A Rose By Another Other Name
The Bush
Administration's Dual Loyalties
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
former CIA political analysts
CounterPunch, December 13, 2002
Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's Middle
East
policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists, U.S. policy on
Israel and
the Arab world has increasingly become the purview of officials well
known
for tilting toward Israel. From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists,
who
had a personal history and an educational background in the Arab
world and
were accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward
Arab
interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite having
limited
power in the policymaking circles of any administration, helped
maintain
some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy from tipping over
totally
toward Israel. But Arabists have been steadily replaced by their
exact
opposites, what some observers are calling Israelists, and
policymaking
circles throughout government now no longer even make a pretense
of
exhibiting balance between Israeli and Arab, particularly
Palestinian,
interests.
In the Clinton administration, the three most senior State
Department
officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were
all
partisans of Israel to one degree or another. All had lived at least
for
brief periods in Israel and maintained ties with Israel while in
office,
occasionally vacationing there. One of these officials had worked
both as a
pro-Israel lobbyist and as director of a pro-Israel think tank in
Washington before taking a position in the Clinton administration
from
which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli issues. Another
has
headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving government.
The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and
policymaking
circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush
administration, which 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.
We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write
articles
about the neo-conservatives' agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and
imply
that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the
two
countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media.
We make
wry jokes about Congress being "Israeli-occupied territory." Jason
Vest in
The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think
tanks that
hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between
U.S.
and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce
the
particular words that best describe the real meaning of those
observations
and wry remarks. It's time, however, that we say the words out loud
and
deal with what they really signify.
Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush
administration is
dual loyalties-the double allegiance of those myriad officials at
high and
middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli
interests,
who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the
United
States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice
to
right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to
a
right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up
in
their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know
whether
their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated
primarily
by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a
desire
to secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through
the
advancement of the U.S. imperium.
"Dual loyalties" has always been one of those red flags posted around
the
subject of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that
induces
horrified gasps and rapid heartbeats because of its implication of
Jewish
disloyalty to the United States and the common assumption that anyone
who
would speak such a canard is ipso facto an anti-Semite. (We have a
Jewish
friend who is not bothered by the term in the least, who believes
that U.S.
and Israeli interests should be identical and sees it as perfectly
natural
for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to
the
United States. But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the
subject
of dual loyalties arises.)
Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the
Bush
administration, the treatment of the their ties to Israel has
generally
been very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about
the fact
that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has
been
on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush
administration,
little has been said about the link between this goal and the
neo-cons'
overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an
examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration
policymaking
circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel
activists,
and an examination of the neo-cons' voluminous written record shows
that
Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always
mentioned
with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy,
always
linked with the United States when national interests are at
issue.
The Begats
First to the cast of characters. Beneath cabinet level, the list
of
pro-Israel neo-cons who are either policy functionaries themselves
or
advise policymakers from perches just on the edges of government
reads like
the old biblical "begats." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
leads
the pack. He was a protégé of Richard Perle, who heads
the prominent
Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Policy Board. Many of today's
neo-cons,
including Perle, are the intellectual progeny of the late Senator
Henry
"Scoop" Jackson, a strong defense hawk and one of Israel's most
strident
congressional supporters in the 1970s.
Wolfowitz in turn is the mentor of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now
Vice
President Cheney's chief of staff who was first a student of
Wolfowitz and
later a subordinate during the 1980s in both the State and the
Defense
Departments. Another Perle protégé is Douglas Feith,
who is currently
undersecretary of defense for policy, the department's number-three
man,
and has worked closely with Perle both as a lobbyist for Turkey and
in
co-authoring strategy papers for right-wing Israeli governments.
Assistant
Secretaries Peter Rodman and Dov Zachkeim, old hands from the
Reagan
administration when the neo-cons first flourished, fill out the
subcabinet
ranks at Defense. At lower levels, the Israel and the Syria/Lebanon
desk
officers at Defense are imports from the Washington Institute for
Near East
Policy, a think tank spun off from the pro-Israel lobby organization,
AIPAC.
Neo-cons have not made many inroads at the State Department, except
for
John Bolton, an American Enterprise Institute hawk and Israeli
proponent
who is said to have been forced on a reluctant Colin Powell as
undersecretary for arms control. Bolton's special assistant is
David
Wurmser, who wrote and/or co-authored with Perle and Feith at least
two
strategy papers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996.
