Corn: Neocons Pressure Bush on Saddam
from the grinding-ideological-axes dept.
David Corn has an opinion piece at workingforchange.com in which he discusses neoconservatives’ growing impatience with dubya on the get-Saddam issue. Leading luminaries of the Right are reportedly growing concerned over the increasing murkiness of the President’s thinking on this whole War on Terra thing. The failure to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Sharon in the pursuit of a Palestinian Final Solution sounded the warning bell, and a go-it-alone invasion of Iraq is now emerging as the litmus test, apparently, for whether the hawks will give dubya their support in the next election.
September 4th, 2003 at 2:51 pm
The DEBKA.file is written by an Israeli group that has
befriended several Mossad and Shin Bet operatives and
is at times “fed” scoops by the Israeli PM’s office.
It is therefore hard to pick the wheat from the chaff
without parallel assets. But a most telling series of
reports are its accounts of Hizzbollah accumulation of
rockets in Southern Lebanon. That, more than any
arguments about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) may
help to explain why President Bush seemed to have
become impatient in March and launched an invasion of
Iraq after giving Saddam 48 hrs. to get out of
Baghdad. This Bush did, even though, according to
Russo-Franco-Brit intelligence reports, the
choreographed maneuvers of US troops in the desert on
the Iraq-Kuwait border were dissolving the Ba’athist
regime in fearful anticipation.
Why was Bush suddenly in such a rush? The nuclear WMDs
threat mentioned by Bush and the “45-min. interval to
devastation” of Blair were “sexy” inventions, that may
have hidden the real issues at play. Barton Gellman et
al, in a very elaborate account in the Washington Post
(8/10/03) entitled: “Deception of Threat Outgrew
Supporting Evidence,” presented a case against the
evidence for nuclear WMDs. We know of Saddam’s
tactical bio-chemical weapons from their use. But
these are meaningless against America’s multimegaton
nuclear devises and its inescapable delivery systems.
But an unsubstantiated case was made for a nuclear
threat– where there was none– a case, according to
Gellman et al, that was deliberate and of long
duration. Why?
It is here that DEBKA.file’s reports on Hezbollah
rockets comes in. It turns out, according to Gellman
et al, that the smoking gun– “aluminum tubes”– were
not meant for centrifuges that separate out enriched
uranium for nuclear bombs, but as components for the
Italian Medussa 81 rocket, whose blueprints the Iraqis
had acquired. Such medium range rockets were believed
by Israel to be intended for mass production, armed
with bio-chemical WMDs for delivery to all anti-Israel
guerrillas. Sharon, apparently threatened to take
immediate action unless Bush, within 48 hrs. invades
and disarms Iraq. Since the production and storage
areas were dispersed so that Israel did not know
precisely where they were, Israel would need to engage
in a massive preemptive nuclear bombardment of Iraq in
order to sanitize it and avoid becoming victim of a
first strike. This would result in a devastating
Mideast conflagration. To avoid this, Bush grafted on
to his administration the Sharon argument for acting
abruptly. However, to make it credible, the regional
nuclear threat from an Israeli first strike, he
attributed to Iraq. The Syrian disarmament of
Hezbollah in Lebanon of Iraqi missiles after the
invasion, it is said, supports this argument.
An addendum was proposed by a number of intelligence
sources. Brazenly, after blackmailing Bush into
attacking Iraq, Sharon blackmailed Bush with exposure
of this if Bush continued to insist rigidly on the
roadmap limitations on the security wall and the
settlements in the Palestinian territories. Facing the
prospect of having to resign if the Israeli attorney
general takes the Israeli police investigators”
advice and indicts him for illicit campaign and
personal finances, Sharon may have shed all
inhibitions of his threats to Bush for his devoted
cause of Greater Israel and no Palestinian state. Bush
and Blair are thus left unable to explain the need for
a sudden invasion of Iraq and for capitulation on the
roadmap. In conclusion, the real deception may not
have been that of Iraqi WMDs, but the fact that Bush
acted out of fear of Sharon instead of fear of Saddam.
Daniel E. Teodoru
September 4th, 2003 at 2:54 pm
The recent Baghdad tragedy does not stand alone. I am
reminded, with admitted bitterness, President Bush’s
response to a press query about all the soldiers
literally “picked off” in Iraq by guerrilla fighters:
“bring them on!” Those are distressing words from a
man who spent the Vietnam War literally “pickled” safe
at home. But more important is how qualified are his
handpicked desk-strategists in DoD to calculate the
effective readiness of our troops?
