Israel escalates efforts to get US to attack Iran, as it did Iraq

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From If Americans Knew:
Israel escalates efforts to get US to attack Iran, as it did Iraq
https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-escalates-efforts-to-get-us-to-attack-iran-as-it-did-iraq/

For many years, Israel and its U.S. advocates have pushed the U.S. to attack Iran, as they pushed  https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-loyalists-embedded-in-u-s-government-pushed-us-into-iraq-war/  the U.S. into the disastrous Iraq War that destroyed multitudes of lives and led to the rise of ISIS...

Recently, Israel used the Afghan exit to promote hostile U.S. policies on behalf of Israel against Iran – policies that could escalate into another disastrous, failed war
Some analysts from across the political spectrum have exposed and opposed these dangerous efforts – including Democracy Now, CounterPunch, Tucker Carlson, Pat Buchanan...

By Alison Weir

As the US was finally in the process of trying to exit the disastrous, 20-year Afghan war in August, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett came to Washington D.C. to push Biden to increase US hostilities against Iran.

Israeli insiders revealed ahead of Bennet's White House visit that Israel planned to use the 'humiliating surrender of the US to the Taliban' to lead Biden to 'flex US muscle toward Iran.' Naftali Bennett's mission in meeting with Biden was, they reported, to convince him that Iran 'poses a tangible and significant threat to the entire world,' and that the U.S. must take action against Iran.

Recently, Israel's defense minister and the head of the Mossad visited Biden with what it claimed was "intelligence about Iranians' uranium enrichment," reminiscent of earlier claims about what turned out to be Iraq's non-existent "weapons of mass destruction."

On Dec. 2nd, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett phoned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to pressure him on Iran. According to Israeli media the call was "long and tough." Blinken, an Israel partisan who helped procure a quarter of a billion dollars for Israel during its 2014 bombing of Gaza, said he'd had "a very good" talk with Bennett, adding: "We have exactly the same strategic objectives."

And just a few days ago Israel's defense minister and head of the Mossad came to DC to once again pressure Biden officials on Iran. According to the Times of Israel, they're pushing for the U.S. to take military action against Iran.

This is not new.

'Israelis willing to fight Iran until the last American soldier stands'
Donald Trump recently said that he had discovered early in his presidential tenure that Netanyahu was not interested in pursuing a peace deal; instead he was trying to "use him against Iran."

Ha'aretz reports that according to a US official, "Trump was mad at Netanyahu and said that the Israelis are willing to fight Iran until the last American soldier stands."

This is part of a decades long Israeli strategy that has created tragedy and destruction – all so that Israel can maintain its project to establish an exclusionary Jewish state on land whose population was originally 95 percent Muslim and Christian. Many Americans have been collateral damage.

From its earliest days, Israel planned a strategy by which it would damage and fragment others in the region so that it could achieve and maintain hegemony. Israel's first Prime Minister detailed this strategy in the 1950s, and other analysts proposed plans to implement it in the years since (more details are below).

Pro-Israel organizations and individuals target Iran

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPptjWfRWRE

While numerous Jewish individuals disagree with this goal and many are working for peace, for many years the powerful Jewish establishment in the U.S. has disseminated anti-Iran messaging. (This was also the case for the the Iraq War. As Michelle Goldberg reported in Salon: "Mainstream Jewish groups and leaders are now among the strongest supporters of an American invasion of Baghdad.")

A 2010 full page advertisement in the New York Times is an example:

  New York Times advertisement demonizing Iran with the list of groups that paid for it. 

One of the many Israel loyalists embedded within the US government who has long worked to protect Israel and to foment anti-Iran policies is Dennis Ross, currently a counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel lobbying organization.

Analyst Phillip Giraldi writes: "Ross was a fixture in senior national security positions relating to the Middle East under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As an ardent Israel firster, Ross was dubbed 'Israel's lawyer' by colleagues and was once admonished in a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who interrupted him when he was arguing in extenso on behalf of Israel. She said that in the future when she wanted the Israel-Likud position from him she would ask for it."

