A War for Israel? 

By Jeffrey Blankfort 

When Malaysian Prime Minister Mathahir Mohammed declared at an
international Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur in mid-October that 
"today the Jews rule the world by proxy [and] They get others to fight
and die for them,"1 the reactions in the U.S. and the West
were predictable. 

It was "a speech that was taken right out of the Protocols of Zion,"
according to one Israeli commentator 2 and Mathahir would be
accused of imitating Hitler and insuring that "Muslims around the world
are similarly being fed a regular diet of classic big lies about Jewish
power." 3 

Big lies? Given Israel’s unchecked dominion over the Palestinians and
its Arab neighbors over the past half century, supported in every way
possible by the United States, one can assume that Muslims, not to
mention intelligent non-Muslims, have no need for additional instruction
as to the extent of Jewish power. As further proof of its existence, if
such were needed, there would be no attempt to measure the Malaysian
prime minister’s words against the reality of the times to determine if
there was anything accurate in his assessment. 

If Mathahir could be accused of anything, it would be of being sloppy
historically and using too broad a brush. The Jews, as such, control
nothing. A segment of American Jewry, however, has been able, with few
exceptions, to shape U.S. Middle East policy since the mid-Sixties.
Given America’s position as a major world power, and now its only
superpower, that is not a small achievement. 

Over the years, that segment, the organized American Jewish
community--in short, the Israel lobby--has amassed unparalleled
political power through skillfully combining the wealth of its members
4 with its extraordinary organizational skills to achieve
what amounts to a corporate takeover of the U.S. Congress plus veto
power over the presidency. 

There is virtually no sector of the American body politic that has been
immune to the lobby’s penetration. That its primary goal has not been to
improve the security and well being of the United States or the American
people, but to advance the interests of a foreign country, namely
Israel, may be debated, but it was acknowledged, in part, more than a
dozen years ago by Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) who complained to an
annual conference of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory
Council that "There’s only one issue members [of Congress] think is
important to American Jews-Israel." 5 

It was no secret that Israel had long been interested in eliminating the
regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and redrawing the map of the Middle
East to enhance its power in the region. 6 Initiating that
undertaking became a task for key individuals in and around the White
House with deep roots in right wing Israeli politics. The attack on the
World Trade Center supplied the opportunity. That Iraq had nothing to do
with it was immaterial. The lobby’s propaganda apparatus would make the
American people believe otherwise. 

The first step has been completed. Saddam Hussein has been removed, not
by Israel, but by the U.S. and its "coalition of the willing." From the
perspective of the Israelis and one must assume, the lobby, it is better
that American and foreign soldiers do the shedding of blood, Iraqis and
their own, rather than those of Israel, the world’s fourth ranked
military power. Such an accusation will most assuredly draw cries of
"Blood libel" from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, but it is a
conclusion that one can readily draw from the facts. The degree to which
the present Iraq situation, as well as the first Gulf War, can be
attributed to efforts of key individuals and the major Jewish
organizations that constitute the lobby is what this article will
examine. The lobby’s existence and power well predate its alliance with
what may be called its Christian fundamentalist auxiliary which has
given it unprecedented influence over both Congress and the White House.

*** 

On March 13th, 2003, during a House appropriations subcommittee hearing
on foreign aid, of which Israel has long been the dominant recipient
7, Secretary of State Colin Powell took the extraordinary
step of assuring members of Congress that a "small cabal" of pro-Israeli
American Jews was not orchestrating President George W. Bush's drive
toward war. 

"The strategy with respect to Iraq has derived from our interest in the
region and our support of U.N. resolutions over time," Powell said, in
response to a question from the subcommittee's Republican chairman,
Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe. 

"It is not driven by any small cabal that is buried away somewhere, that
is telling President Bush or me or Vice President Cheney or [National
Security Adviser Condoleeza] Rice or other members of the administration
what our policies should be." 8 

In fact, there is a cabal that has been driving U.S. foreign policy
under the Bush administration, and some of its members, notably Elliot
Abrams and Michael Ledeeen, were part of the last cabal that operated in
Washington under the Reagan administration, the one that brought us the
Iran-Contra scandal. This one, however, is not nearly as secretive.
Ironically, Powell has been and remains one of its favorite targets and
his frequent public humiliations at the cabal’s hands have led seasoned
observers to wonder why he hasn’t resigned. 

On this occasion as he had on others, Powell played the loyal soldier,
joining in what Ha’aretz’s Nathan Guttman described as the Bush
Administration’s "every effort to play down Israel's role in the future
military conflict...to remove any suspicion that the decision to go to
war with Iraq is a pro-Israeli...step. 

"But, as hard as the administration tries," he wrote, "the voices
linking Israel to the war are getting louder and louder. It is claimed
the desire to help Israel is the major reason for President George Bush
sending American soldiers to a superfluous war in the Gulf."
9 

The loudest among them may have been the free-swinging old line
"conservative," Pat Buchanan who charged "that a cabal of polemicists
and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars
that are not in America's interests... What these neoconservatives seek
is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel,"
Buchanan wrote in the March 24 issue of the magazine he edits, the
American Conservative. Because of his history of advocating right-wing
causes, his comments were largely ignored by the forces mobilizing
against the war. 

Another of those voices was syndicated columnist Robert Novak who
several months earlier had written that "in private conversation with...
members of Congress, the former general [Sharon] leaves no doubt that
the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam
Hussein's Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush
administration, and is a major reason why U.S. forces today are
assembling for war." 10 

Support for a U.S. attack on Iraq was not limited to Sharon or his Likud
Party: 

In a September 12 dialogue with Rabbi William Berkowitz at 

the Center for Jewish History, former Israeli Labor prime minister and
then foreign minister Shimon Peres was asked what he thought of the
administration’s response to Iraq. Peres, likening the situation to the
next world war, replied: 

"Why speak about an attack when you are defending freedom as you did in
World War I, World War II and now in [World War] III?.....I don't think
this is a campaign against Iraq, neither their people nor the land, but
against a terrible killer, a dictator who already initiated two
aggressive wars - one against Muslim Iran for seven years at a cost of 1
million [lives] and against an Arab Kuwait..... Who saved Kuwait? The
Arab League? You gave Japan an improved Japan, and you gave Germany a
better Germany and the Marshall Plan. I believe the strength of freedom
is equal to the strength of the United States. I don't see anybody doing
the job. So I justify the American position fully. The president speaks
loud and clear." 11 

One may speculate whether Powell would have raised the issue had he not
been asked but apparently he felt the need to clear the air following an
uproar that occurred ten days earlier when Virginia Democratic
Congressman Jim Moran claimed that: "If it were not for the strong
support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we wouldn't be
doing this." 12 

As could be expected, his comment was condemned by the White House and
congressional Democratic leaders including Senate Minority leader Tom
Daschle and Democratic House Whip Nancy Pelosi, two long-time loyal
devotees of the Israeli cause. Six local rabbis and Washington Post
columnist Marc Fisher called on him to resign, with the latter comparing
the congressman's remarks to a speech Adolf Hitler delivered to the
German parliament in 1939, accusing "Jewish financiers" of plunging
Europe into a world war. 13 

"Moran is symptomatic of a problem that we have been watching for
several weeks and months," lamented Abraham Foxman, national director of
the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), "and that is that the charge that the
Jews are instigators and advocators of military action has moved from
the extreme into the mainstream," This shift, he added, is emboldening
people such as Moran to "have the chutzpah to say such things." 

