Exposito Correa es un pro-Bush radical. Sus artículos amparados por Arbil hacen que sea necesario replantearse la cobertura que deba darse a esa en otro tiempo gran revista digital. Yo desde su vergonzante defensa de la ocupación de Iraq he dejado de colaborar con ellos y ni pierdo el tiempo en leer la revista. Pero como en los actuales JUSA aún queda un poquitin de dignidad rastreando los archivos de Agencia FARO he encontrado este interesante artículo de Pat Buchanan. Me parece especialmente interesante su intento de explicar porque los intereses de USA no son los de Israel. Siento que esté en lengua enemiga.

Copyright March 24, 2003 The American Conservative

Whose War?

A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of
wars that are not in America’s interest.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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 Woodrow
Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators
Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).
All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a
defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.
Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New
Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
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 Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol, and Washington
Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, 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.”
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.
Copyright March 24, 2003 The American Conservative
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