Part 3: The Transparent Cabal...Stability and the Gulf War Of 1991...During the Clinton Administration

THE TRANSPARENT CABAL: 

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE AGENDA, 

WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST OF ISRAEL 

BY STEPHEN SNIEGOSKI

Chapter 5 

Stability and the Gulf War Of 1991: Prefigurement and Prelude to the 2003 Iraq War

The watchword for American policy in the Middle East was stability,[lol, right DC] which was perceived as a fundamental prerequisite for maintaining the vital flow of oil to the West. In its quest for stability in the Middle East, the post-World War II U.S. supported the conservative monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms, and opposed radical elements that threatened to disturb the status quo.

American security policy was quite different from the position of Israel, especially the Likudnik goal of having Israel surrounded by weak, fragmented statelets. The position of the United States was to defend Israel’s existence, but within the broader framework of regional stability. As Virginia Tilley writes in The One-State Solution:

Every president before Bush recognized that although Israel and the United States are fast allies, their interests in the Middle East are very different. Israel is a local contender for regional influence; the United States is a global superpower exerting hegemonic influence over multiple regions and seeking alliances with numerous states. These different roles generate quite different strategic goals for the two states regarding the region as a whole. From the perspective of U.S. pragmatists (e.g., advisors to the Reagan, Bush père, and Clinton administrations), the best scenario for the United States in the Middle East is clearly a strong state system, in which friendly Arab regimes can contain domestic dissent and help secure a stable oil supply.[1]

What seemed especially dangerous during the Cold War was the likelihood that the radical Arab elements were tied to Soviet Communism and that their success would enable the Soviet Union to gain significant control over the vital Middle East oil producing region – which could raise havoc with the economies of the West.

Undoubtedly this fear of the Soviet Communist specter in the Middle East went back to the President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ anti-Communist foreign policy of the 1950s. But while Dulles viewed radical Arab nationalism, embodied then by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, as a danger, this attitude did not make him a proponent of war in the region. For Dulles simultaneously believed that militant measures against Nasser, interpreted by Arabs as western imperialist aggression, would drive the Middle East into the hands of the Soviet Union. Thus, Dulles opposed the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Suez in 1956 and pressured the aggressors to retreat.[2]

In the aftermath of the Suez War, President Eisenhower declared a major new regional security policy in early 1957, which pledged that the United States would offer economic and military aid and, if necessary, provide military forces to help anti-Communist governments in the Middle East stop the advance of Communism.The policy, which became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, could be seen as a specific application of America’s global policy of containment of Communism. Like the broader containment policy, the Eisenhower Doctrine was conservative in that it was intended to shore up existing regimes. Of course, the more militant thinkers in Israel sought just the opposite – the destabilization of the region.

In the 1970s, Washington feared that Baathist Iraq, under the banner of Arab nationalism and socialism, threatened the conservative Persian Gulf states. In 1972, Iraq formalized its close ties with the Soviet Union, signing a 15-year treaty of Friendship and Cooperation and becoming a recipient of Soviet armaments. Consequently, during the 1970s, the United States backed the Shah’s Iran as the protector of the weak Arab monarchies and guardian of stability in the Gulf. Washington became a major arms provider to the Shah’s government, offering it almost anything it could purchase, short of nuclear weapons.[3]

With the overthrow of the Shah in early 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, American policy was forced to change. Now the United States identified revolutionary Shiite Islamism, directed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, as the foremost threat to the stability of the Middle East. When Saddam launched an attack on Iran in 1980, the American government saw it as a positive move that would serve to rein in the Iranian revolutionary threat.

American policy would soon begin to tilt to supporting Iraq. Iraq was removed from the American list of terrorist states in 1982, and diplomatic relations, which had been severed in 1967, were restored in 1984. Ironically, Donald Rumsfeld, serving as a special envoy, paved the way for the restoration of relations in a December 1983 visit to Iraq.[4]

In fall 1983, a National Security Council study had determined that Iran might defeat Iraq, which would be a major catastrophe for American interests in the Gulf in its threat to the flow of oil. Consequently, the United States would have to provide sufficient assistance to Iraq to prevent that risk from materializing.[5]

Thus, by the mid-1980s, the United States was heavily backing Iraq in its war against Iran, although for a while the United States also had provided more limited aid to Iran (under an arrangement that came to light as the Iran-Contra scandal). American help for Iraq included battlefield intelligence information, military equipment, and agricultural credits. And the United States deployed in the Gulf the largest naval force it had assembled since the Vietnam War, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting oil tankers, but which engaged in serious attacks on Iran’s navy.[6]

During this period when the United States was providing aid to Iraq, numerous reports documented Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against the Iranians. The United States was opposed, in principle, to the use of poisonous gas, which was banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. But the Reagan administration considered this legal and moral issue of secondary importance compared to the pressing need to prevent an Iranian victory.[7][That is bad juju there DC]

In fact, U.S. satellite intelligence facilitated Iraqi gas attacks against Iranian troop concentrations. Moreover, Washington allowed Iraq to purchase poisonous chemicals, and even strains of anthrax and bubonic plague from American companies, which were subsequently identified as a key components of the Iraqi biological warfare program by a 1994 investigation conducted by the Senate Banking Committee.[8] The exports of those biological agents continued to at least November 28, 1989.[9][Do I even have to ask how the hell this happened if not intentional?Shouldn't someone somewhere be accountable for this complicity ? Bet no one was. TIC. DC]

In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq, which had formed a loose alliance with Iran. The attacks, which were part of a “scorched earth” strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage in Congress, and in 1988 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called for sanctions to be imposed on Iraq affecting $800 million in guaranteed loans. The State Department did issue a condemnation of the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, but overall American relations with Iraq were not impaired, despite Saddam’s most gruesome atrocities, accounts of which were being broadcast by numerous international human rights groups.[10]

“The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum addressing the chemical weapons question. “We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis.”[11] In short, the United States was fundamentally concerned about the maintenance of stability in the Gulf region, which took precedence over any humanitarian considerations. The irony of this is that, despite clearly realizing the implications of what it was doing, the United States helped arm Iraq with the very weapons of horror that Bush II administration officials in 2002–3 trumpeted as justification for forcibly removing Saddam from power.

