[wvns] The "Protocol of the Elders of American Neoconservatism"

The "Protocol of the Elders of American Neoconservatism"
and the Blood of American Soldiers
by Walter Uhler
http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/protocol.html

As virtually every literate citizen on our planet knows, since the
nineteenth century anti-Semites have been extolling the crackpot and
wicked Protocols of the Elders of Zion in order to prove a conspiracy
by Jews to rule the world. Even today, alas, the Protocols remain
popular and believable throughout the world, especially the Middle East.

Yet, since the end of the Cold War there has been little in the
political behavior of the Jews among America's neoconservatives to
refute such beliefs. After all, it was people with the names Paul
Wolfowitz, Irv Lewis Libby and Eric Edelman, who "in 1992…co-authored
a security doctrine for the United States that aimed at perpetual
hegemony and implied perpetual aggression to prevent the emergence of
'peer' powers." [Juan Cole, "Informed Comment," July 21, 2007]

Moreover, throughout the 1990s many Jews among America's
neoconservatives demonstrated an alacrity to play fast and loose with
the lives of America's soldiers. For example, in 1995 Charles
Krauthammer urged the United States to "unashamedly" lay down "the
rules of world order" and be "prepared to enforce them." In 1996
Robert Kagan wrote "Military strength alone will not avail if we do
not use it actively to maintain a world order which both supports and
rest upon American hegemony." [Quotes from Andrew J. Bacevich, The New
American Militarism, pp. 84-85]

Granted, America's neocons were not the only people eager to expend
American military blood on the battlefield during the 1990s, witness
the now infamous question by Madeleine Albirght to Colin Powell in
1993: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always
talking about if we can't use it?" [Ibid, p. 24] But the neocons
established a stranglehold on warmongering, especially when it came to
attacking Iraq.

Simply recall the three chicken hawk American neoconservative Jews,
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who signed on in 1996
to write a policy paper -- "A Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the
Realm"-- for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, Feith
and Wurmser recommended that Israel find pretexts for waging wars of
aggression that would roll back its Arab neighbors. Moreover, "The
centerpiece of their recommendations was the removal of Saddam Hussein
as the first step into remaking the Middle East into a region
friendly, instead of hostile, to Israel." [James Bamford, A Pretext
for War, p. 262]

Arguably, such behavior constituted treason. According to James
Bamford: "It was rather extraordinary for a trio of former, and
potentially future, high-ranking American government officials to
become advisers to a foreign government. More unsettling still was the
fact that they were recommending acts of war in which Americans could
be killed, and also ways to masquerade the true purpose of the attacks
from the American public." [Ibid, p. 263]

A year later, as Scott McConnell has written, William Kristol and
Robert Kagan wrote an article, "Saddam Must Go," in which they
asserted: "We know it seems unthinkable to propose another ground
attack to take Baghdad. But it's time to start thinking the
unthinkable." [Scott McConnell, "The Weekly Standard's War,"The
American Conservative, September 21, 2005]

Explicitly willing to shed the blood of America's servicemen and
women, in January 1998, Kristol and Kagan also wrote an Op Ed titled,
"Bombing Iraq isn't Enough," which the New York Times was reckless
enough to publish. (At this point, it's worth noting the observation
made by Robert Parry: "Under principles of international law applied
from Nuremberg to Rwanda, propagandists who contribute to war crimes
or encourage crimes against humanity can be put in the dock alongside
the actual killers." [Consortium News, Posted August 21, 2006])

Nevertheless, on January 26, 1998, Kristol and Kagan "along with more
than a dozen other neoconservative luminaries sent a letter to
President Bill Clinton denouncing the policy of containing Iraq as a
failure and calling for the United States to overthrow Saddam
Hussein." [Bacevich, p. 90] Subsequently both houses of the
Republican-controlled congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998,
which the impeachment-threatened Clinton signed into law -
notwithstanding the fact that it violated U.S. treaty obligations
under the Charter of United Nations.

In 2001, months before the attacks on 9/11, neocon Michael Ledeen
wrote that Mao was correct when he asserted that revolution sprang
"from the barrel of a gun." It was America's "inescapable mission to
fight for the spread of democracy." [Bacevich, p. 88]

After 9/11, the neocons' drumbeat for shedding American military blood
became deafening. Krauthammer asserted: "the way to tame the Arab
street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw
power and victory…. The elementary truth that seems to elude the
experts again and again…is that power is its own reward." [Ibid, p.
93] (In light of the fact that the reckless spilling of American
military - and innocent Iraqi - blood has produced a proliferation of
terrorists and terrorist attacks around the world, it's surprising
that jingoist Krauthammer still has his job at the Washington Post.)

Three months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Joshua Muravchik observed,
"Military conquest has often proved to be an effective means of
implanting democracy." [Ibid, p. 85] And, three months into the war,
Max Boot (another neocon chicken hawk warmonger who, subsequently,
even attempted to excuse the war crimes committed at Abu Ghraib),
urged the spilling of American military blood for the purpose of
"imposing the rule of law, property rights and other guarantees, at
gunpoint if need be." [Ibid. p. 33]

But perhaps the worst of all the bloviating "gutless wonders," who
demanded the spilling of American military blood after 9/11 was effete
William Kristol. After 9/11, it was Kristol's Weekly Standard that
incessantly beat the war drums for invading Iraq. And it did so by
repeating the BIG LIE: Saddam was linked to al Qaeda.

According to Scott McConnell, in the very first issue published after
9/11, the Weekly Standard "laid down a line from which the magazine
would not waver over the next 18 months." Their line was "to link
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to
join them at the hip in the minds of readers, and then lay out a
strategy that actually gave attacking Saddam priority over eliminating
al Qaeda." [McConnell, "The Weekly Standard's War," The American
Conservative, September 21, 2005]

Neocon Douglas Feith supported the Weekly Standard party line from
inside the bowels of the Pentagon. It was Feith's Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group that devoted almost a year after
9/11 to hyping shards of evidence already dismissed by the officially
responsible intelligence agencies in order to falsely assert that
Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda.

Neocon Richard Perle did something similar, but in the public realm.
In October 2002, Perle criticized the intelligence about Iraq coming
from the CIA while assuring Judith Miller of the New York Times, that
Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) "has been without
question the single most important source of intelligence about Saddam
Hussein." [Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco, p.57] Shamefully, Miller became
the Times' stenographer for Chalabi and the neocons.

Darth Cheney also was an eager recipient of Chalabi's disinformation.
It was Cheney, in the fall of 2002, who complained: "We're getting
ready to go to war, and we're nickel-and-diming the INC at a time when
they're providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMD." [The New
Republic, December 1, 2003]

Unfortunately, as Americans learned after the invasion, every piece of
intelligence supplied by Chalabi's INC informants proved to be bogus.
Did Chalabi care? No. When asked whether he felt any remorse about his
role in duping Americans into an invasion of Iraq, Chalabi responded:
"No. We are in Baghdad now." [Ibid, p, 389] Given that Chalabi was
sponsored by the neocons, one is compelled to ask: Was this stupidity
or was it treason?

Consequently, given the eagerness of America's neoconservatives to
spill American military blood, perhaps it's time to reconsider the
words of Stanley Fish: "Much of the world has been opposed to the Iraq
war from its beginning, and now after four years 70 percent of
Americans share the world's opinion. Some who deplore the war believe
that those who got us into it and cheered it on did so, at least in
part, out of a desire to improve Israel's position in the Middle East.
Those who hold this view (and of course there are other analyses of
the war's origins) fear that the same people - with names like
Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, Kristol, Kagan, Krauthhammer,
Wurmser, [the convicted felon] Libby and Lieberman - are pushing for a
strike against Iran, arguably a greater threat to Israel than Iraq
ever was." [Fish, New York Times online on March 4, 2007]

A glaring omission from Fish's list, of course, is the name of Norman
Podhoretz, a Jew who fervently hopes that President Bush will bomb
Iran. Yet, Professor Fish wrote his inflammatory words precisely to
condemn their implicit anti-Semitism. And properly so!

Keep in mind that the majority of America's Jews opposed the invasion
of Iraq. Consequently, it's America's neoconservatives, including it
Jewish members, who deserve America's condemnation, not America's
Jews. Thus, rather than give anti-Semitic believers of the old
"Protocols" any further reason to nurture such nonsense about Jews, I
suggest that the American public, especially America's men and women
in uniform, focus their attention instead on the willingness of
America's neocons (both Jewish and Gentile) to establish a new
"Protocol" - the "Protocol of the Elders of American Neoconservatism."

Under this new "Protocol," American neoconservatives are permitted to
urge the spilling of American military blood for neoconservative
objectives - including world domination -- but without having to
fight, kill or die for those objectives themselves.

Were America's soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to push back
against such cowardly warmongering, they just might save themselves
from the worst excesses of this "Protocol." For example, when William
Kristol recently wrote about progressives, "They Don't Really Support
the Troops," our troops should keep in mind that his real objective
was to mask his own criminal complicity - and the complicity of
America's neocons -- in the deaths of more than 3,600 American
soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

For, as readers of Thomas E. Ricks' book, Fiasco already know, by
clamoring for war, it was the neocons who failed to support the
troops. How so? Because many of America's senior military leaders
(both active and retired) opposed the very invasion of Iraq that the
neocons begged for.

