The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is trying to drag the US into another war in the Middle East, apparently with the connivance of the Obama administration, write James Petras and Robin Eastman Abaya in Washington IPAC AS A LAUNCH PAD: The AIPAC gathering is clearly not a meeting of "just another lobby": it is the launch pad being used by Israel's top political and military leaders to drag the US into another major war in the Middle East -- this time against Iran. Shimon Peres, Israel's president, opened the conference, setting the militarist tone and political framework for Obama, who followed by slavishly echoing the language and substance of the Israeli leader. The following day, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke and forcefully laid out the line for a US war against Iran, with thousands of prominent Jewish- Americans and Israel Firsters leaping to their feet dozens of times in support of a US war. This is a war in which few, if any, of them, or their children, relatives or friends, will suffer loss of life or limbs. This was the same Netanyahu who once opined that the 9-11 attacks on the US had benefited Israel because it linked the US more closely to Israeli interests. Not since the war of 1812, which saw the British occupation and burning of Washington, has the US capital been so utterly humiliated by a foreign power. Unlike the British crown, which then negotiated a peace settlement allowing the US to regain its sovereignty, the Israeli leaders and their "fifth column" demanded a military agreement in which Israel would dictate the terms under which the US would go to war with Iran. Israel's leaders have not secured the submission of the US because of Israel's military, economic or political superiority: they have a puny economy, a fraction of the US's nuclear weapons and few allies and even less approval in the international community. But they do have at least half a million unconditional Zionist militants in the United States, including thousands of multi-millionaires and billionaires who fund the campaigns of both the Democrat and Republican parties. AIPAC is the vanguard of Israel's shock troops in the US. Highly disciplined and organised, AIPAC lobbyists invade the offices of every congress- person armed with a legislative script carefully prepared by and for the state of Israel. They have secured the full commitment of most members of Congress for Israel's agenda, waving both dollar signs and stars (of David). As past history has amply demonstrated, congressional staff or legislators who dare to hesitate or ask for time to reflect rapidly find themselves on the receiving end of AIPAC's political bullying and threats, which usually secure acquiescence. Refusal to capitulate to AIPAC means the end of a political career in Washington. The Israeli (and therefore AIPAC's) agenda is to pursue an unprovoked war, either initiated by the US or as part of a US-backed Israeli attack, against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is targeted because the other opponents of Israel's colonisation of Palestine have been destroyed in previous Zionist- backed US wars, namely Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and in the ongoing proxy war against the Al-Assad regime in Syria. Today, Israeli leaders insist that Iran should be denied what over 120 other nations practice freely: the legal enrichment of uranium for medical, commercial and scientific purposes. Past Israeli propaganda, echoed by the 52 presidents of the major American Jewish organisations, has falsely claimed that Iran possesses nuclear weapons or was in the process of manufacturing them and therefore posed an "existential" threat to Israeli. Even the capacity to enrich uranium for medical purposes (many times below the level needed for a weapon) is presented as a major threat to the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the 27 US intelligence agencies (in their yearly findings) and even the US-influenced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have found no such evidence of an ongoing Iranian weapons programme -- thus the need for bizarre terms like "existential threat" used by Israel. Israel's high command has now come up with a new pretext for war. Iran's potential (through its advanced scientific and technical manpower and research centres) for acquiring a nuclear weapons capability may constitute a sufficient cause for war. In other words, Israel has ordered its 13,000 AIPAC militants to demand that every US congress-person vote for war on the basis of Iran's current uranium-enrichment programme, which is geared to medical uses and its sophisticated scientific and intellectual potential. Meanwhile, Mossad has launched a not-so-secret programme of terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists -- in their homes, offices and universities, with nary a protest from the Zionised US press. WILLING EXECUTIONERS: Netanyahu's newest criterion for war (Iranian capability) has the support of the major Jewish organisations in the US. American Zionists are the willing executioners, promoting an