- Should John Walker Lindh be found guilty of taking up
arms against the United States, pursuant to a fair trial before a court
of competent jurisdiction, this writer would have no objection in principle
to seeing him executed, or put away for a long period. The law is the law;
one may say this without engaging in bloodthirsty rancor or the cheap,
pseudo-patriotic histrionics that are the custom on talk radio or the cable
"news" channels.
-
- That having been stipulated, the American Taliban case
raises fundamental questions of group loyalty, and what it means to cross
the line between Constitutionally-protected activities and openly treasonable
behavior. Moreover, if Walker Lindh's youth and alleged naivetÈ
turn out to be mitigating circumstances, how are we to judge disloyalty
committed by older, presumably responsible citizens who swear an oath to
protect the Constitution when they assume elective office?
-
- What happens, indeed, when inverted and transferred loyalty
becomes so general as hardly to be noticeable?
-
- Probably the emblematic example of this kind of generalized
disloyalty to the country of one's birth is the Vichy government of France.
Histories of the fall of France, such as William Shirer's Collapse
of the Third Republic, or Alistair Horne's To
Lose a Battle, take pains to emphasize that France's military collapse
and generally subservient loyalty to German occupation had their source
not in military weakness per se, but in the profound cynicism, corruption,
and attenuated loyalty of interwar France's professional class of politicians.
-
- One of the archetypes that reverberates in our extended
historical memory is the thoroughly distasteful picture of the dozing,
senile Petain, the feral, rat-like Leval, and a supporting cast of seedy
hack politicians clenching acrid Gauloise cigarettes between tobacco-stained
fingers. When Petain spoke of the "duty of loyalty" of France's
citizens to a collaborationist regime, the modern reader has no difficulty
in calculating that black is white and up is down. Loyalty to France was
not the loyalty preached and practiced by the politicians in Vichy. At
the end of World War II, many of these politicians found themselves at
the end of a rope.
-
- What, then, is one to make of our representatives and
senators in Congress assembled?
-
- For expressions of sheer grovelling subservience to a
foreign power, the pronouncements of Laval and Petain pale in comparison
to the rhetorical devotion with which certain Congressmen have bathed the
Israel of Ariel Sharon.
-
- In March, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma took the Senate
floor and said the September 11 attacks were punishment by God in response
to U.S. policy toward Israel. Asserting that Israel is "entitled"
to the West Bank, he also criticized his fellow citizens who counselled
the Israelis to use restraint, in effect blaming them for the terrorist
attacks of September 11: "One of the reasons I believe the spiritual
door was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that
the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it
with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist
strikes that have been launched against them."
-
- According to this Tornado-Belt St. Augustine, God in
effect allowed airliners to be flown into the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon because U.S. actions towards Israel offended the Almighty. In
other words, the United States was punished because the Bush administration
had been insufficiently worshipful towards Israel (the $3 billion annually
that Congress squeezes out of the taxpayer as tribute to the Jewish State
is apparently not sufficient in the opinion of this self-styled "fiscal
conservative"--and in the opinion of the Almighty Himself, Whose inscrutable
will Inhofe claims to be able to interpret).
-
- Like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Inhofe believes
America suffered divinely-ordained punishment; but the Senator adds a new
twist: those 3,000 innocent Americans died, he believes, because their
government demonstrated insufficient obeisance to a foreign country. For
sheer treacherous Quislingism, Inhofe's statement is hard to top.
-
- But top it we can.
-
- A perusal of the May 6, 2002 Jerusalem Post reveals the
following headline: "Visiting Congressmen Advise Israel to Resist
US Administration Pressure." The Israeli newspaper chronicles the
pilgrimage of a group of Congressional wardheelers to the Promised Land,
carrying with them a copy of the resolution of support for the Israeli
government which passed Congress by a vote of 352-21 with 29 abstentions.
The delegation's leader, Rep. James Saxton of New Jersey, displayed a copy
of the resolution to reporters, which he said they wanted to "hand
deliver" to the Israeli people. Saxton's enthusiasm for Israel is
a matter of long standing, and extends to providing Congressional employment
to Israeli citizen--and rumored Mossad asset--Yosef Bodansky.
-
- An ironic aspect to this Congressional junket is that
these are precisely the public officials who routinely suggest that dissent
against the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Afghanistan is
tantamount to treason.
-
- Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's tepid criticism
of Bush's policies in March elicited a firestorm of self-righteous indignation
from Republicans, and Daschle, duly chastised, slunk offstage.
