Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

On 25 March 2009, I participated in a “Doha Debate” held at Georgetown University under the auspices of the Qatar-Based Doha Foundation. The Oxford Union-style question before the house was: “This house believes that it is time for the U.S. administration to get tough with Israel.” The “no” team consisted of Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz and former Israeli foreign ministry adviser Dore Gold. On the “yes” team were myself and Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s Knesset. Each speaker made a 2-minute opening statement and then was question by the moderator, Tim Sebastian. Thereafter, the debaters fielded questions from the audience for about an hour, and then the audience voted. The “yes” team won 67-percent of the vote, the “no” team 33-percent.

Having seldom been on any winning team, I was more than a bit surprised by the result. On reviewing the debate in my mind it seems to me that the victory of the “yes” position probably was the result of the “no” team’s fundamentally age-old and well-scripted arguments, which were in summary: Washington must leave Israel to do what it pleases; the U.S. should not interfere with internal Israeli affairs; putting U.S. pressure on Israel will cause more not less bloodshed; and the U.S. must keep funding and arming Israel to the extent Israel deems necessary to defend itself against existential enemies, especially Iran.

Now, Messrs. Dershowitz and Gold have every right to hold and endlessly repeat these carved-in-stone views, and I must say that the former expressed his position powerfully and at times theatrically, like the outstanding trial lawyer he is. Mr. Gold seemed content to play the role of his partner’s amanuensis. As a good former diplomat, Mr. Gold took no positions at all that could be attributed to him. He resolutely refused to answer direct and specific questions from the moderator, and when responding to audience questions he mostly read from a file of press clippings, thereby using quotations from others for his answers.

The most impressive of the debaters was Mr. Burg. The former Knesset speaker and current peace activist is an eloquent and to-the-point speaker who successfully used humor to puncture the sanctimony of several of the “no” team’s well-worn bromides. For his part, Mr. Burg clearly and concisely argued that the best chance for an equitable two-state solution was for the U.S. government to take a strong, almost parental hand to cajole and, if necessary, coerce both Israelis and Palestinians to reach an equitable agreement.

I found Mr. Burg’s position logical, thoroughly informed, and poignant, but ultimately unconvincing. If the U.S. government had a policy on the Israel-Palestine issue that was based on protecting genuine U.S. national interests, it just might be able to play the role Mr. Burg suggested. But Washington does not have such a position; under leaders of both parties the U.S. position is that of the Likud, and they are held to mark by the anti-American Israel-Firsters in the media, the Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and AIPAC. Ultimately, Mr. Burg’s campaign for an equitable two-sate solution will be defeated by pro-Israel U.S.-citizens, who are also likely to be the agents of Israel’s demise.

I was the weak link in the debate. My opening statement was too long; I was caught off-guard by Mr. Sebastian’s appropriately aggressive opening question; and I am far from as well-versed on the minutia of Israel-Palestine affairs as the other debaters. But I did learn two things from the debate.

* First, when Mr. Dershowitz stressed that the Israel-Palestine war was not a religious conflict, I asked him why so many Republican and Democratic leaders — and evangelical Israel-Firsters like Reverends Haggee and Graham — claim that it is America’s duty to ensure that God’s promise to Abraham about the land of Israel is kept. Mr. Dershowitz responded “they are wrong,” which can only mean that Israel’s claim on the land they took from the Palestinians, with the West’s help, is based on Israel having more and better guns than Palestinians, as well as unqualified U.S. military support.

* Second, after Mr. Dershowitz — hands waving in the air — raked me over the coals for suggesting that such a thing as the malignant influence of Israel-Firsters even exists in U.S. politics and foreign-policy making, I argued that the roles of Messrs. Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle and others in facilitating America’s war of self-immolation in Iraq suggested there was indeed a strong Israel-First influence in the highest councils of the U.S. government. Mr. Dershowitz’s response was classic, predictable, irrelevant, and a successful tactic to divert debate from the issue at hand. He loudly told the audience something akin to: “Listen to the ethnic names Scheuer is using! He is a bigot, a bigot.” As the name-caller from Harvard Yard railed on, I said that the names James Woolsey, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew McCarthy, and the two evangelical preachers mentioned above could be added to the list but I suspect the words were drowned out by my opponent’s contemptible but effective theatrics.

Mr. Dershowitz and Mr. Gold seem to believe that Americans who disagree with them will always refuse to publicly attack the reality of pro-Israel subversion as long as the Israel-Firsters can pull from the stone the great Excalibur of U.S. politics and strike Americans with a blade emblazoned “bigot” and “anti-Semite.” Perhaps the 2-to-1 vote of the Doha Debate’s audience against Mr. Dershowitz and Mr. Gold suggests that times are beginning to change, at long last, in favor of genuine U.S. national interests.

The Doha Debate described herein will be televised by BBC World on 4 and 5 April 2009.

Published: Antiwar.com

In a recent issue of Newsweek, the journal’s inexplicably renowned Muslim-world and foreign-policy expert Fareed Zakaria had a cover story called “Learning to Live With Radical Islam.” To my surprise, I received a call from Newsweek editor Will Tacy, who said that the journal was canvassing other “experts” for a 700-word comment on Zakaria’s article and asked if I would write a contribution. I agreed, wrote an article of the requisite length, and submitted the piece before the deadline. Mr. Tacy acknowledged receiving the commentary, but I have never heard from him again — despite sending several notes and leaving voice-mail — and the piece was not printed.

Why? Well there is always the chance that my comment stunk. But if that was the case, it was no worse than the article on which it commented. No, I think the reason for Mr. Tacy’s silence is that my piece told Newsweek’s readers that Mr. Zakaria: (a) had been a supporter of the neocons and the invasion of Iraq; (b) was desperately seeking Democratic friends with embarrassingly sycophantic praise for the sophisticated genius of President Obama; (c) had delineated an absolute refusal to take our Islamist enemies seriously; and (d) could not rally enough brain cells to even imagine that prolonged U.S. intervention in the Muslim world had caused and is prolonging the conflict with al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies.

I suspect the last item, on the mortal perils of interventionism, probably clinched my exclusion from the published comments on Mr. Zakaria’s article. (NB: Similarly, last May the New Republic asked me about al-Qaeda’s future. I wrote that if U.S. intervention continued, then al-Qaeda and its allies would win. The journal rejected the piece, instead printing an “al-Qaeda-is-imploding” fantasy that found no fault with the interventionist status quo.) Overall, Mr. Zakaria; Newsweek; the Obama administration; the Republicans; other journals, such as the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal; and most mainstream and cable media outlets are of one mind: U.S. interventionism must be continued, and, through it, secular democracy must be imposed on unlimited numbers of our little brown brothers by either bayonets or a U.S. taxpayer-funded overseas New Deal. Sadly for Americans, this means more intervention; higher taxes; more unconstitutional wars with Muslims; and the further erosion of U.S. national security.

My comment on Mr. Zakaria’s recent article follows.

Learning to increase America’s vulnerability, with Fareed Zakaria

In “Learning to Live With Radical Islam,” Fareed Zakaria extends his range of misperceptions about the Islamic world. Once a champion of President Bush’s spreading-democracy mania and the invasion of Iraq, he revises his tune to please the less martial — but still feckless — foreign-policy approach of President Obama. The revision is also embarrassing, as we find Mr. Zakaria searching for buddies in Democratic Washington by urging the drafting of “a more sophisticated strategy” by Obama, for whom, he says with exquisite sycophancy, such a task “should come naturally.”

Stripping the flattery of Obama and the requisite damning of old Republican friends, Mr. Zakaria’s words show no concern for America’s defense. Speaking in an anti-Muslim voice worthy of a viceroy of British India, Mr. Zakaria concludes, “The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women.”

Take that, you darned medieval, superstitious Muslims. You folks may think Islam is a legitimate “world view,” one that provides divine guidance for all aspects of life — from manners and morals to personal relationships to helping the poor to governing to war — but you would be dead wrong. Mr. Zakaria and Westerners know better. Their Western “world view” is superior to any religion-based world view — which by definition has “no answers” for the worldly wise — and so, can’t you Muslims see, Islam cannot satisfy the aspirations of people who are truly modern and respectable.

