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 Saturday, October 21, 2006

Iraq War: The Game is Over for the Bush Administration. But where are the War-Mongering NEOCONS ?

  "Where are the voices of the War-Mongering NeoCons who instigated the Bush Administration to launch this disastrous Iraq War, culminating with over 2,700 deaths of young Amercian boys and girls in Iraq?

They must also stand fully accountable for the thousands of dead American soldiers and innocent Iraq civilians, women and children in Iraq and to the American public.

Where are the NEOCON ideologues, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, etc ?"


FLASHBACKS

The NeoCons Influencing American Policy on Iraq and Middle East. Read here for more in article dated April 10, 2003, by Michael Lind "

Read here "Distorting U.S. Foreign Policy: The Israel Lobby and American Power" article published in May 2002


"... The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial.

Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council.

On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal.

Most of these "experts" NEVER served in the military.

But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s.

Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy."

Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) provide homes for neocon "in-and-outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI).

The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by sending them on trips to Israel.

The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings.

Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby.

Wolfowitz, (nominated by Bush to head the World Bank) who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist."

The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a P.R. technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neocons published a series of public letters whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team.

They called for the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favorite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media.

That is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives took over Washington and steered the U.S. into a Middle Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the U.S. and opposed by the public of every country in the world except Israel.

  • "BRING THEM ON !"


  • In July 2003, President George Bush challenged the militants who attack U.S. forces in Iraq, that they would be dealt with harshly and said infamously, "Bring 'em on."

    Well, those militants, now called insurgents, have responded in equal measure.

    Iraq War Game Almost Over for the Bush Administration

    Read here related article

    The Pentagon on Thursday admitted defeat in its strategy of securing Baghdad.

    The admission from Bush that the US may have arrived at a turning point in this war -- the Tet offensive led to a massive loss of confidence in the American presence in Vietnam -- comes during one of the deadliest months for US forces since the invasion.

    In Baghdad a surge in sectarian killings has forced the Pentagon to review its entire security plan for the capital, Major General William Caldwell, a US military spokesperson, said on Thursday. "The violence is, indeed, disheartening," he told reporters.

    The bleak assessment arrives as official thinking appears to be shifting on the war, with reports that a study group led by a Bush family loyalist and former secretary of state, James Baker, could be drawing up an exit plan for US forces in Iraq.

    Such a strategy would once have been unthinkable for Bush, who famously vowed to keep US forces in Iraq even if he was supported only by his wife, Laura, and dog, Barney.

    On Wednesday Bush admitted for the first time the existence of a parallel between Iraq and Vietnam.

    Such comparisons had been fiercely resisted by the White House, which has insisted that the US would succeed in bringing stability to Iraq and democracy to the Middle East.

    But Bush appeared to agree that the rise in sectarian killings in Iraq could prove as demoralising to his administration's mission in Iraq as the Tet offensive of 1968/69.

    Although that offensive resulted in a military defeat for the North Vietnamese forces, it turned American public opinion against the war and the then American president, Lyndon Johnson.

    Background on Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War
    The Tet offensive, launched in January 1968, is seen as the turning point of America's involvement in the war.

    The waves of attacks on Saigon and other southern cities was a disaster for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. But the images of violence -- including a commando attack on the US embassy in Saigon -- exposed the hollowness of the Pentagon's claims that America was in control of the situation.

    The offensive shook public confidence in the commander of US forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, and the then president Lyndon Johnson.
    - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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