A shandeh far di goyim

Swell. Just what we need...evidence that the rumblings in the Bush Administration about "Iran is next" may further show that our foreign policy in the Middle East is at the beck and call of the Israel's Likud right-wing:

CBS News has learned that the FBI has a full-fledged espionage investigation under way and is about to -- in FBI terminology -- "roll up" someone agents believe has been spying not for an enemy, but for Israel from within the office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.



[snip]



At the heart of the investigation are two people who work at The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.



CBS sources say that last year the suspected spy, described as a trusted analyst at the Pentagon, turned over a presidential directive on U.S. policy toward Iran while it was, "in the draft phase when U.S. policy-makers were still debating the policy."



This put the Israelis, according to one source, "inside the decision-making loop" so they could "try to influence the outcome."



[snip]



The case raises another concern among investigators: Did Israel also use the analyst to try to influence U.S. policy on the war in Iraq?



With ties to top Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the analyst was assigned to a unit within the Defense Department tasked with helping develop the Pentagon's Iraq policy.

The unholy group marriage in this Administration among the PNAC Likudniks in the Defense Department, the energy industry, and right-wing evangelical Christians looking for George W. Bush to deliver them to the Rapture and rid them of these pesky Jews once and for all is bearing some pretty nasty fruit.



Look, folks, I'm not anti-Israel. I'm a JEW, for God's sake, albeit a pretty lapsed one. But I'm still troubled by the notion of representatives of ANY country sitting with our government decision-makers making policy based on THEIR OWN country's interest. Obviously, as someone in opposition to the Iraq war, I believe we need to work in conjunction with the rest of the world, but that doesn't extend to deciding against whom we go to war.



Almost 1000 American young people, many of them from Bible Belt states, are dead in this war. The last thing we need is even a perception that it was Israeli officials, even by proxy, who sent them there.



SIDE NOTE: Isn't it interesting how often the name Manucher Ghorbanifar shows up whenever the Bush family is in power? WaPo reports:

Franklin's name surfaced in news reports last year that disclosed he and another Pentagon specialist on the Persian Gulf region had met secretly with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s.



That meeting, according to Pentagon officials, took place in late 2001. It had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism. Franklin and the other Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, met with the Iranians over three days in Italy. Ghorbanifar attended these meetings. Rumsfeld has said that the information received at the meetings led nowhere.

Why do the Bushistas continue to do business with these people? Ghorbanifar is as sleazy an operative as their other short-duration personal savior, Ahmad Chalabi -- also a crony of Douglas Feith. Why are such people involved in the decision-making process that already has sent nearly 1000 American kids to their deaths, and may send thousands more? Why aren't we furious about this?