[WCUSP] Fwd: 1."Israel, Lobby Pushing Iran War" Forward 2. Beltway Insiders Versus Neo-Cons Clash of the Elites

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>
Date: Jan 7, 2007 3:53 PM
Subject: 1."Israel, Lobby Pushing Iran War" Forward 2. Beltway
Insiders Versus Neo-Cons  Clash of the Elites
To: karendes at umich.edu



Friends,  we must take this very seriously; call, fax, visit write our
Congress people. And form coalitions with all effected parties against
this Israeli drive for Iran.  karen

"Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a
war that was made in Israel and nowhere else."
January 4, 2007

Subject: An article by Nathan Guttman in Forward on a book by Scott Ritter


Book: Israel, Lobby Pushing Iran War

Nathan Guttman | Fri. Dec 29, 2006, The Forward

http://www.forward.com/articles/book-israel-lobby-pushing-iran-war/

A former United Nations weapons inspector and leading Iraq War
opponent has written a new book alleging that Jerusalem is pushing the
Bush administration into war with Iran, and accusing the pro-Israel
lobby of dual loyalty and outright espionage.

In the new book, called "Target Iran", Scott Ritter, who served as a
senior U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and later
became one of the wars staunchest critics, argues that the United
States is readying for military action against Iran, using its nuclear
program as a pretext for pursuing regime change in Tehran.

The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government
and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded, Ritter writes, in exploiting
the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and
nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public
has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need
to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran.

Later in the book, Ritter adds: Let there be no doubt: If there is an
American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and
nowhere else.

Ritter's book echoes recent high-profile attacks on the pro-Israel
lobby by former President Jimmy Carter and by scholars Stephen Walt
and John Mearsheimer. Ritter, who recently returned from a weeklong
speaking engagement on The Nation cruise, speaks of a network of
individuals that pursues Israel's interests in the United States. The
former weapons inspector alleges that some of the pro-Israel lobby's
activities can only be described as outright espionage and
interference in domestic policies. Ritter also accused the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee of having an inherent dual loyalty. He
called for the organization to be registered as a foreign agent.

Representatives for both Aipac and the Israeli Embassy in Washington
declined to comment on Ritter's accusations.

In his book, Ritter also accuses the pro-Israel lobby of invoking the
memory of the Holocaust and of crying antisemitism whenever Israel is
accused of betraying America. This is a sickening and deeply
disturbing trend that must end, Ritter writes.

According to Ritter, Iran is far from developing a nuclear weapons
program and will not do so in the future if the world makes sure that
stringent inspections are in place to verify that the Iranians live up
to the requirements of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

If Iran does make a political decision to develop nuclear weapons, it
will take them a decade and it won't go undetected, Ritter said. But
it will take the U.S. only five weeks to build up a force capable of
destroying Iran by air strikes. It's a timeline of five weeks compared
to a decade, so I'm not worried about taking a risk.

As for Israeli and American fears regarding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
Iranian president who vowed to wipe Israel off the map, Ritter dubbed
the leader a sick joke and asserted that he does not make the
decisions in Tehran.

Ritter argues that the Bush administration knows that inspections can
solve the Iranian nuclear problem but, at the urging of Jerusalem and
its American allies, is in reality pursuing a different goal: regime
change in Tehran.

Israel has, through a combination of ignorance, fear and paranoia,
elevated Iran to a status that it finds unacceptable, Ritter writes
in his book. Israel has engaged in policies that have further inflamed
this situation. Israel displays arrogance and rigidity when it comes
to developing any diplomatic solution to the Iranian issue.

Ritter is no stranger to controversy.

As a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, he headed several surprise
inspection missions that were denied access to suspicious sites, and
led to the Saddam Hussein regime accusing Ritter of being an American
spy. The frequent refusal of the Iraqis to provide Ritter and his team
access to sites of interest led eventually to the abandonment of the
inspection regime in Iraq. Ritter resigned his post in 1998, accusing
the United States and the U.N. of caving in to the Iraqis.

