Iraq: A war for Israel

[Lamprecht]

After the 9/11 attacks, the US military began its "War on Terror" which included invading and occupying multiple countries in the Middle East. These wars have costed the US taxpayer over $6 trillion USD despite no clear, tangible benefit being conferred to the American people. One of the most notorious of these wars was the war in Iraq. A common trope is that the war was for oil, but the US does not really get oil from Iraq. Of course, when you invade a country that has oil you will occupy the oil fields so that the other side cannot access them, but if the goal was oil then it would have been cheaper just to trade for it. In actuality, the war in Iraq was a war for Israel.

Iraq: A War For Israel

By Mark Weber

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003, and the occupation of the country since then, has cost more than four thousand American lives and more than $500 billion, and has brought death to many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Why did President Bush decide to go to war? In whose interests was it launched?

In the months leading up to the attack, President Bush and other high-ranking US officials repeatedly warned that the threat posed to the US and world by the Baghdad regime was so grave and imminent that the United States had to act quickly to bomb, invade and occupy Iraq.

On Sept. 28, 2002, for example, Bush said:

"The danger to our country is grave and it is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given... This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year."

On March 6, 2003, President Bush declared:

"Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country, to our people, and to all free people... I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people. I believe he's a threat to the neighborhood in which he lives. And I've got good evidence to believe that. He has weapons of mass destruction... The American people know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."

These claims were untrue. As the world now knows, Iraq had no dangerous "weapons of mass destruction," and posed no threat to the US. Moreover, alarmist suggestions that the Baghdad regime was working with the al-Qaeda terror network likewise proved to be without foundation.

So if the official reasons given for the war were untrue, why did the United States attack Iraq?

Whatever the secondary reasons for the war, the crucial factor in President Bush's decision to attack was to help Israel. With support from Israel and America's Jewish-Zionist lobby, and prodded by Jewish "neo-conservatives" holding high-level positions in his administration, President Bush - who was already fervently committed to Israel - resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel's chief regional enemies.

This is so widely understood in Washington that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the US invaded Iraq "to secure Israel," and "everybody" knows it. He also identified three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in Washington who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer, columnist and author. [1]

Hollings referred to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to acknowledge this truth openly, saying that "nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on." Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically support Israel and its policies.

Some months before the invasion, retired four-star US Army General and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark acknowledged in an interview: "Those who favor this attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." [2]

Six months before the attack, President Bush met in the White House with eleven members of the US House of Representatives. While the "war against terrorism is going okay," he told the lawmakers, the United States would soon have to deal with a greater danger: "The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. He can blow up Israel and that would trigger an international conflict." [3]

Bush also spoke candidly about why the US was going to war during a White House meeting on Feb. 27, 2003, just three weeks before the invasion. In a talk with Elie Wiesel, the well-known Jewish writer, Bush said: "If we don't disarm Saddam Hussein, he will put a weapon of mass destruction on Israel and they will do what they think they have to do, and we have to avoid that." [4]

Fervently Pro-Israel

President Bush's fervent support for Israel and its hardline government is well known. He reaffirmed it, for example, in June 2002 in a major speech on the Middle East. In the view of "leading Israeli commentators," the London Times reported, the address was "so pro-Israel that it might have been written by [Israel prime minister] Ariel Sharon." [5] In an address to pro-Israel activists at the 2004 convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Bush said: "The United States is strongly committed, and I am strongly committed, to the security of Israel as a vibrant Jewish state." He also told the gathering: "By defending the freedom and prosperity and security of Israel, you're also serving the cause of America." [6]

Condoleeza Rice, who served as President Bush's National Security Advisor, and later, as his Secretary of State, echoed the President's outlook in a May 2003 interview, saying that the "security of Israel is the key to security of the world." [7]

Long Range Plans

Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years. In mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the Middle East. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was written under the auspices of an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Specifically, it called for an "effort [that] can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right..." [8]

The authors of "A Clean Break" included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three influential Jews who later held high-level positions in the Bush administration, 2001-2004: Perle as chair of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser as special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control. The role played by Bush administration officials who are associated with two major pro-Zionist "neoconservative" research centers has come under scrutiny from The Nation, the influential public affairs weekly. [9]

The author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), detailing the ties between these groups and various politicians, arms merchants, military men, wealthy pro-Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential administrations

JINSA and CSP members, notes Vest, "have ascended to powerful government posts, where... they've managed to weave a number of issues - support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general - into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core... On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war - not just with Iraq, but ‘total war,' as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it... For this crew, ‘regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative."