Wurmser's
wife, Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the media-watch website
MEMRI
(Middle East Media Research Institute), which is run by retired
Israeli
military and intelligence officers and specializes in translating
and
widely circulating Arab media and statements by Arab leaders. A
recent
investigation by the Guardian of London found that MEMRI's
translations are
skewed by being highly selective. Although it inevitably translates
and
circulates the most extreme of Arab statements, it ignores moderate
Arab
commentary and extremist Hebrew statements.
In the vice president's office, Cheney has established his own
personal
national security staff, run by aides known to be very pro-Israel.
The
deputy director of the staff, John Hannah, is a former fellow of
the
Israeli-oriented Washington Institute. On the National Security
Council
staff, the newly appointed director of Middle East affairs is
Elliott
Abrams, who came to prominence after pleading guilty to
withholding
information from Congress during the Iran-contra scandal (and was
pardoned
by President Bush the elder) and who has long been a vocal proponent
of
right-wing Israeli positions. Putting him in a key policymaking
position on
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is like entrusting the henhouse to a
fox.
Pro-Israel activists with close links to the administration are also
busy
in the information arena inside and outside government. The head of
Radio
Liberty, a Cold War propaganda holdover now converted to service in
the
"war on terror," is Thomas Dine, who was the very active head of
AIPAC
throughout most of the Reagan and the Bush-41 administrations.
Elsewhere on
the periphery, William Kristol, son of neo-con originals Irving
Kristol and
Gertrude Himmelfarb, is closely linked to the administration's
pro-Israel
coterie and serves as its cheerleader through the Rupert
Murdoch-owned
magazine that he edits, The Weekly Standard. Some of Bush's
speechwriters -
including David Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" for
Bush's
state-of-the-union address but was forced to resign when his wife
publicly
bragged about his linguistic prowess - have come from The Weekly
Standard.
Frank Gaffney, another Jackson and Perle protégé and
Reagan administration
defense official, puts his pro-Israel oar in from his think tank,
the
Center for Security Policy, and through frequent media appearances
and
regular columns in the Washington Times.
The incestuous nature of the proliferating boards and think tanks,
whose
membership lists are more or less identical and totally
interchangeable, is
frighteningly insidious. Several scholars at the American
Enterprise
Institute, including former Reagan UN ambassador and long-time
supporter of
the Israeli right wing Jeane Kirkpatrick, make their pro-Israel views
known
vocally from the sidelines and occupy positions on other boards.
Probably
the most important organization, in terms of its influence on
Bush
administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute for
National
Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war
specifically to bring Israel's security concerns to the attention of
U.S.
policymakers and concentrating also on broad defense issues, the
extremely
hawkish, right-wing JINSA has always had a high-powered board able to
place
its members inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton,
and
Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration.
Several
lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the Defense
Department.
Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick, former CIA director
and
leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey, and old-time rabid pro-Israel
types
like Eugene Rostow and Michael Ledeen. Both JINSA and Gaffney's
Center for
Security Policy are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a
right-wing
American Zionist, California business magnate (his money comes from
bingo
parlors), and JINSA board member who has lavishly financed the
establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East
Jerusalem.
By Their Own Testimony
Most of the neo-cons now in government have left a long paper trail
giving
clear evidence of their fervently right-wing pro-Israel, and
fervently
anti-Palestinian, sentiments. Whether being pro-Israel, even pro
right-wing
Israel, constitutes having dual loyalties, - that is a desire to
further
Israel's interests that equals or exceeds the desire to further
U.S.
interests, -is obviously not easy to determine, but the record
gives some
clues.
Wolfowitz himself has been circumspect in public, writing primarily
about
broader strategic issues rather than about Israel specifically or
even the
Middle East, but it is clear that at bottom Israel is a major
interest and
may be the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort,
of
which he is the primary spearhead, to dump Saddam Hussein, remake the
Iraqi
government in an American image, and then further redraw the Middle
East
map by accomplishing the same goals in Syria, Iran, and perhaps
other
countries. Profiles of Wolfowitz paint him as having two distinct
aspects:
one obessively bent on advancing U.S. dominance throughout the
world,
ruthless and uncompromising, seriously prepared to "end states," as
he once
put it, that support terrorism in any way, a velociraptor in the
words of
one former colleague cited in the Economist; the other a softer
aspect,
which shows him to be a soft-spoken political moralist, an ardent
democrat,
even a bleeding heart on social issues, and desirous for purely moral
and
humanitarian reasons of modernizing and democratizing the Islamic
world.