But Ritter later became a leading voice warning against taking
military action against Iraq, arguing that a resumption of inspections
would be sufficient to contain Hussein. He accused the United States
of trying to use the U.N. inspection force for spying purposes and
claimed that Iraq was deliberately held to higher standards than other
countries in order to justify a military invasion.

In early 2004, Ritter charged in an interview on the Web site Ynet,
operated by the daily Yediot Aharonot, that Israeli intelligence had
deliberately overstated what it knew to be a minimal threat from Iraq
in an effort to push America and Britain to launch a war. Ritter's
accusations were roundly rejected across the Israeli political
spectrum. Security officials interviewed by the Forward insisted that
no branch of the military could or would deliberately skew the
findings in that way, but they also said that Israeli intelligence
tended to exaggerate threats because it was operating under flawed
assumptions.

Now Ritter is arguing that a similar effort is under way to produce an
attack against Iran.

Speaking to the Forward this week, Ritter stressed that he is not
accusing all American Jews of having dual loyalty, saying that at the
end of the day, I would like to believe that most of American Jews
will side with America.

Ritter is already working on his next book, due for publication in
March 2007. In this tome, he sets out to teach the anti-war movements
that he supports how to wage an effective campaign to win over
American public opinion.





January 5, 2007

Beltway Insiders Versus Neo-Cons

Clash of the Elites

By JOHN WALSH

A titanic power struggle is being waged within the policy elite or
power elite, or more simply the U.S. ruling class. The clash is taking
place over the war on Iraq, U.S. policy toward Israel--and ultimately
over the best way to run the U.S. empire. The war on Iraq is shaping
up as such a disaster for the empire that it can no longer be
tolerated by our rulers in its present form. The struggle is as plain
as the nose on your face; nevertheless it draws little comment. One
reason is that we are taught to view matters political through the
prism of Democrat versus Republican, whereas this struggle among our
rulers cuts across party lines. On the "Left," few so much as allude
to this internecine war, much less use it to good effect. This is
apparently due to a very rigid, very dogmatic view of how empires
function, indeed how they "must" function, and due to a fear of being
labeled anti-semitic and thus running afoul of the Israeli Lobby. In
many cases this silence reflects an actual sympathy among "liberals"
for neocon foreign policy, either out of a latter day do-gooder
version of the White Man's Burden, or an attachment to Israel.

This struggle is in no way hidden and definitely not a secret
conspiracy. It is out in the open, as it must be, since it is in great
part a battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. This
fact makes the absence of commentary about it all the more chilling.
The fight among our rulers sets the neocons against other very
important elements in the establishment: the senior officer corps,
represented by Jack Murtha and Colin Powell; the old money like Ned
Lamont; the oil men, like James Baker (With Baker against the war, how
then can oil be the only reason for the war?); those who want to see
the American imperium run effectively, like Lee Hamilton and Robert
Gates of the Iraq Study Group; many in the CIA, both active duty and
retired; policy makers like Zbigniew Brzezinski who has long opposed
the war which he has ascribed to the influence of certain "ethnic"
groups; and even former presidents Gerald Ford who kept his mouth shut
and Jimmy Carter who has not and whose frustration with Israel and the
neocons is all too clear in his book "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid."

Influential voices tied to the ruling circles include some writers for
the militantly anti-war publication of the Old Right, The American
Conservative.
On the other side are the neocons, based in the Washington "Think"
Tanks, in the civilian leadership of the pre-Gates Pentagon, in Dick
Cheney's office, in large parts of both parties in Congress, and in
the editorial and op-ed pages of the print media. Most of the House
and much of the Senate is still under the control of the neocons
thanks to the fund-raising exertions and threats from AIPAC and its
minions. Hence, the most powerful political allies of the neocons are
the leading Democrats, who indulge in the most intense and shallow
anti-Bush rhetoric but are reliable allies in the neocon crusades in
the Middle East. The neocon side has relied heavily on the power of
ideas,. This in turn hinges on the second rate level of those writing
for the mass media who think little for themselves and go along with
whatever framework for policy discussion is put forward by the
neocons. Good examples of this are most op-ed pages, TV programs like
the Sunday morning talk shows, Weekend Edition on NPR and Washington
Week in Review on PBS. The neocons have not dominated the weekly news
magazines, with the exception of U.S. News and World Report, but they
are working to remedy that. Witness, for example, the adoption of
William Kristol as a star columnist at Time!

