| -Caveat Lector-
Credibility lost amid war
hysteria
The idea that conservative Jews are behind the Iraq push is as dodgy as French platitudes, writes Gerard Henderson.
It is seldom a surprise when the occasional conspiracy theory is shared (albeit for different reasons) by the lunar right and the extreme left. But it comes as something of an eye-opener when such junk receives the apparent endorsement of serious commentators such as ABC-TV Four Corners presenter Jonathan Holmes. Last week Four Corners ran Holmes's report, "American Dreamers", of the United States in the lead-up to what seems likely to become the second Gulf War. There was nothing particularly fresh in the report. The line was familiar, namely that "a tiny unelected network of veteran Washington operators" decided on a course of action which has propelled George Bush to seek the disarmament of Iraq by military force. The guilty party are the "neo-conservatives" - meaning a number of US academics/commentators/think tank operatives who used to support the liberal left (ie, the Democrats) but came to back the tough-minded positions embraced by that section of the US conservative movement which supported Ronald Reagan's anti-communism during the final years of the Cold War. There is some truth in the theory that the group which goes by the name neo-conservative is influential in Washington. After all, the Republicans are in the White House. However, such a finding would scarcely justify Holmes and his crew going to Washington. Hence the story within the story. As Holmes put it, the neo-conservatives (allegedly) driving US policy with respect to Saddam Hussein's Iraq are "almost all Jews whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe". Names were named, and some were interviewed on
camera. The Holmes list included Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defence),
Douglas Feith (Under-Secretary of Defence who was described as a "lifelong
Zionist") and Richard Perle (chairman of the Defence Policy Board). Holmes spoke
to Feith and Perle, but did not put his theory about the impact of their Jewish
backgrounds to either - except to suggest in the first instance that there might
be "a sort of hidden agenda going on here". | ||
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Little wonder then the "agenda" in this instance is "hidden". It cannot be found because it does not exist. Rightly or wrongly, the US is contemplating military action in the Gulf because of the change in the American psyche after the September 11 attacks.
Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, made a brief appearance on "American Dreamers", saying, with respect to Iraq: "What is at stake here is war and peace; and we are willing to try to give peace a chance." This is not only a cliche. Like Holmes, de Villepin has totally misread the US after September 11.
Correctly or incorrectly, the US considers not only that Americans face a real and present danger but that the US is at war. Bush said as much in his recent address to the American Enterprise Institute, declaring that after September 11, "we must look at security in a new way because our country is a battlefield in the first war of the 21st century".
Bush (with Tony Blair and John Howard) has become convinced that Saddam may hand over a weapon of mass destruction to a terrorist movement which may use it to attack New York, London or Sydney. It is unlikely Bush would hold such a position with such intensity if September 11 had not happened, irrespective of whether some American Jews, among others, may have wanted regime change in Iraq.
The Four Corners team appears to take de Villepin's "give peace a chance" platitude at face value. It is not clear that successive governments in Paris deserve such respect. The French have yet to fully acknowledge France's collaboration with Nazi Germany in the early 1940s.
Today the French like to lecture about world peace, despite their miserable record as a colonial power in South-East Asia and Africa and the recent effective support for the mass murderers of Rwanda. Moreover, no Western government has a worse record than France in supplying aid and comfort to Saddam in recent years. This even extended to Jacques Chirac's involvement in the French decision to help Iraq build a nuclear reactor. Thankfully it was destroyed by Israeli military action, outside any United Nations mandate.
At the moment Chirac is the hero of the self-proclaimed peace movement and his nation's left. This overlooks the fact that if Chirac had had his way, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons about the time it invaded Kuwait. In Australia, sections of the lunar right are circulating the works of the US right-wing extremist Patrick Buchanan suggesting that the Gulf tension has been caused by Jewish "neo-conservatives ... colluding with Israel". The lunar right need not have bothered. After all, Holmes ran a similar line on Four Corners - which filmed Perle and Feith accompanied by dramatic musical interludes.
The US policy is not driven by Zionism but rather by fear of homeland terrorist attack. And the French position is not motivated by a search for peace but rather by (traditional) French duplicity. Four Corners, please note.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
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