Ari Fleischer: Les. Reporter: Ari, the New Yorker reports that only four months ago the U.S. government gave $40 million to the Taliban, and the Washington Times reports that since the Oslo Accords the U.S. has given $900 million to the PLO, which produces suicide bombers and thousands who cheered at the September 11th mass murder. And my question is, why does the President allow such federal government expenditures? Fleischer: Well, the President – if your question is about the Middle East, the President does believe it's very important to work with the various sides in the Middle East to help bring about peace. Reporter [incredulous]: Nine-hundred-million dollars?
Fleischer: I don't have the precise figure in front of me, Les. I can't indicate that that's an accurate number or not. But the President has said that it's important to work with the parties to help bring them together, to create peace in the Middle East. – White House Press Briefing Oct. 1, 2001
Thus emerged a most astounding bombshell in an exchange between a White-House spokesman and a reporter which floated away unexamined in the rest of the media. This was no accident, since such facts are a devastating repudiation of the activist foreign policy agenda.
Before proceeding further, I'd first like to thank Gary North for reporting in these pages about the real reasons Evangelical Christians have for supporting the continued existence of the state of Israel. (Hint: it has nothing to do with a special love for, or affinity with, us Jews and of course we Jews have long known that.) Unfortunately, cynical and thoroughly self serving agendas are hardly endemic to just Evangelicals. The ghastly events that occurred in our nation on September 11, 2001 have inspired me to come forward to blow the whistle about more of the same, this time from some members of the establishment leadership of the American gentile and Jewish communities bent on using their influence in tandem with that of the U.S. military-industrial complex to perpetuate more warfare by both the U.S. and Israel, and hence inspire more terrorist reprisals against both nations.
A Parting of Ways Over War
Having the surname of Israel, gentile friends and acquaintances have sometimes made sweeping assumptions about my allegiances, all of which reveal stereotypes some American gentiles have acquired about their Jewish countrymen: supporting a whole host of leftist/neocon policies of mass Third-World immigration, gun control, high rates of taxation and government spending; and apologias ad infinitum support for foreign aid to nations such as Israel, Egypt, and Russia (inevitably ending up in the pockets of corrupt politicians, oligarchs, or psychotically-brutal military officers).
The assumptions that because I'm Jewish, I – like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – support the Marc Rich pardon, advocate letting the traitorous spy criminal Jonathan Pollard out of prison, or condone the unconscionable June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty have now become intolerable and I'm more than happy to join syndicated columnist Mona Charen and a few others to emphasize that the ADL and the American Jewish Congress don't speak for all American Jews.
Surnames aside, the current leftist-neocon (Albright-Wolfowitz) foreign-policy edifice is not only morally and intellectually vacuous, but unsustainable. One sign of this was U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's trip to the Mideast in early October to bribe his way to cohesiveness for the current shaky international coalition supporting the War on Terrorism.
The Myth of Vital Interest
There is certainly nothing wrong with favoring the existence of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. This proposition, though, is entirely different from making the case for U.S.-taxpayer support of said entity and attempts to conflate the two propositions by Zionists of all stripes (from William Bennett to Madeleine Albright) have been characterized by a dialogue of evasiveness, circuity, and intellectual dishonesty. Over the years, the only reason for U.S.-taxpayer support that stands up to any coherent argument is that Israel's Mossad constitutes an important intelligence outpost in the Mideast worth $5 billion per fiscal year in direct and indirect U.S.-taxpayer funded support of the government of Israel. The restated proposition (revealing the starkly tenuous position of its advocates) is, the Mossad is an American public good.
Now the case for economic public goods, as our late, great Jewish friend Murray Rothbard indicated, is pretty weak. But the Mossad as an American public good? Pure chutzpah of the most blatant kind. First is the assumption that a viable, truly free and non-aggressive state needs to gather intelligence. Why would such a state need to do so? If it's not meddling in other nations' affairs and thus creating enemies that want to harm it, what is the reason for a costly, centralized, bureaucratic intelligence agency? Indeed, the gathering of intelligence is an aggressive act per se. It necessarily consists of an invasion of privacy, lies, deceptions, betrayal, and a deliberate invasion of and breaking of the laws of the targeted nation(s).
