"We shall have no peace as long as the whole territory
of the Land of Israel will not return under Jewish
control.... A stable peace will come only then, when
Israel will return to itself all its historical lands,
and will thus control both the Suez and the Ormudz
channel.... We must remember that Iraqi oil fields too
are located on the Jewish land."

Avrom Shmulevic, rabbi and historian
"[American ] strategy should aim, above all, at the
removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power."..[His
removal is absolutely vital to] "the security of the
world in the first part of the 21st century" and for
"the safety of American troops in the region, of our
friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab
states, and a significant portion of the world's
supply of oil."

Neocons' January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill
Clinton
"Israel made a large contribution to the decision to
embark on this [Iraq] war. I know that on the eve of
the war, [Ariel] Sharon said, in a closed conversation
with senators, that if they could succeed in getting
rid of Saddam Hussein, it would solve Israel's
security problems."

Robert (Bob) Novak, American veteran reporter
“We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam
Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire
the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to
build a nuclear weapon.”

Vice President Dick Cheney, September 2002
***
Like apprentice sorcerers, [a group of pro-Israel
Neocons,->http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10804.htm]
took hold of U.S. foreign policy under President
George W. Bush and designed the most wicked and the
most improvised war of aggression by any country
against another that one can remember. This small
group of ideologues, lacking in judgment, knowledge
and wisdom but full of fanaticism, arrogance and
hubris seized upon a double opportunity to advance
their narrow interests at the expense of the American
people, the Iraqi people and world peace and order.
Their first opportunity came when an inept and an
inexperienced politician was barely elected president
of the United States in November 2000, [Texas Governor
George W. Bush.
->http://ap.grolier.com/picturepopup?productid=gme&assetid=nws0030&templatename=/article/picturepopup.html]
Clustered around Vice President Dick Cheney and around
then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they
successfully established a parallel government.within
the Bush-Cheney administration, de facto independent
of the Office of the National Security Advisor
(Condoleezza Rice), of the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) (George Tenet) and of the State Department
(Colin Powell).
The leading warmongering Neocons were Cheney's Chief
of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby (recently convicted of
perjury) and Cheney's Middle East advisor, David
Wurmser, plus the top decision makers at the Pentagon,
Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary
Douglas Feith, assisted by the head of the Defense
Policy Board, Richard Perle and by Elliott Abrams,
head of the Middle East policy at the National
Security Council. On the ground in Iraq, they later
could count on [an advisor and protégé of former Henry
Kissinger
->http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_kissinger_connection]
and a director of Kissinger Associates, L. Paul
(Jerry) Bremer, whose fateful decisions involved
dismantling the entire Iraqi government and firing the
heavily armed 400,000 strong Iraqi army. —This small
group of insiders was supported by [a host of outside
lobbies,
->http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1033] by
an army of sycophants in [Washington pro-Israel think
tanks
->http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1038]
and by far-right journalists and media
at large.
The second opportunity arose with the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks that traumatized the American
people and made them [vulnerable to manipulation,
deception, forgery and lies,
->http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1167]
and any other tactics used to justify an illegal war
of aggression against Iraq.
The Neocon plan for the Middle East was initially
crafted in Israel, in 1996, by a group of advisors to
then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of the
Likud Party. These advisors were Richard Perle, James
Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert
Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, all of
them directing or collaborating with [the Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
->http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1493] (IASPS),
a think tank headquartered in Jerusalem, with a
Washington office, and supported by [the Scaife
Foundation
->http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/398] and the
Bradley Foundation.. —It is
to be noted also that many of these individuals later
found their way to the highest echelons of the
Bush-Cheney administration. Their Israeli policy plan for the
Middle East, entitled ["A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm",
->http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm] was
published by IASPS, and it called for a grand strategy
of total war in the Middle East, using the military
power of the United States to do the job.
Iraq became the testing ground for the Neocons' grand
plan. The Neocons viewed Iraq as an immediate threat
to Israel, and in the long term, they dreamed of
overthrowing the ruling Iraqi Baath Party in order to
transform the entire Middle East in Israel's favor.
Indeed, Saddam Hussein got into the Neocons's sight
even before he took three annoying decisions in the
early 2000s.
First, Iraq announced in September 2000, in the middle
of the U.S. presidential election, that from then on,
it would demand to be paid in euros
instead of dollars for its oil exports. Second, Saddam
Hussein began rewarding the families of suicide
bombers in Israel with a compensation of $25,000,
a move that enraged the Israeli government and its
allies within the U.S. government. And third, in a
move that deeply shook up oilmen Bush II and Cheney,
he announced on April 8, 2002, that Iraq would [suspend
its oil exports ->http://samvak.tripod.com/pp170.html]
for one month, as a protest against the slow pace
toward settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and against Israel's refusal to cease its [illegal
occupation of the Palestinian territories.
->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_territories]
The Oil-Israel nexus is at the core of the motivations
for Bush-Cheney's fateful decisions to launch an
illegal war against Iraq on March 20, 2003.
Maintaining U.S. control over Middle East oil and
shoring up the state of Israel are the two fundamental
and interrelated rationales for involving American
military might in a string of wars in the Middle East.
— Last November 1, (2006) President George W. Bush
finally all but confessed that the U.S. must maintain
occupying troops (indefinitely) in the Middle East [to
keep the flow of oil
->http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Bush_tells_Rush_hes_deeply_concerned_1101.html]
coming, because (if we leave) "extremists [may] be in
a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the
West... and they will do so unless we abandon Israel
". He has also said in the past that the U.S. is
committed to defending Israel,
no matter what. Thus, in Bush's own words, the
invasion of Iraq was a 'preventive aggression' to grab
Iraqi oil, turn Iraq into an oil colony and support
anything Israel does to the Palestinians!
In my book 'The New American Empire',
'Oil and Israel' were precisely the two main reasons I
identified for the U.S. invading a Middle East country
that had not attacked the United States; it had
nothing to do with the hogwash of 'weapons of mass
destruction', 'al Qaeda', the 'war on terror' or
'democracy'. It had everything to do with oil
and Israel
and the power of such related interests within the
American political system.
What Bush was echoing in his declaration is that grand
plan designed by pro-Israel neocon ideologues within
and outside the Bush-Cheney administration to reshape
the entire Middle East region to fit American oil
interests and Israel's strategic interests.
—Unfortunately, this is a flawed and illegal plan that
was crafted and implemented in a climate of arrogance,
amateurishness, stupidity and incompetence on a high
scale. The gruesome and messy results
are all there to be seen by everyone with eyes to see.
The great scandal is that much of the raw truth about
the Iraq War has been hidden from the vast majority of
Americans. Maybe a paper like the New York Times
should publish this article to compensate for all the
falsehoods it published on their front page during the
months that preceded the war.
_______________________________________
Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached
at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
Visit his [blog site
->www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog].
[Author's Website ->www.thenewamericanempire.com/]
Check Dr. Tremblay's coming book ["The Code for Global
Ethics" ->www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/]