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 [IMPORTANT
ARTICLE!]
"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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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
... 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.'"
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