Mr. Zakaria’s distaste for Islam stems, it seems, from a common Western malady, an inability to differentiate between modernization and Westernization. Most Muslims — Islamists and others — appear to be eager, innovative users of modernity’s tools, whether armaments, communications, consumer goods, or information technology. The stunningly adept use of communications and information technology by the Afghan Taliban since 2001 makes this point. What overwhelming numbers of Muslims seem to oppose is Westernization, that grinning, giddy tolerance for nearly everything Allah advises against, such as the brothels, bars, and pornography brought to Kabul by Western NGOs and NATO forces. At base, for Mr. Zakaria, if Muslims are not willing to go on a whoring, whiskey-soaked bender they cannot aspire to modernity, and until they are so willing: “We [the U.S. and the West] should mount a spirited defense of our views and values. We should pursue aggressively policies that will make these values succeed.” In other words, onward you soldiers of secular imperialism, teach them heathen Muslims to hate their religion and become good Westerners.

Besides finding no value in the world view of Islamists or other Muslim faithful, Mr. Zakaria finds no fault in U.S. policy in the Muslim world. He leaves readers believing Islamists have no rational basis for attacking America. On this point, Mr. Zakaria unwittingly shows the foreign-policy continuity from Bush to Obama, which amounts to: Islamists and other Muslims attack us because they hate how Americans live and think, and not for what Washington does in the Muslim world. Here Mr. Zakaria is at his most obtuse and — with his praise for such “thinkers” (?) as Gerecht, Gerges, Kilcullen, etc. — at his most use to bin Laden and other Islamists as what the Cold War-era called a “useful idiot.”

America’s vulnerability to Islamist militancy has steadily risen since 2001, because Republican and Democratic leaders and their academic and media acolytes have lied to Americans about their enemies’ motivation. We are at war not because of our secularism and gender equality, but because we try to force those values on Muslims at bayonet-point, while wholeheartedly supporting those who Muslims see as Islam’s worst enemies: Israel and such Arab tyrannies as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

It is commonsense to conclude we cannot learn to live with radical Islam until we understand it and see the stark decision at hand: either amend foreign policies to make them consonant with U.S. interests or face endless wars. Sadly, Mr. Zakaria’s advice brings Americans no closer to that understanding. It viciously denigrates the “world view” of Muslim believers and leaves America vulnerable to a foe sure of why he is fighting and confident that U.S. leaders have no clue why America is losing.

Published: Antiwar.com

Last December, I spoke to the nonpartisan Jamestown Foundation’s annual conference on al-Qaeda. My talk was a worldwide survey of how America’s war against Islamism had gone in 2008; an analysis of al-Qaeda’s current fortunes and growth potential; and an assessment of whether U.S. policies were adequately protecting genuine U.S. national interests as the Obama administration began. I concluded that 2008 was a year of setbacks for America, and that the future appeared rather bleak.

For the speech, I took as my text a truncated version of the introduction I wrote for the paperback edition of my book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. In preparing the new text I was pleased to find my predictions in the hardcover had been accurate, but saddened that Americans had not faced the fact that our Islamist foes are motivated by U.S. foreign policies and their impact. One policy I am critical of in Marching Toward Hell is the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship. I argued that unqualified, bipartisan support for Israel damages U.S. national security, and I damned those who identify critics of the relationship as anti-American, anti-Semitic, or, in my case, according to AIPAC leader Morris J. Amitay, a man who would make Mein Kampf “required reading” at the CIA.

In the course of analyzing 2008 events, I found no reason to alter my view. And after hearing McCain and Obama during the campaign, there was no reason to expect change in Washington’s Israel policy. At the Jamestown Conference, I therefore first discussed the abject failure of President Bush and his advisers to recognize that al-Qaeda and its allies are waging war because of U.S. policies — one of which is Israel policy — and not because of our lifestyle and domestic politics.

I next offered an estimate of Mr. Obama’s potential to change these terrorism-motivating policies. While admitting an inability to read Obama’s mind, I noted that he had given at least two strong hints — to Americans and the Muslim world — that he would be as pro-Israel as Mr. Bush. I noted that (a) Mr. Obama spent the last months of the presidential campaign “dancing the Tel Aviv two-step,” promising to protect Israel as if it were located inside the United States; and (b) Obama appointed Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, a U.S. citizen who during the 1991 Gulf War left America to serve in Israel’s military.

These statements of fact suggested to me that U.S. policy toward Israel and the Muslim world would be identical to Mr. Bush’s, albeit couched in softer, come-let-us-reason-together rhetoric.

My speech seemed well received, but in January I received a call from Jamestown’s president telling me I had been terminated as a senior fellow by the Foundation’s board of directors. Why, I asked? He responded by citing my comments about Obama doing the “Tel Aviv two-step” and my description of Emanuel’s record, both of which he said might be in a speech by Rep. Ron Paul. My remarks about Emanuel apparently sparked particular anger among the Foundation’s directors, as Jamestown’s president referred to them at least three times in a short telephone conversation. In any event, the president said several major financial donors to Jamestown threatened to withdraw funding if I remained a senior fellow, so I was getting the boot. Then he added that my every-other-week essays for Jamestown’s Terrorism Focus had attracted readers and praise for the Foundation, so the directors said I could keep writing for the journal. I declined this honor, which seemingly was a bribe made in the hope that I would not speak publicly about being terminated as a senior fellow for saying the current state of the U.S.-Israel relationship undermined U.S. national security.

I regret leaving Jamestown, as I have great respect for its analysis on several vital U.S. security issues. But at the same time, I am grateful to the Foundation’s directors for terminating me. In the hardcover of Marching Toward Hell, I condemned the U.S.-Israel relationship and those who take it “upon themselves to decide who is and who is not a ‘good American,’” based on his or her views of U.S.-Israel relations, and “then mete out punishment to those of their countrymen who do not make the grade.” At the time, my view was based on what pro-Israel U.S. citizens had done to Pat Buchanan, President Carter, and Professors Walt and Mearsheimer.

Now, however, I have the personal experience of losing both position and income for condemning Washington’s status quo Israel policy as a threat to U.S. national security. The introduction to my paperback, therefore, can be said to be credibly written by an author with firsthand knowledge of how the Israel Lobby works. After my experience with the “nonpartisan” board of directors at Jamestown, I can only say of them what FDR said of his domestic foes: “They are unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

Published: Antiwar.com

If America were blessed with a non-interventionist foreign policy, we could all thank Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for giving President-elect Barack Obama a thoroughgoing lesson in the absolute irrelevancy of Israel and Palestine to the national interests of the United States. More than a week into Israel’s invasion of Gaza, America is still alive and kicking and none of our citizens are dead, which is the way it should be, as this is their religious war and not ours. If stubborn non-interventionism were our creed — as the Founders intended — the Gaza war could continue for two more days or two more months and we could simply shrug and mutter “Who cares?” America could simply go on its way, rebuilding its economy and marveling over the madness of two religions fighting to the death over a barren sandpit at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, America today is run by a political and media elite that is addicted to intervention. This would be bad enough if these men and women had the brains to intervene and produce a result that benefits U.S. interests, but they are not. They are instead — despite their Ivy League diplomas — uneducated and naïve people who still live in the Cold War, foolishly believing that America is the boss of a strong Western/NATO community (which is now in its death throes on Afghanistan’s plains); that other nations are eager to do America’s dirty work; and, most fatally of all, that the national security interests of the United States and Israel are identical.

There should be no mistake among Americans about what is going on in Gaza. Although Israel has billed its invasion as an attempt to destroy Hamas and thereby protect Israelis, its main goal is to ensure that Obama is tied as tight as Gulliver to the status quo of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. In addition to hurting Hamas, Israel’s invasion of Gaza was designed to and has successfully underscored the salience of Osama bin Laden’s now 12-plus-year-old message to the Muslim world:

First, that the United States — under Republicans or Democrats — will allow Israel to do anything it pleases in regard to starving and bombing the Palestinians. This has been underlined for Muslims by the words of President George W. Bush, the silence of President-elect Obama, and, according to the Jerusalem Post, by the blame-it-all-on-the-Palestinians visits of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Congressman Gary Ackerman, and leaders of major U.S. Jewish organizations.

Second, that the ruling Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere are impotent “agents” of the Zionists and Crusaders and will do nothing to protect Muslims when they are attacked by the U.S.-led West, be those attacks in Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. “[The] failure of the Arab foreign ministers at their meeting in Cairo to take any position to confront the continuing Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip,” explains the independent and influential UK-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-Arabi, “confirms the theory that says the Israeli aggression has come as a result of coordination and the blessing of influential Arab states, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

Third, that Muslims are regarded by the West as subhumans, and their blood, lives, and children are — for America, Israel, and Europe — worthless and expendable. The Gaza score to date will indelibly make this point across the Islamic world: to date, 500 dead and 2,300 wounded Palestinians and less than 10 dead Israelis. As Pakistan’s Frontier Post has said, the West silently watches as “Israel is set to starve the Palestinian Muslims into nonexistence. … No respect for Muslim life! Muslim blood is cheaper than water!”

