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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Understanding Bush By Antonio C. Abaya October 15, 2003 In my column of January 30, 2003 titled �War for Oil and Israel�, written two months before the actual shock and awe hit Baghdad, I theorized on the real reasons for the coming invasion of Iraq, a theme that also appears in an earlier piece, �Iraq is a Hard Sell�, posted on October 4, 2002. Since then billions of words have been written on the subject and posted on the Internet, but my position has remained valid, especially in the light of the US failure to find in Iraq any weapons of mass destruction or any substantive link between the Saddam Hussein regime and the events of 9/11, the two official US rationales for the invasion of Iraq. Now that President George W. Bush is visiting Manila, for eight hours, it is timely to examine what it was that propelled the simple-minded Dubya on his march to folly, which march has not, by any means, taken its final goose-steps. There have been hundreds of outstanding articles on the subject on the Internet, but I am substantially quoting or summarizing from two: The War on Terrorism is Bogus, written by British MP Michael Meacher in The Guardian of September 06, 2003; and The Strategist and the Philosopher, written by Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet in Le Monde of April 15, 2003. Both are archived in the Reference Materials section of the website www.tapatt.org and deserve to be read by the serious observer.. That Iraq was invaded for its oil is now a commonplace. Even US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a.k.a. Wolfowitz of Arabia, the most avid proponent of that invasion, has admitted as much. In his article, MP Meacher added some intriguing details, including the tidbit that � the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010, the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world�s oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of the remaining global oil export capacity.� And it should not be forgotten that President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice were all executives of major oil companies before they entered government service. But all this is already old hat. What is unknown to most Filipinos, even to those who read all the Manila newspapers and assiduously watch (only) ANC, CNN and Fox News (especially Fox News) every waking hour of every day, is the extent of the preoccupation of the Bush Government, more than any other US government in the past, with the security of the state of Israel.. George W. Bush is influenced by two pro-Israel groupings, aside from the traditional Jewish Lobby that annually raises an estimated $5 billion in private donations (in addition to the $3 billion official US aid) for the embattled Israelis. One of these groupings is the Christian fundamentalist movement, under the leadership of TV Evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, which claims an adult membership of 70 million, including George W. Bush and his Attorney General, John Ashcroft. That number cannot be dismissed lightly: to this day 69% of the American public (which projects to 135 million adult Americans) believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for, or had something to do with, 9/11. 70 out of 135 million make the fundamentalists the biggest single political bloc supporting Dubya. I actually met a university-educated American business consultant who really believed that the federal building in Oklahoma City had been bombed by Muslims, even after white-supremacist Timothy McVeigh had been arrested, tried, convicted and executed for it. Christian fundamentalists believe that the state of Israel is a divine creation and they oppose any accommodation with the Palestinians. MP Meacher quotes Nelson Bell, father-in-law of Evangelist Billy Graham: �that for the first time in 2000 years Jerusalem is now completely in the hands of the Jews gives students of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in its accuracy and validity�.� (Christianity Today). More importantly, Christian fundamentalists believe, with Hal Lindsay, author of �The Late Great Planet Earth� (which has sold 50 million copies) that in the coming final battle between Good and Evil in Armageddon, as foretold by the Bible and which may have already begun, �the valley from Galilee to Eilat will flow with blood and 144,000 Jews will bow down before Jesus and be saved, but the rest of Israel will perish in the mother of all holocausts�� And this conversion to Christianity of 144,000 Jews (some fundamentalists believe as many as one third of the Jews in Israel, or about 1.6 million [chosen] people, will convert) while the rest perish, will be the signal for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It cannot get any kinkier than that. Evangelist Jerry Falwell declared on CBS� 60 Minutes program last October 6, 2002 that �the �Christian public� is Bush�s core constituency�I really believe that when the chips are down Ariel Sharon can trust George W. Bush to do the right thing every time�.