Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Wilkerson says Feith and Wurmser were ‘working for Israel’ (as others in US gov’t are now)

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Wilkerson says Feith and Wurmser were ‘working for Israel’ (as others in US gov’t are now)

(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --

The feline is out of the satchel. Amazing interview of Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, by Scott Horton of antiwar. The issue here is, Wilkerson has believed this for many years, and many of us on the realist/left have said that the neocons conflated interests of two countries to the point where they could justify anything on Israel's behalf as being in the U.S. interest-- so the question is, When does this become fair game for the big media? When does the whole confused loyalty issue become a story? Especially now when even Jeffrey Goldberg says that confronting Iran is in Israel's interest not the U.S.'s. Wilkerson:

I think there’s a very clear-cut case that [David] Wurmser was not only working for Rumsfeld and [Douglas] Feith and the Pentagon, but he was also working for Israel. I think Feith was working for Israel too. Cheney, on the other hand, I think was working for Cheney. And so you had this confluence of motivations and confluence of unholy alliance, if you will, of strange characters. You had Feith and Wurmser, who as far as I was concerned, were card-carrying members of the Likud Party. And they had different motivations from people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. And they had different motivations than people like Cheney and Libby and Addington and the vice president’s office. So you had this alliance of these people who were all after one thing, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but in many cases, for very different reasons....

I’ll put it this way. I think Douglas Feith thought that Israel’s interests and the U.S. interests were 100% complementary 100% of the time. So if he was looking out for Israel’s interests, it was not any, by any way, stretch of the imagination, being unfaithful or traitorous with regard to the United States because our interests were the same, all the time, every day, day in and day out. That’s of course nonsense, but I think that’s really the way he believed.

I didn’t know Wurmser that well so I can’t tell you how he believed, but I do know that there were people in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the government, as there are right now this minute, and as there will be tomorrow, who were working as much for Israel as they are for the United States, and I know that with AIPAC and the Jewish Lobby, as John Mearsheimer has called it, in general operating the way it normally operates in this country, this special relationship that we have with Israel overlooks a lot of this a lot of the time. I mean you can throw out Jonathan Pollard and you can throw out an occasional attempt to do something about the more egregious spying, especially when it brings clear damage to us, but by and large it happens all the time. Look at what happened with Franklin and Rosen and AIPAC and that business. It’s pretty much been swept under the rug now. We share classified data with the Israelis all the time, both through official conduits and through unofficial ones too, and people get away with it all the time.
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