-
- No criticism of President Bush is warranted, apparently,
except where Israel is involved. In that case, one is seemingly permitted
to travel to foreign countries at taxpayer expense for the purpose of publicly
undercutting one's own government's foreign policy. What gives this circumstance
added savor is the recollection that Jesse Jackson's erstwhile forays into
hostage negotiation in Lebanon and the Balkans met with grumbling from
Republicans that Jackson ought to be prosecuted for violating the Logan
Act. Again, apparently the Israel exception applies.
-
- A further example of Vichyite subservience is provided
by John McCain, adored pet of newspaper editorial boards and in relentless
competition with Joseph Lieberman as Conscience of the Senate pro tempore.
Addressing the closing plenary session of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee at the Jefferson Memorial on April 23, McCain plighted his troth
with Sharon's Israel in a manner that would have been denounced as fellow-travelership
or useful idiocy had it been Henry Wallace praising the Soviet Union.
-
- Invoking Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (the
founder, as it were, of Congressional Vichyism: a truly odious pork-barreling
errand boy of the military industrial complex whose chief contribution
to American statecraft was launching the careers of the smoothly sinister
Richard Perle and howling militarist Frank Gaffney) McCain described the
indissoluble moral bond between the American Republic and the Middle Eastern
apartheid state run by an ex-general currently under indictment by a Belgian
court for war crimes. Indeed, "To be proudly pro-American and pro-Israeli
is not to hold conflicting loyalties. As Scoop understood, it is about
defending the principles that both countries hold dear. And I stand before
you today, proudly pro-American and pro-Israel." It is notable that
McCain produced this effusion at an American national memorial, surrounded
by Israeli flags. The Senator apparently thinks that this scene would be
so impressive to his Arizona constituents that he put a picture of it on
-
- Command performances before AIPAC have become standard
features in the life of a Washington elected official, like filing FEC
reports and hitting on interns. The stylized panegyrics delivered at the
annual AIPAC meeting have all the probative value of the Dniepropetrovsk
Soviet's birthday greeting to Stalin, because the actual content is unimportant;
what is crucial is that the politician in question be seen to be genuflecting
before the AIPAC board. In fact, to make things easier, the speeches are
sometimes written by an AIPAC employee, with cosmetic changes inserted
by a member of the Senator's or Congressman's own staff.
-
- Of course, there are innumerable lobbies in Washington,
from environmental to telecommunications to chiropractic; why is AIPAC
different? For one thing, it is a political action committee that lobbies
expressly on behalf of a foreign power; the fact that it is exempt from
the Foreign Agents' Registration Act is yet another mysterious "Israel
exception." For another, it is not just the amount of money it gives,
it is the political punishment it can exact: just ask Chuck Percy or Pete
McClosky. Since the mid-1980s, no Member of Congress has even tried to
take on the lobby directly. As a Senate staffer told this writer, it is
the "cold fear" of AIPAC's disfavor that keeps the politicians
in line.
-
- This scam has been going on for decades.
-
- The main purpose, other than to maintain the flow of
weapons and loot to Israel, is to keep Congress's investigatory apparatus
turned off. AIPAC appears to be batting a thousand.
-
- Lyndon Johnson's decision to cover up the deliberate
and protracted Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967 (and which
resulted in 34 deaths: almost double the deaths suffered by the crew of
the U.S.S. Cole) was pointedly not investigated by Congress. Instead, the
surviving crew were shamefully bullied into silence by the gargoyle Johnson
and his functionaries; those who did break their silence later were reviled
by the lobby as delusional anti-Semites.
-
- Likewise, the Congressional investigation into the Beirut
barracks bombing stuck to the narrow issue of the incompetent U.S. military
chain of command, and avoided the wider issue of the Marines' presence
as sitting ducks in the midle of Sharon's first war of conquest. A retired
officer has asserted that the Mossad had intelligence from informers that
the frame of a truck was being reinforced to carry a heavy load of explosives,
but chose to keep the intelligence secret. Despite the lobby's claim that
the U.S.-Israel relationship is one of mutual intelligence sharing, the
real relationship is a starker one: according to old intelligence hands,
Israel takes all and gives nothing, even if U.S. lives are at stake.
-
- The way for then-National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane's
"opening to Iran" was paved by the fact that Israel was already
providing F-4 Phantom spare parts (manufactured in the United States and
transported to Israel at American taxpayer expense) to Iran on the sly
as a way of counterbalancing Iraq's military power.
