With
a manner strongly reminiscent of fellow Brooklyn
native John McEnroe arguing a line call, Robert
Wexler has made himself one of the nation's
loudest critics of President Bush. The liberal
congressman from Boca Raton has made more than
100 appearances on cable television shows during
the past two years, debating with Bill O'Reilly,
Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan, and other conservative
carnival barkers. He's attacked Bush on the
environment, prescription drugs, corporate
scandals, tax cuts for the rich, and the issue
that first put him on the TV map: the
president's 2000 election tactics. For all his
sometimes foolish-seeming bluster, Wexler at
times comes up, again like McEnroe, with bold
winning points that need to be made.
So
when Wexler appeared on CNN's TalkBack Live
September 4 to discuss the president's bull rush
to invade Iraq, we might have expected to
finally hear a South Florida Democrat
vociferously attack the ill-conceived plan. To
hear that Bush is after the bastard God oil,
that he is driven by wrongheaded ideologues,
that he is trying to kill the chimp perched on
his old man's shoulder. That Saddam Hussein,
while a thug and a criminal, has no motive to
lash out wildly with chemical weapons -- unless,
of course, we attack him first. And to hear
that, with Afghanistan in relative chaos and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging, such a move
would not only bring more violence and
anti-American hatred to the Middle East but
prove catastrophic for the entire world.
But
Wexler instead told host Arthel Neville that war
on Iraq is a swell idea. "Well, I support
the president's stated goal, which is a regime
change in Iraq," the congressman
proclaimed. "And I agree with the president
that Saddam Hussein has to go.... And I will
ultimately support the president in terms of an
authorization of military action."
Wexler
isn't a new convert to Bush -- he's just an old
loyalist to Israel, a country that, along with a
powerful Washington, D.C., lobbying group called
the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC),
is pushing the war on Iraq with a vengeance. In
essence, the Israeli lobby is urging big brother
America to come out, flex its military muscles,
and make the Israel-American alliance the
dominant power in the Middle East.
An
orthodox Jew, Wexler has always been a Zionist
hard-liner and
has received tens of thousands of
dollars in campaign contributions from
pro-Israel interests during the past six
years.
And he's picked up a big stick for the fight
against Iraq. A member of the House committee on
international relations, lately he's been
spending an inordinate amount of time traveling
around the country and the world promoting
Israel and the war on Hussein.
So
last week, I asked Wexler the obvious question:
Who, as you prepare to send U.S. soldiers to
war, are you really representing: South Florida
or Israel?
"Let's
get this straight," he answered. "I'm
American. I'm 100 percent American. I bleed
American. Am I proud of my heritage? Yes. I
support the state of Israel and wholeheartedly
support an unbreakable bond between the U.S. and
Israel... but there is nothing about my policy
that is anything other than American. It is not
driven by Israel. At this point, it is
supportive of President Bush."
I
too believe in a strong alliance between the
United States and Israel, but I also believe
that Israel's narrow interests have far too much
influence on our foreign policy. We need a
balanced approach in the Middle East. If America
continues to tie itself almost solely to the
tiny Jewish state as it thrashes about in a sea
of Muslim Arabs, we're asking for long and
widespread warfare in the region.
Unfortunately,
Wexler and several other Jewish Democrats in
Congress, led by Connecticut's Sen.
Joe
Lieberman and a gaggle of representatives from
California and New York, are spoiling for that
fight. And because these same politicians can
usually be counted on to anchor the Democrats'
opposition to Bush, they have helped to destroy
any hope of the party's reining in Dick Cheney's
dogs of war. Of course, a few Jewish members of
Congress -- California Sen. Dianne
Feinstein,
chiefly -- have opposed the invasion.
Broward
County's own Jewish Democrat in Congress, Rep.
Peter Deutsch, is another near-fanatical,
pro-Israel politician who expects to vote for
military action in Iraq and has publicly backed
it. But he recently told me that Bush hasn't yet
met his "three-pronged test" for an
invasion. Deutsch won't support war until the
president has proven that Saddam has nuclear
weapons, expects to use them on the United
States, and is developing a delivery system to
carry out such an attack.
No
such proof has been disclosed, but Deutsch says
he fully expects it will be soon.
The
Washington, D.C.-based Jews for Peace in
Palestine and Israel has put both Deutsch and
Wexler in its "Hall of Shame" for
their pro-Israel voting records. Powerful
lobbying groups like the American Jewish
Congress and AIPAC have "hijacked the
agenda" with millions of dollars in
campaign contributions and powerful backers,
alleges JPPI founder Josh Ruebner, adding that
politicians like Wexler are "representing
the government of Israel, absolutely. Most
American Jewish members of Congress are guilty
of that."
