SMEARING THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
Neoconservative Thought Police on the prowl
antiwar.com
As if to confirm what some opponents of this war have been saying – but not too loudly – about this being a war for Israel, the Bush administration is now "weighing an Israeli proposal for a joint operation in Iraq's western desert to disarm Iraqi missiles before they could be launched against Israel."
That this war has always been about Israel is a matter of simple geography. For all the President's palavering about the "threat to Americans" posed by Iraq, those "weapons of mass destruction" Saddam supposedly has couldn't even reach Europe, let alone the U.S. But Tel Aviv is well within range. Indeed, the prospect of Iraqi missiles raining down on Israel has been one of the chief deterrents against a move by Israel's far-right Likud government to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Arabs – a plan that is increasingly popular among Israelis – and/or move the IDF back into Lebanon. The U.S. occupation of Iraq will eliminate that deterrent – and set up Israel to deal with Hizbollah the Syria in the regional conflagration to follow.
The oddly showy attempts by U.S. government officials to downplay the extent of U.S.-Israeli collaboration have never been too convincing – if they were, you see, the Israeli lobby in the U.S. would be outraged, and that would be the end of that. But who's kidding whom? The coming war in the Middle East will be a joint operation between Washington and Tel Aviv in every sense, not only militarily but also on the political and diplomatic fronts. In the blockbuster second issue of The American Conservative, Paul W. Schroeder, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, disdained the Oedipal explanation for the origins of the President's war plans, writing:
"Much more plausible is the suggestion that this plan is being promoted in the interests of Israel. Certainly it is being pushed very hard by a number of influential supporters of Israel of the hawkish neoconservative stripe in and outside the administration (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and others) and one could easily make the case that a successful preventive war on Iraq would promote particular Israeli security interests more than general American ones."
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The "obsession," unfortunately, is all on the other side. For some reason, a cadre of American pundits, from George Will to Sullivan to Bill Bennett, etc. ad nauseam, is obsessed with promoting Israel's national interests above our own. At least, I guess Sullivan is an American. Though this ex-Brit (or dual citizen?) smearing some of his fellow Americans as proto-Nazis in a British newspaper seems, at best, in poor taste, and at worst a subtle appeal to European anti-Americanism, i.e. you know how those ignorant Yanks are, they hate everyone – Jews, fags, you-name-it.
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