-
- The extent to which President Reagan's privatized foreign
policy used these pre-existing links to pursue the Iranian opening is uncertain.
What is certain is that the joint House-Senate investigating committee,
chaired by long-time AIPAC favorite Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, took
some pains to steer the investigation away from Israel, so that those links
would not be made public in a way that would embarrass our Major non-NATO
Ally.
-
- Finally, for a country that loves a good spy mystery--whether
it is Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, or Robert Hansen, each one eliciting
from Capitol Hill cries for an investigation, more polygraphs, increased
use of the death penalty, etc., etc.--Congress's deafening silence over
the Israeli "art students" saga, particularly after 9/11, is
astonishing for those unfamiliar with Congress's reticence about embarrassing
Israel.
-
- All the more amazing that only two years before, the
Hill was in an uproar over the Chinese spy hysteria (the fact that Wen
Ho Lee, the apparently falsely accused Los Alamos employee, had been fingered
in the columns of manic Zionist and Sharon confidant William Safire supplies
an almost O. Henry quality of irony to the tale). The full story of how
hundreds of Mossad agents-in-training were literally inundating Federal
facilities in the year and a half prior to 9/11 may never be known, thanks
to a total smothering by the Justice Department, Congress, and the major
media, <http://real-info.1accesshost.com/artstudents.htmlbut a good
summary may be read in the following here.
-
- As year chases year, the lobby's power to influence Congress
on any issue of importance to Israel grows inexorably stronger. In 1995,
coincidentally the year her then-husband became Speaker of the House, Marianne
Gingrich was hired by the Israel Export Development Co., Ltd (IEDC) as
its vice president for business development. Mrs. Gingrich's interest in
Israel began during an eight-day trip to Israel she and her husband made
in August 1994 at AIPAC's expense.
-
- Was it a political payoff from a foreign power?
-
- "If I were going to get a political payoff, it would
not be for the amount of money I am making," said Mrs. Gingrich, who
had no experience in the field. Her salary was $2,500 per month, "plus
commissions," the size of which neither she nor anyone connected with
the business would reveal.
-
- By an even odder coincidence, the newly-minted Speaker
Gingrich's foreign policy prescriptions became stridently pro-Israel and
bellicosely opposed to the countries that Israel designates as enemies.
One of Gingrich's notable forays into diplomacy at the time was his public
call for the CIA to overthrow the government of Iran. Someone apparently
failed to remind the Speaker that the agency had already engineered an
Iranian coup in 1953--and look how well that little enterprise turned out.
-
- Israel's strategy of using its influence on the American
political system to turn the U.S. national security apparatus into its
own personal attack dog--or Golem--has alienated the United States from
much of the Third World, has worsened U.S. ties to Europe amid rancorous
insinuations of anti-Semitism, and makes the United States a hated bully.
And by cutting off all diplomatic lines of retreat--as Sharon did when
he publicly made President Bush, the leader of the Free World, look like
an impotent fool--Israel paradoxically forces the United States to draw
closer to Israel because there is no thinkable alternative for American
politicians than continuing to invest political capital in Israel.
-
- We have now reached the point where there may be no turning
back as nuclear Armageddon beckons from the Middle East. Writing recently
in The Washington Post, Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external
relations, says "a senior Democratic senator [alas, Patten does not
name him] told a visiting European the other day: 'All of us here are members
of Likud now.'"
-
- So it has come to this: members of the world's greatest
deliberative body, the heirs of Clay, La Follette, and Taft, now identify
themselves with a radical political movement that grew out of the terrorism
of Judeo-Fascist and Mussolini admirer Vladimir Jabotinsky; Menachim Begin,
co-conspirator in the bombing of the King David Hotel; and Ariel Sharon,
the butcher of Sabra and Shatila.
-
- Whether they identify with Sharon's Israel because of
crass political advantage, or because, like those of Senator Inhofe's,
their views are indistinguishable from the delusions of a certifiable lunatic,
our Vichy Congress is driving us down the path of a final, fatal clash
of civilizations. All Americans, be they old-line conservatives who hate
seeing their country hopelessly embroiled in the Old World's perpetual
quarrels, or liberals in the honorable anti-imperilialist and antimilitarist
tradition of William Jennings Bryan, or the apolitical who resent the prospect
of becoming an irradiated corpse, must put aside their differences and
start loudly and persistently identifying these Congressional Likudniki
for what they are: Quislings.
-
- George Sunderland is the pen name of a Congressional
staff member. Comments to Sunderland can be sent to counterpunch@counterpunch.org
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/
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