The United States rapprochement with Iraq was very upsetting to Israel, which feared the geopolitical ramifications of an Iraqi victory. Israel looked upon Iraq as its most potent military threat, as illustrated by its bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, which was thought to be part of an Iraqi secret nuclear weapons program. Thus, while the United States was supporting Iraq, Israel was selling war material to Iran – a significant example of how Israeli policy had differed from that of the United States. Israel’s support of Iran reflected the long-held Israeli policy of supporting the periphery of the Middle Eastern world against Israel’s closer neighbors. Being farther away, Iran was perceived as a much lesser danger to Israel than Iraq.As long as Iraq was involved in this prolonged conflict, it could not join Syria or Jordan to pose a danger to Israel’s eastern border. Moreover, Israel’s goal was to facilitate a drawn out war of attrition, in which both of its enemies would exhaust each other.[12]

Israel essentially had supported the Shah and continued to pursue a pro-Iranian policy after the Shah’s downfall, despite the Islamic Republic’s open ideological hostility to Zionism. There was a belief in leading Israeli foreign policy circles that Iran was a natural ally of Israel against the Arab states and that it would inevitably return to this position after it got over its revolutionary fervor. Israel’s sale of arms to Iran was done covertly, but it was a rather open secret. Israel valued Iran not only as a counterweight to Iraq, but also as a market for arms sales, which was Israel’s major export commodity.[13]

In addition, Israel had some influence on American policy, which it sought to tilt in favor of Iran. Israelis conspired with officials of the National Security Council to bring about the policy of covert American arms sales to Iran for a period in 1985–6, in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. Israel offered to serve as a bridge to bring about better relations between the United States and Iran.[14]

Neoconservatives loomed large in the covert dealings with Iran, which involved such figures as Michael Ledeen, who served as an agent for National Security Advisor, Robert C. McFarlane. Ledeen initially arranged the secret initiative by meeting with then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in May 1985.[15] Robert Dreyfuss writes in his Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam: “Within the Reagan administration, a small clique of conservatives, and neoconservatives, were most intimately involved in the Iran-contra initiative, especially those U.S. officials and consultants who were closest to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.”[16] As Trita Parsi puts it in Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel,Iran, and the United States, “neoconservatives were masterminding a rapprochement with Khomeini’s government.”[17]

Secretary of State George Shultz expressed concern about the Israeli-orientation of that policy. In a letter to McFarlane, he noted that Israel’s position on Iran “is not the same as ours” and that American intelligence collaboration with Israel regarding Iran “could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene.”[18] The latter, as Dreyfuss points out, was the actual aim of the neoconservatives and CIA director William Casey, “who sought to reengage with Iran, in direct opposition to the official U.S. policy of supporting Iraq in its resistance to Iranian expansionism.”[19]

The neocons and Israel were unsuccessful in altering American foreign policy away from Iraq and toward Iran. The expose of the Iran/Contra affair certainly sounded the death knell to this diplomacy. Some neoconservatives, however, continued to seek this change. Michael Ledeen would write in a New York Times Op Ed on July 19, 1988, that it was essential for the United States to begin talking with Iran. He wrote that the “The United States, which should have been exploring improved relations with Iran before . . . should now seize the opportunity to do so.”[20] (When Israel would later perceive Iran to be a crucial threat, Ledeen would become a leading proponent of the view that Iran was the center of world terror and that regime change was the only solution.[21])

After the Iran/Iraq war ended in August 1988 with an inconclusive ceasefire, Iraq’s development and use of chemical weapons drew increasing criticism in the United States, especially in Congress. By November 1988 both houses of Congress had passed legislation that would have had the effect of imposing sanctions on Iraq.

Congress’s efforts to sanction Iraq, however, were countered by the administration of George H.W. Bush, which came into office in January 1989. The Bush administration essentially continued the Reagan administration’s favorable treatment of Iraq, providing it with military hardware, advanced technology, and agricultural credits. Washington apparently looked to Saddam to maintain stability in the Gulf, and believed that trade and credits would have a moderating effect on him.[22]

Israel’s view of Iraq was quite different from that of the United States. Israel looked upon the Iraq military build-up as a dire threat to its military supremacy in the Middle East. For it appeared that Iraq was developing the capability to counter, at least to a degree, Israel’s superior arsenal of conventional, chemical, and nuclear arms.[23] As noted reporters Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman observed in April 1990: “the Israelis say that, whatever they have, they must ensure it is far more powerful than anything the Arabs may get.”[24]

Israel could conceivably destroy the budding Iraqi arsenal by a preemptive strike, but such an attack would have serious drawbacks. “Eliminating the technological capacity of Iraq, as in 1981, is becoming impractical,” said Gerald Steinberg, a military expert at the Bal Ilan University in Tel Aviv. “The potential costs of it have gone up, and the effectiveness is diminished each time it is done.”[25] Nonetheless, Israel began making secret preparations to attack Iraq’s chemical weapons plants.[26]

In early 1990, tensions in the Middle East began to escalate. On March 15, Iraq hanged a British Iranian-born journalist, Farzad Bazoft, as an alleged spy for Iran and Israel, causing Great Britain to recall its ambassador to Baghdad the following day. On March 22, Gerald Bull, a Canadian ballistics expert who provided engineering assistance to Iraq to develop long-range artillery – especially a so-called “super-gun” that could reach Israel – was murdered in Brussels, and agents of the Israeli Mossad were suspected in that crime. On March 28, the British arrested five men charged with attempting to smuggle American-made nuclear bomb triggers to Iraq. It was also reported that Iraq had deployed six SCUD missile launchers to the western regions of the country, placing Israeli cities within range.[27]

Fearing that Israel may have been planning an air raid similar to the one it launched against Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, Saddam Hussein in early April 1990 announced that if Israel attacked Iraq, he would drench half of Israel with chemical weapons. The Western media portrayed Saddam’s threat as outrageous, often omitting the defensive context of his warning. In response to Saddam’s speech, Ehud Barak, Israel’s chief of staff, asserted that Israel would strike at Iraq any time its forces became a threat to Israel.[28]

Angering Israel and its American supporters further was the Bush administration’s effort to rekindle the Middle East peace process. The PLO, which had recognized Israel in 1988, seemed more willing to negotiate than the Israeli government headed by Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, which was resistant to giving up control of the occupied territories. On January 14, 1990, Shamir insisted that the influx of Soviet Jews necessitated Israel’s retention of the West Bank. On March 1, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker stipulated that American loan guarantees for new housing for the Soviet immigrants in Israel hinged on the cessation of settlements in the occupied territories. And on March 3, President Bush adamantly declared that there should be no more settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.[29]

But Shamir rejected, forthwith and openly, the Bush administration’s entire effort to bring about a solution. And Israel’s American supporters, especially of the right, were thoroughly on the side of the Israeli prime minister.[30] New York Times pro-Israel columnist William Safire complained that “George Bush is less sympathetic to Israel’s concerns than any U.S. President in the four decades since that nation’s birth.” Safire continued:

Mr. Bush has long resisted America’s special relationship with Israel. His secretary of state, James Baker, delights in sticking it to the Israeli right. His national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and chief of staff, John Sununu, abet that mind-set.[31]

Safire was outraged that Bush would threaten to abstain from abetting the Israeli government’s colonization of the occupied West Bank. “This is the first Administration to openly threaten to cut aid to Israel,” he wrote.

This is also the first Administration to tie aid directly to Israel’s willingness to conform to U.S. policy demands: unless the West Bank is barred to Jews who want to move there, no loans will be guaranteed to help Soviet Jews start new lives.

Safire claimed that Jewish settlement of the West Bank was essential for Jewish Russian immigrants because a resurgence of anti-Semitic pogroms was allegedly imminent in post-Communist Russia.[32]

The U.S. media, especially the pro-Israel media, was reporting that Iraq was rapidly producing nuclear materials, chemical weapons, and guided missiles. For example, U.S. News and World Report, owned by the pro-Israel Mortimer Zuckerman, titled its June 4, 1990 cover story about Saddam, “The World’s Most Dangerous Man.”[33] The Bush administration, however, firmly resisted efforts to alter its friendship with Iraq.

Reacting to congressional protests of Saddam’s threat to use chemical weapons against Israel, Secretary of State Baker correctly noted the defensive context of the threat in testimony before the Senate appropriations subcommittee on April 25, 1990, and even went so far as to insinuate that it was appropriate for Iraq to have such weapons as a defensive deterrent. Baker said that while the Bush administration regarded the use of chemical weapons as “disturbing,” Saddam only threatened to use “chemical weapons on the assumption that Iraq would have been attacked by nuclear weapons.’’[34]

What ultimately led to the Bush administration’s break with Iraq, of course, was its aggressive move on the tiny sheikdom of Kuwait. Saddam’s desire to control Kuwait was not unique for an Iraqi leader. Iraqis had long regarded Kuwait as a rightful part of their national domain. In 1963, in fact, Iraq’s then president had asserted an Iraqi claim to Kuwait, only to back down when the British deployed a detachment of regular troops in the emirate. What especially caused Saddam to look longingly toward Kuwait and its oil was Iraq’s dire economic situation. Iraq’s victory over Iran had been a Pyrrhic one, leaving the country economically devastated with an enormous debt of tens of billions of dollars – Saddam admitted to $40 billion. Significant portions of the debt were owed to Arab oil producing neighbors – Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. To pay off the debt, Iraq would have to rely on its oil production, but much of Iraq’s oil producing capacity in the southern part of the country had been destroyed in the war. Moreover, the price of oil had plummeted.[35]

Kuwait seemed a reasonable scapegoat for Iraq’s problems and it simultaneously offered a solution. Kuwait, having felt threatened by Iranian radicalism, had provided Iraq with extensive loans during the war with Iran. With the end of the war, however, the Kuwaiti government demanded full repayment from Iraq, whereas Iraq expected Kuwait to write off its debt as a reward for its having provided the tiny emirate with protection from Iran. Moreover, Kuwait continued to flagrantly exceed its OPEC production quota, overproducing by 40 percent, which helped to depress the oil prices that Iraq desperately needed elevated. Saddam also accused Kuwait of siphoning off oil from the Iraq section of their shared Rumaila oil field through slant drilling and demanded a revision of the territorial boundary to favor Iraq.[36]

In their War in the Gulf, 1990–91, historians Majid Khadduri and Edmund Ghareeb, in assessing responsibility for the Gulf War, assign some culpability to Kuwait for its unwillingness to even consider Iraq’s proposals, which were not totally unreasonable. “Settlement of the crisis by Arab peaceful means,” they maintain, “would have been much less costly to the Arab world than by foreign intervention.”[37] In the long run, it would have been less costly for the United States, too.

At the end of May 1990, in an Arab summit meeting in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein threatened to retaliate against Kuwait if it continued to exceed oil production quotas. On July 17, 1990, a belligerent Saddam accused Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates of being “imperialist agents” whose policy of keeping oil prices low was a “poison dagger” in Iraq’s back. Shortly thereafter, Saddam began to move his military forces toward the Kuwaiti border.[38]

Saddam’s critics expressed outrage. Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer compared Saddam to Hitler. “What makes him truly Hitlerian is his way of dealing with neighboring states,” Krauthammer asserted in the Washington Post on July 27.

In a chilling echo of the ’30s, Iraq, a regional superpower, accuses a powerless neighbor of a “deliberate policy of aggression against Iraq,” precisely the kind of absurd accusation Hitler lodged against helpless Czechoslovakia and Poland as a prelude to their dismemberment.[39]

The Bush administration, however, seemed quite indifferent to the imminent Iraqi threat to Kuwait. In a press conference on July 24, State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler did express moral opposition to “coercion and intimidation in a civilized world,” but pointed out that “We do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.” On July 25, Saddam Hussein summoned U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to a meeting that would later gain great publicity and vociferously complained that Kuwait was engaging in acts of war against Iraq by not assisting with Iraq’s war debt or agreeing to limit its production of oil. If Iraq attacked Kuwait, Saddam vehemently argued that it would be because Kuwait was already making war on Iraq. To Saddam’s overt threat, Glaspie mildly responded that “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts.”It has been widely argued that Glaspie’s response persuaded Saddam that the United States would not militarily oppose his invasion. He had been given the green light to attack.[40]

Then, on July 31, 1990, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs John Kelly, in his testimony before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, pointed out that the United States had no defense treaty relationship with Kuwait or other Persian Gulf countries. The subcommittee chairman, Lee Hamilton (Democrat, Indiana) pressed Kelly for specifics: “If Iraq, for example, charged across the border into Kuwait, for whatever reasons, what would be our position with regard to the use of U.S. forces!” Kelly responded: “That, Mr. Chairman, is a hypothetical [sic] or a contingency, the kind of which I can’t go into. Suffice it to say we would be extremely concerned, but I cannot get into the realm of ‘what if’ answers.”

Hamilton pressed further: “In that circumstance, it is correct to say, however, that we do not have a treaty commitment which would obligate us to engage U.S. forces?”

“That is correct.’’ Kelly responded.[41]

On August 1, the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Bush administration approved the sale of advanced data transmission devices to Iraq, which could be used for missiles. The Bush administration gave no hint that it would oppose an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait militarily.[42]

On August 2, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army swarmed into Kuwait, meeting minimal Kuwaiti resistance. The ruling Al-Sabah family fled, and Iraqi forces occupied the entire country.

With Iraq’s invasion, American policy soon performed an abrupt and complete volte-face. President George H. W. Bush denounced Saddam’s move as heinous aggression that could not be allowed to stand. Whereas Saddam’s barbarous actions heretofore had been largely ignored by the administration, now it trumpeted them to high heaven – even describing non-existent atrocities such as the alleged killing of incubator babies by the invading Iraqi forces in Kuwait.[43]

President Bush quickly made preparations to send troops to Saudi Arabia to protect the kingdom from an Iraqi attack that he alleged to be imminent. But King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was hesitant about allowing American “infidels” on Islam’s most sacred soil. A U.S. influx of that kind would certainly ignite fierce opposition from many of his strongest religious supporters. Thus, the Saudi monarchy, along with other Arab leaders, especially King Hussein of Jordan, was initially not disposed to the use force against Saddam’s Iraq, preferring instead to rely on compromise to encourage Saddam to remove his forces from Kuwait. If the Saudi ruler rejected the American troops, however, the United States would not be able to fight Saddam.[44]

To win King Fahd’s support, therefore, the Bush administration not only relied on diplomatic pressure but even resorted to deception. It apparently exaggerated the threat of an Iraqi armed invasion of Saudi Arabia, through the use of doctored satellite pictures, in order to scare the Saudis into accepting both U.S. troops on their territory and eventual military action against Iraq.[45]

Israel was ecstatic at the reversal in American policy toward Iraq, which vindicated Israel’s claim of the threat posed by Saddam. “We are benefiting from every perspective,” said Yossi Olmert, the director of the Israeli government press office. “Of course, we can lose big if Saddam decides to attack us next. But at least the rest of the world now sees what we have been saying all along.”[46]

Israel wanted strong measures to be taken by the United States and other Western nations against Iraq. Likud officials compared Saddam to Hitler and its invasion of Kuwait to German aggressive acts in the 1930s. The Israeli goal was not simply to drive Iraq from Kuwait but, more important, to remove Saddam Hussein, destroy Iraq’s military power, and thus eliminate a regional rival.[47] Israeli President Chaim Herzog even called upon the United States to use nuclear weapons in its attack. But Israel did not fully trust the United States to carry out a military attack, fearing that it might actually opt for a negotiated peace. On December 4, 1990, Israeli foreign minister David Levy reportedly threatened the U.S. ambassador, David Brown, to the effect that if the United States failed to attack Iraq, Israel would do so itself.[48][Should have called their bluff right there DC]

The crisis in the Persian Gulf also helped Israel by eliminating the American pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians.[49] As it turned out, however, that would simply be a respite for Israel, as the Bush administration would reapply the pressure in war’s aftermath.

Neoconservatives played a leading role in promoting the U.S. war on Iraq, setting up the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, co-chaired by Richard Perle and New York Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asian and Pacific affairs. The new pressure group would focus on mobilizing popular and congressional support for war.[50] War hawks such as Frank Gaffney, Jr., Richard Perle, A. M. Rosenthal, William Safire, and the quasi-neocon organ The Wall Street Journal emphasized in the media that America’s war objective should not be simply to drive Iraq out of Kuwait but also to destroy Iraq’s military potential, especially its capacity to develop nuclear weapons. This broader goal meshed with Israel’s fundamental objective. The Bush administration would come to embrace this position.[51]

Support for the war often closely equated with support for Israel. As columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post:

Israel and its supporters would like to see Saddam weakened or destroyed, and many of the strongest Democratic supporters of Bush’s policy on the gulf, such as Solarz, are longtime backers of Israel. Similarly, critics of Israel – among conservatives as well as liberals – are also among the leading critics of Bush’s gulf policy. “That’s embarrassing,” said William Schneider, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, “because there seems to be a hidden concern – either pro- or anti-Israel.”[52]

Patrick J. Buchanan would make the much-reviled comment that ‘‘There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.’’[53] Even the liberal Jewish columnist Richard Cohen opined in late August that “The problem I have with those who argue for a quick military strike is that they seem to be arguing from an Israeli perspective.” In contrast, “the United States is not immediately threatened by Iraq – as Israel was [in 1981] and is.” Cohen concluded, “Those who plump for war are a bit premature, attempting to make the Middle East safe for not only oil [the American interest] but for Israel as well.”[54]

The goal of eliminating Saddam’s military power undercut diplomatic efforts to get Saddam out of Kuwait put forth by numerous parties – the Arab League, France, the Soviet Union. And Iraq itself made various informal compromise offers. Early on, however, the Bush administration precluded any face saving gesture being offered to Iraq by its assertion that aggression could not be rewarded. The United States offered Saddam only a choice between war and total capitulation. Needless to say, such a hard-line had not been applied to numerous other aggressors.

On August 22, Thomas Friedman the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent, ascribed the Bush administration’s rejection of the “diplomatic track” to its fear that if it became

involved in negotiations about the terms of an Iraqi withdrawal, America’s Arab allies might feel under pressure to give the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, a few token gains in Kuwait to roll back his invasion and defuse the crisis.[55]

What explained the complete transformation on the part of the Bush administration policy toward Iraq? Why would the administration not simply opt for a compromise agreement, since that seemed to be an acceptable condition before Saddam’s invasion? Explanations run the gamut. One implies a conspiracy – that the Bush administration intended to fight Saddam and deliberately gave Saddam Hussein the impression he could get away with an invasion of Kuwait in order to establish a casus belli. At the same time, the United States urged Kuwait to resist Saddam’s demands in order to bring about war.[56]

While logical, the conspiracy thesis assumes too much planning on the part of the U.S. government. Another theory, one involving Israel, would seem more plausible. Steven Hurst in his The Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration contends that the United States pursued a hard line to accommodate Israel, to presumably make it amenable to granting concessions regarding Palestine. Establishing peace in the all-important Palestinian/Israeli conflict would be impossible, Hurst emphasizes, if the U.S. went too far in appeasing Saddam.[57]

But it would also seem that President Bush’s personality was a significant factor in the policy shift. Bush was only tangentially involved in Iraq policy prior to the Kuwait invasion. Baker and the State Department essentially had directed the policy to placate Saddam, unaffected by cries from outside about Saddam’s alleged threat or even by opposition from within the administration by the Department of Defense, headed by Dick Cheney. Baker, in fact, continued to oppose military intervention even after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, seeking instead a peaceful compromise. General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also opposed military action and supported a reliance on sanctions.[58]

President Bush’s intention upon learning of the invasion was actually to follow the pacific policy laid out by Baker. However, the hard-liners toward Iraq were bellowing about American appeasement. Bush was now on center stage, and he was concerned about appearing weak, which was how the critics were already characterizing his policy toward Iraq.

An encounter with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on August 3 in Aspen, Colorado, where Thatcher was attending a conference, drove Bush from uncertainty to avid support for war. Thatcher insisted that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait could not be allowed. “Don’t go wobbly on me, George,” Thatcher lectured the president. As one of Thatcher’s advisors later quipped: “The prime minister performed a successful backbone transplant.”[59]

Bush’s biographers Peter and Rochelle Schweizer explain his adoption of a militant war stance:

George Bush, like so many of the other in his family, was obsessed with the notion of measuring up to the challenge . . . . George had become convinced in the early weeks of August 1990 that his great test would be the struggle against Saddam Hussein. For the first time in his life he made a geopolitical struggle intensely personal. Before, he had always spoken about war and geopolitics in terms of national interest and American security; now he was more direct and personal.[60]

The United States would ultimately unleash Operation Desert Storm, beginning with a massive air bombardment on January 16, 1991, followed, 39 days later, by a four-day ground war that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait and induced Saddam to accept a cease-fire on March 3. The war established a peace that would greatly weaken Saddam, including the requirement that Iraq not possess an arsenal of chemical, bacteriological or nuclear weapons. That comported with the position of Israel, which sought to weaken its enemy.

The quick and decisive defeat of Saddam was a stunning and humiliating blow to the Arabs of the Middle East. But for the defeat of Saddam to be advantageous to Israel, Iraq would have to be devastated. During the American bombing campaign, neocon Bruce Fein wanted to make sure that Iraq was reduced to rubble. Fein was concerned that the United States, in its effort to avoid civilian casualties, was not creating sufficient havoc. Especially upsetting was the “woolly-headed acquittal of the Iraqi people of any responsibility for the arch-villainous actions of their president.” It was necessary, he asserted, to punish the Iraqi people.

Why, therefore, should Mr. Bush instruct the U.S. military scrupulously to avoid civilian targets in Iraq even if a contrary policy would more quickly destroy Iraqi morale and bring it to heel? During World War II, the Allied powers massively bombed Berlin, Dresden and Tokyo for reasons of military and civilian morale. Winston Churchill instructed the Royal Air Force to “make the rubble dance” in German cities. Why is Mr. Bush treating Iraqi civilians more solicitously than the enemy civilians of World War II?[This jackass argues from the point that Churchill was somehow justified in his murder of civilians...wrong then, wrong in 90 DC]

Fein did not just want to kill the Iraqi people during the war; he held that in the postwar period the Iraqi people should be assessed reparations.[61]

Beyond the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, the neoconservatives hoped that the war would lead to the removal of Saddam Hussein and the consequent American occupation of Iraq. However, despite the urging of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to adopt a military plan to invade the heartland of Iraq, that approach was never taken, in part, because of the opposition from General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander.[62]

Moreover, the U.S. had a UN mandate to liberate Kuwait, not to remove Saddam. To attempt the latter would have caused the warring coalition to fall apart. America’s coalition partners in the region, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, feared that the elimination of Saddam’s government would cause Iraq to fragment into warring ethnic and religious groups. That could have involved a Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, spreading to Turkey’s own restive Kurdish population. And the Iraqi Shiites, likely falling under the influence of Iran, would increase the threat of Islamic radicalism in the vital oil-producing Gulf region.[Exactly what has happened since the fiasco in 2003,and we are still there 17 years later underlined above DC]

In 1998, the first President Bush would explain his reason for not invading Iraq to remove Saddam thus:

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger . . . . Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.[63][I guess Junior did not get that message, five years later. DC]

In his 1995 memoirs, Secretary of State James Baker would similarly observe that the administration’s “overriding strategic concern in the first Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonization of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare.”[64]

George H. W. Bush had essentially realized his major goals: the unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Iraq; the restoration of the legitimate Kuwaiti government; and the protection of the region from any future Iraqi aggression. In short, the foremost concern of the first Bush administration, in line with the traditional American position on the Middle East, was regional stability. As Norman Podhoretz would negatively sum up Bush I’s policy thirteen years later:

When Saddam Hussein upset the balance of power in the Middle East by invading Kuwait in 1991, the elder Bush went to war not to create a new configuration in the region but to restore the status quo ante. And it was precisely out of the same overriding concern for stability that, having achieved this objective by driving Saddam out of Kuwait, Bush then allowed him to remain in power.[65]

Israel and its neocon allies sought just the opposite: a destabilized, fragmented Iraq (indeed a destabilized, fragmented Middle East) that would enhance Israel’s relative regional power.[And they got what they wanted starting in 2003,and Obama continued the strategy with Libya and Syria DC] 

Rejecting an American occupation as too dangerous, the first President Bush sought to remove Saddam by less aggressive means. In May 1991, he signed a presidential finding directing the CIA to create the conditions for Saddam’s ouster. As it emerged, the plan consisted largely of supporting propaganda and Iraqi dissidents who came to form the Iraqi National Congress. The hope was that members of the Iraqi military would turn on Saddam and stage a military coup. That was not to happen.[There it is! the directive to the professional s*#t stirrers,who stirred up an invasion 12 years later. DC]

In the process of terminating the war on Iraq, the Bush administration allowed Saddam to brutally suppress uprisings by the Kurds and the Shiites. What made this seem like an especially immoral betrayal was the fact that, during the war, Bush had called for the people of Iraq to rise up against Saddam. Now, as Saddam smashed the rebellions, neoconservatives and other supporters of Israel were outraged. A. M. Rosenthal angrily declared that “by betraying the rebels the U.S. is truly intervening – on the side of the killer Hussein.” To the argument that American intervention might break up Iraq, Rosenthal questioned the need for a unified Iraq: “Anyway, were Americans sent into combat against Saddam Hussein so that Washington should now help him keep together the jigsaw country sawed out of the Middle East by the British after World War I?”[66] Here Rosenthal was questioning the entire principle of stability that had traditionally guided American policy in the Middle East.

“Two months after a brilliant military campaign ended in victory, Mr. Bush has achieved the worst of worlds for millions of Iraqi rebels and for American policy in the Mideast,” opined Rosenthal in the New York Post of April 23, 1991. But the solution he had in mind was more than just providing immediate protection for the Kurds and Shiites. Rosenthal emphasized that “there will be no peace as long as Saddam Hussein rules, and threatens to rise again.”[67][He's gone but peace has not broke out yet DC]

Rosenthal presented what would become the key neoconservative solution for the Middle East – regime change and democracy. And he contrasted the reliance on a democratic approach to the traditional policy of “realism” in the Middle East, which the Bush administration continued to pursue in the aftermath of the Gulf War. “For many years now,” Rosenthal asserted,

the “realists” have dominated American foreign policy, particularly on the Middle East. They constantly search for a “balance of power” that is unattainable because it is based on dictatorships, which by their very nature are the cause of instability. They dismiss the concept of morality in international affairs and believe that democracy is impossible in the Middle East.

Yes, it is impossible – as long as the realists have their way and we appease the Saddam Husseins and Hafez al-Assads of the area, coddle the oil despots and are in a constant twitch of irritation about our support of Israel, the only democracy in the area.[This and the next paragraph are an excellent neo-con synopsis of what has happened over the last 16 years in the M.East DC]

Just see where realpolitik has gotten us in the Mideast: Iran in the hands of religious fanatics, Syria and Libya ruled under terrorist fascism, Saddam Hussein still in power, marauding – and a million Iraqi refugees clawing for food, crying out their hunger and betrayal.[68]

New York Times columnist William Safire, too, wrote of the immorality of the abandonment of the Kurds and Shiites. “Must history remember George Bush as the liberator of Kuwait and the man who saved Iraq for dictatorship?” Safire asked rhetorically. “U.S. troops will return home with a sense of shame at the bloodletting that followed our political sellout.”[69]

Krauthammer would blame Bush’s failure to intervene to save the Kurds and Shiites to his risk-averse personality, in respect of which his war on Iraq represented an aberration.

After seven months of brilliant, indeed heroic, presidential leadership, George Bush’s behavior after the Persian Gulf War – his weak and vacillating hands-off policy – is a puzzle. The best explanation is this: Bush was like the man who wins the jackpot in a casino and walks right out the front door refusing even to look at another table. There are many reasons Bush decided to cash in his chips even if that meant abandoning the Iraqi rebels to Saddam Hussein’s tender mercies – a policy partly reversed when the extent of the Kurdish catastrophe became clear. There was the fear of getting dragged into a civil war, a belief that international law and the wartime coalition would support saving Kuwait’s sovereignty but not violating Iraq’s, and his susceptibility to pressure from his Saudi friends, who feared both the fracturing and democratization of Iraq. These were all factors, but the overwhelming one was the president’s persona: A man of pathological prudence, having just risked everything on one principled roll of the dice, was not about to hang around the gaming room a second longer. It was a question of political capital. After 30 years in politics Bush had finally amassed it. He was not about to spend it in Kurdistan. The willingness to risk political capital is not just a sign of greatness in a leader, it is almost a definition of it.[70]

But the fact of the matter is that while the Bush administration continued the traditional concern of American foreign policy for stability in the Middle East, it was willing to risk political capital by returning to pressuring Israel to move away from its effort to colonize the West Bank. In defying the powerful domestic Israel lobby, that policy was bound to stir up a hornets nest for the Bush administration. But the post-Gulf War public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for President Bush. In early March, just as the war ended, Bush’s approval rating stood at a stratospheric 90 percent.[71] That seemed to provide enough political cushion against the inevitable damage that Bush and Baker would suffer in pursuing their foreign policy agenda.

Essentially, the Bush/Baker approach sought to fit policy toward Israel within the overall framework of maintaining stability in the region. It saw Israel as the unstable element. If the Jewish state would make concessions to the Palestinians, tensions would subside across the entire Middle East, for it was the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians that created a major Arab grievance exploited by anti-American destabilizing elements in the region.

The Bush administration now was especially desirous of placating the Arab coalition that had supported the war by making American policy in the Middle East more even-handed. In supporting a Western attack on a fellow Muslim and Arab country, the leaders of the Middle Eastern states had risked engendering internal opposition from religious and nationalistic elements, and those rulers expected some reward for their loyalty to the United States.

The Bush administration thus returned with vigor to its pre-war effort of trying to curb Israeli control of its occupied territories. It focused on a demand that Israel stop constructing new settlements in the occupied territories as a condition for receiving $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Despite Washington’s objections, Israel had launched a building boom in the occupied territories, intended by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s rightist government to ensure permanent Israeli control there. The plan would boost the Jewish settler population by 50 percent in two years. Asked in early April 1991 how Israel would respond to a U.S. request to freeze Jewish settlement activity, Ariel Sharon, then the housing minister, adamantly stated that “Israel has always built, is building and will in future build in Judea, Samaria [biblical names for the West Bank] and the Gaza Strip.”[72] In May 1991, Secretary Baker harshly condemned the Jewish settlements in testimony before the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, asserting that “I don’t think that there is any bigger obstacle to peace.”[73]

Shamir’s Likud government and Israel’s America’s supporters strongly resisted the Bush administration’s efforts. In his September 12, 1991 news conference, Bush went before the television cameras to ask Congress to delay consideration of the $10 billion in loan guarantees being demanded by Shamir. Bush dared to speak directly of the pro-Israel pressure, saying that

I’m up against some powerful political forces, but I owe it to the American people to tell them how strongly I feel about the deferral . . . . I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.[74]

In performing an end run around the Israel-friendly mainstream media and appealing directly to the American people, however, Bush struck a responsive chord. A public opinion poll only two days later found that 86 percent of the American people supported the president on that issue. But that public support apparently made some members of the administration complacent about the political power of the pro-Zionist lobby. When the danger of alienating Jewish Americans was broached to Secretary of State Baker, he was alleged to have uttered that most taboo-shattering of profanities: “F**k the Jews. They didn’t vote for us.”[75]

Jewish-Americans had been enraged by Bush’s speech. “For a great many Jews, then, Bush’s September 12 press conference was like a blinding flash in the night that would not go away,” wrote J. J. Goldberg. “Jews of every political stripe began writing letters of protest to their newspapers, to their representatives, and to the White House.”[76] Goldberg further wrote that

the Jews were indisputably a powerful political force. George Bush was not wrong in believing that when he convened his September 12 press conference.

Bush’s mistake was saying it aloud.[77]

Bush’s opposition to Shamir’s policy probably contributed to bringing down the Shamir’s government in January 1992. In the subsequent Israeli national election in June 1992, Shamir lost to the Labor Party led by Yitzhak Rabin, which ran on the popular slogan “Land for Peace.” (While Rabin was amenable to pursuing a peace process with the Palestinians – for which he was awarded a Nobel Peace prize in 1994 – the extent to which Jewish settlements on the West Bank would be reduced and the chances for a future viable Palestinian state were always questionable.)

However, while the situation changed in Israel, supporters of Israel in the United States remained intransigent. They were outraged over the Bush administration’s public pressuring of Israel. The neoconservatives set up an organization to back the Israeli position on settlements, giving it the Orwellian moniker, Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East. Members included such neoconservative stalwarts as Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams.[78]

As the 1992 election approached, the Bush administration, seeing its popularity plummet, would try to mend fences with his pro-Israel critics. In July, Bush announced that the U.S. would provide the loan guarantees after all. His concession won him no pro-Israel support.

The role of Israel’s chief lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in the loan guarantee episode was starkly revealed in a private conversation in October 1992 between the president of AIPAC, David Steiner, and potential contributor Harry Katz, which the latter had secretly taped. Steiner boasted about AIPAC’s political sway, saying he had “cut a deal” with James Baker to give more aid to Israel. He had arranged for “almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don’t even know about.”[79]

When Katz brought up the concern that Baker had cursed the Jewish people, Steiner responded: “Of course, do you think I’m ever going to forgive him for that?” He acknowledged that AIPAC was backing Clinton and had supported him from before he received the Democratic nomination. Steiner boasted that AIPAC had numerous supporters in the Clinton campaign and that Clinton would put their people in key positions when he entered office.[80] In fact, the Democratic platform contained a strong pro-Israel plank, and the Clinton campaign attacked the Bush administration for “bullying” Israel.[sly pivot DC]

Like other supporters of Israel, some neoconservatives were trending to Clinton. Richard Schifter, assistant secretary of state for human rights under Reagan and George H. W. Bush (until March 1992), had become a senior foreign policy adviser for the Clinton campaign. Schifter was also working with AIPAC’s David Ifshin to bring fellow neoconservatives back into the Democratic Party.[81] And a number of neoconservatives such as Joshua Muravchik, Penn Kemble, Morris Amitay, Edward Luttwak, Penn Kemble, and R. James Woolsey, would openly back Bill Clinton. Even long-time conservative commentator William Safire would support Clinton. Many others remained at least cool to Bush’s re-election.[82] Moreover, Clinton appealed to neocons by his support of the neoconservative idea that promotion of democracy should be a central feature of American foreign policy.[83] Neocons profess to believe in the promotion of global democracy and such an approach would serve to undermine Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, none of which was ruled in a democratic manner.

Many neocons with strong Republican connections were hesitant to completely make the switch to Clinton, but they would at best be lukewarm Bush supporters. Even a defense of Bush by one of these supporters, Daniel Pipes, acknowledged the difficulties in supporting the president. “If there’s a lot of agreement on anything this election year,” Pipes wrote, “it’s that friends of Israel should not vote to re-elect George Bush. The mere mention of his name in Jewish circles evinces strong disappointment, even anger.”[84]

Clinton received the highest level of Jewish support of any Democratic presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to an American Jewish Congress exit poll, 80 percent of American Jews voted for Clinton, compared to 11 percent for Bush. 35 percent of American Jews had backed Bush in 1988.[85] And the George H. W. Bush who emerged from the Gulf War with an astronomical 90 percent approval rating went down to a humiliating election defeat.

