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Foreign Influence
By Charley Reese
11/11/05 -- -- I don't share the president's high opinion of I.
Lewis Libby, now under indictment for obstruction of justice, making
false statements and committing perjury.
He was, after all, the lawyer who for years represented Marc Rich,
the fugitive billionaire who renounced his own country. It was Libby
who arranged the last-minute presidential pardon of Rich issued by
Bill Clinton — a pardon that stank to high heaven. Rich, along with
a number of Russian oligarchs the Russian government would like to
get its hands on, is now an Israeli citizen.
Libby was also part of the trio of neoconservatives who pushed the
phony intelligence in order to get the U.S. to go to war. Another
member of that trio, John Hannah, has now replaced Libby as Vice
President Dick Cheney's national-security adviser. As described by
Juan Cole in an excellent article at Salon.com. "Most of the members
of Cheney's inner circle were neoconservative ideologues, who
combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with
Israel."
Libby was an early protege of Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the
World Bank but who has been called the architect of the war against
Iraq. Libby and Wolfowitz co-authored a paper in the first Bush's
administration advocating removal of Saddam Hussein, and Libby was
later a founding member of the Project for a New American Century,
an outfit advocating that America forcibly police the world.
Hannah comes from the belligerently pro-Israel think tank Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. It was founded with the help of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel
lobby that seems to dominate Congress. It was to Hannah that Ahmad
Chalabi funneled a lot of the phony intelligence on Saddam's
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Another Cheney adviser is David Wurmser, another alumnus of WINEP.
He co-authored with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others a policy
paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that called
not only for going to war with Iraq, but also for scrapping the Oslo
Peace Plan. It was a stupid paper.
Wurmser's wife is Meyrav Wurmser, who was listed as a co-author of
the paper. She and an Israeli colonel formed the MEMRI translation
service, which cherry-picks Arabic newspapers for their most
outrageous articles and translates them in a continuing program to
depict the Arab world in the worst possible light.
David Wurmser was chosen by fellow neoconservative Feith to be part
of the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. OSP was set up to go
around conventional intelligence agencies to better push the
propaganda for war. It was most likely through this outfit that the
forged business of the nuclear-weapons program ended up in the
president's now-infamous State of the Union speech of 2003.
As some of you might have concluded, many, though not all, of these
neocons are Jewish. Mentioning that, of course, gets you called an
anti-Semite, but what is relevant here is not that they are Jews,
but that they are people who are unusually ardent supporters of
Israel.
Clearly, their passionate support of Israel influenced their policy
positions vis-a-vis Iraq, Syria and Iran. According to Cole's
article — which is excellent, as is his blog — Chalabi won over the
neocons by promising that if he came to power in Iraq, he would
recognize Israel.
George Washington could have been talking about these pro-Israel
neocons when he said this in his Farewell Address about attachment
to foreign countries: "Such attachments are particularly alarming to
the truly enlightened and independent Patriot. How many
opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to
practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to
influence or awe the public councils." He called foreign influence
the bane of republics. It certainly is.
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