Once again news media assumes accommodating pre-war posture. 

“If George W. Bush launches a pre-emptive war on Iran, House Speaker Nancy  Pelosi will bear full moral responsibility for the war,” to quote Patrick Buchanan, former Republican Presidential candidate, political columnist and regular guest on MSNBC’s lineup of cable news shows.  According to the Associated Press report written by Mathew Leed and David M Eso, Pelosi withdrew the requirement that Bush seek congressional approval before launching any new war with Iran.

Pelosi’s capitulation came in the Appropriation Committee, which is passing the one hundred billion dollar appropriation for the war in Iraq. “Pelosi’s decision to strip the provision barring Bush from attacking Iran without Congress’ approval “sends the worst possible signal to the White House,” states John Nichols of The Nation magazine. He goes on to write, "Her (Pelosi’s) disastrous misstep could haunt her and the congress for years to come."

As Pat Buchanan writes on his website, “This episode, wherein liberal Democrats scuttled a bipartisan effort to require Bush to abide by the Constitution before taking us into a third war in the Middle East, speaks volumes about who has the whip hand on Capitol Hill when it comes to the Middle East. Pelosi gets booed by the Israeli lobby, then runs back to the Hill and gives Bush a blank check for war on Iran, because that is what the lobby demands.”

As a recent Gallop poll shows, AIPAC's continued support for the war in Iraq proves how disconnected the organization is from mainstream Jewish Americans. The results of a recent Gallup poll show that Jewish Americans oppose the war in Iraq more vigorously than any other religious group in the U.S. Seventy-seven percent of U.S. Jews (and 89 percent of Jewish Democrats!) believe the war in Iraq was a mistake.

The real problem is what has been haunting America for decades -- the capitulation of the President, the Senate, Congress and the news media to AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobbying group. In our research, which covered the ten largest newspapers in America, we found not one American newspaper that headlined this momentous withdrawal of the provision to require the president to do what the constitution calls for.

An editor I spoke with at the Hill newspaper expressed surprise at the Gallop poll results. My sense is that a number of news editors are equally accommodating to this vocal and powerful minority within a minority. Jews make up 1.6 percent of the national population.

The New York Times published a mea culpa on May 26, 2004 on its editorial page, in effect apologizing for a similar lack of coverage after the troops were on the ground in Iraq and the war proved to be a total disaster.

“… we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.”

Well, as Reagan would say, there you go again, Mr. New York Times, and the rest of the news media, once again leaving the country out there "dangling and twisting in the wind," at the mercy of AIPAC and George Bush. And that's a horrifying position.