The lobby like no other wants a war like no other
Having watched John McCain and Barack Obama resolutely pledge their allegiance — and their countrymen's lives and treasure — to the defense of Israel via AIPAC, the media, and personal meetings with Israeli leaders, it is worth asking what could possibly drive these men to so ardently commit America to participation in other people's religious wars. This question is particularly important today as the Bush administration and the Israel-firsters continue to push for an unprovoked U.S. attack on Iran.
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on August 14, 2008
Turning the tables on the Israel-Firsters
Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of "dual loyalties." The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals — Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal — amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples' religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on July 16, 2008
Have nothing to do with conquest
This speech was delivered at the Ron Paul Revolution March in Washington, DC, on July 12, 2008.
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Why doesn't al-Qaeda attack the US?
With daily television coverage of suicide car-bomb attacks, ambushes, drive-by shootings, stabbings, and other Intifada-type attacks around the world, the question arises as to why al-Qaeda does not stage such small-scale but deadly operations in the United States. From Washington and the presidential campaign trail comes a cocky, multi-part answer: our massive homeland security spending has worked; al-Qaeda is on the run and hiding; and/or the U.S. military is fighting the Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan so they cannot come to America. There may be a mite of truth in each claim, but the correct answer would be frankly to acknowledge that al-Qaeda would have no trouble mounting the kind of attacks made against Israel in America — guns, cars, militant Muslims, and open borders for other needs are all readily available — but that, at this time, it has no interest in staging Intifada-type attacks in the United States.
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on May 29, 2008
Ron Paul, The Revolution, and ending abuses and usurpations
Congressman Ron Paul's new book, The Revolution, is an unusual presidential campaign book in that the candidate — Dr. Paul — is almost entirely absent. This is not to say that his presence is not felt; indeed, Dr. Paul is with the reader every step of the way and writes in a clear and very direct style. But the reader will find that Dr. Paul is not offering the audacity of hope or chanting change; he does not argue that it takes a village or having slept with a former president; and he surely does not hold up his military service as a reason why he should be elected. Instead, Dr. Paul politely, laconically, but frankly lays it on the line for his countrymen: America is in significant and potentially catastrophic trouble economically, financially, and militarily; the country's political class is homogenous, gutless, and ill-educated; its two major parties do not offer a nickel's worth of difference on important issues, especially foreign policy [pp. 2, 26, 163]; and our leaders are consciously negating parts of the Constitution, compromising America's national sovereignty, and circumscribing the liberties of Americans. But then, astoundingly and correctly, Dr. Paul does not say "Only I can fix this mess" — as have Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain — he says: "Only you, the American people, can fix this mess." Dr. Paul confronts Americans with a reality that ought to both chill and inspire them.
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on May 7, 2008
Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Life in a Neocon's Parallel Universe
Douglas J. Feith's new book War and Decision. Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism is an old-fashioned morality tale written by a man with little discernible moral sense or any real concern for the truth. In a nutshell, Feith's story resembles a 1930s cowboy movie. In the white hats are Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and such of their retainers as Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Victor Davis Hanson, and R. James Woolsey. Here, according to Feith, is a team that exists only to support the president by considering all issues from every angle [p. 334] and which refuses to gain political advantage by leaking to the media. [pp.250-252] In the black hats are all those who are blind to the pure motives and sage brilliance of what Feith calls "Rumsfeld's team." The hats of the State Department and the CIA in this movie are particularly black because officials from both undermined the president and betrayed their country by disagreeing with Rumsfeld's team.
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A book Americans must read before time runs out
Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think
John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed
Gallup Press, 2008
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on March 25, 2008
The media must take Dr. Paul's lead and ask specific foreign policy questions
Despite Dr. Ron Paul's courageous campaign against Washington's relentless overseas interventionism, the presidential primaries have been largely free of substantive foreign-policy debate, aside, that is, from quirky assertions that sleeping with a president, serving as a prisoner of war, and setting records for using the word change constitute adequate commander-in-chief training. Having spent a year warning Americans that the 9/11 attackers and our tens of millions of Islamist enemies draw their main motivation from the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world, Dr. Paul has done as much as one man could do to save Americans from the huge coming blood-and-treasure costs of U.S. intervention. For his effort, Dr. Paul has been ridiculed, damned, and vilified by the media and the country's political class, but has earned the enduring respect and thanks of Americans who do not understand why their children's lives and the outrageous taxes they pay are continually wasted in other peoples' wars — especially other peoples' religious wars — where no genuine U.S. national interests are at risk.
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Break out the shock and awe
If we want to defeat our enemies, we have to be willing to use lethal, overpowering force.
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on March 9, 2008
Clueless candidates make Osama's day
While McCain, Obama, and Clinton attend services of their choice on Sunday, all worship at the shrine of intervention-that-spurs jihad the rest of the week. Just in the past month, all three have pushed an interventionist agenda in Pakistan and Kosovo, and, notwithstanding claims by Obama and Clinton, to a great extent in Iraq. At day's end, each is ready to intervene abroad to champion abstractions such as democracy rather than U.S. interests; each is ready to spend the lives of soldiers and Marines to do so; and each advances the Islamist cause by failing to see that Muslim hatred is motivated by U.S. interventionism more than any other factor.
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Author Michael F. ScheuerPosted on February 27, 2008