By Paul Craig Roberts
08/15/07 “ICH“
“No American President can stand up to Israel.”
These words came from feisty Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations (1967-1970) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1970-1974). Moorer was, perhaps, the last independent-minded American military leader.
Admiral Moorer knew what he was talking about. On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the American intelligence ship, USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 173. The Israelis even strafed the life rafts, machine-gunning the American sailors leaving the stricken ship.
Apparently, the USS Liberty had picked up Israeli communications that revealed Israel’s responsibility for the Seven Day War. Even today, history books and the majority of Americans blame the conflict on the Arabs.
The United States Navy knew the truth, but the President of the United States took Israel’s side against the American military and ordered the United States Navy to shut its mouth. President Lyndon Johnson said it was all just a mistake. Later in life, Admiral Moorer formed a commission and presented the unvarnished truth to Americans. http://www.ussliberty.org/moorerfindings.htm [see also http://www.usslibertyinquiry.com/] and [http://www.counterpunch.org/weir06232007.html] and [http://www.signonsandiego.com/]
The power of the Israel Lobby over American foreign policy is considerable. In March 2006, two distinguished American scholars, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, expressed concern in the London Review of Books [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html ] that the power of the Israel Lobby was bending US foreign policy in directions that serve neither US nor Israeli interests. The two experts were hoping to start a debate that might rescue the US and Israel from unsuccessful policies of coercion that are intensifying Muslim hatred of Israel and America. The Israel lobby was opposed to any such reassessment, and attempted to close it off with epithets: “Jew-baiter,” “anti-semitic,” and even “anti-American.” Today Israeli citizens who oppose Zionist plans for greater Israel are denounced as “anti-Semites.”
Many Americans are unaware of the influence of the Israel lobby. Instead they think of the US as “the world’s sole superpower,” a macho new Roman Empire whose orders are obeyed without question or the insolent nonentity is “bombed back to the stone age.” [ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/] Many Americans are convinced that military coercion serves our interest. They cite Libya, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now they are ready to bring Iran and Pakistan to heel with bombs.
This arrogance results in the murder of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children, a fate that many Americans seem to believe is appropriate for countries that do not accept US hegemony.
Coercion is what American foreign policy has become. Macho superpatriots love it. Many of these superpatriots derive vicarious pleasure from their delusions that America is “kicking those sand niggers’ asses.”
This is the America of the Bush Regime. If some of these superpatriots had their way every “unpatriotic, terrorist supporter” who dares to criticize the war against “the Islamofacists” would be sent to Gitmo, if not shot on the spot.
These Bush supporters have morphed the Republican Party into the Brownshirt Party. They cannot wait to attack Iran, preferably with nuclear weapons. Impatient for Armageddon, some are so full of hubris and self-righteousness that they actually believe that their support for evil means they will be “wafted up to heaven.” [see Rapture Ready: The Christians United for Israel Tour (video)]
It has come as a crippling blow to Democrats that “their” political party is comfortable with Bush’s America, and will do nothing to stop the Bush regime’s aggression against the Iraqi people or to prevent the Bush regime’s attack on Iran.
The Democrats could easily impeach both Bush and Cheney in the House, as impeachment only requires a majority vote. They could not convict in the Senate without Republican support, as conviction requires ratification by two-thirds of Senators present. Nevertheless, a House vote for impeachment would take the wind out of the sails of war, save countless lives and perhaps even save humanity from nuclear holocaust.
Various rationales or excuses have been constructed for the Democrats’ complicity in aggression that does not serve America. Perhaps the most popular rationale is that the Democrats are letting the Republicans have all the rope they want with which to produce such a high disapproval rating that the Democrats will sweep the 2008 election.
It is doubtful that the Democrats would assume that men as cunning as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do not understand the electoral consequences of a low public approval rating and are walking blindly into an electoral wipeout. Rove’s departure does not mean that no strategy is in place.
So what does explain the complicity of the Democratic Party in a policy that the American public, and especially Democratic constituencies, reject? Perhaps a clue is offered from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune news report (August 1, 2007) that Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison will spend a week in Israel on “a privately funded trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Federation. The AIEF–the charitable arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)–is sending 19 members of Congress to meet with Israeli leaders. The group, made up mostly of freshman Democrats, has plans to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and [puppet] Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The senior Democratic member on the trip is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has gone three times. . . . The trip to Israel is Ellison’s second as a congressman.”
