- "No American President can stand up to Israel."
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- These words came from feisty Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief
of Naval Operations (1967-1970) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(1970-1974). Moorer was, perhaps, the last independent- minded American
military leader.
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- Admiral Moorer knew what he was talking about. On June
8, 1967, Israel attacked the American intelligence ship, USS Liberty, killing
34 American sailors and wounding 173. The Israelis even strafed the life
rafts, machine-gunning the American sailors leaving the stricken ship.
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- Apparently, the USS Liberty had picked up Israeli communications
that revealed Israel's responsibility for the Seven Day War. Even today,
history books and the majority of Americans blame the conflict on the Arabs.
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- The United States Navy knew the truth, but the President
of the United States took Israel's side against the American military and
ordered the United States Navy to shut its mouth. President Lyndon Johnson
said it was all just a mistake. Later in life, Admiral Moorer formed a
commission and presented the unvarnished truth to Americans.
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- The power of the Israel Lobby over American foreign policy
is considerable. In March 2006, two distinguished American scholars, John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, expressed concern in the London Review of
Books that the power of the Israel Lobby was bending US foreign policy
in directions that serve neither US nor Israeli interests. The two experts
were hoping to start a debate that might rescue the US and Israel from
unsuccessful policies of coercion that are intensifying Muslim hatred of
Israel and America. The Israel lobby was opposed to any such reassessment,
and attempted to close it off with epithets: "Jew-baiter, " "anti-Semitic,
" and even "anti-American. " Today Israeli citizens who
oppose Zionist plans for greater Israel are denounced as "anti-Semites.
"
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- Many Americans are unaware of the influence of the Israel
lobby. Instead they think of the US as "the world's sole superpower,"
a macho new Roman Empire whose orders are obeyed without question or the
insolent nonentity is "bombed back to the stone age." Many Americans
are convinced that military coercion serves our interest. They cite Libya,
Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now they are ready to bring Iran and Pakistan
to heel with bombs.
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- This arrogance results in the murder of tens of thousands,
perhaps hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children, a fate that
many Americans seem to believe is appropriate for countries that do not
accept US hegemony.
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- Coercion is what American foreign policy has become.
Macho superpatriots love it. Many of these superpatriots derive vicarious
pleasure from their delusions that America is "kicking those sand
niggers' asses."
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- This is the America of the Bush Regime. If some of these
superpatriots had their way every "unpatriotic, terrorist supporter"
who dares to criticize the war against "the Islamofacists" would
be sent to Gitmo, if not shot on the spot.
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- These Bush supporters have morphed the Republican Party
into the Brownshirt Party. They cannot wait to attack Iran, preferably
with nuclear weapons. Impatient for Armageddon, some are so full of hubris
and self-righteousness that they actually believe that their support for
evil means they will be "wafted up to heaven." [see
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- It has come as a crippling blow to Democrats that "their"
political party is comfortable with Bush's America, and will do nothing
to stop the Bush regime's aggression against the Iraqi people or to prevent
the Bush regime's attack on Iran.
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- The Democrats could easily impeach both Bush and Cheney
in the House, as impeachment only requires a majority vote. They could
not convict in the Senate without Republican support, as conviction requires
ratification by two-thirds of Senators present. Nevertheless, a House vote
for impeachment would take the wind out of the sails of war, save countless
lives and perhaps even save humanity from nuclear holocaust.
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- Various rationales or excuses have been constructed for
the Democrats' complicity in aggression that does not serve America. Perhaps
the most popular rationale is that the Democrats are letting the Republicans
have all the rope they want with which to produce such a high disapproval
rating that the Democrats will sweep the 2008 election.
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- It is doubtful that the Democrats would assume that men
as cunning as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do not understand the electoral
consequences of a low public approval rating and are walking blindly into
an electoral wipeout. Rove's departure does not mean that no strategy is
in place.
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- So what does explain the complicity of the Democratic
Party in a policy that the American public, and especially Democratic constituencies,
reject? Perhaps a clue is offered from the Minneapolis- St. Paul Star Tribune
news report (August 1, 2007) that Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison
will spend a week in Israel on "a privately funded trip sponsored
by the American Israel Education Federation. The AIEF--the charitable arm
of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)--is sending 19
members of Congress to meet with Israeli leaders. The group, made up mostly
of freshman Democrats, has plans to meet with Isreali Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert and [puppet] Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The senior Democratic
member on the trip is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has gone three
times. . . . The trip to Israel is Ellison's second as a congressman. "
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- According to the Star-Tribune, a Republican group, which
includes Rep. Michele Bachmann (R, Minn), led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va)
is already in Israel. According to news reports, another 40 are following
these two groups during the August recess, and "by the time the year
is out every single member of Congress will have made their rounds in Israel."
This claim is probably overstated, but it does show careful Israeli management
of US policy in the Middle East.
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- Elsewhere on earth and especially among Muslims, the
suspicion is rife that the reason the war against Iraq cannot end, and
the reason Iran and Syria must be attacked, is that the US must destroy
all Muslim opposition to Israel's theft of Palestine, turning an entire
people into refugees driven from their homes and from the lands on which
they have lived for many centuries. Americans might think that they are
merely grabbing control over oil, keeping it out of the hands of terrorists,
but that is not the way the rest of the world views the conflict.
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- Jimmy Carter was the last American president who stood
up to Israel and demanded that US diplomacy be, at least officially if
not in practice, even-handed in its approach to Israel and Palestine. Since
Carter's presidency, even-handedness has slowly drained from US policy
in the Middle East. The neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime has abandoned
even the pretense of even-handedness.
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- This is unfortunate, because military coercion has proven
to be unsuccessful. Exhausted from the conflict, the US military, according
to former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Colin Powell, is "nearly broken." Demoralized elite West
Point graduates are leaving the army at the fastest clip in 30 years. Desertions
are rapidly rising. A friend, a US Marine officer who served in combat
in Vietnam, recently wrote to me that his son's Marine unit, currently
training for its third deployment to Iraq in September, is short 12-16
men in every platoon and expects to be hit with more AWOLs prior to deployment.
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- Instead of re-evaluating a failed policy, Bush's "war
tsar," General Douglas Lute, has called for the reinstitution of the
draft. Gen. Lute doesn't see why Americans should not be returned to military
servitude in order to save the Bush administration the embarrassment of
having to correct a mistaken Middle East policy that commits the US to
more aggression and to debilitating long-term military conflict in the
Middle East.
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- It is difficult to see how this policy serves any interest
other than the very narrow one of the armaments industry. Apparently, nothing
can be done to change this disastrous policy until the Israel Lobby comes
to the realization that Israel's interest is not being served by the current
policy of military coercion.
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- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is
coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
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