Divided loyalties make for strange bedfellows, politically speaking.

Chapter 10: What Shape is the Star on Your Country’s flag?

Harry, my Jewish liberal friend, faced a real dilemma in the months following the September 11 attack on the United States. 

Circumstances had conspired to force him to say supportive things about George Bush and the war with Iraq.  Granted, this didn’t mean that Harry couldn’t still view Bush as an illegitimate leader who stole the election from the rightful winner.  And it certainly didn’t mean that he couldn’t oppose Bush’s Iraq policy at the same time he supported it.  But it did make him stop and think every time he wrote a sentence about whether he was for Bush on that particular issue on that particular day, or against him. 

Now one might ask, why bother to support Bush at all on the Iraq war, even so dishonestly?  For Harry the calculation was complicated by the fact that even though he hated Bush with an intensity normally reserved for rival sports teams and recent ex-wives, Israel was under increasing attack from without and within.  He needed to support Bush to support Israel, without actually supporting Bush.  Consequently, Harry was forced to support a war with Iraq as a legitimate means to protect U.S. interests, which he then tied to Israel’s interests.  Well, at least kind of support Bush and his war on Iraq, depending upon what other points Harry did or didn’t need to make that day. 

Once again Harry was walking that fine Liberal line, particularly when I pointed out his already-apparent hypocrisy several months earlier by accusing him in April of 2002 of acting like Israel was “his country,” and the U.S. just another nation.

Harry: Phil, yes, I do have divided loyalties as do most American Jews, but first and foremost my loyalties rest with the United States, period.  It is in the U.S. national interest to try to broker a truce between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush has no policy toward the Arab Israeli conflict except what he espoused during the campaign, which is basically a hands off policy.

Just to be contrary, I decided to give Harry a taste of his own logic.  If it was in “our” (that is, the U.S.) “national interest to end hostilities in the Middle East,” as Harry contended, then I had a solution.

Phil: Okay.  Let’s support the Arabs.  That will end hostilities.  What you really mean is that you want the U.S. to take an active role in protecting and supporting Israel.  Normally I would do so too, but like you my first and foremost loyalty is to protect my country, particularly after 9/11.  So Israel’s fate is of secondary importance.

Harry argued that it was most certainly in U.S. national interest to fight terrorism and protect the free-flow of Middle East oil.  U.S. national interest and Israeli national interest were therefore one and the same. 

Now while I happen to believe this is true, I was still in the mood to give Harry a taste of his own medicine.  So I decided to be contrary again.

Phil: No, intervening in the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in Israel’s interest, not ours.  What do I care if the whole state of Israel is annihilated?  In fact, this would be one sure way to produce a “peace” to protect our oil.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m rooting for Israel, but not at the expense of my country.  If you keep pushing the call for an immediate intervention to stop the fighting, then I’ll be forced to support the Arabs to end the conflict in a way that will protect my country.  Unlike you I really have no divided loyalties.

The root of this particular exchange began earlier in the day when I had to suffer through another email from Harry.  This time he had escalated our debates to a new level by telling me that he’d written President Bush demanding that he support Israel in its fight against the Palestinian uprising and the threat of foreign aggression.  All he received was an automated reply from the White House, and he found this insulting.  The illegitimate, unelected President he hated had not taken the time out of his busy schedule to write him a personal reply. 

That thought process was silly enough, but the last straw for me was when Harry commented that “the last few days have been an embarrassment for Bush as it is reminiscent of pre-September 11,” where Bush was seen by Harry as weak, vacillating, and incompetent — besides being illegitimate.  According to Harry, “Bush has wavered as has his administration with State vs. Defense.  I am sure you will tell me that the Prez has safely calculated his response to buy time for Israel to rout out the terrorists, and I will ask you what you are smoking.” 

To which I replied:

Phil: Harry, I know this may come as a shock to you, but Israel is not my country.  It’s a foreign nation like Guatemala, Pakistan, and Lower Slobovia.  Although I like and admire the Israelis, in the final analysis I don’t give a rat’s ass about whether their country survives or not if it means choosing between my country and theirs.

