Neocon leader Bill Kristol is upset that Americans have soured on war. “Are the American people war weary? Yes, to some degree,” Kristol acknowledges in a new piece in the Weekly Standard, but, he adds, “Could there be a worse prescription for American foreign policy than giving in to popular war weariness? No.”

Kristol is commenting on the recent intra-GOP spat between Sen. Ron Paul (R-KY) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). McCain referred to Paul as a “wacko bird” for his isolationist tendencies and his 13-hour filibuster critique of President Obama’s targeted killing program (McCain has since apologized), while Paul shot back last week at CPAC, saying McCain’s foreign policy wing of the GOP as “has grown stale and moss covered.”

Kristol jumped in to defend McCain, arguing that Republicans should try again to convince Americans that they shouldn’t be so bearish on war:

Now we’re weary again. And there are many politicians all too willing to seek power and popularity by encouraging weariness rather than point out its perils. [...]

The task of a serious opposition party is to rally the nation to its responsibilities and long-term interests. The task of GOP political leaders is to educate the public about the dangers of the world and to inspire people to rise above their weariness. The task of American conservatives is not to let an understandable Obama-weariness turn into weariness in fighting the nation’s enemies or in supporting our troops in the field.

Got that? The Republican Party must convince the American people that they must RISE ABOVE their collective skepticism about war solving America’s problems. But why? Because Kristol and Co. want to go to war with Iran. “It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force,” Kristol wrote in the Standard nearly two years ago. Last year his factually challenged pressure group called for an end to negotiations with Iran, saying in an ad campaign that “it’s time to act.” And what was the main reason Kristol opposed Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense? Hagel apparently was too skeptical about starting war with Iran.

But Americans don’t want to go to war with Iran — partly because of war weariness, but also because it’s not a very good idea. Kristol knows this, which is why he’s trying to recruit Republicans to his cause to help him convince us otherwise. Who does he have so far? From his new Standard piece:

[Rep. Tom] Cotton [R-AR] is 35 years old. He’s not stale or moss-covered. A combat veteran, he understands real war weariness. But he also understands it needs to be resisted and overcome. Above all, he understands, as did the GOP of old, the GOP of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, that while we may not be interested in war, our enemies remain interested in us.

Cotton was last seen suggesting that Iraq may have had something to do with 9/11. Perhaps then Kristol does know what he’s doing.

In a debate last night with Jeremy Ben Ami of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, neoconservative don Bill Kristol told the audience in the New York synagogue that he had no problems with President Obama’s Israel policies. But just two months ago, a right-wing pro-Israel group Kristol heads rolled out the latest of its serial attacks on Obama’s policies toward Israel.

The Weekly Standard editor praised Obama and said the difference between Obama’s Israel policies and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s “is not that great.” Kristol stated that he was “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree.” He went on:

I’ve been mostly supportive of the Obama administration in the last couple of years…

I think President Obama has moved sufficiently on these issues from the Cairo speech in 2009 to the AIPAC speech of two months ago, that the difference between the parties is less than it was.

But as Haaretz and WNYC pointed out, the Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) consistently lambasts Obama on Israel. The group ran ads in Washington around its campaign asserting Obama was “not pro-israel.” In December, Kristol, in an ECI statement, said Obama “keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.” (Earlier that year, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Kristol frequently praises, said that under the Obama administration “our security cooperation is unprecedented.”)

Just two months ago — far from the “last couple years” Kristol has been “supportive” of Obama’s policies — the hedge fund-bankrolled ECI released a 30-minute anti-Obama online film, complete with ominous music. In the film, Kristol associate Liz Cheney says Obama attempted to “put distance” between the U.S. and Israel. Neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer says Obama “delegitimized” Israel, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Lee Smith said Obama’s “narrative fit [a] rejectionist and resentful narrative.”

This isn’t the first time ECI’s attacks on the Obama administration’s Israel policies have been revealed as disingenuous political maneuvers. Last May, ECI executive director Noah Pollak, commenting via Twitter, publicly praised Obama’s speech on the Middle East, but ECI later condemned the speech in an attack ad. When ThinkProgress revealed the hypocrisy, Kristol disowned the tweets in comments to the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin added: “Kristol graciously avoided pointing out that while Pollak has the executive director title, the group is firmly under the control of Kristol and his two co-founders.”

