Bush’s Neo-Con Praetorian Guards
by Ahmed Amr
June 5, 2004
A few weeks ago, on April 14th, George Bush decided to void the
Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland. The President also
took the occasion to make illegal Jewish settlements a permanent
“fact on the ground.” In a single press conference with Ariel Sharon,
he managed to truncate the size of a Palestinian state and assault
the fundamental human rights of refugees around the world. One has to
assume that Bush has now assumed the right to decide which other group
of refugees can forget about ever returning to their native lands.
Before unilaterally making this radical departure from the policies
of every American administration since 1948, Bush dispatched Elliott
Abrams to negotiate terms with Sharon. Abrams, the radical Likudnik
activist of Iran/Contra fame, has a history of beating the drums of
the Netenyahu wing of the Likud party. His mission was to convince
Netenyahu to accept the terms of the “moderate” Sharon who had declared
his intention to withdraw from Gaza.
Abrams convinced Netenyahu to agree to stop lobbying against Sharon’s
plan, which was scheduled to come up for a vote in the Likud party. But
his agreement came with a stiff price. Netenyahu’s “generous offer” was
contingent on getting American assurances that the Palestinians right
of return would be voided and that the settlements would become legal.
Upon returning to America, Abrams held a meeting in the White House
with the leadership of the Christian Zionist movement, a key Bush
constituency. He wanted to reassure them that Gaza was not part of
biblical Israel and evacuating it would not stall the Second Coming of
Jesus or the prospects of a timely advent of the rapture and the end
of times. You have to marvel at the marketing skills of this Likudnik
fanatic who doesn’t even believe in the First Coming of the Messiah.
In any case, Abrams managed to convince Bush that he had cut a
great deal. All Bush needed to do was to stiff the Palestinian on
a few of their rights and shrink the boundaries of the Palestinian
Bantustan to accommodate Israeli expansionist fantasies. In return,
Netenyahu would not actively obstruct a critical vote in the Likud. The
president accepted Netenyahu’s “generous offer.” By the time Sharon
landed in Washington, Bush had prepared a letter officially committing
to Netenyahu’s terms. For the Palestinians, it was the Second Coming
of the Balfour Declaration.
Abrams didn’t go to Israel to negotiate American terms with Sharon. He
was there to settle an internal Likud party squabble. As a confirmed
member of the Netenyahu wing of the Likud, he wanted to draw a line
in the sand for the “moderate” Sharon. In effect, Bush had dispatched
one Likudnik fox to negotiate with another Likudnik fox on how best
to cook the chicken.
As promised, the reluctant Netenyahu did not publicly campaign against
Sharon’s plan. But he wasn’t about to endorse it either. When the
vote took place, the Likud faithful turned down the “compromise”. So,
the Israelis pocketed George’s concession of Palestinian rights and
Palestinian real estate and laughed all the way to the West Bank.
After the Likud turned down the idea to withdrawing from Gaza, the
Israelis came back and got a green light from the Bush administration
to batter the Palestinians. Sharon explained that he needed to
torment the refugees in Gaza to shore up his standing in the Likud
after failing to get approval for his plan. Bush understood. After
a few weeks of demolishing homes and killing dozens of Palestinians,
the people of Gaza staged acts of resistance that resulted in the
death of thirteen Israeli soldiers.
As usual, Sharon lost his temper and Bush agreed that Israel had
the right to defend its soldiers from the “terrorists” who had the
audacity to resist Sharon’s efforts to demonstrate his toughness in
front of the Netenyahu wing of the Likud. The president of the free
world had an AIPAC engagement coming up and that’s never a good time
to bring up the issue of Palestinian rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. So once again, Bush expressed sympathy and gave
a green light to “Operation Rainbow.” The rape of Rafah was on.
In an effort to resolve a feud within the Likud, Elliott Abrams had
set in motion a major Israeli killing spree.
Abram’s Likudnik antics are typical of the standard operating procedure
in the Bush administration. In reviewing the resume of the folks
Bush appointed as architects a “Greater Middle East,” one runs into
a who’s who list of professional Jewish activists with a long record
of supporting the most extreme right wing factions in Israel.
