I'm sure he's a nice guy, but as I have said before, California lefty Stephen Zunes has made idiotic statements about the Israel lobby and the Iraq war. Here is the smoking gun of idiocy. In lamenting the Rahm Emanuel appointment on alternet for good leftwing reasons–he's a tool and a hawk–Zunes notes with helpful clarity that Emanuel said on Meet the Press that he would have supported the Iraq war even knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction. Zunes then interprets the admission: "effectively acknowledging that his support for the war was not about national security, but about oil and empire."
Much later in the piece, Zunes includes a pro forma paragraph about Emanuel's fondness for Israel, ending with this piece of boilerplate: "Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s." When Iraq attacked Israel, I would add.
The great sadness here is that the minds of the respectable left, such as they are, recognize that Israel plays some considerable role in Emanuel's mental landscape, but are simply unable to process this information in a logical manner. To assign it any real functionality in Emanuel's Iraq-war-planning would, they reason, contribute to anti-semitism. Ergo: "oil and empire." They are hopeless as interpreters of the Iraq fiasco. And providing cover to the neocons. (Zunes has attacked Walt and Mearsheimer over just this issue, of Zionist motivation for fostering the Iraq disaster.)
Imagine for one moment that a Christian agenda were involved, that we were talking about, say, buses from churches bringing voters to defeat a gay-rights measure. Would leftwing "thinkers" fail to speak of a religious motivation for destructive political action?
And here's more ammunition for your claims regarding the "left"' being hostage to the israeli lobby: your favorite DailyKos had several diaries in the past couple of days attempting to breach the issue of this ill- advised appointment. lots of comments immediately after – enough to get them up to the "recommended" level. Then, suddenly, quick removal. At least one diarist said he was told to delete his diary and did.
I do, however, sense rebellion brewing in the ranks. Obama may have gotten friendly with Emanuel – both being Chicago polls (and part of the new Daley machine). But as you know full too well, Phil, the pro-Israel personalities are very good at explaining their own proclivities and political biases and Emanuel is not the first to develop a certain charm based on competence, personal appeal and a certain chuzpah that masks true aggressiveness.
My unease with this appointment is growing by the second. For all the reasons you say plus a few. Interesting that Rahm's brother, Ari, is the head of Hollywood's biggest agency. And today we learn that Rahm served for a while on freddie mac's board during the time it was found negligent – scandalously so. Then there's the crazy racist father. Nice – now we'll have closed the full circle of jewish influence in the US: government, Hollywood, money and israel. All we need to add is the closet neocon Ross and the hapless Summers and it's off to never-never land for the future US foreign policy.
It's time, I think, to round up the motley crew for some hard work (they all read your blog, Phil – many in the invisible cloud…)
Phil, I'm not sure I get this bit:
"Much later in the piece, Zunes includes a pro forma paragraph about Emanuel's fondness for Israel, ending with this piece of boilerplate: "Emanuel himself served in a civilian capacity as a volunteer for the Israeli army in the early 1990s." When Iraq attacked Israel, I would add."
Are you saying that the fact that Emanuel rushed to serve in the Israeli army as opposed to the American one, doesn't say anything about where his loyalties are? Also, one could debate whether it was Iraq that attacked Israel first. After all, Israel has the ability to attack other countries via its proxies, and that doesn't mean that it's not Israel doing the "attacking". It is no secret that Israel has been working towards Iraq's destabilization, weakening, and ultimately fragmentation (as is happening today), since at least 1982 (see Oded Yinon's report prepared for the World Zionist Organization in 1982), and so I don't see why Iraq's couple of scuds would count as an ATTACK rather than a response to ongoing attacks against Iraq by Israel, both directly (the Israeli attack on the Osiraq plant) and indirectly via proxies (USA). Saddam Hussein was no more a tyrant than the tyrant allies of the U.S (Saudi royals, Jordan's King, Egypt's prez, etc.), and yet, it was Iraq that was targeted, and for a while, via Iraq, Iran (the famous let them fight it out without any side achieving clear victory over the other, so that both will be weakened — for Israel's benefit, of course). How did any of this benefit USA? None of it did. Meanwhile, here's what Oded Yinon had to say about Iraq:
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel…In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So three (or more) states will exist around the major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the South will separate the Sunni and Kurdish North."
Source: Kivunim, No. 14, Feb. 1982, WZO Dept. of Publicity, Jerusalem.
And now, the Israelis have decided it's Iran's turn. Would you blame Iran if it struck Israel pre-emptively? I, for one, would not.
If the reason for the presence of Rahm is to have someone able to walk Obama through Lobby waters without getting eaten by neocon sharks then the Lobby has become another estate power. That people accept an israel-firster as an administrative operator of the highest level is one thing. That people accept a foreign lobby as an integral part of state without howls of indignation is a recipe for civil war. You better start thinking about erasing aipac and the likes from your political landscape once and for all.