And
it's a dangerous policy, according to Nidal
Sakr,
a Muslim political activist from Miami Beach.
Wexler and other liberal Jewish hawks are
"clearly serving foreign interests rather
than the national interest they are supposed to
be serving," says Sakr, who runs a group
called March for Justice. "The U.S.-Israeli
relationship is the largest threat to our
national security and the safety of our
citizens.
Our support for Israel and its
crimes
against Palestinians that have been denounced
again and again by the international community
and the United Nations fuels the anti-American
sentiments and feelings of hatred that are being
compounded around the world."
For
the record, I believe that Yasser Arafat is a
terrorist and Sharon is a war criminal. Both
have been implicated in the killings of
countless civilians. Both are violent,
power-hungry, small men who hope to eradicate
the other's people. And both are manifestations
of an age-old madness that can't cure itself.
The world, through the United Nations, needs to
solve that problem with armed peacekeeping
forces and nation-building plans that dictate a
two-state system fair to both Israel and
Palestine.
But
America, with its many vetoes of U.N. sanctions
against Israel for alleged human rights abuses,
helps to keep that from happening. And until
there is peace between the Israelis and
Palestinians, any talk of attacking Iraq is
premature and damaging to our relations in the
region.
Ruebner,
who trekked to the West Bank last month, reports
there is much fear among Palestinians that
Israel will use the chaos of a war in Iraq as
cover for ethnic cleansing -- not to kill them
but to forcibly remove them from the area.
If Iraq launches missiles at Israel and mad dog
Sharon jumps into the fight, Ruebner expects
atrocities.
When
I asked Wexler what he thought about such a
possibility, he reacted with surprise at the
term "ethnic cleansing" and said:
"If Israel is being threatened by
Palestinians, they need to respond. Sometimes
the right to self-defense is the right to be
proactive, to preempt, as President Bush has
said, to eliminate a danger before it destroys
you. Sometimes you just can't wait."
This
rather unsettling answer makes me wonder if
getting rid of the Palestinians isn't a hidden
goal of this push for the so-called regime
change by the Jewish hawks (a group that,
incidentally, includes Paul Wolfowitz, the chief
war ideologue in the Bush administration, and
Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, a key pitchman
for the invasion).
While
he casts Palestinians as usurpers and
terrorists, Wexler speaks glowingly of Israel as
a bastion of peace, love, and understanding.
"I am a steadfast supporter of the
American-Israeli relationship that is based on
shared values, democracy, freedom, and the love
of life," he says robotically, as if the
words were encoded in a computer chip inserted
in his brain.
I
asked him, "Are you saying that Israel's
hands are clean? That it hasn't committed any
atrocities?"
He
paused and euphemized, "Israel at times
has
made mistakes in terms of strategy. Even they
have admitted that."
Of
course the Israelis have admitted it or Wexler
wouldn't have conceded the point. For his
pandering, Wexler was recently ridiculed in the
British magazine Bully. After a BBC
interview in May, he made Bully's
"Piss List" (which is described as
"things that irk the shit out of us")
for this remark: "Americans are just rock
solid with the people of Israel. It is a
democratic nation and a freedom-loving people
and a very decent people, and they deserve to
have a free and secure state."
The
magazine added this comment: "If Israel
loves freedom so much, why won't they let
inspectors establish whether a massacre occurred
in Jenin in April? Wexler should try that pitch
on the innocent Palestinians who have had their
houses bulldozed for 'strategic' purposes."
Wexler,
in recent months, has also been peddling an
attack on Iraq to government leaders around the
world. Just in the past several months, he's
traveled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey
trying to win support for ousting Saddam. And he
has been urging Congress to increase trade with
Turkey in an effort to buy that key country's
support. It's part of a very quiet effort on the
part of our wonderful country to purchase allies
for the unpopular and bloody business of
overturning the Iraqi regime.
"Turkey
is an incredibly important ally of the
U.S.," Wexler says before assuring me that
the Turks will soon jump on the war train.
"They are a model country for other
countries in the region. And right now, Turkey
has enormous economic problems. They're leading
the fight in Afghanistan, and I think America
has an obligation to help Turkey like they are
helping us."
Wexler
agrees that an attack on Iraq presents horrific
dangers. He acknowledges that it carries a
"grave risk" to stability in the Arab
world and might set off other conflicts. He rues
the fact that it could detract from the
rebuilding of Afghanistan, which he notes is
already at the brink of falling apart. He says
that the sure loss of American soldiers is his
"highest concern" and that Iraq may
well attack Israel in retaliation. He also
concedes that there is no "smoking
gun" tying Saddam to 9/11 or any terrorism
against American targets.
Despite
all that, he still wants to go after the
mustachioed dictator ASAP.
"If
we have a successful regime change, we won't
have World War III but the opposite,"
Wexler opines. "When people see how serious
America is about protecting our interests, how
serious we are about seeing that terrorism does
not flourish, then Syria, Lebanon, and Iran --
all who have toyed around with terrorism -- will
look at themselves and have to decide which side
they are on."
Can
anybody say "imperialist"? I'm afraid
we're proving Osama bin Laden right: The U.S.
wants to conquer the Muslim world militarily
after all. It even has a name: the Bush
Doctrine.
Wexler
is banking on the idea that our little act of
naked aggression will scare all those other Arab
nations into joining America and Israel. If they
don't embrace us infidels, though, we'll surely
be fighting one war after another -- or perhaps
just one big one, the aforementioned World War
III.
It's
all worth the risk, and it's really just part of
our war on terror, according to Wexler. For the
congressman, 9/11 made it our duty to go to war
wherever terrorists flourish, regardless of
whether they are a direct threat to our country.
The only requirement is that they threaten our
"interests" -- a code word he often
uses to mean Israel.
So
the horrible events of September 11 have been
reduced to just another bargaining chip for
pro-Israelis who want America to conquer the
Middle East. Deutsch
too is on a campaign to
broaden the war on terror to include those who
threaten Israel, especially Arafat, and he's
using September 11 as a sales tool. One of the
more sickening items of propaganda Deutsch and
others have been pushing is that Israel,
proportionate to its population, suffers a 9/11
every time 50 of its citizens die in terrorist
attacks. On March 17, while leading a special
service on the House floor in honor of the
Israeli Independence Day, Deutsch announced that
"just this past month, Israel sustained the
equivalent of three 9/11s, and I think if we can
just imagine what the United States, God forbid,
that would have occurred to us, what we would
do."
Palestinian
deaths suffered at the hands of Israel, however,
aren't any big deal among the pro-Israelis,
apparently. Just "strategic mistakes",
as Wexler put it.
Deutsch
is strongly aligned with AIPAC and, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics, has received
roughly $100,000 in campaign contributions from
pro-Israeli political interests during his past
decade in office -- including $40,000 since
2000. In May, he traveled to Israel, where he
pledged allegiance to the Jewish state and
hand-delivered to Sharon a House resolution
pledging unequivocal support from the United
States.
During
the trip, Deutsch announced, "We are
totally committed to the war against
terrorism... and there should not be a Yasser
Arafat exception," according to the Jerusalem
Post. "He is a terrorist." It's
one of the Broward-based congressman's favorite
phrases, "Arafat exception," and it
implies, though Deutsch doesn't say it, that the
United States should forcibly remove Arafat from
power.
Most
recently, Deutsch has taken to traveling around
with an explosives-laden suicide bomber's vest
given to him by the Israeli Defense Forces. It's
a wonderful propaganda tool, designed to invoke
emotion rather than reason. He's also fond of
defending the recent Israeli incursions into
Jenin and Ramallah by recounting the weapons
Israel has recovered in Palestinian territory.
Bush
isn't the only unlikely political ally Wexler
and Deutsch have in their solidarity with
Israel. During a huge April 15 pro-Israel rally
at the Capital, they shared the stage with
ultraconservative Bill Bennett, Texas Republican
Dick Armey, and members of the Christian
Right,
including a representative from the gay-bashing
Family Research Council. And Deutsch accompanied
none other than Newt Gingrich on a pro-Israeli
mission to the Middle East back in 1998, when he
praised the Georgia Republican, again in the Jerusalem
Post, as a "an insightful and forceful
speaker."
But
when I spoke with Deutsch last week, he backed
away from his hawkish stance on Iraq. "I
could not support military action based on what
is on the table at this time," he told me.
Then
he laid out his three-pronged test regarding
nuclear weapons -- which seems to me reasonable.
If Bush meets that test, the country would
likely stand behind a war on Iraq, just as it
did toppling the Taliban. But the president, of
course, has proved nothing of the kind. "I
know the president has more information than I
have," Deutsch said. "And my
assumption is that the data he has from an
intelligence perspective is that [Saddam] has
the capability of a nuclear attack and the
intention to use nuclear weapons.... I believe
that I will ultimately support military
action."
He
seems so certain of it, I wonder if Deutsch
knows something we don't.
As
we all wait for a damn war that seems
preordained, I'm issuing a call to any potential
antiwar movement leaders in South Florida. There
seems to be a dearth of them in this alleged
Democratic bastion. Or at least, there is in our
delegation to Congress -- the only place it
seems to really count.