[Mb-civic] Israel's Albatross: U.S. Neocons Robert Scheer

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer31aug31.story

ROBERT SCHEER

Israel's Albatross: U.S. Neocons
 Robert Scheer

 August 31, 2004

 With friends like these, Israel doesn't need enemies. The purported Israeli
"spy caper" is another sign that the neoconservatives in the Bush
administration, who claim to be big supporters of Israel, on the contrary,
have increased the risks for the Mideast's only functioning democracy.

 As the developing story goes, a neocon Pentagon official allegedly gave
classified documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the
pro-Israel lobby, which then passed them on to the Israeli Embassy.



 So far, these are only unproved accusations. It is disturbing that some
well-placed officials in the Bush administration have leaked to the media
allegations of spying against the Pentagon official and a respected ally. As
demonstrated in the phony, Clinton-era China spy case, in which Los Alamos
nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee was smeared, such lurid charges may not
stick. But the charges now circulating do call attention to the
regime-change ideologues in the Pentagon, whose antics have left Israel more
vulnerable than at any time in recent memory.

 First, the Bush administration abandoned the Israel-Palestinian peace
process and the United States' historical role as a good-faith broker
between the two sides. Then, after 9/11, the tight band of so-called
neoconservatives who had championed the invasion of Iraq for years, both in
Israel and in the U.S., successfully completed their hijacking of U.S.
foreign policy by landing us in the Iraq quagmire.

 This has only served to inflame passions across the region, increasing the
threat to Israel. Many Israelis concerned for their country are alarmed by
President Bush's substitution of militarism for diplomacy, which they
believe only benefits those who profit from fear and hate ‹ such as arms
brokers and political and religious extremists.

 In addition, moderates across the Muslim world have seen their position
eroded by popular anger over the U.S. occupation and Washington's uncritical
support for Ariel Sharon. Al Qaeda and allied terror groups have seized on
the chaos and fury to recruit a new generation of fighters. Extremists are
now in control of crucial parts of Iraq and disrupting the rest, while rogue
Iran is more politically influential among their co-religionists in the
Shiite majority in Iraq than is the U.S. with its 120,000 troops on the
ground.

 Now, after the missing weapons of mass destruction and Abu Ghraib, comes
the latest embarrassing blow to America's image ‹ which polls show has been
in free fall since the decision to invade Iraq. It centers on neocon Larry
Franklin, the Pentagon's chief Iran analyst, who, according to unnamed
officials, is under investigation for allegedly supplying the American
Israel committee with a secret draft presidential directive on U.S.-Iran
policy that was allegedly passed on to Israel.

 Franklin is an ideological comrade of his bosses, Douglas J. Feith,
undersecretary of Defense for policy, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.
Wolfowitz, the two strongest promoters inside the administration of
preemptively invading Iraq. He also was part of the unit that funneled
intelligence chum up the food chain and into Bush's now-discredited speeches
claiming Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent danger.

 These are the folks who bought the disinformation pumped out by Iraqi exile
Ahmad Chalabi, whom they promoted as the George Washington of the new Iraq
state. Now the neocons distance themselves from Chalabi, who has been
accused of spying for Iran and harangues radical Iraqi Shiite crowds with
anti-American rhetoric. That can't be good for Israel, which is threatened
by Iran's nuclear program.



 The neocons are unstable ideologues, more in love with their own radical
dream of breaking the world to remake it in their image than they are with
protecting Israel or the U.S. Such unbounded arrogance, embraced by Bush,
has greatly amplified the voices of those persistent anti-Semitic conspiracy
theorists in the Muslim world and beyond who are now seizing upon the latest
Israeli spy rumors.

 "It revives the old charge that Israel is not an ally but a treacherous
country," Nathan Guttman wrote Monday in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

 That charge is false. What is true is that not every Bush administration
hawk who claims to support Israel is actually a reliable friend.


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