In July, Bloomberg featured an article by Ross entitled "To Deter Iran, Give Israel a Big Bomb." In the piece, Ross advocates providing Israel the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound mountain-buster, the world's largest non-nuclear bomb. Two Israel advocates in Congress have introduced legislation to give the bomb to Israel (renewed since).

Giraldi writes that the bomb would give Israel "the means to start a major regional war that would likely escalate to include direct US involvement."

Journalist Philip Weiss similarly reported that Israel partisan Mark Dubowitz "is seeking to use the Afghan debacle to derail a return to the Iran deal." Dubowitz is CEO of the Foundation For the Defense of Democracy, another Israel-advocacy think tank.

Neocons previously promoted disastrous Iraq war
The Israeli media and some U.S. analysts have long reported that Israel partisans were a key factor in pushing the disastrous attack on Iraq, which has cost the U.S. at least two trillion dollars, nearly 7,000 American soldiers' lives (untold more with life-long injuries), around 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (many of them children), the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and the rise of ISIS.

And these numbers are a conservative estimate. Brown University's reports: "20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion and have killed more than 900,000 people."

  Old City district of Mosul, Iraq.   

  In October 2005, Bryan Anderson lost both legs and his left hand while serving in Iraq. He is one of at least 1,500 service members who have lost limbs in combat since the wars began in 2001. 

While some excellent documentaries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7MBv9FixxE  have exposed how the fraudulent claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction caused the war, these largely omit the pro-Israel causation.

Former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has discussed this in detail. Naming names in a must-read 2002 article, Christison pointed out:

...It's time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.

Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties – the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium......

... Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, their ties to Israel have generally been treated very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration, little has been said about the link between this goal and the neo-cons' overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel activists...

Pentagon insider & Israeli media...
Similarly, an Air Force officer who served in the top echelons of the Pentagon has reported her eye-witness account about how Israel partisans embedded in a secretive office in the Pentagon manufactured anti-Iraq disinformation and disseminated it to the White House and American public. She stated that the "Office of Special Plans was a propaganda office. It was not the expanded Iraq desk. It was a neoconservative propaganda office."

Israeli media were not shy about reporting this aspect. For example, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz stated on April 4, 2001:

"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history."

Speaking to Israeli journalist Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in May 2003, said:

"[Iraq was] the war the neoconservatives wanted ... the war the neoconservatives marketed ... I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington, D.C.]), who, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."

Image from "The Neocons: First in War, Last in Peace"   

There is considerable evidence that these neocons were the decisive factor in the U.S. going to war.

In their book on the Israel Lobby, University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard professor Stephen Walt, write that "the neoconservatives—most notably Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis—played a critical role in persuading the president and vice president to favor war."

"Vice President Cheney had maintained throughout the 1990s that conquering Iraq would be a major strategic blunder and he did not sign either of the letters calling for military action against Saddam that the neoconservatives sent to President Clinton in early 1998."

They report that there was" little enthusiasm for going to war against Iraq inside the State Department, the intelligence community, or the uniformed military."

Neither were the oil interests interested in pushing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002–03. "The oil companies, as is almost always the case, wanted to make money, not war." This fact is also documented in two books on the topic.

The neocons waged an unrelenting campaign to win support for invading Iraq, constructing anti-Iraq propaganda that was fed to the administration and to the general American public.  Mearsheimer and Walt write that "well-known journalists like Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and William Safire" helped the neocon's drum beat for war.

How an alleged traitor became Dep. Assist. Secretary of Defense
Ha'aretz columnist Akiva Eldar is another Israeli journalist who discussed the topic, once observing:: "Perle, Feith, and their fellow strategists are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests."

There is evidence that a number ofthem seem to have stepped over that line, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Stephen Bryen.

Author Stephen Green wrote a a meticulously researched article in CounterPunch exposing some of this. Despite the fact that Green was the author of major books on the region, no mainstream U.S. media would publish Green's investigative exposé.

Following is the kind of information from Green's article that almost no one was willing to reveal: A case study of how an American allegedly guilty of espionage escaped prosecution and ws eventually appointed to a high governmental position with top secret clearance:

In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that [neocon Stephen] Bryen, then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution for espionage. John Davitt, then Chief of the Justice Department's Internal Security Division, concurred.