According to the Star-Tribune, a Republican group, which includes Rep. Michele Bachmann (R, Minn), led by Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va) is already in Israel. According to news reports, another 40 are following these two groups during the August recess, and “by the time the year is out every single member of Congress will have made their rounds in Israel.” This claim is probably overstated, but it does show careful Israeli management of US policy in the Middle East.
Elsewhere on earth and especially among Muslims, the suspicion is rife that the reason the war against Iraq cannot end, and the reason Iran and Syria must be attacked, is that the US must destroy all Muslim opposition to Israel’s theft of Palestine, turning an entire people into refugees driven from their homes and from the lands on which they have lived for many centuries. Americans might think that they are merely grabbing control over oil, keeping it out of the hands of terrorists, but that is not the way the rest of the world views the conflict.
Jimmy Carter was the last American president who stood up to Israel and demanded that US diplomacy be, at least officially if not in practice, even-handed in its approach to Israel and Palestine. Since Carter’s presidency, even-handedness has slowly drained from US policy in the Middle East. The neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime has abandoned even the pretense of even-handedness.
This is unfortunate, because military coercion has proven to be unsuccessful. Exhausted from the conflict, the US military, according to former Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, is “nearly broken.” Demoralized elite West Point graduates are leaving the army at the fastest clip in 30 years. [http://observer.guardian.co.uk/] Desertions are rapidly rising. A friend, a US Marine officer who served in combat in Vietnam, recently wrote to me that his son’s Marine unit, currently training for its third deployment to Iraq in September, is short 12-16 men in every platoon and expects to be hit with more AWOLs prior to deployment.
Instead of re-evaluating a failed policy, Bush’s “war tsar,” General Douglas Lute, has called for the reinstitution of the draft. Gen. Lute doesn’t see why Americans should not be returned to military servitude in order to save the Bush administration the embarrassment of having to correct a mistaken Middle East policy that commits the US to more aggression and to debilitating long-term military conflict in the Middle East.
It is difficult to see how this policy serves any interest other than the very narrow one of the armaments industry. Apparently, nothing can be done to change this disastrous policy until the Israel Lobby comes to the realization that Israel’s interest is not being served by the current policy of military coercion.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
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see:
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Rapture Ready: The Christians United for Israel Tour (video)
Dandelion Salad 
Okay, one more comment here since we seem to have a number of brainwashed jewish people who are commenting about this article.
It seems that many of you are woefully being led astray by your government. Your history does not go back thousands of years. Your Talmud was made up of rewriting myths from old that had been told for ages past.
And these Palestinians are more semitic than most of the Jewish people of today. For the majority of Jewish people today are the ones who came out of Poland back before WWI. And by following the genes of these self-acclaimed jews, they are of the lineage of the Huns. They never set foot in Middle East until they took the Palestinians lands from them.
And I have to almost laugh anytime I see the “anti-semite” accusation now. This accusation has been used so much that it is threadbare now. It is now only scare tactics. A phrase that is thrown out by bullies who have no knowledge of what they speak.
Ah, well. What can you expect. This is what the Israelis are spoon-fed from birth. They are brainwashed (and there are those who do admit that this is what is going on) from the time that they are born so it is ingrained in them. They are given books on how to respond to anyone who can actually think for themselves and see what is really going on. It is a losing battle to argue with them because they really do believe what they have been told. And it is sad. To be so miserable brainwashed that you cannot actually “see” what is right before you face.
They have been taught that anyone who is not Jewish is an animal. Not human. And that it matters not if you kill an animal.
And this brings us right back to who is in charge. Psychopaths. No conscience, no empathy.
This article is spot-on. The only thing different I would say is that it is not all Israelis. There are many who are as against what is happening both in Iraq as well as Palestine.
Who is to blame? There are a certain percent of people who have no conscience, no empathy. They are called psychopaths. Unfortunately, the present Zionist party has quite a few of them, as do all governments of the world now.
