“You’re sure? You understand the
consequences?
You know you’re going to be owning this place?”
Colin L. Powell to George Bush,
shortly before the invasion of Iraq
At his tightly controlled press conference of April 14, 2004 (at
which only pre-selected questions were answered), George Bush
offered this explanation for our catastrophic misadventure in Iraq:
“And, of course, I want to know why we haven't found a weapon yet.
But I still know Saddam Hussein was a threat, and the world is
better off without Saddam Hussein.”
He wants to know why we haven’t found “a weapon” yet, folks, but he
just knows Saddam was a threat to the United States. To read the
child-like locutions of George W. Bush in defense of his
preposterous war is to fear for the very future of our homeland. As
Bush explained his latest intuition of why he started the war on
Iraq: “My job as the President”—the President, he says, as if he
were the head of a little neighborhood boy’s club—“is to lead this
nation into making the world a better place. And that's exactly what
we're doing.… We're going to do the job. And a free Iraq is going to
be a major blow for (sic) terrorism. It will change the world.” A
major blow for terrorism is surely what Bush has accomplished, as
the Sunnis and the Shiites put aside thousand-year-old enmities to
unite against the American occupation.
Tragically, the American body count mounts as history’s most
powerful military machine pounds away at what is left of Iraqi
society, at the command of a man who cannot muster the eloquence and
intellectual focus of a middling high school student defending a
policy position in civics class: We must make the world a better
place. We must “free” Iraq. We must do the job. We must change the
world. This jumble of vague notions is what now animates our
none-too-swift Commander in Chief, long after his originally
proffered justifications for the war were exposed as fraudulent.
Bush Sells Out the Palestinians
What The New York Times rightly called Bush’s “rambling and
unfocused” performance at his one and only press conference of 2004
reminds us that, after all, Bush is little more than a figurehead
captain of the ship of state, who failed a pop quiz on the names of
four world leaders before he took office. It is the men who do
Bush’s thinking for him who have their hands on the ship’s wheel.
Just whose hands are on the wheel was revealed the day before the
April 14th press conference, when Bush, with Ariel Sharon standing
by his side at the White House, suddenly changed United States
policy and sold out the people of Palestine. Bush’s bombshell
diplomatic letter to Sharon renounced the long-recognized right of
Palestinian Arabs to return to the territory from which 750,000 of
them were expelled by the Israeli army in 1948, following the
illegal creation of a “Jewish state” by UN fiat:
The United States is strongly
committed to Israel's security and well-being as a Jewish state.
It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic
framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as
part of any final status agreement will need to be found through
the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of
Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.
As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and
recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between
the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In
light of new realities on the ground, including already existing
major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that
the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete
return to the armistice lines of 1949…
A beaming Sharon gloated that Bush had “handed me a letter that
includes very important statements regarding Israel's security and
its wellbeing as a Jewish state.” As the Globe and Mail put it:
“U.S. President George W. Bush told Palestinian refugees Wednesday
to forget about ever returning to their ancestral homes in what is
now Israel. Indicating a major shift in policy, Mr. Bush rejected
the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians uprooted in the 1940s and
[also] suggested that Palestinians should recognize that some Jewish
settlements on the West Bank are here to stay.”
That is, Bush has not only renounced a Palestinian right of return
to the territory seized in the 1940s, but also ratified further
Israeli seizures of Arab land in the West Bank during the Six Day
War in 1967, and most of the Likudist West Bank “settlement”
expansions since then. (The Israelis now propose to relinquish only
the illegal Gaza strip settlements they no longer deem worth
retaining.) As Bush and Sharon would have it, the “Jewish state”
created ex nihilo by the United Nations now includes about 80% of
the total land area of Palestine—all of it seized by the Israelis in
violation of international law (save for about 5% actually purchased
lawfully by early Zionist immigrants). Thus, Bush has hemmed the
United States into a negotiating position in which any future
Palestinian state in a “two-state” peace agreement could consist of
no more than about 20% of former Arab territory for 100% of the
current, and much larger, Arab population.
