by B. R. GOWANI
CHART/Time
Chuck Hagel, the nominee for defense secretary, before the Senate Armed Services Committee PHOTO – Christopher Gregory – The New York Times
President Barack Obama’s nominee for the post of Secretary of Defense, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, faced very hostile Republican senators during the confirmation hearings. (The presidents’ nominees should be appointed to the post right away. The confirmation hearings are a waste of time and money. It just provides Congress persons with a chance to show that they’re doing some work.) Like his former friend, Republican Senator John McCain, Hagel is a Vietnam veteran. But McCain is friend no more. He was very angry when he questioned Hagel’s opposition to the 2007 surge in Iraq which McCain, always a warrior, had favored.
Then there was another Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who tried inciting Hagel to “name one dumb thing we’ve been goaded into doing because of the pressure from the Israeli or Jewish lobby.” And that’s where the power of the Israeli Lobby comes into play. No one, who is seeking a government post, can openly criticize Israel or the Israeli Lobby because that would be the end of his or her career.
Just a month ago, Graham had openly displayed on CNN “the pressure from the Israeli or Jewish lobby,” he was under when he said: Mr Hagel “would be the most antagonistic secretary of defence towards the state of Israel in our nation’s history”.
The US secretaries of state (and others, including the presidents) have been extremely hostile to various countries at different times. Since the early 1960s, a tiny country of Cuba has suffered under the US economic embargo. George H. W. Bush’s animosity towards Iraq’s Saddam Hussein resulted in over a million Iraqi deaths in the 1990s when the US waged an illegal war against that country. The most recent example is that of Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State during the first term, who, along with Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, Obama’s US Ambassador to the United Nations, waged illegal war against Libya.
Back in 2006, Hagel had expressed his helplessness openly when he said, “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here”.
And when does a Congress person says that “I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator?” Only when he or she is forced to do something which is obviously against his or her will. Hagel uttered the above words in 2008. And he is not the first one in power to say that. In 2000s, while in Israel, the US Secretary of Sate Collin Powell was asked by the then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon not to go to Syria.
Sharon: “I don’t want you to go to Damascus [Syria]. I don’t think it serves the interests of peace, and we don’t like it here in Israel when you go to Damascus.”
Powell: “Ariel, thank you very much but I am going anyway. I am Secretary of State of the United States of America and not the foreign minister of Israel.“
There are many more examples such as the above.
During the hearings, Israel was mentioned 166 times. Iran came second with 144 times. Iran’s second position was not out of some love for that country, but the mere fact that Hagel is opposed to war with Iran. So is Obama. But not the puppets of Israel in the Congress. Peace was mentioned only 3 times.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com