Iran threatens Israel, not U.S.

Tom Maertens

In his book “Chain of Command,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh asks, “How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives … redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military (to engineer the Iraq invasion)? Is our democracy that fragile?”

The neoconservatives, a cabal of mostly Jewish intellectuals linked to Israel’s right-wing Likud, believe the United States should defend Israel at all costs. As spelled out in Paul Wolfowitz’s open memo in 1992, Richard Perle’s “The Clean Break” in 1996, and elsewhere, the neocons advocated military action against Israel’s enemies, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Anyone who opposed attacking Muslims on behalf of Israel was labeled anti-Semitic.

It was the neocons and Cheney who fabricated the Big Lie about Saddam’s role in Sept. 11 and about WMD to justify an invasion, principally for Israel’s benefit. Under international law, the unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state is a war crime.

Tens of millions of Christian Zionists supported the invasion, according to Craig Unger (“The Fall of the House of Bush”) to hasten the Rapture.

Now the neocon zealots, the Christian fanatics and George Bush himself are whipping up a frenzy against Iran, which could threaten Israel, not the United States.

In 2003, the Israeli paper Haaretz reported that Bush told Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas that he invaded Iraq because God told him to strike at Saddam. If true, that means that a decision to attack Iran may depend on a delusional president who thinks God wants him to kill Muslims for Israel.