Wolfowitz’s sister actually gave up on America and immigrated to
Israel. Like his sibling, he has spent his whole adult life working
on Likudnik agendas. Douglas Feith’s law partner in Israel represents
the right wing settler movement. Lewis Libby, the lawyer who convinced
Clinton to pardon the tax dodging Mark Rich, has well established
ties to Israeli intelligence. Richard Perle sits on the board of the
Jerusalem Post and works with Conrad Black, a media mogul and Zionist
propagandist. Along with Dick Cheney’s wife, all four are affiliated
with the neo-con movement that has its imprint all over Bush’s Middle
East policies.
Before joining the Bush administration, this neo-con cabal agitated
against the Oslo agreement and worked on Netenyahu’s election
campaign. Dick Cheney and his wife actually retained Bernard Lewis to
tutor our president of vice on the “Arab mind.” Lewis is a vicious
anti-Arab racist and a suspect pseudo-academic who was convicted in
a French court of denying the Armenian genocide.
One has to be extremely delusional to subscribe to the notion that
any of these characters are interested in the freedom of any pedigree
of Arabs, be they Iraqi or Palestinian. Quite the contrary. Their
real motives are to subjugate and humiliate Arabs into accepting
Sharon’s dictates.
It should come as no surprise that Douglas Feith was the Pentagon
official who signed off on torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi
prisoners. Or that Feith and Libby are the main suspects in leaking
the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent. Or that Wolfowitz
and Perle virtually created Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and
collaborated with the INC in fabricating false intelligence and
feeding it to neo-con media operatives like Judith Miller and Charles
Krauthammer. Or that Libby and Feith were the force behind setting
up the Office of Special Plans that sabotaged the CIA’s and DIA’s
intelligence gathering operations. Or that Feith was in charge of
the now discredited post invasion fantasies. Or that Paul Bremer,
the current emperor of Baghdad, is a self-declared neo-con and a
protégé of Henry Kissinger. Or that Michael Rubin, a neo-con zealot,
was given a major role in administering our Iraqi colony. After
his assignment in Baghdad, Rubin went right back to his desk at the
American Enterprise Institute.
These are the Bush advisers that prey on the mind of a president who
believes he is getting battle plans from God. They write his speeches
and condense the news that he can’t bother to read. Even Republican
Senators are alarmed at the virtual seclusion of this President
behind a wall of Praetorian guards recruited from the ranks of the
Israeli Lobby.
None of this is a secret. It is just one of those taboo subjects that
can get you libeled as an anti-Semite if you so much as hint at who
these people are or question their allegiance to a foreign state ruled
by a serial war criminal. But some prominent Americans have apparently
had enough of their shenanigans. Retired General Anthony Zinni and
Senator Hollings and others are finally taking them on. Zinni, in a
challenge to the complicit silence of many in Washington, recently
appeared on a 60 Minutes program and said, “I know what strategy they
promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have
convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don’t believe
there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in
Washington that doesn’t know where it came from.”
Zinni is not just any old retired General. During his military career,
this distinguished American officer served for four years as the
commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, in charge
of American forces in the Middle East.
The Israeli Lobby has always had an extraordinary amount of influence
on American foreign policy. With Bush, they have hit the jackpot
because they find him so easy to manipulate, especially when they
make an appeal to his faith. He is at once the most peculiar and
the most transparent of Presidents. If he appears to be cruel, he
is just administering the wrath of God on planet earth. For him,
Palestinian and Iraqi sufferings are a necessary price to pay to bring
on Armageddon. He is not an opportunist preaching to the flock. He is
part of the Christian Zionist movement. The designated priests of this
Christian heresy are folks like Abrams who must get a huge kick out
of messing around with the collective emotions of these holy rollers.
We can only hope that a slumbering America will wake up to the real
and present danger of giving this very simple and very dangerous
President a mandate of a second term in office. If he gets four more
years, we might just find ourselves two years away from Armageddon.
Unfortunately for the Palestinians, John Kerry appears to be recruiting
his own brigade of neo-con Praetorian guards to administer Middle
East policy. Rafah was just one more sign that the Palestinians are
set to lose another American election.
Ahmed Amr is the Editor of NileMedia. He can be reached at:
[email protected].
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