"It's out there and therefore we are concerned," Foxman said. "If, God
forbid, the war is not successful and the body bags come back, who's to
blame?" 14 

Fueling such anxieties, the Jewish weekly Forward noted, was "the
increasing media focus on the White House’s concern with protecting
Israel and the views of Jewish hawks within the administration."
15 

While the mainstream press condemned Moran’s remarks, columnist Michael
Kinsley 16 pointed out that "The thunderous rush of
politicians of all stripes to denounce Moran's remarks as complete
nonsense might suggest to the suspicious mind that they are not complete
nonsense" and that Jewish organizations were being hypocritical since
they were posting comments on their own web sites lauding the Israel
lobby's ability to get things done. Wrote Kinsley: 

.... Moran is not the only one publicly exaggerating the power and
influence of the Zionist lobby these days. It is my sad duty to report
that this form of anti-Semitism seems to have infected one of the most
prominent and respected-one might even say influential-organizations in
Washington. This organization claims that "America's pro-Israel
lobby"-and we all know what "pro-Israel" is a euphemism for-has
tentacles at every level of government and society. 

On its Web site, this organization paints a lurid picture of Zionists
spreading their party line and even indoctrinating children. And yes,
this organization claims that the influence of the Zionist lobby is
essential to explaining the pro-Israel tilt of U.S. policy in the Middle
East. It asserts that the top item on the Zionist "agenda" is curbing
the power of Saddam Hussein. (emphasis added) The Web site also contains
a shocking collection of Moran-type remarks from leading American
politicians. 17 

The site he was referring to is that of AIPAC, the American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s official Washington lobbying arm
that, which, in testament to its power, is generally referred to in the
halls of Congress simply as "the lobby." 

From a one-man office when it was founded 50 years ago, AIPAC has grown
into an organization of 85,000 members with activists in every Jewish
community in the United States. Each Spring it holds a national
three-day conference in Washington. "It’s climatic Congressional Dinner
attracts hundreds of congress members and dozens of foreign
ambassadors," writes Forward editor J.J. Goldberg "all of them eager to
curry good will with AIPAC and the Jewish community. Lest the point be
lost, the dinner chairperson always reads a ‘roll call’ naming every
senator, every representative, and ambassador present in the hall...
followed by private receptions by lawmakers courting Jewish campaign
support." 18 The organization does not contribute money to
candidates directly but advises numerous Jewish PACs and wealthy Jewish
donors as to the campaigns where their money might be the most useful to
Israel. 

AIPAC holds similar conferences, but on a smaller scale, around the
country in the winter, with local officials from the respective regions
being honored as invited guests. 

It so happened that AIPAC’s annual conference last year followed the
Iraq invasion by a week. Since " AIPAC is wont to support whatever is
good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war," wrote
Ha’aretz's Guttmann, "so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who
convened in the American capital." 19 

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank did not go quite that far, but noted
that the meeting put a spotlight on the Bush administration's "delicate
dance with Israel and the Jewish state's friends over the attack on
Iraq". While, "officially," he wrote, AIPAC had no position on the
merits of a war against Iraq before it started, as delegates were
heading to town, the group put a headline on its Web site proclaiming:
"Israeli Weapons Utilized By Coalition Forces Against Iraq." The item
featured a photograph of a drone with the caption saying the
"Israeli-made Hunter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle" is being used "by U.S.
soldiers in Iraq." 20 

A parade of Israeli as well as top Bush administration officials
--Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, political director
Kenneth Mehlman, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, one of the rare
non-Jewish neocons, and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns --
appeared before the AIPAC audience. The meeting, attended by about 5,000
people, according to Milbank, including half the Senate and a third of
the House -- was reportedly planned long before it became clear it would
coincide with hostilities in Iraq. "This is not about Iraq," AIPAC
spokesman Josh Block insisted. "This is about going to Congress and
lobbying for the Israeli aid package." 21 

House Whip Pelosi, who had reversed her early tepid opposition to the
war and was now on the bandwagon, made a point of condemning anyone who
sought "to place responsibility for this conflict on the American Jewish
community." In her speech to AIPAC, she expressed America’s "unshakable
bond" with Israel in a variety of ways at least a dozen times. Echoing
the neocon agenda, she condemned "Syria’s and Iran’s bankrolling of
terror and the development of weapons of mass destruction" which she
declared to be "a clear and present danger." 22 

There was déjà vu atmosphere about the AIPAC gathering. A dozen years
earlier, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, AIPAC leaders acknowledged
that the lobby "had worked in tandem with the [first] Bush
administration to win passage of a resolution authorizing the president
to commit U.S. troops to combat." A Wall Street Journal article at the
time noted that the "behind-the-scenes campaign avoided AIPAC’s
customary high profile in the Capitol and relied on activists-calling
sometimes from Israel itself-to contact lawmakers and build on public
endorsements by major Jewish organizations." 

"Yes, we were active," AIPAC’s director Tom Dine, told the paper. "These
are the great issues of our time. If you sit on the sidelines you have
no voice." 23 

And, to be sure, money had its role with Democrats who had benefited
from large contributions form pro-Israel PACs being among the swing
votes. Having "pro-Israel liberals behind the resolution made it easier
to hold moderate Republicans as well." 24 

While the U.S. Congress was divided over going to war in 1990, "there is
one place in the world which is longing for war, said retired Major
General Matti Peled, a former Knesset Member and, before his death, a
leader of the Israeli peace camp, "and that is Israel... Every
commentator finds it his duty to join the party of the war-mongers.
Arrogant statements about the slowness of the Americans are heard every
day." 25 

Anti-war activists paid no attention to such statements or to the
activities of the Israel lobby then nor have they since. 26,
While they chanted "No Blood for Oil!," in national protests on October
25th, Kinsley, a mainstream liberal, described the situation as "the
proverbial elephant in the room....Everybody sees it, no one mentions
it." 27 

A month before the war, the Forward’s Ami Eden, commenting on Kinsley’s
piece noted that what was "once only whispered in back rooms... [was]
lately splashed in bold characters across the mainstream media, over
Jewish and Israeli influence in shaping American foreign policy." 

"In recent weeks," he wrote, "the Israeli-Jewish elephant has been on a
rampage, trampling across the airwaves and front pages of respected
media outlets, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, the
American Prospect, the Washington Times, the Economist, the New York
Review of Books, CNN and MSNBC. 

"For its encore," he added, "the proverbial pachyderm plopped itself...
smack in the middle of "Meet the Press," NBC's top-rated Sunday morning
news program." 28 

It occurred on February 23, when host Tim Russert read from a February
14 column by veteran journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large of
the Washington Times, who argued that the "strategic objective" of
senior Bush administration officials was to secure Israel's borders by
launching a crusade against its enemies in the Arab world. One of
Russert’s guests was Richard Perle, at the time, chairman of the Defense
Policy Board, a key advisory panel to the Pentagon, as well as a fellow
of the influential pro-Israel, American Enterprise Institute. Of,
perhaps, even more significance, Perle had been a founder of JINSA, the
Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, a little known neo-con
think tank that will be examined later in the article. Russert turned to
Perle and addressed the question: "Can you assure American viewers
across our country that we're in this situation against Saddam Hussein
and his removal for American security interests?" And then came the
bombshell: "And what would be the link in terms of Israel?" Both Perle
and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who has family in
Israel, have been routinely described in the press as the "architects"
of the war on Iraq, so the question was addressed to the right person. 

Clearly Perle was not prepared. Squirming slightly he replied: "Well,
first of all, the answer is absolutely yes. Those of us who believe that
we should take this action if Saddam doesn't disarm -- and I doubt that
he's going to-- believe it's in the best interests of the United States.
I don't see what would be wrong with surrounding Israel with
democracies; indeed, if the whole world were democratic, we'd live in a
much safer international security system because democracies do not wage
aggressive wars." 

I’ll leave that contradiction for another time and note, as did the
Forward’s Eden, that: 

"...it was a startling question, especially when directed at Perle, the
poster boy- along with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and
Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith - for anti-semitic critics who
insist the United States is being pulled into war by pro-Likud Jewish
advisers on orders from Jerusalem. 