aggressive, unprovoked, military attack against the homeland (and homes) of 75 million Iranians. Let us be clear, there are genocidal impulses permeating some of the pronouncements of the leading US Jewish religious leaders. The executive vice president of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi Herring, for example, has suggested that Israel should consider "the use of tactical nuclear weapons in areas that aren't so populated or in the open desert... to show the Iranians that their lives are on the line, that Israel won't go quietly." The rabbi did not specify whether population centres of a quarter of a million inhabitants or fewer qualified under his definition of "not so populated" and therefore were suitable targets for this educational display of thermo-nuclear destruction. Let us keep in mind that among the Zionist fundamentalists, "not a few organisational leaders... wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons right now." When Netanyahu gave the command to the AIPAC delegates to invade the US Congress and secure a war commitment on the basis of Iran's "capacity" for uranium enrichment, there was no debate and no dissension among the "shock troops" -- only unanimous approval among Jewish- American citizens for their foreign master. These respectable Jewish-Americans marched lock-step in platoons right up to the Congress members on their lists, canned arguments in one hand and Israeli-ghost-written legislation in the other. They boast of having rounded up a substantial majority of elected US representatives for war. If Israel's power in the US depends on AIPAC's tight control over the US Congress, the lobby for its part depends on the power of the wider Zionist power configuration that permeates strategic political and administrative offices, political party structures and the electoral process itself. This, in turn, depends on Zionist media influence linked to economic and financial power. The democratic and representative process has been totally crushed under this narrow-focussed juggernaut for war on behalf of Israel. CONGRESSIONAL AND EXECUTIVE COLLABORATORS: While much has been made of the influence AIPAC exercises over the US Congress and executive via "lobbying", better termed intimidation and pressure tactics, a great part of its success is based on the larger Zionist matrix of power operating within the government, civil society and the economy. When AIPAC lobbyists approach members of Congress with Israeli-dictated foreign policy priorities in hand, they coordinate and are given a major platform by the 40-plus elected Zionist legislators who just happen to occupy strategic positions, such as the chairpersons of congressional committees dealing with foreign policy, especially policy related to the Middle East. In other words, AIPAC's conquest of Congress is "by invitation," and the relationship is reciprocal. AIPAC and the 52 presidents of the major American Jewish organisations and various fundraisers mobilise money and activists to help elect reliable Zionists to office. Once in place, these openly collaborate in writing pro-Israel legislation and ensuring that "majorities" vote the "right way". Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, helped to write the latest Iran sanctions bill, according to a London Financial Times report in March. This "foundation" is better known as an unconditional promoter of Israel's agenda. Dubowitz is one of many un-elected US "legislators" who write and promote laws at Israel's behest. The legislation to impose sanctions on Iran, authored by Dubowitz, is designed to brutalise and starve 75 million Iranian citizens into submission, in order to further Israel's goal of unquestioned supremacy in the Middle East. AIPAC's operations are not confined to Congress or to the electoral process. From the Reagan administration to the Obama administration, AIPAC has supplied committed Zionists to key positions in the Treasury, State Department, National Security Council and to the president's inner circle of advisors on the Middle East. AIPAC pressure ensures the appointment of Zionists to the executive branch and has led to the creation of special administrative posts designed specifically to pursue Israel's agenda. A good example of AIPAC's success is the post of under-secretary of the treasury for terrorism and intelligence. The position was first held by Stuart Levy, a Zionist zealot, whose whole purpose was to design and implement US (and later EU) sanctions against Iran. His replacement, David Cohen, a clone from AIPAC, is the author of legislation pushing for punitive sanctions against Syria. Dennis Ross, widely known as "Israel's lawyer" and a former AIPAC leader, was appointed senior adviser to presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama and was the architect of US support for Israel's starvation blockade and criminal bombing of Gaza (1999) and the murderous invasion of Lebanon (2006). He has provided cover for Netanyahu's massive building of Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land and his cynical "peace negotiations". Jeffrey Feltman, the current AIPAC front man in the State Department, is the key official in charge of Middle East affairs in the US administration, especially where that refers to Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Obama's own inner circle of advisers is dominated by unconditional Israel supporters, including David Axelrod as chief confidant and the former presidential chief-of-staff and dual US-Israeli citizen and current mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel. What is striking is the cycle from leadership and activity in Zionist organisations, entry into powerful government posts, and then return to one or another pro-Israel think tank, "civic organization," electoral office or lucrative private practice -- all promoting the interests of Tel Aviv. AIPAC AND THE 52 GRASSROOTS ORGANISATIONS: AIPAC's power in Washington depends on the activism of hundreds of thousands of American Zionists affiliated with organisations under the 52 presidents of the Major American Jewish Organisations (MAJO). While there is considerable overlap of membership, MAJO leaders openly serve as a transmission belt for Israel: transmitting the political line from Tel Aviv to their membership, including activist doctors, dentists and stockbrokers in New York, Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco and all points north, south, east and west. When AIPAC has trouble securing an elected representative's sign-on to legislation for sanctions against whichever country is currently targeted by Israel, the reluctant legislator becomes a prime target for local Zionist notables and "fund raisers", who will pay a "visit", to persuade, if possible, but to threaten retaliation, if necessary. If a legislator still refuses to hew to Israel's line, or considers service to a foreign power to be harmful to the United States, he or she will soon find that AIPAC has raised millions of dollars to fund a campaign of slander leading to electoral defeat. Along with these upper-middle-class "grassroots" activists, there are the numerous highly politicised Zionist mega-millionaires and billionaires, like Adelson, Saban and scores of others, who make no bones about being Israel Firsters and donate millions to congress-people willing to subordinate US interests to Israel's quest for Middle East supremacy. Besides this legal corruption of the political process, there is the issue of illegal espionage and thuggery on AIPAC's part, most recently evidenced by the ongoing law suit by one of two former top AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen, who was caught spying for Israel by passing on classified documents on US military policy towards Iran. Rosen, who was acquitted in a highly manipulated trial, maintains that AIPAC routinely encourages its officials to secure confidential US government documents for Israel. And then there are the prominent free-lance Zionists, who engage in vicious, highly publicised political thuggery, as well as physical assault and blackmail against critics of Israel. The most prominent defamers, like Abraham Foxman of the Anti (sic) Defamation League, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, manipulate legions of respectable and wealthy people to pressure schools, universities and other employers to censor and fire critics of Israel. These Zionist organisations now far exceed the reach of an earlier generation of witch hunters, like senator Joseph McCarthy, who were rank amateurs in comparison. The recent antics of Israel-Firster Andrew Adler, editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, whose calls for the Israeli Mossad to assassinate president Obama led merely to his resignation as editor after several weeks of outrage but no federal investigation or charges. What is striking here is that while most respectable Zionists dissociate themselves from AIPAC spies and verbal assassins, the power of the Israel Firsters ensures that such thugs are rarely charged for their crimes and have never gone to jail. The wider impact of Zionist influence and thuggery is evident in the timorous self-censorship of the majority of Americans who privately express fear and loathing for the confrontational and abusive Zionist-Americans pushing a foreign agenda. ISRAEL AND THE MASS MEDIA: The mass media is a key political resource, which the pro-Israel power configuration exploits to the full. Not a single major print, television, film or radio outlet is willing to provide a balanced account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel's dispossession of thousands of Arab families from their homes and the daily Zionist settler and military assaults against Palestinians protesting against land seizures go unreported. The hundreds of nuclear weapons in Israel's arsenal are never mentioned, while Israel's hysterical claims that non-nuclear Iran represents an existential threat are repeated and magnified, ad nauseam. The leaders of the 52 organisations know their Goebbels: a lie repeated often enough becomes an accepted truth. What is crucial in understanding the Zionist power configuration's stranglehold over the US government is how it leverages power. For example, a tiny minority falsely claims to speak for all American Jews, who represent about three per cent of the US population. However, based on this claim, they mobilise and raise funds to elect committed Zionists who hold about 10 per cent of the seats in the US Congress. These representatives, in turn, enjoy the support of a tiny cadre of super-rich Zionists, whose promotion allows them to gain control over key committees dealing with Middle East policy and security. Domestic security has been deeply influenced by the Zionist-Israeli agenda. Former US attorney-general Michael Mukasey and homeland security tsar Michael Chertoff have been among the most prominent officials orienting US domestic security to focus on critics of Israel and the entrapment of Muslim citizens in bizarre webs of phoney terrorist plots, while real domestic security has suffered and civil rights have been shredded. The over-representation of Zionists on the US Supreme Court (three out of nine) and the careful selection of recent justices like Justice Sotomayor underscores the profound nature of the process as it extends to the judiciary. The Zionist power configuration controls the Middle Eastern policies of both the Democratic and Republican Parties and their presidential nominees through their congressional and political party power bases. The US president, in turn, is leveraged in order to secure key policy appointments for Zionists in the state department, treasury and Pentagon. Their leverage in the foreign policy establishment allows Zionist officials to put pressure on allies and clients in the United Nations and European Union to support policies such as Israel's boycott and punishment of the elected Hamas government in Gaza and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Leverage is how Israel, a small and insignificant state with less than one per cent of world GNP, exports and market share and occupying .001 per cent of the world's territory, can play such a disproportionate role in the reconfiguration of power in the Middle East. Through its American-Zionist influence, Israel has manipulated the US into a quagmire of wars in the Middle East, costing the world's consumers of oil untold billions of dollars and pushing the world economy into recession. WAR THREATS AND THE PRICE OF OIL: During the first three months of 2012, the price of oil rose 15 per cent (over 30 per cent since summer 2011), largely due to Israel's warmongering and threats to launch an offensive war against Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Peres and Foreign Minister Lieberman have all repeatedly demanded that the US bomb Iran, or failing that Israel would launch its own offensive war against the Iranian people and drag the US into another war. Almost all oil experts and political analysts agree that the spike in oil prices is a result of Israel's warmongering, as major international oil speculators bet that an Israeli assault on Iran will provoke a major disruption in production and transportation of petroleum in the Middle East and provoke a global shortfall. The 52 presidents of the MAJO have added to the war hysteria by echoing and embellishing Israel's claims of an Iranian nuclear threat (or Iran's "growing capacity" to threaten Israel in the future). During the first three months of this year alone, the increased price of petrol -- or more accurately Israel's war tax on US consumers and drivers, cost an additional 60 cents a gallon, or $9 dollars more to fill a 15-gallon tank. This represents the tribute the Zionist power configuration has imposed on American consumers in its push for a new war on Israel's behalf. No US politician would dare discuss this issue, let alone speak up and tell the Zionist chattering classes and their "beloved leaders" to stop pimping for war, or else risk the cutting off of Israel's $3 billion dollar annual handout from US taxpayers. Leading economists have stated that the price hike in oil (caused by a bellicose Israel) is stunting growth and pushing the US and EU back into recession, costing millions more job losses. If we add the consumer losses caused by high oil prices to losses in world economic output, the war chants of Netanyahu, Lieberman, Peres and the AIPAC will cost the global economy hundreds of billions over the course of the next year. Any mention of Israel's oil tax on American family budgets will elicit outraged accusations of anti- Semitism from Zionists and ugly threats from their thug accomplices. When Obama performed his infamous annual belly crawl to pleasure the AIPAC delegates and their Israeli guests, in the midst of cheers over his re-affirmation of America's unconditional loyalty to the state of Israel he also quietly asked Israel to lower the war cries at least until after the November elections because of their effects on the price of oil to the American voter. The high price of oil is damaging Obama's chances for re-election as president. The American electorate may not understand the real cost of Obama's submission to Israel and may not be aware of Israel's oil tax, but it is holding the putative president responsible for pain at the pump. There is only one thing that Obama cherishes more than Zionist support and that is the vote of an economically squeezed American electorate, which is turning against him in droves as the price of gasoline soars. The week of 4 to 11 March 2012 will go down in history as a week of national humiliation: a time when legions of American Zionists took over Washington; when the entire cabinet, led by Obama, grovelled before the officials of a foreign state in the heart of Washington DC. When the president and the prime minister of Israel directed their foreign legionaries to march on the US Congress and shove their flimsy pretexts for war with Iran into the faces of the cringing legislators, the simplistic message was: bomb Iran because it may soon have a nuclear capacity. If asked what constitutes capacity, they quote their beloved leaders in Tel Aviv, including the former nightclub bouncer Foreign Minister Avi Lieberman, the morally corrupt Netanyahu, and the quietly diabolic Shimon Peres to the effect that the Iranians can "enrich uranium" -- a capacity long held by 125 other countries. It is with supreme arrogance that the followers of AIPAC and the 52 presidents penetrate the US government in order to serve a foreign power. None bother to hide their past, present or future affiliations with the state of Israel. They are backed by prestigious Zionist academics, whose tendentious justifications for war have already sent tens of thousands of US soldiers to an early grave or to the wards of military and veteran hospitals and clinics across the country. They have sold Americans the argument that by serving the interests of the state of Israel they are serving those of the United States. From this, it follows that to break the law and act as an unregistered agent for a foreign power, to transfer classified government documents to Mossad agents at the Israeli embassy, and to threaten Americans who criticise or oppose Israel is a patriotic act. Naval analyst Jonathan Pollard, the convicted US spy for Israel, is celebrated in Israel as an honorary colonel in the IDF and a hero, and the leaders of the major Zionist organisations are again pressuring Obama to release this traitor. The documented performance of the leading Zionists in public office in the United States over the past two decades has been an unmitigated disaster. The self-proclaimed best and brightest have led the country into the worst economic and military catastrophes in a century. It was Alan Greenspan, as head of the Federal Reserve, who deregulated the financial sector and optimised conditions for the mega-swindles and speculative frenzy bringing down the entire financial system. It was his replacement, Ben Bernanke, who pushed for trillions of US tax-payer dollars in bail-out funds to save his cronies on Wall Street and set them back on course in the last two years to repeat the speculative orgy, while allowing compatriots like Stephen Schwartzman to reap $213 million in earnings in 2011. It was Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Libby, Abrams and Ross, as well as their less- prominent lieutenants, who pushed the US into wars on Israel's behalf in Afghanistan and Iraq, all the while confidently predicting low cost, quick victories. Never has such a cohort of Ivy League mediocrities collectively produced so many disastrous policies in such a brief historical period, while never being held in any way, shape or form responsible or accountable for their performance. It is obvious that these policy disasters did not result from faulty intellects or from the lack of an elite education. These individuals' apparent ignorance of historical, political, economic and military realities was a result of their blinding Zionist loyalties to the Israeli state, whose real interests they embraced. This lack of accountability guarantees that this process will continue until the US, as a republic, is destroyed against the interests of its masses of misled citizens. In order to justify a war against Israel's regional adversaries, these blind mediocrities have distorted the realities of Arab nationalism. It was with supreme arrogance and racism that they assured themselves that Arabs could never sustain prolonged resistance to their imperial juggernaut. They believed precisely what their religion/ideology told them: that they were a chosen people. They were the most financially successful investors or speculators. They attended and taught at the most prestigious universities. When, on occasion, a leading Zionist philanthropist, like Bernard Madoff, fell foul of the law and actually went to jail it was because, like Milken, Boesky and Pollard, he didn't buy his one-way ticket to Israel soon enough. When a country like the United States is in decline it is not because of external competition: declining competitiveness is only a symptom. It is because of internal rot. Decline results when a nation is betrayed by craven leaders, who crawl and humiliate themselves before a minority of thuggish mediocrities pledged to a foreign state without scruples or moral integrity.