(And, no, the Palestines were given no choice in the matter of whether they could live side by side with the Jews who came and stole their country from them. The Zionist Jews were given the go-ahead by A. J. Balfour. It was agreed that if the Jewish elite could get the U.S. into the war that these same Jewish elite could have what was then known as Palestine. They stole a peoples home from them, and said that their god told them they could. And these people had lived in their land for over 1500 years. Since that time, the Zionists have had control of the U.S., U.K. and Australian governments. And they put in power other persons who are psychopaths or have psychopathic tendencies. Or persons who were just puppets.
And there are all kinds of references to this. And all of them that I have read have not been authored by any Palestinians. But, I digress.
There is an article I would like to recommend titled, “Insiders and Outsiders in Washington” that will explain these things further for those of you who are interested. You can find it here:
http://tinyurl.com/ysyfct
The only way to combat the PTB who are running our country, and the world, into the ground is by knowledge. Once we know who and what we are up against, we can then come up with a way to get them out of control and come up with a better way of electing our officials.
Thank you for your article. It is very interesting.
Five minutes’ research online turned up the fact that Admiral Moorer, so revered by this Reaganite, is extolled on a horrible website called New Totalitarians (www.newtotalitarians.com/welcome.html). They’re wildly anti-feminist and took pride in flying our flag upside-down during the Clinton presidency, for instance.
Please, fellow-readers, take the anti-Semitic drivel here with the bagful of salt it deserves. Note especially the author’s reference to “The London Review of Books”. Brit public opinion was, it is widely known, bought even ahead of our own by the enormous quantity of Arab petrodollars gained from our first (mock) “oil crisis” of the 1970s. Much of their windfall was spent through Hill & Knowlton, the huge PR firm with no compunction whatever, which also coached the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter in Washington to pose as a nurse who’d supposedly witnessed Iraqi barbarity in Kuwait, thereby fooling Americans into supporting the first Gulf War.
Please let us not forget (despite things they’ve done lately that I don’t like, either), that Israel was attacked repeatedly by its Arab neighbors — so intent upon driving the Jews into the sea that they told their co-religionists in what had been Palestine to get out of the way of their onslaught and, when the onslaught failed, wouldn’t take them in. They preferred to create a “refugee crisis”, perpetuate it for decades and blame it on Israel.
The original Israelis, Jews at last given a homeland by the U.N. after the horrors of the Holocaust (during which no other countries would receive more than a few), never told the Palestinians to go and would have lived quite happily among them, had their neighbors not refused that option. This fact of history is forgotten by most, thanks to the disinformation campaign, but its truth lives on in the fact that some Arab states (not to mention their most violent factions) still refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
How can any resolution of Middle Eastern problems take place without that long-overdue recognition as a fundament?
Our country’s special relationship with Israel sprang from well-justified guilt for how little we did for the Jews during World War II — in fact, our then-Secretary of State was wantonly anti-Semitic — and from diplomatic efforts later made by the marvelous Golda Meir, who grew up in America. Yes, there’s now another level of affinity, in that they need our protection and we need a trusted ally in the Middle East, but this doesn’t negate the truth of history (except in minds bought by PR campaigns or twisted for some other reason, such as greed for Arab oil).
It just kills me when progressives buy into the “Palestinian” PR line, without any knowledge of what really happened.
Your antisemitism is exactly why the Simon Wiesenthal Center was created.
The Holocaust did happen, although I am sure you deny that.
The Palestinians use suicide bombers to murder innocent Israeli civilians. I am sure you deny that.
Why not just say you want all Jews all over the world to be murdered and get it over with? You obviously do not feel they have a right to exist.
The Jewish tradition goes back thousands of years. The Palestinians rich tradition goes back about 50.
Jordan murdered 1,000,000 Palestinians. I am sure you deny this.
Arabs in Israel can vote. Israelis in Arab contries are shot to death. I am sure you deny this.
Palestinians contribute nothing positive to this world. If you disagree, name something. Murdering Jews does not count.
There are 1 billion Arabs and 12 million Jews. I am sure you deny this.
There is no such thing as a Palestinian. They are an invented fictional people.
I will now leave you to your hatred of Jews. We were here before your horrible column, and we will be here long after you die.
Despite your best efforts, Jews will remain alive, despite people like you trying to murder us through blood libel.
Deal with it.
eric http://www.blacktygrrrr.wordpress.com