But Russert is no David Duke, nor even a Patrick Buchanan. If Russert is
asking the question on national television, then the toothpaste is out
of the tube: The question has entered the discourse in elite Washington
circles and is now a legitimate query to be floated in polite company."

29 

In a length front page story, the Washington Post’s Robert Kaiser
described what appeared to be an unprecedented political partnership
between Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush, headlined "Bush and Sharon
Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy." 

"Over the past dozen years or more,." Kaiser wrote, "supporters of
Sharon's Likud Party have moved into leadership roles in most of the
American Jewish organizations that provide financial and political
support for Israel." 30 * 

The leadership does not necessarily reflect overall Jewish opinion. A
poll to gauge Jewish opinions on the war - conducted a month before it
broke out - found that 56 percent of Jews were supportive of the war
which corresponded to that of the general public. The rate was said to
be even higher immediately afterward, corresponding to increased support
for the war among the American populace in general. 31 

Concern about appearances, however, had earlier led members of the
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, a
Jewish umbrella group with 52 member organizations, to refrain from
taking a bellicose stand. 

"Just as we have not issued a public statement, we do not think it's the
right time for the Presidents Conference to issue a public statement
either," American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris told
the Forward in October of 2002. "Our interest here is to not be out
ahead of the administration." (Emphasis added) 

In contrast, the liberal American Jewish Congress had no such
reservations. "The final statement ought to be crystal clear in backing
the president having to take unilateral action if necessary against Iraq
to eliminate weapons of mass destruction," Jack Rosen, president of the
American Jewish Congress, told the paper. The AJCongress had already
issued its own position supporting the "U.S. administration in its
stated position to intervene in Iraq to ensure that Iraq is no longer a
threat." 32 

But already, in March of 2002, Mortimer Zuckerman, the chair of the
Jewish President’s conference and editor publisher of U.S. News and
World Report and the N.Y. Daily News, had made his position clear, He
was supporting the administration’s budding plan to remove Saddam: 

The next target in the war’s phase, clearly, will be Iraq. The West’s
lackluster efforts at nonproliferation have done little more than delay
the inevitable-a Baghdad with nuclear weapons...The United States is
prepared to take the risks, and is right to do so, in forcing a change
in Iraq. 33 

By late October, he was eager to get it on: 

The only way to force Iraq to get rid of its terrible weapons is to rid
the country of the regime that builds them. Washington must not pause...
in its push to depose Saddam... We are in a war against terrorism, and
we must fight that war in a time and place of our choosing. The war’s
next phase, clearly, is Iraq. 34 

Zuckerman would write six more editorials in the weeks leading up to the
war, each more emphatic than the one before in calling for Saddam’s
head. If Zuckerman’s opinions carried unusual weight, it was because the
Conference of Presidents is the Jewish body whose task it is to lobby
the White House and the Executive branch while AIPAC focuses on
Congress. 

As could be expected, accusations that Israel and its supporters within
the government were orchestrating U.S. policy towards Iraq led to
accusations of anti-semitism and raised questions as to what extent
criticism of Israel, American Jews and Jewish officials working in the
White House would be tolerated. Lawrence Kaplan, senior editor of the
New Republic, declared that references to Jewish and Israeli pro-war
pressure were reminiscent of Buchanan's claims in 1990 that only
soldiers with non-Jewish names would be killed in a war being pushed
solely by Israel and its American "amen corner." 35 The ADL’s
Foxman told the Forward that while it was legitimate to raise questions
concerning the pro-Israel leanings of certain administration officials
it was obligatory to note that not all the hawks were Jewish and it was
most definitely not kosher to portray these individuals and Jewish
organizations as composing "a shadowy Jewish conspiracy that controls
American foreign policy." "It is an old canard that Jews control America
and American foreign policy," Foxman said. "During both world wars,
anti-semites said that Jews manipulated America into war. So when you
begin to hear it again, there is good reason for us to be aware of it
and sensitive to it." 36 Foxman was correct regarding the
world wars but this time there seems to be more than enough proof that a
significant number of Jewish aficionados of Israel played a decisive
part in getting the U.S. to invade and occupy Iraq. 

Retired General Anthony Zinni, former head of the military’s Central
Command which includes the Middle East, appeared to be on the same page
as Mathahir. Zinni first raised questions about attacking Iraq in 1998,
suggesting that a "fragmented, chaotic Iraq... could happen if this
isn't done carefully [which] is more dangerous in the long run than a
contained Saddam is now," a warning that caused Wolfowitz, then a dean
at Johns Hopkins, but active behind the scenes, to attack him in print. 

Zinni was simply reiterating what had been the policy of the first Bush
administration and that prior to the attack on Saddam had been repeated
not only by former members of the elder Bush’s cabinet such as Secretary
of State James Baker, and National Security Advisor Brent Snowcroft, but
by the elder Bush himself. 

(This is worth noting because the first Bush and members of his
administration had strong ties to the oil producing countries and the
industry and had this truly been "a war for oil" they could have been
expected to support it. As it happened, those who insisted that it was
about oil, ignored this apparent flaw in their argument.) 

As the Washington Post reported, "The more he listened to Wolfowitz and
other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became
convinced that interventionist "neoconservative" ideologues were
plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't
understand. 

I think the American people were conned into this... I don't know where
the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on...
Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice
president. 37 

Zinni is a harder target for the U.S. media than Mathahir so most of the
pro-war shills in the mainstream media chose to ignore him. Not,
however, Joel Mowbray, a right-wing ideologue from the National Review
whose attack on Zinni appeared on line: 

Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former
General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he
blamed it on the Jews... 

"Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East
didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite
for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’ As the name implies,
‘neoconservative’ was originally meant to denote someone who is a
newcomer to the right. In the 90’s, many people self-identified
themselves as ‘neocons,’ but today that term has become synonymous with
‘Jews.’ 38 

Despite Mowbray’s assertion that to criticize the neo-cons is thinly
disguised anti-semitism, he is correct in noting that the term has
become synonymous with a certain group of Jews. The miniscule handful
that are not, such as former CIA chief James Woolsey, long-time
Washington insider Frank Gaffney, former Congressman Newt Gingrich and
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, are unabashed Israeliophiles. 

Russian-born Max Boot, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and
a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, a veritable neocon house
organ, did not wait for Zinni’s comments to realize that the inevitable
criticism of the neocons’ role in producing the Iraq quagmire had to be
stopped. 

It is a "malicious myth," that the "Bush administration is pursuing a
neoconservative foreign policy." Boot wrote in Foreign Affairs. "If only
it were true!" Showing contempt for the intelligence of his readers, he
trotted out one of the weaker argument the neocons have used in their
defense, that while their numbers in the Bush administration "seems
impressive, it also reveals that the neocons have no representatives in
the administration's top tier." 39(Bush advisor Karl Rove is technically
not there either, but no one would argue that he carries no clout with
the president). 

"The contention that the neocon faction gained the upper hand in the
White House has a superficial plausibility," wrote Boot, "because the
Bush administration toppled Saddam Hussein and embraced democracy
promotion [sic] in the Middle East," but these policies, he would have
us believe, are not the result of neocon cajoling, but rather an
outgrowth of the September 11 attacks and the decision by Bush that the
U.S. "no longer could afford a 'humble' foreign policy." That’s their
spin. Let’s see how well it holds up in the light of the facts. 

The neocon movement arose during the early 1970s among a small group of
disgruntled liberals and former Trotskyists, some of whom had studied
under Professor Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. The group was
almost exclusively Jewish, and was defined by "their attachment to
Israel [and to] the Reaganite right's hard-line anti-communism,
commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene
politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote
democratic [sic] values (and American interests)," all of which "would
guarantee Israel's security." 40 

They were opposed as well to the Nixon administration's policy of
détente and the easing of tensions with the Soviet Union which meant
U.S. acquiescence to its influence over the East Bloc states. The
neocons wanted to challenge the Soviets through a massive build-up of
this country's military strength and a willingness to use American power
to further America’s hegemonic interests, not dissimilar, as we shall
see, to the agenda of the Project for a New American Century. 

