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Israel Frenzy

(Sacramento Bee) William F. Buckley, Jr. - It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neoconservative policies are determined by the advantages they bring to the State of Israel. Pat Buchanan wrote 10 years ago that Congress had become the "Amen corner" for pro-Israel policies. I once jocularly proposed that Israel be annexed as the 51st state, which would give us the advantage of participating in the formulation of Israeli policies, which we would then automatically endorse. Nobody who knows his way around questions the political leverage of the Jewish vote in critical states or denies the importance of Jewish patronage of favored candidates and officeholders. But the transposition of this into the position that U.S. policies are formulated because they bear directly on Israeli interests is invention. The hostility to Israel on the part of the Muslim community is a fact of life, but to say that the war against Iraq bolstered Israel's security is not to say that we went to war in Iraq in order to bolster Israel's security. There was no distinctive pressure, in 2003, to send U.S. Marines to Iraq in order to destroy a regime hostile to Israel. And associates of the administration would probably confess that they would not have recommended the war on Iraq except for their conviction that it was becoming a storehouse of weaponry that Saddam was entirely capable of using, whether against Kurds, Kuwaitis, Iranians, or Israelis.
2004-03-03 00:00:00
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