[June
2004]American
Conservative
Buchanan interviewing
Nader
[excerpt]
Pat
Buchanan: Then you would say it is not only Bush who is at fault, but
Clinton and Bush and Reagan, all the way back?
Ralph
Nader: The subservience of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military policy has been consistent. Until ’91, any dictator who was anti-Communist was our ally.
Pat
Buchanan: You used the term
“congressional puppets.” Did John Kerry show himself to be a congressional puppet when he voted to give the president a blank check to go to war?
Ralph
Nader: They’re almost all puppets. There are two sets: Congressional puppets and White House puppets. When the chief puppeteer comes to
Washington, the puppets prance.
Pat
Buchanan: Why do both sets of puppets support the Sharon/Likud policies in the Middle
East rather than the peace movement candidates and leaders in Israel?
Ralph
Nader: That is a good question, because the peace movement is broad indeed. They just put
120,000 people in a square in Tel Aviv. They are composed of former government ministers, existing and former members of the Knesset, former generals, former combat veterans, former heads of internal security, people from all backgrounds. It is not any fringe movement.
The answer to your question is that instead of focusing on how to bring a peaceful settlement, both parties concede their independent judgment to the pro-Israeli lobbies in this country because they perceive them as determining the margin in some state elections and as sources of funding. They don’t appear to agree with Tom Friedman, who wrote that memorable phrase,
“Ariel Sharon
has Arafat under house arrest in Ramallah
and Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office.”
Virtually no member of Congress can say that, and so we come to this paradoxical conclusion that there is far more freedom in Israel to discuss this than there is in the United States, which is providing billions of dollars in economic and military assistance.