The neocons became in effect the intellectual arm of the Reagan
administration...[Elliot] Abrams, as undersecretary of state for Latin
American affairs, was a key figure in the effort to counter the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua..., Perle... spearheaded the drive to deploy
Pershing missiles in Western Europe [and] the overall guru formulating
these policies was Paul Wolfowitz. 

Well, the same team is back guiding the decisions of the Bush
administration in its war against terrorism and in challenging Iraq to
give up its weapons of mass destruction. Judging by his past record,
Abrams can be expected to be a strong advocate for linking Israel's war
against terrorism to America's war in muscular terms made familiar by
the neocons. 41 

Quite a different appraisal than that offered by Boot. 

There is probably no more appropriate place to begin our probe of the
neocons than with Perle who came to be known as "The Prince of Darkness"
while serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Reagan
administration and who has been described by Joshua Micah Marshall as
the neocons’ eminence grise," whose "acolytes..are also Jewish,
passionately pro-Israel, and pro-Likud. And all are united by a shared
idea: that America should be unafraid to use its military power early
and often to advance its interest and values." 42 

Since the invasion of Iraq, Perle has been involved in several scandals,
including a conflict of interest situation which caused him to resign as
chair of the Defense Policy Board, but remain as a member. I will,
however, limit this article to examining his role in fomenting the
present war in Iraq. 

To do so, we need to go back to 1975 and the administration of Gerald
Ford. In that year, Ford, like Richard Nixon before him, tried his hand
at achieving a Middle East peace settlement and was confronted with an
intransigent Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, then in his first tour
of office. 

In March of that year, exasperated with Israel’s behavior, Ford had made
a speech calling for a "reassessment" of U.S. policy towards Israel On
the advice of his secretary of state, none other than Henry Kissinger,
Ford "conspicuously delayed delivery of weapons to Israel, including the
F-15 fighter plane [and] suspended negotiations for pending financial
and military aid to Israel" 43 

Within White House circles, a consensus for a peace plan was emerging
that "looked very much like UN Resolution 242 and the Rogers Plan" that
would have required Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, with
provisions that its security would be guaranteed. The idea was for
President Ford to make a major speech, spelling out America’s basic
interests in the Middle East and those interests required Israel’s
withdrawal. 44 

It was not to be. As J.J. Goldberg noted in his book, Jewish Power,
"Rabin and his aides entered the Kissinger negotiations as hard
bargainers with a clear sense of the bottom line...And one of the most
potent weapons at their disposal was the American Jewish community..."
45 

Two years before, after the end of what the Israelis describe as the Yom
Kippur War, with an Arab oil embargo causing gasoline shortages and
widespread resentment around the country, the General Assembly of the
Council of Jewish Federations voted to launch an emergency
public-relations campaign in behalf of Israel. It would be endowed with
a $3 million emergency public-relations fund and administered by a
special task force on Israel. The campaign would combine the "national
clout and know-how of the major [Jewish] agencies with the local
resources of the federations and community-relations councils"
46 

As Goldberg describes it, "President Ford was the first to taste its
power, when he spoke about his ‘reassessment’ of U.S.-Israel relations.
Within six weeks, Ford gave up the idea after 76 senators signed a
letter, drafted by AIPAC, demanding that he "back off." 47
The letter’s key paragraph put the president on notice that: 

within the next several weeks, the Congress expects to receive your
foreign aid requests for fiscal year 1976. We trust that your
recommendations will be responsive to Israel’s urgent military and
economic needs. We urge you to make it clear, as we do, that the United
States acting in its own national interests stands firmly with Israel in
search for peace in future negotiations and that this premise is the
basis of the current reassessment of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
48 

Senator Charles Mathias, (R-MD) acknowledged that due to lobbying
pressure, "Seventy-six of us promptly affixed our signatures although no
hearings had been held, no debate conducted, nor had the administration
been invited to present its views. Mathias added that "as a result of
the activities of the [Israel[ lobby, congressional conviction has been
measurably reinforced by the knowledge that political sanctions will be
applied by any who fail to deliver." 49 

Despite their victory in this situation, certain Jewish supporters of
Israel in Washington were determined that such a potential crisis in
U.S.-Israel relations would not to be allowed to happen again. Enter
Perle and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. 

As a staffer for Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson in 1972, Perle
had been working with others in Washington to draft a law linking
U.S.-Soviet trade relations to the right of Jews to emigrate from the
Soviet Union. 50 

Much to the displeasure of President Nixon and Secretary of State
Kissinger 51 who saw the resulting Jackson-Vanik amendment as
interference in the president’s ability to determine foreign policy,
their effort would ultimately prove successful. Now, in 1976, it appears
that Perle had a larger goal: to insure that the maintenance of the
military power and security of Israel would become an integral part of
U.S. foreign policy. 

JINSA’s actual origins are as murky as the activities it carries out,
but the organization that Perle established together with Max Kampelman,
"an arms control negotiator whose old law firm is a U.S. agent for
Israeli government military interests." 52 was the precursor
of the more well known Project for a New American Century and the well
from which has emerged the collection of Jewish neocons and their fellow
travelers whose signatures and thumb prints are all over America’s
current adventure in Iraq as well as its threats against Syria and Iran.

According to its web site, JINSA has a two-fold mandate: 

1. To educate the American public about the importance of an effective
defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be
safeguarded and 

2. To inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about
the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic
interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. 

Its activities in behalf of the first mandate it has done out of the
public’s view. Other than the Wall Street Journal article in 1992,
JINSA’s existence was virtually unknown even to the political left until
an article by Jason Vest appeared in the Nation in September, 2002.
53 

It is JINSA’s second mandate that demands our attention. "Under a
program called "Send a General to Israel," hundreds of thousands of
dollars of tax-deductible contributions bankroll an annual tour of
Israel by retired U.S. generals and admirals." 54 Judging
from a look at JINSA’s board of advisers, at least 25 of these
ex-generals and retired admirals have subsequently been recruited into
the organization as have executives from a number of the major arms
manufacturers. Consequently, it was no surprise when a JINSA protégé,
former General Jay Garner, was named the first U.S. pro-consul in Iraq
following the fall of the regime. 

As Vest noted: 

"almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA's board of advisers or
has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA letter works or
has worked with military contractors who do business with the Pentagon
and Israel. While some keep a low profile as self-employed 'consultants'
and avoid mention of their clients, others are less shy about their
associations." 55 

In other words, what JINSA represents can best be described as the
Military-Industrial-Israeli complex. 

Sitting on its board, in addition, are such public figures as former UN
ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick, former CIA chief James Woolsey , former
Congressman Jack Kemp, Michael Ledeen, an un-indicted co-conspirator in
the Iran-Contra affair and former Congressman Stephen Solarz, a very
important player who we will look at later in the article, and, of
course, Perle. 

Of all those recruited into the ranks of JINSA, none would be prove to
be more important than Dick Cheney, the former congressman who served as
Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration. 

Looking towards the future, JINSA makes sure it is not just generals and
admirals who get the grand tour. It also provides a study program in
Israel for cadets and midshipmen from the Naval Academy, West Point and
the Air Force Academy, from whose ranks will come the next generation of
generals and admirals. 

It should be noted that both of these programs are in keeping with the
practice of Jewish organizations and federations across the country that
routinely send public officials, such as mayors, supervisors, city
councilors, police chiefs, etc.--the pool from which future members of
Congress are likely to arise-on all expense paid trips to Israel,
thereby virtually assuring their support for the Jewish statee in the
future. No base is left uncovered. 

JINSA has been "industrious and persistent," writes Vest, and has
"managed to weave a number of issues -- support for national missile
defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful
weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in
general -- into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its
core." 

On no issue, he points out is the organization’s "hard line more evident
than in its relentless campaign for war -- not just with Iraq, but
‘total war,’ as Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in
Washington, put it [in 2001]. For this crew, "’regime change’ by any
means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian
Authority is an urgent imperative." 56 

Interviewed for David Horowitz’s Front Page web site at the year’s end
Ledeen’s message had not changed. 

When asked about the Israel-Palestine conflict, Ledeen disingenuously
replied: 

"I don't follow it, as you know," then added that "I don't think it is
possible for anyone to do anything meaningful about it until we have
defeated the terror masters in Tehran, Damascus and Riyadh, because the
terrorism against Israel gets a lot of support from those evil people.
In other words, you can't solve it in situ, it's part of a regional war.
Maybe, once we have liberated the Middle East and the peoples have a
chance to make their own decisions, it will be easier." 57 

Those in government who dissent and who insist that differences may
exist between the security interests of the United States and those of
Israel can expect to be publicly trashed and called on the carpet by an
Israeli-friendly Congressional committee - whether it is Powell or
someone from the State Department, from the CIA or the military or
ex-military as in the case of General Zinni. 

If there was a single "smoking gun" that led to accusations against the
neocons that the attack on Iraq was a war for Israel, it was the
revelation that in 1996, Perle directed a task force that included two
other high ranking American Jewish neocons, current Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, senior adviser to John Bolton,
Under-Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, that
produced a white paper for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. It was entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing
the Realm" and the name referred to putting an end to Israel’s
negotiating with the Palestinians and the concept of trading land for
peace. 

The paper, which might have been lifted from JINSA’s web site, advocated
the overthrow by Israel of Saddam Hussein as the beginning of an Israeli
policy to redraw the map of the Middle East in Israel’s favor, a task
that is now, apparently being carried out by U.S. soldiers in Israel’s
behalf. This effort, it said, "can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from
power in Iraq... Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the
Middle East profoundly." 

"Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," said
the paper, which was commissioned by the Jerusalem-based Institute for
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), where Wurmser was
working at the time. Presumably Israel was to have a say as to who would
do the dominating. 

Well before 9-11 and before the junior Bush could even formulate the
thought, the paper called for "reestablishing the principle of
preemption." 

It didn’t stop there. "Israel can shape its strategic environment...by
weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria by sponsoring proxy
attacks in Lebanon and striking at selected targets in Syria. "Given the
nature of the regime in Damascus," the paper argued, "it is both natural
and moral that Israel abandon the slogan "comprehensive peace" and move
to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction
program, and rejecting "land for peace" deals on the Golan Heights." 

But what surely must raise the question of "dual loyalties," a charge
which quickly subjects the questioner to accusations of "anti-semitism"
from Jewish organizations are statements such as this that appear in the
text: 

"We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East. We in
Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.
Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes. We live in a
dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries.
Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish
state and the desire to annihilate it by trading 'land for peace'
will not secure 'peace now'. Our claim to the land -to which we
have clung for hope for 2000 years--is legitimate and noble. It is not
within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make
peace unilaterally. Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of
our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, 'peace
for peace', is a solid basis for the future." (Emphasis in original)
58 

In 1999, Wurmser would publish a book (with a foreword by Perle) called
"Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam 

Hussein." It provides a detailed description of a dramatically improved
Middle East, from the hawk point of view, after regime change in Iraq. 

With the invasion of Iraq, it became apparent to some in Israel, that
the U.S. had adopted the Clean Break crew’s agenda. Within a week of the
invasion, former Israeli Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, now his country’s
Defense Minister, was calling for the U.S. to neutralize all those
countries in the region with whom Israel had not signed a peace treaty.
59 

Two weeks later, Mofaz was still singing that tune, as Ha’aretz’s Brad
Burston wrote: 

"That while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took on Syria in an
oratorical shock and awe campaign this week, Israel gave signs of what
it would like to see Washington do to bring Damascus to heel, and what
the Jewish state could gain from the effort. The Americans have taken
out a 'yellow card' on them, and were right to do so." 60 

Mofaz was referring to a soccer referee's warning card for players who
have broken the rules of the game, and, if infractions continue, may be
expelled. 

According to Burston, Mofaz "set out a long list of demands he said the
[U.S.] administration would be asked to press on Syria." 

Mofaz’s statements attracted the attention of the Financial Times of
London which reported that even: "Before the war against Iraq was
launched, members of Israel's rightwing government had been open in
expressing their hope that the U.S. would next turn its attention to
Syria, saying it harbors anti-Israeli militant groups, and also to Iran,
for providing weapons and military support to such groups."
61 

The article quoted from an interview that Mofaz had given to the Israeli
daily Maariv in which he said, "We have a long list of issues that we
are thinking of demanding of the Syrians and it is proper that it should
be done through the Americans." 

"It starts from removing the Hezbollah threat from southern Lebanon."
and for "an end to Iranian aid to Hezbollah through Syrian ports." 

The headlines in the Israeli press made no effort to hide the
government’s agenda, nor the Sharon government’s arrogance in expressing
it. 

Mofaz was not just speaking for himself. Less than a month into the
invasion of Iraq, beneath the headline, "Israel to U.S.: Now deal with
Syria and Iran," Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn, wrote: 

"Two of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior aides will go to Washington
for separate talks this week and suggest that the United States also
take care of Iran and Syria because of their support for terror and
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction." 62 

They must have been buoyed when in the week following the invasion,
Secretary of State Powell announced to delegates at AIPAC’s annual
conference, that Syria and Iran are "supporting terror groups" and will
have to "face the consequences." 

Was it any wonder then that Israel’s first air raid on Syria in 30 years
was greeted sympathetically by both the president and members of
Congress? While "ostensibly, it was retaliation for an atrocious
Palestinian suicide bombing;" in journalist David Hirst’s view, "it was
also a blatant attempt by Israel to recast itself as an operational ally
of the U.S. in ‘reshaping’ the region, and in punishing an autocratic
regime in Damascus that, in the neocons’ view, was next for treatment."
63 

So it is hardly a surprise that 2004 dawned with Syria in Washington’s
cross-hairs. In what can only be described as a Pavlovian response to
Israel’s wish list, both houses of Congress last year approved the
Orwellian Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration
Act. 

While technically calling for the Bush administration to apply sanctions
against Syria if it does not cease support for what Israel and
Washington consider to be terrorist organizations, eliminate what they
allege to be its weapons of mass destruction, and end its occupation of
part of Lebanon, the act essentially gives both Israel and the
administration the go-ahead to do whatever either government wants to a
country that has never attacked or ever posed a threat to the U.S. The
votes, 389-4 in the House, and 89-4 in the Senate, should be an
embarrassment to any country that pretends to be a democracy. And yet in
the climate of an American election season, the significance of those
votes has been almost completely ignored. 

Not only did passage of this act represent another major victory for the
neocons it also served notice that their agenda had been adopted by the
leading American Jewish organizations. Those that had any questions
about it were content to keep them within the community. 

Without the presence of Cheney in the White House, the neocons’ road to
power would have been far more difficult, and this is where his
recruitment into JINSA paid off. 

In 1991, the organization had given him its "Distinguished Service
Award" and he was declared to be "excellent" on issues of U.S.-Israeli
security cooperation, according to JINSA’s director of special projects
Shoshana Bryen. 64 

If he was a neocon at the time, he failed to show it, telling the Senate
Budget Committee in February of 1990, "America should continue to anchor
its strategy to the still-valid doctrines of flexible response, forward
defense [and] security alliances... Even the extraordinary events of
1989 do not mean that America should abandon this strategic foundation,"
certainly a statement more Powell than Perle. 65 

By the time he became the Veep, however, he was firmly on board and
feeling impregnable. News of Wurmser’s participation in the Clean Break
project and questions raised in the press didn’t stop Cheney from adding
him to his security staff last September, joining a team led by another
Jewish neocon, national security adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. 

Wurmser, described in the Forward 66 as "a neoconservative
scholar known for his close ties to the Israeli right... boasts a
complex network of relationships to a variety of pro-Likud think tanks
and activist groups [and] has frequently written articles arguing for a
joint American-Israeli effort to undermine the Syrian regime." 

"The vice president undoubtedly chooses staff whose views are compatible
with the policies of the administration," wrote Judith Kipper, a Middle
East scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, in an e-mail to the
Forward. "The question is, how does the vice president's [national
security staff] function in relation to the president's national
security staff and how important policy decisions are made in the White
House. While the vice president has a critical role to play, the secrecy
surrounding his unusually large foreign-policy staff raises many
questions which the American public needs answered." 67 

To this date, they haven’t been. 

Not only did Cheney bring Wurmser as well as Feith into the
administration, "It was Cheney's choices [as opposed to Powell’s] that
prevailed in the appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet
national-security officials," as Jim Lobe has pointed out, including
securing the Deputy Defense Secretary position for "his own protégé,
Paul Wolfowitz. 68 

Libby, "a Wolfowitz protégé, is considered a far more skilled and
experienced bureaucratic and political operator than [Condaleeza]Rice,"
writes Lobe. "With several of his political allies on Rice's own staff -
including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Middle
East director Elliott Abrams - Libby "is able to run circles around
Condi," according to a former NSC official cited by Lobe. 

As former CIA agents Bill and Kathy Christison summed it, up "the Bush
administration... is peppered with people who have long records of
activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in
Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with
existing U.S. policy. These people, who can fairly be called Israeli
loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at
the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and
Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the
vice president's office." 69 

As noted earlier, Israel loyalists, outfitted as lobbyists, worked
behind the scenes to drum up public and Congressional support for the
first Gulf War and were happy when the U.S. started bombing Iraq in
1991. They weren’t pleased with the results. Like their friends in
Jerusalem, they had wanted Saddam taken out completely and the sanctions
did not meet their standard of what was required. They did not spend
their time writing letters to the editor. 

He has been called "Wolfowitz of Arabia" in jest by the New York Times’
Maureen Dowd, 70 and, with respect, "the intellectual
godfather of the war...its heart and soul" by Time’s Mark Thompson.
71 If the war on Iraq is anybody’s war it is Paul
Wolfowitz’s. 

Wolfowitz is also no stranger to Israel or to Israelis. As a teenager he
lived briefly in Israel, his sister is married to an Israeli, and "he is
friendly with Israel's generals and diplomats." 72 He is also
"something of a hero to the heavily Jewish neoconservative movement" and
a close friend of Perle’s. 73 

In 1992, as Under Secretary of Defense for policy in the Clinton
administration, he supervised the drafting of the Defense Policy
Guidance document. Having objected to what he considered the premature
ending of the war, his new document, contained plans for further
intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure "access to vital
raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.

It called for preemptive attacks and since "collective action cannot be
orchestrated," the U.S. should be ready to act alone. The primary goal
of U.S. policy would be to prevent the rise of any nation that could
challenge U.S. supremacy. The document was leaked to the New York Times,
which condemned it as extreme and it was supposed to have been
rewritten. As we will see, the original concepts are now part of the
current National Security Strategy. 74 

In 1996, as noted above, the scene shifted to Israel and we had Perle,
Feith and Wurmser preparing the Clean Break paper for Netanyahu when
Bush Junior was four years from arriving in office. 

Then in September of 2002, during the buildup to the invasion, the
Glasgow Sunday Herald reported that it had discovered "A secret
blueprint for U.S. global domination [which] reveals that President Bush
and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure
regime change even before he took power in January 2001." 75
What it was describing was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
and it even had a web site which spelled out its plans until they were
subsequently removed. That it was discovered by a Scottish newspaper was
another telling commentary on the state of American journalism. 

Founded in June of 1997, following the Clean Break by a year, part of
PNAC’s plan was for the U.S. to take control of the Gulf region with
overwhelming and deadly military force. "While the unresolved conflict
with Iraq provides the immediate justification," the PNAC document
explains, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
76 

As information about PNAC made its way slowly into the mainstream media,
ABC Nightline’s Ted Koppel could no longer avoid it. On March 5th, he
told his audience, that "Back in 1997, a group of Washington
heavyweights, almost all of them neo-conservatives, formed an
organization called the Project for the New American Century. 

They did what former government officials and politicians frequently do
when they're out of power, they began formulating a strategy, in this
case, a foreign policy strategy, that might bring influence to bear on
the administration then in power, headed by President Clinton. Or
failing that, on a new administration that might someday come to power. 

They were pushing for the elimination of Saddam Hussein. And proposing
the establishment of a strong U.S. military presence in the Persian
Gulf, linked to a willingness to use force to protect vital American
interests in the Gulf. 

All of that might be of purely academic interest were it not for the
fact that among the men behind that campaign were such names as, Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. What was, back in 1997,
merely a theory, is now, in 2003, U.S. policy. Hardly a conspiracy, the
proposal was out there for anyone to see. But certainly an interesting
case study of how columnists, commentators, and think-tank intellectuals
can, with time and the election of a sympathetic president, change the
course of American foreign policy." 

There was something different about this operation, however. Politicians
out of power may plot how to return to power, but this group was more
than that. It had been organized and was largely being run by the Jewish
neocons whose activities we have been following, plus neocon journalists
and neocon think-tank members with a long history of connections to the
Israeli right wing and whose faces and opinions dominate the TV screens
when issues of U.S foreign policy are under discussion. And as indicated
above it had the support of the leading American Jewish lobbying
organizations. 

Heading up PNAC was William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the
leading journal of the neocons and Robert Kagan, a columnist for the
magazine as well as for the Washington Post whose columns in the Post
and whose joint columns with Kristol in the Weekly Standard have
maintained a steady drumbeat for Washington to send more U.S. troops to
Iraq and keep to its original unilateralist position. 

Asked by Koppell if "part of the, larger vision that you and your
colleagues had, or have to this day, is the, removal, either by force or
otherwise, of the current power structure in Iran?," Kristol replied : 

"I think that would be great. I hope we can do it otherwise. And I think
we can do it otherwise than by force. I think getting, rid of Saddam
would help there. But, no, we will have to leave American troops in that
region, I think in Iraq for quite a while... It's a good investment. I
think it helps keep stability in the area. And it helps strengthen the
forces of freedom in the area..." 

In February of 1998, PNAC wanted to let President Clinton and the
American public know its position on Iraq, but since, despite Koppel’s
statement to the contrary, the group and its plans had not yet come to
the public’s attention, it used the letterhead of the Committee for
Peace and Security in the Gulf, a largely paper organization that had
been put together in 1990 "to support President Bush's policy of
expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait." It read, in part: 

"Seven years later, Saddam Hussein is still in power in Baghdad. And
despite his defeat in the Gulf War, continuing sanctions, and the
determined effort of UN inspectors to fetter out and destroy his weapons
of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein has been able to develop biological
and chemical munitions. To underscore the threat posed by these deadly
devices, the Secretaries of State and Defense have said that these
weapons could be used against our own people. And you have said that
this issue is about "the challenges of the 21st Century. 

Iraq's position is unacceptable. While Iraq is not unique in possessing
these weapons, it is the only country which has used them -- not just
against its enemies, but its own people as well. We must assume that
Saddam is prepared to use them again. This poses a danger to our
friends, our allies, and to our nation. 

It is clear that this danger cannot be eliminated as long as our
objective is simply "containment," and the means of achieving it are
limited to sanctions and exhortations... Saddam must be overpowered; he
will not be brought down by a coup d'etat..." 77 

The letter called on the president to "recognize a provisional
government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi
National Congress (INC) that is representative of all the peoples of
Iraq" (presumably incorporated in the person of their favorite, Ahmed
Chalabi)...and providing it with the "logistical support to succeed. 

The signatories acknowledged that: 

"In the present climate in Washington, some may misunderstand and
misinterpret strong American action against Iraq as having ulterior
political motives. (My emphasis). We believe, on the contrary, that
strong American action against Saddam is overwhelmingly in the national
interest, that it must be supported, and that it must succeed... We urge
you to provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves and the world
from the scourge of Saddam and the weapons of mass destruction that he
refuses to relinquish." 

Heading the list of over 40 signatures, and were its authors, Stephen
Solarz and Perle with the rest, beginning with Elliot Abrams, following
alphabetically. Among the others were both Feith and Wurmser, who at the
time was heading the Middle East desk at the American Enterprise
Institute. It included most of the board of JINSA and Wolfowitz, as well
as soon to be Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who must have become
aware of the direction in which the center of power was moving and what
opportunities it would provide. 

For those who believe the Iraq invasion was launched in Israel’s behalf,
Solarz could well compete with the Clean Break Three to be the war’s
poster-boy, given his record in Congress. 

Representing Brooklyn in 1980, Solarz sent a newsletter to his Jewish
constituents, headlined "Delivering for Israel," in which he boasted how
he was able to obtain an additional $660 million in aid for Israel under
difficult circumstances. "It is a story," in Solarz’s own words, "of how
legislative maneuvering and political persistence managed to prevail
over fiscal constraints and bureaucratic resistance." 

What were the "fiscal restraints?" Solarz acknowledged that it was "a
time of double digit inflation, with all sorts of domestic programs
facing severe cutbacks in spending." After describing the ins and outs
of his successful maneuvering, he reminded his constituents of his
devotion to Israel: 

When I was first elected to Congress six years ago (1974) I deliberately
sought an assignment on the Foreign Affairs Committee precisely because
I wanted to be in a position to be helpful to Israel... it is only the
members of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House, and the Foreign
Relations Committee in the Senate who are really in a position to make a
difference where it counts-in the area of foreign aid upon which Israel
is so dependent. 78 

For Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, PNAC assembled a book, edited by
Kristol and Kagan which seems to have been adopted as the agenda for the
Bush administration. It as entitled "Present Dangers: Crisis and
Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy" and among its
contributors were the now familiar names of Perle, Wolfowitz, and
Abrams. 79 

In his chapter on the Middle East, Abrams laid out the "peace through
strength" concept and argues that U.S. military strength and its
willingness to sue it will remain "a key factor in our ability to
promote peace." He called for a pre-emptive toppling of Saddam, as did
other contributors. 

"Strengthening our major ally in the region, Israel, should be the base
of U.S. Middle East policy," wrote Abrams, "and we should not permit the
establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold
U.S. policy in the region." 

In their introductory chapter, on Regime Change, Kristol and Kagan
selected Iraq, Iran, North Korea as well as China countries that needed
to be confronted. They concluded that the U.S. will have to intervene
abroad "even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed 'vital
interest' of the U.S. is at stake." 

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, two years earlier Kristol and
Kagan had argued that "Saddam Hussein must go" and to insure "that the
Iraqi leader never again uses weapons of mass destruction, the only way
to achieve that goal is to remove Mr. Hussein and his regime from
power." According to Kristol and Kagan, the air strikes carried out by
the Clinton administration under the "Iraq Liberation Act" were not
enough to protect "our interests." 80 Whose interests they
were referring to is open to question. 

As the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Camille Taiara put it, "These
interests were defined nine months later," when in another article in
the Weekly Standard entitled "A Way to Oust Saddam", Kagan cited those
incentives: the protection of "the safety of Israel, of modern Arab
states and of the energy resources on which the United States and its
allies depend." 81 

Ten days after the attack on the World Trade Center, an event that
conveniently met the description of a "Pearl Harbor like attack" that
PNAC said was needed to launch "the New American Century," the group
issued an open letter to President Bush. What he needed to do, the
letter said, was to take the anti-terror war beyond Afghanistan by
removing Saddam Hussein, breaking ties with the Palestinian Authority,
and to gear for action against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The
41 signatories on that letter included were largely the same as those
who signed the letter to Clinton three years earlier, minus those who
were now in the government. 

PNAC made no secret of its affinity for Israel. In a letter to Bush on
April 3, 2002, he was commended for his: 

"..strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in
the present campaign to fight terrorism...no one should doubt that the
U.S. and Israel share a common enemy. We are both targets of what you
have correctly called an 'Axis of Evil.' [a term coined by Canadian
Jewish neocon David Frum] Israel is targeted in part because it is our
friend, and in part because it is an island of liberal democratic
principles - American principles - in a sea of tyranny, intolerance and
hatred. As Secretary of State [sic] Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out,
Iran, Iraq and Syria are all engaged in 'inspiring and financing a
culture of political murder and suicide bombing' against Israel, just as
they have aided campaigns of terrorism against the U.S. over the past
two decades... 

...the U.S. should lend its full support to Israel as it seeks to root
out the terrorist network that daily threatens the lives of Israeli
citizens." 

The letter also urged Bush to accelerate plans for removing Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq. It had 34 signatories including the familiar
neocons such as Perle, but this time there was the name of Norman
Podhoretz, one of the godfathers of the movement. Also signing were
Reagan appointee Ken Adelman, Kagan, Daniel Pipes, and former CIA
director Woolsey. 

That letter came at a particularly critical moment as the Sharon
government was receiving widespread international criticism for the
Israeli army’s barbarous assault on the Palestinian refugee camp of
Jenin and its destruction of the old city of Nablus. Under pressure from
US allies, Bush was compelled to tell the Israeli prime minister,
"Enough is enough" and to withdraw his troops. 82 The PNAC
letter, however, combined with critical columns from long time
Republican mainstays, William Safire and George Will, led the president
to back down and to describe Sharon as "a man of peace" despite the
prime minister’s refusal to pull out his forces. 83 

The last document in the neocons theoretical armor during the
pre-assault period was "The National Security Strategy of the United
States of America." "Wolfowitz's influence has been felt most keenly in
President Bush's report" on the security strategy wrote Murray Friedman
in the Forward. The report which was released on September 17, 2002 

in tone, specificity and gravity... echoes Wolfowitz's controversial
recommendations in a 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" draft leaked to
the press and disavowed by the first Bush administration. 

As Friedman admiringly describes it, 

The national security strategy introduces as a primary tool and policy
preemptory strikes, with international support when possible but without
it when necessary. It carefully lays out the legal basis for preemption.

The document unabashedly calls for American hegemony but simultaneously
has a Wilsonian flavor in seeking to make this country a resource for
human freedom in the world. The document clearly pulls out all the stops
on the neoconservative internationalist argument from the days when it
was first formulated. 84 

By then the neocons had already gone beyond putting words on paper. In
the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team in January
2001 after the president took the oath of office, Wolfowitz, the newly
appointed deputy secretary of Defense reportedly raised the issue of
invading Iraq, and officials all the way down the line started to get
the message. 

In the days immediately following 9/11,as if it was preplanned,
Wolfowitz quietly initiated a new operation in the Pentagon that was
designated the Office of Special Plans (OSP). As exposed by Seymour
Hersh, the group of policy advisers and analysts called themselves,
"self-mockingly, the Cabal." 85 

Their goal was to produce "a skein of intelligence reviews that would
help "to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq." While
using data gathered by other intelligence agencies they heavily weighted
information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group
headed by Ahmad Chalabi, now of the leading power brokers in the
American-appointed "Iraqi Governing Council". 

By the Fall of 2002, the operation rivaled the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s
own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main
source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons
of mass destruction and connection with Al Queda. 

The director of the Special Plans operation is another neocon Abraham
Shulsky, who Hersh describes as "a scholarly expert in the works of the
political philosopher Leo Strauss." Shulsky had spent three decades
working in the government on foreign policy issues, including a stint in
the early Eighties under Perle in the Reagan Administration. 

The overall chief of the OSP is Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti,
a retired Navy captain who was also an early advocate of military action
against Iraq. 

Besides convincing the public that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction, a critical task of the neocons was to convince the American
public that there was a link between Al Queda and Saddam. Their
colleagues among the nation’s major syndicated columnists such as
Safire, Will, Tom Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby, and Paul
Greenberg were all too willing accomplices. By the time, the U.S.
launched its invasion, more than half of the public was convinced that
Saddam had been behind the attacks. 

Typical was the comment of the New York Times’ Safire, who frequently
brags of his close friendship with Sharon. Criticizing Powell for saying
that "President Bush ‘has not worked out what he might do in later
stages,’", Safire wrote, just two weeks after 9/11, "Now is the time to
work out how to strike down terrorism’s boss of all bosses. "’Later’ may
be a stage too late." 86 

When they weren’t writing, these longtime supporters of Israel and the
government neocons became the talking heads for warmongering pro-Israel
hosts of CNN, Fox News, as well as ABC, CBS and NBC. Under this
onslaught the critics would eventually be submerged. 

Israel’s vaunted intelligence service, meanwhile, was doing its part,
according to reports that appeared in the world press in December. 

"Israel was a "full partner" in U.S. and British intelligence failures
that exaggerated former president Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons programs before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq," the
Washington Post’s Molly Moore reported from Jerusalem. 87 

"The failures of this war indicate weaknesses and inherent flaws within
Israeli intelligence and among Israeli decision-makers," Brig. Gen.
Shlomo Brom wrote in an analysis for Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center
for Strategic Studies. 

Brom, a former deputy commander of the Israeli military's planning
division accused Israeli intelligence services and political leaders of
providing "an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities," raising
"the possibility that the intelligence picture was manipulated." 

The report did not pull its punches. "A critical question to be answered
is whether governmental bodies falsely manipulated the intelligence
information in order to gain support for their decision to go to war in
Iraq, while the real reasons for this decision were obfuscated or
concealed." 88. 

Did that report feed into the opinion of Israeli officials regarding the
U.S. going to war? 

On August 17, 2002, Fox News presented an example of the "big lie" that
General Brom was referring to when it reported that: "Israeli
intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up
efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons". 

Fox News also quoted Ranaan Gissin, a long time adviser to Prime
Minister Sharon who told the notoriously pro-Israel network that "Any
postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose.
It will only give him [Saddam] more of an opportunity to accelerate his
program of weapons of mass destruction." 

"As evidence of Iraq's weapons building activities," Fox reported,
"Israel points to an order Saddam gave to Iraq's Atomic Energy
Commission last week to speed up its work." 

The network presented no evidence presented to back up what was an
apparent fabrication. 

Was this a war fought by the U.S. for Israel? 

On March, a week before the invasion, Chemi Shalev reported in the
Forward that "Most senior strategists here believe Israel would emerge
in a stronger position after a war. A changed regime in Baghdad is
widely expected to create new opportunities for Israel vis-à-vis the
Palestinians... Israeli intelligence officials, in both the Mossad and
Military Intelligence, believe a quick and decisive American victory
against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would send positive shock-waves
throughout the East, convincing hard-line and terrorist-supporting
regimes to mend their ways for the better." 89 

A year later, those assessments have proved to be more accurate than
were their assessments of Saddam’s inventory of WMDs. And they have paid
off. 

"With the assault on Iraq," wrote the distinguished historian, David
Hirst, " the U.S. was not merely adopting Israel’s long-established
methods-of initiative, offense and pre-emption-it was also adopting
Israel’s adversaries as its own... 

"To where this Israel-American, neo-conservative blueprint for the
Middle East will lead is impossible to forecast. What can be said for
sure is that it could easily turn out to be as calamitous in its
consequences for the region, America and Israel, as it is preposterously
partisan in motivation, fantastically ambitious in design and terribly
risky in practice." 90 

One immediate and invaluable benefit for Israel was to have the army of
its primary benefactor become a fellow occupier of Arab land and to have
turned to Israel for instructions on how to suppress the armed
resistance to its presence. 91 The effect of this was
predictable. As the Israel’s occupying forces escalated their attacks on
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, even the usual token slap on the
wrist by U.S. officials was missing. 

Well before the end of the year American forces were blowing up the
homes of suspected "terrorists," bombing some from the air and
bulldozing others to obtain clear "fields of fire." Their checkpoints in
the Sunni area were identical to their Israeli counterparts and by the
end of the year, the US was already holding more than 9,000 Iraqis in
detention. Moreover, following the pattern of the Israelis, they had set
up assassination teams to target resistance leaders. 92 

While the neocons were convinced that both the war and the occupation
would be relatively risk free, it is likely that the Sharon and his
military cadre were aware that with or without Saddam, segments of the
Iraqi public would resist the occupation. Was getting the US mired down
in Iraq one of their goals? Perhaps, and it seemed as the first
anniversary of the war approached as well as the 2004 election season,
that President Bush, at least, was beginning to have second thoughts. 

"It may take four or five months to take shape," wrote Jim Lobe, "but a
new scenario could be unfolding, a shifting balance of power within the
Bush administration, a reconfiguration in the interests of realism - and
aimed at a Bush re-election victory." 93 

The first sign of what appeared to be a shift in Bush’s thinking was the
appointment of James Baker, Secretary of State in his father’s
administration and a long-time family friend, to be his personal envoy
to the nations holding Iraq’s massive debt. Assigned to the goal of
persuading them to forgive the tens of billions of dollars owed by
Saddam’s regime, Baker immediately found himself sabotaged by Wolfowitz
who declared that the allies that are owed most of that debt would not
be permitted to bid on the US$18.6 billion in reconstruction contracts
since they had opposed the US war effort. 

That Wolfowitz’s policy was soon watered down was an indication that the
neocons influence, at least for the moment, was waning. Ironically,
being named the Jerusalem Post’s Man of the Year for 2003, 94
may have been his last hurrah. 

How much Baker will become involved in other aspects of the
administration’s agenda remains to be seen, but as Lobe pointed out,
"the fact that he is now in the White House 

and dealing directly with all of Washington's major allies in Europe,
Asia and the Middle East on the future of Iraq, if not the entire
region, places him in the thick of the administration's foreign policy,
to put it mildly. From now on, very little is likely to be decided on
anything 

that affects Iraq or US alliances without his input." 95 

If true, this is not good news for either the neocons or Israel. Like
most of the officials of the first Bush administration, Baker opposed
the present Gulf War, believing it would destabilize the oil-rich
region, but more than that, his relations with Israel and the Israel
lobby while Secretary of State were, at times, openly
hostile.96 

Even without the appointment of Baker, the neocons were taking nothing
for granted. In January, Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum
came out with a book, appropriately entitled, "An End to Evil: How to
Win the War on Terror" 97 which calls for duplicating the
Iraq experience, if necessary, anywhere on the globe but with a
particular focus on Syria, Iran and Hizbollah which, as we have seen,
just happens to match Israel’s enemies list. For good measure, they are
against a Palestinian state. 

A press release for the book claims that it "will define the
conservative point of view [they don’t like the term, neo-cons] on
foreign policy for a new generation - and shape the agenda for the 2004
presidential-election year and beyond." 

The younger Bush has an affinity to Baker, who helped him secure
Florida's electoral votes in 2000 following the state’s contested
balloting, but he also is aware of what happened to his father in 1992
when, backed by Baker, the senior Bush boldly challenged Israel and the
lobby over Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, which
many observers believe may have cost him the election.98 

Given that background, the contest of wills within the Bush
administration in the coming months may be at least as interesting, and,
perhaps, as significant as the 2004 election itself. 

If the past is prologue, however, expect the lobby to come out on top. 

jblankfort@earthlink.net