Re: Oil Power Politics: [NYTimes] Is the War Good for the

This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by ibnsubhi@yahoo.com.

Greetings, for an interesting analysis that few of us here in the US are 
willing to consider, I found this essay a breath of fresh air, especially 
coming from NY Times.  Yes oil and geopolitics is essential to 
understanding the US war on Iraq, but there is also this otherside as well: 
religious Christian fundamentalists' alliance with Israel as well as good 
old US party politics.  Please read this essay, for such honesty doesn't 
come very often to the pages of the NY Times - Khaldoun

The administration prefers not to advertise Israel alongside Bulgaria and 
Spain on its marquee of allied supporters, for the same reason it has gone 
to tremendous lengths to keep Israel out of the coming war. No one wants to 
feed the dangerous idea that this is, as the jihad propagandists claim, a 
war of Americans and Zionists against Arabs and Islam.

[dangerously true !]

ibnsubhi@yahoo.com


Is It Good for the Jews?

March 8, 2003
By BILL KELLER

One conspiracy theory of the moment is that we are about to
send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for
the sake of Israel.

[LOL - latest newspeak neologism: "conspiracy theory" is now a synonym for 
"plain, self-evident fact"]


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/opinion/08KELL.html?ex=1048134215&ei=1&en=d2a7c1b653aa80a0

Is It Good for the Jews?

By BILL KELLER

Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense 
Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — 
I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the 
Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of 
the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael 
Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding 
that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, 
they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable 
intelligence- crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to 
top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to 
explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may 
explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the 
notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers 
to war for the sake of Israel.

This idea has received only fleeting attention in the mainstream discussion 
of our looming invasion of Iraq, and it would not deserve more except for 
three things: (1) The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and 
more widely held than you may think. (2) It has interesting ripples in our 
domestic politics. (3) It has, like many dubious theories, sprouted from a 
seed of truth. Israel is part of the story. And why shouldn't it be?

The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from malignant 
to merely cynical, but it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist 
zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the 
"amen corner," as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last 
time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer for 
Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have finally 
succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk of a 
gullible president.

Exhibit A for this plot is a document entitled "A Clean Break: A New 
Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared in 1996 by a group of American 
defense thinkers for the hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of 
Israel. This study proposed an aggressive redirection of Israeli strategy, 
including a plan for "removing Saddam Hussein from power." Three of the 
authors of the prescription — Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David 
Wurmser —are now prominent "embeds" in the Bush administration.

The "Clean Break" group, interestingly, did not call for an American 
conquest of Saddam. With President Bill Clinton in office, there was little 
hope of that. They proposed that Israel handle it together with Jordan and 
Turkey. Jordan's Hashemite dynasty would share the management of Iraq with 
the Shiites — presumably leaving the fate of the poor Kurds in Turkish 
hands. As for America, the document proposed that Israel adopt a new policy 
of self- reliance, immediately declining economic aid and, eventually, 
military assistance. This was all a bit much, even for the ultranationalist 
Mr. Netanyahu.

A less conspiracy-minded observer might point out that the longstanding 
Bushite animosity toward Iraq is complex and hardly secret, and the fact 
that our interests coincide with Israel's does not mean that a Zionist 
fifth column has hijacked the president's brain. But that would not satisfy 
the yearning for a simple story.

Reinforcing this sinister narrative is the suspicion that the presidential 
mastermind Karl Rove designed the war as shameless pandering to Florida's 
Jewish voters and to the tens of millions of evangelical Christians who 
have taken up Israel as a passion. (Many evangelicals love Israel because 
in their Biblical end-of-days scenario, the gathering of Jews in the Holy 
Land is necessary for the Second Coming. Inconveniently for the Jews, the 
story calls for them to either abandon their beliefs or be exterminated in 
time for the great rapture.)

2)

While the polls show that the attitudes of American Jews on a war with Iraq 
are not appreciably different from those of the general electorate, most of 
the big Jewish organizations and many donors (with the important exception 
of Hollywood donors) are backing war.