But his interest in Israel always crops up. Even profiles that
downplay his
attachment to Israel nonetheless always mention the influence the
Holocaust, in which several of his family perished, has had on
his
thinking. One source inside the administration has described him
frankly as
"over-the-top crazy when it comes to Israel." Although this
probably
accurately describes most of the rest of the neo-con coterie, and
Wolfowitz
is guilty at least by association, he is actually more complex and
nuanced
than this. A recent New York Times Magazine profile by the Times'
Bill
Keller cites critics who say that "Israel exercises a powerful
gravitational pull on the man" and notes that as a teenager Wolfowitz
lived
in Israel during his mathematician father's sabbatical semester
there. His
sister is married to an Israeli. Keller even somewhat reluctantly
acknowledges the accuracy of one characterization of Wolfowitz as
"Israel-centric." But Keller goes through considerable contortions to
shun
what he calls "the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty" and in the
process
makes one wonder if he is protesting too much. Keller concludes
that
Wolfowitz is less animated by the security of Israel than by the
promise of
a more moderate Islam. He cites as evidence Wolfowitz's admiration
for
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel and also
draws
on a former Wolfowitz subordinate who says that "as a moral man, he
might
have found Israel the heart of the Middle East story. But as a
policy
maker, Turkey and the gulf and Egypt didn't loom any less large for
him."
These remarks are revealing. Anyone not so fearful of broaching the
issue
of dual loyalties might at least have raised the suggestion that
Wolfowitz's real concern may indeed be to ensure Israel's
security.
Otherwise, why do his overriding interests seem to be reinventing
Anwar
Sadats throughout the Middle East by transforming the Arab and
Muslim
worlds and thereby making life safer for Israel, and a passion for
fighting
a pre-emptive war against Iraq - when there are critical areas
totally
apart from the Middle East and myriad other broad strategic issues
that any
deputy secretary of defense should be thinking about just as much?
His
current interest in Turkey, which is shared by the other neo-cons,
some of
whom have served as lobbyists for Turkey, seems also to be directed
at
securing Israel's place in the region; there seems little reason
for
particular interest in this moderate Islamic, non-Arab country, other
than
that it is a moderate Islamic but non-Arab neighbor of Israel.
Furthermore, the notion suggested by the Wolfowitz subordinate that
any
moral man would obviously look to Israel as the "heart of the Middle
East
story" is itself an Israel-centered idea: the assumption that Israel
is a
moral state, always pursuing moral policies, and that any moral
person
would naturally attach himself to Israel automatically presumes that
there
is an identity of interests between the United States and Israel;
only
those who assume such a complete coincidence of interests accept the
notion
that Israel is, across the board, a moral state.
Others among the neo-con policymakers have been more direct and open
in
expressing their pro-Israel views. Douglas Feith has been the most
prolific
of the group, with a two-decade-long record of policy papers,
many
co-authored with Perle, propounding a strongly anti-Palestinian,
pro-Likud
view. He views the Palestinians as not constituting a legitimate
national
group, believes that the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel by
right, and
has long advocated that the U.S. abandon any mediating effort
altogether
and particularly foreswear the land-for-peace formula.
In 1996, Feith, Perle, and both David and Meyrav Wurmser were among
the
authors of a policy paper issued by an Israeli think tank and written
for
newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that urged Israel to
make a
"clean break" from pursuit of the peace process, particularly its
land-for-peace aspects, which the authors regarded as a prescription
for
Israel's annihilation. Arabs must rather accept a "peace-for-peace"
formula
through unconditional acceptance of Israel's rights, including
its
territorial rights in the occupied territories. The paper advocated
that
Israel "engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism" by
disengaging
from economic and political dependence on the U.S. while maintaining
a more
"mature," self-reliant partnership with the U.S. not focused
"narrowly on
territorial disputes." Greater self-reliance would, these
freelance
policymakers told Netanyahu, give Israel "greater freedom of action
and
remove a significant lever of pressure [i.e., U.S. pressure]
used against
it in the past."
The paper advocated, even as far back as 1996, containment of the
threat
against Israel by working closely with -- guess who? -
Turkey, as well as
with Jordan, apparently regarded as the only reliably moderate Arab
regime.
