Have the US military gone Zionist?

"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

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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/

Comments

[Lemur]

"Judeo-Christian values"

It would more sense to speak of 'Islamo-Christian values' than those of the Jews. The Muslim literary material describes Jesus as a prophet, not boiling in excrement in hell. And it would make actual sense to speak of Zoroastrian-Christian values. Christianity was developed as a theological system using Greek thought (itself influenced by Zoroastrian Persia) and culturally 'Germanized' (see the Germanization of Late Medieval Christianity). I remember reading a whole article over at the (Jewish) Tablet Magazine describing how whenever Jews or Judaism was brought up by Christian Europe, it was as an antithesis or adversary. "Judeo-Christian" is an ahistorical projection back onto the past constructed for political ends in the 20th century.

At the core of the Christian idea is that the divine took human form. Thus Christ's Jewish origin is irrelevant. The only thing that Christianity takes from Judaism is the idea of the 'seed of Abraham', which is interpreted as the church in both the Old and New Testament.

None of the so-called 'Abrahamic Religions' share a coherent philosophical or moral system. Thus it always funny when this "Judaeo-Christian' phrase is trotted out.

[Lemur]

It's tempting to blame evangelicals but this article places their role in the American-Israeli relationship in context.

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2005/12/01/the-protestant-deformation/

tl;dr - jews, neocons, liberal globalists engineered the background conditions for America's Middle East adventures, and generated and promulgated the specific policies involved. Evangelicals played a peripheral role, shoehorned into Republican coalitions because the GOP paid lip-service to family values. If Israel thought the evangelicals were the golden ticket, they wouldn't spend all that money lobbying in DC. Also, you have to explain why Democrats Presidents cater to Israel too...they don't answer to the religious right.

[Lemur]

"Cultural Marxism" is the term discursively confused term normie conservatives apply to the liberal project. It's a fancy way of saying 'civilizational AIDS, or more academically, 'left-wing oligarchy.' Currently world-historic forces beyond the remit of the global managerial elite are turning with a vengeance on this virus, so now may be a good time to sell off your ideological stocks before the big crash.

[Lemur]

i think you made some good points but at the same time i got the impression i was reading an all too neatly packaged whig account of history

[Croesus]

I think I love you!
Agree 66%, and so pleased to see inclusion of Zoroaster.

The "Judeo-Christian" formula is historically, theologically, mythologically inappropriate.
I was tempted to edit the quote, but Browder's use of the formula indicates how the concepts he was convinced to teach and propagate are politically - ideologically driven.

I consider "Abrahamism" and "Zoroaster- Greek thought" to be antithetical. The core of Zoroastrianism is "Good thoughts, Good words, Good deeds;" each person is accountable for his own behavior. Zoroastrians tend not to involve themselves in converting others..

In contrast, Maimonides wrote of Abraham:

"He realized the way of truth and . . . righteousness . . . that there is a God who . . . created the world, and besides whom there is none other.
He also knew that the whole world was erring, . . . Once he achieved this, he began to reason with the inhabitants of Ur Casdim and to argue with them, saying that by serving idols they were not following the way of truth.
He broke their images, and began to proclaim that it is not fitting to serve anyone other than God, . . . Abraham also proclaimed that it was fitting to break and destroy all the figures, so that nobody will err on account of them "

[Anna]

Excuse me for sounding "snoopy," but what are the names of those who have been primed by Israel-firsters to become a Fifth Column in the US?
Do the primed have any shame?

[David Habakkuk]

Larry Kart,

From an article entitled ‘Is Israel Good for the Jews?’ published by the sociologist Norman Birnbaum in the ‘Nation’ back in 2006:

‘Domestically, the chief allies of American Jewry were once the liberal Protestants; the modern Catholics, whose great achievement was the Second Vatican Council; and progressive secularists. Now organized Jewry has an alliance with those who were not so long ago embittered anti-Semites. The Protestant fundamentalists think the founding of the Jewish state means that the conversion of the Jews is imminent. Suppose the fundamentalists demand that US Jewry anticipate the end of time by beginning their conversion now? Some have welcomed the Lebanon crisis as the initiation of Armageddon. In the meantime, they combat the pluralism of the public sphere, which is indispensable to enduring rights for Jews in the United States. America is in serious danger of becoming a nation defined not by citizenship but by bargains among struggling ethnic and religious communities, united in an impossible project of global domination. Will Nobel prizes and business acumen, and seventeenth-century biblical imagery of America as a New Israel, protect the Jewish minority as our imperial project disintegrates? Its end could generate the domestic deprivation and tension conducive to renewed anti-Semitism.’