I ask this question because I see in Iraq laxity with
dire consequences such as I do not recall seeing in
Vietnam. If my personal comparison– limited to what
one pair of eyes can see from one moment to another–
is correct, it raises the very questions that Dana
Priest asks in her book THE MISSION. Are somewhat
older “weekend soldiers” with their wives and several
kids back home on their minds the best troops to do
perimeter security in a hot far off country?
I intend no disparagement. They are and always will be
heroic in my mind for the way they hang in there while
the rest of us almost forget them in pursuit of
careers and creature comforts back home. But certainly
the best trained of what we have, have been sent out
in small lethal and very effective teams into
Afghanistan. To adequately train all our troops would
have taken much more time and much more money. That
raises yet another issue. Were we blinded by our
intercalated “reinventing” capacity, thus raining
massive death on our enemies with weapons backed up by
high power computers, unable to anticipate the issue
of preparing the boots for that they alone can
accomplish, of occupation security?
Perhaps the benign attitude of Balkan people had
caused Americans to misperceived the quality of
occupation training given their troops. However, any
assumption that, given the turbulent atmosphere in the
Mideast where so many are willing to become shaheeds
“martyrs” to keep US casualties slowly but steadily
rising, American “weekend soldiers” are up to the task
was dramatically devastated by the enemy’s ability to
drive a Russian-made truck from the motor pool of
Saddam’s defeated army full of explosives right to the
UN headquarters. So I must ask, are we less attentive
at the political level because we no longer have a
conscript army? Are the armchair strategists hired as
“consultants” to the Pentagon given free play because
the volunteer army has little political clout in
Congress?
Recently, the congealing of outspoken strategists
called “neoconservatives” have written much in press
and strategy journals about how America is to
implement its– their term– “imperial hegemony.”
Having read much of it, I find it disturbingly
amateurish, coming from long time advocates of blood
letting who never served in any American war and from
neophytes who reached draft-registration age long
after elimination of Selective Service. One in
particular– Max Boot– published an article in
FOREIGN AFFAIRS that seemed exceptionally childish and
devoid of grasp of the fact that most human affairs
are very complex and thus do not lend themselves to
theoretical schematization. Particularly hollow, in my
opinion was the following statement by Boot:
“Paradoxically, increasing precision makes US
firepower more effective and less destructive.” This
statement totally fails to consider the excuse used by
these scribes to justify all military errors in their
avowed use of firepower: the fog of war. Thus, the
greater the focus of destruction and the deeper its
penetration, the more informed and sophisticated must
be the decision as to when and where to use it. If we
do not have adequate intelligence or precise aiming
capacity, we are MORE destructive and LESS effective.
This is particularly an issue of follow through.
Invariably, given the massive investment of its
wealth, America is the most high tech and the most
devastating force in the world. But are we devoting
our best minds to fit such capacity? Can national
service in the military attract these best minds away
from the public sector to match our high tech weapons
with their talents?
I would recall that policy makers and their cognitive
functions caused us to “lose” to a tiny half nation of
low tech soldiers a war a decade long in Vietnam. Now,
our expensive war gadgets got us a quick victory
against a moribund army, only to have our soldiers sit
in Baghdad picked off one a day with no end in sight.
All of Mr. Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s glowing promises as
to what our “liberation of the Iraqi people” would
mean, have come to nothing, tells us our Iraq chief on
the ground, because the guerrillas– in no way
popular– we are told have free access to destroy
whatever we construct. As a result, we are told by
numerous press reports, our nervous “weekend soldiers”
are becoming trigger happy, and all their precise
weapons are leading to more destruction and less
efficiency.
Once again, paper generals who study military science
as a subfield of social science are lulled into the
illusion that soldiering does not require a grasp of
the complexities of physics. Such semi-docs as Perle,
Kristol and others, whose dubious expertise is further
brought into question by their confounding allegiance
to a foreign nation as well as by their retainers from
war industry corporations, are exploiting the “cannon
fodder” attitude many had towards our weekend soldiers
when America switched to an all-volunteer army. The
neocons seem to bet on the notion that “not my son”
has to fight will make Americans much more tolerant of
the excruciating bottomless hole into which our
weekend soldiers are thrown. And so, with the same
zealotry with which they preached a class uprising to
fulfill the Leninist revolution when younger, these
Sharon idolizing American Likudniks think they can
render US armed forces the auxiliaries of Sharon in
order to remodel the Middle East to fit his vision of
a massive Jewish state dominating all those primitive
and corrupt Arabs, disciplining them to accept
“democracy” where the vote always results in what Bush
and Sharon deem to their common best interest. In no
way can the “neocons” conceive of a divergence of
policy between Sharon and Bush. Israel and America are
so intertwined as one in their minds that should there
ever be a parting of the ways it can only be because
of those “anti-semites in the State Dept.” Israel can
do no wrong, they insist, but America can be corrupted
by its “good life.” So it is there task to save
hundreds of thousands of weekend soldiers from
becoming couch potatoes by sending them out to clean
the house of those filthy Arabs.