Jordan had become attractive for these strategists because it was at
the
time working with opposition elements in Iraq to reestablish a
Hashemite
monarchy there that would have been allied by blood lines and
political
leanings to the Hashemite throne in Jordan. The paper's authors saw
the
principal threat to Israel coming, we should not be surprised to
discover
now, from Iraq and Syria and advised that focusing on the removal of
Saddam
Hussein would kill two birds with one stone by also thwarting
Syria's
regional ambitions. In what amounts to a prelude to the neo-cons'
principal
policy thrust in the Bush administration, the paper spoke frankly
of
Israel's interest in overturning the Iraqi leadership and replacing
it with
a malleable monarchy. Referring to Saddam Hussein's ouster as "an
important
Israeli strategic objective," the paper observed that "Iraq's future
could
affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly" -
meaning give
Israel unquestioned predominance in the region. The authors urged
therefore
that Israel support the Hashemites in their "efforts to redefine
Iraq."
In a much longer policy document written at about the same time for
the
same Israeli think tank, David Wurmser repeatedly linked the U.S.
and
Israel when talking about national interests in the Middle East.
The
"battle to dominate and define Iraq," he wrote "is, by extension,
the
battle to dominate the balance of power in the Levant over the long
run,"
and "the United States and Israel" can fight this battle together.
Repeated
references to U.S. and Israeli strategic policy, pitted against a
"Saudi-Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-PLO axis," and to strategic moves
that
establish a balance of power in which the United States and Israel
are
ascendant, in alliance with Turkey and Jordan, betray a thought
process
that cannot separate U.S. from Israeli interests.
Perle gave further impetus to this thrust when six years later,
in
September 2002, he gave a briefing for Pentagon officials that
included a
slide depicting a recommended strategic goal for the U.S. in the
Middle
East: all of Palestine as Israel, Jordan as Palestine, and Iraq as
the
Hashemite kingdom. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seems to have taken
this
aboard, since he spoke at about the same time of the West Bank and
Gaza as
the "so-called occupied territories" - effectively turning all
of Palestine
into Israel.
Elliott Abrams is another unabashed supporter of the Israeli right,
now
bringing his links with Israel into the service of U.S. policymaking
on
Palestinian-Israeli issues. The neo-con community is crowing about
Abrams'
appointment as Middle East director on the NSC staff (where this
Iran-contra criminal has already been working since mid-2001, badly
miscast
as the director for, of all things, democracy and human rights). The
Weekly
Standard's Fred Barnes has hailed his appointment as a decisive move
that
neatly cocks a snook at the pro-Palestinian wimps at the State
Department.
Accurately characterizing Abrams as "more pro-Israel, less solicitous
of
Palestinians" than the State Department and strongly opposed to
the
Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Barnes gloats that the Abrams
triumph
signals that the White House will not cede control of Middle East
policy to
Colin Powell and the "foreign service bureaucrats." Abrams comes to
the
post after a year in which it had effectively been left vacant.
His
predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been serving concurrently as
Bush's
personal representative to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban
and
has devoted little time to the NSC job, but several attempts to
appoint a
successor early this year were vetoed by neo-con hawks who felt
the
appointees were not devoted enough to Israel.
Although Abrams has no particular Middle East expertise, he has
managed to
insert himself in the Middle East debate repeatedly over the years.
He has
a family interest in propounding a pro-Israel view; he is the
son-in-law of
Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neo-cons and a long-time
strident
supporter of right-wing Israeli causes as editor of Commentary
magazine,
and Midge Decter, a frequent right-wing commentator. Abrams has
written a
good deal on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, opposing U.S.
mediation and
any effort to press for Israeli concessions. In an article published
in
advance of the 2000 elections, he propounded a rationale for a U.S.
missile
defense system, and a foreign policy agenda in general, geared
almost
entirely toward ensuring Israel's security. "It is a simple fact,"
he
wrote, that the possession of missiles and weapons of mass
destruction by
Iraq and Iran vastly increases Israel's vulnerability, and this
threat
would be greatly diminished if the U.S. provided a missile shield
and
brought about the demise of Saddam Hussein. He concluded with a
wholehearted assertion of the identity of U.S. and Israeli interests:
"The
next decade will present enormous opportunities to advance
American
interests in the Middle East [by] boldly asserting our
support of our
friends" - that is, of course, Israel. Many of the fundamental
negotiating
issues critical to Israel, he said, are also critical to U.S. policy
in the
region and "require the United States to defend its interests and
allies"
rather than giving in to Palestinian demands.
