posted on Feb, 19 2003 @ 10:50 AM
"The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying the most powerful
Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all
campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected--if he was elected--US President. And they weren't doing so for the
benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (
www.israeleconomy.org... )
called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and produced by a group
headed by--yes, Richard Perle. The destruction of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons and allow it to defeat the
Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement Sharon has in store.
Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us--a war for Israel is not going to have our boys lining up at the recruiting offices--Jewish
American leaders talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish American groups who so bravely oppose
this madness have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of oil but of water, too; why should
canals not link the Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic must be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen,
of Johns Hopkins University, tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations'
objections to the war might--yet again--be ascribed to "anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a
malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said, is opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave
Israel with even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks Israel and Sharon then joins the US battle against the Arabs.
The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and
the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the continent which refuses, ever again,
to slaughter the innocent. It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old" America; not the "new" America of freedom, the America of F D
Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise the old America that killed its native Indians and embarked on imperial adventures. It is "old" America we
are being asked to fight for--linked to a new form of colonialism--an America that first threatens the United Nations with irrelevancy and then does
the same to Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor for Nato. But it may well be the last chance for America to be taken seriously by her
friends as well as her enemies."
www.counterpunch.com...