With ECI “firmly under the control of Kristol,” and with Kristol now “happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree” on Israel, will the organization lay off its right-wing attacks on the president? “We’re trying to decide,” Kristol told WNYC.

It was fairly easy to predict that the right wing would get hysterical after President Obama and his top defense advisers announced a new military strategy that would rely on a “leaner” force. While some like Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) have focused on the “myth” that the new strategy eliminates the military’s ability to fight two major wars at once (the New York Times notes the “two-wars” strategy “was always an artificial construct intended mainly to ensure the Pentagon got all it wanted”), others have advanced claims about the strategy that are “complete bullshit.”

Bill Kristol joined in last night on Fox News and offered his (albeit contradictory) two cents attack line. One the one hand, Kristol said that the cutbacks in military spending “would decimate our military” and then just moments later, he downplayed the cuts as a deficit reduction measure, saying they are “tiny”:

KRISTOL: This would decimate our military. It would weaken the United States of America. Let’s not kid ourselves. There is no magic. You have don’t cut the ground forces he wants to cut, cut our capacities around the world, tell allies, whoa, you know, you thought in the past ground troops could land if there was a problem. I’m not so sure anymore. [...]

It’s unbelievably irresponsible. The savings are tiny when it comes to the actual budget deficit. The highest number is $40 billion a year when he is running $1.5 trillion deficit when he wasted $800 billion on the stimulus, none of which went to the military. Doesn’t that tell you everything.

Watch the clip:

Max Boot says it’s “impossible” (impossible!) to cut $1 trillion from military spending over the next decade, although he doesn’t exactly say why (it’s actually very possible).

But Kristol’s back and forth highlights the fact that, as this blog has noted numerous times before, those opposed to eliminating wasteful military spending rely primarily on fear mongering, not facts. Taking a line from Kristol, “Doesn’t that tell you everything?”

After a speech on Friday by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that implored Israel to make moves to thaw its cool relations with strategic partners and overcome its growing isolation, neoconservative commentators went bananas. Former Bush Mideast hand Elliott Abrams, speaking with neocon Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, wondered, “Does anyone wonder why Israelis don’t trust this administration to guard their security?” (In September, Abram’s himself said it was “true” that Israel and the U.S. enjoy “the best military-to-military relationship ever.”)

The most overblown response, though, came from right-wing don Bill Kristol. Speaking through a press release from the far-right-wing pressure group he heads, the Emergency Committee for Israel, Kristol attacked President Obama’s comments last weekend to Jewish donors that his administration’s security cooperation with Israel had reached new heights in the partnership. Kristol said:

Nobody believes President Obama when he claims, as he did last week, that he “has done more for the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.” That’s because he hasn’t — and because President Obama and his administration keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.

The problem with Kristol’s statement, and one he seems to willfully ignore, is that there are at least a few people who don’t hold his stated opinion about the Obama administration’s work on Israel’s security, among them Israel’s leaders.

In a speech delivered to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) national convention in May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called American security cooperation with Israel during the Obama administration “unprecedented”:

Yesterday President Obama spoke about his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security. He rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented. He spoke of that commitment not just in front of AIPAC. He spoke about it in two speeches heard throughout the Arab world. And he has backed those words with deeds.

In September, Netanyahu personally thanked Obama in a speech for his attentiveness and support in resolving a crisis when demonstrators overtook Israel’s embassy in Cairo.

The various U.S. security commitments to Israel are legion. In the same speech Kristol criticized, Panetta announced that “the U.S. armed forces and the [Israel Defense Forces] will conduct the largest joint exercises in the history of that partnership.” This spring, Israel used an expanded aid package from the Obama administration to develop the Iron Dome missile defense system that protects citizens of southern Israel from rocket attacks with a 93 percent success rate. And the U.S. has worked closely with Israel in slowing Iran’s nuclear progress, even reportedly partnering up to create the Stuxnet virus that hampered Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and selling Israel bunk-busing bombs. All the work has included unflinching diplomatic support for Israel in international fora.

