Judith Miller's Bias

It never occurred to me until I read this recent article in the Washington Post that Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who went to prison to protect her sources, most of whom leaked information favorable to the Bush Administration, was Jewish. This posting by Alfred Lilienthal indicates that she is and that she was inclined to push an Israeli line in her reporting:

New York Times columnist Judith Miller has been known to direct her considerable reportorial skills to support the perceptions of some of her co-religionists in the US Jewish mainstream. It was she who printed Solarz's reference to a "Middle East Munich, " after having reported a change of mind by President Bush "in trying to cajole the man he had called 'Hitler revisited'." Her articles seldom ignore an opportunity to conjure up the Nazi spectre. Recently, she authored a lengthy book, One by One by One: Facing the Holocaust, based on interviews with European survivors of the Nazi horrors. Describing her book as not about the Holocaust, but "only how it is remembered, " Miller readily admits in her preface that "American Jews have a practical stake in keeping memory of the Holocaust alive, as a way of maintaining American support for Israel."

She apparently has a stake herself in incessantly pricking the Christian conscience so as to bring about what, for her and her newspaper, is the correct perspective toward the Middle East conflict. Undaunted by the prospect of a war in which thousands of Iraqis and her fellow Americans might die needlessly, she, like Kissinger and Solarz, is set on a violent solution. For her, no Holocaust would be good enough for Saddam Hussain or for the Palestinians!

Unfortunately, stuff like this reinforces my belief that the war in Iraq was a Jewish inspired war. In trying to find out more about this allegation, I also ran into reports (particularly this from the Jerusalem Post) that Lewis Libby, presumably her main source of information favorable to the Administration and the war in Iraq, is Jewish.

Adding Judith Miller and Lewis Libby to the mix that already includes Richard Perle, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and many other Jews, the Iraq war really begins to look like it was started by a Jewish conspiracy. But if Jews are so smart, why did they start a war that in the short to medium term appears to strengthen Israel's enemies? So far the main beneficiary of the war in Iraq is Iran. It's possible that if the internecine bloodletting among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds becomes more severe, it could make the whole Muslim world forget about Israel, or weaken them so much that they present less of a threat to Israel, but that seems like a big gamble.

Bush did not come in as a foreign policy President or a military leader. So, maybe for the Jewish hawks (or Vulcans) Iraq just presented itself as a target of opportunity after 9/11. Bush felt he needed to do something strong after 9/11, and he already wanted to one-up his father on Iraq by getting rid of Saddam, which his father had failed to do. Rove told him that wars are good for getting re-elected (which was true). The Bush 41-Saddam failure may have been the hook for the Jews' getting Bush 43 to invade Iraq, while there was no similar hook for Iran, although Iran may have posed a greater threat to both Israel and the US. That assumes, of course, that there was some real conspiracy or cabal, which there may not have been. But the vaunted influence of AIPAC and other American Jewish political groups and think tanks, which appear more prone to hawkish group-think than Israeli Jews, lends some credence to the idea.

The Washington Post article that prompted me to look into Judith Miller's background said:

Miller testified that she flew to Israel in 1993 after reading about Salah's arrest and contacted aides to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whom she described as a longtime friend....

Defense attorneys repeatedly tried to portray her as biased in favor of Israel.

"Have you ever been used as a Mossad asset?" asked Salah's attorney, Michael Deutsch, referring to the Israeli intelligence service.

Miller said no.