The evidence was strong. Bryen had been overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be poly-graphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed to be poly-graphed and passed the test.

The Bureau also had testimony from a second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee, that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah, discussing classified documents that were spread out on a table in front of an open safe in which the documents were supposed to be secured. Not long after this second witness came forward, Bryen's fingerprints were found on classified documents he'd stated in writing to the FBI he'd never had in his possession....the ones he'd allegedly offered to Rafiah.

Nevertheless, following the refusal of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access by Justice Department officials to files which were key to the investigation, Keuch's recommendation for a grand jury hearing, and ultimately the investigation itself, were shut down. This decision, taken by Philip Heymann, Chief of Justice's Criminal Division, was a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker, the lead investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer. A complicating factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court Clerk of Bryen's attorney, Nathan Lewin.

Bryen was asked to resign from his Foreign Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation was concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half, he served as Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to AIPAC.

In April, 1981, the FBI received an application by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security clearance for Dr. Bryen. Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, was proposing Bryen as his Deputy Assistant Secretary! Within six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-"NATO/COSMIC" clearances.

(Top L-R) The Justice Dept's Philip Heymann, attorney Nathan Lewin, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle helped Stephen Bryen (lower right), who had been witnessed giving Israel classified documents, become Deputy Assistant Secretary of defense with a top secret security clearance.

An Israeli analyst discussed one of the reasons such information rarely reaches the American public. He pointed out that Americans' information about Israel largely comes 

"from articles in the 'liberal' American press, written almost totally by Jewish admirers of Israel who, even if they are critical of some aspects of the Israeli state, practice loyally what Stalin used to call 'the constructive criticism. ..... it must be assumed that Israel has always 'good intentions' and only 'makes mistakes'...

In addition, Israel and its loyalists' work to cover up their actions. As Mearsheimer and Walt report:

Israel's enthusiasm for war eventually led some of its allies in America to tell Israeli officials to damp down their hawkish rhetoric, lest the war look like it was being fought for Israel. In the fall of 2002, for example, a group of American political consultants known as the Israel Project circulated a six-page memorandum to key Israelis and pro-Israel leaders in the United States. The memo was titled "Talking about Iraq" and was intended as a guide for public statements about the war. "If your goal is regime change, you must be much more careful with your language because of the potential backlash. You do not want Americans to believe that the war on Iraq is being waged to protect Israel rather than to protect America."

They write:

"[Then Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon told Israeli diplomats and politicians not to say anything that made it appear that Israel was pushing the Bush administration to topple Saddam. The Israeli leader was worried by the growing perception that Israel was advocating a U.S. invasion of Iraq. In fact, Israel was; it just did not want its position to be widely known."

Iraq War led to regional instability and devastation
In addition to the trillions of dollars and multitudes of lives lost because of the war, the destruction of Iraq led to the rise of the violent extremism that has beset the region, and beyond, ever since.

  Al-Nineveh Street, the commercial center of Mosul's Old City in Iraq, 2017. 

  2014 photo shows residents of the besieged Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus, Syria, queuing to receive food supplies.   

Such U.S. attacks have been disastrous both for the recipients and others. Analysts at the Cato Institute write in understated prose:

The lesson to draw about how to avoid future monsters like ISIS is not that sometimes America should be more eager to use force, but that military action, especially in the Middle East, inevitably delivers negative unintended consequences, and so should remain an absolute last resort.

The fact is, however, that some of the "unintended" consequences may not be wholly unintended by Israel. As General Wesley Clark said in a 2007 speech at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club:

This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup.... They wanted at us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtXA4DAl2W4

Clark also spoke about the push for war against Iran in a long interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOtbNC4oJ54

England's Guardian newspaper also reported the intentional nature of the chaos that has resulted:

For the hawks, disorder and chaos sweeping through the region would not be an unfortunate side-effect of war with Iraq, but a sign that everything is going according to plan.

In their eyes, Iraq is just the starting point – or, as a recent presentation at the Pentagon put it, "the tactical pivot" – for re-moulding the Middle East on Israeli-American lines

The Guardian specified:

Its roots can be traced, at least in part, to a paper published in 1996 by an Israeli thinktank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Entitled "A clean break: a new strategy for securing the realm", it was intended as a political blueprint for the incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu.....

