Perspective
by
Tom Mysiewicz
“Q. What’s the difference between Rush Limbaugh and a whale–10 I.Q. points, 100 pounds or a sports jacket?
“Q. What’s the difference between Rush Limbaugh and a whale–10 I.Q. points, 100 pounds or a sports jacket?
A. A sports jacket–the whale can always lose weight and Rush can go to school.”
Grafitti at an American truck stop
Rush Limbaugh’s daily neo-conservative “Truth in Broadcasting” diatribe aimed at whipping Americans into a war frenzy may have finally come close to a truth.
In a 2/19/03 show equating antiwar protests almost exclusively with “communists” (and a few dupes) and saying the left “was hanging on by its fingernails over a deep chasm…and would be in even worse shape when, after the war, the truth (of the WMDs Saddam actually had) finally came out” Rush actually began to make some sense.
Rush blamed Saddam’s WMD capacity on France’s Chirac and Germany, to a lesser extent. He claimed these Europeans had secretly supplied Saddam with deadly weapons, in contravention of U.N. regulations, and that one reason they didn’t want a war was because the full evil of their activities would be revealed. America would discover–when we beat the baddies and captured all that incriminating evidence the inspectors just can’t seem to find–that Chirac and all the other “old Europe” bad guys had been just opposed our noble war for selfish reasons.
There may be a gem of truth in this. The Israeli cities of Nes Ziona and Dimona are widely believed to be hotbeds of chemical-biological-nuclear warfare projects. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website is chock full of Israeli nuclear weapons development information. Even published reports of Israeli work with Americium-243 and isotopes presuppose the ability to produce significant amounts of Plutonium (the fuel of a nuclear warhead). Recent reports have surfaced of a speech given by an Israeli academician claiming European cities are targeted by Israeli nukes and that the Europeans deserved to be nuked for their part in the holocaust.
In fact, the major reason Mid East countries desire weapons of mass destruction is to PROTECT themselves from Israeli use of such weapons. As America and the USSR found during the Cold War, mutually assured destruction can be a great deterrent to war. And, during the last half of the Second World War, Hitler failed to use large stocks of nerve gas (which the Germans invented) because of the possibility of Allied mass killings of German civilians, such as occurred in Dresden.
As for “old Europe” it is both threatened by a direct Israeli attack with WMDs–say for meddling in the Palestinian “situation” or not making desired trade concessions–and by the indirect destruction of its economy should the Israelis somehow set off a conflagration that would destroy or make inaccessible Mid East oil supplies.
That the Israelis do not come clean and make a declaration of all the WMDs they actually have is still more ominous. As Rush Limbaugh correctly pointed out in a discussion of North Korea during the same show:
“More dangerous than Kim are nations that HAVE nuclear weapons but don’t tell anyone (like Saddam, he intimated) because they intend to use them.”
How about, like the Israelis as well?
Bush’s strategy, which will leave Europe at the mercy of the harsh Likkudites in Israel and in the U.S. Government, cannot be attractive to them.
Rush, and other neo-cons, I’d like to offer a solution to this highly-dangerous impasse:
Station U.S. troops and guarantee (jointly, with Russia) nuclear protection of Israel in its 1967 borders, have U.N. supervised destruction of ALL illegal Israeli weapons of mass destruction, and create a Palestinian state as per the Camp David accords. Then, begin the systematic destruction of WMDs held by other Mid Eastern nations, including Iraq, with help from our European and other allies.