Bush, who is President of the United States — not President of Israel — is getting ready to attack Iraq.  To do this successfully, he has determined that he needs some Arab support (or, more accurately, he needs to keep these countries from actively opposing him).  Since all the Arab states have their panties in a wad over the Palestinian-Israel conflict, he’s trying to keep a lid on things until our war with Iraq is finished.

That is the underpinning of our policy. It has nothing to do with “buying time” for Israel.  You only see vacillation, confusion, and hypocrisy in Bush’s stand on the present war in the Middle East because you have divided loyalties between America and Israel.  For those of us who know where our loyalties reside, no such confusion exists.

To make myself perfectly clear, I personally do not care if every Jew and Arab in the Middle East kills each other, if it means the difference between my country’s success or failure in pursuing a war against our enemies.  Absent the need to pursue our own foreign policy initiative, I’d rather see Israel wipe the Palestinians off the face of the Earth, followed by Syria, Iran, Lebanon and a few others, if that’s any consolation to you. 

Israel will do what we tell them to do (i.e. not retaliate in a way that would widen the Middle East conflict), which will be in our best interest — not theirs — or they can go it alone against the Arabs, and buy their F-16’s from some other country.

Harry continued to maintain that Bush was an incompetent fool who was jeopardizing U.S. interests by failing to give Israel a free hand to retaliate against Palestinian attacks.  Since he had written President Bush to express his feelings, I decided to write a letter to the Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who in a typical Democrat manner couldn’t win the position at the ballot box, but instead assumed the office as a result of Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords' defection from the Republican Party in 2001 that gave the Democrats a post-election majority in the Senate.  Unlike Harry, I didn’t spend the next 18 months whining and moaning about how “unfair” this was.  Sleazy yes, but it was all perfectly legal within the established rules of the Senate.  Like it or not the Democrats controlled that body — at least until the 2002 mid-term elections, when Republicans would have a chance to get it back.

I sent Harry a copy of my letter, which was never actually sent, using it as another object lesson in his continuing education program.  If the touchy-feely goal embraced by Harry and the Liberals was to stop the killing, as I had told Harry earlier, I had a solution.  It didn’t help Harry’s cause any when I could use, as my starting point, the mealy-mouth public pronouncements Daschle had previously made that Israel must withdraw from the Palestinian areas they were presently attacking.

April 10, 2002

Senator Tom Daschle
Senate Majority Leader
Washington, DC.

Dear Senator Daschle,

I am writing to support your recent call for an immediate end to Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.

I was not convinced that President Bush was correct in his call for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces until I heard you echo and expand upon this same demand.  My great respect for the electoral process that put you in the Senate leadership position demands that I fall in line with your position, since unlike George Bush (who was not elected President), the Democratic party received sufficient votes in November 2000 to take control of the Senate and make you the highest elected official in this country.

I also support your call for an immediate end to Israeli aggression because my other country, the Vatican, has also demanded that Israel immediately end its military operations.  I want you to understand that I do not have divided loyalties, but clearly when my other country is under attack I must support it.  Even as we speak Israeli troops are surrounding the Church of the Nativity and firing their weapons at the people inside — all without provocation!  I know this to be true because I heard it on CNN.

Since I do not act solely upon the basis of political expediency, and since my loyalties are not divided between the United States and some other country, I offer you my un-conditional support until you change your mind and advocate some other position.

Respectfully,

Phillip E. Jackson

I jabbed Harry a bit further by reminding him that Daschle was actually the “duly-anointed Senate Majority Leader,” and unlike the vacillating, illegitimate Bush, “he’s your guy, not mine.”

Phil: You liked him just fine before when Jumpin’ Jim deposed the Republicans, so you must like him now and support everything he says?  Right?  See what happens Harry when you [screw] with the electoral process and throw principle to expediency?  But don’t worry.  I’m sure Daschle will change his position in another day or two when it’s expedient to do so.

Like I said before, Harry and I were friends.  And what good is friendship if you can’t take a club to the other guy’s head once and a while?  As Harry wrote back to me:

Harry: Do I denote a bit of sarcasm in your email?

