Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: interessante l'opinione di Pat Buchanan

No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington Post
depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the hard-line
neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on
putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative
moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they
are losing their grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of hysteria.
In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is no middle way for Americans:
It is victory or holocaust.” “What is new since 9/11 is the chilling
realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained” now
menaces “our survival as a nation.”
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died
in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent
peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
“[A] radical strain within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow
our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic
societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But
what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to “overthrow our
civilization” and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this
same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself
anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as
one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our
Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird
for more battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take
seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty
bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or
container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at
Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was
one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for
200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did
not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of
World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs.
Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of
devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and
the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the
weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s
side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and
Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is
a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of
Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected
them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached
Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does
not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab
nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the
size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone
the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic.
If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of
death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is
dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his
estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, “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.”
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, “[T]he only thing we have
to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which
paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede
America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq,
though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to
al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans
to attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors
insist she was.
Calling their book a “manual for victory,” they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against
this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans
are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are
fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal
scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.
But no nation can “end evil.” Evil has existed since Cain rose up against
his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every
human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and
Perle propose to “end” it? Nor can any nation “win the war on terror.”
Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political
ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was
used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in
Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA,
Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black
September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa
Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the
ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that
attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954,
to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela.
Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin,
Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo
Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by
assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge
named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can
“end” it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and
“immortality,” will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: “We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they
kill our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror
as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not” [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending
everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that
might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to
Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the
Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used
torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations
that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli
Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a
short list of priority targets: “The war on terror is not over, it has
barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder.”
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And
if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s
duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn,
“present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly
against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well:
Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.”
“Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?” the authors demand.
They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get
Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end
support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a “Western
orientation”—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus?
Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to
guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak
offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir
Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
“We don’t have much time,” say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing
that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103,
giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in
to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are
not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first
Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of
Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are
directed to provide us “with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror,”
or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how
would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own
hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at
the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse
than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform
government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was
behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did
Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our
responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack
occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and
comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe
Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a “state
sponsor of terror” 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet
missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is
developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the
cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and
propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. “The regime must go,” say our authors,
because Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize
control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our
power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our
interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss
dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels
when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to “toss
dictators aside”? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam
aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the
capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the
ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an
acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead,
demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all
missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to
safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive
strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air
blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves.
“We have no doubt how such a war would end,” say the authors. They also
had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future
of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean
peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North
Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept
that outcome.
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear
strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist
North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our
AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not
shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders
on the desperate for action this day: “We can feel the will to win ebbing
in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency
and denial.”
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and
rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq
could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be
experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and
friends.
They promised him a “cakewalk,” that we would be hailed as “liberators,”
that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East,
that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord
Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, “What all the wise men promised has not
happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.”
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness
to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam
resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of
Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before
U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003.
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de
Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the “INC terrified the Saudis
and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the
Saudis.” The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a
brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on
charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since
Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle
asserted that Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s
simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”
Naming Khidir Hamza, “one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons
program for Saddam,” as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of
400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. “Some of them look
like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like
warehouses. You’ll never find them.” Only “preemptive action” can save us,
said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed
Saddam was imminent:
With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal.
We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to
enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know
he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and
components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not
know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had
access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza
deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his
links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s “collaboration with terrorism is well
documented,” wrote Perle, “Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a
senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11
ringleader, is convincing.”
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the
war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it
did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the
venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired
generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered
concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the
softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not.”
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment
may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well
as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve
us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking
for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. “No war in ‘04” is
said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about
“unipolar” moments and “American empire” aside, there are limits to
American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000
are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National
Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his
“axis-of-evil” rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, “We
have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the
imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the
antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, “One squeezes
the orange and throws away the rind.”
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars,
seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in
unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he
would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade
Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on
the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the
Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it
appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya,
Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world
and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy
these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the
draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism
here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the
wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must
resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and
our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum
prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of
the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for
Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria,
Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to
isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power
including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not
being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the
mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have
interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to
help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help
us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another
enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of
enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked
us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies.
They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls “the Firemen’s
War” into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit
9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their
desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy
as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and
isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia
and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance
his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us
fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it
imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As
did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite
strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of
operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should
adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and
Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our
humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of
our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an
Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to
Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their
war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat
eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by
Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi
monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not
America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East
Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the
neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for
Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the
neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum
and Perle concede, this is “our generation’s great cause.”
“Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men
who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and
retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a
citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was
cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David
invented the “axis-of-evil” phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum
ratted out his old colleagues in a “hot” book and got himself hired by
National Review, where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen
“Unpatriotic Conservatives” who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP,
hate America, and “wish to see the United States defeated in the War on
Terror.”
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must,
in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four
regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a
serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has
betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle
co-authored “A Clean Break,” a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu
to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The
road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli
Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus
secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported
by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a
letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate
all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would
launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of
Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including
Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put
up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate
themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French
cannon once bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of
kings. The toxic charge of “Anti-Semite!” has become the last argument of
the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People
are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk
away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He
opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched
and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni
related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with
which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the
neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc
there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had
had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons
came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow,
the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review’s response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a
separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of
having “blamed the Jews,” he insisted that the term neocon, in common
usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was
the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former
head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He
instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites:
‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier
who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but
only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their
tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of
the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word “neocon,” he writes, the “con”
stands for conservative and the “neo” stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so
few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a
book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: “This
is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth.”
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is
it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every
grand strategy neocons advance, from “American empire” to “benevolent
global hegemony” to “a Pax Americana” to “world democratic revolution”
have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of
American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the
Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp
David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a
Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon
stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a
State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an
anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the
security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to
guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But
because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have
preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny
Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national
interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no
longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli
strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of
Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has
been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right
only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined
by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our
forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of
foreign wars, avoid “permanent alliances,” beware of “passionate
attachments” to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory
was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic
into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French
alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be
central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies
of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and
Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of
self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of
us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of
a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute
solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the
poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for
Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to
rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. “The
Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism,” Frum and Perle
protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey
says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the
Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write
this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an
“ideological” nation, “like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.” We and Israel
are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to
it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of
France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to
defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated
geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
But this is nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France
declared war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not “come to the
defense of France and Britain.” He delivered a fireside chat that night
promising the nation America would stay out. There will be “no blackout of
peace” here, FDR promised us.When France fell in May-June of 1940,
pleading for planes, FDR sent words of encouragement. Not until 18 months
after the fall of France did we declare war on Hitler and not until after
Hitler declared war on us. Thus, we did not go to war to defend democracy
in Britain or France. We went to war to smash the Japanese Empire that
attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Kristol is parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek,
Salazar, Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee
and the Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil,
Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved
far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt,
and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold,
we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, “A state, it is the coldest of all
cold monsters.”
India is democratic and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India’s wars
with Pakistan, we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were
allies, and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and
Pakistan autocratic made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has America really given her $100 billion and taken her
side in every Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony Judt. When this British historian proposed—given the
impossibility of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank—that Israel
annex the West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians
equal rights, neocons went berserk.
Frum called Judt’s idea “genocidal liberalism” that would leave Jews
exposed to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it “unthinkable” and “the
definition of intellectual corruption.” “[H]aughty and ugly,” said the New
Republic, which hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just solution to the South African problem was to abolish
bantustans and create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not even
a debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the
antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they
are the “neo-Jacobins” of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The
ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a
voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new
kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired
to modesty and self-restraint.
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’
fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing
their plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to
deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they
came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how they had
become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war
drums, one of them bellowed, “We are all neoconservatives now!”
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the
prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they
are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country
ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who
will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as
McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one they’ve got right. 
March 1, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative
-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it

 B"H _  PUBBLICA spero raccomand azzzione ... a Comitatone Ri 2016 - 2097 grasssie
 HALTER nativ Sindaco Milan NO : o Beppe Parisi , o MARCO CAPPATO nonno di Emma Bonino ! 
 JAL MOLCA FrancoLevi @ Tiscali.it | B"H _ REGENI sono stati i vizj gretti GIOVANI TURCHI di Erdoganav |-
 PICCO PACCO SOLA soglia del PETROLIO + ne trovi - pesa . Cara Ciurma , spero presto potremo diagolare .  | Almeno qualche giorno Maritsì e io saremo in Israel e in Tunicilia . Rinnovo iscrizione pure a Ecoradikal @ GMAIL.com ; info @ Ecoradicali.it ; Ecoradicali.ARE @ GMail.Com .
 Come noi MOLCHITI , tanti pensano esattamente come VOI , eppertanto X referendum 3VELLE raccomand votammo No ! Poi potremo insieme partecipare a TRIVOLUZIONE .
 Le TRI velle si combattono con la TRI volu ZION . Salumi e caci . JAL MOLCA .
 " Gli Ebrei sono l' eterno futuro di tutti " ( Massimo Cacciari )
 E' ora : TUTTI leggano la Meghillàh Estèr e conoscano le vicende di Purìm .
 PF inserite ODG e diffondete X dibottito grz ! Michelle va comprendendo tante cose .
 Speriamo i Cittadini USA eleggano LA OBAMA . w MICHELLE 4 PRESIDENT ! 
 Maduro Chavez mandano ruboli copecoli oboli spontanei dei Venezuelani ai poveretti
 della Città , dell' Urbe e dell' Orbe , specie ai Podemos dei Pirenei , delle Ande ,  di Panama  ;
 e ai mendicanti di Canton e di HSBC e di tutti i Cantoni , agli affamati cui gli Svizzeri
 rosicano i formaggi e lasciano soltanto i buchi . BERNA CFR consolida l' ASSE :
 Teheran Venezuela Mosca Pyongyang Damasco SUDAN Pavia BAIRES Ankara MEXICO  .
 Egitto ospita già 5 milioni di " MIGRANTI " . Era pronto a accoglierne altri . La U EURO stava per dare al Cairo
 EURO miliardi per ajutare ciò . i GIOVANI TURCHI , agenti di ERDOGANAV in Egitto , torturarono a morte Giulio REGENI ,
 sganciando ATOMICHE sui buoni rapporti fra Egitto e Italia e ACCIDENTE in genere .  Così , guarda caso , i miliardi vanno
 a Erdoganav . Meglio accogliere Turchia in U EURO . Così Erdoganav il Panamense
 e i suoi tirapiedi non potranno più rispondere " cessate ingerenze in casa nostra , fatevi i casvoli vostri " . 
  Petrolio cala prezzo e prepotenza se ne trovi appo Arezzo e Potenza ! Più ce n' è , meglio : petrolio cala prezzo
 e prepotenza . Emiri sceicchi fachiri e crumiri invitarono a votar SI' , coi soliti utili idionoti tirapiedi capaci soltanto
 di fare bolsi giuochi di parole sui cognomi di avversarj più INTER ligenti . A proposito : puzzano mani e piedi di EMIRI Califfi & Co .
 Amano poco acqua e sapone . Dessi fossili potranno usare le loro fonti fossili per FARSI pediluvio e af FINA .
 Petrolio cala prezzo sopra tutto perchè Refluopetrolio & ECAT Gatto Einstein Fusione Fredda F5
 realizzati da HAR Husserl Andrea Rossi filano e bene . Nel Mondo todo tondo e non soltanto in USA veicoli natanti velivoli etc filano
 a tutta birra sanza bisogno di fossili grazie a Fusione Fredda . Prendiamocelo noi qui vicino il greggio che ci basta .
 Ormai è soltanto un triste ricordo la penuria . Evviva OIL GLUT ! evviva TRI volu ZION .
 Ormai petrolio è prezioso soltanto per curare emorroidi sotto code e sopra i cranj .
 Vedi anche : 
http://LeviMOLCA.WordPress.Com
 ... PRO varo Libera ZIONNE 2016 Pasqua Buona TUNICILIA TRI Voluzione TRI boom 
| Pavia Veltri P2 NDRINA mala Monsigni IOR Marcius Hilarion Lefebvre Capucci MEZZANA TERRA | Grati a chi firma la petizione : |
 
 
https://www.change.org/p/valentinadotstellaatassociazionelucacoscionidotit-tri-voluzione-tri-boom-w-nunismo-artsenu-democrazia-glocal?recruiter=33614124&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive
 
 
 | . . . Capovolgi ONU Buon Pèsach TUNICILIA Erice BRECCIA Scienza Liberazione Majorana Sbarco Bergamo Breccia
w NUNISMO TRI volu ZION TRI boom Democrazia GLOCAL | TESTA PUZZA DAL PESCE | ...