Over at antiwar.com, William Lind reports on the other election:
At present some, polls suggest the Likud Party will win. If that happens, it will mean as much for America as for Israel. Why? Because America’s Middle Eastern policy is effectively the tail on Likud’s dog.
Those who imagine an Obama victory will see the neocons shown the door are in for an unpleasant surprise. Under the guise of neo-libs, they are no less influential in the Democratic establishment than in the Republican.
A Likud government in Israel come next spring would make two wars virtually certain: a war between Israel and Hezbollah and another between Israel and Iran.
Our strategic position in Iraq hangs by a thread, its long, thin supply line coming up through the Persian Gulf and Kuwait. If Iran and its allied Iraqi Shi’ite militias cut that line, the best outcome we can hope for is a sauve qui peut withdrawal of U.S. forces north into Kurdistan.
Those countries still exporting oil might dump the dollar and demand payment in gold. The American defense budget could skyrocket at a time when the U.S. faced an urgent need to cut federal spending, leading to printing-press dollars and hyperinflation.
The West might be going out with a whimper, but the US appears set on going out with a bang. It’s hard to dismiss someone like Lind, but I hope he’s wrong.
roho on 29 Oct 2008 at 12:54 pm #
Perhaps high casualties is the “Trigger Mechanism” to create mass vollunteers or conscription?……….No longer does anything shock me as this nation crashes like an avalanche out of control.
RonL on 29 Oct 2008 at 9:22 pm #
It is nice to see that Bill Lind ,unlike most purposely uninformed “conservatives” like Buchanan, realizes that the Likud party does not run Israel and has not done so in years.
Then again he, like so many others, presumes that the Likud runs US foreign policy, despite any and all evidence to the contrary. I gess he imagines US Pressure on Israel to trade land for terrorism to be pro-forma. (Of course, even that makes no sense. If the US followed nationalist Israeli posisiotns, we would not be telling them to give up an inch more, at least until terrorism ends and the Palestinian Authority and Hamasistan/Gaza, live up to treaty obligations.) Likewise calls for a Palestinian State, proposed more by President Bush than by any other serving president would not exist.
But if you pay attention to those facts, you won’t end up on Justine Raimondo’s website.
Aside from that Lind’s ideological love affair with Islamist 4th Generational Warfare warps his logic. If the US ever beat an Islamist insurgency, his entire shtick for the past 9 years would become irrelevant.
And this damages the security of the US. Never once does it occur to Lind that a nuclear Iran (followed by a nuclear Saudi Arabia and Egypt) would threaten American security by ending deterrence.
Lind is effective calling for the US to be in a position of not being able to effectively respond when one our cities are nuked. That is no patriot of the US.
As for a war in Lebanon, the Kadima sham war allowed Hizbullah to survive. This is what will create future conflict regardless who runs Israel. Iran’s proxy is pushing for Israel to give up territory that was part of the British mandate in 1923 and part of Israel since 1967. If Israel give in to this, Hezbollah will simply demand the whole Galilee. This isn’t rocket science.
As for Weaver’s point about the West going out with a whimper, if Israel does through out the Kadima-court system-GSS police junta, it will doing what other Western states refuse to: survive or at least protest its death sentence.
Weaver on 29 Oct 2008 at 9:38 pm #
I’m in favor of Israel surviving, but I’m also in favor of the US pulling out from the Middle East.
Are the two mutually exclusive? And if not, which party/ political leader should I be pulling for?
I’ve said before that I don’t mind Greater Israel, but I don’t want the US involved.
fellist on 30 Oct 2008 at 11:45 am #
Buchanan does not suffer the delusion you ascribe to him, RonL, he knows perfectly well that the Likud party is not in power – in Israel at least.
The two state solution is the policy of the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership. If Americans and Europeans must be brought into semitic squabbles, it is reasonable that they should support the consensus position of the two sides. If it also seems just, so much the better.
To characterise Lind as having an “ideological love affair with Islamist 4th Generational Warfare” betrays your lack of honesty and effort to propagandize us. He studies and writes about the methods of non-state parties in conflicts, he does not endorse their aims. His “schtick” could only become irrelevant if non-state parties were never again to engage in conflict with states.
(Never once does it occur to Lind that a nuclear Iran (followed by a nuclear Saudi Arabia and Egypt) would threaten American security by ending deterrence.)
Do you expect anyone to believe that Iran could threaten the USA, or would choose to do so? Or expect people at a conservative – as opposed to neoconservative – site to believe that safety comes from pursuing the policy of full spectrum dominance – and keeping the rest of the world cowering in the corner?