After the Gaza invasion, Israel will have accomplished two vital goals. It will have reenergized Hamas, which will in turn renew the suicide bombings inside Israel that allow America’s Israel-firsters — including Obama’s IDF-veteran chief of staff — to portray their country-of-first-allegiance as the poor, put-upon innocent. It will also have produced the end of whatever slim hope there was of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement over the course of Obama’s term. What is likely to become known across the Islamic world as the “Gaza slaughter” will ensure the continued growth of the Sunni insurgency al-Qaeda leads and inspires. All told, Israeli leaders at the conclusion of the Gaza invasion will be able to more credibly quote President Bush and say that their “mission” has been accomplished.

Now, there is no reason for Americans to be angry at Israel. Hamas is a nagging military threat to Israel, and Israel’s leaders can defend their citizens in the manner they deem appropriate. Indeed, had various U.S. governments abstained from continuously intervening in the Arab-Israeli conflict over the past 30 years, it may well have been long since settled and over — one way or another.

The American people should be livid, though, with their bipartisan political elite and the Israel-firsters at Commentary, the New York Times, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Post, as well as that hive of anti-American U.S. citizens that fund and lead AIPAC, for involving them in this barbarous mess. At some point down the road, every U.S.-taxpayer-funded bomb, artillery shell, and bullet aimed at the Palestinians will yield Americans killed at the hands of al-Qaeda, its allies, or those it inspires in attacks launched in response to U.S. support for Israel. Those Americans will be killed because their political and media leaders — corrupted to the bone by AIPAC — have involved them in a religious war that threatens nothing vital to their country’s principles or national security, their personal economic well-being, or their children’s lives.

And worse is yet to come. Israel’s Gaza invasion has produced an unusual number of public anti-Israel demonstrations by American Muslims around the United States. The 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war produced similar events, but the current, Gaza-focused demonstrations are angrier and larger in number. How long, one wonders, will it be before Israel’s military actions lead to violent clashes in America?

If this occurs, Israel and its American supporters will have the insurance policy they desire above any other, one they are desperate to obtain before Israel takes harsh action — by forced deportation or other means — against its rapidly growing and radicalizing Arab population. Once the Arab-Israeli religious war has been brought into the United States and is producing blood in America’s streets, the Israel-firsters will claim the carnage proves that secular America and theocratic Israel are in the same boat and facing the same enemies. Flogging this plausible but palpable lie, AIPAC-owned American leaders will consign this country to an unending war against Islam, the same catastrophe that is Israel’s lot.

Published: Antiwar.com

Having watched John McCain and Barack Obama resolutely pledge their allegiance — and their countrymen’s lives and treasure — to the defense of Israel via AIPAC, the media, and personal meetings with Israeli leaders, it is worth asking what could possibly drive these men to so ardently commit America to participation in other people’s religious wars. This question is particularly important today as the Bush administration and the Israel-firsters continue to push for an unprovoked U.S. attack on Iran.

Let me say that I harbor no resentment over the actions of Israel’s leaders. For more than 60 years, they have knowingly made their country a pariah in the Arab and Islamic worlds, just as the Palestinians have made themselves pariahs in much of the West. This is, of course, the right of both parties, but neither seems to want to face the consequences of their decisions. With demographic realities and increasingly radical, well-armed Arabs making them panicky about Israel’s security, Israel’s leaders naturally to try to lock down as much U.S. support as possible. Having consciously — if unwisely — put all their eggs in the U.S. basket since the 1973 War, Israel’s leaders must do everything possible to protect their relationship with Washington.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq, it seems, was not enough for the Israel-firsters. Now, according to Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a U.S.-launched war on Iran is needed because “the threat that the U.S. and Israel face from the Islamic Republic of Iran is today greater than ever.” Though based on the fantasy that Ahmedinejad’s tin-pot regime is a threat to the world’s only superpower, this is a perfectly commonsense position for Israel and its U.S.-citizen backers in AIPAC to champion. In their view, U.S. wars with Muslims are the ultimate good for Israel. Recall, if you will, the perfectly accurate April 2008, words of Benjamin Netanyahu, likely Israel’s next prime minister: “We [Israel] are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” These wars, Netanyahu said, have “swung American public opinion in our favor.” How much more must Netanyahu and AIPAC believe that a U.S. war with Iran would add to this “swing” in Israel’s favor?

My own anger falls not on Israel, then, or on Palestine, for that matter; as I have written elsewhere, America would do just fine and would be better off without either or both. It falls rather on the lobbying efforts of AIPAC, that organization’s blatant purchasing of fealty from U.S. politicians in both parties, and the media’s obsequious parroting of specious canards about “Israel’s right to exist” and “the duty of Americans to support an island of democracy in the Middle East.”

While few would question the right of AIPAC leaders to lobby U.S. politicians, legally bribe them with campaign contributions, or limit their right to speak as they please in public, not matter how scurrilous or libelous their words, I sometimes wonder if Americans have focused on what AIPAC lobbies for and what its acolytes in politics and the media support.

It is a commonplace to say that lobbying is a pervasive activity in U.S. politics at all levels of government, especially at the federal level. People lobby for tax advantages for business or tax breaks for individuals; for the right to own guns or laws to ban them; for subsidies for agriculture or vouchers for private schools; for universal health care or smaller government. Across this diverse array of lobbyists there are two common threads: (A) None are working to push the United States to participate in other peoples’ wars; and (B) All are arguing for things that will — from their perspective — improve America, whether by making it richer, better protected, more competently educated, healthier, freer, etc. The anti-gun lobby, for example, is no less confident than the NRA and its affiliates that they are working for the best interests of Americans. One or the other is wrong, but their activities are shaped by their perception of what is best for America.

It is this last point that separates the lobbyists working for and with AIPAC — most of whom are U.S. citizens — from almost all other U.S.-based lobbyists. AIPAC does not lobby, bribe, and libel to make Americans and America better off. It lobbies solely, forthrightly, and cynically to make Israel richer, better protected, and able to do as it pleases in its relations with Muslim states. AIPAC makes no pretense of doing things meant to benefit America; rather, its members take pride in seeking a goal that runs directly counter to the economic welfare and physical security of almost all other U.S citizens by seeking to keep them involved in a religious war in which no U.S. national interest is at stake.

Now, there are a few other similar anti-American lobbies — those for Armenia, Lebanon, Greece, etc. — but AIPAC is clearly primus inter pares in this dastardly group. And given that every AIPAC success is a net loss for U.S. security and the U.S. Treasury, it seems odd that our so-called political leaders take orders and funds from this fundamentally anti-U.S. organization. Odd or not, however, that is the reality. Senators Obama and McCain have become AIPAC poster boys, each strengthening his support for Israel over the course of the current presidential campaign. Obama’s position, in fact, has changed so drastically in a pro-Israel direction that the Illinois senator appears to have no mind of his own on this issue. He has simply and obsequiously adopted the Democrats’ traditional abject subservience to their small but powerful pro-Israel constituency.

McCain is an Israel-firster of the deepest hue. Coached by Joe Lieberman — who argues there is a U.S. duty to ensure God’s promise to Abraham about Israel is kept — McCain is now considering Republican Congressman Eric Cantor for his running mate. Rep. Cantor, needless to say, is eager to spend American blood and treasure to secure Israel. Speaking in Israel, Cantor pushed the same false assertion that is the staple of U.S. leaders in both parties. “What befalls Jerusalem,” Cantor said, “threatens the security of the United States and its allies worldwide. That’s because Jerusalem and Israel are Ground Zero in the global battle between tyranny and democracy, radicalism and moderation, terrorism and freedom.”

This, of course, is nonsense of a high order, and Lieberman and Cantor know it. Both men are committed to Israel as a religious idea, not because it has anything to do with U.S. security. According to Lieberman, “The rabbis say in the Talmud that a lot of rabbinic law is to put a fence around the Torah so you don’t get near to violating it. Well, McCain has a series of very clear-headed policies toward terrorism and Islamic extremism [that put] extra layers behind his support for Israel.” He also told a conference of Christians United for Israel that he was pleased they recognized it was America’s duty to defend Israel, blithely lying to them that “President Washington and the Founding Fathers” would support America fighting Israel’s wars. Cantor, playing to both the Israel-firsters and their U.S. evangelical allies, also has made clear where his primary loyalty lies:

“Jerusalem is not merely the capital of Israel but the spiritual capital of Jews and Christians everywhere. It’s the site of the First and Second Temples, which housed the Holy of Holies, and it’s the direction in which we Jews face when we pray. This glorious City of David is bound to the Jewish people by an undeniable 3,000-year historical link.”

