The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (3 page)

Chapter 2

Credit Crunch or Zio Punch?

Back in 1992, the United States Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, appointed Paul Wolfowitz (Undersecretary for Defence Policy at the time) and his deputy Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, to draft the USA Defense Planning Guidance (DFG) for the 1994-99 fiscal years. The document that was later named as the ‘“Wolfowitz Doctrine’” was soon leaked to the New York Times and raised some harsh criticism.

This astonishing document laid out the strategy for merging American and global Zionist interests into a unified practice. It all happened in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as America was becoming the single super power.

‘Our first objective,’ wrote Wolfowitz, ‘is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat of the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.’
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As much as Wolfowitz may claim to believe in ‘freedom’ and the ‘free market’, he states that America should not allow anyone to question its primacy in the market and the new world order.

‘The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.’

Wolfowitz had already realised, in 1992, that the world might be reluctant to support his visionary American expansionist philosophy. America, according to him, should therefore adopt a unilateral assertive practice. Rather than counting on international coalitions and UN initiatives, America had better get used to the idea that it would have to act alone. Seemingly, already in 1992, Wolfowitz had appointed America as the World Police.

‘Like the coalition that opposed Iraqi aggression, we should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives to be accomplished. Nevertheless, the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S. will be an important stabilizing factor.’

Hence, Wolfowitz stresses, America should intervene when and where it believed necessary. But then the Global Zionist pops out. Wolfowitz and Libby reaffirmed U.S. commitments to the Jewish State.

‘In the Middle East and Persian Gulf, we seek to foster regional stability, deter aggression against our friends and interests in the region, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways and to the region’s oil. The United States is committed to the security of Israel and to maintaining the qualitative edge that is critical to Israel’s security.’

The Project for the New American Century

Wolfowitz’s ‘draft’ soon led to the foundation of the most powerful think tank in Washington: the Project For The New American Century (PNAC), which lasted from early 1997 to 2006 and exerted a major influence within President George Bush’s administration. It would be impossible to analyse American policy and the neoconservative expansionist wars during this time without taking into account the influence of the PNAC. It would also be impossible to understand the collapse of global American hegemony (in general) and in the Middle East (in particular) without bearing in mind the interventionist philosophy advocated by the PNAC and its support of Israeli global and regional interests.

According to the PNAC’s homepage, the think tank’s goal was ‘to promote American global leadership.’
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Following the interventionist precept set by Wolfowitz and Libby, PNAC believed that ‘American leadership was both good for America and good for the world’
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. It openly suggested that everything that was good for the Americans was also good for the rest of humanity
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.

The New American think-tankers clearly had their eyes on Iraq’s oil. However Iraq also presented a constant risk to the Americans’ beloved ally in the region, the Jewish state, to whom Iraq was one of the last defiant enemies. Regime change in Iraq remained the consistent position of PNAC throughout 1997-2000. Wolfowitz, who naturally emerged as a leading figure within the PNAC, put constant pressure on Clinton’s administration, advocating the immediate removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime.

In 2002-2003, as America and Britain were preparing for a war against Iraq, it became evident that Bush’s administration complied with PNAC’s political philosophy.

As we know, the war turned into a complete disaster. For many political analysts it symbolises the beginning of the end of the American Empire. By the end of 2006, there wasn’t much left of the notorious neoconservative think-tank. The PNAC was reduced to a voice-mailbox and a ghostly website, with a single employee left to wrap things up. The members of the notorious think tank quietly disappeared; some settled in far less glorious academic and administrative political posts, others just retired or faded away. Yet their philosophy left more than one and a half million fatalities in Iraq. It left one billion Muslims outraged and hostile to America’s relentless expansionism. Before long the entire American geopolitical philosophy collapsed as the Arab masses identified America as their enemy, and some of the Arab tyrants as American collaborators.

Obviously knowing what we know today about Neocon
‘moralist’ interventional inclinations and PNAC advocacy of expansionism, such devastating consequences shouldn’t take us by surprise. Yet, questions must be asked: How is it that America didn’t find, within its ‘free media’ and political establishment, the means to resist Wolfowitz and Libby? After the election of George
W. Bush in 2000, a number of PNAC’s members or signatories were appointed to key positions within the President’s administration. The American media and political system were very slow to react. This fact alone raises a crucial question.

How did America allow itself be enslaved by ideologies inherently associated with foreign interests?

Oil is important

The United States of America is a big country with big roads and many thirsty cars. Consequently, cheap oil is the key for its social and economical stability. Wolfowitz, Libby and PNAC, so it seemed at the time, found their way to heaven. They were about to kill two birds with just a single war. They planned to rob the Arab oil and to simultaneously ‘secure’ their beloved Jewish state.

As we all know, the plan didn’t work out. In spite of the 2003 invasion, America didn’t manage to put its heavy hand on Iraqi oil. Reconstruction of Iraq, another attempt to bank some cash, is ‘yet’ to happen.

However, Wolfowitz didn’t fail entirely. He succeeded in destroying one fierce enemy of Israel. He toppled Saddam Hussein. But it looks as if Saddam, on his way down, managed to pull the entire American Empire and what was left of the British one, with him. Moreover, by the time the last American soldier is evacuated or air lifted from the Green Zone (Baghdad) it will be clear that it was actually the failure of Wolfowitz’s doctrine that made Iran into the leading regional superpower.