I would take Greg Cochran’s analysis before any offered by an Israel-firster:
Iran is now at the top of the enemies list, but of course it poses no strategic threat to the United States. Iran’s GNP is 20 to 40 times smaller than that of the U.S., and the Iranians are hardly sophisticated technologists. If they tried hard, if they spent a huge fraction of their GNP on weapons, they might be able to spend 1/30th as much on arms as we do. But they’re not trying hard.
In truth, Iran hasn’t embarked upon any military adventures in years: there is no pattern of aggression and conquest, no frantic military buildup. The war with Iraq a generation ago seems to have used up most of the Iranians’ revolutionary zeal. We do not hear of their “last territorial demands.†In fact, we’re still waiting for the first.
Even when provoked, they’ve been cautious. The Taliban, back in 1998, killed a number of Iranian diplomats along with thousands of fellow Shi’ites. The Iranian government was angry, as any government would have been. The Iranians threatened, they mobilized troops on the Afghan border—but never invaded. I can’t read their minds, but I’d guess that some in their government argued that they couldn’t afford it, others that they might lose, while still others had read their Kipling and couldn’t imagine what they would do with Afghanistan if they owned it. (Interestingly, Condoleezza Rice, back in 2000, seemed to have been unaware that this crisis ever occurred. When she was interviewed by the New York Times, she thought that Iran supported the Taliban. I guess future secretaries of state have better things to do than read.)
The Iranians may be working on nuclear weapons—there is no clear evidence, but it is at least physically possible for them to be doing so, unlike Iraq under sanctions. If they eventually succeed, they’ll have a few bombs without any long-range delivery systems. Not a threat to the United States. And of course, they’re deterred: like any enemy with a return address, any nuclear attack on the U.S. would be answered a hundredfold, leading to the extinction of their nation.
The simplest explanation for the current Iranian nuclear program is that it is an attempt at deterring the U.S. from invading. It is not part of an offensive strategy. Any kind of force projection strategy would require a general conventional military buildup, and no such buildup is underway.
Lind, Raimondo and Cochran vs. the likes of Perle, Kristol, and Podhoretz. Who was right about Iraq? Whose counsel should we respect on Iran?
Weaver on 30 Oct 2008 at 12:11 pm #
Fellist,
y’know, China, Russia, and ah Israel also potentially threaten the US with nukes.
Perhaps we should force them to give up their nukes too?
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Iran didn’t want a nuclear program and Russia didn’t want to help it until the US stepped in.
Diplomacy could solve the Iran nuclear threat, but diplomacy isn’t what Likud wants. Globalism is again involved: I’m not saying this is exclusively Likud foreign policy of course, but it is a major player and possibly (I speculate) the two are one and the same (Likud an arm of globalism). Whatever the true loyalties and goals, these people want bloody war.
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Remember Raimondo and Cochran are lefties. Trifkovic and Lind are pretty good I think.
fellist on 30 Oct 2008 at 2:27 pm #
It’s almost impossible to predict what the crazies’ll do (whichever figurehead wins the election), but I feel that Pakistan is becoming more likely a target than Iran anyway. That place really is unstable and nuclear, as well as Islamic.
(Likud an arm of globalism) I don’t think globalism has a mind or can be said to be at the back of a fiercely nationalist party that seems intent on sustaining regional conflict and fanning ethnic conflict outside the region. Globalism and Likud are products of the same mind, and the obvious question is who benefits from each?
(Remember Raimondo and Cochran are lefties) I don’t know about that. Raimondo is a rigorously consistent libertarian if anyone is. Certain fundamental ‘leftist’ ideas are absolutely anathema to him like government’s inherent goodness and capability, and the anti-discrimination drive. Cochran seems more like one of those guys who’s overcome the left-right shell game – you get all kinds of these people getting as far away as they can from the Washington consensus and ending up at a place that’s traditionally centrist. Normal.
– By the way, Seymour Hersh has written some good stuff on the Pakistani bomb, and just how helpful the US government and some Turkish, er, minorities were in helping them get it.
Weaver on 31 Oct 2008 at 12:14 pm #
I’ll have to locate the Hersh commentary – that sounds worth knowing to be sure.
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Just the same, few American “lefties” could conceive of Bush or McCain as being left wing
Who does benefit really? In the end the US will collapse, Israel will be hated, Islam will be more united and fired up, and Western states (incl. colonies) where Jews have traditionally fared well will be mired in conflict, with the invaders in each case not being so rosy about Jews.
Likudnik strategy sounds like more Trotskyite warmongering to me.
