And Cheney? What was Cheney's motivation? Leaving aside the big issues of oil and geopolitics, could it just be money? Cheney still receives a salary from Halliburton, has interests in Halliburton's success, and no doubt will be well rewarded by Halliburton when he leaves politics. Halliburton is the subject of what is probably the largest series of military frauds in American history, and still receives a constant feed of new contracts, all without question sent its way by the Vice President himself (see Halliburton share price history chart, as referred to in Cosmic Iguana). I still find it amazing that Cheney continues to skate on this scandal, which should by rights be front-page news in every American newspaper.

Let's say you're Cheney, and you know before you arrive in power that you're going to start an attack on Iraq in order to line your own pockets as a result of the largest financial scandal in American procurement history. How do you go about protecting yourself if everything should go wrong and the American public starts looking for a scapegoat? By picking the people in the Administration on the front line in preparing for the attack from an identifiable scapegoat group. Cheney picked all these Likudnik Jewish intellectuals for the specific reason that when the shit hit the fan the whole thing could be blamed on Israel.

The fact that Israel and its friends were set up to take the blame doesn't take them off the hook. After all, they were given the bait and they all grabbed at it. Every one of them committed the treason required to start a disastrous war for reasons associated only with what they perceived to be the interests of Israel, and the American Likudniks deserve all the blame they are starting to receive. Nevertheless, the real person to blame for this is still Cheney. Cheney set this up in order to start a war to fill his pockets and the pockets of his friends, while providing a tidy alibi when things went sideways.

A real conspiracy theorist might even go back to the origins of all these intellectuals in various right-wing Washington think tanks set up in the last twenty years. Were these think tanks staffed with Zionists by some forward-thinking anti-Semites, who knew that the Zionists would eventually serve their purpose as scapegoats while hurting the Jewish people? Those who claim that pointing out the obvious fact that the war was started for Israel makes you an anti-Semite are playing right into the hands of the wider conspiracy. The dangerous Zionists aren't Jewish. After all, American Jews were probably more against the attack than the average American. The real dangerous Zionists, the ones with real power behind the scenes, are Christian Zionists. The Christian Zionists are the real anti-Semites, despite their current preoccupation with Israel. The Christian Zionists are interested in Israel only because they see its destruction in the apocalypse as a necessary precursor to their rapture, and so foster the positions of the Likudniks as they correctly see such positions as inevitably leading to World War in the Middle East. It could very well be that the seeming victory for Israel in the American attack on Iraq has been set up by real anti-Semites, with Cheney as their (well-paid) agent, intending to frame the Jewish people by playing on the stupidities and weaknesses of the American Jewish Likudniks.