My own view is that if God promised Palestine to the Israelis, God is perfectly capable of keeping that promise, and America is no way committed to expend the lives of its soldier-children in a war over conflicting interpretations of God’s word. The Israelis and the Muslims should be perfectly free to fight over whether Yahweh and Abraham or Allah and Mohammed are right, and Americans should be perfectly free to draw the correct conclusion, that the United States does not have a dog in this fight. In addition, there is a genuine constitutional question of church-state separation on this issue. Why should American taxpayers have their earnings and children’s lives spent to defend a theocracy in Israel or, for that matter, to protect an Islamic theocracy in Saudi Arabia.? (Imagine the howls of protest and torrents of church-state separation rhetoric from the media and both parties if a congressman introduced a bill calling for the U.S. to designate that an amount equivalent to what’s spent to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia be sent to the Vatican — a nation-state like Israel and Saudi Arabia — to improve its defenses against the now well-articulated threat from al-Qaeda and other Islamists.)

Objectively, three realities are clear: (1) U.S. survival is not at stake in the Israeli-Muslim war; (2) the taxes of Americans should not be spent to defend theocratic states; and (3) holy books are insane tools to use as guides for U.S. foreign policy. In America, however, these realities lie unspoken because of the lobbying efforts of AIPAC and the pro-Israel mantras of the politicians it purchases with campaign contributions and promises of media exposure, including McCain and Obama. By their consistent anti-American actions, AIPAC and the U.S. politicians who do its bidding have fully validated the words of the real George Washington — not the figment of Washington painted by Joe Lieberman. “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” President Washington wrote in 1796, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Published: Antiwar.com

Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of “dual loyalties.” The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals — Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal — amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples’ religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.

The Israel-firsters’ success is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Most recently, for example, we heard President Bush echo Sen. Lieberman’s insane and subversive contention that the United States has a “duty” to ensure the fulfilling of God’s millennia-old promise to Abraham regarding the creation and survival of Israel. Bush told the Knesset all Americans are ready to endlessly bleed and pay to ensure Israel’s security. And where does the president derive authority to make such a commitment in the name of his countrymen? From the Constitution? On the basis of America’s dominant religion? From — heaven forbid — a thoughtful, hardheaded analysis of U.S. interests?

No, Bush’s pledge was based on none of these. Bush’s decision to more deeply involve America in the eternal Arab-Israeli war was based on nothing less than the corruption wrought on the American political system by the Israel-firsters, AIPAC’s enormous treasury, and the lamentable but growing influence of America’s leading evangelical Protestant preachers.

The Israel-firsters started the Iraq war and now have the United States locked into an occupation of that country that may not end in any of our lifetimes. Unless Americans ignore the likes of Hanson, Podhoretz, Lieberman, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the cost in blood and treasure will ultimately bankrupt America.

AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel’s interests above America’s. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.

Leading American Protestant evangelical preachers — men like Hagee, Parsley, and Graham — are the newest and perhaps most anti-American members of this fifth column. They serve two purposes: (1) to reinforce in the minds of their flocks the Bush-Lieberman absurdity that the United States has a “duty” to ensure Israel’s survival; and (2) to use religious rhetoric to steadily convince the Muslim world that U.S. leaders are interested only in taming — and if need be, destroying — Islam.

The reality and power of this anti-American, pro-Israel triangle — Israel-first politicians, civil servants, and pundits; AIPAC’s corrupting influence; and the warmongering of major evangelical Protestant preachers — is so obvious and palpable that the only way its members can blur reality is to deny the triangle’s existence and identify their critics as anti-Semites. Well, the time has come to simply ignore these folks’ knee-jerk hurling of that epithet. Indeed, the slur ought to understood for what it is: a sure sign that the Israel-firsters know that their fifth column would be destroyed in a minute if their fellow Americans come to recognize that their sons and daughters are dying in Iraq and soon elsewhere to protect an Israeli state whose existence is just as important to U.S. interests as the creation of a Palestinian state — that is, of no importance whatsoever.

American voters must start using the democratic process to begin removing themselves from the religious war known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Disengagement will take time, hard work, and a steadfast commitment to the rule of law. Three actions are well within the voters’ capability, and their use would bring pressure on federal officials to stop killing America’s children in wars between Arabs and Israelis.

1. Voters should press federal representatives to end taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and other such organizations. These organizations’ main function is to promote the fallacy that U.S. interests are served by making sure that Israel — “the embattled island of democracy in the Middle East” — is protected, and that the lives of American children should be joyfully spent to bring democracy to foreigners in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
2. Voters should not vote for any candidate for federal office who accepts contributions from AIPAC or any other Israel-first organization. This decision would be an important step in beginning to sweep clean the Augean stable that is American politics.
3. Voters of all faiths must press their religious leaders to regularly, publicly, and specifically denounce the evangelical Protestant preachers whose fire-and-brimstone support for Israel involves Americans in religious wars in which U.S. interests are not threatened.

Neutralizing the Israel-first fifth column must be done, but it must be accomplished using legitimate democratic tools: voting, lobbying, free speech, and support for candidates pledged to keep America out of other peoples’ religious wars. The invocation of the anti-Semite epithet by the Israel-firsters should be ignored. To be silenced by the slurs of the Israel-firsters is to ignominiously invite the end of American independence by subordinating U.S. interests to those of a foreign nation, as well as to forget the warning of the greatest American. “If men are precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind,” George Washington said in March 1783, “reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” As long as the Israel-firsters can define the limits of acceptable public discourse, Americans are on their way to the slaughter.

Published: Antiwar.com

This speech was delivered at the Ron Paul Revolution March in Washington, DC, on July 12, 2008.

“If there be one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1791, “it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” We are here today because our bipartisan governing elite and its media apologists have turned Mr. Jefferson on his head to America’s detriment. Today’s leaders in both parties unrelentingly intervene in the affairs of other nations and regions, and, by all appearances, care not a damn about preserving America’s independence. These individuals aspire to be celebrated citizens of the world, believing that being an American citizen is a hum-drum affair best left to the rest of us who pay for their imperial aspirations and interventionist wars with our taxes and soldier-children.

When we celebrated Independence Day eight days ago, no party leader had the moral courage to tell Americans the truth, which is that in the last 50 years both parties have eviscerated our independence in regard to the single most important foreign policy issue — that is, the decision on whether or not to go to war.

• Both parties, for example, have failed to move the United States to energy security since the first Arab-led oil embargo in 1973. Instead of freeing our economy from the Arab-held dagger that is pointed at its heart, American presidents — Democratic and Republican — have shamefully grovelled, begging for more oil, from their energy-producing masters in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Muslim police states. The same presidents have so enormously overspent the public treasury that they have put America further in the thrall of the Arab tyrants who buy an ever-increasing portion of our debt.
• Because of this cowardly leadership, Americans find they have lost control of the decision of whether to go to war. If anti-Saudi unrest in the kingdom’s Eastern Province ever severely curtails oil production, U.S. soldiers and Marines will automatically deploy to secure the Saudi police state and restore production.
• And the reality of automatic war for oil goes beyond the Arab world. By 2012, the United States will receive 20-percent of its crude from Africa’s Niger Delta and the Gulf of Guinea. If production in that region — which already is plagued by insurgent attacks — is ever significantly reduced, U.S. soldiers and Marines will be automatically deployed there to restore production. And if you think the insurgencies being fought today in Iraq and Afghanistan are nightmares, just wait until our men and women are fighting in the Niger Delta’s 27,000 square kilometers of swamp and forest.

We also have lost control of the peace-or-war decision because of our bipartisan elite’s decision to involve America almost inextricably in the unending and unendable war been Arabs and Israelis. Ignoring and even ridiculing the Founding Fathers’ explicit guidance to avoid involving the United States in other peoples’ wars, both parties have not only done so in the Middle East but have blithely involved us in other peoples’ religious wars.

• Can there be any better definition of an insane foreign policy than the one that today finds the United States not only being involved voluntarily in someone else’s war but backing both of the major antagonists in that war — Israel and Saudi Arabia?
• By being the main financier and unquestioning protector of Israel, and the only protector of the fundamentally anti-American Saudi state, Washington has created a situation in which America will be drawn into the next Arab-Israeli war, no matter what the wishes or interests of the American people.

Having thus all but negated the ability of the United States to abstain from wars over oil and wars between Arabs and Israelis, our political elite has completed this axis of doom for Americans by their limitless zeal for democracy crusading overseas, a perversion of what America stands for that can only lead to war and more war.

• Our elite’s democracy-crusade in Iraq has destabilized the entire region, creating new threats to oil supplies and driving up their price. It has cost American taxpayers nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and killed 4,200 of their soldier-children and wounded 30,000 more. A few more such missions accomplished in the democracy-building realm will bankrupt our nation.
• And the still-present threat of another democracy-imposing war against Iran — which is a more democratic state than any of Washington’s Islamofascist Arab state allies — would be a negative achievement of epic proportions. War on Iran would be disguised as a campaign to liberate Iranians, but in reality would be nothing more than war to protect Israel. Such a war, moreover, would unite the entire Muslim world — 1.4 billion Sunnis and Shia, if you are counting — in a jihad against the United States.

Our bipartisan governing elite, then, has brought Americans face-to-face with war at every turn: Wars over oil; wars over the religious conflicts of foreigners in which no genuine U.S. national interest at stake; and wars to impose secular democracy on people who will resist it to the death. This situation is surely the antithesis of what the Founders intended when they designed a constitutional system meant to limit the chance of an arbitrary government that inevitably leads to tyranny. The Founders knew — and Americans must relearn — that there is no better definition of tyranny than one that finds an entire nation led into war by the negligence, personal beliefs, or even whims of a single individual — be he or she a king, a dictator, or a popularly elected president.

Americans must begin to reestablish their control over the decision to go to war by removing from office an interventionist elite that is ready to destroy the American republic and replace it with an expanding American empire. The question, of course, is how to begin to draw back from the blank-check war commitments our leaders have given to foreigners? Let me suggest several ways.

• We must accelerate conversion to alternative energies, expand nuclear power, and further exploit U.S. fossil fuel reserves. Nothing should be allowed to deter the ingenuity and initiative of Americans from gaining energy self-sufficiency. Demands for absolute protection for Arctic hares or shrimp-inhabited reefs, at the cost of dead Marines and soldiers, should be ignored. Beyond oil, America has no national interests in the Arab Peninsula region — save the freedom of navigation, which the U.S. Navy can ensure — and as our energy dependence ends, this will be clear. Self-sufficiency will allow America to stop protecting the Gulfs’ tyrannies which now cloud our economic destiny, export religious hatred for us, and make our advocacy of freedom appear to be pure and even spectacular hypocrisy. It also will end the current, cruel reality that sees some portion of the price U.S. parents pay at the pump flow from oil-rich Arabs to the Islamic insurgents who are their killing the soldier-children in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• We must stay out of other peoples’ wars, particularly their religious wars. America now stands as an abject loser in the Israel-Hizballah conflict; the Israel-Palestine war; and the economic strangling of HAMAS; indeed, America is in part losing to the Islamists because of its absolute backing of Israel and its blind-eye for the Saudis’ blatant and aggressive jihad-spreading. America must withdraw from this savagery. No important aspect of American life or security would be negatively impacted if Palestine or Israel or both disappeared tomorrow, and we are tied to the Saudi tyranny only because of the cowardice of U.S. politicians. Americans also must reject their political class’s patently absurd contention that U.S. and Israeli national security interests are identical. America is now shedding blood and treasure because our country’s Israel-first citizens and their journals — men like Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, James Woolsey, and such journals as the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal — provoked a hubristic war based on the idiot idea that a state could be created in Muslim Iraq that was not anti-Israeli. These men severely and permanently compromised Israel’s security from the moment the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began. Moreover, it is not a fixable situation because a potentially pro-Israel regime in Iraq exists only in the ahistorical and fervid imaginings of U.S. citizen Israel-firsters, who are, when all is said and done, Israel’s worst and most lethal enemies. The cost of unqualified U.S. support for Israel has heretofore been measured in the expenditure of dollars and political capital, and as such has been acquiesced in or ignored by Americans inured to their government’s prodigal waste of national assets. We now have transitioned into a situation where the cost of such support for Israel is being measured in the blood and lives of the children of American parents. That cost will quickly become obvious, abhorrent, and utterly unacceptable to those parents.
• We must force the Congress to end its supine abdication to the Executive of its sole power to declare war by electing representatives pledged to restoring constitutionality — and therefore sanity — to our war-making process. Infamously, no Congress has declared war since December 8th, 1941, and yet we have repeatedly seen the American people dragged into wars because one man and his advisers have decided it is the right thing to do. Resolutions allowing the president to use military force offensively are cowardly acts that surrender constitutional prerogatives in a manner that allows senators and congressman to have it both ways: they can applaud the troops if the war goes well, or they can snipe at and undermine the president if a war goes belly up. Our post-war history is littered with failed wars that were initiated by the president and which divided Americans amongst themselves. Perhaps the restoration of the Founders’ intent on the issue of war-making will allow us both to win wars abroad and not wage them against each other at home.
• Finally, and most important, we must stop trying to spread democracy abroad by military, financial, humanitarian, or political intervention. No young American should die for the insane goal of “giving the people of Iraq a possibility of embracing democracy,” a phrase used ad infinitum by President Bush and other Western leaders. No small “r” republican government like ours has the right to spend the lives of its young in military crusades for such patently-unobtainable abstractions as giving liberty, justice, and democracy to foreigners. U.S. foreign policy must revert to what it was before the historical anomaly called the Cold War gave license to U.S. politicians to become democracy-mongering interventionists. Foreign policy defends who we are; it does not and cannot define who we are. Foreign policy need do only one thing: protect America so as to allow the domestic expansion of liberty, freedom, and equality of conditions. If no additional foreigner ever votes in an election, Americans would be no worse off. Washington’s efforts to build democracies abroad has a track record of making America less safe, not more safe, and, may I ask, is there a better definition of pure waste, than spending the lives of our Marines or soldiers so Mrs. Muhammad can vote in an Iraqi or Afghan election. The post-Cold War, democracy-crusading of U.S. administrations has impoverished us in treasure, blood, domestic political unity, and what has been called the “rightful influence of our republican example.” We must return to the Founders’ goal for America, to be, “the well-wisher of freedom and independence for all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

In closing, let me urge that none of us lose heart or fall prey to despair. Though the dangers that confront our republic are many and dire, the future of America, as always, is in the hands of Americans. All of those in attendance here today and the millions more listening or watching across this broad land know that the greatest danger America faces comes not from China, or from Russia, or from global warming, or from Islamic extremism, but rather it comes from the members of our own bipartisan governing elite.

There is not a nickel’s worth of difference between President Bush and former president Clinton; between Senator McCain and Senator Obama; between Speaker Pelosi and Mayor Giuliani, or between any of the foregoing and their pro-empire, Israel-first cheerleaders at the Council of Foreign Relations, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the America-Israel Political Action Committee. They are all rank and reckless interventionists, bent on involving America in other peoples’ wars and content to see our republic destroyed by their ego-building and democracy-crusading military adventures overseas.

The greatest danger to the republic lies in the imperial ambitions of these men and women; they are a mortal threat to the American people and all that they have built here in North America over the last 232 years. And no one, may I say, has done more to alert his countrymen to this danger than that soft-spoken gentleman from Texas, Dr. Ron Paul. In a campaign made luminous and memorable by this man’s personal integrity, intellectual honesty and consistency, unwavering allegiance to the Founders’ principles, and most of all, his limitless moral courage, Dr. Paul’s efforts have created space in the public square for me and many others to stand and support him in favoring the best foreign policy for America, the foreign policy of non-intervention. While there is much hard and lengthy work still to do, Dr. Paul has made a lasting start for all of us in the effort to reclaim our republic from the war-mongering hands of our interventionist elite. Dr. Paul, as another patriot-insurgent named Thomas Paine once wrote, has found that “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered” but Dr. Paul has proven again and again that he is neither a summer soldier nor a sunshine patriot, but rather a man who knows “the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph” and who today, for his efforts against all odds, “deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

May God always bless Dr. Paul and may God also give us all the moral courage to carry on to success the campaign to destroy interventionism that he has so nobly begun. Let me close by expressing my deep appreciation for the chance to speak here today, and let me leave you with the words Thomas Paine used to describe what it takes to make a successful revolution. “I call not upon a few, but upon all,” Paine wrote in December 1776,

“not on this state or that state, but on every state; up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future world that, in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence but “show your faith by your works,” that God may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you. The far and the near … the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now, is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man who can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and can grow brave from reflection. It is the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

Paine closed this passage with words that could just as well have been spoken by Dr. Paul and which should be spoken by all of us:

“I thank God that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it.”

