I recently enjoyed an hour with Congressman Robert Wexler. Wexler represents Fl 19 and one of the strongest voices for Israel in the U.S. Congress. (Of course, his greatest accomplishment was his interview on Colbert Report!) His positions (inmy view) are strong and progressive. Tonight, I heard a lot to applaud. At least one comment Wexler made, however, caused me to consider whether he was revealing a major change in position by the "Israeli lobby" in D.C.
Wexler is one of the brightest and most passionate voices for the progressive movement in Washington. He's also close to the Israeli representatives in Washington,and was one of the few American officials who traveled to Israel during the war last summer. (He's attracted some heat because he's made at least 20 trips there in the past 10 years.)
One of his comments seemed a dramatic change in policy: "An America mired in Iraq will not be any help for Israel..." On this site and many others, there has been a lot of speculation that at least some of the pressure for action against Saddam came from neo-conservatives with (alleged) strong allegiance to Israel, including Richard Perle.
To recap history, here's a quote from just one of many speculative pieces (this one by Mark Weber, who is discussing Perle and his ilk):
"My own answer...is that the lie [that a massively-armed Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and its interests and who wanted the United States to smash Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to Israel in the region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it until after Sept. 11, 2001..."
The fact that Saddam's implicit and explicit support for suicide bombers was wreaking havoc in Israel can't be denied. The fact that the interests of (some) part of the Israeli lobby coincided with interests of the oil lobby, the military/industrial gang, and the Bushies doesn't put the blame for this fiasco at any single faction's door. That's not my point here.
But something Wexler said left me thinking, and he repeated it several times: "Chaos in Iraq is not in the interest of Israel..." This same thread has come through in the statements of many other voices who would normally have been on the militaristic end of the political spectrum. Is that a change in position, by even the most aggressive (former) war advocates?
Here's Perle last month in Vanity Fair:
"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'
Listen carefully. This major shift in position of one group in the "Go to War" chorus may be more important than it seems.
Now if the Democrats can just figure out a way to convince Halliburton that its days of obscene profits are coming to an end...But it won't matter, because the challenge of displacing an idea that's become fixed in our President's head may be far greater.