- The next war. It is now fashionable to talk about "the
day after".
-
- Let's talk about the night after.
-
- After the end of hostilities in Iraq, the world will
be faced with two decisive facts:
-
- First, the immense superiority of American arms can beat
any people in the world, valiant as it may be.
-
- Second, the small group that initiated this war - an
alliance of Christian fundamentalists and Jewish neo-conservatives - has
won big, and from now on it will control Washington almost without limits.
- The combination of these two facts constitutes a danger
to the world, and especially to the Middle East, the Arab peoples and the
future of Israel. Because this alliance is the enemy of peaceful solutions,
the enemy of the Arab governments, the enemy of the Palestinian people
and especially the enemy of the Israeli peace camp.
-
- It does not dream only about an American empire, in the
style of the Roman one, but also of an Israeli mini-empire, under the control
of the extreme right and the settlers. It wants to change the regimes in
all Arab countries. It will cause permanent chaos in the region, the consequences
of which it is impossible to foresee.
-
- Its mental world consists of a mixture of ideological
fervor and crass material interests, an exaggerated American patriotism
and right-wing ionism.
-
- That is a dangerous mixture. There is in it something
of the spirit of Ariel Sharon, a man who has always had grandiose plans
for changing the region, consisting of a mixture of creative imagination,
unbridled chauvinism and a primitive faith in brute force.
-
- 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.
-
- For many years, this was a marginal group that fostered
a right-wing agenda in all fields. They fought against abortion, homosexuality,
pornography and drugs. When Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel,
they offered him advise on how to fight the Arabs.
-
- Their big moment arrived with the collapse of the Twin
Towers. The American public and politicians were in a state of shock, completely
disoriented, unable to understand a world that had changed overnight. The
neo-cons were the only group with a ready explanation and a solution. Only
nine days after the outrage, William Kristol (the son of the group's founder,
Irving Kristol) published an Open Letter to President Bush, asserting that
it was not enough to annihilate the network of Osama bin Laden, but that
it was also imperative to "remove Saddam Hussein from power"
and to "retaliate" against Syria and Iran for supporting Hizbullah.
-
- Following is a short list of the main characters. (If
it bores you, skip to the next section).
-
- The Open Letter was published in the Weekly Standard,
founded by Kristol with the money of ultra-right press mogul Rupert Murdoch,
who donated $10 million to the cause. It was signed by 41 leading neo-cons,
including Norman Podhoretz, a Jewish former leftist who has become an extreme
right-wing icon, editor of the prestigious Encounter [Commentary] magazine,
and his wife, Midge Decter, also a writer, Frank Gaffney of the Center
for Security Studies, Robert Kagan, also of the Weekly Standard, Charles
Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and, of course, Richard Perle.
-
- Perle is a central character in this play. Until recently
he was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the Defense Department,
which also includes Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross. Perle is a director of
the Jerusalem Post, now owned by extreme right-wing Zionists. In the past
he was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, who led the fight against the
Soviet Union on behalf of the Jews who wanted to leave. He is a leading
member of the influential right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Lately
he was obliged to resign from his Defense Department position, when it
became known that a private corporation had promised to pay him almost
a million dollars for the benefit of his influence in the administration.
-
- That Open Letter was, in effect, the beginning of the
Iraq war. It was eagerly received by the Bush administration, with members
of the group already firmly established in some of its leading positions.
Paul Wolfowitz, the father of the war, is No. 2 in the Defense Department,
where another friend of Perle's, Douglas Feith, heads the Pentagon Planning
Board. John Bolton is State Department Undersecretary. Eliot Abrams, responsible
for the Middle East in the National Security Council, was connected with
the Iran-Contra-Israel scandal. The main hero of the scandal, Oliver North,
sits in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, together with
Michael Ledeen, another hero of the scandal. He advocates total war not
only against Iraq, but also against Israel's other enemies, Iran, Syria,
Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Dov Zakheim is comptroller
for the Defense Department.
-
- Most of these people , together with Vice-President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (right), are associated with
the "Project for the New American Century", which published a
White Paper in 2002, with the aim 'to preserve and enhance this 'American
peace'" -- meaning American control of the world.
-
- Meyrav Wurmser (Meyrav is a chic new Israeli first name)
is Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute.
She also writes for the Jerusalem Post and is co-founder of the Middle
East Media Research Institute that is, according to the London Guardian,
connected with Israeli Army Intelligence. MEMRI feeds the media and politicians
with highly selective quotations from extreme Arab publications. Meyrav's
husband, Davis Wurmser, is at Perle's American Enterprise Institute, heading
Middle East Studies. Mention should also be made of the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy of our old acquaintance, Dennis Ross, who for years
was in charge of the "peace process" in the Middle East.