Samuel Francis, author, editor and columnist, also looked into the "neo-conservative" role in fomenting war. [10] "My own answer," he wrote, "is that the lie [that a massively-armed Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and its interests and who wanted the United States to smash Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to Israel in the region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it until after Sept. 11, 2001..."

In the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently pro-Zionist "neo-conservatives" in the Bush administration - who for years had sought a Middle East war to bolster Israel's security in the region - exploited the tragedy to press their agenda. In this they were backed by the Israeli government, which also pressured the White House to strike Iraq.

"The [Israeli] military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq," reported a leading Israeli daily paper, Haaretz, in February 2002. [11]

The Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, the respected British daily, reported in August 2002: "Israel signalled its decision yesterday to put public pressure on President George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq, even though it believes Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel." [12]

Three months before the US invasion, the well-informed Washington journalist Robert Novak reported that Israeli prime minister Sharon was telling American political leaders that "the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime." Moreover, added Novak, "that view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war." [13]

Israel's spy agencies were a "full partner" with the US and Britain in producing greatly exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq's ability to wage war, a former senior Israeli military intelligence official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a brigadier general in the Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a major Israeli think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a significant role in supporting the US and British case for making war. Israeli intelligence agencies, he said, "badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons [of mass destruction] existed." [14]

The role of the pro-Israel lobby in pressing for war has been carefully examined by two prominent American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University. [15] In an 81-page paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," they wrote:

"Pressure from Israel and the [pro-Israel] Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure... Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel's Likud Party. In addition, key leaders of the Lobby's major organizations lent their voices to the campaign for war."

Important members of the pro-Israel lobby carried out what professors Mearshiemer and Walt call "an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq. A key part of this campaign was the manipulation of intelligence information, so as to make Saddam look like an imminent threat."

For some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort to install Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of Israel, was for years editor of Commentary, the influential Zionist monthly. In the Sept. 2002 issue he wrote:

"The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced 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, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen."

Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known writer and commentator, and former White House Communications director, has been blunt in identifying those who pushed for war: [16]

"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 US 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...

"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."

Uri Avnery - an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a three-time member of Israel's parliament - sees the Iraq war as an expression of immense Jewish influence and power. In an essay written some weeks after the US invasion, he wrote: [17]

"Who are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers... The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican party. ... Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power."

In Britain, a veteran member of Britain's House of Commons bluntly declared in May 2003 that Jews had taken control of America's foreign policy, and had succeeded in pushing the US into war. "A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians," said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House member. "There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States," he added. [18]

Summary

For many years now, American presidents of both parties have been staunchly committed to Israel and its security. This entrenched policy is an expression of the Jewish-Zionist grip on America's political and cultural life. It was fervent support for Israel - shared by President Bush, high-ranking administration officials and nearly the entire US Congress - that proved crucial in the decision to invade and subdue one of Israel's greatest regional enemies.

While the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq may have helped Israel, just as those who wanted and planned for the war had hoped, it has been a calamity for America and the world. It has cost many tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Around the world, it has generated unmatched distrust and hostility toward the US. In Arab and Muslim countries, it has fueled intense hatred of the United States, and has brought many new recruits to the ranks of anti-American terrorists.

Americans have already paid a high price for their nation's commitment to Israel. We will pay an ever higher price - not just in dollars or international prestige, but in the lives of young men squandered for the interests of a foreign state - until the Jewish-Zionist hold on US political life is finally broken.

