[casi] Whose War? Final

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...   "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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