Israel should not be allowed to push US into war with Iran

No More Blank Checks for War
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, July 11, 2008

After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28,
1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a "blank cheque" to punish
Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to
take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted.

On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in its
dispute with Germany over Danzig, a town of 350,000 Germans. Should
war come, Britain would fight on Poland's side.

Poland refused to negotiate, Adolf Hitler attacked, and Britain
declared war. After six years, the British Empire collapsed.
Germany was burnt to ashes. Poland entered the slave quarters of
Joseph Stalin's empire.

Lesson: No great power should ever give to a small ally or client
state a blank check to drag it into war.

This raises the question: Has President Bush given Israel a blank
check?

A year ago, Israel attacked and smashed an alleged nuclear reactor
site in Syria. In April, Israel held a five-day civil defense
drill. In June, Israel sent 100 F-15s and F-16s, with refueling
tankers, toward Greece in a simulated attack. The planes flew 1,450
kilometers, the distance to Iran's uranium enrichment facility at
Natanz.

On June 6, Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz threatened, "If Iran
continues its nuclear weapons program we will attack it."

Ehud Olmert returned from a June meeting with Bush to tell
Israelis, "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian
threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the
matter before the end of his term."

Is Israel bluffing, or in dead earnest?

For while Israel can do damage to Iran, she cannot defeat Iran
without using nuclear weapons. But any attack Israel launched
against Iran would require U.S. complicity, and any Israeli war
with Iran would almost certainly require the United States to do
most of the fighting to win or end it.

Thus, if George Bush does not want war with Iran, with two U.S.
wars already, he must inform the Israelis in unequivocal terms that
the United States opposes any Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran,
and will not assist but denounce any such attack.

If Bush believes war with Iran is vital to U.S. security, he should
make that case to Congress. To allow Israel to start a war we do
not want would be an abdication of his duty as president.

Clearly, among the reasons Israel conducted its dress rehearsal for
war was to maximize pressure on Iran to halt enriching uranium.
Bush may well have welcomed the added pressure.

But as the Iranians have insisted, they are entitled, under the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed and Israel did not, to
enrich uranium for fuel in power plants. Tehran has declared it
will not be the only nation to surrender its legal rights under the
NPT. And in response to the Israeli military exercises, Tehran
conducted its own missile-firing exercises this week.

If neither side yields, confrontation is inevitable. Perhaps soon.

For we are only four months from the election, and Israel is pawing
the ground to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Is this Bush's back door to war with Iran?

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, in Israel a week
ago, returned to say a "third front" in the Middle East, with Iran,
would be "extremely stressful" to U.S. forces.

He is saying that U.S. ground forces probably cannot now cope with
another war, with a nation three times as large as Iraq.

Asked about Israel taking unilateral action, Mullen replied, "This
is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be
more unstable." But Mullen is not the president. What did Bush tell
Olmert? Does Israel have a green light, a yellow light or a red
light?

Should Israel attack Iran and Bush deny complicity, he would no
more be believed than were Britain and France in 1956. Then, the
Israelis stormed into Sinai, and Britain and France said they were
intervening to separate the warring nations and secure the Suez
Canal. Outraged, Ike ordered the British, French and Israelis alike
to get out of Suez and Sinai. They did.

President Bush must step up to the plate.

If he believes sanctions are not succeeding and Iran's nuclear
program must be halted, he should go to Congress for authority to
neutralize the facilities. If he has not so concluded, he should
tell Israel it is not to start a war that U.S. airmen, sailors,
soldiers and Marines will have to finish.

America needs to restore that absolute freedom of action in matters
of war and peace she once had, before entering the skein of
entangling alliances that now encumber the republic.

No ally, no client state, should ever be allowed to drag America
into a war she has not chosen, constitutionally, to fight.

No more blank checks for any nation.

SOURCE:

http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb-no-more-blank-checks-for-war/

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Israel Believes Obama Will 'Deprive' It of Political Support for
Iran Attack

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/07/israel-believes-obama-
will-deprive-it-of-support-to-attack-iran.html

Here is a tiny URL for the above one:

http://tinyurl.com/5bpvvb

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Subject: DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked (see the comments posted at the bottom of the URL for this article as well)

Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 5:40 AM

DE BORCHGRAVE: Attack plans spiked

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/09/attack-plans-spiked/

See Video: Neocons Pushed Us into War with Iraq and Now with Iran!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbxD55LnlGg&feature=PlayList&p=71316451BE...

Here is a tiny URL for the above one:

http://tinyurl.com/5johhg

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/07/neocons-pushed-us-into-w...

Here is a tiny URL for the above one:

http://tinyurl.com/5aspp5

Scott McClellan Questioned about Neocon Push for Iraq War:

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/06/scott-mcclellan-question...

Here is a tiny URL for the above one:

http://tinyurl.com/6gzo4o

Additional linked via the pics at the following URLs:

http://neoconzionistthreat.com

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com

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Looking Into the Lobby

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference is one of Washington’s most important—and least reported—events.