Notes

1. Remarks by Ernest F. Hollings, May 20, 2004. Congressional Record - Senate, May 20, 2004, pages S5921-S5925. See also: M. Weber, "'Iraq Was Invaded to Secure Israel,' Says Senator Hollings..."
(http://web.archive.org/web/200408251006 ... ings.shtml)
2. The Guardian (London), August 20, 2002.
3. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 186. See also p. 188
4. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 320.
5. R. Dunn, "Sharon Could Have Written Speech," The Times (London), June 26, 2002.
6. Bush address to AIPAC convention, Washington, DC, May 18, 2004.
7. A. S. Lewin, "Israel's Security is Key to Security of Rest of World," Jewish Press (Brooklyn, NY), May 14, 2003. Rice's interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharnonot is quoted.
8. Text posted at http://web.archive.org/web/200008152210 ... strat1.htm See also: J. Bamford, A Pretext for War (Doubleday, 2004), pages 261-269; B. Whitaker, "Playing Skittles with Saddam," The Guardian (Britain), Sept. 3, 2002.
9. J. Vest, "The Men From JINSA and CSP," The Nation, Sept. 2, 2002
(http://web.archive.org/web/200603181106 ... 20902/vest).
10. S. Francis, "Weapons of Mass Deception: Somebody Lied," column of Feb. 6, 2004
(http://web.archive.org/web/200404160955 ... is/wmd.htm).
11. A. Benn, "Background: Enthusiastic IDF Awaits War in Iraq," Haaretz, Feb. 17, 2002. Quoted in J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, p. 30, and p. 68, fn. 146.
12. Jonathan Steele, "Israel Puts Pressure on US to Strike Iraq," The Guardian (London), August 17, 2002.
13. Robert Novak, "Sharon's War?," column of Dec. 26, 2002.
(http://web.archive.org/web/200601082105 ... on.sharon/).
14. L. King, "Ex-General Says Israel Inflated Iraqi Threat," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 2003.; See also: J. J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, p. 29, and p. 67, fn. 142.
15. John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," March 2006, pages 29, 30, 32.(http://web.archive.org/web/201303200059 ... Policy.pdf). A shorter version appeared in the London Review of Books, March 23, 2006. (http://web.archive.org/web/200609030933 ... ar01_.html). The two authors followed up their paper with a detailed book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux: 2007).
16. P. J. Buchanan, "Whose War?," The American Conservative, March 24, 2003.
(http://web.archive.org/web/200303130306 ... cover.html).
17. Uri Avnery, "The Night After," CounterPunch, April 10, 2003
(http://web.archive.org/web/200306211006 ... 02003.html).
18. F. Nelson, "Anger Over Dalyell's 'Jewish Cabal' Slur," The Scotsman (Edinburgh), May 5, 2003; M. White, "Dalyell Steps Up Attack On Levy," The Guardian (London), May 6, 2003.

About the Author
Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. He studied history at the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).
#2018 03/2008 (revised)

http://archive.fo/I7KxV | http://web.archive.org/web/202101071713 ... qwar.shtml

[Archie]

I'd never heard that part about Senator Hollings before. That's a pretty good reference.

Here some of the points I've found the most convincing on this.

1) The Clean Break paper. Discussed above by Weber. Authors Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith would go on to work for Bush. I mean, really we could just stop right here.

2) Project for a New American Century. Founded by Jewish Zionists Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997. Sent an open letter to Bill Clinton in January 1998 calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Ten out of the twenty-five people who signed PNAC's founding statement went on to serve in the Bush administration including Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.

3) Office of Special Plans.

The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which existed from September 2002 to June 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith, as charged by then–United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to supply senior George W. Bush administration officials with raw intelligence (unvetted by intelligence analysts, see Stovepiping) pertaining to Iraq.[1] A similar unit, called the Iranian Directorate, was created several years later, in 2006, to deal with intelligence on Iran.[2]

Wolfowitz and Feith basically created this office to circumvent the established intelligence agencies who might have questioned their dubious "intelligence work."

4) Karen DeYoung's Colin Powell biography. Powell was Secretary of State and was one of the more reluctant people in the Bush administration to get on board with the Iraq invasion. He talks pretty frankly about how the push for war came from the neocons at the DOD. The "JINSA crowd," he calls them!

For many top Defense Department ideologues--Wolfowitz, Undersecretary for Planning Douglas Feith and Feith’s deputy, William J. Luti, along with Richard Perle--the conflict fell squarely within the parameters of the worldwide antiterrorist crusade Bush had launched. Any pressure on Israel to negotiate with Arafat amounted to appeasement of terrorists and a betrayal of a leading U.S. ally. In their view, whatever sustenance Palestinian militants drew from dictatorships such as Syria, Iran and Iraq made it all the more important to go after those regimes. Once they were replaced with democratic governments, the Mideast swamp would dry up.