Given this balance of forces, it would seem that the neocons must lose
 but the outcome remains an open question. If they do prevail, that
will be the end of our democracy and freedoms as we have known them.
If you have any doubts about that, consult their philosopher, Leo
Strauss. The neocons cannot be automatically counted out, even though
their base is narrow, for they can draw on all the resources of a
mighty nation state, Israel, a modern Sparta, with its vaunted
intelligence services and special forces which span the world and
operate in the U.S., as well as its ability, if it desires, to launder
cash and deliver it to U.S. operatives. And of course the war
profiteers like Halliburton and others love the Iraq adventure. The
arms manufacturers may be less happy with it, since money is not being
spent on profitable high-tech weapons which do not have to function
but rather on highly unprofitable "boots on the ground."

The public forays of the anti-neocons in this struggle are well-known.
James Wilson in the New York Times, accusing Bush of lying about
uranium from Niger; Richard Clarke's expose on the incompetence behind
9/11; the exposure of Judith Miller as lying about WMD, thus
corrupting the NYT reportage (even the Washington Post, dominated as
its opinion pages are by the neocons did not allow its reporting to be
undermined by the likes of Judith Miller); the antiwar stance of John
Murtha indicating the unhappiness of the senior officer corps with the
dominance of US Middle East policy by the Israel-first neocons;
Mearsheimer and Walt's paper, as important for who wrote it as for its
content, which finally took on the Israeli Lobby, the core adversary
of the anti-neocons; and most recently Jimmy Carter's book which
inevitably raises the question of the shedding of American blood to
preserve Israeli apartheid and to lay waste every and any nation
perceive by Israel to be a threat. Add to this the report of the Baker
Commission and the near-simultaneous removal of Rumsfeld and his
replacement with a member of the Baker Commission.

The biggest blow to the neocon agenda came from the people themselves,
in the form of the 2004 election defeat of the Republicans.
Unfortunately, this defeat amounted only to a registration of national
disgust over the war in Iraq but not one which would result in policy
changes since the establishment Dems are solidly neocon in their
foreign policy  especially when it comes to the Middle East and
Israel. The same is true of many progressives. One looks in vain for a
reference to the Lobby on the Michael Moore web site for example or in
the missives from UFPJ or from "P"DA.

Two questions emerge. Are there advantages to be gained from this
struggle for the peace movement? Most definitely. We are being
provided with powerful testimony from the most unassailable sources
Jimmy Carter, Richard Clarke and Mearsheimer and Walt to name a few.
And we should not allow this important information to be discredited
by the neocons. The leading anti-neocons are not anti-empire, but at
least they want to end the bloody war on Iraq and the dominance of
Israel over key segments of U.S. foreign policy. That is a step
forward. And second, given the key power of the Israel Lobby, can the
peace movement fail any longer to ignore it as though it were
irrelevant? Absolutely not. We ignore it at our peril. And we must get
rid of all fears of being labeled as anti-semites. Most Jewish
Americans, much to their credit, oppose the policies of the Lobby,
which in the long run may be responsible for stirring up considerable
anti-semitism in the U.S. and around the world. Would it not be
wonderful if an anti-Lobby organization of Jewish Americans emerged
with a title like "Not in Our Name"?

Finally, given the balance of forces at play, it is difficult to
discern what Bush is likely to do in the coming days and months. The
punditry is now predicting an escalation of the war in Iraq (aka a
"surge"), but Bush surprised once with the firing of Rumsfeld of which
there was no advance hint  quite the contrary. He is certainly under
enormous pressure to alter course, and he may have to do so no matter
how much he recoils from it. He may even do so after a "surge" which
could be used as a smoke screen for a policy shift. But escalating the
conflict even temporarily will sink his ratings below 30% and make him
the most unpopular president in history. We shall see.

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar at gmail.com.