<DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> This is the ugly accusation an alert reader should suspect in encountering the word "Straussian ," or these days even "neo-conservative" in the context of the Iraq debate. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle find their Jewish heritage a point of attack. But George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are gentiles. Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell don't look Jewish to me, but they also helped draft the basic statement of the Bush Doctrine, the September 2002 "National Security Policy of the United States." Clearly, the administration's critics are anxious to seize any straw to discredit its success in Iraq, to leap to the worst possible construction of events. It was a "quagmire" when troops were slowed by a sand storm, now it's "deception" because chemical weapons dumps haven't been found. The impulse is so strong that Leo Strauss gets exhumed, words are twisted from their meaning, and the Times and New Yorker make common cause with Lyndon LaRouche. --- * * * And it's antisemitism when the New Yorker's Jewish Seymour Hersch identifies a group that others have remarked (accurately) to be disproportionately Jewish, and it's LaRouchism to criticize this group for advocating what it actually does advocate. Thank you, Robert Bartley. jks</BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><hr SIZE=1> Do you Yahoo!? Free <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/tag/*http://calendar.yahoo.com">online calendar</a> with sync to Outlook(TM).