Antiwar.com Blog

A funny little essay in a local newspaper came to my attention this morning. During an email discussion over the events and motives in the Gaza crisis, a friend of mine forwarded part of an op-ed piece that appeared in this week’s Sun Sentinel, a daily newspaper in Fort Lauderdale. I immediately thought it sounded a little too familiar. Sure, Israeli officials and other apologists are serving the same talking points across all the television networks and in print media, but this sounded like more than just simple rehash, so I plugged the quote into a search engine. Jackpot!

There was the piece, but it was on a shared website for a pair of central New Jersey papers that I normally don’t read either. It was longer, and, oh, the author was different too. With my curiosity now piqued, I could not help but search some more. I found a nearly identical one written by David A. Harris, executive director of American Jewish Committee, over at The Dallas Morning News. Hmm, the other two “authors” also identified themselves as AJC directors. Eventually, I located Harris over at the Jerusalem Post where he had contributed not only this same piece but many others as well. My guess is that I probably read the piece there a few days back.

Clearly, this is just a press release created by the American Jewish Committee and being passed off by its members as their heartfelt and original opinions. Another local newspaper, The Palm Beach Post, even published the same piece a day after its competitor ran it. Thankfully in this case though, it was “authored” by the same South Floridian. I wonder how many other newspapers fell for it.

I’m sure the members all do genuinely feel that way, but did they really need to fake homegrown gravitas to ensure publication in as many local opinion pages as possible? Probably. You don’t engage in large-scale propaganda – excuse me, “a public relations campaign” – unless you feel like you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar. From the look of the essay, it seems that the pro-Israel crowd is going for the “but they did it first” tactic favored by young children for time immemorial. Occasionally that might work with one’s peers, but it’s a piss poor way to convince the rest of the world that they have the moral high ground – or maybe they are really just trying to convince themselves.

Just hours after the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Iraq took effect, we reported that American forces shot a civilian woman in Baghdad.

Such a shooting was expected to be a big test for the SOFA, which ostensibly was meant to prevent the US from shooting and arresting so many civilians. But the US now has an explanation, and that seems good enough for the Iraqis.

See, that woman, an employee of Biladi Television, seemed suspicious, so they screamed at her to stop. When she didn’t, they fired two warning shots into her stomach. All perfectly innocent, right?

Except of course that the woman they shot couldn’t hear… now it’s been awhile since I read the SOFA, but I don’t recall there being an exemption for shooting deaf people in the question of legal immunity for crimes against civilians.

Jacob Heilbrunn of The National Interest, which is related to the Nixon Center, has written two very interesting articles on the plight of the neo-cons after the Republican debacle in November that are well worth a read.

The first, published on the journal’s blog December 19, addresses the departure of Joshua Muravchik and Marc Reuel Gerecht, as well as that reported earlier of Michael Ledeen, from the foreign-policy ranks of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Like Ledeen, Gerecht has found a new home at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which, so far as I can tell, is basically a front for both Israel’s Likud Party and for the pro-Likud Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). Muravchik, who, like Ledeen, had been associated with AEI for some 20 years, is apparently yet to find a new perch. Heilbrunn suggests that these departures are evidence of an ideological purge against neo-cons led by Danielle Pletka, who came to prominence as a staffer for the ultra-right Jesse Helms, but I find this a little difficult to believe if, for no other reason, than Pletka is as neo-conservative (and Likudist) as anyone I can think of. I understand from mutual friends that Muravchik had been worried about his position at AEI for at least the past year and a half due to withering pressure from above to write and publish more than he had. It is true as Heilbrunn points out, however, that Muravchik has been a bit more nuanced in his approach to the various “evils” that neo-cons have identified over the past two decades than some of his ideological colleagues; for example, Daniel Pipes (with whom Pletka has been close) has attacked him (and Gerecht) for entertaining the notion that the West should be willing to dialogue with and possibly even support non-violent Islamist parties in the Middle East, a notion that is anathema to Pipes. Perhaps AEI’s or Pletka’s aim is guided less by Republican loyalty than by Islamophobia, if indeed ideology — and not personality, as was reportedly more the case with Ledeen — is playing a role in these decisions.

The second article by Heilbrunn, whose book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons I reviewed last year, is much longer and appears in the latest issue (Jan 12) of The American Conservative. It speculates on the internal splits that the neo-cons are going through as a result of the political campaign and Obama’s victory, and the possibility (I would say probability) that at least one major faction — headed by people like Robert Kagan, David Brooks and even David Frum — will seek to forge an alliance with liberal interventionists, presumably led by Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton (although Susan Rice also fits the bill), in the new administration, much as they succeeded in doing during the Clinton administration with respect to Balkans policy. As I’ve written before, the two movements have similar historical origins (inspired in major part by the “lessons” — “never again” — they drew from Munich and the Holocaust) and tend to see foreign policy in highly moralistic terms in which the U.S. and Israel are “exceptionally” good. While I don’t agree with everything in Heilbrunn’s analysis, it offers a good point of departure for watching the neo-cons as the Age of Obama gets underway.

Both Hamas and the Israeli government bear some of the blame, but the Israeli slaughter of civilians far exceeds that inflicted by the ragtag rockets fired from Gaza.

The craven response by the American political class to the use of American planes and weapons to slaughter civilians is what any reasonable cynic should have expected. Obama is maintaining his silence – perhaps because there is little hay to be made from victims outside of Darfur.

This conflict may be even more ludicrous than the typical Mideast carnage. The New York Times, in a front page story headlined, “Israel Reminds Foe It Has Teeth,” noted, “Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to expunge the ghost of its flawed 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and re-establish Israeli deterrence.”

“Teeth”?

Blasting the hell out of an overcrowded prison-like slab of land that has no anti-aircraft defenses? This is the New Macho??

Whom does Israel think that this will deter? Other groups of hungry and discontent convicts throughout Eurasia?

For Israel to “flaunt its strength” by using airstrikes against Gaza would be like the Bush administration seeking to regain its military swagger after Iraq by having the U.S. Air Force blast the hell out of a few Indian reservations in Arizona.