For the Israelis, such a deal. For the Arabs, yet another
provocation from the United States. As The Globe and Mail reported,
“moderate Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia insisted that his
people ‘will not accept’ Mr. Bush's position. ‘Bush is the first
U.S. president to give legitimacy to Jewish settlements on
Palestinian land. We reject this, we will not accept it… Nobody in
the world has the right to give up Palestinian rights.” The same
Globe and Mail article reported that Islamic Jihad’s spokesman Kaled
al-Batsh told Reuters that “Bush's denial of the Palestinians' right
to return was a declaration of war against the Palestinian people.
Bush and Sharon will have to shoulder the responsibility for the new
cycle of war.”
So, at the very moment Bush’s armies are decimating Arab homesteads
in Iraq in an effort to break the back of Shiite resistance, Bush
commits the United States to the proposition that there must be a
“Jewish state” in Israel from which forcibly dispossessed Arab
families would forever be excluded. As Bush uses military force to
prevent the emergence of a Shiite state in a country whose
population is 65% Shiite, he defends and protects a “Jewish state”
in territory illegally seized from its Arab owners by a Jewish
minority. Pluralism, you see, is just for the goys.
And this is how George Bush proposes to fight “the war on
terrorism.” Or rather, it is how the men who hand Bush pieces of
paper to read into the microphone propose to fight it. And who are
these men? They are the same pro-Israeli brain trust that has been
plotting the invasion of Iraq since at least 1998.
The Iraq War: A Zionist Project
In an article for The American Conservative in October 2001, Paul W.
Schroeder noted the possibility that “the unacknowledged real reason
and motive” behind the coming Iraq war was “security for Israel.” If
America were to invade Iraq for Israel’s benefit, wrote Schroeder,
“It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It
is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting
smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first
instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do
the fighting as the proxy of a small client state.” But that is
exactly what is happening in Iraq at this very moment.
As we know, until he made the mistake of invading Kuwait (after
receiving a diplomatic nihil obstat from the administration of Bush
I), Saddam Hussein was our man in the Middle East. During the Reagan
administration it was none other than special envoy Donald Rumsfeld
who represented the United States in the process of restoring
relations with Iraq in 1983. As Stephen J. Siegnoski notes in his
important article “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel,” from
1983-88 “Washington eased up on its own technology export
restrictions to Iraq, which allowed the Iraqis to import
supercomputers, machine tools, poisonous chemicals, and even strains
of anthrax and bubonic plague. In short, the United States helped
arm Iraq with the very weaponry of horror that administration
officials are now trumpeting as justification for forcibly removing
Saddam from power.” During the Iran-Iraq war, Washington had nothing
to say about Saddam “gassing his own people”—that is, Kurdistan
insurgents, along with the Iranians Washington virtually
commissioned Saddam to kill by proxy.
By early 1998, however, American Jewish neo-cons were already
demanding war on Iraq as a first step in a “war on terrorism” that
would embrace Iran, Syria, Lebanon and even Saudi Arabia. That
policy goal happens to coincide perfectly with the old Zionist dream
of expelling the Arabs from all of Palestine with a resulting
pax Israelica—a dream that has
had a revival with the ascendancy of Ariel Sharon and the Likud
Party. As Siegnoski observes:
It was during the 1980s, with the
coming to power of the rightwing Likud government, that the idea
of expulsion publicly resurfaced. And this time it was directly
tied to a larger war, with destabilization of the Middle East
seen as a precondition for Palestinian expulsion. Such a
proposal, including Palestinian population removal, was outlined
in an article by Oded Yinon, entitled 'A Strategy for Israel in
the 1980s,' which appeared in the World Zionist Organization's
periodical Kivunim in February 1982. Oded Yinon, had been
attached to the Foreign Ministry and his article undoubtedly
reflected high-level thinking in the Israeli military and
intelligence establishment.
The article called for Israel to bring about the dissolution and
fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings.
Thinking along these lines, Ariel Sharon stated on March 24, 1988
that if the Palestinian uprising continued, Israel would have to
make war on its Arab neighbors. The war, he stated, would provide
'the circumstances' for the removal of the entire Palestinian
population from the West Bank and Gaza and even from inside Israel
proper. On February 19, 1998—three-and-half years before 9/11—the
Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf published an Open
Letter to Bush II proposing a “comprehensive political and military
strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime.” Along with Donald
Rumsfeld, the signers of the Open Letter included the following pro-Likud
neo-cons, all of whom would become high-ranking advisors to the Bush
II administration: Elliott Abrams (National Security Council), Doug
Feith (Defense Department), Paul Wolfowitz (Defense Department),
David Wurmser (State Department), Dov Zakheim (Defense Department),
and Richard Perle (Defense Policy Board). Sniegoski points out that
“Signers of the letter also included such pro-Zionist and
neoconservative luminaries as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Frank
Gaffney (Director, Center for Security Policy), Joshua Muravchik
(American Enterprise Institute), Martin Peretz (Editor-in-Chief, The
New Republic), Leon Wieseltier, (The New Republic), former
congressman Stephen Solarz.”
