Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  2. Stephen J. Sniegoski, “The Neoconservative Smoke Screen,” April 4, 2003, The Last Ditch (http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_smoke.htm).

  1. This author produced an earlier piece on the origins of the war on Iraq entitled, “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel,” The Last Ditch, February 10, 2003 (http://www.thorn-walker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm).

  2. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 231; On the connection between Jews, Zionism, and neo-conservativism, see Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993); J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the Jewish Establishment (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996), pp. 159–162; Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993); James Neuchterlein, “This Time: Neoconservatism Redux,” First Things, Vol. 66, October, 1996, pp. 7–8.

  1. Paul Gottfried, “Goldberg Is Not the Worst,” LewRockwell.com, March 20, 2003.

  2. Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” The Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003, online.

  3. Mark Gerson, “Introduction,” in Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996), p. xvi.

  4. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), pp. 312–313.

  1. Kristol, loc. cit.

  2. Israel Shahak, trans. & ed., The Zionist Plan For the Middle East (Belmont, Mass.: A.A.U.G., 1982), a translation of Oded Yinon, A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties (http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/zionist_plan.html).

  1. Ibid.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  1. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel's Fateful Hour (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 57–58.

  2. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 353, 356.

  3. Christopher Layne, “Why the Gulf War was Not in the National Interest,” The Atlantic, July 1991, pp. 55–81.

  1. American Defamation League, Anger on the Right: Pat Buchanan's Venomous Crusade, 1991 (http://www.adl.org/special_reports/pb_archive/pb_1991rpt.pdf).

  2. Arnold Beichman, “How the Divide Over Iraq Strategies Began,” Washington Times, November 27, 2002, p. A18.

  3. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 489.

  1. The Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000 of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” (http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm).

  2. Arnaud de Borchgrave, “All in the Family,” Washington Times, September 13, 2004, online.

  3. “New Citizen's Project,” Disinfopedia (http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title= New_Citizenship_Project).

  1. PNAC describes itself as follows: “Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project (501c3); the New Citizenship Project's chairman is William Kristol and its president is Gary Schmitt” (http://www.newamericancentury.org/aboutpnac.htm).

  2. PNAC Letter to President William J. Clinton, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamer-icancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm).

  3. Publications of the Center for Security Policy No. 98-D 33 (http://www.security-pol-icy.org/papers/1998/98-D33at.html).

  4. “Open Letter to the President,” February 19, 1998 (http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/rumsfeld-openletter.htm); Frank Gaffney, “End Saddam's Reign of Terror: Better Late Than Never,” National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), February 21, 2002.

  1. PNAC Letter to Gingrich and Lott, May 29, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm).

  2. Seymour Hersh, “The Iraq Hawks,” New Yorker, December 20, 2001, online; Richard Perle, “Foreword,” David Wurmser, Tyranny's Ally (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1999), p. xii.

  3. Neil Mackay, “Bush Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' Before Becoming President,” Scottish Sunday Herald, September 15, 2002, online.

  4. PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, A Report of The Project for the New American Century September 2000, p. 51.

  1. David Wurmser, “Middle East 'War': How Did It Come to This?” AEI Online, January 1, 2001.

  2. “GOP Backing Out of Iraq Offensive?” FOX News, August 16, 2002, online; Todd S. Purdum and Patrick E. Tyler, “Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy,” New York Times, August 16, 2002, online; Jim Lobe, “Washington Goes to War Over War,” Asia Times, August 21, 2002, online; Brent Scowcroft, “Don't Attack Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002 (online at http://www.ffip.com/opeds081502.htm).

  3. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), p. x.

  4. “Home Stretch Madness,” November 4, 2000, quoted at “How Slatesters Voted,” Slate, November 7, 2000 (http://slate.msn.com/id/93134/).

  1. Ian Urbina, “Rogues' Gallery, Who Advises Bush and Gore on the Middle East?” Middle East Report 216, Fall, 2000, online.

  2. Terry M. Neal, “Bush Backs Into Nation Building,” Washington Post, February 26, 2003, online.

  3. Quoted in Mann, Rise of the Vulcans p. 257.

  4. Quoted ibid.

  1. Halper and Clarke, op. cit., p. 135.

  2. Quoted in Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, p. 259.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Francis Foer, “The Neocons Wake Up: Arguing the GOP,” New Republic, March 20, 2000, p. 13. See also Charles Krauthammer, “A Winner? Yes,” Washington Post, February 11, 2000, online.

  5. “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” Nationmaster (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Committee-for-the-Liberation-of-Iraq); Laurie Mylorie, “'Iraq Liberation Act' introduced into Congress,” Federation of American Scientists, Iraq News, September 29, 1998 (http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/09/980929-in2.htm).

  1. Justin Raimondo, “John McCain and the War Party,” Antiwar.com, February 14, 2000.

  2. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 252–53.