In fact, the neocons have fostered the spilling of American military
blood in Iraq in at least three different ways. First, through their
drumbeat for the unprovoked, illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq, a
country that had no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al Qeada
and no initial connection to Bush's so-called war on terrorism. (Iraq
became connected only after Bush's blunder drew jihaidsts like flies
to that God-forsaken country.)

Second, through their ideologically inspired negligence, the neocons
helped to create the debacle that our troops now face in Iraq. The
negligence of neocon Douglas Feith deserves particular scorn. He
simply blew off his responsibilities to plan for the post-invasion
occupation. Consider the words of a Bush administration official:
"Feith ought to be drawn, quartered and hung…He's a sonofabich who
agitated for war in Iraq, but once the decision is made to do it, he
disengages. It was clear there were problems across the board - with
electricity, with de-Baathification, with translators, with training
the Iraqi police - and he just had nothing to do with it. I'm furious
about it, still." [Ricks, pp. 167-68]

Even worse than Feith's negligence, was the ideologically inspired
negligence of Paul Wolfowitz. Remember Wolfowitz's asinine assertion:
"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide
stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war
itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his
army. Hard to imagine." [George Packer, The Assassins' Gate, pp. 114-15]

Thus, thanks, in part, to Wolfowitz, the U.S. military went into Iraq
with insufficient troop strength, and thus proved unable to prevent
either the widespread looting or the subsequent emergence of the
insurgency, which soon blossomed into a civil war. As a consequence,
more American military blood was spilled (and continues to be spilled)
in Iraq than was necessary.

Finally, nothing better establishes the failure of the neocons to
support the troops than the opposition of their views to the sobering
assessments made by America's military leaders.

First, consider the words about the "surge" recently uttered by
William Kristol: "[T]hese soldiers, fighting courageously in a just
cause, could still win the war." [Weekly Standard , 30 July 2007]

Putting aside his "just cause" canard, simply contrast Kristol's
disingenuous words with the assessment made more than three years ago
-- on May 12, 2004 -- by Bush's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Gen. Richard Myers: "[T]here is no way to militarily win in Iraq."

Better yet, contrast Kristol's words with the assessment made by
Bush's Joint Chiefs' nominee, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, just three days
ago: [T]here is no purely military solution in Iraq."

Clearly, Kristol's encouraging words were designed to service the
"Protocol of the Elders of American Neoconservatism."

Second, juxtapose the airy words (now signifying nothing) uttered by
Robert Kagan in 1996 with the recent assessments made by retired
General William Odom and the vary same Adm. Mullen.

Kagan: "Military strength alone will not avail if we do not use it
actively to maintain a world order which both supports and rest upon
American hegemony."

Odom: "No U.S. forces have ever been compelled to stay in sustained
combat conditions for as long as the Army units have in Iraq. In World
War II, soldiers were considered combat-exhausted after about 180 days
on the line. They were withdrawn for rest periods…In Iraq, combat
units take over an area of operations and patrol it daily, making
soldiers face the prospect of death from an IED or small arms fire or
mortar fire each day. Day in and day out for a full year, with only a
single two-week break, they confront the prospect of death, losing
limbs or eyes, or suffering serious wounds." [Odom, "'Supporting the
Troops' Means Withdrawing Them," Neiman Watchdog, 5 July 2007]

Mullen: American forces are "not unbreakable." [William Branigin,
"Joint Chiefs Nominee Notes Toll on Military, Need to Plan for Iraq
Drawdown," Washington Post, August 1, 2007]

Sidney Blumenthal recently wrote an exceptionally thoughtful article
for salon.com ("Operation Iraq Betrayal"
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/07/26/cheney/ ), which
demonstrated that the Bush administration and its neocon supporters
have escalated their stab-in-the-back blame game for losing Iraq. Eric
Edelman's ill-considered slap down of Senator Hillary Clinton and
William Kristol's attack on The Nation and The New Republic are but
two recent examples of this slimy phenomenon. Bush's recent warning to
congress, lest it vote to withdraw our troops, constituted a third.

But, as the evidence presented above clearly demonstrates, it has been
the American soldier who has been stabbed in the back. America's
neoconservatives have repeatedly demonstrated that they are quite
willing to fight to the last drop of American military blood (but not
their own!) for the sake of America's empire, the world's oil and Israel.

If only our American servicemen and women knew!

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose
work has been published in numerous publications, including The
Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military
History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is
President of the Russian-American International Studies Association
(RAISA).

waltuhler @ aol.com

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