-
- In all the important papers there are people close to
the group, such as William Safire, a man hypnotized by Sharon, in the New
York Times and Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Another Perle
friend, Robert Bartley, is the editor of the Wall Street Journal.
-
- If the speeches of Bush and Cheney often sound as if
they came from the lips of Sharon, one of the reasons may be that their
speechwriters, Joseph Shattan, Mathew Scully and John McConnell, are neo-cons,
as is Cheneys Chief-of-Staff, Lewis Libby.
-
- 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 RRepublican party. The founding fathers were
Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, who once got a jet plane as a present
from Menachem Begin, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition and the
Christian Broadcasting Network, which help to finance the Christian Embassy
in Jerusalem of J.W. van der Hoeven, an outfit that supports the settlers
and their right-wing allies.
-
- Common to both groups is their adherence to the fanatical
ideology of the extreme right in Israel. They see the Iraq war as a struggle
between the Children of Light (America and Israel) and the Children of
Darkness (the Arabs and Muslims).
- By the way, none of these facts are secret. They have
been published lately in dozens of articles, both in American and world
media. The members of the group are proud of them.
-
- The Zionist general. The man who symbolizes this victory
is General Jay Garner, who has just been appointed chief of the civilian
administration in Iraq.
-
- He is no anonymous general who has been picked accidentally.
Garner is the ideological partner of Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-cons.
-
- Two years ago he signed, together with 26 other officers,
a petition organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,
lauding the Israeli Army for "remarkable restraint in the face of
lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority,"
which is certainly news to the Israeli peace forces. He also stated that
"a strong Israel is an asset that American military planners and political
eaders can rely on."
-
- In the first Gulf War he praised the performance of the
Patriot missiles, which had failed miserably. After leaving the army in
1997, he became, not surprisingly, a defense contractor specializing in
missiles. It was alleged that he landed non-competitive Pentagon contracts.
This year he obtained a defense contract for $1.5 billion, as well as a
contract for building Patriot systems in Israel.
-
- Therefore, there can be no better candidate for the job
of chief of the civilian administration in Iraq, especially at a time when
contracts for billions of dollars for reconstruction have to be handed
out, to be paid for by Iraqi oil.
-
- A new Balfour declaration. The ideology of this group,
that calls for an American world-empire as well as for a Greater Israel,
reminds one of bygone days.
-
- The Balfour declaration of 1917, that promised the Jews
a homeland in Palestine, had two parents. The mother was Christian Zionism
(among whose adherents were illustrious statesmen like Lord Palmerston
and Lord Shaftesbury, long before the foundation of the Zionist movement),
the father was British imperialism. The Zionist idea allowed the British
to crowd out their French competitors and take possession of Palestine,
which was needed to safeguard the Suez Canal and the shorter sea route
to India.
-
- Now the same thing is happening again. Last year Richard
Perle organized a briefing in which a speaker proposed war not only on
Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well, in order to secure the world's
oil heartland. Iraq, he asserted, was only the pivot. One of the justifications
for this design is the need to defend Israel.
-
- To bet on our life? 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.
-
- But this tendency troubles me. We are like a gambler,
who bets all his money and his future on one horse. A good horse, a horse
with no current competitor, but still one horse.
-
- The neo-cons will cause a long period of chaos in the
Arab and Muslim world. The Iraqi war has already shown that their understanding
of Arab realities is shaky. Their political assumptions did not stand the
test, only brute force saved their undertaking.
- Some day the Americans will go home, but we shall remain
here. We have to live with the Arab peoples. Chaos in the Arab world endangers
our future.
-
- Wolfowitz and Co. may dream about a democratic, liberal,
Zionist and America-loving Middle East, but the result of their adventures
may well turn out to be a fanatical and fundamentalist region that will
threaten our very existence.
-
- The partnership of the neo-cons and the Christian fundamentalists
may engender counter-forces in Washington. And if Bush is defeated in the
next election, like his father after his victory in the first Gulf War,
this whole gang will be thrown out.
-
- The Bible tells us about the kings of Judea, who relied
on the then world power, Egypt. They did not appreciate the rise of forces
in the east, Assyria and Babylon. An Assyrian general told the king of
Judea: "Behold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed,
upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce
it." (II Kings 18, 21).
-
- Bush and his gang of neo-cons is not a bruised reed.
Far from it, he is now a very strong reed. But should we bet our whole
future on this?
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