� (See www.cbsnews.com). The other pro-Israel grouping that wields enormous influence on George W, that has in fact hijacked the foreign and defense policies of his government, even if he does not have the erudition to comprehend it, is a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals, mostly East Coast and mostly Jewish, who drew up the blueprint for Pax Americana in 1996. This group was originally made up of Dick Cheney (who became v.p. on Dubya�s election in 2000), Donald Rumsfeld (who became defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (who became Rumsfeld�s deputy), Jeb Bush (Dubya�s younger brother) and Lewis Libby (who became Cheney�s chief-of-staff). The group grew into a think tank called Project for the New American Century or PNAC and attracteden more intellectuals into its fold: Richard Perle (who became chair of the Defense Policy Board), journalists Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams (who became Middle East specialist in the National Security Council), Douglas Feithe (who became undersecretary of defense). The last two, according to the Le Monde writers, �have an unconditional support for the state of Israel, whatever government sits in Jerusalem.� I would argue that the entire group, not just the last two, pimps for Israel. The notable thing about this group, aside from their undisputed high intellectual caliber, is that most of them are Jewish, though with a sprinkling of token Anglo-Saxons like John Bolton. Last May, BBC World ran a one-hour long feature on this PNAC group, which it called The War Party because of its advocacy of the doctrine of pre-emptive strike against America�s perceived enemies, such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea (Dubya�s �axis of evil.�). The BBC interviewer raised the point of the group�s pronouncedly Jewish make-up when he talked to one of the neocons, Mershav Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute, whose Hebraic first name and slight accent suggested she was a sabra or native-born Israeli; she is married to another neocon, David Wurmser of the Hudson Institute. �Yes, � she admitted, �most of us are Jewish. But that is not something to apologize for, is it?� Maybe not. But having cornered the exclusive franchise on the Bush Government�s foreign and defense policies, the PNAC�s decidedly pro-Israel stance cannot be separated from the group�s pronouncedly Jewish make-up, and vice-versa, which guarantees �endless war� (Cheney�s endearing phrase) since it is precisely the US� support for and defense of Israel that inflame Muslim passions and was one of two reasons cited by Osama bin Laden for launching the 9/11 and other attacks on US targets. (The other: the desecration of land [in Saudi Arabia] sacred to Islam with the presence of 4,000 US troops, including, Allahu akhbar!, female soldiers in short shorts.) Awareness of the neocons� influence on Bush was almost certainly the reason Malaysian PM Mahathir remarked on Oct. 17 that �today the Jews rule the world by proxy� and control the world through their influence over major powers. (Washington Post, Oct 17). As the Le Monde writers perceptively noted, �George W. Bush has made neoconservative intellectuals and Christian fundamentalists live and work together, a surprising and explosive ideological cocktail.� An accomplishment of sorts for a simple-minded Texas cowboy with a limited vocabulary. Just how many of the PNAC�s neocon Jewish intellectuals will convert to Christianity when Armageddon and the Second Coming occur, according to fundamentalist Biblical prophecy, is open to speculation. ***** The neocons preach, and certainly have convinced the Bush Government, that the US should use its pre-eminence as the sole surviving military superpower to crush all states and organizations that pose a threat, actual or potential, to it, and at the same time propagate the political, economic and social values of America to the entire world, especially to the Third World, precisely in order to pre-empt, counteract and minimize that threat. To that end, the neocons urged the Bush Government to take military control of the Middle East �whether or not Saddam Hussein remains in power�; �discourage advanced and industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global roles�; encourage �regime change� in China; �increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia�; create �US space forces� to dominate space; control cyberspace to prevent �enemies from using the Internet against the US�; consider developing biological weapons �that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool�. (All the quotes above are from the Meacher article.) In September 2000, the PNAC acknowledged that �the process of transforming the US into �tomorrow�s dominant force� is likely to be a long one �in the absence of some catastrophic and cataclysmic event, such as a new Pearl Harbor.