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Ostensibly Likud provokes Arabs and Jews to fight in order to rile up Jews and their American supporters to give the OK for throwing out the Muslims and expanding to create Greater Israel while taking out the regional powers and ensuring a monopoly on the nuclear threat, but how well is this really working? Greater Israel wouldn’t really come about without a paradigm shift, and similarly Arabs and Jews could be brought to clashing without giving the rest of Islam a reason to step in. Enemies are not usually desired…
Cui bono? Not Israel and Jews as I can see, though keep in mind I know very little of Jewish and Israeli politics and society. I know some right wing Jews, but I can’t ever get anything out of them because when talking on matters of substance either I make them uncomfortable or else furious haha. So, I just talk about other things and accept my ignorance while picking up bits from Israeli news sources, which are far less pro-Israel than are American news sources as you pointed out before. There’s either some truth in Israel news sources, or else the propaganda is simply of a different flavor. In any case, the accepted truth is very different between the two.
fellist on 31 Oct 2008 at 3:36 pm #
You probably have read Lawrence Auster’s very good articles about the impossibility of a moderate Islam; the would-be-moderate Muslims are ever pulled toward their more authentic and dogmatic brothers, and there’s nothing moderate about moderate Islam anyway. Well, I think the same is true of both Judaism and Zionism.
The Likud party and the greater Israel strategy should be seen as the normative Israeli position, because it’s really the only authentic one. If you believe the Jewish people have a right to their state and that it should serve as a potential refuge for all Jews, you really have to grant that the Israelis are liable to ethnically cleanse many more people from their homelands than already they have. The Israel of 2008 is simply too small.
That’s why I say the Likud party isn’t the current government of Israel, but the Likudites, the real Zionists, still control the fiercely Zionist US and European governments. And, as we know, these governments are also fierce globalists. But there’s a core ideological schizophrenia there – supporting the effective end of ones own people and state: the SPP, NAU, open borders, multiculturalism on the one hand; and supporting an ethno-religious state with claims to expand its own soverign territory and displace people of a different ethnic and religious background.
The simplest way to explain it is that Jewish interests are behind both, securing its own position while undermining the independent existence of all others. There exists plenty of evidence for this hypothesis, and as far as I’m aware there is no alternative theory. Perhaps because of Jewish power, no-one ever asks about the double standard, which I take as more evidence.
Please understand, I’m not saying there’s a diabolical plan anywhere, it’s just how these major human groups are interacting as both culturally and genetically distinct and competing organisms.
We can only hope that the backlash will come sooner rather than later, and that this latest Jewish attack on the White nations will finally teach us that we cannot live together. If the requirement that we put their interests and survival before our own is the price of living with them, it is surely too much.
fellist on 31 Oct 2008 at 4:01 pm #
I was confused. I said Hersh when I mean Raimondo, easy to do, both being among the very best anti-war journalists around, and Hersh is featured in the article I was thinking of:
Plame, Pakistan, a Nuclear Turkey and the Neocons
Weaver on 31 Oct 2008 at 8:12 pm #
Fellist,
Judaism doesn’t have the religious commands for jihad that Islam does. What it does have is commentary in its Talmud that is aggressive, but this isn’t religious backed and Jews do not want converts. Surely this difference is a major one. Jews do have a dual-morality, but this doesn’t mean they go to extremes in this.
You can very much have moderates of any religion: they’re called nonbelievers. Many who identify as Christians too are either heretics or nonbelievers.
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A right to have their own state? A right based on what – there are no international rights of any kind because there is zero basis for any international rights…
They’ve the right to mind their business, and we’ve the right to mind ours.
I realise Israel as it is now is too small, but I also realise that Europeans like you who wish Jews to be thrown out of the West don’t offer a location for them to go to… There is no European interest in defending the Palestinians, only a bias against the Jews.
It’s funny reading folks like David Duke talk of how evil Jewish oppression of Palestinians is when he essentially wants to do the same here in the US.
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No alternative except for the one I offered: that there ought to be an Israeli party that puts Jewish interests first.
You’re clearly of the belief that the Iraq War etc. and the destruction of the West are in the best interests of the Jews. Explain how…
They are simply not going to be able to craftily maneuver their way to the helm of a global government as people nowadays believe. Theories such as that are based in a superstitious view of Jews. The only people who buy into the Holocaust (which was horrible but not the most horrible event as we currently view it – other events deserve attention too) mournings and anti-racism etc. are whites… And there’s no reason to believe another group will come to value such things out of such proportion as the West does today. It is this Holocaust orientation combined with our belief that Jews have been unjustly and without cause persecuted by Christians and others for thousands of years that makes the Jews so strong in Europe and the US. However, there’s no reason to believe this could be passed on to another group.
Tell Danish Muslims that Jews have suffered for their freedom of religion, and the Muslims might say all nonbelievers deserve it, etc. Islam in the past has been more tolerant of nonbelievers, but be sure it has been radicalised as a result of so much fighting.
