by Patrick J. Buchanan
March 24, 2003
from
TheAmericanConservative Website
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.
“If Stanley Hoffman can say this,” asks Kaus,
“why can’t Chris Matthews?”
Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to
mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and
his Likud Party.
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.
The Neoconservatives
Who are the neoconservatives?
The first generation were ex-liberals,
socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who
rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with
Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to
be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to
be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI)
or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).
As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar
with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank. Almost none came
out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the
Goldwater campaign.
The heroes they invoke are:
All are interventionists who regard
Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed.
Among their luminaries are:
-
Jeane Kirkpatrick
-
Bill Bennett
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Michael Novak
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James Q. Wilson
Their publications include:
Though few in number, they wield
disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations
and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves
to men of power.
Beating the War Drums
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a
new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On
Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity
to steer America’s rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies,
the Arab and Islamic “rogue states” that have resisted U.S. hegemony and
loathe Israel.
The War Party's plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance
of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban,
was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked
meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
Before introducing the script-writers of America’s future wars, consider the
rapid and synchronized reaction of the neocons to what happened after that
fateful day.
On Sept. 12, Americans were still in shock when Bill Bennett told CNN
that we were in “a struggle between good and evil,” that the Congress must
declare war on “militant Islam,” and that “overwhelming force” must be used.
Bennett cited Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China as targets for
attack. Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama’s terrorists.
How did Bennett know which nations must be
smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target
list, calling for U.S. air strikes on,
“terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and
Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt.”
Yet, not one of Bennett’s six countries, nor one
of these five, had anything to do with 9/11.
On Sept. 15, according to Bob Woodward’s
Bush at War,
“Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments
to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.”
Why Iraq?
Because, Wolfowitz argued in the War Cabinet,
while,
“attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain…
Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was
doable.”
On Sept. 20, forty neoconservatives sent an
open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war
on terror must be conducted.
Signed by,
...the letter was an ultimatum.
To retain the signers’ support, the president
was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria
and Iran if they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam.
Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned
Bush,
“will constitute an early and perhaps
decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the
Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not
follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror.
Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done?
Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.
President Bush had been warned. He was to exploit the attack of 9/11 to
launch a series of wars on Arab regimes, none of which had attacked us. All,
however, were enemies of Israel.
“Bibi” Netanyahu, the former Prime
Minister of Israel, like some latter-day Citizen Genet, was ubiquitous on
American television, calling for us to crush the “Empire of Terror.”
The “Empire,” it turns out, consisted of
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and “the Palestinian
enclave.”
Nasty as some of these regimes and groups might be, what had they done to
the United States? The War Party seemed desperate to get a Middle
East war going before America had second thoughts.
Tom Donnelly of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
called for an immediate invasion of Iraq.
“Nor need the attack await the deployment of
half a million troops… [T]he larger challenge will be occupying Iraq
after the fighting is over,” he wrote.
Donnelly was echoed by Jonah Goldberg of
National Review:
“The United States needs to go to war with
Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq
makes the most sense.”
Goldberg endorsed “the Ledeen Doctrine” of
ex-Pentagon official Michael Ledeen, which Goldberg described thus:
“Every ten years or so, the United States
needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against
the wall, just to show we mean business.”
(When the French ambassador in London, at a
dinner party, asked why we should risk World War III over some “shitty
little country” - meaning Israel - Goldberg’s magazine was not amused.)
Ledeen, however, is less frivolous. In
The War Against the Terror Masters, he
identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the
terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And
then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia… Once the tyrants in
Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will
remain engaged…
We have to ensure the fulfillment of the
democratic revolution… Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a
misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The
real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American
mission,” Ledeen goes on to define America’s authentic “historic mission”:
Creative destruction is our middle name,
both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every
day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema
to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of
energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may
be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace… [W]e must destroy
them to advance our historic mission.
Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than
to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that
cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.
To the Weekly Standard, Ledeen’s enemies list was too restrictive. We
must not only declare war on terror networks and states that harbor
terrorists, said the Standard, we should launch wars on,
“any group or government inclined to support
or sustain others like them in the future.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol
were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon.
The coming war,
“is going to spread and engulf a number of
countries… It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that
everyone has hoped to avoid… [I]t is possible that the demise of some
‘moderate’ Arab regimes may be just round the corner.”
Norman Podhoretz in Commentary
even outdid Kristol’s Standard, rhapsodizing that we should embrace a war of
civilizations, as it is
George W. Bush’s mission “to
fight World War IV - the war against militant Islam.”
By his count, the regimes that richly deserve to
be overthrown are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis
of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). At a minimum, the axis should extend to
Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘“friends” of America like the Saudi
royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian
Authority.
