March 22, 2006
It comes as no surprise two "of America’s top scholars," having released an article
criticizing the hijacking of American foreign policy by AIPAC, the
neocons, and the tiny outlaw state of Israel, are unable to get a
hearing in the corporate media. John Mearsheimer of the University of
Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kenney School "say that [AIPAC]
is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any
U.S.-based publication," reports United Press International.
"They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and
operates against American interests, that it has organized the
funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and 'has a
stranglehold’ on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large
campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic
administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle
East dominates the policy debate."
Mearsheimer and Walt come
close to stating what many of us have known for some time—a clique of
Straussian neocons, wedded to radical Likudites in Israel, and share
"close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA (Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs) or WINEP (Washington Institute for Near
Eastern Policy)," exploited nine eleven to "adopt the general goal of
ousting Saddam" and push forward "preventive war," that is to say
invasions of sovereign Muslim and Arab nations, a plan long in the
tooth and at the heart of Likudite Zionism. Unfortunately, the authors
do not arrive at the natural conclusion—not only did the neocons
exploit nine eleven, they orchestrated it from within the Pentagon, as
a previous cabal of Pentagon insiders, including the Joint Chiefs,
attempted to create an earlier nine eleven by way of Operation
Northwoods. Fortunately for the American and Cuban people, that earlier
plan was eighty-sixed by Robert McNamara and John F. Kennedy. No such
luck with nine eleven.
Mearsheimer and Walt name
names—Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol,
Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, key
members of the inner circle of the neocon clique. It is interesting a
name not normally associated with the neocons is mentioned—Bernard
Lewis. It was the elderly "Arabist" Lewis who urged "Lebanonization" in
the Arab and Muslim Middle East. "In 1992, in the aftermath of the
Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council
on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state
in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region
should expect to go through a prolonged period of
'Lebanonization’—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist
violence and chaos," write Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg.
"Lebanonization"
is a reference to the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement by
the French under the League of Nations in the 1920s, dividing Lebanon
into five provinces based along ethnic and religious lines. Of course,
this artificial construct eventually resulted in a bloody civil war
between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, exacerbated by the Israeli
lebensraum policy of ethnically cleansing Palestinians (this conflict
resulted in the death of over a 100,000 people and created 900,000
refugees), and was intensified and prolonged by an Israeli invasion and
political and military participation by the United States.
Lewis
concluded his Foreign Affairs article by predicting the
"Lebanonization" of the entire region with the notable exception of
Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East … are of recent and
artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the
central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society
to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity
or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then
disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling,
feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties," a process well
underway at this moment in Iraq.
"For the past several
decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece
of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel,"
Mearsheimer and Walt continue. "The combination of unwavering support
for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy’ throughout the
region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only
U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation
has no equal in American political history. Why has the U.S. been
willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in
order to advance the interests of another state?"
It is a
situation, the authors conclude, created by the influence of AIPAC, an
organization representing the Jabotinsky-Likudite faction in Israel.
According to Thompson and Steinberg, Bernard Lewis’ son, Michael, is
"the director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee’s
super-secret 'opposition research section.’ This is one of the most
important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently
saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for
precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting
for decades." Defecting AIPAC staffer Gregory Slabodkin
told the Washington Report in 1992 that AIPAC’s secret "opposition
research section" concentrates on "releasing derogatory (and generally
false or misleading) information about American 'enemies of Israel’ to
their rivals in the media and academia."
Israel "works
ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics
and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in
U.S. public life," the UPI summarizes the not destined for prime-time
conclusions of Mearsheimer and Walt.
"Not surprisingly, the
Jewish establishment organizations are lining up behind Aipac and not
too subtly rolling out the traditional big guns by suggesting that the
accusations themselves might be motivated by anti-Semitism," writes Michael Lerner.
"Aipac and a variety of closely linked Jewish organizations regularly
use the anti-Semitism card to attack anyone who dares criticize the
occupation of the West Bank. Increasingly dominated by Jewish neo-cons
and their worldview, the Jewish establishment has moved far to the
right in the past two decades, spurred in part by Aipac’s powerful
impact."
As we know, the neocon "worldview" is one of
endless conflict and misery abroad and subversion of American ideals at
home. The Straussian neocons—and it is important to stress the
Straussian aspect with its Machiavellian philosophy and fascist
ideology taking cues from the authoritarian idealism of a Nazi jurist,
Carl Schmitt—are decidedly behind schedule on implementing the next
phase of their master plan, gleaned in part from Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s", of attacking and balkanizing Iran.
Once again, Bush reminds us
of the tight relationship between Israel’s territorial aspirations and
its connection to the military prowess (now in obvious decline) of the
United States. "The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated
objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That’s a threat, a serious
threat. It’s a threat to world peace," said our Caesar. "I made it
clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to
protect our ally Israel."
In fact, this is the only
approach, as long ago sketched out by the Straussian neocons and their
Jabotinksyite overlords, and diplomacy is but a shell game introduced
to make the neocons appear reasonable, when in fact they are neo-Jacobin radicals.
Bush’s neocons, in control of the Pentagon, plan to eventually attack
Iran, certainly not this month as initially speculated, but some time
down the road, maybe this summer, maybe next year, but eventually, as
the Straussian neocons, the anti-American AIPAC, and the reprehensible
Israeli Jabotinskyite racists have long planned, even if it results in
the ultimate destruction of America.