Sniegoski further references an article by Jason Vest in The Nation
that discusses “the immense power of individuals from two major
neoconservative research organizations, the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy
(CSP), in the current Bush Administration. Vest details the close
links between these organizations, right-wing politicians, arms
merchants, military men, Jewish multi-millionaires/billionaires, and
Republican administrations.”[1]/ That’s the leftist The Nation
magazine, not some “anti-Semitic” publication of the Far Right.
Vest notes that JINSA and CPSU members “have ascended to powerful
government posts, where… they’ve managed to weave a number of
issues—support for national missile defense, opposition to arms
control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid
to Turkey and American unilateralism in general—into a hard line,
with support for the Israeli right at its core…. On no issue is the
JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for
war—not just with Iraq, but ‘total war,’ as Michael Ledeen, one of
the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For
this crew, ‘regime change’ by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran,
Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent
imperative.’”
Sniegoski’s deductions from this evidence are perfectly obvious:
“First, the initiation of a Middle East war to solve Israeli
security problems has been a long-standing idea among Israeli
rightist Likudniks.
Next, Likudnik-oriented neoconservatives have argued for American
involvement in such a war prior to the September 11, 2001
atrocities. After September 11, neoconservatives have taken the lead
in advocating such a war, and they hold influential positions in the
Bush administration regarding foreign policy and national security
affairs.”
In short, the war on Iraq, while manifestly pointless and
disastrously counterproductive from an American perspective, is a
rational undertaking from the Zionist perspective—provided, of
course, that the entire plan for destabilization of the Middle East
is carried out by the United States as Israel’s proxy. Otherwise,
ironically enough, Israel too will only suffer from the half-measure
of the American invasion of Iraq. This is not to suggest that an
American occupation and political remodeling of Iraq, Iran, Syria,
Lebanon and Saudi Arabia is even remotely achievable. Bush’s vision
of a “democratic” Middle East is but a childish fantasy, as the
out-of-control situation in Iraq alone should demonstrate to all but
the most delusional proponents of “the war on terrorism."
Listen
to the Rabbis Yet what is Zionism itself but a childish fantasy—a
fantasy born of the rebellion of those children Our Lord wished to
put under His wing, but they wouldst not. The fantasy that the Jews
can establish an earthly kingdom on a piece of land taken by force
from their fellow men is seen as a rebellion against divine
authority even by Orthodox Jews in their reading of the Old
Testament. This is why some of the strongest opposition to Zionism,
from the nineteenth century to the present day, has come from
Orthodox rabbinic leadership.
Consider, for example, an address delivered by Rabbi Yisroel Dovid
Weiss at the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR),
publishers of the Middle East Affairs Journal, on March 14, 2002.2
Rabbi Weiss gave a theological critique of the Zionist agenda that
is astonishingly consistent with the traditional Catholic view of
the Jewish people and the Book of the Apocalypse, even if it fails
to perceive that the exile of the Jews has resulted specifically
from their rejection of their own Messiah. The Rabbi’s remarkable
observations (which reflect a substantial segment of Orthodox Jewish
opinion) deserve to be quoted at length:
Through many of the Prophetic books in the Old Testament the Jewish
people were warned that a serious rebellion against the Will of G-d
would result in the most severe of punishments. Unchecked it could
lead to the ruin of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and the exile of
the entirety of the Jewish nation.
And, it is here, my friends, in those Old Testament prophesies, that
the quarrel between Judaism and Zionism begins.
Eventually the horrors foretold by the Prophets came to pass. Jewry
was exiled from the Land. The first exile, also known as the
Babylonian captivity, lasted only 70 years. By a series of
miraculous events the people were returned to the land. This second
entry into the land led to the rebuilding of the Temple. The Second
Temple stood from about 2500 years ago until about 1900 years ago,
then it too was destroyed. This time the cause was once again the
backsliding of the people who were, as always, held to a very
demanding Divine standard….
The exile would not be forever. There would be years of dispersion,
many of them endured under persecution. Yet, there was the promise
that the people would yet return to the Land. But this return was
not to be under human control. It would be heralded by the advent of
Elijah the Prophet and accompanied with many miracles. And, this
time, the redemption would not just be for the Jewish people but
rather for all men….
…Thus, at the burning of the Second Temple, the Jewish people were
sent into an exile which extends till today. For two thousand years
Jews have prayed for the end of their exile and the accompanying
redemption of the entire world….
To suggest that one could use political or military means to escape
the Creator’s decree was seen as heresy, as a denial of the Divine
stewardship over sin and forgiveness…. [N]o Jew anywhere
suggested—and this among a people that studied its sacred texts
constantly and wrote about them voluminously—that exile could be
ended by human means.
It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century, among Jews
far estranged from their faith, that the notion began to be put
forth that exile was the result of Jewish weakness. Theodore Herzl
and a handful of others, all ignorant or non-observant of Torah,
began to set the process in motion that by the end of the next
century would have produced untold suffering for Jews and
Palestinians. Rabbi Weiss went on to observe that: “The very concept of Zionism
was a refutation of the traditional Torah belief in exile as
punishment and redemption and as dependant on penitence and Divine
intervention.” The Rabbi then uttered a conclusion that should be
obvious to anyone who calls himself a traditional Catholic:
“Friends, there will be no peace in the Middle East until there is
no state of Israel. The Torah cannot be violated. Our task in exile
cannot be fulfilled by trying to end exile by human agitations. Nor
can our hopes for redemption be realized in the Israeli state.”
The Rabbi’s solution to the crisis in the Middle East is,
accordingly, precisely the one George Bush has just renounced to the
delight of the Zionist Ariel Sharon and his Zionist Likud Party:
The true Torah solution, the key to peace is the immediate return of
Palestine to the Palestinians in its entirety including the Temple
Mount and Jerusalem. This would, of course, include a full right of
return for all Palestinian refugees. That is what elementary justice
demands. This is the path of the Torah and of common sense….
May it be the Creator’s Will that the state of Israel be peacefully
dismantled speedily in our days, that Jew and Palestinian live yet
in peace with each other around the world and in the Holy Land and
that speedily in our days all mankind may merit the advent of Divine
Redemption where G-d’s Kingdom will be accepted. No traditional Catholic has any excuse for rejecting “the Torah
solution” to the Middle East crisis and the threat of Arab
terrorism. Catholics, guided by the light of the Gospel, can hardly
be more inclined than even Orthodox Jews to tolerate the malign
influence of an outlaw “Jewish state” whose very existence is
obviously the chief provocation for Arab terrorism throughout the
world. Can Any Traditionalist
Still Defend This Debacle? And yet one of the most intelligent and committed traditionalists I
know persists in defending war in the Middle East as the answer to
terrorism, even as he acknowledges that it is America’s pro-Zionist
foreign policy that has created our Arab enemies. Since our Israeli
policy cannot be changed, he argues, “the only alternative is to go
after the enemies we create because of our Israeli policy—to protect
our citizens as best as we can.” That is, we must allow the Zionist
tail to wag the American dog, no matter what it costs our nation in
blood and treasure.
With all due respect, it is impossible to see how this could be an
acceptable Catholic position. If even Orthodox Jews recognize that
the very existence of a “Jewish state” offends Almighty God and is
the root cause of Arab terrorism, how can traditional Catholics
continue to support a Middle East war plan that is clearly the doing
of American Zionist Likudniks? Why is it that traditionalists who
unhesitatingly denounce Zionist designs wherever else they appear in
history, simply throw up their hands when confronted with the
Zionist influences on American foreign policy that were the sine qua
non of the insane war in which this nation is now embroiled?
These are the questions that must be answered by the few remaining
traditionalist defenders of George Bush’s monumental folly in the
deserts of Iraq.
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1 The Men From JINSA and CSP, The
Nation, September 2, 2002
2 http://www.nkusa.org/activities/speeches/Boston061503.cfm.
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