Fixing the Intelligence Around the Facts Part Deux
AP has gotten hold of the text of some more Downing Street Memos.
Mark Danner at Tomdispatch.com has further thoughts about the Downing Street Memo and reactions to the dismissals of its significance in the mainstream press.
Justin Raimondo explores one source of the controversy around the Democratic Party hearings held by Congressman John Conyers, which was the criticism voiced by one witness of Israel and its rightwing Zionist supporters in the Bush Administration, for having helped push the US into war against Iraq.
Well, gee, I wonder what was the position of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on whether the US should go to war against Iraq? Ooops, one war wasn’t good enough for him. He wants our young men and women to die in Iran, as well. (Iran is 3 times more populous than Iraq and much bigger geographically–3 times the size of France). Then Sharon and other high Israeli officials tried to peddle the line to the gullible American public that Saddam transferred his (non-existent) chemical and biological weapons to Syria. I can’t prove this was a lie; I know it to be ridiculous on the face of it, and strongly suspect it was another Israeli disinformation campaign aimed at getting the US to go to war against Syria. So if the controversy is over whether the Sharon government egged the US on to war, it isn’t actually controversial. In fact, from Sharon’s point of view the US hasn’t fought enough wars in the Middle East yet.
American Jews were less likely to support the Iraq war than the general US population. So no one should blame “the Jews” for the Iraq War. Mainly they should blame Bush and Cheney and Delay and Frist. But the case for an Iraq War was significantly bolstered by American supporters of Ariel Sharon (by no means all of them Jewish) high in the Bush administration.
By the way, I’ve recently been criticized by Michael Rubin, once of the Pentagon the Office of Special Plans for linking to Bob Dreyfuss. (Rubin charges that Dreyfuss once was involved with Lyndon LaRouche, a political crazy, but then actually admits that Dreyfuss has long ago dissociated himself from the Larouchies for veering to the Right!) This is an old McCarthyite tactic. Rubin smears veteran investigative reporter Dreyfuss, then smears me for linking to him. It is an attempt to create taboos and non-persons. Rational public discourse requires that we all examine ideas put forward by members of the Republic of Letters. These ideas can be rejected or accepted on reasoned grounds. But to say “so and so is beyond the pale” about someone like Dreyfuss is an essentially Stalinist tactic. It is also clear that the Zionist Right especially targets liberal Jewish intellectuals, attempting to revive the kind of anti-Semitism prevalent in late 19th century Europe, which displayed a fear of Jews as progressives.
As in the case of another famous Dreyfus, I give the same answer as Zola: J’accuse!
By the way, Rubin’s ploy is rich given that Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute brought a former LaRouchie in to brief the Pentagon on Saudi Arabia when he was chair of the Defense Advisory Board. Will Rubin promise never to cite or refer to or use any ideas coming from Perle as a result? And, of course, it is a real question as to why anyone would listen to Rubin after he served in Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked intelligence and perpetrated the fraud of the Iraq-al-Qaeda and Iraq WMD fantasies on the American public. And it is further rich that Rubin publishes his screed in David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag, which is if anything more certifiable than the LaRouchie rags. But it isn’t his associations that we should interact with in Rubin; it is his ideas. If the ideas are flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated. Who he has been hanging out with is less important than whether he has something useful to say in any particular instance. In this particular instance, his keyboard has produced nothing more interesting than a stool sample.
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