The paper set out a plan by which Israel would "shape its strategic environment", beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad.

With Saddam out of the way and Iraq thus brought under Jordanian Hashemite influence, Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and "roll back" Syria. Jordan, it suggested, could also sort out Lebanon by "weaning" the Shia Muslim population away from Syria and Iran, and re-establishing their former ties with the Shia in the new Hashemite kingdom of Iraq. "Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them", the paper concluded.

To succeed, the paper stressed, Israel would have to win broad American support for these new policies – and it advised Mr Netanyahu to formulate them "in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the cold war which apply well to Israel".

At first glance, there's not much to distinguish the 1996 "Clean Break" paper from the outpourings of other right-wing and ultra-Zionist thinktanks ... except for the names of its authors.

The leader of the "prominent opinion makers" who wrote it was Richard Perle – now chairman of the Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon.

Also among the eight-person team was Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative lawyer, who now holds one of the top four posts at the Pentagon as under-secretary of policy.

Mr Feith has objected to most of the peace deals made by Israel over the years, and views the Middle East in the same good-versus-evil terms that he previously viewed the cold war. He regarded the Oslo peace process as nothing more than a unilateral withdrawal which "raises life-and-death issues for the Jewish state".

Two other opinion-makers in the team were David Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav (see US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy, August 19). Mrs Wurmser was co-founder of Memri, a Washington-based charity that distributes articles translated from Arabic newspapers portraying Arabs in a bad light. After working with Mr Perle at the American Enterprise Institute, David Wurmser is now at the State Department, as a special assistant to John Bolton, the under-secretary for arms control and international security.

A fifth member of the team was James Colbert, of the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) – a bastion of neo-conservative hawkery whose advisory board was previously graced by Dick Cheney (now US vice-president), John Bolton and Douglas Feith.

One of Jinsa's stated aims is "to inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East". In practice, a lot of its effort goes into sending retired American military brass on jaunts to Israel – after which many of them write suitably hawkish newspaper articles or letters to the editor.

.....With several of the "Clean Break" paper's authors now holding key positions in Washington, the plan for Israel to "transcend" its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to achieve it.

The six-year-old plan for Israel's "strategic environment" remains more or less intact, though two extra skittles – Saudi Arabia and Iran – have joined Iraq, Syria and Lebanon on the hit list...

Allan C. Brownfeld, of the American Council for Judaism, wrote in a 2015 article:

"Together with other elements of the Israel lobby, neoconservatives—the same people who successfully pushed the nation to war with Iraq, a country which never attacked us and never possessed "weapons of mass destruction"—are now promoting a war with Iran, a country more than three times the size of Iraq. 

   Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) meets with Middle East historian Bernard Lewis.   

Brownfeld reveals that pro-Israel historian and presidential advisor Bernard Lewis also disseminated the anti-Iran message:

In 2006, Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, an adviser to President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney, predicted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Iran's then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was going to end the world.

The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to the farthest mosque, usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary the world."

Neocons fund Tom Cotton's rise to power

  Tom Cotton (third from left) with Noah Pollak and Bill Kristol of the Emergency Committee for Israel. Kristol and cohort funded Cotton's rise to power.   

Brownfeld describes the neocons' role in the previously unknown Tom Cotton's ascendancy; all Cotton needed to do was be the front man for a letter against Iran, and the money came flowing in:

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) was an unknown before he prepared a letter signed by 47 Republicans to leaders in Iran warning against a nuclear agreement. He echoed all the points made by Netanyahu and by American neoconservative spokesmen. The Emergency Committee for Israel, led by Kristol, spent $960,000 to support Cotton in his Senate race in Arkansas. In that same race, a firm run by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire from New York and a leading donor to pro-Israel causes, contributed $250,000 to Arkansas Horizon, an independent expenditure group. Seth Klarman, a Boston-based pro-Israel billionaire, contributed $100,000 through his investment firm.