As one who was there to see what 9/11 was all about, I
join any and all ready to combat terrorism– though it
is a bit late, after the damage was done. However, I
cannot be blind to the festering Mideast wound that
our pro-Zionist policies created. Nevertheless, I feel
that we must invest in a secure Israel and in
determined deterrence of extreme Islamic terrorism for
ultimately– after Sharon leaves and another Rabin
takes over– Israel will indeed be a light onto its
neighbors.
I cannot forget that the worst of the Islamic terror
is directed against Muslims. The insane radicals
consider them wayward that need purification in blood.
Despite the mass Islamic desire for a pacific Islam,
however, most Arabs will not join us in our struggle
because we allow Sharon to practice on the
Palestinians the techniques he learned from years of
deliberate study of apartheid in South Africa. We are
in effect, in the eyes of most Arabs, encouraging and
supporting Sharon’s practice of a racist evil that we
brought down South Africa’s white government through
sanctions and pressure for practicing. The neocons
exhibit no bones about our need to stand with
Sharonist apartheid. Many Americans passively accept
that as our historic “imperial mission,” per Perle,
Boot, Kristol and many others in and out of the Bush
Administration. We are, in effect, as we did in
Vietnam, “liberating” the people of Iraq, not so much
because of our love for their children’s future, as
said by Bush, but because it is best for the Israel
that Sharon would fashion with our weapons and
dollars, per the neocon fighters at their
word-processors. Implementation of such one time
Leninist-Trotsyist (remember, that was the enemy)
ravings as our “neoconservative policy,” now, in the
name of our “imperial destiny” as Israel’s partner,
instead of for the sake of class warfare, is a very
shabby fate to impose on our fellow citizens so
patriotic as to answer the call of the Flag so far
away in Iraq– all the while Kristol does the dinner
party circuit in Wash DC and Perle counts his
big-bucks retainers from the arms industry in his
French coastal villa, eating the best that “those
anti-semitic Frenchies” can cook-up for a gourmandier
growing fat on the war mystery of others. A sad state
for our weekend soldiers and their families indeed.
Daniel E. Teodoru
September 15th, 2003 at 2:11 am
GET ARAFAT!!!!
There are many aspects to Arafat’s medical condition
which make him unequivocally irrelevant to Mideast
realities, yet make seem heroic his defiant refusal to
leave the Palestinian Authority (PA) headquarters. A
description of life therein would be most instructive
as it might help one to understand why Sharon and his
Likudnik Russians are obsessed with him. The PLO had
ONCE UPON A TIME within it rather mentally deranged
elements. No one can better appreciate that than the
Israelis, for similar elements came to Palestine as
Holocaust survivors after WWII, and were exactly like
that. They lived on borrowed time, only to destroy the
enemies of Zion and to leave a modest little something
behind as a monument to all those that died so
miserably. Such were Begin and Shamir. And, such is
Arafat and the old timers with keys to their one time
homes around their necks. Sharon and his Russians,
such as Sheransky, are like most Arabs, unwilling to
accept the idea that you cannot have your cake and eat
it too. You can, they insist, if God wills it, just as
insist HAMAS, Hezzbollah and Jihad, for that is
exactly what the Islamic radicals believe. However,
secular Arafat, like Begin and Shamire celebrates
secular life, not spiritualism, in wily struggles that
resist and out survive the enemy rather than crush
him. Sharon and his Russians are also like the Arabs.
But while the latter would have their cake and eat it
too by deceiving themselves into thinking that it is
possible, Sharon and his Russians prefer to achieve it
by deceiving others. It is almost an ecclesiastic
fortune– a God sent– that for them achievement of
this eating and having of the cake requires that they
deceive GW Bush Jr, very much a lightweight. Both
failure and success for Sharon are defined as a
Palestinian state– real vs. imaginary. One must first
and foremost remove the one man who has brought the
Palestinians from their image as cutthroats of
helpless women and children to an internationally
recognized nation. There is nothing that the dying
Arafat can do to endanger Israel or to promote terror.
