A War For Israel

A War for Israel

Jeffrey Blankfort
LeftCurve
April 22, 2004
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Introduction

When Malaysian Prime Minister Mathahir Mohammed declared at an international
Islamic Conference in Kuala Lumpur in mid-October, 2003 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 and virtual 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, Iraqi 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.
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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 neo-conservatives 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’s 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 theadministration.”[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, 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
neo-cons, 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 déja 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 from 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 lengthy 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 non-proliferation 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 as well
as 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 ‘neo-conservative’ 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
neo-cons came from – that wasn’t the platform they ran on… Somehow, the
neo-cons 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: “neo-conservatives.” As the name implies, “neo-conservative”
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 neo-con house organ,
did not wait for Zinni’s comments to realize that the inevitable criticism
of the neo-cons’ role in producing the Iraq quagmire had to be stopped.

It is a “malicious myth” that the “Bush administration is pursuing a
neo-conservative 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 neo-cons have used in their defense, that
while their numbers in the Bush administration, “seems impressive, it also
reveals that the neo-cons 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 neo-con 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 neo-con 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 neo-con 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 neo-cons 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 neo-cons 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 neo-cons.[41]


Quite a different appraisal than that offered by Boot.

There is probably no more appropriate place to begin our probe of the
neo-cons 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 neo-cons’
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 which
“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 searching 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 neo-cons 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 protÈgÈ, 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 whom 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 state 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
neo-cons 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 neo-cons, 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 “re-establishing 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
neo-cons’ 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
neo-cons, 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 neo-cons’ 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 neo-con 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 VP, 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 neo-con,
national security adviser, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Wurmser, described in the Forward [66] as “a neo-conservative 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 neo-conservative 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 pre-emptive 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.” (My emphasis) [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.”(My emphasis)


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 neo-cons whose
activities we have been following, plus neo-con journalists and neo-con
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 neo-cons, 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 Koppel 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 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 US$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