Irrefutable evidence, american jews & Israel are to blame for Iraq invasion
Quote:
So the weight of public discourse since before the Iraq war was launched has been that any Israeli role in inspiring or pushing for it is at best a silly invention and at worst a vile anti-Jewish lie, and both the Wilkerson and the Greenspan statements play into this impression. Until these statements, the knowledge of an Israeli connection had begun to gain some greater currency thanks to a few valiant souls who have dared raise the subject, including people like Chris Hedges, Scott Ritter and, most recently, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. In July, Hedges wrote a hard-hitting article for Truthdig, subsequently widely circulated, saying that the war "was strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States," and Israel and its neocon supporters wanted Iraq neutralized. Hedges also acknowledged a "desire for American control of oil" as a major driver of the war, along with "the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region."
Quote:
But Israel's Ariel Sharon was, in Ritter's words, "quick to catch on," and in those last several months of 2002 -- the critical months of war planning, coming well after the early 2002 period that Wilkerson was discussing -- Israel jumped on the Iraq war bandwagon, publicly and privately, and began to press for and justify a U.S. invasion. Sharon assigned a senior Israeli military intelligence official to give the U.S. Israeli intelligence assessments on Iraqi WMD activity, according to Ritter, and at the same time, with an eye to later broadening the conflict to Iran and beyond, Israeli intelligence "pressed home to [the U.S.] the notion that the upcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq must serve as a springboard for a larger transformation within the Middle East, one that swept away not only Saddam Hussein, but also anti-Israeli elements in Syria, Palestine, and, of course, Iran."
Quote:
The principal elements of the paper involved overturning the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to save Israel from having to make any territorial concessions and then sparking massive changes, through force if necessary, in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, leading to an era of peace in which Israel and the U.S. jointly dominated a transformed and intimidated Middle East.
Quote:
In their book on the lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt provide overwhelming evidence for an Israeli link to the war
Quote:
The two authors devote more than 30 pages and a remarkable 175 footnotes to constructing an irrefutable case for an Israeli role in helping plan, and a large lobby role in pressing for, the war.
Quote:
Israel and the lobby "played crucial roles in making that war happen." Without the lobby and particularly the core of neocon policymakers inside government and neocon commentators and think-tank analysts on the sidelines, Mearsheimer and Walt conclude bluntly, "the war would almost certainly not have occurred" and "America would probably not be in Iraq today."
Quote:
The U.S. alliance with Israel has unquestionably led to a gross distortion of U.S. policy in exactly the way in which Washington predicted, creating the illusion of a common interest where none exists and injecting Israel's enmities into the U.S. with little or no justification. If the U.S. cannot distinguish its own interests from those of Israel and Israel's lobby, then it simply cannot act, as it should, purely in its own interest. Those who minimize the role of the Israel lobby in influencing U.S. policy choices, and who refuse or fail to recognize the part Israel and the lobby have played in leading the U.S. into disastrous foreign adventures, pose an incalculable danger to the U.S., for a failure to recognize the reason for a misguided policy will inevitably doom us to repeat it.
Irrefutable evidence, american jews & Israel are to blame for Iraq invasion