(Humorous sidebar: You can tell I was never much a fan of James Bond movies. One forensic thread running through the entire series is a public-good rationale for the existence of James Bond and his fancy taxpayer-funded rocket cars and sex flings with beautiful women. Prince Charles never had it so good. And poor Brad Edmonds thinks The Andy Griffith Show had a sinister agenda.)
Hence, a truly peaceful nation has no need for an intelligence bureaucracy, whether it's the CIA or Mossad. Both of the latter certainly blew it in terms of warning Americans about the September 11 U.S. attacks. (We're now learning that a sizable fraction of Brooklyn's Arab-American community had foreknowledge of the attack but chose to remain silent.) Besides, "intelligence agency" is an oxymoron. These agencies are anything but bright and they're notoriously bad at keeping secrets, the John Deutch (17,000 pages of "classified" documents on his home computer) and Aldrich Ames scandals notwithstanding.
Even the awkwardly-named
Senate Intelligence Committee – with 17 members – can't keep a secret. Recall the Bush administration's fury at Orrin Hatch (R, UT) for spilling the beans that the U.S. suspected bin Laden's Al Queda sponsored the terrorist attacks right after they occurred on the basis of information gathered from an intercepted phone call. (By the way, why isn't the German intelligence agency which intercepted that phone call considered a "vital American interest" necessitating the support of $5 billion of U.S. foreign aid to the German government every year? )
If the rationale for U.S. taxpayer support of Israel is shaky, it's nonexistent for Egypt. In fact the basis for Egyptian aid is placation of resentment in the Arab world aroused by U.S. aid to Israel. (Rothbard again: government meddling on an international level always self-perpetuates reasons for yet further meddling just as it always will on a domestic level.)
Saudi Arabia might be considered a plausible vital interest because it supplies the U.S. with a significant portion of its demand for oil. The root of the matter is, outside of the Saudi royal family (and even inside it, below the surface), there is a great hatred of the U.S. both for its support of Israel and its occupation of the Arabian peninsula. These two actions were indispensable in creating the U.S. enemies of Osama bin Laden (a Saudi national) and 16 of the 19 September 11, 2001 hijackers who were Saudi nationals.
With the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, four airliners, and anthrax cases in New York and Florida, Americans have finally seen the chickens of Mideast meddling come home to roost. The real question is how do we, as grassroots Americans, bring about a change in policy?
First, by naming the real enemies of reform (hint: Osama bin Laden isn't one of them).
u2018The Second Most Powerful Lobby in Washington'
While the case for foreign aid is tenuous, there's little indication that it will stop anytime soon given two very powerful lobbies that have an incentive to maintain the current perverse geopolitical nexi. Next to the American Association of Retired Persons, the most powerful lobby in Washington according to Fortune Magazine is The America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an unholy creation of gentile and Jewish war Zionists. By wining, dining, and filling up the campaign war chests of U.S. politicians, it is able to cajole $5 billion in money, weapons, and loan guarantees from U.S. taxpayers every year and give them to the Israeli government. AIPAC, more than any other lobbying group, has almost singlehandedly commandeered U.S. foreign policy and skewed it overwhelmingly in favor of the Israeli side of the Mideast conflict.
AIPAC is careful not only to have its dollars gushing into the campaign coffers of Senators and Representatives, it also has more than a sufficient amount of its emissaries in journalism and government, all of them issuing decrees (actually veiled threats aimed at George W. Bush and Colin Powell should they stray from the AIPAC reservation) calling for endless war around the world, and very conveniently the enemies list is helpfully prioritized toward Israel's most threatening foes. Thus we have de facto Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz calling for the War on Terrorism to include not only Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden but also the Taliban, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Iran, as well as terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbolla, PLF, PIJ, PFLP, PFLP-GC, Al-Jihad, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, and AIG. These latter groups have operations in Egypt, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Lebanon, U.K., Algeria, Austria, Israel (and its occupied territories), Lebanon, Germany, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. It's all an endless neocon world war in the making.
