Giuliani, Greenwald, and Israel

Kurt Nimmo
Saturday September 22, 2007

It should come as no surprise Rudy Giuliani is a stark raving neocon. One glance at Giuliani’s foreign policy team—stacked with the usual suspects from the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation—and it should be obvious what sort of decider-commander guy Giuliani would be, not that he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere near the White House. No, the White House is reserved for the Bilderberg Queen, Hillary, and the “field,” as it is called, is little more than a dog and pony show for distracted Americans, who think they live in a democracy.

“Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to include Israel and warning that if Iran’s leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power ‘we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years,’” Newsday reported earlier this week. “Giuliani’s implied threat of a U.S. or allied attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities goes further than the hard line against Iran by most other Republican presidential hopefuls, and even exceeds the stern warnings of the Bush White House.” In fact, this “hard line” is more of the same, albeit a bit shriller than the typical neocon superfluity of warmongering. But then Rudy is attempting to stand out from the other “hopefuls,” all of them down to the man and women—with the notable exception of Ron Paul—calling for continued mass murder and war crimes.

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According to Celia Sandys, Winston Churchill’s grand daughter, Giuliani is Winton “in a baseball cap,” an appropriate designation, as Churchill was renown for his hatred for and violence against Arabs. In 1920, as colonial secretary, Churchill declared he was “strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes,” namely Iraqis and Kurds, who didn’t take kindly to occupation by the Empire. Giuliani, of course, does not suggest the use of gas, but instead favors the continued use of an even more pernicious substance, depleted uranium. For his effort and emulation of Churchill, who blithely declared the “story of the human race is war,” Giuliani received an award named for “iconic conservative” Margaret Thatcher from the U.S.-U.K. think tank Atlantic Bridge, a coming together of neocons heralding the “special relationship” between the United States and England, that is to say a fellowship of warmongers. “America and Britain, with their special relationship, should lead the fight against radical Islamists threatening terror by creating stronger intelligence cooperation among Western nations, a massive U.S. military build-up, an expanded NATO and a redoubled effort in the ‘war of ideas,’ Giuliani said,” Newsday continues. In other words, more of the same, only “redoubled,” never mind the reservations of the vast majority of American who want the neocon drive, promised to last a hundred years or more, to end.

All of this bothers Glenn Greenwald. “In London this week, Rudy Giuliani proposed what is probably the single most extremist policy of any major presidential candidate, certainly this year and perhaps in many years,” Greenwald writes for Salon. Mr. Greenwald is only partially correct, as Giuliani’s “extremist policy” is nothing new, a fact revealed upon even cursory examination of what the neocons say and do.

In particular, a declaration uttered by Nile Gardiner, a former Thatcher aide and Heritage Foundation wonk recently announced as a new Giuliani adviser, crawls under Greenwald’s skin. Giuliani and Gardiner propose including Israel in NATO, a dingy proposal, as Israel is a bit too far away to be considered part of Europe, never mind the gobs of money streaming out of Europe, destined for the tiny outlaw and criminal state. “While Giuliani did not explicitly address the implications for Iran of adding Israel to NATO in his speech,” Newsday notes, that “step would ‘leave the mullahs with no illusions about the West’s determination to respond to Iran’s strategic threat to the region,’ Gardiner wrote. ‘Any nuclear or conventional attack on Israel, be it direct or through proxies such as Hezbollah or other terrorist groups, would be met by a cataclysmic response from the West.’” For example, the next time Hezbollah defends the people of Lebanon after yet another Israeli invasion and butchering of school children, the “West” will be obliged to respond in cataclysmic fashion.

“Like most countries, Israel deems all of its wars to be defensive wars in response to threats,” Greenwald writes. “So Rudy Giuliani, as President, would in essence deem any war in which Israel is involved to be, by definition, a war on the U.S., and would use American resources and lives to become involved in any such war and fight on behalf of Israel. Shouldn’t the fact that the leading GOP candidate for President believes such a thing be the source of a bit more discussion? Other than John Edwards’ views regarding haircuts, is there any major presidential candidate who has espoused a view anywhere near this radical or controversial?”

First and foremost, Israel’s wars are not “defensive wars in response to threats,” but rather “self-provoked incidents,” as Livia Rokach notes, reading from the personal dairy of Moshe Sharett, the second prime minister of Israel. As Naseer H. Aruri notes in the preface to Rokach’s book, Israel’s policy toward the Arabs “in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion.”

It is amusing, if not pathetic, that Mr. Greenwald calls for “a bit more discussion” on the part of a corporate media legendary for obfuscating the truth, especially in regard to the neocons. “American resources and lives,” according to the neocons, are naturally squandered for the sake of “deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion,” as noted above. Greenwald writes:

In a rational world, Giuliani’s proposal would be a major controversy, and the other presidential candidates—Republican and Democrat alike—would be loudly pointing to this extremist view to harm the Giuliani campaign. After all, if Americans are asked: “Do you think the U.S. should fight in any wars that Israel fights?” or “do you believe the U.S. should consider any attack on Israel to be an attack on the U.S.?”, is there really any doubt what the views of most Americans would be? Giuliani’s desire to commit the U.S. military to fighting in any Israeli wars is obviously a fringe position—the type that normally harms presidential candidates greatly.

