Is the merging of American interests with Israeli interests and the

demonization of Arabs/Muslims, not just the Palestinians, the common aim of the Bush and Sharon administrations? That to me would explain several things.First the Iraq invasion on false pretexts. It would also explain the unanimity of views between the grand poohbahs of the Republican and Democratic Parties on these issues.

valid point of view.

I don't have time to get into an argument with an anti-Israel person right now. That's why I stay out of the basement AKA the Israeli/Palestinian affairs board.

in Iraq.

marriage to right-wing Israeli politics. The basement is for non-US policy related, I/P conflict items.

You've just entered the basement by not acknowledging that the Palestinian situation is two-sided while our government only supports one side.

oh wait, sorry, it's useless to debate you people. You're so much smarter than me. I'm just an uninformed sheeple who's never learned about the "anti-Zionist" argument. God is my face read

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. Now wear can I buy my Rachel Corrie poster?

world.

I no more wish to think that Sharon represents Israel, than I wish to think Bush represents America. If either represents their country, then the times are dark indeed.

Both Bush and Sharon have a vested interest in demonizing Arabs/Muslims. There's no excuse for it. Nor is there any excuse for the flase intelligence both Bush and Sharon fabricated for this war & the coming wars in the Middle East.

==

Office of Special Plans
By Tom Barry | February 12, 2004

In the days after September 11 terrorist attacks, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in Iraq as its top priority.

One might have thought that the priority for a special intelligence would have been to determine the whereabouts of the terrorist network that had just attacked the homeland. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Feith, working closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney, had other intelligence priorities.

To bolster the Iraq war party, they needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that Saddam Hussein's regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department would not provide them with type of alarmist threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, they created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The day after the September 11 attacks Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq . This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) directed by Abram Shulksy, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to “search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists.” (1) OSP's mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.

(snip)

The OSP worked closely with Ahmad Chalabi and others from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an expatriate group promoted by the neoconservatives to replace the Hussein regime once U.S. troops were in Baghdad. Chalabi assured the Pentagon that a U.S. invasion would be supported by widespread Iraqi resistance, leading to claims by top administration officials and neocon pundits that the invasion would be a “cakewalk.” The OSP also relied on intelligence flows about Iraq from a rump unit established in the offices of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--who like Chalabi was a proponent of a U.S. military invasion and had close relations with neocons like Wolfowitz and Feith.

(snip)

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402osp.php

we went to war in Iraq in the first place. And when I did not see any voices opposing that invasion, I was even more perplexed. That is all I wanted to say in the post.It seemed that my explanation was a logical one.

Yes, I think what you said was certainly one of the factors but perhaps as important or more important was the quest for a huge supply of oil and the geopolitical pressure on China. A number of factors seem to interlock here in a dire way.