In August, former Israeli prime minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that he could “hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.” Last month, Barak said Obama is an “extremely strong supporter of Israel in regard to its security” and that his administration was “excelling in this.” He added: “I don’t think that anyone can raise any question mark about the devotion of this president to the security of Israel.” Maybe someone should tell Bill Kristol.

Condoleezza Rice continued her book tour this week talking with Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin. Rogin pushed Rice to share her reflections on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and surprisingly, the former Secretary of State chose to distance herself from the right-wing talking point that the end of year troop withdrawal from Iraq will dangerously strengthen Iran’s regional influence.

The go-to criticism leveled by GOP hawks doesn’t hold much water with Rice. She told Rogin:

The Iraqis are good armed forces; they’re buying a lot of our equipment. I think they’ll be able to defend themselves. They continue to need help on the counterterrorism side, and it would have been a good message to Iran. Although I think it’s easy to overstate the degree to which the Iraqis have any attraction to Iran — that’s a pretty lousy relationship, really.

Neocons and various Republicans harshly criticized President Obama for announcing that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year. Fred and Kimberly Kagan wrote that “it will unquestionably benefit Iran.” Newt Gingrich told an audience, “Don’t kid yourself, it is defeat. Iran is stronger.” Rick Santorum claimed “Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government.” And the Bill Kristol “letterhead organization,” the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) wrote, in anticipation of a withdrawal, that the U.S. must maintain a strong presence in Iraq to “help ensure Iraq remains oriented away from Iran and a long-term ally of the United States.”

While neoconservatives and GOP presidential hopefuls are eager to suggest that the Obama administration’s withdrawal from Iraq — in conformity with the Status Of Forces Agreement negotiated and signed by Bush — is a major win for Iran, the former Secretary of State is clearly not buying it.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — a right-wing “pro-Israel” pressure group — attempted to paint the Occupy Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic. But while plenty of evidence runs counter to the ECI’s far-reaching assertions that politicians are “turning a blind eye to anti-semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” the ECI is much slower to condemn its own ties to ethnic and religious intolerance.

ECI board member Rachel Abrams — wife of George W. Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams — litters her blog, “Bad Rachel,” with homophobic, anti-Palestinian, innuendo-filled screeds about political opponents.

Last year, she focused on Christopher Hitchens’ bisexuality in a post titled “Giving Homosexuality a Bad name.” She wrote:

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford.

And following the death of Sen. “Teddy” Kennedy (D-MA), she offered the following innuendo-filled limerick:

An amorous sot name of Teddy
Lost control when things got a bit heady.
He went over the side,
Left his ride in the tide,
And his squeeze giving head to an eddy.

But Abrams saves her harshest, most dehumanizing, words for Palestinians. Abrams writes that after Israel finishes celebrating the release of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, they should:

…round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.

Abrams’ violent fantasies are protected under the first amendment, but the organization’s leadership might want to look in the mirror before smearing the Occupy Wall Street protests as intolerant. (HT: Media Matters)

The charges against two people in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. has given neoconservative think tanks — such as the America Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Heritage Foundation — yet another reason to promote military action against Iran. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol even went so far as to gloat that “we have an engraved invitation” for war against Iran.

But not everyone is buying into the neoconservative push for yet another U.S. military operation in the Middle East. Rep. Presidential contender Ron Paul (R-TX) pushed back against the calls for war in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday:

BLITZER: But why do you think — because various Republicans and Democrats, Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — you know him — he believes that the evidence is strong [against the Iranians].

PAUL: I think it’s mostly war propaganda. They’ve been itching to go to war against Iran for a long, long time. This is exactly what they did leading up to the war in Iraq, and the danger was not there.

I don’t think the Iranians are that stupid. And yet, the people here right now are getting pretty excited about it.

[...]

People are suggesting we go to war over this. That is such a careless attitude.

Watch it:

Indeed, the drive for war has come from some of the same voices who had pushed for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein since the 1990s. And, much as in Iraq, inconvenient intelligence reports are overlooked by these hawks.

Today, the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick revealed that while Iran continues to stockpile enriched uranium, the nuclear program is “riddled with problems” as a combination of old equipment and inferior replacement machinery have resulted in a steady decline in enriched uranium output.

Warrick also reports that U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran is seeking the technical capability to produce a nuclear weapon but that there is little indication that the clerical leadership has firmly committed to making a bomb.

While much remains to be explained about both Iranian nuclear intentions and the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, neoconservatives and their allies are using the latest diplomatic crisis with Tehran as yet another justification for preemptive military action.

In the wake of charges against two people in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudia Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington, several neoconservative think-tankers both implicitly and explicitly called for the U.S. to engage in a war with Iran. Now, they’re being joined by neoconservative don Bill Kristol, the well-connected Weekly Standard editor behind innumerable hawkish neocon projects of the past 15 years.

In the October 24, 2011, issue of the Weekly Standard, Kristol writes:

It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force.

And now we have an engraved invitation to do so. The plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was a lemon. Statesmanship involves turning lemons into lemonade.

So we can stop talking. Instead, we can follow the rat lines in Iraq and Afghanistan back to their sources, and destroy them. We can strike at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back. Lest the administration hesitate to act out of fear of lack of support at home, Congress should consider authorizing the use of force against Iranian entities that facilitate attacks on our troops, against IRGC and other regime elements that sponsor terror, and against the regime’s nuclear weapons program.

What Kristol is talking about here is an all out war with Iran: attacking the Islamic Republic’s military, regime elements, and of course Iran’s nuclear program (which is alleged to be aimed at nuclear weapons, but has yet to be proven so — though don’t look for Kristol to make the distinction).

Sometime Kristol ally and fellow Standard writer Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, made a similar call in the Wall Street Journal last week: “The White House needs to respond militarily to this outrage. If we don’t, we are asking for it.”

Gerecht called for attacking Iran in 2010 and Kristol, for his part, indicates that the latest alleged Iranian plot is little more than a pretext to start a war he’s had on his mind for a while: He writes that “it’s long since been time” to start a war with Iran.

Kristol was a central node in the long-running campaign for war with Iraq. He founded the Project For a New American Century, which advocated for war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1998 and said, less than two weeks after 9/11, that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power.” Kristol was also an advisory board member to the short-lived pressure group the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a hawkish outfit that worked in 2002 and 2003 to push Congress and the public for war.

The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), has joined the pack of conservative groups working to discredit the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The ECI — a Bill Kristol-Gary Bauer-Rachel Abrams-conceived organization — launched a YouTube ad this morning, seeking to paint the Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic.

The ad, which was faithfully promoted by ECI’s go-to media outlets — Politico’s Ben Smith, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary — alleges that Democratic party leaders are “turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks,” and urges President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to “stand up to the mob.” Watch it:

While the anti-Semitic signs and clips shown in the commercial are deeply offensive, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have consistently rejected the attempts of a small number of extremists to hijack the movement. In fact, on Friday, “new media activist” Daniel Sieradski organized over 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters to participate in Kol Nidre, the prayers that begin Yom Kippur.

ThinkProgress reported in June that two-thirds of ECIPAC’s contributions in the past election cycle came from Daniel S. Loeb, CEO of Third Point Management, a New York based hedge fund.

Loeb’s $100,000 in support for ECI follows his track record of falling out of love with Obama after the White House pushed for financial regulatory reforms.

On April 26, the Wall Street Journal reported on Loeb’s change of heart and quoted from an email Loeb wrote and circulated in late 2010.

“I am sure, if we are really nice and stay quiet, everything will be alright and the president will become more centrist and that all his tough talk is just words,” Mr. Loeb wrote in an email about four months ago expressing frustration with the president’s posture toward Wall Street. “I mean, he really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it.”

Indeed, in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Loeb has contributed nearly $170,000 to a stable of Republican candidates including radical Islamophobe Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

And last week, the New York Times reported that Loeb had signed on to support Mitt Romney.

While the ECI appears to be in the business of taking any and all opportunities to paint the Obama administration and the Democratic party as anti-Israel, their attempts to smear the Wall Street protests as anti-Semitic closely aligns the right wing pro-Israel group with the domestic political and business interests of its biggest financial backer.