Powell referred to Rumsfeld’s team as the “JINSA crowd.” JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, was a Washington-based organization that equated U.S. national security with strong backing for Israel’s defense needs. Feith, a Washington lawyer who had actively opposed Mideast peace talks for most of his career, had served on its board, as had Perle and Cheney. (Page 356)

In mid-January 2002, just four months after the September 11 attacks, a little-noticed article in The Washington Times reported that the Pentagon had launched its own secret effort to develop a case for attacking Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein as part of the war on terrorism. The so-called mainstream media-led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the major television networks--had little use for The Washington Times, a conservative daily funded by the eccentric self-proclaimed “messiah,” South Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The State Department paid far more attention to the mainstream papers.

Established under Paul Wolfowitz by Douglas Feith, the Pentagon effort was overseen by Feith’s deputy, William J. Luti. Luti, a retired naval officer and former aide to ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, had come to the Pentagon from Cheney’s office. Chief among the new office’s multiple tasks was a closer examination of all intelligence information to find links between Iraq and al-Qaeda and evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that other analysts might have overlooked or underappreciated. The office, which maintained close contact with “Scooter” Libby and his deputy, John Hannah, on the vice president’s staff, also managed the Pentagon’s relationship with its favored candidate to replace Saddam, Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, a leading supplier of anti-Saddam intelligence.

Intelligence analysis was normally the province of the CIA, and the State Department was nominally in charge of the administration’s relationship with Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. But at the White House and the Pentagon, both the CIA and the State Department were considered insufficiently aggressive on the subject of Iraq and unnecessarily hostile toward the INC. (Page 397)

Libby nearly always attended for Cheney, as did Wolfowitz or Feith from the Pentagon. Since there had been no official policy decision on invading Iraq, the meetings had an air of unreality about them. The deputies considered and again rejected Wolfowitz’s idea of an independent “enclave” in Southern Iraq, they recycled discussions on whether Saddam Hussein could be overthrown by exiles or his own military and they spoke about regime change through U.S. military force. “We knew what we were talking about, but we didn’t know what we were talking for,” recalled one State Department participant. “We didn’t know whether secretly a decision had been made.” (Page 398)

5) Judith Miller in the NYT. Miller, a Zionist Jew, wrote several prominent stories in the "liberal" New York Times which served to convince people of the WMD threat. Most of her information came from the OSP.

6) From the horse's mouth: Ari Shavit, “Neocons (mostly Jewish) behind Iraq war,” Haaretz, 3 Apr 2003
https://web.archive.org/web/20190402092840/https://www.haaretz.com/1.4764706

In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.

Because Kristol is believed to exercise considerable influence on the president, Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he is also perceived as having been instrumental in getting Washington to launch this all-out campaign against Baghdad.

What is the war about? I ask. Kristol replies that at one level it is the war that George Bush is talking about: a war against a brutal regime that has in its possession weapons of mass destruction. But at a deeper level it is a greater war, for the shaping of a new Middle East. It is a war that is intended to change the political culture of the entire region. Because what happened on September 11, 2001, Kristol says, is that the Americans looked around and saw that the world is not what they thought it was. The world is a dangerous place. Therefore the Americans looked for a doctrine that would enable them to cope with this dangerous world. And the only doctrine they found was the neoconservative one.

That doctrine maintains that the problem with the Middle East is the absence of democracy and of freedom. It follows that the only way to block people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden is to disseminate democracy and freedom. To change radically the cultural and political dynamics that creates such people. And the way to fight the chaos is to create a new world order that will be based on freedom and human rights - and to be ready to use force in order to consolidate this new world. So that, really, is what the war is about. It is being fought to consolidate a new world order, to create a new Middle East.

Kristol is basically saying that one hand you have the story being told to the public about how Saddam is going nuke America. But what it's really about is "reshaping the Middle East." For Israel

Additional References
-Walt and Mearsheimer article, later expanded to a book, The Israel Lobby. This is probably the primary "mainstream" argument.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090921095603/http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

-The Transparent Cabal by Stephen Sniegoski. Sniegoski is a PhD historian and his book is probably the most thorough treatment of this and he pulls a lot fewer punches than Walt and Mearsheimer.
https://www.unz.com/book/stephen_j_sniegoski__the-transparent-cabal/

-Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique has an appendix to chapter 6, "Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement." Not really about Iraq, but good for context.
https://www.unz.com/book/kevin_macdonald__the-culture-of-critique/

[Archie]

Much of this is so well documented the only counter-arguments they can even attempt are to argue that there might have been other reasons as well or to say that there were some gentiles involved, or they will say a lot of Jews didn't support the war (supposedly). Very similar to the arguments over Jews and communism. Not all Jews were communists and not all communists were Jews, therefore ... no connection! Not many people will buy this however so their preferred approach is to make sure nobody learns about any of this.