(See https://www.thenation.com/article/israel-good-jews/ .)

[Babak Makkinejad]

Pirouz Bahram.

[English Outsider]

Lemur - yes, you've ID'd it with remorseless accuracy. Whiggish as hell. More or less straight Macaulay, or as much of it as I could remember, with the odd bit of customisation.

Wiki quotes Lord Acton on Macaulay:-

"[T]he Essays are really flashy and superficial. He was not above par in literary criticism; his Indian articles will not hold water; and his two most famous reviews, on Bacon and Ranke, show his incompetence. The essays are only pleasant reading, and a key to half the prejudices of our age. It is the History (with one or two speeches) that is wonderful. He knew nothing respectably before the seventeenth century, he knew nothing of foreign history, of religion, philosophy, science, or art. His account of debates has been thrown into the shade by Ranke, his account of diplomatic affairs, by Klopp. He is, I am persuaded, grossly, basely unfair."

Again according to Wiki, Karl Marx put the boot in too: Marx says of Macaulay that he was "a 'systematic falsifier of history'.[37]"

An ideal model, therefore, for a Rovian re-writing of English history that conforms to Mrs Bryen's equally extraordinary re-writing of American history.

I'm pretty sure I got the cutlery bit right though.

[The Porkchop Express]

This is absolutely true. Literal word of God. The Christian dispensationalists and most of the evangelicals don't need convincing. They support Israel 100% without getting into the muck of politics. End times, Messiah returns, etc... They give Israel support because it has to exist in order for Christ to return.

Part of this prophecy is that once Jesus returns to Earth, the Jews must convert or be cast into the pit of fire. That the Israelis go along with the support of this insane theology says more about their political cynicism than anything else.

[David Habakkuk]

The Beaver,

Thanks for that, which I found instructive and enjoyable.

There are however critical ways in which the world has changed, which I think are not appreciated by Friedman, JINSA, and their like.

A fundamental premise of British, and American, policy has been that we could co-operate with the Saudis against those deemed our common enemies, without risking serious ‘blowback.’

We have had now had repeated terrorist attacks in the West from jihadists – and it has not escaped people’s attention that those responsible are not Alawites from Syria, Hibzullah, or Iranians.

So the emptiness of the endless charade of promises that the Saudis will suddenly become part of Friedman’s ‘flat world’ is now increasingly noticed and regarded as important, in a way it was not in the past.

Also relevant is the fact that the Israelis appear to be able to imagine no solution to any of their security problems other than bombing people and inveigling others in doing this. The fact that this has quite patently done much to exacerbate the jihadist problem, and the migration crisis, both of which pose very major threats to European countries, does not appear to worry them.

Historical ‘narratives’ can mutate in strange ways – and do so rapidly.

The King David Hotel bombing, to which Colonel Lang referred in his post, is no more forgotten in Britain than is the attempt to sink the USS Liberty in the United States.

On a site called ‘British Forces in Palestine’ you will find, among much other material, a page entitled ‘Kidnap, Torture and Murder of Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice.’

Ironically, according to ‘Haaretz’, the former was ‘the circumcised, Hebrew-speaking son of a Jewish mother.’

(See http://www.britishforcesinpalestine.org/attacks/sergeants.html ; https://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/the-cruel-revenge-that-helped-drive-the-british-out-of-palestine-1.456440?block=true&trailingPath=2.169%2C2.216%2C2.218%2C ,)

If they go on the way they are going, people like Shoshana Bryen could wake up one morning to discover that, far from being ‘our other best friend in the world’, the British are a people with very decidedly mixed feelings about Zionists – and indeed, that many here are inclined to write Israelis off as little more than a bunch of thugs.

[LeaNder]

Anna, tell me why this "cultural Marxist" and post-Zionist isn't really surprised about your association?

[Babak Makkinejad]

This sounds consistent with the Poetry of William Blake; when the project of building a new Jerusalem on England's green and verdant shores proved impractical, it was conveniently moved to America. And we suffer these Delusions thanks to our civilization's weakness in opposing alien peoples' fantasies.

[Babak Makkinejad]

The "good speech, ..." was only a spiritual exercise for fortifying oneself for the on-going and relentless war against the Evil Essence that permeates the Universe.
The semitic religions of Western Asia are confused interpretations of the Din Behi.
Zoroaster did send emissaries, he himself was martyred in Jihad against Turanians.

[David Habakkuk]

EO,

Good god man – are you really an enthusiast for the rule of the Major-Generals?

And this history really does matter, given that people like Rabbi Sacks and Soshana Bryen are trying to suggest a fundamental harmony between Israel and the United States on the basis of common origin of their political ideas in the Hebrew Bible. So Sacks writes: ‘Covenant is central to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. It is central to the speech of John Winthrop aboard the Arbela in 1630.’

A less sympathetic view, from the time, of the mentality of the kind of people who, at the time to which Sacks is going back, ‘internalized the Hebrew Bible’ in the way he appears to find congenial was brilliantly itemised in the great doggerel poem ‘Hudibras’ by the – very drunk – royalist poet Samuel Butler. His description of the religion of his protagonist, a colonel in the Parliamentary Army, begins:

‘For his Religion, it was fit/ To match his learning and his wit;/ ‘Twas Presbyterian true blue;/ For he was of that stubborn crew/ Of errant saints, whom all men grant/ To be the true Church Militant ...’

It concludes:

‘All piety consists therein/ In them, in other men all sin’.

(See http://www.exclassics.com/hudibras/hudibras.pdf )

Clearly, Butler’s view is not the whole truth, by any means. But to see that it has substance – and was in tune with the feelings of very many of his fellow-countrymen, both then and later – one needs only to read a review by Ronald Hutton of the 2001 study ‘Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution’ by Christopher Durston. An excerpt:

‘One of the biggest factors in the failure of the Major-Generals consists of their lack of popularity, manifested in their own reports concerning their reception and their decisive rejection by the electorate, despite all their efforts to pack a Parliament. Dr Durston considers two traditional explanations, that they were hated either as soldiers or as agents of a legally dubious governmental centralisation, and while admitting some force to them rejects them in favour of a third. This is to emphasise their status as the allies and patrons of local cadres of godly Protestant fundamentalists; in common parlance radical puritans. In this reading, it was the inherent anti-puritanism of the English and Welsh, as powerful at times if less celebrated than their anti-Catholicism, which made the generals most obnoxious to them. There is nothing that can be faulted in such a suggestion; but nor is it actually demonstrated, and it probably cannot be. The great problem in evaluating public responses to the Major-Generals is that the latter possessed so many qualities likely to give widespread offence, consisting of all those mentioned above, that together they made up a package of irredeemable unacceptability.’

(See http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/232 )

What Bryen, channelling Sacks, have accurately described are the ideological roots of a self-image of ‘exceptionalism’ which is actually the fundamental problem with American foreign policy today. And indeed, the spirit of ‘neoconservative’ Middle East policies seem very close indeed that of those Puritans who, to quote Butler again:

‘Call fire and sword and desolation,/ A godly thorough reformation,/ Which always must be carried on, And still be doing, never done’.

[rjj]

Anna, I think your names question refers to a comment I did not make. Don't know enough to make such a statement.

Do the primed have any shame?

That usually only comes after things turn out badly.

[turcopolier]

David Habakkuk

As a matter of boring self-referential pride three of my ancestors; John Alden, William Mullins and Richard Warren signed the Mayflower Compact. I am pleased to say that Winthrop was not among my grandfathers but Major John Mason is a grandfather. He carried out Winthrop's policy toward the Pequots. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

Butler's last 2 words were also asked about Napoleon, "Will he ever be satisfied?"

[Babak Makkinejad]

That is what I thought too, once again for the Jew to die in order for the Christian to be saved.
That we are discussing all of this 200 years after Voltaire attests to the depth of religious sentiment and its hold on human mind.

[Babak Makkinejad]

And England maintains destroyers in the Persian Gulf against Iran.

[David Habakkuk]

Babak Makkinejad,

That was precisely what ultimately did for him.

For a considerable time, Tsar Alexander I attempted to find a place for Russia within the European order that Napoleon had created. It was also relevant here that some very intelligent people in his country’s élite were inclined to think that British sea power posed a much greater long-term danger to their country than French land power. (A view with which I have a great deal of sympathy.)

When it became clear that Napoleon was not prepared to accept anything other than something close to unconditional subordination, Alexander and his advisors prepared seriously for war. As part of the process, the Minister of Defence, Barclay de Tolly, created Russian military intelligence – and with its aid, he and others worked out what kind of war Napoleon wanted to fight, and how to make sure he was not able to fight it.

Doing this may sound easy in retrospect, but it was not at the time. In 1812, it involved making an army whose whole culture was offensive avoid taking offensive action, and retreat without breaking. For Barclay – the Baltic German bourgeois – it also meant that his determined pursuit of the one strategy that held out prospects of victory led to accusations of disloyalty.

After he was replaced by the old Russian noble Kutuzov, Barclay commanded the right flank at Borodino. I do not know whether the claim on the RT site ‘Russapedia’ that he had four horses shot under him is accurate, but he was clearly in the thick of the fighting, and it is good to see one of Russia’s greatest commanders given the honour he deserves, after his shabby treatment by Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace.’

(See http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/military/mikhail-barklay-de-tolly-michael-andreas-barclay-de-tolly/ .)

When it became clear clear that Napoleon had been decisively repulsed, the old division resurfaced. So Kutuzov, and the former Foreign Minister Rumyantsev, were inclined to think it made better sense to let a weakened Napoleon survive – on the basis that his total destruction would play into the hands of the British.

The view taken by Alexander was, quite precisely, that Napoleon would never be ‘satisfied’ – that, of his nature, he was an ‘overreacher’, and that no stable peace was possible in Europe until he had been completely destroyed.

The 2009 study ‘Russia Against Napoleon’ by Dominic Lieven, a descendant of a Baltic German family who served Alexander and his successors with distinction, is an exposition of the strategy which the Tsar and Barclay de Tolly developed, and a defence of the decision to destroy Napoleon, even at the risk of empowering the British. (Among other things, it is a kind of ‘settling of scores’ with Tolstoy.)

Its conclusions were summarised in a lecture Lieven gave at the London School of Economics following the book’s publication, available at http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=433 .

At this year’s Valdai Group meeting, Lieven presented the conclusions of his subsequent study of the origins of the First World War and the 1917 Revolution.

Also on the Valdai website is an encomium by a contemporary Russian scholar, Alexei Miller, who clearly concludes that Lieven had put Tolstoy in his place: his title is ‘Dominic Lieven Outmatched Leo Tolstoy.’

(See http://valdaiclub.com/multimedia/video/alexei-miller-dominic-lieven/ ; http://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/revolution-war-and-empire/ )

[Mahatma Propagandhi]

Thank you for your mention and links to the MRFF. I'm a long-time supporter of Mr. Weinstein's organization, which does not, IMO, get enough ink. His descriptions of, and battles with, Christian Dominionists who have captured the USAF Academy are scary indeed, not to mention his wider struggles against the ubiquitous proselyzation referenced in your post.

[Larry Kart]

I'm not sure why they left Palo Alto, but perhaps the funding for his wife's research was going to dry up, and/or she might have progressed at Stanford to the academic level she had been aiming for. Also, family ties might well have played a role.

[The Porkchop Express]

It's a really bizarre thing to behold. The entire relationship/understanding is an antithetical one. Theologically their positions are predicated on the other side being dead wrong at the end of the day (end of days). But presently? Marriage made in Heaven.

[Walrus]

Thank you for your post. I just ordered the book as a Christmas present to me.