Phil: Moi?

Harry: What would you do with your life if you didn’t have Daschle to kick around?

Phil: I’d write letters to you.

Harry, Israel, the Middle East, and the Iraq War were the gift that kept on giving, so the fun of pointing out his inane logic and unprincipled inconsistencies didn’t end here.  When the conservative Ariel Sharon defeated the liberal Edud Barak for Prime Minister of Israel and brought Netanyahu into his cabinet, Harry railed about what reactionary Neanderthals they both were.  Now, however, he saw these same monsters as statesmen.

Harry may not have remembered his earlier remarks, but I certainly did.  So following upon the heels of my mythical Daschle letter, I sent Harry an email jabbing him about Netanyahu too.

Phil: Harry, I hope you’ll join me in condemning that fascist Benjamin Netanyahu who had the gall to come before OUR Congress today and oppose OUR President’s foreign policy.

Normally, I would have agreed with him, but I know from your previous emails that Netanyahu and Sharon are scurrilous, brutal, blood-thirsty conservatives who need to be soundly defeated by Barak so Israel can live in peace.  It’s time to do what your guy Barak originally wanted to do and just give the Palestinians 98% of the land they want, which includes parts of Jerusalem, to get a lasting and just peace in the Middle East.  They can begin this process by stopping their attack against the Palestinian terrorist strongholds and withdrawing from this territory.  That will have the dual benefit of immediately stopping the killing (the absence of war is peace, correct?), and helping Clinton get his proper Middle East legacy after all.

I’m incensed that an arch-conservative like Netanyahu would think that force against a terrorist thug like Arafat is the way to solve the world’s problems.  We must immediately return to the Clinton-Barak approach and assuage the terrorists through unilateral concessions and a withdrawal from disputed territory.  That, surely, will send evil people everywhere a signal that Israel means them no harm, and only wants to live with their Arab neighbors in peace.  Rather than embolden the terrorists to demand more concessions, I’m sure it will end the fighting once and for all.

I trust you’ll join me in voicing your opposition to Netanyahu and Sharon and their policy of resisting Arab terrorism through the tempered, strategic application of counter-force.  Obviously, if they were such Neanderthals three years ago when Sharon was running for office, they must certainly be twice as bad now that Sharon is actually in office.

I ended my message with a “PS” that told Harry I wasn’t going to “hold my breath” waiting for him to join me.

Phil: I know that your distaste for Netanyahu and Sharon a couple of years ago was merely tactical.  It suits you to support them now, so you will.  And when it doesn’t suit you, you’ll go back to vilifying one or both of them for the same types of actions they’re taking now.  That’s the difference between our approach to life and politics.  My principles aren’t subject to expediency.

Harry’s reply was to focus on the fact that Bush had avoided using the label “terrorist” to describe Arafat.  The Bush Administration had “blown the Middle East situation sky high since for 14 months they totally ignored trying to broker a peace” for no other reason than they wanted to do the opposite of what the Clinton Administration had done in 2000.

Harry: At least Clinton had a hands-on definitive policy.  Why has Bush not spoken out against Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas? Perhaps could it be because they only target Israeli civilians and that is no problem for Bush?

Or maybe, I replied, it was because he was anticipating that war would come with Iraq, and he needed to limit any Arab sympathy or support for Saddam by not further inflaming tensions in the Middle East?  Naw, that couldn’t be it.  It was probably just like Harry said.  Bush was stupid and unprincipled and didn’t care about a bunch of dead Jews.

There were, however, occasional lucid moments when Harry actually wanted to understand why the world was collapsing around him, instead of simply using each new isolated incident as a weapon to bash Bush.

Demagoguery is fine for Liberal Democrats until the stakes get too high and actual life and death issues are at stake, instead of purely rhetorical ones.  It’s at times like this that England turns away from Chamberlain to embrace Churchill, that Israel kicks out Barak and elects Netanyahu, and Harry turns to Phil to find out what the hell is really going on.  

