[Nettime-bold] Jim Lobe: The War on 'Blame America First'

[geert <geert@xs4all.nl>]

The War on Dissent Widens
<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12612>

Jim Lobe, AlterNet
March 12, 2002

A powerful group of neo-conservatives is launching a new public relations
campaign in support of President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
At a Tuesday gathering of the National Press Club, members of the new
Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT) declared their intention to
"take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand
the nature of the war we are facing."

Those groups and individuals, AVOT claims, need to be resisted both here
and abroad. A full-page AVOT advertisement carried in the March 10 Sunday
New York Times pointed to radical Islam as "an enemy no less dangerous and
no less determined than the twin menaces of fascism and
communism we faced in the 20th century." At the same time, the $128,000 ad
lambasted those at home "who are attempting to use this opportunity to
promulgate their agenda of 'blame America first.'"

"Both [internal and external] threats," the ad continues, "stem from either
a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a
misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice."

To expose the internal "threats," AVOT has compiled a sample list of
statements by professors, legislators, authors and columnists that it finds
objectionable. The strategy appears similar to an earlier, much-criticized
effort to monitor war dissidents by the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni (ACTA), a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President
Dick Cheney, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman.

AVOT's list of speakers it considers threatening include:
- Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who said, "Some of us,
maybe foolishly, gave this president the authority to go after terrorists.
We didn't know that he, too, was going to go crazy with it."
- President Jimmy Carter, who assailed Bush's use of
the phrase "axis of evil," arguing that it was "overly simplistic and
counter-productive."
- Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who accused the
president of "canceling, in effect, the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and
Eighth Amendments" and called the war "the patriot games, the lying games,
the war games of an unelected president."
- American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner criticizing
"Bush's dismal domestic policies" and his "dubious notion of a permanent
war."
- Lewis Lapham, the editor of "Harper's Magazine,"
who in a recent editorial said that Washington itself has used terrorist
tactics during the 1990s, including the bombing of civilian targets in
Baghdad and the Balkans.

Who exactly is behind AVOT's efforts? The newly-formed organization is
headed by a formidable array of right-wing luminaries. At the top of the
list is former Secretary of Education and drug czar William Bennett, AVOT's
chairman. The group's Senior Advisors include former CIA director R.  James
Woolsey; former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney; William P.  Barr,
attorney general under George Bush, Sr; and mega-political donor Lawrence
Kadish. AVOT is a project of Empower America, also co-chaired by Bennett,
whose principal members include conservative political operatives Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp, Vin Weber and William Cohen.
During the press conference, Bennett insisted that, "We do not wish to
silence people," adding that for now, AVOT plans to hold teach-ins and
public education events, particularly on college campuses.
In response to AVOT's criticism, Harper's Lewis Lapham said Bennett is a
"wrong-headed jingo and an intolerant scold." He added that AVOT appeared
to be a new "front organization for the hard neo-con (neo-conservative)
right," which has gained unprecedented influence in the Bush
administration, particularly among the top political appointees in the
Pentagon and Dick Cheney's office. "This is the war-monger crowd," he said.
Indeed, AVOT is being initially funded primarily by Lawrence Kadish,
chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and a top donor to the
Republican Party. Kadish, a real estate investor in New York and Florida,
was cited by Mother Jones Magazine as one of the country's top individual
donors, having given $532,000 to the GOP. His RJC has long tried to build
links between the Republican Party, including its Christian Right
component, and American Jews.
Bennett, Gaffney, and Woolsey are all veteran members of a neo-conservative
network of groups with overlapping boards of directors that have long
championed rightwing governments in Israel and, among other things, urged
strong U.S. action against both Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Islamic
government in Iran, as well as Palestine Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Both Gaffney and Bennett, for example, were two of about three dozen mainly
neo-conservative signers of an open letter sent to Bush in the name of the
"Project for a New American Century" nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
It called not only for the destruction of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
network, but also to extend the war to Iraq, and possibly to Iran, Syria,
Lebanon and the Palestine Authority unless those nations ceased their
alleged support of terrorist groups opposed to Israel.
Woolsey, meanwhile, was sent by the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board to
Britain in late September to gather evidence that could link Iraq to the
Sept.  11. He and has since become one of the most visible commentators in
the media in favor of extending the war to Baghdad. Woolsey is also on the
board of the Jewish Institute for National Security, a hawkish pro-Israel
group.
AVOT is also linked through many channels to Richard Perle, chair of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (which sent Woolsey on his Iraqi
quest).  Perle, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, perches full time at the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-con think-tank that has emerged as the
hub of an "axis of incitement"a small but potent network of like-minded,
ultra-hawkish officials, analysts and opinion-makers. It appears that AVOT
is the latest institutional offspring of that network, which is united by a
passionate belief in the inherent goodness and redemptive mission of the
United States; the moral cowardice of liberals and European elites; the
existential necessity of supporting Israel in the shadow of the Holocaust
and in the face of Arab hostility; and the primacy of military power.
These beliefs came through clearly at Tuesday's press conference. Woolsey,
for example, told reporters he agreed with those who are "calling the war
we're in now World War IV." But Gaffney was the most strident of the
speakers at the event, saying that we should be skeptical of our "new-found
friends" in the war on terror.
"[We must] pay special attention to friends like Saudi Arabia and Egypt
whose ongoing use of media are creating problems for our allies," (implying
Israel), Gaffney said. Any criticism of the administration's conduct of the
war, he added, could be "interpreted in such a way as to hurt national
resolve...(and) embolden the enemy."

---------

Jim Lobe writes on international affairs for Inter Press Service,
Oneworld.net, Foreign Policy in Focus and AlterNet.org.


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