Pro-War Organization Hides Its Pro-Israel Agenda

By Philip Weiss

Last night Ari Fleischer was on Hardball speaking up for Freedom’s Watch, a new organization that is buying ads to support George Bush’s war “plans” in Iraq. Fleischer warns that if we don’t stay the course, the whole region will “explode.”

According to the Washington Post, two of the three leaders of Freedom’s Watch, including Fleischer, are associated with the Republican Jewish Coalition (the third is involved with the Holocaust Memorial). Its donors, per the Post, include three other members of the Republican Jewish Coalition and Gary Erlbaum, a leader of the conservative Jewish community in Philadelphia. That’s a lot of right wing Jews.

I talked to Erlbaum a year ago. Israel is front and center for him. Three years ago I heard Fleischer talking to a Jewish audience in Cincinnati, urging them to vote for George Bush in the upcoming election. Fleischer made explicit pro-Israel appeals. He said that his mother was a Democrat who opposed Bush but had softened because the Iraq war had been good for Israel’s security. He said that he was proud of the fact that in all his statements on Israel/Palestine while White House press secretary, he had never used the term “cycle of violence.” I.e., he masked the endless brutalization there, as if Israel is getting somewhere by bulldozing houses and performing messy assassinations that kill little children, too.

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“More War on the Horizon”

By Paul Craig Roberts

No pullout from Iraq while I’m president, declares George W. Bush.

On to Iran, declares Vice President Cheney.

Israel is a “peace-seeking state” that needs $30 billion of US taxpayers’ money for war, declares State Department official Nicholas Burns.

The Democratic Congress, if not fully behind the Iraqi war, at least no longer is in the way of it.

Nor are the Democrats in the way of the Bush regime’s build up for initiating war with Iran.

The Bush regime says it is going to designate part of Iran’s military – the Revolutionary Guards – a terrorist organization, whose bases and facilities Bush intends to bomb along with Iran’s nuclear energy sites. Three US aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. B-2 Stealth Bombers are being fitted to carry 30,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to use against hardened sites. Politicized US generals assert that Iran is providing arms and aid to the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. The media is feeding the US population the same propaganda about nonexistent Iranian weapons of mass destruction that they fed us about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. A former CIA Middle East field officer, Robert Baer, has written in Time magazine that the Bush regime has decided to attack the Revolutionary Guards within the next 6 months. Remember the “cakewalk war”? Well, this time the neocons think that an attack on the Revolutionary Guards will free Iran from Islamic influence and cause Iranians to back the US against their own government.

Lies, unprovoked aggression, and delusional expectations – the same ingredients that produced the Iraq catastrophe – all over again. The entire Bush regime and both political parties are complicit, along with the media and US allies.

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