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.American
Free Press |
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| .Volume
V.#29/30.Jul
18&25, 2005.americanfreepress.net |
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P. 21, AMERICAN
FREE PRESS * July 18 & 25, 2005...
Eye on Israel
with Michael Collins Piper
Will America
Be Dragged
Into
More
Wars for Israel?
By Michael Collins Piper
 |
The
reverberations from the ugly and devastating U.S. invasion of Iraq
continue to echo around the globe. As time passes, the truth about
why the United States waged war against Iraq is becoming all the
more obvious: it was all about U.S. favoritism toward Israel.
A damning indictment of the U.S. “special relationship”
with Israel and how it led to the invasion of Iraq has now come
in a new book by veteran international correspondent John Cooley
entitled An Alliance Against Babylon: The U.S., Israel,
and Iraq (Pluto Press, 2005). Cooley, formerly a correspondent
for ABC News and The Christian Science Monitor,
points out that most contemporary coverage of the two wars the United
States has engaged in against Iraq “ignore an important factor,”
that being “the role played by Israel, and the relationships,
antagonistic and otherwise, of the Jewish people with the people
and states of former Mesopotamia, now Iraq, from Old Testament Bible
times until now.”
Although many critics of the war loudly proclaim that the war is
“about oil,” Cooley’s cogently argued historical
work makes it clear that the war was really — as former Sen.
Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) said, shortly before his retirement —
about “President Bush’s policy to secure Israel.”
PULLS NO PUNCHES
Cooley’s overview of Israel’s terror war against the
British occupation forces in Palestine in the late 1940s pulls no
punches. He points out that when Jewish underground forces blew
up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on June 22, 1946, the Jewish
terrorists were “disguised as Arabs,” a tactic that
has long been used by Israel in various terrorist endeavors.
In the massacre at the King David — which was the British
military headquarters — Begin’s team left 90 people
dead, including 15 Jews, demonstrating that, contrary to what many
misinformed people believe, the Israelis are willing to sacrifice
their own for what might they perceive as “the greater good.”
Regarding Iraq itself, while Cooley is no defender of Saddam Hussein,
he makes it clear that despite the fact that there was domestic
opposition to Saddam — largely the Kurdish minority, Shia
Muslim clergy and communists — “all of these groups
had been weakened by [the] emergence of the growingly prosperous
and politically docile middle class that Saddam had taken pains
to create.”
In other words, while Saddam was indeed killing Islamic religious
hard-liners — the same people that President George Bush proudly
declared his intention to kill anywhere he found them — Saddam
was setting in place a strong country with a thriving middle class.
It is thus no wonder that prior to the first American attack on
Iraq — in 2001 — followed by crippling sanctions imposed
on the country at the insistence of the United States, both the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were preparing to
declare Iraq a “First World nation.”
Cooley also examines the evidence that has already been outlined
by Christopher Bollyn in American Free Press,
namely “allegations about Israeli involvement” in the
infamous Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which, as Cooley notes, were
“repeated by Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, the U.S. officer
in charge of Abu Ghraib.”
In summarizing the consequences of the bloody American venture in
Iraq — which shows no sign of getting any better — Cooley
notes that the destruction of Iraq’s armed forces, a “cherished
objective” of Israel, had been accomplished “largely
without loss of either Israeli blood or treasure.” Cooley
says that there will never be peace in the Middle East, as he first
asserted in the 1960s and repeats today, “there is a fair
settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.”
On May 11, the New York-based Forward,
a leading Jewish community newspaper, reported that Barry Jacobs
of the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee said that
he believes there are high-ranking officials inside the U.S. intelligence
community who are hostile to Israel and are waging war against pro-Israel
lobbyists and their neo-conservative allies in the inner circles
of the Bush administration.
Citing the ongoing FBI investigation of possible espionage by officials
of AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobby group, Forward
reported that Jacobs believes, in Forward’s
summary, that “the notion that American Jews and Pentagon
neo-conservatives conspired to push the United States into war against
Iraq, and possibly also against Iran, is pervasive in Washington’s
intelligence community.”
Meanwhile, more and more voices, in high places, are publicly raising
questions about the validity of Israel’s foundation as the
state that exists today. To the distress of many, a respected British-based
Jewish academic, Prof. Jacqueline Rose, issued a new book, The
Question of Zion, published by the distinguished Princeton
University Press, saying that Zionism as a historical experiment
has failed and that Zionism is, as she puts it, “in danger
of destroying itself.”
Critics said that Rose has “demonized” Israel, but the
problem for supporters of Israel is that many people share her concerns.
NEW BOOK
Now with the advent of Cooley’s new book regarding the U.S.
and Israel vis-à-vis Iraq, what is so remarkable is that
Cooley’s thesis mirrors — from both a historical standpoint
and from a current events standard — a thesis regarding Israel’s
central positioning in U.S. policy toward Iran outlined in 1991
in the book Iran, Israel and the United States by a leading American
conservative academic, Dr. Henry Paolucci.
In addition, as far back as June 14, 1994, in a story beginning
on page one, The Washington Post let the
cat out of the bag when it declared, in a headline on the inner
“jump” page, that “CIA sees nuclear weapons program
in North Korea as a threat to Israel,” reporting that —
effectively unbeknownst to most Americans — the real concern
about North Korea’s nuclear aims is actually founded on the
security interests not of the United States, but those of Israel.
So the “theory” that Israel is a cause of America’s
plight in the world today is not just limited to the problem of
Iraq. It goes much, much further.
As the Bush administration and its allies in Israel continue to
raise the question of whether Iran is engaged in nuclear weapons
development, and whether North Korea’s nuclear intentions
are dangerous, Americans would do well to ponder the simple questions:
“Is it worth it? Are Israel’s interests really those
of America — and vice versa?”
( #29/30.... July 18 & 25, 2005
.
American Free Press)
