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Shockwaves from what more and more critics
are saying was a Bush administration program to entangle the
United States ever deeper into Middle East politics by deceiving
the country into the Iraq war continue to reverberate through
American society.
Testimony in the recent court-martial
of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who has been charged with refusing
to join his brigade's deployment to Iraq, speaking contemptuously
of the president and committing acts unbecoming an officer, has
shone yet another spotlight on the possibly illegal means by
which the administration secured the introduction of thousands
of American troops into the Mideast under the pretext of eliminating
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction from the hands of terrorists.
'Most of the hearing was consumed
by defense testimony, with three witnesses attacking the Bush
administration's approach to the war and asserting that an officer
could justifiably refuse to participate,' said a Seattle Times
account of the court-martial.
"There was no authorization
from the U.N. Security Council ... and that made it a crime against
the peace," said Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois
professor of international law, who said the Army's own field
manual required such authorization for an offensive war.
Boyle, an outspoken critic
of the administration policy in Iraq, went into considerable
detail about the rules for war as detailed in the Army Field
Manual. He accused the administration of using fraudulent means
to persuade Congress to authorize the war, twice-failing to get
U.N. Security Council authorization for the war and then allowing
war crimes to occur.'
Watada's case may be bolstered
by a new book by Thomas E. Ricks, a military reporter for the
Washington Post. Titled 'Fiasco: The American Military Adventure
in Iraq,' Ricks' book says the Bush administration deceived the
American public about the existence Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
that the administration claimed could one day be used against
America--weapons that an exhaustive post-invasion search failed
to turn up.
'It already is abundantly apparent
in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war with Iraq with
scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect
information - about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed
nexus between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda's terrorism - and then
occupied the country negligently,' Ricks writes.
In a review of 'Fiasco' for
the Seattle Times, Bruce Ramsey takes note of Ricks' venture
into fleshing out the psychological motives that might have animated
Bush and his Iraq war policy makers: 'Ricks profiles Defense
Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, an early champion of belligerency,
and reveals how Wolfowitz's family's losses in the Holocaust
shaped the way he thinksRicks argues that Bush and his senior
advisers wanted a fight, and deceived themselves as well as the
public about Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction.' '
This isn't the first time Wolfowitz's
name has come up in relation to the allegedly deceitful use of
his government employment on behalf of the pursuit of a personal
vendetta or agenda. According to a 2004 report in Asia Times
by Jim Lobe, 'Wolfowitz was investigated in 1978 for providing
a classified document on the proposed sale of a US weapons system
to an Arab government to an Israeli official via an [Israel lobby]
AIPAC staffer.
'In 1992, when he was serving
as under secretary of defense for policy, Pentagon officials
looking into the unauthorized export of classified technology
to China found that Wolfowitz's office was promoting Israel's
export of advanced air-to-air missiles to Beijing in violation
of a written agreement with Washington on arms re-sales.'
Douglas Feith, who served under
Wolfowitz in the run up to the Iraq war, also has a checkered
past of covert dealings on behalf of Israel. He was removed from
his position as a Middle East analyst in the National Security
Council in 1982 when he came under suspicion by the FBI for passing
classified material to Israeli embassy officials, reports say.
In 2004 respected scholar James
Petras took critical note of the large number of committed Jewish
nationalists working in the Pentagon under Wolfowitz and elsewhere
within the Bush administration and found that they were the driving
force behind the Iraq war:
'Wolfowitz, Feith, [Elliot]
Abrams, [Richard] Perle, [Michael] Rubin et al were the most
zealous promoters of the war against Iraq. They worked closely
with other Zionist ideologues like Bush speechwriter David Frum
to promote the notion of 'axes of evil,' to engage in a sequence
of wars against Muslim regimes hostile to Israeli colonial policy
in Palestine and beyond. Wolfowitz, Feith set up the parallel
'intelligence' agency (the Office of Special Planning) run by
fellow Zionist Abram Shulsky using [Ahmed] Chalabi to provide
phony data on Iraq to precipitate that war. An army of 'Israel
First' academic and journalist ideologues wrote, spoke and acted
to justify the US attack on Iraq as the first part of a regional
war to destroy any and all regimes critical of Israeli expansionism.'
Certainly President Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
were well-aware of the record of shady dealings on behalf of
Israel by Wolfowitz, Feith and other Jewish nationalists eventually
hired by the administration. Federal agencies perform exhaustive
security clearance checks on all recruits to national security-sensitive
areas of the government prior to their employment, which means
that the administration knew exactly what it was getting when
it brought them into service--and likely waived any national
security concerns raised.
In fact, given Bush's apparent
Christian Zionists religious beliefs (a recent Nation magazine
report says that the White House holds secret Middle East policy
meetings with dispensationalist Christians who believe that "supporting
Israel's expansionist policies is 'a biblical imperative'"),
Wolfowitz and Feith's staunch Jewish nationalist credentials
and their reported history of attempting to advance that country's
interests through the co-opting of U.S. government resources
on behalf of the Israeli agenda may well have been the exact
characteristics the administration was looking for in those to
whom it planned to entrust the formulation of America's foreign
policy.
In his testimony before the
court-martial hearing, Lt. Watada's expert witness Francis Boyle
didn't go into details about the motives of the Bush administration's
deceitful Iraq war initiative, only that the administration used
fraudulent means to persuade Congress to authorize the war. To
be fully effective, future critics may need to establish the
administration's motives as well. The Christian Zionist/Jewish
nationalist religious/ethnic loyalties to Israel held by top
administration officials may well be a good place to start.
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