Bush must reject the,
“timorous counsels” of the “incorrigibly
cautious Colin Powell,” wrote Podhoretz, and “find the stomach to impose
a new political culture on the defeated” Islamic world.
As the war against al-Qaeda required that we
destroy the Taliban, Podhoretz wrote,
We may willy-nilly find ourselves forced …
to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world
(including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian
Authority). I can even [imagine] the turmoil of this war leading to some
new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be
to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more
amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place… I
can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American
protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more
come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert
so much leverage over us and everyone else.
Podhoretz credits Eliot Cohen with the
phrase “World War IV.”
Bush was shortly thereafter seen carrying about
a gift copy of Cohen’s book that celebrates civilian mastery of the military
in times of war, as exhibited by such leaders as Winston Churchill and David
Ben Gurion.
A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen,
Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction
thus includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and “militant
Islam.”
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Cui Bono?
-
For whose benefit these endless wars in
a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the
Arabs must sell us to survive?
-
Who would benefit from a war of
civilizations between the West and Islam?
Answer: one nation, one leader, one
party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America. In
February 2003, Sharon told a delegation of Congressmen that, after Saddam’s
regime is destroyed, it is of “vital importance” that the United States
disarm Iran, Syria, and Libya.
“We have a great interest in shaping the
Middle East the day after” the war on Iraq, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz
told the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. After U.S.
troops enter Baghdad, the United States must generate “political,
economic, diplomatic pressure” on Tehran, Mofaz admonished the American
Jews.
Are the neoconservatives concerned about a war
on Iraq bringing down friendly Arab governments? Not at all.
They would welcome it.
“Mubarak is no great shakes,” says Richard
Perle of the President of Egypt. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.”
Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq -
which he predicted would be a “cakewalk” - might upend governments in Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah
Marshall of Washington Monthly,
“All the better if you ask me.”
On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to
Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense
Policy Board. In a briefing that startled Henry Kissinger, Murawiec
named Saudi Arabia as,
“the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the
most dangerous opponent” of the United States.
Washington should give Riyadh an ultimatum, he
said. Either you Saudis “prosecute or isolate those involved in the
terror chain, including the Saudi intelligence services,” and end all
propaganda against Israel, or we invade your country, seize your oil fields,
and occupy Mecca.
In closing his PowerPoint presentation, Murawiec offered a “Grand Strategy
for the Middle East.”
“Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia
the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize.”
Leaked reports of Murawiec’s briefing did not
indicate if anyone raised the question of how the Islamic world might
respond to U.S. troops tramping around the grounds of the Great Mosque.
What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make
the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on
Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.
Washington Times editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave calls
this the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine.”
“Washington’s ‘Likudniks,’” he writes, “have
been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn
into office.”
The neocons seek American empire, and Sharonites
seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely.
And though neocons insist that it was
Sept. 11 that made the case for war on Iraq and militant Islam,
the origins of their war plans go back far before.
“Securing the Realm”
The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop
Jackson, who, in 1970, was overheard on a federal wiretap discussing
classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli
Embassy.
In Jews and American Politics, published in
1974, Stephen D. Isaacs wrote,
“Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a
tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in
behalf of Jewish interests.”
In 1983, the New York Times reported that
Perle had taken substantial payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.
In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote, “A
Clean Break - A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” for
Prime Minister Netanyahu.
In it, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser urged Bibi to
ditch the Oslo Accords of the assassinated Yitzak Rabin and adopt a
new aggressive strategy:
Israel can shape its strategic environment,
in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and
even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in
its own right - as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan
has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the
restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.
In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy,
Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad.
Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish “the principle of
preemption,” has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the
United States.
In his own 1997 paper, “A
Strategy for Israel,” Feith pressed Israel to re-occupy,
“the areas under Palestinian Authority
control,” though “the price in blood would be high.”
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted
joint war plans for Israel and the United States,
“to fatally strike the centers of radicalism
in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should … broaden the
conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism
in the region - the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and
Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the
United States or Israel is suicidal.”
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a
crisis, for as he wrote,
“Crises can be opportunities.”
Wurmser published his U.S.-Israeli war plan on
Jan.1, 2001, nine months before 9/11.
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes:
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and
Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in
Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back
to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish
intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these
hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the
chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the power and
reputation of Israel.
Right down the smokestack.
Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is
an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special
assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John
Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line.
According to the Israeli daily newspaper
Ha’aretz, in late February,
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton
said in meetings with Israeli officials… that he has no doubt America
will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from
Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a
letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal
of Saddam Hussein’s regime the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use
military action because “diplomacy is failing.”
Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged,
they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary
endeavor.” Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John
Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz.
