Village Voice on Feith
US foreign policy supports the withdrawal of Israeli colonizers from the Palestinian Gaza Strip. But the outgoing number 3 man at the Pentagon, the son of a founder of the proto-fascist Likud Party, has his own foreign policy and fanatically favors the aggressive expansion of Israel and further expropriation of Palestinian property. It is shameful that he is only now resigning, since he has all along opposed the roadmap to peace of the Bush administration. And while others might have had complex motives for taking out Saddam, the reams of disinformation that issued from Feith’s “Office of Special Plans” are easily explained. He saw the Baath regime as a brake on his hopes for a “Greater Israel.” As number 3 in the US Department of Defense, moroever, it is hard to see how he could have been insulated from the decisions that led to the torture of Arab prisoners.
If France appointed Jean-Marie LePen as its number 3 in the Ministry of Defense, there would be howls of outrage from the international community. But Feith’s commitment to colonizing Palestinians is just as racist a project as any of LePen’s programs. If any other American bureaucrat had dared to maintain that it is perfectly all right for one country to colonize another, he would have been considered poison in Washington. But the Likudniks have made themselves respectable in ways that are mysterious to those of us outside the beltway.
See also Doug Ireland at ZNet on the AIPAC case and the conspiracy to get up an Israeli or US attack on Iran, in which Feith’s subordinates and contacts have been implicated.
The outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame is also wrought up with protecting the phony rationales for the Iraq War cooked up by people like Feith. Elizabeth de la Varga argues that the Plame leak is in fact prosecutable.