  1. Jim Lobe, “Dick Cheney, Commander-in-Chief,” AlterNet.org, October 27, 2003.

  2. Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin, “Cheney Is Fulcrum of Foreign Policy: In Interagency Fights, His Views Often Prevail,” Washington Post, October 13, 2002, p. A1; Lind, loc. cit.

  3. Kathleen and Bill Christison, “Dual Loyalties: The Bush Neocons and Israel,” Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, September 6, 2004 (http://www.ccmep.org/2004_arti-cles/palestine/090604_dual_loyalties.htm).

  4. Mark Thompson, “The Godfather of the Iraq War,” Time, (posted) December 21, 2003, online.

  5. Bret Stephens, “Man of the Year,” Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2003, online. The designation applied to the Jewish year 5763 and to A.D.2002–03.

  1. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 21.

  2. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 231.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 21–22.

  1. Colin L. Powell, “Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa,” Cairo, Egypt, (Ittihadiya Palace), February 24, 2001 (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm); John Pilger, “Colin Powell Said Iraq Was no Threat,” Daily Mirror, September 22, 2003 (online at http://www.coldtype.net/Assets/Pilger/JP.26.%20Sept%2022.pdf); James Ridgeway “Tripping Down Memory Lane,” Village Voice, October 15–23, 2001, online.

  2. Ronald Bleier, “Sharon Routs Bush: Palestinians
Now Vulnerable to Expulsion,” Demographic, Environmental, and Security Issues Project, Institute for Global Communications, August 2001 (http://desip.igc.org/SharonRoutsBush.html); Bleier, “The Next Expulsion of the Palestinians,” Demographic, Environmental, and Security Issues Project, Institute for Global Communications, January 2001 (http://desip.igc.org/TheNextExpulsion.html).

  3. Tikva Honig-Parnass, “Israel's Recent Conviction: Apartheid in Palestine Can Only Be Preserved Through Force,” Between the Lines, September, 2001 (http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2001/sep/Tikva_Honig-Parnass.htm).

  4. Ronald Bleier, “Sharon Gears Up for Expulsion,” January 2002 (http://desip.igc.org/SharonGearsUp.html).

  1. Tikvah Honig-Parnass, “Louder Voices of War: Manufacturing Consent at its Peak,” Between the Lines, Vol. 1, No. 8, July, 2001, quoted in Ronald Bleier, “Sharon Routs Bush,” loc. cit.

  2. Associated Press, “Israeli War Plan Revealed,” July 12, 2001 (http://www.globalex-change.org/countries/palestine/news2001/ap071201.html); “Israelis Generals' Plan to 'Smash' Palestinians,” Mid-East Realities, July 12, 2001, online (http://www.middleeast.org/premium/read.cgi?category=Magazine&standalone=&num=278&month=7&year=2001&function=text); Tanya Reinhart, “The Second Half of 1948,” Mid-East Realities, June 20, 2001 (http://www.middleeast.org/premium/read.cgi?category=Magazine&num=251&month=6&year=2001&function=text).

  3. Bleier, “Sharon Routes Bush,” loc. cit.

  4. James Bennet, “Spilled Blood Is Seen As Bond That Draws 2 Nations Closer,” New York Times, September 12, 2001, p. A22; “Horrific Tragedy, the Media, Palestinian Reaction,” Jerusalem Media & Communication Centre (http://www.jmcc.org/new/01/Sep/us.htm).

  1. Ron Dermer, “A Strategic Opportunity,” The Israel Report, December 6, 2001 (http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/isreport/dec01/opportunity.html).

  2. Quoted in Drew, loc. cit.

  1. Bob Woodward, Bush at War, p. 49.

  2. Ibid., p. 83; Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul ONeil (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), p.188.

  3. DoD News Briefing – Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, September 13, 2001 (http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Sep2001/t09132001_t0913dsd.html).

  4. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 84.

  5. Patrick E. Tyler and Elaine Sciolino, “Bush's Advisers Split on Scope Of Retaliation,” New York Times, September 20, 2002, online; Julian Borger, “Washington's Hawk Trains Sights on Iraq,” October 15, 2001, online.

  1. “Vice-President Appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert,” White House, September 16, 2001 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20010916.html).

  2. Glenn Kessler, “U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past,” Washington Post, January 12, 2002, p. A1; Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 26.

  3. James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 263–331; Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, January/February 2004, online; Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker, May 6, 2003, online; Richard Cummings, “War, Lies, and WMDs,” LewRockwell.com, May 22, 2003; Robert Dreyfuss, “More Missing Intelligence,” The Nation, July 7, 2003 (posted June 19, 2003), online; Jason Leopold, “Wolfowitz Committee Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims,” Antiwar.com, July 17, 2003.

  1. William Kristol et al., letter to the President, September 20, 2001 (online at PNAC, http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm).

  2. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Gathering Storm,” The Weekly Standard, October 29, 2001, online.