I don't for a second believe that Mr. Bush is marching to war to secure the 
votes of Palm Beach County. But Republican strategists do foresee — and 
savor — the fact that a victory in Iraq could give the president new 
inroads with a small but politically active and traditionally Democratic 
constituency.

"If the policy succeeds in the war and the peace," one Republican 
strategist said, "then I think you'll see a further tectonic shift of 
Jewish political support, both in terms of money and votes, toward Bush. 
That's not why it's being done, but it will be a consequence if they're 
successful."

Mr. Bush may also be enjoying the way the question of Israel and the 
Palestinians has sown strife within the antiwar ranks. Michael Lerner, 
editor of the leftist Jewish magazine Tikkun, says he was blackballed from 
speaking at an antiwar rally in San Francisco because some of the sponsors 
refused to have a "pro-Israel" speaker, an incident that prompted 
considerable gloating among hawks.

You hear lowbrow versions of the it's-really-about-Israel theory at protest 
rallies, especially in Europe, where selective sympathy for the 
Palestinians runs high. You can hear more sophisticated versions, sometimes 
whispered or oblique, among scholars, op-ed writers and politicians. They 
speak of the "Israel-centric" war on terror or "Sharon's war."

Making the world safer for us — defusing terrorism and beginning to reform 
a region that is a source of toxic hostility to what we stand for — happens 
to make the world safer for Israel as well. But the idea that Israel's 
interests are driving one of the most momentous shifts in America's foreign 
policy is simple- minded and offensive. (There is also a simple-minded and 
offensive flip side, which holds that opposition to the war is heavily 
fueled by anti-Semitism — another sweeping slander with a grain of truth in 
it.)

What is demonstrably true is that Israelis believe that the war in Iraq is 
— to use a phrase that is a staple of Jewish satire — good for the Jews. 
Even though Israel is a likely target of Iraqi reprisals when war breaks 
out, it is the only country I know of where polls show overwhelming support 
for an invasion to oust Saddam, preferably sooner.

The administration prefers not to advertise Israel alongside Bulgaria and 
Spain on its marquee of allied supporters, for the same reason it has gone 
to tremendous lengths to keep Israel out of the coming war. No one wants to 
feed the dangerous idea that this is, as the jihad propagandists claim, a 
war of Americans and Zionists against Arabs and Islam.

There are obvious reasons that Israelis would like to rid the region of a 
man who trains terrorists and pays blood money to suicide bombers' 
families. But the deeper explanation, says Stephen Cohen, an analyst at the 
Israel Policy Forum, is profound despair over the bloody dead end in which 
Israeli- Palestinian politics sit. A conquest of Iraq offers the prospect 
that the United States will take the region in hand. It is, to many 
Israelis, the only hope of change for the better.

In his speech last week to the American Enterprise Institute, President 
Bush for the first time seemed to embrace this thankless responsibility. He 
declared that success in Iraq could break the impasse and move Israel and 
the Palestinians toward the obvious two-state solution. He underscored this 
as "my personal commitment."

The speech may have been a sop to European opinion, but a successful war 
would offer Mr. Bush a precious opportunity. A lot of people wish that he 
had engaged the Palestinian question intensively and earlier, if only to 
gain some credibility with the Arabs prior to disarming Saddam. But later 
would still be better than never.

The question is, What will Mr. Bush make of this moment? If the U.S. 
manages to make a more benign Iraq — and perhaps a chastened Syria — the 
Israelis could decide to dig in their heels: Our friend Mr. Bush is here, 
he's on our side; we can now sit tight, wait for the Palestinians to read 
the handwriting on the walls of Baghdad and maybe offer them half a state.

Or the Americans could seize the opportunity to say to Ariel Sharon, who 
has shown no prior gift for strategic statesmanship: "We are here now — you 
know we won't let you down. It's time to roll back the settlements and 
close a deal."

Will Mr. Bush choose to lead on this? We know now that the man isn't afraid 
of a big gamble. But we also know that he likes his stories black and 
white, and no amount of conquest will make the Middle East a simple plot.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company