This is the best article on the net about the Iraq War:

http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_conc1.htm

In a lengthy article in The American Conservative criticizing the rationale for the projected U.S. attack on Iraq, the veteran diplomatic historian Paul W. Schroeder noted (only in passing) "what is possibly the unacknowledged real reason and motive behind the policy — security for Israel." If Israel's security were indeed the real American motive for war, Schroeder wrote,



It would represent something to my knowledge unique in history. It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state. [1] (http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/concnotes.htm#note1)

Is there any evidence that Israel and her supporters have managed to get the United States to fight for their interests?

To unearth the real motives for the projected war on Iraq, one must ask the critical question: How did the 9/11 terrorist attack lead to the planned war on Iraq, even though there is no real evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11? From the time of the 9/11 attack, neoconservatives, of primarily (though not exclusively) Jewish ethnicity and right-wing Zionist persuasion, have tried to make use of 9/11 to foment a broad war against Islamic terrorism, the targets of which would coincide with the enemies of Israel.

Although the term neoconservative is in common usage, a brief description of the group might be helpful. Many of the first-generation neocons originally were liberal Democrats, or even socialists and Marxists, often Trotskyites. They drifted to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as the Democratic Party moved to the antiwar McGovernite left. And concern for Israel loomed large in that rightward drift. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg puts it:


One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right's hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel's security. [2] . .

> This is the best article on the net about the Iraq War

No doubt.

http://www.instantlobotomy.com/lrh22_1big.gif

I agree that Sniegoski's article is superb. (BTW, I hadn't heard of the website on which it appears, but the hosting of this article, in addition to some additional browsing, has convinced me that it holds a lot of promise. I'll probably send them a donation.) Not only does he provide a comprehensive (and well-referenced) timeline of the known machinations that led up to the Iraq invasion, he provides just the right amount of insightful speculation about the more hidden aspects of the neocons' plot.

The following selection (found in Part Four) is my favorite piece of the article because it offers a plausible explanation as to why the neocons initially sought to invade Iraq with a military force of insufficient strength. When reading this, I found myself slapping my forehead and saying, "Of course! How could I have failed to see that?" (Bold type added by me below.)


Neoconservatives not only have determined the foreign policy leading to war against Iraq but have played a role in molding military strategy as well. Top military figures, including members of the Joint Chiefs, initially expressed opposition to the whole idea of such a war. [62] But Perle and other neoconservatives have for some time insisted that toppling Saddam would require little military effort or risk. They pushed for a war strategy dubbed "inside-out" that would involve attacking Baghdad and a couple of other key cities with a very small number of airborne troops, as few as 5,000 in some estimates. According to the plan's supporters, such strikes would cause Saddam's regime to collapse. American military leaders adamantly opposed that approach as too risky, offering in its stead a plan to use a much larger number of troops — about 250,000 — who would invade Iraq in a more conventional manner, marching from the soil of her neighbors, as was done during the Gulf War of 1991.

Perle and the neoconservatives, for their part, feared that no neighboring country would provide the necessary bases, so that this approach would likely mean that no war would be initiated or that, during the lengthy time needed to assemble this large force, opposition to war would so burgeon as to render the operation politically impossible. Perle angrily responded to the military's demurral by saying that the decision to attack Iraq was "a political judgment that these guys aren't competent to make." [63] Cheney and Rumsfeld went even further, referring to the generals as "cowards" for being insufficiently gung-ho about an Iraq invasion. [64]

Now, one might be tempted to attribute Perle and the other neocons' rejection of the military's caution to insane hubris — how could amateurs pretend to know more about military strategy than professional military men? However, Richard Perle may be many things, but insane is not one of them. Nor is he stupid. Undoubtedly he has thought through the implications of his plan. And it is apparent that the "inside-out" option would be a win-win proposition from Perle's perspective.

Let's assume that it works — that a few American troops can capture some strategic areas and the Iraqi army quickly folds. Perle and the neocons appear as military geniuses and are rewarded with free rein to prepare a series of additional low-cost wars in the Middle East.

On the other hand, let's assume that the mini-invasion is a complete fiasco. The American troops are defeated in the cities. Many are captured and paraded around for all the world to see. Saddam makes bombastic speeches about defeating the American aggressor. All the Arab and Islamic world celebrates the American defeat. American flags are burned in massive anti-American celebrations throughout the Middle East. America is totally humiliated, depicted as a paper tiger, and ordinary Americans watch it all on TV. How do they react?