Unfortunately the Wolfowitz Crusade is a piker's agenda compared to that favored by Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century. Donnelly and Schmitt want an imminent full-blown subjugation of Iraq with the details worked out later. "[T]he attack [need not] await the deployment of half a million troops…The larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over." David Tell of The Weekly Standard has even grander plans. He wants immediate destruction of not only past subsidizers of terror (regardless of what they're doing today) but wants destruction of "any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future." Can anyone say, "Saudi royal family"? The October 15 edition of the New Yorker did.
Despite its tectonic influence and power in Washington D.C., few people have ever heard of AIPAC. It has been able to repose quietly under the radar for way too long. For grass-roots activists to bring about any sea change in Mideast policy this much change. Like Handgun Control Incorporated, its evil deeds must be flushed out, exposed, and constantly put under the closest scrutiny. AIPAC lackeys in Congress need to be written, telephoned, e-mailed, and humiliated in town hall after town hall for their treasonous support for a lobby with interests so antithetical to those conducive to keeping our national peace and tranquility.
And Then There Were…More Than Three
It would be naive or unscrupulous to portray AIPAC as the lone root of recent U.S. terrorism. The second crucial half of the equation is the military-industrial complex, a public-private Leviathan defending the military-budget demand for its product: weapons of widespread destruction and the know-how of their use. The military-industrial complex is composed of roughly three main components: the armed services (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines), the centralized bureaucratic military leadership (the Department of Defense headquartered at the Pentagon), and private defense contractors. This is a formidable hydra to be sure, but grassroots pressure can be effective by focusing on the lifeblood of these entities: specific expenditures in the federal budget that need to be as every bit vigorously as publicized, protested, and de-funded as foreign aid.
Armed Services: All outposts of U.S. armed services personnel outside of the continental United States, Hawaii, and Alaska must immediately be defunded. Officers who wish to continue living overseas will have to do so on their own dime. The U.S. Military Empire currently maintains at least an astounding 30 outposts around the world:
Europe (120,000 troops scattered throughout in Iceland, Britain, Germany, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and afloat on vessels near those nations). Middle East (30,000 troops scattered throughout Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and afloat on vessels near those nations). Asia (100,000 troops in South Korea, Japan, and afloat on vessels near those nations).
Along with the worldwide War Empire, the military leadership at the Pentagon which administers it must be defunded. While we're at it, let's unplug the State Department, the National Security Council at the White House, and the CIA as well.
Last of all, there must be a conversion away from war production to consumer goods at a number of defense contractors. Those who can't make it in the market for consumer goods will meet a welcome demise in the competitive marketplace as they should. From a quick search, they include but certainly aren't limited to the following corporations:
Aircraft (Murder From Above):
- Lockeed Martin: F-117 Stealth Fighter, F-16 Falcon, AC-130A Spectre Gunship.
- Northrop Grumman: B2 Stealth Bomber
- General Electric: fighter jet aircraft engines on F/A-18 Hornet, F-14B & D Tomcat
- Pratt & Whitney: fighter jet aircraft engines on F-14 Tomcat and F-15 Eagle
- Rockwell International, North American Aircraft: B-1 bomber
- Boeing: Bombers: B-15 Stratofortress, B-1B Lancer, B-2 Spirit. Fighters: F/A-18 Hornet, F-15 Eagle, F-22 Raptor, AV-8B Harrier II. Attack Helicopters: AH-64 Apache
- Fairchild Republic Corporation: A-10 Thunderbolt
- Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc.: AH-1 Cobra and SuperCobra attack helicopters
- Sikorsky: UH-60L Blackhawk attack helicopter
- General Dynamics: RAH-66 Comanche attack helicopter.
Missiles (Murder from Afar):
- General Dynamics: Tomahawk cruise missile, V-22.
- Morton Thiokol: AGM-88 HARM missile, AGM-65 Maverick
- Raytheon: AIM-9 Sidewinder missile, AIM-54 Phoenix missile, Sparrow missile
- Teledyne Brown: Harpoon and Harpoon/SLAM missiles
- Lockeed: GBU-28 "bunker buster"
Warships (Murder from the Oceans):
- Newport News Shipbuilding Company: aircraft carriers Truman, Nimitz, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Vinson.
