March 22, 2006 The War Party in Disarray by Justin Raimondo It isn't looking so good for the War Party. As things fall apart on the ground in Iraq, a similar process of disintegration is occurring on the home front. It seems as if there are almost daily defections from the ranks, and â as the blame game gets underway â our war birds are turning on each other, with Donald "Super-Stud" Rumsfeld, once hailed as the War Party's answer to George Clooney, now in the neocons' crosshairs. As for our commander in chief, his poll numbers are at an all-time low, and he seems to have retreated so deeply into a world of delusion that not even the outbreak of full-scale civil war in Iraq can shock him out of his mental catatonia. Worse yet, as the ostensible rationales for the invasion of Iraq are debunked and fall by the wayside, the War Party's real motivation for bringing about what Gen. William E. Odom has rightly called the biggest strategic disaster in our history has come out in the wash. "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a study by John J. Mearsheimer, the doyen of foreign policy realism, and Stephen M. Walt, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has blasted the scales from our eyes. While not falling into the trap of identifying the efforts of "the Lobby" as the sole reason for the radicalization of U.S. foreign policy in the post-9/11 era, their research clearly shows that this was the decisive factor. I have to say that this conclusion was fairly obvious early on: after all, if all the other rationalizations â WMD, Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda, uranium-pilfering in Niger â were pure bunk, then, by means of a simple process of elimination, we come to the geopolitical explanation as the only logical alternative. If the U.S. is systematically dismantling Arab regimes from Baghdad to Beirut to Tehran â and perhaps beyond â then the primary geostrategic beneficiary leaps out at any objective analyst. As I put it way back in 2003: "The Iraq war, as we are beginning to discover, had nothing to do with 'weapons of mass destruction,' zero to do with al-Qaeda, and zilch to do with implanting 'democracy' in the inhospitable soil of Iraq. The first phase of the second Yom Kippur War is revealing, in action, the strategic doctrine at the heart of U.S. Middle Eastern policy: the installation of Israel as regional hegemon." I am glad to see the Kennedy School is finally catching up to the level of analysis long available here at Antiwar.com: it's a good sign, albeit long overdue. Another good sign is the wellspring of hysteria that has arisen in the wake of the study's publication. Already Alan Dershowitz has smeared the distinguished authors as anti-Semites, and the Usual Suspects have launched a deafening chorus of caterwauling. Among the "arguments" raised by the study's detractors: David Duke has praised it, the Washington office of Fatah is handing out copies, and the Muslim Brotherhood likes it, too. None of which proves anything â except for the thesis, advanced by the study's authors, that the role of the Lobby is to prevent any objective analysis and rational discussion of the very "special relationship" Israel enjoys with key U.S. policymakers. The Mearsheimer-Walt study is an important step in identifying how and why we are bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, but it is only a first step. The second, third, and fourth steps will come as we unravel the complex web of lies that lured us in on a variety of pretexts. What were the sources of the phony "intelligence" that made U.S. policymakers believes â or pretend to believe â Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" primed to launch at a moment's notice? More importantly, how did this ersatz data get pumped into the U.S. intelligence stream, and who injected it? As I wrote two years ago: "The concept of the Iraq war as a successful Israeli covert operation is altogether plausible. It would hardly be the first time a foreign government made a concerted effort to drag us into war on their side. " Those who are crying the loudest about this study are the same people who, when confronted with the news of an FBI raid â two of them! âon the headquarters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby that has long dominated the debate of Middle East policy on Capitol Hill, were either uncharacteristically silent or else in total denial. The arrest of Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, and charges of spying on behalf of Israel lodged against longtime AIPAC leader and spark plug Steve Rosen, and his associate Keith Weissman, should have alerted even the most loyal pro-Israel stalwarts that where's there's so much smoke there has to be some real fire. Seen as background to the mid-April trial of Rosen and Weissman, the Mearsheimer-Walt study throws some real light on a situation that has long been untenable and may now be finally coming to a head. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8743
Death tolls: Wars started by Democrats in the last century: WWll (1917-1918) Wilson 116,708 WWll (1941-1945) Roosevelt 408,306 Korea(1950-1953) Truman 54,246 Viet Nam(1963-1972) JFK 58,219 Wars Started by Republican Presidents Grenada (1983) Reagan 19 deaths Gulf War GHB (1991) 147 Desert Storm GWB 2314 And of course neither JFK nor LBJ ever had the balls to ask the Democrat majority in Congress for a declaration of war in Viet Nam.
I fail to see the point you are making. This wouldn't be one of those straw man fallacies that the right wing uses persistently, would it?
It's you who introduced the language of War Party. How about a historical definition. Does the 2000 Demo VP candidate support the war? How about the First Lady/#1 advisor to WJC?
It is 2006, isn't it? Besides, the neocons exist in both republican and democrat form...... Did you even read the article posted? Sheesh.....
It's interesting to me how anti-semitism has become not only acceptable but trendy on university campuses. Faculties shelter and tolerate anti-semitic professors under the guise of academic freedom, but you know they would hound out any professor who deviated from the PC line on any other issue. You could ask Larry Summers. So it appears that outright anti-semitism has become PC, as has unquestioned support for palestinian terrorists. Interesting. As for this "study", it fits neatly into this emerging PC template. I know arab money has become to have an influence at some universities. The Israelis don't fund too many faculty chairs, and the arabs tend to expect value for their donations. No question the war has been a disaster. Even the Afghanistan operation, which is deemed a major success, has its warts. Our handpicked government there is preparing to execute a man for converting from islam to Christianity. Nothing like a few executions to fire up the Republican base and get them to turn out in the mid-term elections....NOT. So the Republicans are in disarray, but I think it's unfair to blame it on the Israelis. This is a homegrown, Bush-produced and directed disaster.
its not anti-semitism.... its anti freakin Israel... FU Israel.... rot in hell you bastards for making our soldiers die to fight your war...... FU I said... the US is Israel's bitch baby $$$
What is most disturbing about Israel to me, is their position that they are above criticism. If you find anything at all wrong with Israel's actions, you are immediately labeled an anti Semite. We simply do not apply even standards of law and reasonableness to Israel, they are afforded an unreasonable status of being above the law, and people constantly rationalize their actions as justified because they are "Israel." Undue influence is a reality, and when Israel exerts undue influence on our government, the results are obvious. There is no bigger load of bullshit than the concept of a "chosen people" and the politics that surrender to such nonsense.
Lol, no shit. Namely the fact that its people are Muslims. Not much you can do about that, unfortunately. Not even "historic" elections - the supposed key to all things good - taking place seem to have been enough to help the poor sap there who's recently been charged with the horrendous crime of converting to Christianity. As for the Jews, they really should have seen it coming: the insane liberalism so many of them so fanatically supported has started to turn on them. This could get ugly...
the war is a success -> America has a stronghold in the Muslim arena where they get 75% of their energy from, all based out of Iraq. I hope no one considers success in war means 0 deaths, 0 dollars spent, 0 crying from moonbats, because its not. By the way Pabst, congratulations on becoming moderator, its good to see it go to you.