Such a catastrophe would be another Pearl Harbor in terms of engendering hatred of the enemy. The public would demand that American honor and prestige be avenged. They would accept the idea fed to them by the neoconservative propagandists that the war was one between America and Islam. Washington would unleash total war, which would involve heavy bombing of cities. And the air attacks could easily spread from Iraq to the other neighboring Islamic states. A war of conquest and extermination is the neocons' fondest dream since it would destroy all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East. (It appears that the Pentagon has augmented the magnitude of the Iraq strike force to reduce the risk of the aforementioned scenario.)

Zionism's Useful Idiots
By Kurt Nimmo
Dissident Voice.org 11-22-4
http://www.rense.com/general59/zs.htm
That's you and me, taxpaying US citizens.

We're useful idiots for the Zionists in Washington and Tel Aviv. Useful because our hard-earned paychecks can be harvested to pay for war and mass murder in the Middle East, idiots because we don't do anything about it.

So outraged were the Sons of Liberty over British taxation without representation, they pitched a whole lot of Darjeeling tea into the Boston Harbor.

Now?

We're couch potatoes, useful idiots more interested in Bachelor Bob than the possibility of an apocalyptic war that will consume the lives of our children and our wealth.

So, usefully idiotic are we that treacherous neocons no longer bother to offer threadbare lies to cover their murderous tracks.

On Thursday, November 20, the former lead conspirator of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and long-time accused Israeli spy, Richard Perle, proudly admitted Bush's invasion of Iraq was illegal. "I think international law stood in the way of doing the right thing," he brazenly told a London audience.

In other words, laws reached by international consensus, agreed upon by the vast majority of civilized people on the planet for centuries, are little more than doormats for Zionist gangsters such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, to name but the most obvious, and their bosses, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Like their philosophical and spiritual swami, Ariel Sharon, these criminals not only thumb their noses at their foes, but also target them for assassination if they get in the way.

It's as if Perle and his ruthless gang have suddenly decided to dump the philosophy of the neocon cognoscenti of Machiavellian lying and deception, Leo Strauss.

Instead of telling lies and building half-ass fabrications in preparation for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the name of a clan of Likudites in Israel and corporate mobsters close to the Bushites in America, the neocons now seem more than happy to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

It's easier, less hassle, and besides Joe Taxpayer doesn't really seem to care one way or the other if he's lied to, told the truth straight up, or kept in the dark entirely. He's essentially imperturbable, or maybe semi-comatose.

So long as the ultimate cost, in lives and hard cash, remains an abstraction in the short term, well, nobody on Main Street's going to complain too much.

Maybe a few anti-war types here and there will hoot and holler, but they can easily be sloughed off -- or ignored entirely -- by the Bush Ministry of Disinformation (i.e., Fox, ABC, CNN, CBS, etc.) as hate
America firsters or a meaningless focus group.

Death on such a magnitude cannot remain an abstraction forever, especially now with coffins (the Pentagon calls them "transfer tubes") and wounded coming home in ever-increasing numbers. For now, however, the wounded piling up at Walter Reed and Fort Stewart, and the dead arriving daily at Dover, will not make prime or any other time. "I don't understand why these guys are so hidden, why there are no pictures of them," Cher lamented recently.

Well, Cher, that's a no-brainer.

The Bush neocons understand something very essential - people, that is average, every day people - will do almost anything to avoid war, mostly because they are the ones to pay the highest price for it.

Roosevelt understood this -- and that's why he steered the Japanese into invading Pearl Harbor.

Something outrageous has to push the people into war, be it the prospect of rapacious Japanese murdering defenseless GIs or Saddam conniving with Osama to murder Americans with weapons of mass destruction.

Never mind that the Japanese had no intention of killing Americans until Roosevelt embargoed their oil. Never mind that Osama hates Saddam and, besides, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It was, and is, murderous deception.

"Of course the people don't want war," mused a recalcitrant Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials.

"But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

If the average American were suddenly exposed to an endless parade of coffins and the gruesome stories of those seriously wounded in Iraq, the dreaded Vietnam Syndrome would come screaming back - in other words, people would demand an end to war, like they did during the Vietnam war -- and the neocon jihad against the Arab Third World in the name of Zionism and neoliberal corporate theft would be throttled in short order.

Obviously, the Perles and the Wolfowitzes and the Cheneys and Rumsfelds and their ideological bedfellows outside of the White House and Pentagon are not going to let this happen.

They're going to do whatever it takes to keep the "war on terrorism" moving forward, even if it means another attack on the American heartland. Even if it means another slaughtered 3,000 office workers, or a dirty bomb going off during Christmas rush in the parking lot of the Mall of America.

These people are sincerely immoral, even sociopaths. Their legacy is Operation Northwoods, the firebombing of Hamburg, Tokyo, Dresden, Kobe, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's the deliberate murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, the spreading of depleted uranium across the globe, the methodical serial murder of nearly 3,000,000 Vietnamese.