The political action committee run by Bolton spent at least $825,000 to support Cotton. That PAC is in part financed by other major pro-Israel donors, including "bingo king" Irving and Cherna Moskowitz of Miami, who fund illegal Jewish-only settlements in East Jerusalem.

Although Senator Cotton claims to have personally composed the letter to Iran's leaders, this seems less than likely. After all, it is highly unusual for a freshman senator to take a bold step like the Iran letter and then persuade dozens of colleagues to endorse it. Kristol admits having had a conversation with Cotton about the letter. There continues to be much speculation about who really composed it.

More information on Cotton and his neocon backers can be found here:
- https://lobelog.com/omg-cotton-is-kristols-protege/
- https://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/cottons-fueled-matthews/

Some Republicans have also opposed wars for Israel. One of the most clear spoken was Illinois Congressman Paul Findley, who served in Congress for 22 years. Findley wrote:

Israel – and only Israel – urged the United States to invade Iraq. Israel's lobby in Washington pushed hard and prevailed. To our foreign critics, these wars focus on killing people outraged by our pro-Israel bias. Our government has done nothing to redress the grievances of Israel's victims.

Despite this grim record, U.S. subservience to the wishes of Israel's leaders does not change. Unconditional aid to Israel keeps flowing, as does Israel's savage treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs. Moreover, the Bush administration is fully and openly pledged to do whatever is necessary – even acts of war- to halt Iran's nuclear program even if its projects are lawfully limited to peaceful purposes. Israel is the only nation urging the United States to attack Iran. The lobby is pushing hard again. If the U.S. assaults Iran it will be on Israel's behalf.

He continued:

"The situation is highly dangerous. America has already paid a towering price for our subservience to Israel, and great additional burdens seem inevitable....

....All U.S. citizens must accept a measure of responsibility for Israel's grip on America. Those of us who knew what was happening did not protest with sufficient force and clarity. Those who did not know should have taken their responsibility as citizens more seriously. They should have informed themselves.

The scene is likely to improve only if U.S. elected officials are criticized so forthrightly from home that they fear a constituent revolt more than they fear Israel's lobby. This, of course, will not happen until the countryside benefits from a rigorous and edifying public debate about Israel's role in our national life.

Pat Buchanan is another who has opposed such wars for many years.

He has frequently pointed out that there is no strategic reason for the U.S. to attack Iran, and suggests that the U.S. should not cede to Israel "something no nation should ever cede to another, even an ally: the right to take our country into a war of their choosing but not of ours."

In a detailed article against invading Iraq, he wrote: "President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons."

"What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel."

In his 2004 book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, Buchanan accurately described American policies on Israel-Palestine: "

Americans use a hypocritical double standard in dealing with Arabs and Israelis. We embargoed and blockaded Iraq, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi children, because Saddam defied UN resolutions. Yet we give Israel all the aid Sharon demands to defy UN resolutions, seize Arab land, and deny Palestinians rights that America professes to champion.

On the Iraq War he wrote:

In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have. His war cabinet assured President Bush that weapons of mass destruction would be found, that U.S. forces would be welcomed with garlands of flowers, that democracy would flourish in Iraq and spread across the Middle East, that our triumph would convince Israelis and Palestinians to sit down and make peace.

None of this happened. Those of us who were called unpatriotic for opposing an invasion of Iraq and who warned we would inherit our own Lebanon of 25 million Iraqis were proven right. Now our nation is tied down and our army is being daily bled in a war to create a democracy in a country where it has never before existed.

With the guerrilla war, U.S. prestige has plummeted. The hatred of President Bush is pandemic from Marrakech to Mosul. Volunteers to fight the Americans have been trickling into Iraq from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In spring 2004, revelations of the sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison sent U.S. prestige sinking to its lowest levels ever in the Arab world. We may have ignited the war of civilizations it was in our vital interest to avoid. Never has America been more resented and reviled in an Islamic world of a billion people.

Buchanan recommends that people read George Washington's Farewell Address, in which Washington emphasized: "A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other..."

Washington continued: "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government."



Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.
- http://ifamericansknew.org/
- http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/home
- http://www.amazon.com/Against-Our-Better-Judgment-History/dp/149591092X?&linkCode=wey&tag=ifamericankne-20