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May 10, 2002
CounterPunch Special Report
A Congressional Staffer Details Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill:
"We are All Members of Likud Now."
Our Vichy Congress
by George Sunderland *
Should John Walker Lindh be found guilty of taking up arms against the United
States, pursuant to a fair trial before a court of competent jurisdiction, this writer
would have no objection in principle to seeing him executed, or put away for a long
period. The law is the law; one may say this without engaging in bloodthirsty rancor
or the cheap, pseudo-patriotic histrionics that are the custom on talk radio or the
cable "news" channels.
That having been stipulated, the American Taliban case raises fundamental
questions of group loyalty, and what it means to cross the line between
Constitutionally-protected activities and openly treasonable behavior. Moreover, if
Walker Lindh's youth and alleged naiveté turn out to be mitigating circumstances,
how are we to judge disloyalty committed by older, presumably responsible citizens
who swear an oath to protect the Constitution when they assume elective office?
What happens, indeed, when inverted and transferred loyalty becomes so general as
hardly to be noticeable?
Probably the emblematic example of this kind of generalized disloyalty to the country
of one's birth is the Vichy government of France. Histories of the fall of France, such
as William Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, or Alistair Horne's To Lose a
Battle, take pains to emphasize that France's military collapse and generally
subservient loyalty to German occupation had their source not in military weakness
per se, but in the profound cynicism, corruption, and attenuated loyalty of interwar
France's professional class of politicians.
One of the archetypes that reverberates in our extended historical memory is the
thoroughly distasteful picture of the dozing, senile Petain, the feral, rat-like
Leval, and
a supporting cast of seedy hack politicians clenching acrid Gauloise cigarettes
between tobacco-stained fingers. When Petain spoke of the "duty of loyalty" of
France's citizens to a collaborationist regime, the modern reader has no difficulty in
calculating that black is white and up is down. Loyalty to France was not the loyalty
preached and practiced by the politicians in Vichy. At the end of World War II, many
of these politicians found themselves at the end of a rope.
What, then, is one to make of our representatives and senators in Congress
assembled?
For expressions of sheer grovelling subservience to a foreign power, the
pronouncements of Laval and Petain pale in comparison to the rhetorical devotion
with which certain Congressmen have bathed the Israel of Ariel Sharon.
In March, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma took the Senate floor and said the
September 11 attacks were punishment by God in response to U.S. policy toward
Israel. Asserting that Israel is "entitled" to the West Bank, he also criticized his
fellow
citizens who counselled the Israelis to use restraint, in effect blaming them for the
terrorist attacks of September 11: "One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door
was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that the policy of
our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to
retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched
against them."
According to this Tornado-Belt St. Augustine, God in effect allowed airliners to be
flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because U.S. actions towards
Israel offended the Almighty. In other words, the United States was punished
because the Bush administration had been insufficiently worshipful towards Israel
(the $3 billion annually that Congress squeezes out of the taxpayer as tribute to the
Jewish State is apparently not sufficient in the opinion of this self-styled "fiscal
conservative"--and in the opinion of the Almighty Himself, Whose inscrutable will
Inhofe claims to be able to interpret).
Like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Inhofe believes America suffered divinely-
ordained punishment; but the Senator adds a new twist: those 3,000 innocent
Americans died, he believes, because their government demonstrated insufficient
obeisance to a foreign country. For sheer treacherous Quislingism, Inhofe's
statement is hard to top.
But top it we can.
A perusal of the May 6, 2002 Jerusalem Post reveals the following headline: "Visiting
Congressmen Advise Israel to Resist US Administration Pressure." The Israeli
newspaper chronicles the pilgrimage of a group of Congressional wardheelers to the
Promised Land, carrying with them a copy of the resolution of support for the Israeli
government which passed Congress by a vote of 352-21 with 29 abstentions. The
delegation's leader, Rep. James Saxton of New Jersey, displayed a copy of the
resolution to reporters, which he said they wanted to "hand deliver" to the Israeli
people. Saxton's enthusiasm for Israel is a matter of long standing, and extends to
providing Congressional employment to Israeli citizen--and rumored Mossad asset--
Yosef Bodansky.
An ironic aspect to this Congressional junket is that these are precisely the public
officials who routinely suggest that dissent against the Bush administration's conduct
of the war in Afghanistan is tantamount to treason.
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's tepid criticism of Bush's policies in March
elicited a firestorm of self- righteous indignation from Republicans, and Daschle, duly
chastised, slunk offstage.
No criticism of President Bush is warranted, apparently, except where Israel is
involved. In that case, one is seemingly permitted to travel to foreign countries at
taxpayer expense for the purpose of publicly undercutting one's own government's
foreign policy. What gives this circumstance added savor is the recollection that
Jesse Jackson's erstwhile forays into hostage negotiation in Lebanon and the
Balkans met with grumbling from Republicans that Jackson ought to be prosecuted
for violating the Logan Act. Again, apparently the Israel exception applies.
A further example of Vichyite subservience is provided by John McCain, adored pet
of newspaper editorial boards and in relentless competition with Joseph Lieberman
as Conscience of the Senate pro tempore. Addressing the closing plenary session of
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee at the Jefferson Memorial on April 23,
McCain plighted his troth with Sharon's Israel in a manner that would have been
denounced as fellow-travelership or useful idiocy had it been Henry Wallace praising
the Soviet Union.
Invoking Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (the founder, as it were, of Congressional
Vichyism: a truly odious pork-barreling errand boy of the military industrial complex
whose chief contribution to American statecraft was launching the careers of the
smoothly sinister Richard Perle and howling militarist Frank Gaffney) McCain
described the indissoluble moral bond between the American Republic and the
Middle Eastern apartheid state run by an ex-general currently under indictment by a
Belgian court for war crimes. Indeed, "To be proudly pro-American and pro-Israeli is
not to hold conflicting loyalties. As Scoop understood, it is about defending the
principles that both countries hold dear. And I stand before you today, proudly pro-
American and pro-Israel." It is notable that McCain produced this effusion at an
American national memorial, surrounded by Israeli flags. The Senator apparently
thinks that this scene would be so impressive to his Arizona constituents that he put
a picture of it on his web site.
Command performances before AIPAC have become standard features in the life of
a Washington elected official, like filing FEC reports and hitting on interns. The
stylized panegyrics delivered at the annual AIPAC meeting have all the probative
value of the Dniepropetrovsk Soviet's birthday greeting to Stalin, because the actual
content is unimportant; what is crucial is that the politician in question be seen to
be
genuflecting before the AIPAC board. In fact, to make things easier, the speeches
are sometimes written by an AIPAC employee, with cosmetic changes inserted by a
member of the Senator's or Congressman's own staff.
Of course, there are innumerable lobbies in Washington, from environmental to
telecommunications to chiropractic; why is AIPAC different? For one thing, it is a
political action committee that lobbies expressly on behalf of a foreign power; the
fact
that it is exempt from the Foreign Agents' Registration Act is yet another mysterious
"Israel exception." For another, it is not just the amount of money it gives, it is the
political punishment it can exact: just ask Chuck Percy or Pete McClosky. Since the
mid-1980s, no Member of Congress has even tried to take on the lobby directly. As a
Senate staffer told this writer, it is the "cold fear" of AIPAC's disfavor that keeps
the
politicians in line.
This scam has been going on for decades.
The main purpose, other than to maintain the flow of weapons and loot to Israel, is to
keep Congress's investigatory apparatus turned off. AIPAC appears to be batting a
thousand.
Lyndon Johnson's decision to cover up the deliberate and protracted Israeli attack on
the U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967 (and which resulted in 34 deaths: almost double the
deaths suffered by the crew of the U.S.S. Cole) was pointedly not investigated by
Congress. Instead, the surviving crew were shamefully bullied into silence by the
gargoyle Johnson and his functionaries; those who did break their silence later were
reviled by the lobby as delusional anti-Semites.
Likewise, the Congressional investigation into the Beirut barracks bombing stuck to
the narrow issue of the incompetent U.S. military chain of command, and avoided the
wider issue of the Marines' presence as sitting ducks in the middle of Sharon's first
war of conquest. A retired officer has asserted that the Mossad had intelligence from
informers that the frame of a truck was being reinforced to carry a heavy load of
explosives, but chose to keep the intelligence secret. Despite the lobby's claim that
the U.S.-Israel relationship is one of mutual intelligence sharing, the real
relationship
is a starker one: according to old intelligence hands, Israel takes all and gives
nothing, even if U.S. lives are at stake.
The way for then-National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane's "opening to Iran" was
paved by the fact that Israel was already providing F-4 Phantom spare parts
(manufactured in the United States and transported to Israel at American taxpayer
expense) to Iran on the sly as a way of counterbalancing Iraq's military power.
