Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is publishing a new book on Monday, his fourth on the Bush administration. According to a review in, well, the Washington Post:

The book also says that the U.S. troop “surge” of 2007, in which President Bush sent nearly 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces and support troops to Iraq, was not the primary factor behind the steep drop in violence there during the past 16 months.

Rather, Woodward reports, “groundbreaking” new covert techniques enabled U.S. military and intelligence officials to locate, target and kill insurgent leaders and key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward does not disclose the code names of these covert programs or provide much detail about them, saying in the book that White House and other officials cited national security concerns in asking him to withhold specifics.

We haven’t read the book, so we’re commenting in the dark here. But it seems to us, as former IDF soldiers who observed (and, rarely and peripherally, participated in) such operations, that this is a plausible argument: it isn’t the number of troops that brings down insurgent activity, but an aggressive, ongoing covert action that exacts a steep personal price from terrorist leaders.

But why would giving credit to the one (opening a new covert front) involve dismissing the other (conventional troop buildup)? Extensive covert operations – we know this from personal experience – demand a serious conventional “envelope.” Woodward himself apparently notes this:

Overall, Woodward writes, four factors combined to reduce the violence: the covert operations; the influx of troops; the decision by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his powerful Mahdi Army; and the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with U.S. forces.

That is: a covert element, a conventional troop buildup, an Iranian decision to quiet the arena and a Sunni realization (in part because of the first two elements) that their lives will be better in the US-built Iraq than under Al Qaeda. So why, in Woodward’s book, isn’t the surge “the primary factor” in the recent successes in Iraq, particularly since the buildup was almost certainly the “umbrella” under which the other factors could develop?

Perhaps because the Republican presidential candidate has taken credit for the surge, while the Democratic candidate predicted an abject failure. Are Democrats looking for something, anything, that could take the surge success away from McCain? Is Woodward trying to supply that?

The book is out Monday and includes other interesting insights, including Rice-Rumsfeld tensions and the claim (which seems to us blindingly obvious) that the US spied on Iraqi leaders.

The ADL put out a review on Friday of a new book that claims the Iraq War was generated by Jews working for Israel. This one is a doozy!

John Hostettler was a six-term Republican congressman from Indiana who lost his 2006 reelection bid. He’s a die-hard conservative without a whole lot of ideological complexity. He’s pro-gun, pro-life, anti-estate tax, even anti-federal student loans.

The ADL writes:

Hostettler gets to the red meat of his thesis when he focuses on the neoconservatives, relying on names such as Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Shulsky, to convey the specter of a covert cabal that has intrigued to encourage the United States to go to war for the benefit of Israel.

This claim is getting old, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any weaker. Yes, many senior Republicans are Jews. So are many senior Democrats. It isn’t being Jewish that made them invade Iraq, it’s being Republican hawks that did it. Was Douglas Feith more or less important than Donald Rumsfeld? Than Dick Cheney?

As John Bolton once told us when we asked if he considered himself a neocon, “no, I’m a conservative. Neocons are liberals who were mugged by reality. I’ve never been a liberal.” Or as Rumsfeld is reputed to have said in response to this conspiracy theory, “Do they think we all just got off the apple cart?” It was these non-Jewish non-neocon Republican hawks who went to Iraq.

As the ADL notes:

For someone who was a six-term congressman, he seems to have a grievous lack of understanding of the messy and argumentative way policy – foreign or domestic — actually gets made.

American Jews, we should note, have opposed the war more than the average Democrat, more than the average American Catholic, even more than atheists and African-Americans. Republican Jews, too, opposed the war more than the average Republican. Here’s a news report of Jewish opinion on the war put out by Gallup in early 2007. The key points are quoted here:

Asked if “the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,” 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support.

The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%.

The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, Jewish opposition to the war was greater than that expressed by non-Jewish Democrats. In polls taken from 2005 to 2007, 89% of Jewish Democrats opposed the war and just 8% supported it, while non-Jewish Democrats opposed the war by 78% to 20%. …

The Gallup Organization itself noted that “these data show that the average American Jew – even those who are Republicans and may support the Bush administration on other matters – opposes the war.”

As the always-topical Tom Gross points out, Iraqi media are now reporting that Israelis – yes, Israelis – are busily buying up Iraqi real estate with the goal of turning Kirkuk into “a new Jerusalem.”

Here it is in Farsi, Arabic or in a Google Translate version of the Arabic.

Of course, what paranoid report about Jews would be complete without the Mossad (the language is probably the fault of Google Translate and not the author):

If it is not surprising compared with the Jewish influx since the fall of Baghdad in April – in April 2003 manual entry of tens of elements of the Israeli intelligence service “Mossad”, under multiple names as Mesopotamia, and other companies with illusory.

What’s the motivation for this kind of talk? Welcome to paragraph 7:

She adds that Party sources said the Israeli intensified its efforts since the beginning of this year to buy land and homes and farms in Kirkuk and its environs, as well as continuing to carry out assassinations of political figures long Turkoman and Arab, Kurdish and bombed party headquarters of the Turkmen and Kurds in Kirkuk, with the aim of igniting ethnic discord.

Ethnic discord ripping our country apart? Kurds and Sunnis can’t get along? Clearly we’re all victims of secret Jewish agencies working hard to “ignite ethnic discord.”