[Lamprecht]

In this 2017 article, Giraldi names many of the individual Jews and Jewish groups that had been leading the charge to invade Iraq and Iran. He shows that they faked intelligence and lied to make their case, and refused to explain how those two countries actually threatened the US or its interests.

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars
Shouldn't they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?
PHILIP GIRALDI • SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 • 1,600 WORDS

I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”

It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel.

Most recently, some pundits, including myself, have been warning of an impending war with Iran. To be sure, the urging to strike Iran comes from many quarters, to include generals in the Administration who always think first in terms of settling problems through force, from a Saudi government obsessed with fear over Iranian hegemony, and, of course, from Israel itself. But what makes the war engine run is provided by American Jews who have taken upon themselves the onerous task of starting a war with a country that does not conceivably threaten the United States. They have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat, so much so that nearly all Republican and most Democratic congressmen as well as much of the media seem to be convinced that Iran needs to be dealt with firmly, most definitely by using the U.S. military, and the sooner the better.

And while they are doing it, the issue that nearly all the Iran haters are Jewish has somehow fallen out of sight, as if it does not matter. But it should matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens.

Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative has a good review of the New Yorker piece entitled “Yes, Iran Hawks Want Conflict with Iran,” which identifies the four above cited hawks by name before describing them as “…a Who’s Who of consistently lousy foreign policy thinking. If they have been right about any major foreign policy issue in the last twenty years, it would be news to the entire world. Every single one of them hates the nuclear deal with Iran with a passion, and they have argued in favor of military action against Iran at one point or another. There is zero evidence that any of them would oppose attacking Iran.”

And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.

So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews. Indeed, I would opine that most of the fury from Congress re Iran comes from the same source, with AIPAC showering our Solons on the Potomac with “fact sheets” explaining how Iran is worthy of annihilation because it has pledged to “destroy Israel,” which is both a lie and an impossibility as Tehran does not have the resources to carry out such a task. The AIPAC lies are then picked up and replayed by an obliging media, where nearly every “expert” who speaks about the Middle East on television and radio or who is interviewed for newspaper stories is Jewish.

One might also add that neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush. Recall for a moment Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. Yes, all Jewish and all conduits for the false information that led to a war that has spread and effectively destroyed much of the Middle East. Except for Israel, of course. Philip Zelikow, also Jewish, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.

Add to the folly a Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel who identifies with the most right-wing Israeli settler elements, a White House appointed chief negotiator who is Jewish and a Jewish son-in-law who is also involved in formulating Middle East policy. Is anyone providing an alternative viewpoint to eternal and uncritical support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his kleptocratic regime of racist thugs? I think not.

There are a couple of simple fixes for the dominant involvement of American Jews in foreign policy issues where they have a personal interest due to their ethnicity or family ties. First of all, don’t put them into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted. Let them worry instead about North Korea, which does not have a Jewish minority and which was not involved in the holocaust. This type of solution was, in fact, somewhat of a policy regarding the U.S. Ambassador position in Israel. No Jew was appointed to avoid any conflict of interest prior to 1995, an understanding that was violated by Bill Clinton (wouldn’t you know it!) who named Martin Indyk to the post. Indyk was not even an American citizen at the time and had to be naturalized quickly prior to being approved by congress.

Those American Jews who are strongly attached to Israel and somehow find themselves in senior policy making positions involving the Middle East and who actually possess any integrity on the issue should recuse themselves, just as any judge would do if he were presiding over a case in which he had a personal interest. Any American should be free to exercise first amendment rights to debate possible options regarding policy, up to and including embracing positions that damage the United States and benefit a foreign nation. But if he or she is in a position to actually create those policies, he or she should butt out and leave the policy generation to those who have no personal baggage.

For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”

As none of the above is likely to happen, the only alternative is for American citizens who are tired of having their country’s national security interests hijacked by a group that is in thrall to a foreign government to become more assertive about what is happening. Shine a little light into the darkness and recognize who is being diddled and by whom. Call it like it is. And if someone’s feelings are hurt, too bad. We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver. Seriously, we don’t need it.

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/americas-j ... icas-wars/