We’ve seen what happened in the USSR: the Bolsheviks lost power, Trotsky was thrown out, and Stalin came to power. The Jews are not some mystical race with superhuman powers of manipulation and craftiness… They benefit from a nation-state just as does everyone else. Communists in Russia did realise the hypocrisy of Jewish tribalism and communism, and under a similar nonJewish ethnic nationalist or globalist zeitgeist, Jews would be singled out just the same. They could only ever hide the hypocrisy among whites because of white guilt, and this white guilt is again a unique phenomenon that isn’t likely transferable to another people.
The correct view of Judaism is that Eastern European Jews immigrated from the US after intense competition with the locals (due to these Jews’ high fertility rate) and thus a hatred for them and for Christianity in general. They’re leftwing in the US for one reason: sentiment. They aren’t geniuses (the IQ boost is only verbal), and their prone to the same stupidity as every other human group.
The Jews who were here before the Eastern Europeans weren’t so left wing, in fact many were relatively right wing and defending of the status quo.
That said, Western Europeans Jews have immorally been involved in banking and usury (most famous example: the Rothschilds), but we currently allow such things legally… Our culture correctly views such things as immoral, as does Jewish culture at least when applied to other Jews, but we’ve not enforced these cultural values. Actually, Calvin comes to this loony conclusion that usury isn’t inherently against Christian teachings (though he makes a qualifier to that), and so many Calvinists totally ignore the Bible and allow it… Anyway, not every banker and lender is Jewish, and our society currently permits such things, so they can’t be blamed too much as a group for it.
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And so I’ll end with: despite popular belief among the entire far right, I cannot see how war in the Middle East is actually in Israel’s interests. I can see how its in Israel’s sentiment, that is that it wouldn’t like competitors and those who are different from it, but there’s no intelligence behind it. It’s a raging bull without a destination.
roho on 31 Oct 2008 at 10:14 pm #
And now “Joe The Plumber” even says that, “A vote for Obama is a vote for the destruction of Israel!”………..Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!…..(Has he discovered the deep pockets of AIPAC?)
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/joe_theplumber_attacksObama_would_1028.html
Ha-Ha-Ha!
Weaver on 31 Oct 2008 at 10:26 pm #
bad link, but yea Likud definitely doesn’t want Obama haha.
I googled a similar story, so probably just read what you wanted me to :p
fellist on 05 Nov 2008 at 2:53 am #
Judaism doesn’t have the religious commands for jihad that Islam does.
I think the Muslims’ Jihad arises directly from the Jews’ various Text to be displCovenants with God that Muslims – and Christians – believe they have inherited. In Judaism, the second class status of all other peoples is no less an imposition than dhimmitude. Judaism is little but the racial supremacism of Jews made religion, and if you won’t separate yourself from Jews, you are choosing to permit yourself to be victimised in a million ways.
A right to have their own state? A right based on what – there are no international rights of any kind because there is zero basis for any international rights…
“Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state†is the usual formula, see here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030509-11.html
…Frequently defended by people horrified at the idea of ethnic nationalism for non-Jewish peoples, anti-‘gentiles’ in other words. Like Ron Lewenberg and George Bush.
I realise Israel as it is now is too small, but I also realise that Europeans like you who wish Jews to be thrown out of the West don’t offer a location for them to go to… There is no European interest in defending the Palestinians, only a bias against the Jews.
It’s funny reading folks like David Duke talk of how evil Jewish oppression of Palestinians is when he essentially wants to do the same here in the US.
Good Europeans did try and defend the Palestinians, TE Lawrence most famously. And personally I deeply regret the way the Western powers colluded with Zionists to re-create Israel in Palestine. displacing hundreds of thousands of people and securing the slaughter of many tens of thousands. Establishing Israel in Palestine while permitting Jews to continue running other countries too, may turn out to be the greatest error in world history: a million dead Iraqis testify to the dangers inherent in that corrupt combination. But it’s 2008 Weaver, and we have to put our own people first: securing OUR existence is the priority. Neither Jew or Arab would lift a finger to defend us from an attack by the other.
I don’t know if you’re getting your info on Duke second-hand, but I thought he always sounded perfectly reasonable in his radio addresses. At the start of every program he used to stress the message of universal nationalism and his rejection of supremacism or hate. It’s a while since I’ve listened, so I may be wrong…
You’re clearly of the belief that the Iraq War etc. and the destruction of the West are in the best interests of the Jews. Explain how…
That’s not my belief – I believe some Jews think like that, though very few. The unending culture war and the creation of conficts between other nations seem more automatic and instinctive than deliberate and knowingly evil. Either way, I agree with your words, Judah is like a “Raging Bull” – that’s why I want away from the beast. I can’t understand why you want to go on living with it.