The Greenspan Doctrine - Money Makes The World Go Round

How is it that America failed to restrain its Wolfowitzes? How is it that America let its foreign policy be shaped by some ruthless Zio-driven think tanks? How come alleged American ‘free media’ failed to warn the American people of the enemy within?

Money probably provides one answer, it does indeed make the world go round, or at least the ‘American housing market’.

Throughout the centuries, some Jewish bankers have gathered the reputation of backers and financers of wars
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and even one communist revolution
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. Though some rich Jews have been happily financing wars using their own assets, Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, found a far more sophisticated way to facilitate or at least divert the attention from the wars perpetrated by Libby, Wolfowitz and PNAC.

Unlike old-fashioned Britain, where Tony Blair recruited Lord Levy to encourage his ‘Friends of Israel’ to donate their money to a party that was just about to launch a criminal war, in America Alan Greenspan provided his president with an astonishing economic boom. It seems that the prosperous conditions at home divert the attention from the disastrous war in Iraq.

Greenspan is not an amateur economist, he knew what he was doing. He knew very well that as long as Americans were doing well, buying and selling homes, his President would be able to continue implementing the ‘Wolfowitz doctrine’ and PNAC philosophy, destroying the ‘bad Arabs’ in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’, ‘ethics’, and even ‘women’s rights’.

Greenspan advised the American people to buy – he repeated the old mantra: ‘spending is patriotic’. He also managed to convince them that if they did not have the money, that shouldn’t stop them. They would ‘pay later’. To a certain extent he was correct, we are all having to ‘pay later’… we may even never stop paying.

Without going too deeply into economics, it was Greenspan who through some excessive deregulation prepared the monetary ground for the rise of the subprime mortgage companies: a lending market that specialises in high-risk mortgages and loans.

‘Innovation,’ said Greenspan in April 2005, ‘has brought about a multitude of new products, such as subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants.’
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It is almost touching to find out that Greenspan cares so much about immigrants.

‘Such developments,’ continues Greenspan, ‘are representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services industry throughout the history of our country … With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers.’

Greenspan admits that he is leading the American banking system into an ‘innovative’ experiment: ‘Where once the more marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately.’

It seems the entire Western economy is paying the price for Greenspan’s non-scientific notion of ‘appropriately’.

‘These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly ten percent of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just one or two percent in the early 1990s.’

Like Wolfowitz, Greenspan had a plan. Like Wolfowitz’s war it even worked for a while, but somehow it didn’t work all the way through. As we all remember President Bush’s embarrassing declaration of victory in Iraq, we also know that it didn’t take long for the American people to acknowledge that America would never win in this war. Similarly, Greenspan had some initial numbers to be proud of. The subprime borrowing he
pushed for was a major contributor to an increase in home ownership and the demand for housing. The overall U.S. homeownership rate increased from 64 percent in 1994 to a peak in 2004 with an all-time high of 69.2 percent. Real estate had become the leading business in America, more and more speculators invested money in the business. During 2006, 22 percent of homes purchased (1.65 million units) were for investment purposes, with an additional 14 percent (1.07 million units) purchased as vacation homes.

These figures led Americans to believe that their economy was indeed booming. And when an economy is booming nobody is really interested in foreign affairs, certainly not in a million dead Iraqis. But then the grave reality dawned on the many struggling, working class Americans and immigrants, who were failing to pay back money they didn’t have in the first place.

Due to the rise in oil prices and the rise of interest rates, millions of disadvantaged Americans fell behind. By the time they drove back to their newly purchased suburban dream houses, there was not enough money in the kitty to pay the mortgage or elementary needs. Consequently, within a very short time, millions of houses were repossessed. Clearly, there was no one around who could afford to buy those newly repossessed houses. Consequently, the poor people of America became poorer than ever.

Just as Wolfowitz’s toppled Saddam, who dragged the American Empire down with him, the poor Americans, that were set to facilitate Wolfowitz’s war, pulled down American capitalism as well as the American monetary and banking system. Greenspan’s policy led an entire class to ruin, leaving America’s financial system with a hole that now stands at a trillion dollars.

Greenspan and Wolfowitz remind me of the joke about an insensitive surgeon who comes out of the theatre after a 12 hour heart operation, telling the anxious family ‘the operation was a
great success but unfortunately your beloved didn’t make it to the end.’

The Moral Agenda

Greenspan and Wolfowitz’s doctrines looked promising on paper. The operation was indeed successful but the American Empire didn’t make it to the end. It is now doomed to lose its primacy. Greenspan, so he says, did it all for the ‘immigrants’ and the ‘poor’. Wolfowitz appointed Great America to be the global police force. He did it for the Iraqis, for ‘morality’ and democracy. At least this is what he wants us to believe. The pattern is familiar, a few ‘graceful’ people who always try to save the world in the name of one ideal or another. They ‘bring’ democracy to the ‘savage’, they ‘bring’ equality to the poor. They employ abstract ethical concepts. But somehow, the Jewish state is always set to benefit. One just has to read the first and prominent Zionist prophet Theodor Herzl to know that this is what political Zionism is all about: getting superpowers to serve the Zionist cause.

Some Americans were fooled into blindly following Wolfowitz and Greenspan, many others, especially in the highest economical, political and media echelons, were stupid not to stop them in time. Greenspan and Wolfowitz should have at least been restrained. Already in 1992 Americans should have been alerted to the possible dangers concerning foreign interests within the hub of their strategic headquarters.