But his prestige as a symbol of Palestinian resistance
and a world recognized state is terror in the hearts
of Sharon et al. So long as Arafat is in the Moqueta,
the Palestinian state is a real place and the
Palestinian Authority a real government and Oslo a
real peace process awaiting fulfillment. For Sharon
and his Russians having his cake and eating it too
means negotiating an imaginary Palestinian state in
the West Bank and Gaza that will never exist.
Therefore, the road map only creates a vacuum, one
that is expected to suck two million Diaspora Jews
into it by 2020. Only by making life unbearable for
the Palestinians and making Arafat an example of what
he would like to do with all the Palestinians– exile
or death– Sharon expects to negotiate with Bush the
road map to an imaginary Palestinian state with no
real Palestinians in it. That is a
have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too vacuum, one that will
suck two million Jews as olims into a grand alyiah to
Greater Israel (ie. West Bank and Gaza). It is thus
that Sharon gets to have his cake and eat it too.
Unfortunately, no one else is as gullible as Bush, so
no one– including Blair– will stand for the Sharon
deception: Arafat’s “voluntary separation” from
Palestine, just like the one Herzl had in mind in
1905. If Sharon does pull it off it will firstly be
bloody and secondly make in they eyes of the world the
term “Zionazi” a permanent afixture to the state of
Israel. Perhaps Sharon and his Russian Likudniks don’t
care. But Bush might well be thrown out of office next
year, then what? Israel is a money sucking leach on
America’s back. It gets more than anyone else and
can’t seem to get enough. Nor can it break its
addiction to US$$$. If anyone else but Bush wins in
Nov. 2004, one cannot expect a financially depressed
America exanguinating dollars and lives in Iraq to be
as generous with “Zionazi” labeled Israel as Bush was.
The cost of following the conquest-road-map that
Sharon attentively learned in the years he spent as a
student of apartheid in South Africa, will cost him
severely, (assuming that he escapes indictment for
embezzlement in the next few weeks). Any Democrat
coming to power knows that he owes his victory to the
US labor and ethnic vote. With “Zionazi” affixed to
Israel’s name as a result of the bloody extermination
of a sick old man, Arafat, the Democrat President
knows that the labor and the ethnic vote to whom he
owes his victory will want to find ways of stopping
America’s $$$bleeding. He will realize that the
billions spent on Israel could easily be used to fill
the hole left by the tens of billions spent on Iraq.
What then happens to Israel?
Rabin realized that by helping the Palestinians build
a modern state, the Israelis can finally integrate
themselves economically and culturally with their
fellow Middle Eastern Semites. Then, as a Mideastern
state rather than a European one (at least that’s what
Israeli officials used to insist in the 60s), Israel
can truly be a light onto its region, just as Rabin
dreamed– one all Diaspora Jews can be proud of, one
that they will think a great place to visit, even
though most would want to live there. Mr. Sharon
should remember that though he has 60% of Israelis are
understandably so driven insane by terrorism that they
would like Arafat killed, some 80% of the much larger
number of Diaspora Jews consider that a crime. It
would do little for Israel’s future if Sharon drives
the Jews of the world to also see his state as
“Zionazi.” Better focus on separating the Palestinians
from the extremists through help to their state, than
to add Arafat to the list of assassinated
Palestinians. What do you think?
Daniel E. Teodoru
May 4th, 2004 at 4:19 pm
“BREAKING-DOWN” THE “BAD-GUYS” IN IRAQ
I sometimes wonder if Seymour Hersch and I are tasked by the same “.gov” people to make the public aware of what is being done at the Defense Dept. (DoD) under Sec. Rumsfeld and his neoconservative cabal. For, within days of eachother, we have been both loaded with similar evidence that there is something rotten in the Pentagon, paraphrasing Shakespear.
My earlier indication was one of what seemed like a hastily put together war without much planning. But, of course, much planning had gone into an Iraq invasion for several years, starting with the Clinton Administration. These plans, to minute details, based on all the avialable facts, proved very well informed. The trouble was that they all indicated that the cost in life and treasure for us to remove Saddam and “deomcretize” Iraq (a term which turned all of the former academics in DoD into utter babblers)demanded far, far more that either adminstration deemed prudent to spend. So Mr. Rumsfeld, by the prestigiditory powers infered on him, presumably by Merlin, did a real “snow job” on this president, with a blizzard of “Rummy snowflakes” that made visibility into the future of such a war totally impossible. Then, this hawkish advocate, suddenly turned into a stingy pencil pushing accountant, cutting down everything the Joint Chiefs required. I leave the details to the Gen. Franks’ book that will be a real blast. When asked to take the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs after “victory,” he told Rumsfeld: no thanks, I’m going to write a book instead– the message was loud and clear, sir– stay tunned. Finally, the Rumsfeld DoD civilians, in all their hubris, decided to take a Napoleonic approach: first we advance; then we see. The concequences that almost everyone(and I) predicted were the same, in many case with far far less hard info than others.