I was baiting Harry with news reports that Pope John Paul II had asked Israel to again stop the “siege” (the Pope’s exact quote) of the Church of the Nativity, where Palestinian terrorists had taken up refuge. The monks inside had given interviews on Fox, CNN and NBC stating emphatically that they were not being held hostage, further bolstering the Pope’s request.  To Harry, who lived and died by the turn of a word or the expression of a wish — never really considering that words may be lies to cover up the truth, or that wishes were not a substitute for actual policy — the turmoil in the Middle East was almost incomprehensible.

Harry: Phil, either I am thick as a brick or I must please ask you to clarify this for me.  What is really going on here?  Isn’t it obvious that the 200 gunmen were not invited in for high tea by the Monks and Priests, but instead they found this place to be a convenient refuge from Israeli gunners?

When Harry dropped the partisan BS he normally tried to pedal as a substitute for genuine analysis, and entered into an intelligent conversation about politics, I always found him to be a pretty thoughtful guy.  Not that I’d admit it to his face, but when he got serious instead of partisan, at times he could give me a pretty good run for my money, though I still felt that my more-coherent world view offered better insight and more real-world solutions to the issues we were discussing.  Nevertheless, this was one of those rare moments when Harry genuinely wanted to understand something, so I was happy to accommodate him.

Phil: It’s very simple.  The monks say they aren’t hostages because if they do, they’re afraid the Israelis will try to “save” them, and the Church will be destroyed in the process.

The Pope demands that Israel stop the siege because (a) he’s a Man of Peace, and this is what Men of Peace are expected to do, and (b) the longer the siege goes on, the greater the chance that violence will occur (even without an Israeli assault) when the terrorists inside get desperate and pull a Waco [i.e. destroy the Church themselves].

So, when you get down to it, the pope and the monks are ignoring the fact that these terrorists need to be dealt with because they’re worried about a friggin’ building!  Which is why I don’t take my cues on global politics from the Catholic Church.

If I was Israel, I’d pull a Rodney King.  I’d get the gunmen inside to start firing, then begin the videotape at the point the Israelis struggle to take cover, and then end up being forced to return fire.  Then I’d kill every terrorist inside the Church, even if it meant severely damaging the building.  If a few monks were accidentally killed in the battle, I’d make sure when their bodies were displayed for the media their throats would be slit post-mortem to show that Israel was trying to rescue them while they were being butchered by the terrorists.  In short, I’d play the game exactly the way the terrorists do, only without their overt, indiscriminate brutality.

And in the end, if no one believed me and the Vatican got really, really mad, I’d say “who cares?”  Some of these people think that Jews killed Christ anyway, so their opinion of Sharon et.al. isn’t going to get any worse.  The world already condemns Israel for all sorts of manufactured atrocities, so what difference does another one — real or imagined — make?  Does anyone think better or worse of Arafat because he’s authorized 30 suicide bombings instead of 29?  And I’d realize that even if certain U.S. officials got really pissed off and really wanted to punish Israel, American Jews and the Republican Party and Southern Christians would never allow us to abandon Israel.  So who cares what the rest of the world thinks? 
 
And finally, if I was Israel I’d remember that I have nuclear weapons, and they don’t.  So if the world really tried to [mess] with me, I’d take Syria, Iran, and Iraq out with me.

Don’t focus on the theater of what’s going on in the Middle East, Harry.  Look at the actions (or inactions) of the people involved. The U.S., Vatican, etc. are doing nothing more than criticizing Israel.  Who cares?  It mollifies the Arabs enough to stay out of the conflict, while giving Israel a free hand to kill all of Arafat’s people.  Even the French haven’t backed up their words with anything more than a few Synagogue burnings, which is just a typical weekday for those anti-Semites.  The only country that has actually done something is Iraq — which embargoed oil to the U.S. as a protest.  But no one else has joined them.

When it’s all said and done, Bush will probably publicly handslap Sharon, then immediately replace all his expended military resources.  Instead of trying to force Israel into giving away 98% of its occupied territory so he can win a Nobel peace prize, Bush will publicly criticize Sharon while privately supporting everything Israel does.  Why else would it take a week for Powell to get to Jerusalem?