Neo-cons in the Henhouse
The neo-con strategy papers half a dozen years ago were dotted
with
concepts like "redefining Iraq," "redrawing the map of the Middle
East,"
"nurturing alternatives to Arafat," all of which have in recent
months
become familiar parts of the Bush administration's diplomatic
lingo.
Objectives laid out in these papers as important strategic goals for
Israel
-- including the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the strategic
transformation of
the entire Middle East, the death of the Palestinian-Israeli peace
process,
regime change wherever the U.S. and Israel don't happen to like
the
existing government, the abandonment of any effort to forge a
comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace or even a narrower Palestinian-Israeli peace
-- have now
become, under the guidance of this group of pro-Israel neo-cons,
important
strategic goals for the United States. The enthusiasm with which
senior
administration officials like Bush himself, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
have
adopted strategic themes - originally defined for Israel's guidance
-and
did so in many cases well before September 11 and the so-called war
on
terror -- testifies to the persuasiveness of a neo-con
philosophy focused
narrowly on Israel and the pervasiveness of the network
throughout
policymaking councils.
Does all this add up to dual loyalties to Israel and the United
States?
Many would still contend indignantly that it does not, and that it
is
anti-Semitic to suggest such a thing. In fact, zealous advocacy of
Israel's
causes may be just that -- zealotry, an emotional connection to
Israel that
still leaves room for primary loyalty to the United States --
and affection
for Israel is not in any case a sentiment limited to Jews. But
passion and
emotion -- and, as George Washington wisely advised, a
passionate
attachment to any country -- have no place in foreign policy
formulation,
and it is mere hair-splitting to suggest that a passionate attachment
to
another country is not loyalty to that country. Zealotry clouds
judgment,
and emotion should never be the basis for policymaking.
Zealotry can lead to extreme actions to sustain policies, as is
apparently
occurring in the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith Defense Department.
People
knowledgeable of the intelligence community have said, according to
a
recent article in The American Prospect, that the CIA is under
tremendous
pressure to produce intelligence more supportive of war with Iraq
-- as one
former CIA official put it, "to support policies that have already
been
adopted." Key Defense Department officials, including Feith, are said
to be
attempting to make the case for pre-emptive war by producing their
own
unverified intelligence. Wolfowitz betrayed his lack of concern for
real
evidence when, in answer to a recent question about where the
evidence is
for Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, he replied,
"It's
like the judge said about pornography. I can't define it, but I will
know
it when I see it."
Zealotry can also lead to a myopic focus on the wrong issues in a
conflict
or crisis, as is occurring among all Bush policymakers with regard to
the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The administration's obsessive focus
on
deposing Yasir Arafat, a policy suggested by the neo-cons years
before Bush
came to office, is a dodge and a diversion that merely perpetuates
the
conflict by failing to address its real roots. Advocates of this
policy
fail or refuse to see that, however unappealing the Palestinian
leadership,
it is not the cause of the conflict, and "regime change" among
the
Palestinians will do nothing to end the violence. The
administration's
utter refusal to engage in any mediation process that might produce
a
stable, equitable peace, also a neo-con strategy based on the
paranoid
belief that any peace involving territorial compromise will spell
the
annihilation of Israel, will also merely prolong the violence.
Zealotry
produces blindness: the zealous effort to pursue Israel's right-wing
agenda
has blinded the dual loyalists in the administration to the true face
of
Israel as occupier, to any concern for justice or equity and any
consideration that interests other than Israel's are involved, and
indeed
to any pragmatic consideration that continued unquestioning
accommodation
of Israel, far from bringing an end to violence, will actually lead
to its
tragic escalation and to increased terrorism against both the United
States
and Israel.
What does it matter, in the end, if these men split their loyalties
between
the United States and Israel? Apart from the evidence of the
policy
distortions that arise from zealotry, one need only ask whether it
can be
mere coincidence that those in the Bush administration who most
strongly
promote "regime change" in Iraq are also those who most strongly
support
the policies of the Israeli right wing. And would it bother most
Americans
to know that the United States is planning a war against Iraq for
the
benefit of Israel? Can it be mere coincidence, for example, that
Vice
President Cheney, now the leading senior-level proponent of war with
Iraq,
repudiated just this option for all the right reasons in the
immediate
aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991? He was defense secretary at the
time,
and in an interview with the New York Times on April 13, 1991, he
said:
"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have
to go
to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you will do
with
it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of
the
one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a
Sunni
regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Ba'athists,
or one
that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists. How much credibility
is that
government going to have if it's set up by the United States military
when
it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay
to
protect the people that sign on for the government, and what happens
to it
once we leave?"
Since Cheney clearly changed his mind between 1991 and today, is it
not
legitimate to ask why, and whether Israel might have a greater
influence
over U.S. foreign policy now than it had in 1991? After all,
notwithstanding his wisdom in rejecting an expansion of the war on
Iraq a
decade ago, Cheney was just as interested in promoting U.S.
imperialism and
was at that same moment in the early 1990s outlining a plan for
world
domination by the United States, one that did not include conquering
Iraq
at any point along the way. The only new ingredient in the mix today
that
is inducing Cheney to begin the march to U.S. world domination by
conquering Iraq is the presence in the Bush-Cheney administration of
a bevy
of aggressive right-wing neo-con hawks who have long backed the
Jewish
fundamentalists of Israel's own right wing and who have been
advocating
some move on Iraq for at least the last half dozen years?
The suggestion that the war with Iraq is being planned at Israel's
behest,
or at the instigation of policymakers whose main motivation is trying
to
create a secure environment for Israel, is strong. Many Israeli
analysts
believe this. The Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar recently observed
frankly
in a Ha'aretz column that Perle, Feith, and their fellow strategists
"are
walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments
and
Israeli interests." The suggestion of dual loyalties is not a
verboten
subject in the Israeli press, as it is in the United States. Peace
activist
Uri Avnery, who knows Israeli Prime Minister Sharon well, has written
that
Sharon has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring the
Middle East
and that "the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon. I
have
absolutely no proof that the Bushies got their ideas from him . But
the
style is the same."
The dual loyalists in the Bush administration have given added
impetus to
the growth of a messianic strain of Christian fundamentalism that
has
allied itself with Israel in preparation for the so-called End of
Days.
These crazed fundamentalists see Israel's domination over all of
Palestine
as a necessary step toward fulfillment of the biblical Millennium,
consider
any Israeli relinquishment of territory in Palestine as a sacrilege,
and
view warfare between Jews and Arabs as a divinely ordained prelude
to
Armageddon. These right-wing Christian extremists have a profound
influence
on Bush and his administration, with the result that the Jewish
fundamentalists working for the perpetuation of Israel's domination
in
Palestine and the Christian fundamentalists working for the
Millennium
strengthen and reinforce each other's policies in administration
councils.
The Armageddon that Christian Zionists seem to be actively promoting
and
that Israeli loyalists inside the administration have tactically
allied
themselves with raises the horrifying but very real prospect of
an
apocalyptic Christian-Islamic war. The neo-cons seem unconcerned,
and
Bush's occasional pro forma remonstrations against blaming all Islam
for
the sins of Islamic extremists do nothing to make this prospect less
likely.
These two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have
dovetailed
into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle
East,
all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil
resources up
for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil.
All
of these factors -- the dual loyalties of an extensive network
of
policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing
of
Christian fundamentalists, and oil -- probably factor in more or
less
equally to the administration's calculations on the
Palestinian-Israeli
situation and on war with Iraq. But the most critical factor
directing U.S.
policymaking is the group of Israeli loyalists: neither Christian
fundamentalist support for Israel nor oil calculations would carry
the
weight in administration councils that they do without the pivotal
input of
those loyalists, who clearly know how to play to the Christian
fanatics and
undoubtedly also know that their own and Israel's bread is buttered
by the
oil interests of people like Bush and Cheney. This is where loyalty
to
Israel by government officials colors and influences U.S.
policymaking in
ways that are extremely dangerous.
***
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a
political analyst with the
CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her
last
seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979. Since leaving
the
CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily with the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine:
Their
Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the
University of
California Press and reissued in paperback with an update in October
2001.
A second book, "The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian
Story,"
was published in March 2002.
Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the
analysis side of
the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as
National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of
Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia,
South
Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the
CIA's
Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. They
can be
reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