- Bath Iron Works
- Ingalls Shipbuilding: Arleigh Burke and Spruance class destroyers
Murder on the Ground:
- Colt Industries: M-16 and M-203 assault rifles
- General Dynamics: M1A2 Abrams Tank; Crusader, and Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle
Bring the War Home 21st-Century Style
In the September 16 issue of the U.K. Independent, Robert Fisk details his own confrontation with the AIPAC-military industrial complex war machine:
America's name is literally stamped on to the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. Only four weeks ago, I identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in – of all places – Florida…[it] was fired by the Israelis into the back of an ambulance near the Lebanese village of Mansori, killing two women and four children. I collected the pieces of the missile, including its computer coding plate, flew to Georgia and presented them to the manufacturers at the Boeing factory. And what did the developer of the missile say to me when I showed him photographs of the children his missile had killed? "Whatever you do," he told me, "don't quote me as saying anything critical of the policies of Israel."
The companies listed above must not be allowed to continue rationalizing and burying their heads in the sand about the murder to which they are willing accomplices. Taking a page from the anti-abortion movement, the victims of these corporations need to have their images (maimed, mutilated all) put on large posters and paraded outside company headquarters and munitions plants like the one in Georgia mentioned by Fisk. Let employees who have young sons and daughters have to drive in and out of their workplace every day and face the indirect results of their handiwork and have trouble sleeping at night. The Nazi excuses that "we were just following orders" or "we just wanted to make a living" didn't work at Nuremberg, and it shouldn't work at missile factories in Georgia.
Foreign Policy: A New Paleolibertarian Agenda
[A] passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation…betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions…by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible – George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796.
Lesley Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died [as the result of UN sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And – and you know, is the price worth it? Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it – "Punishing Saddam," 60 Minutes, CBS Television, May 12, 1996.
After working vigorously to de-fund the American war empire in its various guises of foreign outposts, foreign lobbies, and private defense contractors, a new domestic agenda must be pursued as well. It would include but not necessarily be limited to:
Declare and practice a policy of neutrality in all disputes between foreign nations. George Washington's warning against foreign alliances should have been heeded. Immediately deport all lobbyists and ambassadors for foreign interests. Likewise, we should bring all our ambassadors home. The entire ambassadorial system has encouraged the growth and entrenchment of a activist foreign-policy establishment. Nine of the infamous nineteen September 11 hijackers were living in the U.S. legally. Three had expired visas and seven had no records at all. Solution: repeal the Immigration Act of 1965 and enact a permanent Constitutional ban on legal immigration (illegal immigrants would be immediately deported with repeat offenders receiving lifetime sentences of hard labor in prison). Yes, Mrs. Linda Chavez, it's true that the price of farm products would increase in the absence of your beloved Mexican illegal immigration. It would be well worth it. You and your neocon friends who've attended Ivy-League schools and never held real jobs in your entire lives (apart from making public policy decrees that govern a real world you've never lived in) will just have to pay a little more money from now on to entice the "little people" to clean the toilets and scrub the floors in your mansions. This may be unsettling to you, but from now on you're just going to have to (gasp!) put the peace and tranquility of our nation above your own incredibly selfish, elite interests. Either get over it or get out of OUR country. Repeal all gun control laws including the National Firearms Act of 1934 (which banned private possession of automatic weapons). Terrorism is not only a Muslim flying a plane into a World Trade Center tower, it is also domestic criminal endeavors such as carjackings, home-invasion robberies, burglaries, assaults, and rapes. All American citizens must be properly armed to fight criminals, whoever or wherever they are.
All in all the American public, who has so ignored the wisdom of its first president expressed 205 years ago, is the body that bears the most responsibility for the mess in which we currently find ourselves. They are a groupthinking sheeple, that have allowed many adverse changes to take effect in this country in return for some perceived personal payoff (Social Security, veterans benefits, housing and farm subsidies, SSI, HUD, ad infinitum, ad nauseum). In this regard they have helped create an environment that naturally facilitates the buying and selling of government policy. In this environment, why would AIPAC and the military-industrial complex not partake of mass largesse as well? They'd be crazy not to. It's time for Americans to abandon their hypocrisy of "largesse for me but not for thee" and unqualifiedly unplug the entire big government establishment (not just those areas they happen to dislike). Failure to do so will not only bring us more passenger jets turned into kamikaze missiles, but nuclear terrorism as well.
October 24, 2001