And the way out for America is, of course, the Founders’ strict non-interventionist foreign policy that Dr. Paul so bravely champions.

With daily television coverage of suicide car-bomb attacks, ambushes, drive-by shootings, stabbings, and other Intifada-type attacks around the world, the question arises as to why al-Qaeda does not stage such small-scale but deadly operations in the United States. From Washington and the presidential campaign trail comes a cocky, multi-part answer: our massive homeland security spending has worked; al-Qaeda is on the run and hiding; and/or the U.S. military is fighting the Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan so they cannot come to America. There may be a mite of truth in each claim, but the correct answer would be frankly to acknowledge that al-Qaeda would have no trouble mounting the kind of attacks made against Israel in America — guns, cars, militant Muslims, and open borders for other needs are all readily available — but that, at this time, it has no interest in staging Intifada-type attacks in the United States.

There are at least three solid reasons why al-Qaeda is not running an Intifada-like campaign in the United States:

1. Al-Qaeda does not want to fight the United States for any longer than is needed to drive it as far as possible out of the Middle East, and its doctrine for so doing has, in Osama bin Laden’s formulation, three components: (a) bleed America to bankruptcy; (b) spread out U.S. forces to the greatest extent possible; and (c) promote Vietnam-era-like domestic disunity. Based on this doctrine, al-Qaeda leaders have decided that attacks in the United States are only worthwhile if they have maximum and simultaneous impact in three areas: high and enduring economic costs, severe casualties, and lasting negative psychological impact. Such an attack, they believe, would require significant U.S. military participation in the post-attack phase — especially if the weapon used is the nuclear device they have sought since the early 1990s — and thereby reduce the military’s ability to operate overseas. They also believe that a greater-than-9/11 attack would greatly undermine the confidence of Americans in Washington’s ability to protect them. (NB: The usually deft Osama bin Laden also has put himself in something of a box regarding another attack in America because he pledged the next attack will be more destructive than 9/11. Paradoxically, a spate of Intifada-type attacks by al-Qaeda in the United States could well be good news because it probably would signal an admission by bin Laden, et. al that they no longer have the capability to match or exceed the attacks of 9/11 inside America.)
2. Al-Qaeda appears to recognize the huge difference between attacking Israel and attacking the United States. For Palestinian and Hezbollah insurgents, Intifada-style attacks have sufficed; over the decades, the limited number of casualties the Palestinians and Hezbollah have inflicted on Israel’s small population has repeatedly won concessions. Suicide attacks, ambushes, and stabbings against America’s 300-plus-million population would cause outrage, a few casualties, and some panic, internal confusion, and perhaps limited inter-ethnic-group violence. They would not, however, shift the strategic balance in al-Qaeda’s favor. Intifada-style attacks could not satisfy any of al-Qaeda’s three-part doctrine: they would not (a) cause U.S. bankruptcy, (b) require large numbers of U.S. troops to clean-up after, or (c) significantly undermine political cohesion. Indeed, there is reason to surmise that al-Qaeda’s leaders have concluded that attacks like those used against Israel — which intend to cause deaths of women, children, and the elderly — would unite Americans rather than divide them.
3. Al-Qaeda leaders probably think, for the moment, that it would be counterproductive to stage any but a larger-than-9/11 attack in America. Currently, Bin Laden and his senior lieutenants are clearly off balance vis-à-vis the United State because so much substantive success has accrued to al-Qaeda’s interests so quickly since 9/11. Neither al-Qaeda nor the Taliban were destroyed in 2001; both escaped with most of their forces largely intact. Each has regrouped, rearmed, and retrained in safe havens in the Pashtun tribal lands that straddle the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The Pakistan army’s incursion into the tribal zone was defeated; the new, less-pro-U.S. government in Islamabad is suing for peace with the tribes; and the Islamization of Pakistan continues unabated. The Muslim world perceives that the U.S. military is being defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been further alienated by the U.S. treatment of captured mujahideen. Finally, the U.S. economy is slowing, Americans are severely divided over Washington’s activities overseas, and none of the three major presidential candidates are likely to drastically alter the foreign policies all polls show are hated by up to 80 percent of Muslims. This embarrassment of riches advances each part of al-Qaeda’s doctrine for fighting America — casualties, costs, and disunity — and it has been accumulated without a follow-up-to-9/11 attack. While bin Laden might well risk this good fortune for a chance to detonate a nuclear device in the United States, he certainly would not risk it now for the sake of shooting up a half-dozen theaters, coffee shops, and pizza parlors.

So, Americans can relax a bit, go to the movies or the mall, and stop afterwards for coffee or pizza without worrying too much about al-Qaeda launching small-scale attacks. For now, Americans should see themselves as being in standby mode for the larger-than-9/11 attack bin Laden eventually will trigger because the last two U.S. administrations and Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama have warned about the severe Islamist threat, while knowingly encouraging its worldwide growth by championing status quo foreign policies that degrade U.S. security, as well as by supinely appeasing their Saudi and Israeli masters.

Published: Antiwar.com

Congressman Ron Paul’s new book, The Revolution, is an unusual presidential campaign book in that the candidate — Dr. Paul — is almost entirely absent. This is not to say that his presence is not felt; indeed, Dr. Paul is with the reader every step of the way and writes in a clear and very direct style. But the reader will find that Dr. Paul is not offering the audacity of hope or chanting change; he does not argue that it takes a village or having slept with a former president; and he surely does not hold up his military service as a reason why he should be elected. Instead, Dr. Paul politely, laconically, but frankly lays it on the line for his countrymen: America is in significant and potentially catastrophic trouble economically, financially, and militarily; the country’s political class is homogenous, gutless, and ill-educated; its two major parties do not offer a nickel’s worth of difference on important issues, especially foreign policy [pp. 2, 26, 163]; and our leaders are consciously negating parts of the Constitution, compromising America’s national sovereignty, and circumscribing the liberties of Americans. But then, astoundingly and correctly, Dr. Paul does not say “Only I can fix this mess” — as have Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain — he says: “Only you, the American people, can fix this mess.” Dr. Paul confronts Americans with a reality that ought to both chill and inspire them.

“Ours is not a fated existence, for nowhere is our destiny etched in stone. In the final analysis, the last line of defense in support of freedom and the Constitution consists of the people themselves. If the people want to be free, if they want to lift themselves out from underneath a state apparatus that threatens their liberties, squanders their resources on needless wars, destroys the value of their dollar, and spews forth endless propaganda about how indispensable it is and how lost we would be without it, there is no force that can stop them. If freedom is what we want, it is ours for the taking.” — [p. 167]

At the risk of angering some of this website’s readers, to my conservative-but-not-libertarian mind no American presidential candidate or serving president since Abraham Lincoln has put so clearly to Americans the problems they face and the sole means of their solution. “I wish you to remember now and forever,” Mr. Lincoln told an audience in Indianapolis on 11 February 1861,

that it is your business not mine; that if the union of these States and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of fifty-two years of age, but a great deal to the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States and to their posterity, in all coming time. It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves, and not for me.

Albeit through far different philosophical lenses, Dr. Paul sees much the same thing as did Mr. Lincoln: an approaching national calamity that only the American people themselves can act to avert. And Mr. Lincoln’s reference to “posterity” is an appropriate point from which to look at Dr. Paul’s concern for America’s future because he, as did Mr. Lincoln, believes that the guide for ensuring the welfare of our posterity lies in the Constitution left to Americans by the Founders of their republic.

Dr. Paul reminds Americans that they are the inheritors — the posterity, if you will — of the work and guidance of the single wisest, most courageous, and most foresighted group of leaders who ever lived at one time and labored successfully to form a new republic. Refusing to be fashionable — a most admirable characteristic — Dr. Paul forthrightly declares that the Founders’ work and guidance remain just as relevant to Americans today as it was two-plus centuries ago. [p. 10] In making this argument, he echoes Oxford Professor Daniel N. Robinson’s contention that the Founders drew from “the political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature,” a treatise that held as a certainties the beliefs that man was a flawed, non-perfectible creature whose attitudes and character did not change over the ages. The Founders knew that people do not change, that good and evil are constants in history, and — most important — that power not freedom is the universal value.

As Dr. Paul notes, all U.S. politicians in this era pay lip service to the Founders and their work, but few seem to know anything about what the Founders thought, fought for, or passed on to us. In so saying, Dr. Paul is being kind. I doubt a single one of the other presidential candidates could extemporaneously compare and contrast the differences over the draft constitution that put fellow Virginians James Madison and George Mason at odds in 1787. Indeed, it would not surprise me if they failed to distinguish between a paper by Ben Franklin and the latest political pronouncement from Ben and Jerry, the Vermont socialists. Dr. Paul has a well-honed contempt for charlatan politicians who talk a good game about their fidelity to the Founders, but by their actions show they regard them as a group of irrelevant and thankfully dead white males. “These critics should have the honesty to condemn the Founding Fathers … [but] they wouldn’t dare,” Dr. Paul writes, “But it would be refreshing to hear it stated in so many words: our current political class is blessed with historic genius, and Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were contemptible fools.” [p. 14]

Let me say that I am not competent to assess the entire range of issues discussed by Dr. Paul in The Revolution, but that at least makes me the equal of all his presidential competitors. On the issue of U.S. foreign policy and its impact, however, I have had a bit of experience and can say with confidence that no sections of Dr. Paul’s book are more immediately important to Americans than those dealing with foreign affairs. America today faces a quickly approaching, total, worldwide, and economically ruinous war — in which the conscription of our young will be unavoidable — against growing numbers of Islamist fighters and their broadening support base. And if there was ever a war that the United States did not need to wage in a total manner, it is this one.

At base, the war is about matters overwhelmingly internal to the Muslim world. America has been attacked and will continue to be attacked not because the Islamists hate our freedoms and liberties or even because we are their main enemy. We are being attacked because of the unrelentingly interventionist foreign policies our bipartisan political class has pursued in the Muslim world for more than 35 years. This interventionism — as Dr. Paul so well argues — has involved us in other peoples’ wars in which America has no genuine national interests at stake, most notably in the Arab-Israeli religious war. We were attacked in Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, Yemen, again, New York, Washington, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan because of our decades-long record of interventionist policies, which have included unqualified and unconscionable support for Israel and equally unconscionable and unqualified support and protection for Muslim tyrannies like Saudi Arabia. So mindless has been what Dr. Paul terms “hyperintervention” [p. 16] that the United States finds itself in the absurd position of being the major backer and protector of both sides in the Arab-Israeli religious war, Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Dr. Paul rightly says, the Islamists’ “grievances are basically that we’re u2018over there,” [p. 18] and we are “over there” because of the lust of U.S. leaders to intervene. “The point is a simple one,” Dr. Paul concludes, “when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet’s nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people. That’s just common sense. But hardly anyone dares to level with the American people about our fiasco of a foreign policy.” [p. 19]

Hardly anyone, that is, except Dr. Paul. In The Revolution, Dr. Paul has some kind things to say about my work, that of Dr. Robert Pape, and for the studies of others who have tried to focus Americans on the growing dangers to the United States posed by their political class’s overseas interventionism. Always the self-deprecating gentleman, Dr. Paul does not mention that it is really those of us he compliments who ought to be thanking him for making it possible to begin a debate on the issue of interventionism. Without Dr. Paul’s courage, persistence, and the popularity of his non-interventionist views among Americans in their mid-20s to mid-30s — which must be profoundly disturbing to the two major parties — there would be no such debate and bipartisan interventionism would continue to be the unquestioned order of the day.

Dr. Paul’s detailed and outspoken defiance of our political elite’s interventionist gospel, however, has begun to expand what Alexis de Tocqueville called the remarkably closed circle of acceptable speech in America. Dr. Paul’s success is evident in that non-interventionists can now speak publicly and be smeared as appeasers, America-haters, and anti-Semites no more than 80-percent of the time. This, believe me, is a marked improvement as compared to several years ago. And in an April, 2008, talk I gave about my book Marching Towards Hell to San Francisco’s World Affairs Council and Chicago’s Global Affairs Council, I tried in the following brief digression to make a small payment on the large debt all non-interventionists owe Dr. Paul. “And, if I may be frank,” I said to the hospitable San Franciscans and Chicagoans,

“Americans today face no bigger threat to their national security than Senators McCain, Obama, and Clinton who in May 2007, along with those presidential candidates now withdrawn, condemned and tried to silence Texas Congressman Ron Paul for speaking the truth. When Dr. Paul said that the Islamists attacked us on 9/11 because we had been intervening in their world for more than fifty years, he spoke the non-partisan truth on behalf of all of us.”

And, yet, Dr. Paul was dismissed as absurd by most of his fellow candidates, and faced demands that he recant and apologize. On that occasion, free speech was acceptable only if it meshed with our political class’s all-party line, which is summed up in the phrase: “The terrorists hate us for who we are, not for what we do.” Today, this is the quite dishonest operating assumption of Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama.

The most important impact of this sorry episode, however, is that Dr. Paul’s fellow candidates and the unctuous media deliberately halted the first post-9/11 foreign policy discussion among senior U.S. politicians that would have worried Osama bin Laden and his allies. When Dr. Paul told Americans the truth and was shunted aside by other candidates and the media, bin Laden and his ilk breathed a heavy sigh of relief. For the time being, bin Laden’s only indispensable ally — the status quo in U.S. foreign policy — was safe.

To conclude, I can only urge Americans to get Dr. Paul’s The Revolution; read and think about it; and then share and talk about it with your family and friends. But be prepared to feel a new burden of responsibility in your life because Dr. Paul makes it clear that America’s future is in its citizens’ hands. Again at the risk of angering this site’s readers, Dr. Paul’s book will tell you exactly what Mr. Lincoln told Americans 170 years ago: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Dr. Paul recognizes this reality and closes his book with the simple sentence: “Let the Revolution begin.” [p. 167]

And so let it, but let us first underscore the importance of Dr. Paul’s exhortation by remembering that it must begin from our recognition of duty. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” a certain Mr. T. Jefferson of Virginia wrote in the summer of 1776, “evinces a design to reduce them [Americans] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Perhaps Dr. Paul should have written: “Do your duty Americans, let the revolution begin.”

Douglas J. Feith’s new book War and Decision. Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism is an old-fashioned morality tale written by a man with little discernible moral sense or any real concern for the truth. In a nutshell, Feith’s story resembles a 1930s cowboy movie. In the white hats are Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and such of their retainers as Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Victor Davis Hanson, and R. James Woolsey. Here, according to Feith, is a team that exists only to support the president by considering all issues from every angle [p. 334] and which refuses to gain political advantage by leaking to the media. [pp.250-252] In the black hats are all those who are blind to the pure motives and sage brilliance of what Feith calls “Rumsfeld’s team.” The hats of the State Department and the CIA in this movie are particularly black because officials from both undermined the president and betrayed their country by disagreeing with Rumsfeld’s team.

Feith’s horse-opera-like script will be familiar to all who read this book, and it should have had a happy ending except for the fact that Feith, like all neoconservatives, lives in a parallel universe where he defines reality and only his ideas are valid, pure, and good for America. As a result, and despite 528 pages of text, Feith unwittingly explains how he and Rumsfeld’s team brought America unmitigated disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also shows how delusional the Bush administration is in its day-to-day modus operandi; to paraphrase a Celtic warrior’s words about the Romans, the Bush administration creates catastrophes for America and calls them successes.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Feith’s Hitlerian big lie about the total success the Bush administration achieved by putting Hamid Karzai in power in Afghanistan [pp. 135, 143, 145, 152, 253, 372, 458]. It is obvious to all with an eye to see that Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice knew nothing about Afghan history or its ethnic and tribal structure; ignored the lessons of the harrowing military disasters experienced in Afghanistan by Alexander, the British, and the Soviets; picked Karzai as leader, a man who represented no one but himself; sent an amateurishly small military force to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban; and naively believed that winning the battle of the Afghan cities equaled winning the Afghan war. The current situation in Afghanistan makes it clear that a few more of what Feith described as total successes will defeat the United States.

Feith is quick to explain that the invasion of Iraq really had nothing to do with any of the issues the Bush administration hawked as the basis for war. Saddam’s supposed WMD arsenal was not the cause and it was given too much weight by Secretary of State Powell [p. 354]. Also not reasons for war were Saddam’s breaking of UN sanctions [p. 181] or the Bush administration’s goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq and spreading it across the Arab world. [pp. 234-235] (NB: Feith takes President Bush to task for talking too much about democracy building. [p. 392]) And, Feith reports, Saddam’s purported connections with al-Qaeda were never highlighted in the administration’s discussions and were a minor concern. [pp. 48, 215, 324]

No, Feith says, the central reason America invaded Iraq was because of the “legitimate” fear that somehow, someday, sometime Saddam Hussein just might give a WMD to an unidentified terrorist group that might use it inside the United States. [p. 491-92] Feith gives not the first shred of evidence as to why the administration believed this to be a possibility; he speaks only of the “intense concern that a hostile state, working with a terrorist group, could precipitate a catastrophic attack on us.” [p. xi] Feith’s words smack of nothing so much as a cynical after-the-fact justification for the administration’s deliberate misleading of American on the reasons for war.

But whenever this particular casus belli was dreamed-up, it can be quickly and absolutely dismissed. If the Bush administration was the least bit interested in making sure there would not be a nuclear detonation inside the United States, it would have bent every effort to complete the securing of the Former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal — a program now underway since 1991 — as well as to lock up the substantial amount of fissile material that continues to be less than fully secured at research and power reactors around the world. The Bush administration, however, followed the example of Mr. Clinton’s and cut personnel and funding for the effort. There also is no indication in Feith’s book that the Pentagon made sure that Iraq’s numerous WMD scientists were, first, accounted for, and, second, later kept check on, although Feith says “the existence of WMD programs” — and implicitly the scientists who ran them — “was far more important [in the decision for war] than the question of [WMD] stockpiles.” [p. 225] If the Iraqi WMD scientists have been allowed to wander from the country and find work with other regimes or groups since Iraq fell, Saddam’s biggest contribution to WMD proliferation was made courtesy of the Rumsfeld team.

After thus admirably explaining that there was only a theory-based, not a reality-based justification for the Iraq war, Feith then deploys the neoconservatives’ tried-and-true tactic of analysis by assertion, a method of argument that presents glib lies in the place of facts. Here is just a sampling.

• “The dead of the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and on Flight 93 had been murdered simply as symbolic U.S. targets.” [p.4] Nonsense. The 9/11 attacks followed al-Qaeda’s 1996 declaration of war against the United States for what it perceived as attacks by U.S. foreign policy on Islam. There was nothing “symbolic” about the attacks; they were an act of war. They occurred because the Clinton and Bush administrations consciously chose not to adequately defend America.
• “If the proper priority of U.S. action was to prevent the next attack, then the enemy was not just the particular group responsible for the 9/11 hijackings. It was the wider network of terrorists and their backers that might organize additional, large-scale strikes against the United States — no doubt inspired and energized by the ‘success of 9/11.’” [p.6] In other words, how do we neoconservatives twist a specific act of war against the United States by a specific group so that we can address Israel’s security agenda — Iraq, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria etc. — even though that means we will not devote all U.S. resources to annihilating al-Qaeda, and American lives and treasure will be wasted fighting other peoples’ wars? The answer was of course to lie about Iraq’s culpability for 9/11 and the threat it posed to the United States, attack a main enemy of Israel, and leave the al-Qaeda threat to America largely intact.
• “Wolfowitz warned against focusing narrowly on al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. The next 9/11, after all, could come from other organizations and places in the global terrorist map.” [p.49] Imagine this argument in a different context: In a cabinet meeting just hours after Pearl Harbor, the Undersecretary of War warned President Roosevelt against Washington too narrowly focusing on Imperial Japan when responding to the events of 7 December 1941. He urged that considerable resources be diverted from war against Japan to make sure no strikes against America came from Brazil, Siam, or another unexpected quarter, perhaps Paraguay.
• “In a little more than three weeks after 9/11, the Defense Department had helped the President set a course for a war that was ambitious in scope and unprecedented in its goals. As an element of this, the department had produced from scratch a war plan for Afghanistan.” [p.87] Because al-Qaeda knew when the 9/11 attacks were going to occur and we did not, the “little more than three weeks after 9/11” Feith speaks of allowed al-Qaeda and the Taliban to evacuate their most important cadre, materiel, and files from Afghanistan. Feith also makes clear that Rumsfeld did not have a clue about the elusive and quick-moving enemy America faced: “Rumsfeld questioned the assumption that the United States had to respond to 9/11 with immediate military strikes … [and even] raised the idea of deferring military strikes in Afghanistan.” [pp. 66, 82-83] The plain fact is that the Department of Defense — five-plus years after al-Qaeda declared war — was caught without any plans to defend America against al-Qaeda, or any plans to reach out and squash the group before it could disperse. Feith’s attempt to divert Americans from this reality also is an effort to deny that those fellows in the blackest black hats — the CIA field officers — had hit the ground in Afghanistan long before any U.S. military units; had lined up the Afghan allies and military facilities that helped win the battle of the Afghan cities; and had the coffee brewing when, at long last, the Pentagon put in place enough search-and-rescue capability to commit U.S. troops.
• “When Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, or I used the phrase ‘end the occupation,’ [L. Paul] Bremer would reply that many Iraqis would still say they were under occupation so long as large numbers of U.S. troops were in their country. He had a point, but we thought it mattered whether the Iraqi government was run by Americans or Iraqis. There was a difference between occupation as an accusation and occupation as a legal fact.” [p.463] Apparently Feith has never experienced foreign military occupation; perhaps he should spend a year living in the West Bank. The irrelevant, academic hair-splitting Feith does in the paragraph above is emblematic of the vast failure of common sense that was endemic in Rumsfeld’s team and the White House. Not once in his book does Feith — or any other members of Neocon, Inc., — make an effort to assess the overwhelmingly negative impact the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has had on the Muslim world’s perception of Washington’s intentions toward Islam. Indeed, there is no indication in the book that anyone in the Bush administration — save for those traitorous black hats at State and CIA — even for a moment considered that the invasion of Iraq would have an impact beyond Iraq. Feith claims that some worst case scenarios were sketched out in memos, but nowhere is there any evidence to suggest that he or any other U.S. leader made an attempt to explain why the United States would be immune to the disasters that befell Britain in Iraq and the USSR, Britain, and Alexander the Great in Afghanistan. In the end, it was not immune in either place, and that lack of immunity was entirely predictable. Feith now holds a professorship at Georgetown University; given the mediocre brainpower exposed during his stint in government and in writing this book, it is a good thing he teaches because he probably could not gain admission there as a student.
• “At the time [13 September 2001] it was a common assumption among government officials that a global war on terrorism would, at some point, involve some kind of showdown with Iraq — a known sponsor of terrorists….” [p.48] If it was a common assumption, it was a stupid one. Saddam Hussein was the single most important ally of the United States against al-Qaeda and its allies, and he was the best kind of ally because he did what America needed done without our having to coax, pay, or coerce him to do so. As long as Saddam was in power, the jihadis were stuck in place in South Asia and they were not coming west to permanent bases because the Iraqi intelligence and military services lethally greeted them on arrival. Saddam surely supported Palestinian terrorists, but so what; they attacked Israel not the United States. For America, Saddam was the cork in the neck of the bottle that kept the Sunni Islamists penned-up. Feith and his neocon sidekicks pull the cork from the bottle and now the jihadis have moved 2,500km west to more seriously threaten the Arab Peninsula, the Levant, Europe and Israel. In this regard, there seems to be a newly emerging iron law of history; to wit; everything the Neocons do in the name of helping Israel — such as hyping the threat from state sponsors of terrorism, invading Iraq, and urging war with Iran — digs Israel’s grave a bit faster and a bit deeper. There is more than a bit of poetic justice in that.

Much more could be said about Feith’s book: it champions opposing views of the same issue if it serves this neocon apologia, particularly on the issue of insisting on a nation’s right to self-determination as long as an Islamic government is not elected [p. 287-88]; it is, with great thoroughness and consistency, internally contradictory on many issues, especially on the issue of overseas democracy building and the Saddam-al-Qaeda non-connection [pp. 410, 259-67]; and it is wholly and willfully ignorant of the fact that U.S. foreign policy is motivating the growing Islamist foe against whom America is now fighting in a broadening war. [p. 505]

Throughout Decision and War, Feith states in varying formulations that “no dereliction of statesmanship is as unpardonable as a failure to protect the nation’s security.” [p. 524] He is absolutely correct in this, but he is totally blind to the fact that through his efforts and those of Rumsfeld’s team and the Bush administration, U.S. national security is much weaker in 2008 than it was on 9/11. And so is Israel’s.

Published: Antiwar.com