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

[Larry Kart]

May have told this story before here: About five years ago my wife and I were on a tour of Israel. Our hardbitten cynical tour guide was a former Israeli Air Force officer who recently had lived in the Palo Alto area while his wife, a scientist (gene therapy IIRC), was teaching at Stanford. While in Palo Alto he ran a "security firm."

When we got to the area where the battle of Armageddon was supposed to take place, he mentioned that when he was serving as a guide for tours of American Evangelicals, they were understandably quite excited by this. I asked him whether they asked what the Israelis would do when the Messiah arrived. He said, "We'll ask him if he's been here before. If he says 'yes," you win. If he says 'no,' we win." "How do the Evangelicals react when you say that?" I asked. "The same way you did," he said. "They laugh."

[Babak Makkinejad]

Everyone knows that Isa Masih will appear in Mecca - accompanying the Twelfth Imam.

[turcopolier]

Babak

If I understand Shia thinking, this Mesih will be the Mahdi as well and he will come with Jesus. pl

[turcopolier]

larry Kart

They left Palo Alto? Why? The Middle East sucks. pl

[English Outsider]

Colonel,

For those who are not as familiar with American history as I am I may be able to explain Mrs Bryen's final statement in her speech linked to in your article:-

"For the British, rights came from the earthly King or Queen, and only those rights the sovereign choses to give – which is why we had a Revolution."

On the face of it this statement looks puzzling. But Mrs Bryen has clearly been studying Constitutional Theory and here displays a true analyst's grasp of the underlying principles. I would guess she has also been studying the relevant history, which I set out here.

From early times the Continental Monarchies had been tending towards ever greater absolutism, a tendency that reached its high point in the early 21st century but which was marked enough before that for Continental Constitutional theory to be described by some specialists as L'etat c'est moi squared.

The Stuart Kings of England liked the idea of absolutism and had a go at it in England. Influential and widely read theorists such as Sir Robert Filmer propounded the Divine Right of Kings in support - I've no doubt it's his works that Mrs Bryen studied in preparing her thesis. But the Stuarts ran into a snag. The awkward squad - the Puritans and such like - took against the enterprise. They were more attached to the idea of "We the People" running the show.

The awkward squad won. The English rejected the idea of absolutism and the subservience to the continental monarchies that went with it. The historians call this victory Brexit 1. Then the Stuarts came back for a return match. We the people told them to push off again. There was a Glorious Revolution (Brexit 2) in 1688 that led to the famous English Constitutional Settlement: we would no longer settle our differences with swords and muskets, which were becoming outdated anyway. We'd settle them by bribing the respective sets of politicians. This compromise worked reasonably well until the early 21st Century, at which point the cronies got fed up with messing around and took over the whole shooting match.

As you will know, at an early stage in the proceedings many of the awkward squad decamped to the new American Colonies, where they invented some very interesting ways of cooking Turkey that I mean to try at Christmas if my IT skills run to retrieving your recipe from the SST archives. In addition to taking their cutlery with them - that bit's assumption on my part but there's no evidence of the cutlery getting there before the Puritans and you can't eat turkey without it, so it's fair assumption - they took with them a well-justified suspicion of the English Monarchy.

They also took their teapots with them. And used them enthusiastically, to judge from their reluctance to pay any more for their tea than they had to. That reluctance led to the Boston incident and to subsequent events that further strengthened their well justified suspicion of the English Monarchy. It is that well justified suspicion of the English Monarchy that Mrs Bryen summons up so effectively in the peroration at the end of her speech that I have quoted above.

Tea, incidentally, was to remain close to the heart of the American people and there are recorded instances of Tea Parties being held as late as the early 21st Century, at which point the cronies got fed up with messing around and took over the whole shooting match there too.

But that's by the way. I can confirm that the account of our respective histories that Mrs Bryen's working from is reasonably accurate, except that Mrs Merkel's French isn't very good so she says L'etat c'est moi in German instead. Apart from that I'd say that Mrs Bryen's grasp of the English Constitution is fully as secure as her grasp of history.

[dsrcwt]

I seem to remember reading that a lot of these junkets include "honey-traps". It would explain a lot.

[Bill Herschel]

Recall that the church supported slavery in the South. Visit France to find a country that believes in the separation of church and state. The U.S. certainly today has become more theocratic than ever. Roy Moore? God's law above human law? Trump supports him and has as a Secretary of Education an avowed evangelist?

[Babak Makkinejad]

Never read or heard anyone refer to Mahdi as Masih. There is only one Masih and he has been Jesus, who, it is hoped, will intercede on behalf of evil doers and enemies of True Religion, so as Mahdi's armies won't have to shed that much of their nlood.

[Bill Herschel]

I think it's worth hypothesizing, I believe correctly, that the Israeli/Saudi rapprochement, absolutely unequivocally signaled by Friedman's piece, directly comments on Israel's dissatisfaction with the results of the programs Colonel Lang describes.

The United States has about as much military presence in the ME as can be imagined. It has fought at least two wars there in the past few decades. Russia comes in, and in an extraordinarily brief stretch of time, completely overturns what the U.S. has been trying to do, certainly in Syria and perhaps throughout the ME, including Lebanon.

Can Israel's leaders be happy with this turn of events? Can it be happy with the results of what it has patiently bought throughout the decades?

What Russia has done in Syria is to, as effectively as it can, protect the Syrian population. And probably the Lebanese population and the Iraqi population as well. And we should throw in Iran. The Russian idea of a victory celebration is a concert in Palmyra, not Putin posing in a flightsuit on the deck of an aircraft carrier moored a few hundred yards off shore.

This is strong stuff from Russia and it will take quite a lot of articles by Friedman to overcome it. Embracing the genocidal Saudi's is a desperation move.

Trump has succeeded in slipping an additional 40,000 troops into Afghanistan to try to track down the Taliban. Let's see him go to war in Lebanon/Iran/etc. And let's see how convincing his threats against NK become if he is in a hot war in the ME.

[Croesus]

imo zionism is more deeply embedded in the American (Anglo) psyche than Evangelicalism (which is, I've been led to believe, a deliberately distorting implant on biblical faith, by way of Scofield & Oxford press).

Heinrich Graetz wrote the first 'modern' history of the Jews ~1860. The earliest (modern) zionists were raised on Graetz; Rabbi Stephen Wise, right-hand man to both Louis Brandeis & Henry Morgenthau, wrote to his wife about his delight in reading Graetz.

Vol. V is astonishing. Graetz expresses profound disgust with Polish Jews and their "Talmudic" trickery and deceptions. He dedicates several pages to describing in gory detail the battles with Cossacks, which, says Graetz, Polish Jews brought upon themselves.

Then he turns to Manasseh ben Israel and the numerous stratagems he used to gain re-admittance of Jews to England as a preliminary step to the fulfillment of Jewish return to the Holy Land -- first, Jews had to be scattered to all the ends of the Earth.

"Manasseh reveled in intoxicating dreams of the approaching glorious time for Israel. He regarded himself as the instrument of Providence to bring about its fulfillment. In these dreams he was upheld and confirmed by Christian mystics, who were eagerly awaiting the millennium."

In response to Manasseh's visions and pleadings. Cromwell gladly sent a passport to Manasseh. He was far from alone in laying out the welcome mat.

"Cromwell had called together . . .the Short . . .Parliament, which was composed wholly of saints, i.e., Puritan preachers, officers with a biblical bias, and millennium visionaries. The partiality of Cromwell's officers for the old Jewish system is shown by the serious proposition that the Council of State should consist of seventy members, after the number of the Jewish synhedrion. In Parliament sat General Harrison, a Baptist, who, with his party, wished to see the Mosaic law introduced into England. When Parliament met (July 5, 1653), Manasseh hastened to repeat his request that Jews be granted permission to reside in England. "

[J]

I like that, instead of the 'Grand Old Party', it's now the 'Giant Israel Puppet'. Question is, are they stick figure marionettes, or are they stuffed sock puppets? When we see the GOP figures on TV, are we really seeing the Monkees part deau? Controlled with wires from above by Israeli handlers, or a bunch of stuffed monkeys, either way is bad for U.S. policy and U.S. interests.

With (just to name one Pastor among many) all the trips and freely provided Lear Jets at Pastor John Hagee's disposal provided by the Israeli Government, Hagee and many Pastors like him IMO needs to be hammered by DOJ to register as a Foreign Agents, and the IRS needs to jerk their 501C status. After all it's American Taxpayer money that the Israeli Government is using to pay their puppets like Hagee, with Taxpayer funded Israeli Government money laundering operation.

The Israeli government propaganda mantra is hammered into the American psyche each and every Sunday service. Just think, an I/O operation with little to no overhead, I'm sure that the Kremlin and Beijing are green with envy.

[kooshy]

Colonel Lang, according to late British professor of History of Zoroastrianism, Professor Mary Boyce of university of London, the bases for this belief in return of Mahdi/Messiah in Abrahamic religions originated in Zoroastrianism.

[Peter AU]

Not long ago, Trump did not certify that Iran was in compliance with the nuke agreement. It is now up to congress as to what to do about it.
MBS now has total control of Saudi purse strings and I would guess continued "sponsorship" and donations to "foundations" will be dependent on US going to war with Iran.
Team Trump is handpicked for their hatred of Iran. Nutty wants the US to destroy Iran.
Reading this article, it seems that the US going to war against Iran may now be inevitable.

[turcopolier]

Bill Herschel

Not a Christian? the various churches tolerated slavery. they did not support it. "Theocratic?" No. More religious among some people does not equal "more theocratic." pl

[Phil Cattar]

No Babak,IMO the secular American Creed is stronger than ever and gaining strength.There are a few pockets in parts of the US where Evangelicals are strong.These are mostly in the South...................ie Southern Baptist etc................There is a strong overlap of Trump supporters,Evangelcal Christians and the Tea Baggers..............Your Northern Roman Catholics and your mostly non southern Protestants ie Methodists,Episcopalians are on the wane.................I'm not in favor of this but the country is becoming less religious by the hour.

[Henshaw]

Mr Friedman?? try this for your Thanksgiving amusement. It's better than the real thing.
http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php

[mariner]

'The ME clearly has no national benefit'

US interest is making money. Asia not the ME is where the US must go to do that. Iran, Saudi, Israel know it and are doing so themselves. The US dalliance in the ME and the Gulf in particular may be of use if it enables economic leverage over PRC oil and gas supply. The recent changes in Saudi, if they last, will change Islam in Asia and the US as a Saudi ally stands to gain.

[Mathiasalexander]

Is it ok for me to like cultural Marxism but not Zioism?

[LondonBob]

It is interesting to recount the experience of the post WWI officer corps, Marshall, Wedemeyer, Patton etc. and the attitudes they held and how they were effectively neutered.

http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/benderskyrev.htm

In the 20s and early 30s they freely spoke their minds and were given a platform in the media to do so. The Military Intelligence Department investigated Jacob Schiff's involvement in funding the Bolshevik revolution, whilst individuals like Felix Frankfurter were of deep concern. Ultimately though the access to the media was cut off and political pressure from the Roosevelt administration meant their opinions came to be expressed only privately. Indeed General Moseley was one of the few who continued to speak his mind publicly and was forced in to retirement in '38. Steadily this generation died out and were replaced by those brought up in the new ideology. As with now people are shaped by the ruling ideology of the time and the environment they operate in.

[LondonBob]

Massachusetts and Connecticut had established churches up in to the 19th century. The New Hampshire constitution required members of the legislature to be Protestant until 1877 with state funding of Protestant classrooms continuing to 1968. The idea of the US being a strictly secular country was a fringe far left opinion in the early 20th century, through political and legalistic manoeuvring this vision was imposed against the wishes of the majority of Americans.

[rjj]

because this asseveratio [fake rhetorical term + pun]

I have taken more than 400 ..... I have sent more than 500 .... And I can say that they all understood .... They don’t always agree .... but I never found one that didn’t believe in ....

sounds a lot like Auntie Sadie (everybody knows one) warming up for a tirade, perhaps Ms. Bryen should be 1. encouraged to speak, and 2. widely quoted.

Anybody know ... did she go to Harvard??

[Dubhaltach]

In reply to Bill Herschel 24 November 2017 at 12:45 PM

Autosycophancy has always been one of Friedmans's traits.

[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.