil is right on this.
Most self-affirming Jews support Israel's defense, and observe many military, terrorist and verbal attacks and feel a combination of fear and defensiveness from those attacks.
They wonder "is this the beginning of another era of horror?"
Most Jews ARE sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians, and even desparately desire for Palestinian life to improve, in its own right and as a palliative to reduce the expression of Arab rage.
The question of breaking up or dissolving Zionism is far from their minds. They regard Israel as a viable state, having earned its stature, though in need of reform.
My sense, is that they believe that the state of Arab dissenting politics is more fascist agitation than democratic.
My impressions.
MANY residual Jews don't give a shit, and prefer appeasement, as their primary motive is to reduce the heat on themselves.
Richard, point taken re Most Jews Sympathetic to Palestinians.
In the meantime, when the chairman of the NY Hitorical Society and Commentary, formerly the publicatoin of the AJC, still a bulwark of Jewish journalism, publish an article that is so contemptuous of Arab testimony of atrocities, what is the duty of Any Jew? Residual, Conventional, Orthodox etc? Or to be less grand about this, do you see this article as in any way worhty of condemnatoin?
What's the dividing line between ruthless paranoia
and practical bias?
One day a bee stings you.
A month later another bee happens to buzz close by.
You duck and roll.
Send a neighbor's kid to go back with his baseball bat.
The kid bashes the crap out of the first bee hive he finds hanging sufficiently low to reach.
Later, sitting in the visitor waiting room at the hospital, you tell yourself, "One day a bee could come out of there and sting me."
You point to the spot on your arm where the bee had once stung you.
The kid doesn't notice. He's in a coma.
"do you see this article as in any way worthy of condemnatoin?"
Disagreement about some attitudes and conclusions, yes. Condemnation no.
I think there is a GREAT DEAL of truth in the article, that the Palestinian proponents cavalierly dismiss, rather than address.
Do you want to go point by point with perhaps Saif?
There are questions of fact and questions of interpretation and degree of relevance.
The success of the American Jewish community now is no proof that it will not face extinction in the future.
It's imaginable. Philip Roth did so imagine and wrote a book about it.
Of course he had to change actual history as offered up by his fellow Americans.
The danger faced by Jews in America to date is not physical survival. America is safe for Jews, who makeup a key part of the Establishment, but not for Judaism.
If America is a Promised Land, then why do Jews need their actual Promised Land?
Because their is no spiritual identity that comes with simply being an American?
Is Zionism meant to create for the Jewish people a homeland in the land of Israel, assured by international legitimacy?
Is Israel's present policy, for example, in the West Bank dynamics gaining sympathy or losing it in the international consensus?
Can Israel defend itself alone?
Could more push by Israel toward a viable Palestinian state secure significant world empathy?
If Zionism defines the community of world Jews as a nation, one in the family of nations, how does this substantially differ from pan-Arabism? From the outlook of Rev Wright as to Afro-centric right and need? Israel is not a state for all citizens equally, but for the Jewish people. Yes, compared to other nations in its region it is relatively democratic, but look at the discriminatory matrix of internal Israeli laws and court decisions. Let's not debate this–can we agree some land part of the biblical Israel as defined by Israel yet needs to be secured by international legitimacy?
What Muslim power or Jewish power ever created anything like the USA, dedicated in principle for the proposition that all men were created equally before the Lord, and then fought its own Civil War to prove it with its own blood?
The whole world's best hopes have centered in this knowledge. The most effective appeal is to look at the USA. Today everyone knows the USA's historical warts as well as its higher angels. The US Constitution itself was amended time after time to correct its own birth pains, it's own time and place of set attitudes.
In comparison, where today beyond the Middle East is the impulse toward religious and ethnic purity stronger?
The endless cycle calls into question Israel's ability to flourish, if not survive.
Given the current WMD facts, I find it really hard to imagine the USA or Israel threatened by nuclear Iran, but that did not stop what's happened to Iraq, and what the neocons want to happen to Iran (& Syria). I doubt they want to bring about the utter obliteration of their civilizations as Hillary put it.
What am I left with to account for AIPAC and the Likud mentality?
Israel at least has the ethnic-cultural worry of demographics.
That's not until after 2050 for the USA.
What's Bush's excuse?
The difference between any old feudal lord (Bush) and his henchmen (AIPAC), survival. Both adhere to their own sense of identity. One short-term (The Bush Family), the other long term (Jews will survive forever, after all other people expire).
Hitler actually saw this. He opted for, shall we say, the Talmud approach.
The full range of higher Torah was beyond him. As was higher Christianity.
If you're not a carpenter, and you have kids, yet you see the money-changers should be kicked out of the temple, see the result of the Law in the Good Samaritan who gave of the spirit rather than the Law, what do you do?
Somehow, it seems obvious to me that Israel domestic discussion is more related to reality than the USA's. I think the difference is that Israel has a conscript Army, while the USA's is "volunteer" aka economically and educationally coerced.
"If America is a Promised Land, then why do Jews need their actual Promised Land?"
In 1945 US was not a promised land, but an excluded land.
"Is Zionism meant to create for the Jewish people a homeland in the land of Israel, assured by international legitimacy?"
That is its intent, which it has succeeded at. (It doesn't mean that every individual wants to move there. I don't.)
"Is Israel's present policy, for example, in the West Bank dynamics gaining sympathy or losing it in the international consensus?"
2 steps forward, 2 steps back.
"Can Israel defend itself alone?"
If it has to. It shouldn't have to alone. Its friends should keep their promises.
"Could more push by Israel toward a viable Palestinian state secure significant world empathy?"
Yes. It would stand as an example of great courage to treat others that mean them harm, well. that others continue to harm civilians makes the abdication of responsibility to defend its civilians by military or state, a valid cause for the accusation of "traitor".
"In comparison, where today beyond the Middle East is the impulse toward religious and ethnic purity stronger?"
Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria.
"I find it really hard to imagine the USA or Israel threatened by nuclear Iran"
A nuclear armed Iran with missile capability of delivery is a VERY LARGE threat to Israel. On the example of Iraq, that in the first Gulf War, shelled Israel as a means to threaten the US, Iran is imagined to consider similarly.
Its a DIFFERENT threat than Mutually Assured Destruction. Its the threat to kill a third party.
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