�� Fortuitously for the neocons, the al-Qaeda�s suicide attacks on US soil on 9/11/01 provided exactly that �new Pearl Harbor�, giving the Bush Government an �extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC blueprint into action.� Meacher alleges that �plans for military action in Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11;� they had been drawn up then to address the problem of securing oil and gas supplies. MP Meacher also alleges that �US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11,� despite warnings from the intelligence agencies of 11 countries, including two senior (Israeli) Mossad agents �who were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and the FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.� The list of 200 terrorists included four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested. Meacher mentions other intelligence lapses too numerous and detailed to insert in this article. MP Meacher is saying that some members of the Bush team, not necessarily including Dubya himself, knew in advance about 9/11 but deliberately allowed it to happen in order to permit the neocon-PNAC blueprint to play out. That may sound far out in left field, but it is a fact that the White House did resist for more than a year calls in the Senate for an investigation of the pre-9/11 intelligence readings, and when the White House finally relented, it was on the strict condition that when the Senate committee published its report, as it did early this year, certain sensitive passages and entire pages would be blocked out from the public eye, as indeed they were. It is interesting to examine the intellectual underpinnings of the neocons. But there is no space here to delve into the teachings of their spiritual godfather, the German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss. Perhaps in another article. Those in a hurry to read up on or about Leo (not Levi) Strauss are advised to access the Le Monde article by Frachon and Vernet cited earlier in this piece. ***** The bulk of this article appears in the October 25, 2003 issue of the Philippines Free Press. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Understanding Bush� ----- Original Message ----- Subject: Understanding Bush �... my position has remained valid, especially in the light of the US failure to find in Iraq any weapons of mass destruction or any substantive link between the Saddam Hussein regime and the events of 9/11, the two official US rationales for the invasion of Iraq.� . UN Security Council resolution no. 1414, not these two�. [email protected] October 18, 2003 ������������������������������� Dear Tony, Another outstanding article. Has the CIA or MOSSAD contacted you lately? Rick B. Ramos, [email protected] October 18, 2003 ................................................................................................................................................. MR ANTONIO: THANK YOU FOR YOUR ARTICLE WHICH GOES INTO DETAIL. SMALL CORRECTION ON PRES BUSH. HE WAS AN EXECUTIVE OF ONLY SMALL OIL COMPANIES. HE WAS A BOARD OF DIRECTOR ON HARKEN ENERGY (HEC) AND SPECTRUM SEVEN ENERGY WHICH WAS AQUIRED BY HARKEN. HE LEFT THE BOARD OF HARKEN MANY YEARS AGO AND THEN GOT INTO BASEBALL OWNERSHIP. I THINK IT IS SAFE TO SAY THAT BUSH WAS INFLUENCED BY HIS CURRENT DEFENSE DEPT LEADERS BUT NOT NECESSARILY THE ARMY GENERALS THEMSELVES WHO DISAGREED WITH RUMMY AND WOLFY. WHY THEY DID IT IS NOT TOO HARD TO SEE-OIL AND THE ABILITY TO PROJECT POWER. THE PROBLEM IS THAT WE ARE RUNNING THE WAR INCORECTLY AND IF WE DO NOT GET SOME SORT OF BREAKTHROUGH WE COULD END UP IN A SORT OF VIETNAM OR AFGHANISTAN LIKE THE RUSSIANS DID WITH NO END GAME EXCEPT TO PULL OUT OR TO TRY TO TRANSFER POWER TO A POORLY TRAINED IRAQI FORCE. IF THE US CAN GET THE UN TO PUT IN SUFFICIENT TROOPS WE MAY GET A RESPITE. THIS WAR IS CAUSING LOTS OF HIDDEN DAMAGE WITHIN OUR ARMED FORCES, MOSTLY THE ARMY AND THE GUARD AND RESERVES. IN MY OPINION, RUMMY AND WOLFY DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING AT THIS TIME. BUSH HAS TO BE CAREFUL THIS THING DOES NOT RUIN HIS FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL CAREER SO HE NEEDS TO HAVE A GOOD END GAME HERE. THE COMMANDER OF EITHER 3 CORPS OR 5 CORPS, I DO NOT REMEMBER, JUST THE OTHER DAY SAID THAT WE COULD HAVE OUR TROOPS IN IRAQ FOR ANOTHER 6 YEARS. HE SHOULD KNOW, HE COMMANDS THE IRAQI AREA. TONY DANGELO, [email protected] October 19, 2003 �����������������������������������������������. Maybe Bush is singular-minded but: 1. Security of Israel is a bi-partisan consensus in the US and worldwide it has a huge reservoir of support. After all, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. 2. If only the ragheads can straighten themselves out and use their petro resources for their own people's good maybe we will have a more stable Middle East. Do you still recall the oil embargo the ragheads made to support their war against Israel? 3. What a pity that many places in Iraq use camel dung for fuel. Saddam and all the ragheads before him didn't even think of piping LPG or LNG for their people. And this is all because of a Zionist conspiracy. Ross Tipon, [email protected] October 19, 2003 MY REPLY. I did not write that Bush was singular-minded. I wrote that he was simple-minded. There is a whale of a difference between being focused and being dumb. �����������������������������.. Glad you finally came around on this topic. Mild mentioning of it a few times in the past used to earn only your terse dismissal as traditional or inbred anti-Semitism. There is, of course, much more about this topic. Especially who masterminded 9/11. Anyone aware of Pearl Harbor's true background has serious reason to doubt the official 9/11 story. And the mother of all, centralized monopoly control over America's - and by extension the world's - money and credit. If control over money and credit were spread out and in the hands of myriads of little communities, none of the big political, economic and moral outrages or crimes of the 20th century could even have taken place, and it would sound like wild phantasmagoria to even speculate how today's world could look without them. Another point I made to you about who would be next in line for attack was Syria. Recent events seem to confirm that this reading was correct, in spite of much conflicting media coverage to pull wool over people's eyes. Regards, Peter J. Ritter, [email protected] October 19, 2003 MY REPLY. I have not �finally come around on this topic.� I am still generally pro-Israel and I still admire the Jews for their intelligence, creativity and resourcefulness. Similarly, I am still generally pro-American. However, the rise to power of Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush, and the harsh policies that both have pursued, have tempered but not reversed my positive feelings for the two countries. That the present American president is strongly influenced by Christian fundamentalists and neoconservative Jewish intellectuals into an extremely activist pro-Israel posture is a recent development that does not negate the previous 220 years of American history. I certainly do not share your expressed belief that 9/11 was masterminded by Jews. That has as much credible intellectual content as the belief of my American redneck acquaintance that the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed by Muslims. As for the Jews� historical pre-eminence in banking and finance, who is to blame for that? For centuries your ancestors in Europe were forbidden by Christian church doctrine from lending money with interest because this was considered an immoral, unnatural and sinful act, condemned by St. Thomas Aquinas on the Aristotelian logic that an inanimate object (money) cannot possibly bear fruit like an animate object. This has not prevented the Christian churches from eventually engaging in banking themselves. But the Jews got there first and had no competition for several centuries. To this day, Muslims are still forbidden by their religion to lend money with interest, though this has not prevented the Muslim sheiks from lending their petro-dollars with interest to your gnomes in Zurich (and elsewhere), both Christian and Jewish. There is enough hypocrisy to go around to all sides so that there is no reason for anyone to feel morally or racially superior to others. ������������������������� Most interesting. Thanks Tony for sharing your columns via email. Romy Bernardo, [email protected] October 21, 2003 ���������������������������������� Tony - Congratulations on your great, and revealing column. Our view is now gaining currency since Mahathir's recent remarks. I only hope that the US public will wake up eventually to the fact that their government is leading them to disaster by allowing Israel to dominate US policy re the Middle East. Regards, Ken Wright, [email protected] October 23, 2003 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |