Israeli lobbies and the Upcoming War on Iran

The writer is Mazin Qumsiyeh, a PhD who served on the faculty of both Duke and Yale Universities (six and five years respectively). He is currently serving on the Steering Committee of the US Campaign to End the Occupation, the executive committee of the Palestinian American Congress, and the board of the Association for One Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. His third and latest book is titled "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle".  His home page is here. 

Philip Weiss is a Jewish American who has blogged about Jewish attitudes and most importantly about the Jewish American "leadership" (in quotes because they are "leaders" by their self-definition but some dispute this -- leadership for political Zionism only). His blogs provide interesting angles not revealed in mainstream media.  For example, the claim that American Jews were more concerned about Iran in 2002 and early 2003 and were thus less inclined to support the war on Iraq is interesting but simply false on many grounds).   American Jewish opinions on the Iraq war before it happened was solidly supportive of war (as was the wider American and Israeli publics who were shielded from facts by a political Zionist manipulated media and government) and there was no mention of Iran until after "finishing-off" of Iraq.  In fact, some of these surveys were carried out by the American Jewish Establishment itself; here is one example from the American Jewish Committee.

 What Weiss and other logical people agree to is that attitudes do not shape policy, actions do and in this case the self-declared Jewish leaders and politically driven Zionist pundits were very influential and pushed methodically to convince Jews and others to support war on Iraq (using lies and deception in the process) as they are now doing with Iran.  I need not here rehash the neocon Zionist work for regime change in Iraq before September 11, 2001.  People by now are familiar with their memo to Netanyahu in 1996 and with the "Project for New American Century" the neocon project that said preemptive war would be difficult to sell to the US public "save for a Pearl Harbor like event" (which they conveniently got a few years later).  But let us focus in this article on the period between September 11, 2001 and March 2003 because understanding that period helps understand the period now leading up to the conflict with Iran.

 The "Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs" , or JINSA (Dick Cheney was on its board before he became VP) issued a statement September 13, 2001 even before the dead were buried from the attacks of 9/11: “In response to the attack on September 11, 2001 JINSA calls on the United States to: Halt all US purchases of Iraqi oil under the UN Oil for Food Program and to provide all necessary support to the Iraq National Congress, including direct American military support, to effect a regime change in Iraq.”

 In an April 2003 issue of the Jewish Forward magazine, we read “As President Bush attempted to sell the ... war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense.  In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.”

 In the 1 October 2001 issue of the Weekly Standard, Israeli apologists Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq after changing the regime in Afghanistan.  They and the cadre of Israeli apologists (both leaning to the Democratic Party and leaning to the neocon wing of the Republican party) repeated these calls often in countless interviews and articles.  One could fill a whole book on these quotes but it is the actions of Israeli advocates within Congress and within the administration carried more weight.  Of course those within government are functionaries who pay heed to where their money and support comes from when elections come around.  You can bet that those inside the government watched carefully and got the messages when the the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations had Iraq on top of its agenda on July 26, 2002  

The history of this period leading up to the war will be written by historians when all the documents are declassified and/or leaked from the hundreds of Israel-first think tanks and other lobby organizations become available.  But enough material exists to draw a rather somber reminder for those who now bought the non-sense that Iran is a threat to the US.  I think it is critical for people who want to understand and hopefully prevent the upcoming war on Iran to first understand the lobby's role in pushing the war on Iraq. While I wrote about this issue before (see for example, Connect the Dots)  the most thorough research on this issue was done by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt.   So here is the section of the work of these two distinguished professors that is worth reading or rereading.  This will help start the process of rethinking the slippery slope that the endless and misnamed "war on terrorism" has been taking people and why. Only such an understanding disseminated to people around the world who then act could help humanity avoid the international catastrophe that would be an attack on Iran (which would make the mayhem in Iraq look like a walk in the park by comparison).  Go to excerpt of Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy