"That is the center of America’s security relationship with Israel – the notion that our two countries have the same founding principles, the same respect for the social contract and for the social covenant. I have taken more than 400 American security professionals – primarily retired American Admirals and Generals – to Israel in more than 30 trips. And at the other end of their careers, I have sent more than 500 cadets and midshipmen of our service academies to Israel before they received their commissions. And I can say that they all understood the fundamental and profound principles that guide both the United States and Israel.
They don’t always agree with Israel’s politics – or Israel’s defense choices – or any other single aspect of Israeli political, military and social life, but I never found one that didn’t believe in the relationship between Jews and the land of Israel.
The United States military, then, is a Zionist institution." Shoshana Bryen
------------
It's an open question but I think the answer is probably yes. The US military now seems to be totally focused on Israeli policy goals in Iran, Syria and Iraq. Israel is not much interested in Afghanistan or Korea and in those ares the US is not slavishly following the Israeli lead.
Israel wants Iran neutered and eliminated as a power rival in the Middle East. The putative Iranian nuclear weapons program is just one target of Israeli policy toward Iran. To reach the goal of Morgenthau-style comfort with regard to Iran, Israel wants to destroy Syria and Hizbullah as allies of Iran. The Russians are an obstacle to those aims and I am sure that is causing a lot of heartburn for Bibi when he is not fretting over his approaching likely familial imprisonment. Saudi Arabia? Nobody likes the Saudis. They don't like each other. That is being demonstrated at present. The Israelis don't like the Saudis. The US military has never liked the Saudis but they are now regarded by Israel as allies of convenience against Iran and for this reason there is a new show of chumminess between the US military and SA.
The process of conditioning American officers to make them Zionists has been ongoing for a long time. when I came in the Army in 1962, there was little interest in Israel in the officer corps. "Exodus," the Otto Preminger extravaganza with its glorious music was a couple of years in the past. It had made a good impression on a great many Americans even though the main plot feature was the terrorist attack on the British billet at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The 1956 War in Egypt had been a messy business involving the US, Britain, France, Israel, Egypt and the USSR. It was a confusing occurrence that had occurred concurrently with the revolt against the Communists in Hungary. The 1956 War did not make a big impression on the US military. We were focused on Europe and the Cold War. The 1967 war was a watershed. Israel's total victory had been unexpected by most. Americans are mentally driven by aggressive sports analogies and Israel was a winner. That made a big difference in spite of the repeated day long attacks by the Israeli air force and navy against USS Liberty, an American SIGINT collector positioned off the Egyptian coast. LBJ suppressed an armed reaction by a US carrier battle group in the area and a subsequent naval investigation. His policy then became one of relatively complete support of Israel.
The indoctrination and conditioning program described by Shoshana Bryen began in earnest after that and has carried through to the present under the umbrella of AIPAC and its galaxy of linked organizations especially the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). This program has been wildly, incredibly successful. As a result there is an unthinking willingness among senior, and not so senior American officers to support Israeli policy in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and now Saudi Arabia.
The handful of ME trained and educated US officers are ignored, treated as technical experts or shoved out the door when they speak up. pl
https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2017/11/20/u-s-military-zionist-organization/
Apparently, from the pen of NYT’ Thomas Friedman and supposedly from intellect of MbN, the new competition to Mr. Putin as the new Hitler president is none other than Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran.
Never mind that Hitler was a product of Western Europeans wars and greeds,and had nothing to do with orthodox Russia or a Shia Muslim Iran, which were greatly harmed due to this same wars, nevertheless it was the poor Palestinians who lost their land and territory due to this inter-European wars of colonialist greed.
Posted by: Kooshy | 24 November 2017 at 12:04 PM
You will note that the same sort of conditioning was started with protestant ministers in the 1980s: free trips to the "Holy Land," propaganda about the Palestinians, etc. This is in part how the GOP was turned into an Israeli puppet.
It is helpful to simply assume that the entire US government, the banking cartel, media, academia and protestant churches has been mentally colonized by Zionism, Cultural Marxism, or both. Try this for six months and all those policies you have been scratching your head about begin to make a lot more sense.
If you reflexively say this sounds like the delusions of a paranoid anti-Semite, you may want to consider that YOU have been gaslit.
Posted by: Huckleberry | 24 November 2017 at 12:24 PM
Great documentation, Col Lang. These all-expense-paid junkets that Shoshanna Bryen boasts of, which are actually intelligence recruitment operations, should be outlawed in IMO for young soon-to-be officers. Something for Congress to take up. Meanwhile, some US private institutions would do well to publicize the dissidents inside the Israeli military and intelligence community. They aren't perfect, but frequently more outspoken and truthful than American commentators.
Posted by: Decameron | 24 November 2017 at 12:45 PM
This article by Friedman is the most amazing piece of propaganda I have yet to see in the NYT, and that is saying something. It is required reading.
It contains statements such as the following, MBS describing Donald Trump, "the right person at the right time".
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab-spring.html
Posted by: Bill Herschel | 24 November 2017 at 12:45 PM
So Colonel, what do you imagine/extrapolate/intuit the repercussions of this blind support of Israeli objectives within our Congress, the Executive and Military will be?
We can see the immediate results in Syria, but what do you imagine will transpire based on the stated goals of the US military and the vague goals of the US government?
Korea is unimportant to Israel, and military efforts there would be catastrophic for US internationally, unless there was a very convincing false flag executed.
Israel cares not a bit about NATO, the EU and Russia, nor do they care about Ukraine - so are those just going to remain in limbo until they fall apart on their own?
Where does Yemen fit into this mix?
Do you believe the tiny enclave of mercs and SOF remaining in the immediate area of Syria will be strengthened?
And NO - I am not going to barbecue you for just thinking out possibilities - but what else can we civilians do? At least you have the background sufficient to imagine, and know some of the principals - invaluable in estimating what might happen.
Posted by: Oilman2 | 24 November 2017 at 01:03 PM
oilman2
I am here to teach you to think about these things, not to be a fortune teller. Work it out for your self. pl
Posted by: turcopolier | 24 November 2017 at 01:40 PM
decameron
IMO what they are recruiting are agents of influence. pl
Posted by: turcopolier | 24 November 2017 at 01:42 PM
Col. Lang:
Has the US soldiery, officers and the enlisted men, become - per chance - more religious? On the whole?
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 24 November 2017 at 01:43 PM
Babak
There are a lot more evangelical Christians than there used to be. pl
Posted by: turcopolier | 24 November 2017 at 01:44 PM
james
Why didn't I think of that? pl
Posted by: turcopolier | 24 November 2017 at 01:46 PM
They all become Zioconned with life membership in the Kosher-Nostra.....
Posted by: Willybilly | 24 November 2017 at 01:50 PM
So the secular American Creed has weakened ?
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 24 November 2017 at 01:59 PM
Babak
MO, even as the coastal elites have grown ever more materialistic and self-centered, the population of ordinary Americans from whom the military are recruited has either become more devout or have not turned away from religion. Israel is a politico religious phenomenon that skillfully develops gentile guilt over the Shoah. This is a potent weapon. I have known a lot of Israeli officers. Most were not religious at all and quite cynical about the evangelicals. These officers were Jewish/Israeli nationalists. That was a bond between us but this process of narrative shaping and domination of American policy has gone very far. pl
Posted by: turcopolier | 24 November 2017 at 02:24 PM
Like Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven, Friedman "Sometimes he even amazes himself". Throughout the years, I have read many super optimistic predictions of Mr. Friedman printed in NYT as an expert' analysis. Frankly never before, I had read one as overtly and embarrassingly ridicules about an absolute dictatorial monarchy that has been proven instrumental for current extremist Sunni Muslim terrorism including 9/11 in the world. Whichever US PR firm hired by Saudis for this write up in NYT, deserves a refund.
Posted by: kooshy | 24 November 2017 at 02:33 PM
Shoah guilt seems to play well with the Coastal elites. I'm acquainted with a lot of evangelicals and never heard an evangelical speak of it. For them it is all about the bible being the literal word of God, God's covenant with Israel, and the various End Times prophecies as interpreted by various Church leaders over the years and the role Israel plays in God's plans. I still remember some of that stuff from the Plain Truth magazine that showed up at our house once in awhile 50 years back. Support for Israel is really a matter of faith for them.
Posted by: Terry | 24 November 2017 at 02:54 PM
In a slim volume titled "Expanding Historical Consciousness: The Development of the Holocaust Educational Foundation," author Anita Weiner traces -- make that celebrates -- the efforts of Zev Weiss to insert 'holocaust consciousness/education' in, first, American universities, then military academies, then globally.
Weiss's first triumph was the recruitment of Peter Hayes at Northwestern University in 1987. Weiss identified Hayes as "an Irish Catholic who taught German history;" Hayes describes himself as a specialist in economics. To bring him up to speed, Weiss paid $3000 to someone to cover Hayes's class load while Hayes traveled to Israel & visited Yad Vashem.
Notre Dame and then Christopher Browning were Weiss's next two acquisitions; by 1992, "65 colleges and universities had courses on the Holocaust . . . that had been introduced by The Foundation."
It took Weiss over a year to get The Air Force Academy on board with the "Expanding Historical Consciousness"/ Holocaust education project. Next in line was West Point, where European studies professor Dewey Browder was tapped to take on the program. He, too, initially resisted on the basis that he knew little about the topic, but Weiss
Browder's an interesting character. He moved from West Point to Austin Peay University, where ROTC students were in his classes in European history. In addition,
Now retired, Browder recently endowed a scholarship to promote European studies,
I wonder, though, about the dual-emphasis of those tours Browder leads, and if he questions whether giving "Holocaust" equal weight with 2000+ years of "European culture" has contributed to young Americans "losing sight of their origins."
And I question, especially, if the airmen, cadets, and midshipmen who are learning to assess the morality of military orders are fully grounded if the context of that instruction is a Holocaust narrative that is purveyed by a group with a self-interested agenda, and which is loaded with misconstructions and omissions, but which is forbidden to be critically analyzed or challenged.
Posted by: Croesus | 24 November 2017 at 02:57 PM
Col. Lang
If even the military leadership has become zioconned then the situation is hopeless. It would seem that only a catastrophic loss can provide the impetus for change. Even there it may be that they double down.
The ME clearly has no national benefit. There's nothing of strategic value there. It seems purely an ideological pursuit. Do you see any similarity to the anti-communist mindset that was pervasive post-war?
Posted by: blue peacock | 24 November 2017 at 03:09 PM
One can only imagine the horrified reaction of media and politicians if Russia was to ever stage that kind of paid propaganda stages and visits for US military. Horror soon followed by a witch-hunt of Stalinist proportion.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | 24 November 2017 at 03:10 PM
Kooshy
Check this thread on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/anhistorian/status/934080718816399361
In honor of Thomas Friedman’s latest love letter to Saudi here is 70 years of the NY Times describing #Saudi royals in the language of #reform.
Posted by: The Beaver | 24 November 2017 at 03:26 PM
The parasitoid has taken the host by its head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovo_T0KqdYg
"The parasitoid Jewel Wasp (Ampulex compressa) uses cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) as a live fresh food supply for its offspring. The wasp injects venom directly into the cockroach brain to control its behavior. In this movie, we show the life cycle of this amazing predator, which ends in a slow horrifying death of the cockroach."
Posted by: Anna | 24 November 2017 at 03:52 PM
If they did this, they would be crushed into oblivion
Posted by: Linda | 24 November 2017 at 04:22 PM
Yes, strongly agree. I encountered then repeat lay up thru my last assignment (2012).
Posted by: Linda | 24 November 2017 at 04:26 PM
Not ideological, but religious.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 24 November 2017 at 04:32 PM
Friedman: "Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive." Ho ho, ha ha.
Posted by: Walrus | 24 November 2017 at 05:01 PM
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation was set up by 1970s US Air Force Academy grad Michael Weinstein 10+ years ago in response to the harassment his sons received at that same institution a generation later by evangelical Christian proselytes. The elder Weinstein had experienced similar harassment in his time there. The foundation pushes back on all forms of religious proselytization that is reported to them. The perpetrators are usually evangelicals of some flavor or other, and the targets the MRFF assists include Moslems, Roman and Orthodox Catholics and mainstream Protestants as well as Jews. Weinstein's book about his and his sons' experiences that led to the MRFF's founding are a worthwhile read, as is the Wikipedia page on the organization. This issue appears to border on being a similar misuse of religious influence and it will be interesting to see how the MRFF responds when it is brought to their attention.
Posted by: ex-PFC Chuck | 24 November 2017 at 05:07 PM