That’s what’s really going on.  Everything else is rhetorical BS as we get ready for the big showdown with Iraq, and shouldn’t be given a second thought.

This seemed to make some sense to Harry, and for a brief, fleeting moment we had a real conversation.  It was only a matter of days, however, before Harry returned to his old ways, and began to criticize US actions in Iraq (which he “supported,” but didn’t like the way it was executed — or anything else about it). 

I decided to jab him with his own logic about Bush’s lack of pre-planning for the Iraq war and the corresponding “no exit strategy” that Harry found inexcusable, not to mention the recurring criticisms that U.S. servicemen were continuing to die after the halt to major combat operations, and the fact that the Iraq war was costing U.S. taxpayers a lot more money than originally thought. 

In a facetious email titled “This Has to Stop!” I wrote:

Phil: Would someone please tell me what the exit strategy is to stop the violence in Israel?  Every day another soldier is killed.  This is WAR!  People aren’t supposed to be killed, especially after Israel declared victory in 1967.

Israel is blowing up buildings and shooting rockets into crowded streets.  This is dangerous and irresponsible.  They obviously have no “plan.”  Today, they even killed the son of one Hamas leader instead of the man himself.  This is unacceptable.  The poor 32-year-old boy was just an innocent child.

Israel’s intelligence is obviously questionable.  After 30 years they still haven’t found all the “weapons of ordinary destruction” that are right under their very noses.  Are we sure these weapons even exist?

This has to stop, and NOW!  Sharon has got to go!  Israel is alienating the world with its arrogant, go-it-alone stand.  Its only allies are the United States, Britain, and other western democracies except France and Germany.  The war against the Arabs is costing a lot of money that should be spent on the children instead.

By the way, lest anyone doubt, I unequivocally support Israel and its war on Hamas.  My position has always been consistent in this regard.

Because nothing exceeds like excess in beating Harry over the head with his own logic, I followed that email up with another one a day later, on September 11, 2003 — the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on America. 

By now the Democrats were trying to claim that Bush should have known in advance that the 9/11 terrorists were going to hijack four planes and slam them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The outgoing Clinton administration had given the incoming Bush administration a Power Point presentation in January 2001 mentioning, among other threats, that they should be aware of some guy named Osama Bin Laden who apparently didn’t like the U.S. very much.  In August of 2001 a daily presidential briefing prepared by the CIA mentioned that Bin Laden wanted to attack America some day, somewhere, and somehow, but gave no specifics.  From this, Harry and the Democrats screamed for Bush’s head since he had “failed to connect the dots” and see the attack coming at 9:00 am on the morning of September 11. 

I figured if clairvoyance was an expected trait of U.S. leaders, then we should expect the same for Harry’s other country, Israel.

Phil: Please help me out here.  You know that I’m a strong, unequivocal supporter of Israel’s war on terrorism.  But I just learned today that the homicide bomber who attacked yesterday was dressed like an Israeli soldier.

Why didn’t Israeli officials know this was going to happen?  They’ve had 36 years as an occupying force in the Middle East.  Surely this was enough time to develop a “plan” to understand that Hamas disguises its homicide bombers?

I’m extremely concerned that the Israeli war effort is going very badly.  It’s obvious the Israeli policy isn’t working and needs to change.  We need new leadership and direction in that country. STOP FIGHTING THE TERRORISTS!  It only makes them mad.  In fact, Israel has become a magnet for terrorism precisely because of their arrogant, go-it-alone policy.  It’s time to put the U.N. in charge of the occupied territory.

Of course, I don’t support the same conclusion for the U.S.  That’s a different case all together.  But I am a strong supporter of Israel’s war on terrorism, and no one should question my commitment.

I ended my email with a note that “it’s amazing how stupid this logic becomes when you put it in the same partisan framework as some ‘strong supporters’ of the U.S. war on terrorism do.”
  
But the stupidity didn’t end here.  Less than two years after 9/11, Liberals and Democrats had already begun an effort to re-write history.  A proposed museum at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center was supposed to memorialize all injustices and atrocities that lead to all such actions everywhere. 