Four years before 9/11, the neocons had
Baghdad on their minds.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, a startling document was leaked from the office of Paul
Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. Barton Gellman of the Washington
Post called it a “classified blueprint intended to help ‘set the nation’s
direction for the next century.’”
The Wolfowitz Memo called for a permanent
U.S. military presence on six continents to deter all “potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Containment, the
victorious strategy of the Cold War, was to give way to an ambitious new
strategy designed to “establish and protect a new order.”
Though the Wolfowitz Memo was denounced and dismissed in 1992, it became
American policy in the 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS)
issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002.
Washington Post reporter Tim Reich
describes it as a,
“watershed in U.S. foreign policy” that
“reverses the fundamental principles that have guided successive
Presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston
University, writes of the NSS that he marvels at,
“its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with
barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of
sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely
collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von
Moltke.”
In confronting America’s adversaries, the paper
declares,
“We will not hesitate to act alone, if
necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting
preemptively.”
It warns any nation that seeks to acquire power
to rival the United States that it will be courting war with the United
States:
[T]he president has no intention of allowing
any nation to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened
since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago… Our forces
will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a
military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the
United States.
America must reconcile herself to an era of
“nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy,” Robert Kagan
instructs.
But this Pax Americana the neocons
envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes
called “permanent war for permanent peace.”
The Munich Card
As President Bush was warned on Sept. 20, 2001, that he will be
indicted for “a decisive surrender” in the war on terror should he fail to
attack Iraq, he is also on notice that pressure on Israel is forbidden.
For as the neoconservatives have played the
anti-Semitic card, they will not hesitate to play the Munich card as well. A
year ago, when Bush called on Sharon to pull out of the West Bank, Sharon
fired back that he would not let anyone do to Israel what Neville
Chamberlain had done to the Czechs.
Frank Gaffney of the Center for
Security Policy immediately backed up Ariel Sharon:
With each passing day, Washington appears to
view its principal Middle Eastern ally’s conduct as inconvenient - in
much the same way London and Paris came to see Czechoslovakia’s
resistance to Hitler’s offers of peace in exchange for Czech lands.
When former U.S. NATO commander Gen. George
Jouwlan said the United States may have to impose a peace on Israel and
the Palestinians, he, too, faced the charge of appeasement.
Wrote Gaffney,
They would, presumably, go beyond Britain
and France’s sell-out of an ally at Munich in 1938. The “impose a peace”
school is apparently prepared to have us play the role of Hitler’s
Wehrmacht as well, seizing and turning over to Yasser Arafat the
contemporary Sudetenland: the West Bank and Gaza Strip and perhaps
part of Jerusalem as well.
Podhoretz agreed Sharon was right in the
substance of what he said but called it politically unwise to use the Munich
analogy.
President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for
peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he
will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style
appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservatives allies inside his own
Big Tent.
Yet, if Bush cannot deliver Sharon there can be no peace. And if there is no
peace in the Mideast there is no security for us, ever - for there will be
no end to terror. As most every diplomat and journalist who travels to the
region will relate, America’s failure to be even-handed, our failure to rein
in Sharon, our failure to condemn Israel’s excesses, and our moral
complicity in Israel’s looting of Palestinian lands and denial of their
right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic
world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
Let us conclude.
The Israeli people are America’s
friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help
them secure these rights. As a nation, we have made a moral commitment,
endorsed by half a dozen presidents, which Americans wish to honor, not to
permit these people who have suffered much to see their country overrun and
destroyed. And we must honor this commitment.
But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and
when they do, U.S. interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the
Sharon regime as “America’s best friend.”
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behavior of the Israeli regime has been
Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad,
had agents in Egypt blow up U.S. installations to make it appear the work of
Cairo, to destroy U.S. relations with the new Nasser government. During the
Six Day War, Israel ordered repeated attacks on the undefended USS Liberty
that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 and included the
machine-gunning of life rafts.
This massacre was neither investigated nor
punished by the U.S. government in an act of national cravenness.
Though we have given Israel $20,000 for every Jewish citizen, Israel refuses
to stop building the settlements that are the cause of the Palestinian
intifada. Likud has dragged our good name through the mud and blood of
Ramallah, ignored Bush’s requests to restrain itself, and sold U.S. weapons
technology to China, including the Patriot, the Phoenix air-to-air missile,
and the Lavi fighter, which is based on F-16 technology.
Only direct U.S. intervention blocked
Israel’s sale of our AWACS system.
Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to
return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to
Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between
Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price
for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back
to Israel as a national hero.
Do the Brits, our closest allies, behave like this?
Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president
has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the
neoconservatives’ agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve
only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to
preserve and protect.