  1. Eliot A. Cohen, “World War IV,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2001, online.

  2. Scott McConnell, “The Struggle Over War Aims: Bush Versus the Neo-Cons,” Antiwar. com, September 25, 2002.

  3. Ibid. [N.B.: Wolfowitz was sworn in as Deputy Secretary of Defense over six months before McConnell's piece was written.—Ed.]

  1. Georgie Anne Geyer, “Pro-Israeli, Anti-Arab Campaigns Could Isolate America,” Universal Press Syndicate (uexpress.com), October 25, 2001.

  2. Naomi Klein, “The Likud Doctrine,” The Guardian, September 10, 2004, online.

  3. Dana Milbank, “For Bush, War Defines Presidency,” Washington Post, March 9, 2003, p. A1.

  1. Ibid.

  2. Norman Podhoretz, “In Praise of the Bush Doctrine,” Commentary, September, 2002 (online at http://www.ourjerusalem.com/opinion/story/opinion20020904a.html).

  3. Halper and Clarke, op. cit., pp. 137–38.

  1. Richard Perle, “Thank God for the Death of the UN,” The Guardian, March 21, 2003, online.

  2. Halper and Clarke, op. cit., p. 9.

  1. Quoted in Drew, loc. cit.

  2. Michael Ledeen, “Creative Destruction,” National Review Online (www.nationalre-view.com), September 20, 2001.

  3. “GOP Backing Out of Iraq Offensive?” loc. cit.; Purdum and Tyler, loc. cit.; Jim Lobe, “Washington Goes to War,” loc. cit.

  4. Scowcroft, loc. cit.

  5. Michele Steinberg, “Can the Brzezinski-Wolfowitz Cabal's War Game Be Stopped?” Executive Intelligence Review, December 7, 2001, online.

  6. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997). A similar argument that the control of vital resources is the key to global power and global warfare is presented by Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).

  1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Why Unity is Essential,” Washington Post, February 19, 2003, online.

  2. Robert Kuttner, “Neocons Have Hijacked U.S. Foreign Policy,” Boston Globe, September 10, 2003, online.

  1. Norman Mailer, “We Went to War Just to Boost the White Male Ego,” April 29, 2003 (http://www.veteransforpeace.org/We_went_to_war_042903.htm); Mailer, “The White Man Unburdened,” The New York Review of Books, July 17, 2003, online.

  2. Steve Sailer, “Analysis: Which American Groups Back War?” UPI, March 20, 2003, online.

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: At the end of the following essay, Justin Raimondo raises a crucial and sensitive issue for those who have opposed the Iraq war and its neoconservative architects. This is the question of the “Jewish” identity of neoconservatism. In the grand scheme of things, the religious persuasion of neoconservatives shouldn't matter – and for most of their reasonable critics, it doesn't. Yet the issue continues to arise, and – perhaps revealingly – it is raised most frequently not by critics of the neocons but by the neocons themselves.

  A July 2005 article by leading neocon Michael Ledeen bemoaned the existence in Britain of “so many complaints that 'Zionists,' 'Likudniks,' 'Jewish hawks,' and – the single epithet that sums up all of the above -'neocons' had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq. The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz.” Senator John Kyl (R-Ariz.) vented a similar lamentation at the CSIS in May 2004. The “conspiracy theory” surrounding the neoconservatives, he said, “has its bigoted overtones: many of the neoconservatives are Jews; they are accused of having favored elimination of Saddam Hussein's regime because of the Iraqi threat to Israel rather than the threat to the United States; therefore, according to these theories, a way had to be found to get George W. Bush to do Israel's bidding.”

  Where does all this whining leave the facts? Religious questions aside, there is still the political reality: American support for Israel has costs. Some people think the costs worthwhile, others think not. That Israel is a self-proclaimed “Jewish state” means that Jewishness will be pivotal whenever reasonable people discuss political support for Israel. It is not surprising that many supporters of Israel are Jewish and feel an obligation to support Israel on a religious and political basis. T
his is a normal fact of life, where religious, political, social and all kinds of other influences combine to lead people in one direction or another. At any rate, none of this should make “off-limits” the discussion of what motivated the war in Iraq and whether those motivations were right or wrong. To say that discussion of Israel and foreign policy equates to hatred of people for their race or religion is silliness at best, intentionally slanderous at worst. It's evidently quite good PR, though.

  CHAPTER

  7

  A Real Hijacking: The Neoconservative Fifth Column and the War in Iraq

  ………

  Justin Raimondo

  MANY WERE BAFFLED by the Bush administration's fixation on Iraq as the next target in our perpetual “war on terrorism.” After all, there was no proven link between Saddam and 9/11 or Iraq and the anthrax scare, no weapons of mass destruction (as we discovered to our chagrin) – so why did the President of the United States go off on such a pronounced tangent, beating the war drums for Gulf War II? Chris Matthews, the columnist who throws a fast Hardball on NBC, knew before the shooting ever started and wasn't shy about saying what was behind Dubya's diversion: