The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were fool’s errands from the beginning; the U.S. was never going to be able to establish Western-style pluralistic republics in either of those countries, and its attempt to do so was doomed to be rejected by most people in both countries as being contrary to the Sharia and hence un-Islamic — as I explained in March 2003.
Unfortunately, however, most of the opponents of these wars in the U.S. were antisemitic paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan and the execrable Justin Raimondo, who in their hatred for Israel and Jews minimized the jihad threat and derided any action against it as serving an insidious Zionist agenda. I have had unpleasant personal encounters with several of these people, including a prominent paleocon writer whose ugly antisemitism invariably appears after a few drinks; in this article, P. David Hornik ably exposes Buchanan, primarily by simply quoting him and showing the ugly thread that has run through his statements on these issues for years. Just as Islamic jihadists are exposed by quoting them, so is Buchanan.
Anyway, in reality, Israel is on the front line of the global jihad. Jihadis have vowed repeatedly to destroy it. All free people should stand with Israel.
“The Ten Worst U.S. Purveyors of Antisemitism, #6: Patrick Buchanan,” by P. David Hornik in PJ Lifestyle, January 5:
Here’s Pat Buchanan in 1990, not long before the First Iraq War:
There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East””the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.
Here he is in 2004:
[N]eoconservatives”¦Perle and Wolfowitz and Wurmser and the others, working with Netanyahu, had an agenda for war with Iraq that was going nowhere.
9/11 happens, and they put this agenda before a president, who in my judgment was untutored, as his father was not. Reagan would not have done this. I don’t think his father would have done this.
They captured Rumsfeld, and they captured Cheney, and I think they captured the president”¦.
Also in 2004:
Who would benefit from these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America””save oil? “¦ Who would benefit from a “war of civilizations” with Islam? Who other than these neoconservatives and Ariel Sharon?…
Sprinkled through Buchanan’s writings one can find derisive references to the non-Israelis and non-Jews who were hawks on Iraq in the 1990s, or on Iraq in the 2000s, or are hawks on Iran today””Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, George W. Bush, William Bennett, the Wall Street Journal, James Woolsey, John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, and Trent Franks are a few.
In Buchanan’s telling they are all in thrall to Israel, the source of all evil and the only threat to America emanating from the Middle East. No one, not even a president, a defense secretary, can think for himself; anyone who has ever been a hawk on any of those three issues has never had a valid argument but has instead been corralled by the Jewish lust for war.
Nothing has ever made Buchanan think otherwise. Not 9/11; not Iran’s 2011 attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant; not its ongoing record of anti-American terror; not its whole parliament joining in “Death to America” chants on November 3, 2013; not its continuing work on ICBMs; not dire warnings on its nuclear progress by groups like the IAEA and the ISIS (in the Jews” pocket?); not statements by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei like “our people say “˜Death to America,” and this is like saying “˜I seek God’s refuge from the accursed Satan”¦.–