Of course, in Bushzarro world, it is not a “major controversy,” but rather a minor bump in the news cycle. Indeed, the neocon position is a “fringe position,” but the fringe, pushed by the likes of AIPAC and a gaggle of pro-Israel think tanks, dominate U.S. foreign policy, and that includes fighting Israel’s war in Iraq—as admitted by Bush crime family insider Philip Zelikow—and will soon include the shock and awe and granny and toddler slaughter campaign against Iran. Giuliani’s focus on this “fringe position,” supposedly to the detriment of “presidential candidates,” i.e., selectees, demonstrates the staying power of the neocons.

During the Israel-Hezbollah war last summer—even with virtually no significant political figures criticizing the Bush administration for involving itself so blatantly in supporting Israel’s war effort — the vast majority of Americans wanted the U.S. to stay out of that war. A Washington Post poll found that a plurality (46%) blamed “both sides equally” (Israel and Hezbollah) for the war; a plurality (48%) believed that Israel’s claimed “bombing [of] rocket launchers and other Hezbollah targets located in civilian areas” was “not justified”; and a solid majority (54-38%) said Israel “should do more to try to avoid civilian casualties in Lebanon.”

As if Israel, or rather its current and enduring crop of rulers, cared about “civilian casualties in Lebanon.” It can be persuasively argued that in fact civilians were the primary target, as the Jabotinskyites in control of the horizontal and vertical in Israel are legendary for the hatred of Arabs and have consistently lumped civilians in with Hezbollah, a creation that would have never likely occurred without Israel’s serial invasions of Lebanon. “Zionist designs upon Lebanon long antedated the formation of the state of Israel,” writes Ralph Schoenman. “The invasion of Lebanon in 1982 followed a series of raids and invasions in 1968, 1976, 1978 and 1981. Plans to dismember Lebanon were joined now to the primary objective of dispersing the Palestinian inhabitants of Lebanon through massacre followed by expulsion…. The slaughter and dispersal of the Palestinian people was one component of Israeli strategy. Another was the decimation of the vital Lebanese economy which, despite Israeli efforts, had emerged as the finance capital of the Middle East.” Giuliani, regardless of what the American people want, will facilitate this process, not that he will be given the opportunity. But then Hillary’s “policy” toward the Arabs—and specifically, the Persians of Iran—enunciated before the AIPAC gathered, will suffice, even if it leaves out the hyperbole of Giuliani and his neocon advisors.

Plainly, the last thing most Americans want is for the U.S. to expand its involvement in Middle East wars, particularly when doing so is on behalf of the interests not of the U.S., but of another country. Yet here is Giuliani advocating that we do exactly that—embrace an obviously radical strategy opposed by the overwhelming majority of Americans, likely vehemently opposed—and the silence is deafening.

Again, this is irrelevant, as the neocons are Machiavellian fascists, quite remarkably unconcerned with the growing opposition of “the overwhelming majority of Americans,” who are to be fleeced and eventually chewed up as conscripted slaves in coming wars in the name of the “clash of civilizations,” that is to say the neocon-neolib shared conquest project, beginning in the Middle East and expanding outward, as promised by the PNAC gang.

Of course, none of Giuliani’s extremism on this issue should be surprising, given that his senior foreign policy advisor is Norman Podhoretz, whose life has been devoted to trying to induce the U.S. to wage war against any country hostile to Israel. Podhoretz was one of the signatories on the 2002 PNAC letter to President Bush which declared that “No one should doubt that the United States and Israel share a common enemy” and—listing Iraq, Iran and Syria, among others—argued that “Israel is fighting the same war.” Podhoretz currently “prays” that the U.S. bomb Iran.

One way or another, Podhoretz will get his wish, no matter who ends up in the White House, as Hillary Clinton shares the “common enemy” theology, albeit with less of a neocon and more of a neolib slant. Clinton believes the United States and Israel are “fighting the same war,” that is to say a war to flatten Arab and Muslim countries, a belief she has elucidated on numerous occasions, most notably before the AIPAC gathered. For the neolibs, the neocon plan is useful, as the idea is to standardized the Muslim world and dispense with any silly Muslim ideas about usury. Islamic contract law prohibits trading on credit, a precept of course anathema to everything the banker one-world neolibs believe. For the neocons, it has more to do with a visceral and racist hatred of all things Arab, but at the end of the day the neolibs and neocons believe likewise that Arab and Muslim society and culture must be flattened and eradicated.

Now that we are occupying two Middle Eastern countries, with a broken military, and are threatening imminent war with at least another one, isn’t it long past time to have the discussion about the extent to which the U.S. is willing to wage war on behalf of Israel’s interests? Do Americans really think that Iranian hostility towards Israel or its support for “terrorists groups” that are hostile to Israel are grounds for declaring Iran to be our Enemy or waging war against them? If so, then let proponents of war with Iran make that case expressly. And for the rest of the presidential campaign, shouldn’t Giuliani’s desire to involve the U.S. military in every war Israel fights be a rather central feature in discussions of his potential presidency?

Sorry, Glenn, but discussion is out of the question—the American people will be obliged to weather total and unremitting war, no matter who the resident is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, the “proponents of war with Iran” have made “that case expressly,” a fact obvious enough if one can stomach an hour or so of Fox News or read the neocon magazines and web sites. Giuliani is simply keeping the neocon agenda under the limelight and in the face of the American people, who must be conditioned to accept—or at least acquiesce, it is all the same to the neocons. Giuliani will not be the next selectee of the United States, Hillary Clinton will, as she was anointed by the same people who anointed her husband, on par and even exceeding George W. Bush and the neocons when it comes to war crimes and the psychotic proclivity toward mass murder.