But I felt far more alone when I sought to serve as transmitter of British press reports on the American attitude towards the Iraqis after America came to “own” them, per Sec. Powell’s “Pottery Barn rules.” It is that in their desperation, Mr. Rumsfeld and his civilian neocons at DoD chose to resort to Middle Eastern methods in order to replace Middle Eastern ends with that muddled thing, “Western Democracy.”
Totally unprepared for the growing resistance to an incompetent and negligent “liberation,” the American Proconsul Bremer refused to admit that the pipeline of “reconstruction” was empty for six moths because the war on Iraq was run on funds stollen from the war on terror in Afghanistan, the one approved by Congress. Thus, many Iraqis who trully saw the Americans as “liberators” came to see them as “occupiers” motivated by oil. I would say here that if one develops a network of informers amongst the dispersed Iraqi medical profession, one gets reports of every step along the pathologic path of anti- Americanism. As one who watched up close America turning the war in Vietnam into its own, I can only say that since we respected our Vietnamese enemies, most of whom we also killed, we tended to treat those who survived with respect– expressing outrage when stopping their Saigon army compatriots from humiliating or hurting them. But in over our heads, in an occupation running out of supplies, we turned to another nation with over half of a century experience in occupying Arabs at minimum cost. The Israeli occupation of the conquered Palestinian territories made them ideal trainers in Middle Eastern ways of occupation; hence the large proportion of civilian casualties along with the killing of the resisters we call, “the bad guys”– “criminals, perverts and murderers” all, per Gens. Myers and Sanchez; and, hence also the abuse and humiliation of prisoners swept up randomly in dragnets and in need-to-be-“broken down”-so-that-they-will-talk Arabs. It is often forgotten by our zealous “intelligence” units that these anaonymous “bad guys” have brothers, fathers, cousins and friends ready to avenge them at any cost– life included. The stoicism of the Vietnamese is not to be found in Iraq. And so, the more Iraqis we kill and/or humiliate and “break down,” the more come out to kill us. Being as low-casualties- tolerant as the Israelis, we might find ourselves choosing between “ethnic cleansing” or “transfer,” like the Israelis, in order to secure “our” Iraq. But by then the “coalition of the willing” may be limited to one– US.
Already the great muddler of English, Bush, and the great disember of English, Cheney, are speaking of our “occupation” instead of our “liberation” of Iraq. As the June 30th deadline appears and we run out of “add water and stir” instant-Iraqi-leaders from near and far, we may find that no one given that post can any longer be trusted to express gratitude for our presence– instead, demanding that we leave forthwith. Then, it will be like South Vietnam circa 1963-65: revolving door governements; as we removed one for negotiating a “entre nous les vietnamiens” deal, offering to kick us out, replacing it with another that assures us that it will never deal with the enemy, we found ourselves kicking it out for secret talks with the Vietcong and again we were looking for another no-negotiations alternative. But in Iraq, there may not be any Thieu and Ky available. Even Chalabi has today expressed refusal to have anything to do with Israel, according to Salon.com. His is a position held by every other DoD darling Iraqi. Since we secretly demanded a pledge of “love thy neighbor”- Israel, we may now be back where we were in Vietnam, 1964.
Yet, I hear no outrage at the fact that for 3/4 of a year the President and his cabinet had no idea how much Iraq “reconstruction” would cost, nor how long our troups would be there. I hear no outrage that the Asst. Sec of Defense had no updated casualty figures on hand when asked in a Congressional hearing and so he low-balled it. I hear no outrage that the President told a press conference that while we are doing well in Iraq, alQaeda “is still coming after us”– the reverse was supposedly the purpose of our war on terror begining two years ago. I cannot help but think that America’s “higher education” teachers, are just not teaching the President or the public the “higher” realities that somehow don’t get into the campaign ads.
Perhaps finally, Americans looking at the pictures of the abused Iraqis, Hersch made public, will in their shame and fear of retribution seek answers to the question: how is it that our kids so hate the people they are supposed to die “liberating”? They may discover that this hate comes from Israeli training based on the principle often heard in Israel: the only good Arab is a dead Arab.
Daniel E. Teodoru