The Iraq war coverup: What did AIPAC do and when did it do it?
(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --
As I pointed out yesterday, the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Democratic-Party-linked thinktank in D.C., has met quietly with officials of the Israel lobby group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and explicitly sought to squelch suggestions by its own journalists that AIPAC is pushing war on Iran...
Though AIPAC wants to deny it now, it lobbied for the Iraq war. And CAP is participating in a coverup.
Here's the data:
Back in 2000, AIPAC specifically worked to ramp up sanctions on Iraq because of its "weapons of mass destruction." Remember them? In March 2000, AIPAC circulated an Action Alert to Congress, urging its members to put pressure on Congress to pressure the Clinton administration.
If sanctions were lifted, Saddam could spend the oil revenue to accelerate Iraq's military programs rather than on the humanitarian needs of Iraqi citizens.Very similar to the Iran sanctions AIPAC pushed last summer.
It is essential that you contact your representative today and urge them to sign the letter to President Clinton:
Then in April 2003, according to JWeekly, AIPAC rose up against a congressional effort led by California Republican Tom Campbell, then taking on Dianne Feinstein in a Senate race, to weaken those sanctions:
The military threat from Iraq is a major concern of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which favors retaining economic sanctions.Talk about eery parallels: When Obama tried to stop sanctions on the Iran Central Bank, AIPAC posterized Obama in the Senate 100-0 last December.
"Lifting sanctions wouldn't benefit the Iraqi people," said Amy Friedkin, an AIPAC national vice president who lives in San Francisco. Rather, it would enable Saddam to obtain more oil money, and use it to amass more weapons. That would constitute a danger to the rest of the Middle East and the world, she added...
Campbell and his allies are now rallying behind H.R. 3825, legislation by Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) that would allow U.S. companies to export food and medicine to Iraq outside of the U.N. oil-for-food program. Campbell and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) are among the bill's co-sponsors.
Friedkin said AIPAC opposes the bill, although the organization recognizes the sponsors' "very compassionate reasons" for proposing it.
Elliot Brandt, AIPAC's Pacific Northwest regional director, said: "AIPAC has no desire to hurt the people of Iraq, but we have a vested interest in hurting Saddam Hussein's ability to build weapons of mass destruction. Rather than blaming the sanctions for hurting the people of Iraq, we should be putting the blame on Saddam Hussein, who is cynically and cruelly using his people as a political card to generate sympathy and support."
Let's skip forward to the Iraq war itself, 2003.
In The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Walt and Mearsheimer clearly show that AIPAC pushed the Iraq war, though quietly.
AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC's annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: "AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital." AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr's statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged "‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq" was one of "AIPAC’s successes over the past year." And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that "AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war."Dana Milbank reported in the Washington Post on that AIPAC conference as the Iraq war began:
Officially, AIPAC had no position on the merits of a war against Iraq before it started. Officially, Iraq is not the subject of the pro-Israel lobby's three-day meeting here.The clear thrust of this information is that AIPAC wanted a war but didn't want its fingerprints on the war. So it has cried foul whenever anyone has called it out.
Now, for the unofficial part:
As delegates to the AIPAC meeting were heading to town, the group put a headline on its Web site proclaiming: "Israeli Weapons Utilized By Coalition Forces Against Iraq." The item featured a photograph of a drone with the caption saying the "Israeli-made Hunter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle" is being used "by U.S. soldiers in Iraq."
At an AIPAC session on Sunday night, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom proclaimed in a speech praising Secretary of State Colin L. Powell: "We have followed with great admiration your efforts to mobilize the international community to disarm Iraq and bring democracy and peace to the region, to the Middle East and to the rest of the world. Just imagine, Mr. Secretary, how much easier it would have been if Israel had been a member of the Security Council."
In 2007 Virginia Congressman James Moran said that AIPAC had pushed the Iraq war in comments to Tikkun:
He said that AIPAC was in favor of the Iraq war and "pushed this war from the beginning." And he claimed that on the Iraq war, AIPAC didn't represent "the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all."
But Moran got slammed for saying this. Matt Yglesias, then at CAP himself, was fabulous on this point back in '07, a post bracingly titled AIPAC and Iraq:
One of the odder notions to take hold in recent years is that AIPAC specifically, and the so-called “Israel lobby” more generally had absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq War, and that anyone who says otherwise is an anti-semite. As John Judis writes for The New Republic, however, this is just false:To answer Yglesias, some Jews really did push the Iraq war, out of a perceived Jewish interest-- supporting Israel right or wrong. They're neoconservatives, well represented at AIPAC.
'At the time, a Senate staff person with a responsibility for foreign policy told me of AIPAC’s lobbying. But I don’t have to rely on my memory. AIPAC’s lobbying wasn’t widely reported because AIPAC didn’t want Arab states, whose support the Bush administration was soliciting, to be able to tie Bush’s plans to Israel, but it lobbied nonetheless. In September 2002, before Congress had begun considering the administration’s proposal authorizing force with Iraq, Rebecca Needler, a spokeswoman for AIPAC, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “If the president asks Congress to support action in Iraq, AIPAC would lobby members of Congress to support him.” Then at an AIPAC meeting in New York in January 2003, before the war began, but after Congress had voted to authorize Bush to go to war, Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s executive director, boasted of AIPAC’s success in lobbying for the war. Reported the New York Sun, “According to Mr. Kohr, AIPAC’s successes over the past year also include guaranteeing Israel’s annual aid package and ‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq.”'
And, obviously, other institutions of the hawkish “pro-Israel” establishment — the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Saban Center, JINSA, The New York Sun, The New Republic, etc. — all advocated strongly in favor of invasion. That’s not to say that “the Jews caused the war” (I think Bush, Cheney, Blair, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. had a little something to do with it) but it’s still true.
The best way to oppose war against Iran is not just to say, We're against it, but to identify who is pushing for it.
AIPAC and the neoconservative lobby are back to their old tricks, pushing sanctions on Iran, and saber-rattling too. Eery parallels indeed...MORE...LINK
2 comments:
The liberal establishment is largely Jewish, so what part of the Jewish establishment isn't/wasn't in support of the war?
I would say that nearly all Jews who support Israel (the vast majority of Jewry) were either openly or secretly in support of the Iraq war.
Some Zionist Jews still pose as anti-war as a carryover from their anti-Vietnam war days, a pose they were using to incite an insurrection against the WASP establishment of the era in order that it could be softened up, divided, and ultimately replaced by the current Jewish establishment.
OTH, I blame the WASP establishment for falling into this. Wars nearly always benefit organized Jewry, which never does the fighting, but always manages to profit from them one way or the other. That may be why Jesus preached Turn the other cheek whenever possible, which might be read as Don't let scheming pharisaic Jews get you into unnecessary fights, which they will leverage to their own advantage.
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