Of course, the average American -- the sheepish Untermensch, the useful idiot for Zionism, the guy who unconsciously donates part of his paycheck to Israel every year -- he's immersed in an entertainment fog, the modern equivalent of Roman bread and circuses, so he's essentially clueless to what's going on.

Since he rarely ventures beyond Fox, the Bush Ministry of Disinformation, for his "news," he knows nothing about Zionist control of not only the White House, but also Congress and the very media he's passively consuming.

He's a blinkered cash cow.

Maybe, as well, his kid's a bullet stopper for a Zionist settler who thinks Americans should die so he can steal land from Palestinian Arabs, so no powerful rival will emerge in the Arab world to challenge Israeli crimes against Arabs.

"An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals, all of them unelected and therefore unresponsive to public pressure," explains Edward Said. This "small cabal," writes Edward Herman, consists of "the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which advances Israeli interests by pushing for U.S. aid and protection to Israel, and, currently, by pressing for a war against Iraq, which again will serve Israeli interests. This lobby has not only helped control media debate and made congress into 'Israeli occupied territory', it has seen to it that numerous officials with 'dual loyalties' occupy strategic decision-making positions in the Bush administration."

You can't get much more "strategic" than Dick Cheney, vice president, the guy right below Bush (or some would say Bush is below Cheney).

Here's a former advisor for JINSA, short for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, running the executive branch of the government. Directly below him are staunch Israeli-firsters, friends of the war criminal and mass murderer Ariel Sharon and the criminal, Arab (and British and American) killing machine, also known as the Likud Party, a gangster organization based on "revisionist" Zionism, in other words the philosophy of Vladimir (Zeev) Zabotinsky, a fascist Arab hater who harbored warm and fuzzy feelings for Benito Mussolini.

The Israel-firsters in the Bush administration, according to Ann Pettifer, "pursue political power not in order to make the US a better place, to right wrongs or to fight inequality here, but to promote Israel's pre-eminence in the Middle East, to confine Palestinians to a couple of Bantustans or, better still, engineer their expulsion to Jordan... Wolfowitz and fellow Jewish neo-cons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have emerged as the Pentagon's Paladins, their aim being to subdue the Islamic world through decisive, pre-emptive use of American military superiority."

In other words, chew up US treasure and kill American kids who thought they joined the military to defend their country - or, like the hapless Jessica Lynch, joined up because they couldn't get a job or an education anywhere else.

The streets of Iraq have become in short order murderous hellholes designed by malevolent former Ba'athists -- who were brought to power by the CIA in the 60s -- to kill US soldiers. Bush, of course, and the Likudite Zionists who run his illegally appointed administration don't give a rat's ass about the lives of a few thousand American soldiers or, for that matter, 28 million odd Iraqis.

Israel, and the racist colonialist mentality of the Zionists, is all that matters. It's currently what the foreign policy of the United States is all about.

All of us, especially the Arabs, are expected to pay homage to the Zionists. Those of us who live in the United States and pay our (war) taxes, we ante up every week or two weeks, certain our money will go to build Israel's apartheid wall, pay for new settlements on Arab land, or grease the gears of bulldozers that smash down ancient olive trees.

We pay dearly for Israeli ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile, by default or mere stupidity and ignorance, the American people remain useful idiots for Zionism.

They may not realize George Bush's so-called "war on terrorism" is actually, as the neocons deem it, the opening salvos of World War IV (according to neocon and former CIA director James Woolsey).
It's a war Bush has declared will last a long time, possibly for the rest of our lives, generations, but few Americans seem to glimpse the obvious implications - more mass murder, increasing hardship, loss of constitutional liberties, maybe even nuclear Armageddon.

Stupid Americans.

As Wilhelm Reich knew, the "little man" will invariably embrace not only his enslavement, but also revel in his own denigration. He not only supports dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin (and now Bush), but admires them as well.

"You give impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you," Reich wrote. "Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded."

Now's the time to stop the fraud.

But I don't know if the useful idiots of Zionism are up to it.

No, we "know" now that Israel could never do this and to think otherwise is to believe in ridiculous and disgraceful conspiracy theories.

They're going to do whatever it takes to keep the "war on terrorism" moving forward, even if it means another attack on the American heartland. Even if it means another slaughtered 3,000 office workers, or a dirty bomb going off during Christmas rush in the parking lot of the Mall of America.


This is, one of the things I am most concerned about. Looking ahead, especially to the impending war with Iran, syria,etc, and you know it's coming, what is going to need to happen to keep the lemmings on board? I could be wrong, but I do not think that most people are going to be in favor of another war and invasion. There is going to have to be another "spectacular attack" to fuel the fire and get the masses waving their flags again.