In this case, the U.S. was partially to blame for the 9/11 attack because of its racist policies towards people of color in general and native Americans in particular, in addition to our depraved Middle East policies (meaning, our unequivocal support for Israel’s right to exist). 

Moreover, the Iraq war which liberated millions from the tyranny of the “butcher” Saddam was a fiasco.  Foreign fighters were infiltrating Iraq and killing U.S. soldiers, which meant that the U.S. was hated by all Iraqis.  The Iraq war was costing more U.S. dollars than originally projected, and there was a call in some liberal quarters to get out now and stop the fiscal bleeding. (I didn’t remember a similar demand for the war in Bosnia or the metaphorical War on Poverty that ran trillions of dollars past initial budget projections.  And I couldn’t think of a single U.S. domestic or foreign program that didn’t exceed its original budget projections, but as Al Gore would say, this was just a “detail”.) 

These same critics also concluded that fighting the terrorists who came to Iraq only made them more angry at the U.S., and since violence never fed a single child (although it did keep them from getting killed and tortured by bad guys), the U.S. should get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and then the Arabs would like us again.  At least, that is, until we refused to abandon our support for Israel, at which point they would target American citizens for death just like before. 

And if the time ever came that we dumped Israel to make the terrorists happy, they would then stop targeting Americans — unless, of course, we refused to convert to Islam, at which point they felt justified in continuing to kill Infidels whose very existence was a perceived slander to their religion.  So once everyone in the West converted to Islam and recognized the authority of the Mullahs to guide our lives, the killing would stop.  That is, unless we converted to the wrong brand of Islam, at which point we would be heretics who deserved to die because our very existence insulted the one true path to God, who wanted us all dead if we didn’t believe exactly what his followers said we should believe.
   
So you can see it’s all Bush’s fault that the U.S. was hated by everyone in Iraq and the Arab world.  This, coupled with his lies about the reasons for going to war against the butcher Saddam (who, incidentally, no one wanted to return to power because all of them were glad he was deposed), and his failure to “connect the dots” about the 9/11 attack on America (which everyone knows was a Jewish plot anyway, and had nothing to do with the institutionalized intelligence failures of the Clinton Administration which forbade the FBI and CIA to share information), and Bush’s lack of planning and cost overruns on the prosecution of the war, demanded that the country “throw the bum out” and return the Democrats to power. 

Once in office, their plan would be not to do the same things as Bush, or maybe do the same things but only differently, and everything would then return to normal.  Exactly what these alternative plans and approaches were were a bit vague, however, since the Democrats and Harry didn’t think the country needed to be burdened with any details prior to regime change in the U.S.  But since Bush was such an abject failure, it was obvious the Democrat approach would be better — whatever it was.  

This twisted logic, combined with Harry’s refusal to apply the same criteria to evaluating Israel’s own war on terrorism, prompted me to postulate what I called the “Dead Jew Policy.”  This, probably more than anything, ended up driving a permanent wedge between myself and Harry.  Within a few weeks we broke off communication again, and haven’t resumed speaking since that time. 

The U.S. war on terrorism is too intense an issue for me to treat as a political football, and I grew to resent what I thought was a deliberate double standard by Harry and most of the Democrats.  Excuse Israel for the same exact thing you condemn the U.S. under George W. Bush for doing.  I leave Liberals out of this triumvirate, because I think that the majority of their spokespeople and organizations are as anti-Israel as they are anti-U.S.  At least they are consistent in their call for both the U.S. and Israel to stop fighting Arab terrorism.  Wrong, but consistent.   
 
The only way I could make Harry understand the fallacy of his arguments, and try to force him to stop playing politics with the war in Iraq, was to satirically “support” the following policy.  (Note that I wrote the upcoming passage several years ago.  Little has changed in the hate-Bush camp since that time.  In fact, this now reads less like a parody, and more like Nancy Pelosi’s current talking points, which is truly frightening.)