The extent to which President Reagan's privatized foreign policy used these pre-
existing links to pursue the Iranian opening is uncertain. What is certain is that the
joint House-Senate investigating committee, chaired by long-time AIPAC favorite
Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, took some pains to steer the investigation away
from Israel, so that those links would not be made public in a way that would
embarrass our Major non-NATO Ally.
Finally, for a country that loves a good spy mystery-- whether it is Alger Hiss, the
Rosenbergs, or Robert Hansen, each one eliciting from Capitol Hill cries for an
investigation, more polygraphs, increased use of the death penalty, etc., etc.--
Congress's deafening silence over the Israeli "art students" saga, particularly after
9/11, is astonishing for those unfamiliar with Congress's reticence about
embarrassing Israel.
All the more amazing that only two years before, the Hill was in an uproar over the
Chinese spy hysteria (the fact that Wen Ho Lee, the apparently falsely accused Los
Alamos employee, had been fingered in the columns of manic Zionist and Sharon
confidant William Safire supplies an almost O. Henry quality of irony to the tale). The
full story of how hundreds of Mossad agents-in-training were literally inundating
Federal facilities in the year and a half prior to 9/11 may never be known, thanks to a
total smothering by the Justice Department, Congress, and the major media, but a
good summary may be read in the following here.
As year chases year, the lobby's power to influence Congress on any issue of
importance to Israel grows inexorably stronger. In 1995, coincidentally the year her
then-husband became Speaker of the House, Marianne Gingrich was hired by the
Israel Export Development Co., Ltd (IEDC) as its vice president for business
development. Mrs. Gingrich's interest in Israel began during an eight-day trip to
Israel
she and her husband made in August 1994 at AIPAC's expense.
Was it a political payoff from a foreign power?
"If I were going to get a political payoff, it would not be for the amount of money I
am
making," said Mrs. Gingrich, who had no experience in the field. Her salary was
$2,500 per month, "plus commissions," the size of which neither she nor anyone
connected with the business would reveal.
By an even odder coincidence, the newly-minted Speaker Gingrich's foreign policy
prescriptions became stridently pro-Israel and bellicosely opposed to the countries
that Israel designates as enemies. One of Gingrich's notable forays into diplomacy at
the time was his public call for the CIA to overthrow the government of Iran.
Someone apparently failed to remind the Speaker that the agency had already
engineered an Iranian coup in 1953--and look how well that little enterprise turned
out.
Israel's strategy of using its influence on the American political system to turn the
U.S. national security apparatus into its own personal attack dog--or Golem- -has
alienated the United States from much of the Third World, has worsened U.S. ties to
Europe amid rancorous insinuations of anti-Semitism, and makes the United States
a hated bully. And by cutting off all diplomatic lines of retreat--as Sharon did when
he
publicly made President Bush, the leader of the Free World, look like an impotent
fool--Israel paradoxically forces the United States to draw closer to Israel because
there is no thinkable alternative for American politicians than continuing to invest
political capital in Israel.
We have now reached the point where there may be no turning back as nuclear
Armageddon beckons from the Middle East. Writing recently in The Washington
Post, Chris Patten, the European commissioner for external relations, says "a senior
Democratic senator [alas, Patten does not name him] told a visiting European the
other day: 'All of us here are members of Likud now.'"
So it has come to this: members of the world's greatest deliberative body, the heirs of
Clay, La Follette, and Taft, now identify themselves with a radical political movement
that grew out of the terrorism of Judeo-Fascist and Mussolini admirer Vladimir
Jabotinsky; Menachim Begin, co-conspirator in the bombing of the King David Hotel;
and Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila.
Whether they identify with Sharon's Israel because of crass political advantage, or
because, like those of Senator Inhofe's, their views are indistinguishable from the
delusions of a certifiable lunatic, our Vichy Congress is driving us down the path of a
final, fatal clash of civilizations. All Americans, be they old-line conservatives who
hate seeing their country hopelessly embroiled in the Old World's perpetual quarrels,
or liberals in the honorable anti-imperilialist and antimilitarist tradition of William
Jennings Bryan, or the apolitical who resent the prospect of becoming an irradiated
corpse, must put aside their differences and start loudly and persistently identifying
these Congressional Likudniki for what they are: Quislings.
George Sunderland is the pen name of a Congressional staff member. Comments to
Sunderland can be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
End<{{{
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