Portion below; whole thing (via Angry Arab Newservice) here:
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2008/072808Floyd.shtml
But while it's understandable that people would seek to blame outsiders for the crimes committed by their own nation -- even to the extent of believing that a minor country could somehow force the overlords of a great empire to act against their own will -- it's odd that almost no one considers the opposite [and blatantly obvious] view: that the American dog wags the Israeli tail -- and that, if anything, is the Israeli elite that have been subverted, bought off and hijacked to serve the interests of American empire.
One can occasionally see glimpses of this reality. For example, the estimable "Angry Arab," the learned professor As'ad AbuKhalil, points us to a key passage in a recent Washington Post story:
... Israeli leaders routinely get half or more of their campaign contributions for party primaries from overseas, and mostly from American donors. The fundraising trend is especially pronounced on Israel's political right; politicians who advocate aggressive military action against Iran and Hamas and who maintain an uncompromising stance against ceding land to the Palestinians have typically found generous support for their views in the States. Former prime minister and Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu, for instance, received approximately $400,000 -- 75 percent of his donations for a 2007 primary -- from U.S. contributors, according to the Israeli comptroller's office. By contrast, Israeli donors accounted for less than 5 percent of reported contributions to Netanyahu, who hopes to return to power if Olmert falls and who has sharply criticized the current government for its willingness to cut deals with Israel's enemies.
Netanyahu is of course the darling of the war-profiteering wing of the U.S. Establishment, especially those especially devoted to maintaining and expanding America's "unipolar domination" of world affairs. One such faction took quiet root in the Cheney-led Defense Department during the administration of the elder George Bush and later flowered into the open, aggressive militarism of the Cheney-Rumsfeld "Project for the New American Century" group, which, as we've noted here before, produced a veritable blueprint of the Bush Administration's later policies – including the imposition of a U.S. military presence in Iraq (even if Saddam Hussein was no longer in power there), the vast expansion of military spending, new military bases in Central Asia, and other measures which the group admitted could not be speedily implemented, if at all – unless the American people were "catalyzed" into supporting this radical militarist agenda by "a new Pearl Harbor." This blueprint was issued in September 2000.
As these plans developed from Cheney's Pentagon – where they were originally overseen by his aides Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby – the role of Israel as a tool for their implementation took on more importance. There developed a mutually beneficial symbiosis between the American Dominationists and the militant Israeli hardliners like Netanyahu. American "neo-con" stalwarts like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked on Netanyahu's "Clean Break" strategy, which, like the PNAC plan for America, envisioned a much more aggressive and militarized posture. In this shared vision, war and domination are exalted, and the only acceptable peace is the peace of the conqueror, with the shattered, humiliated enemy at his feet. The Muslim nations of the Middle East were to be broken down, bit by bit, atomized into warring internal factions, seeded with ethnic and religious strife, rendered impotent and humiliated, given pliable client governments and made ready for the return of Western domination.
[It should be noted that Israeli and American policy were already quite aggressive and militarized before the PNACkers and Clean Breakers came along; we're certainly not harking back nostalgically to some lost golden age. But there can be no doubt that the last few years have seen an acute intensification of the worst elements in long-running American and Israeli policy.]
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