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_06_30/article3.html

by Philip Weiss

For three days in the capital in early June, suspense built over the question of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference would greet Barack Obama. There was a lot of grousing about Obama in the hallways of the Washington Convention Center, and AIPAC officials repeatedly warned the faithful to be respectful. “We are not a debate society or a protest movement. … our goal is to have a friend in the White House,” executive director Howard Kohr said in a strict tone. It wasn’t hard to imagine things going poorly: Obama gets booed on national television. He feels insulted. Conservative Jewish donors and voters turn off to Obama. He becomes president without their support. AIPAC has no friend in the Oval Office.

But of course, Obama complied. His speech became the annual example the conference provides of a powerful man truckling. Two years ago, it was Vice President Cheney’s red-meat speech attacking the Palestinians. Last year, it was Pastor John Hagee’s scary speech saying that giving the Arabs any part of Jerusalem was the same as giving it to the Taliban. Obama took a similar line. He suggested that he would use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, made no mention of Palestinian human rights, and said that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” a statement so disastrous to the peace process that his staff rescinded it the next day. Big deal. The actual meeting had gone swimmingly.

This was my first AIPAC conference, and the first surprise was how blatant the business of wielding influence is. The conference makes no bones about this function, the most savage expression of which is the Tuesday dinner at which AIPAC performs its “roll call,” where the names of all the politicians who have come to the conference are read off from the stage by three barkers in near auctioneer fashion. The pols try to outdo one another in I-love-Israel encomia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely won the day when she teared up while dangling the dogtags of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas two years ago.

The second big surprise was that apart from coverage of the headline speakers, the AIPAC conference is a media no man’s land. It would be hard to imagine a more naked exhibition of political power: a convention of 7,000 mostly rich people, with more than half the Congress in attendance, as well as all the major presidential candidates, the prime minister of Israel, the minority leader, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House. Yet there is precious little journalism about the spectacle in full. The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence. They would have to take on an unpleasant informative task that they have instead left to two international relations scholars in their 50s—Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of last year’s book The Israel Lobby.

The press is missing a phantasmagorical event. Imagine a basement meeting in the Warsaw Ghetto transplanted to the biggest hall in Vegas, and you have something of the feeling of the thing. The staging is faultless. Little documentaries called “Zionist Stories” play on the Jumbotron, complete with footage of Auschwitz, and then the subject of the documentary comes out on stage to thundering applause. There is breakout session after breakout session on Middle East policy and Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, with star turns by Natan Sharansky, Bill Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. The press was excluded from “Advanced Lobbying Techniques,” but still this is a feast of the political condition. And posh. The roll call is described by AIPAC as the largest seated dinner in Washington. The wine flows. I went about in a daze of awe and admiration.

My awe was for men like Haim Saban, a toymaker and giant donor to the Democratic Party. After his Zionist story, Saban came out on stage wearing a platinum tie and white shirt and silver gray suit. He has wonderful presence and something of an Arab look—black-haired, wide forehead. He was surrounded by 200 college students, veterans of the Saban Leadership Seminars he sponsors at AIPAC.

On Middle East policy, Saban is barely distinguishable from his Republican counterparts, who are there in equal force. The main hall of the conference was filled with lavishly-produced banners featuring AIPAC donors, not a few with trophy wives, alongside statements of their mission. There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.”

I was writing that down when an AIPAC spokesman stopped to check my credentials. The audience for this stuff isn’t the public, it’s people in the hall—other rich Jews who might put AIPAC in their wills.

At most conventions, people gather out of self-interest. Therein lies my admiration: the AIPAC’ers didn’t come for selfish reasons. They are devoutly concerned with the lives of people they don’t know, very far away. Yes, people with whom they feel tribal kinship. When Israelis came out on the dais to speak, they were almost invariably overwhelmed by the generosity, if not the Vegas schmaltz. “There is a tremendous amount of love in this place,” Meir Nissensohn, an Israeli executive of IBM, said in wonder. “If it was a beaker, it would explode.” Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment.

Among the devout there is only one real issue: What is the latest AIPAC line? This is the organization’s function. After consulting closely with the Israeli political leadership (leaning toward the right wing), AIPAC regurgitates a simple version of Israeli policy to its followers, who in turn regurgitate that line to American politicians. AIPAC’ers do this with the conviction that Israel’s life is on the line. “It is we that are the guardians of that relationship,” AIPAC president David Victor said. James Tisch, the Lowes executive and leader in the Jewish community, warned the audience that it might be 1939 all over again were it not for them.

AIPAC makes sure the Israeli line is America’s line by cultivating politicians before they reach the national scene. Victor described this process when he warned the audience that 10 percent of Congress will be new next year because so many seats are open: “Do we know them? Do they know us? Have they

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Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He blogs at www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/

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Stop The AIPAC sponsored "Iran War Resolution"

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=91563

Additional about AIPAC's push for the coming war with Iran via the following URL (be sure to access the Scott Ritter youtubes linked at the top of the comments section as well):

AIPAC Pushing US to War with Iran for Israel:

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/10/re-aipac-is-pushing-us-t...

Hedges: It's Insane to Attack Iran:

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/05/hedges-its-insane-to-att...

Bob Barr: Attacking Iran Highly Irresponsible and Detrimental:

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/05/bob-barr-attacking-iran-...

McCain's loyalty is to Israel first and foremost:

http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/03/make-people-aware-subscr...

Walt & Mearsheimer's Proof That 'Tail Wagged the Dog' Points American Jews to a Universalist Ethos:

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/09/more-on-walt-me.html