Phil: I am now convinced by the Democratic Party’s arguments that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq — based on faulty or incomplete intelligence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and a lack of sufficient pre-war post-war planning, not to mention it being very expensive — was wrong.  I now believe that we need proof positive of any threat before we act, as well as a clear pre- and post-war plan of action before we respond.  And, even with all these factors in place, we cannot act until the United Nations Security Council has officially approved such actions.  This applies not only to the United States, but to Israel as well. 

So with specific respect to Iran’s intentions to build a nuclear bomb, we cannot accept anything less than absolute proof of the bomb’s existence before going to the U.N. to seek approval for Israeli action.   Evidence of uranium refinement, the possession of specific weapons technology, or the existence of ‘dual use’ equipment that might possibly be used for making an atomic bomb or some benign children’s toy is not sufficient proof that Iran possesses an existing nuclear capability.  Only the presence of a mushroom cloud over Tel-Aviv would constitute proof-positive of the existence of an Iranian atomic bomb.

So I asked Harry how many dead Jews would it take to prove the existence of Iranian WMD?  Or asked another way, how many dead Jews would there be in Israel if they followed the same prescription for action that Harry and the Democrats wanted to impose on the Bush administration? 

The key point to both questions was that Bush and Rumsfeld, the “incompetent bumblers without a post-war plan,” were unwilling to wait until the U.S. was attacked by a foreign enemy before they authorized military action with or without the UN’s blessing.  This was the same exact policy that Israel followed. 

Harry’s criticism of Bush was based on a phony assumption about real-world politics. These assumptions were driven by partisan politics pure and simple, whose only purpose was to allow Democrats to criticize Bush.  They weren’t meant to be applied to the world as it presently existed; they were created simply to present an opposing argument to Bush policy to help the Democrats regain power. 

No matter that the phony debate injured national security by stirring up uninformed domestic opposition to Bush’s war on terrorism, or encouraged America’s enemies abroad to keep resisting U.S. efforts in Iraq.  Osama Bin Laden himself made reference to these Democratic talking points in one of his broadcasts from his cave.  All that mattered to Harry and the Democrats was embarrassing or defeating Bush, and I resented that as an American, not just as a conservative Republican.

Harry, of course, didn’t see the issue this way at all.  He was the height of consistency, logic, sound reasoning, and above all patriotism.  Bush screwed up the entire Middle East conflict by refusing to follow the Clinton “hands-on approach,” which would have avoided much of the turmoil today.  And of course, though the war was fought for illegitimate reasons, we needed to send more troops into Iraq.  Why?  According to the Democrat talking point logic, to win it before we unilaterally withdrew because the war was a failure.  

In truth, this criticism, like every other, was simply the opposite of what Bush said, did, or wanted to do.  Bush wanted multi-lateral talks with North Korea to dismantle their nuclear program.  The Democrats wanted bi-lateral talks because the U.S. has a clear moral position to lead.   Bush engaged in bi-lateral talks with Libya to dismantle their nuclear weapons program.  The Democrats were incensed because we did it alone instead of working with others.

But as intense and convoluted as it got at times with Harry, my real debate on this subject wasn’t with him.  It was with a group of Brazilian nationals I had been corresponding with for the past several months on an entirely different subject.  It was quite clear to all of us that Iraq was not going to comply with the last 14 resolutions of the U.N. Security Council and come clean on its violations of the 1991 treaty to end the Gulf War.   And it was equally clear that France, Germany and Russia had no spine to confront Iraq with any serious consequences for its actions. 

At that time we did not know about the secret, illegal dealings these countries had with Iraq, which would be exposed by an attack on Iraq that deposed Saddam.  But it didn’t really matter.  Bush, Tony Blair, and other members of the “coalition of the willing” were prepared to act even if the U.N. didn’t officially sanction the effort, just as the U.N. had not sanctioned the war in Bosnia under the Clinton administration.  So it was just a matter of time before allied forces, led by the United States of America, pulled the trigger (literally and figuratively) and invaded Iraq.
 
How my Brazilian friends felt about this naked threat of pre-emptive war in a post-9/11 world was as revealing as any conversation I had with Harry.

Look for the next chapter coming soon — Preemptive Military Action — or — “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”