What one sees in the Gulf War was a temporary and partial shift from America’s traditional policy of working to maintain stability in the Middle East to a policy firmly aligned with that of Israel to militarily defeat Israel’s greatest enemy at the time. While the United States had provided arms to Israel before to enable it to defeat its enemies – most conspicuously the military arms airlift during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 – the United States had never before gone to war against a primary enemy of Israel. In fighting an enemy initially identified by Israel and its American supporters, American policy in the Gulf War prefigured the Bush II administration’s war on Iraq, which would be on a much grander scale.[Was not a temporary shift when you consider Bush gave his S.S. the go in 91. 29 years later, not looking so temporary DC]

Under the Bush I administration, the war and defeat of Saddam still took place within the overall foreign policy framework of maintaining stability – and in its rejection of an American occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration certainly did everything it could to try to restore the status quo, to the great consternation of the friends of Israel who desired regime change and continued destabilization. However, as it happened, the very establishment of the American military presence in the Middle East had a destabilizing effect. It would feed into the popular grievances in the Middle East, exploited by Islamists such as Osama bin Laden. To many radicals, America became a fundamental enemy on par with Israel.

The drastic American military intervention into Middle East affairs had unleashed forces that could not be reversed. The tinder was dry and needed only the neocons of the Bush II administration to light the spark for a new American war and a complete transformation of American policy. To avoid the chances of a future war, the United States would have had to pull out of the region after 1991, and that was an approach alien to all establishment geo-strategic thinkers, wedded as they have been to a policy of global intervention on the part of the U.S. government.

The second, greater war would not have started when it did had the neocons not been able to gain control of foreign policy in the George W. Bush administration, a seizure of power that resulted from the 911 terrorist disaster. However, the neocons, though empowered, could not have initiated the 2003 war if the earlier war had not taken place. In that sense, the 1991 Gulf War was a prelude to the 2003 war on Iraq, in which the United States government would pursue a policy in complete harmony with the thinking of the neocons and the Israeli Likudniks to precipitate regime change and destabilize the Middle East.

Also of benefit to the neocon Middle East war agenda, the first Bush administration left a document that reflected neoconservative national security strategy and would provide a basis for the national security policy for the George W. Bush administration. This was the draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, which would set a new post-Cold War rationale for American military power. In his Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann refers to this document as

one of the most significant foreign policy documents of the past half century. It set forth a new vision for a world dominated by a lone American superpower, actively working to make sure that no rival or group of rivals would ever emerge.[86]

The draft of Defense Planning Guidance was prepared under the supervision Paul Wolfowitz, the Department of Defense’s under secretary for policy. I. Lewis Libby, Wolfowitz’s top assistant, Richard Perle, and Albert Wohlstetter also had a role in its input. The draft was composed by Zalmay Khalilzad.[87][ Look at what else it says about Defence Proposed Policy....'The second goal is to strengthen and extend the system of defense arrangements that binds democratic and like-minded nations together in cooperation defense against aggression, builds habits of cooperation, avoids the renationalization of security policies.'wonder what the drafters of this document think of Trump? DC]

https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf

In addition to emphasizing the goal of American world supremacy, the document cited the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hostile countries as the greatest danger to the United States and advocated “pre-emptive” strikes to counter such a danger. The document was for military planning and not intended to be released to the public. However, a draft of the document was leaked to the press and a huge outcry arose around the world over the implication of American militaristic imperialism on a global scale. Embarrassed, the administration called for the language to be softened. Most particularly, the emphasis on unilateral action in the draft was altered to mention collective security. Nonetheless, even in the final softened form, the document provided key ideas for the neoconservatives. It served to justify overwhelming American global power even at a time when, with the demise of the Soviet Union, there was no obvious global threat. Thus, it continued the Cold War alliance between the neoconservatives and both American conservative imperialists and the military industrial complex, even when some conservative anti-Communists, such as Pat Buchanan, were drifting back to the American right’s traditional non-interventionist moorings.

Moreover, the focus on a WMD threat to the U.S. could be used to attack Israel’s Middle East enemies, since most of those nations would certainly like to possess WMD as a deterrent to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. In short, the document, which explicitly focused on maintaining American global supremacy, could simultaneously serve to enhance Israel’s regional supremacy in the Middle East.

Chapter 6 

During the Clinton Administration

Although some neoconservatives supported Bill Clinton, and his administration promised to include them in foreign policy positions, he did not give them a role. “There is no question that they were short-shrifted,” complained neocon Ben Wattenberg in early 1993.

By its appointments and its policy moves so far, the administration is creating a culture that makes moderates and conservatives feel unwelcome. It is as though the old antiwar activists are applying a litmus test to everyone, and when they decide someone is ideologically impure, the administration is unwilling to go to the mat about it.[1]

Unrewarded, the neoconservatives quickly began to criticize Clinton as simply another liberal Democrat, who had disguised himself as a moderate during the 1992 campaign, and who was failing to maintain American military strength.[2]

During the Clinton administration neocons promoted their views from a strong interlocking network of think tanks – such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Center for Security Policy (CSP), and Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – which had significant influence in the media and became essentially a “shadow defense establishment.”[3] These think tanks would eventually provide key staff for the administration of George W. Bush.

It was this interlocking group of organizations, staffed by many of the same individuals, that helped to give the neocons power far transcending their small numbers. As Jim Lobe points out, the neocons have been extremely adept “in creating new institutions and front groups that act as a vast echo chamber for each other and for the media, particularly in media-obsessed Washington.”[4]

Some of these organizations were originally set up by mainline conservatives and taken over by neoconservatives;[5] others were established by neoconservatives themselves. Some had a direct Israeli connection. For example, Yigal Carmon, formerly a colonel in Israeli military intelligence, was a co-founder of Memri. And all of the organizations have been closely interconnected, with prominent neoconservatives having multiple affiliations. For example, the other co-founder of Memri, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, was also a member of the Hudson Institute, while her husband, David Wurmser, headed the Middle East studies department of AEI. David Wurmser also was director of Institutional Grants at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy from 1994 to 1996. Richard Perle was a “resident fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a member of the advisory board of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA), and a trustee of the Hudson Institute.[6] Michael Ledeen was a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and a member of the JINSA advisory board. As Jim Lobe writes:

This proliferation – not to say duplication and redundancy – of committees, projects and coalitions is a tried and true tactic of the neo-cons and their more traditional Republican fellow travelers, at least since the 1970s. The tactic appears largely to persuade public opinion that their hawkish policies are supported by a large section of the population when, in fact, these groups represent very specific interests and its [sic] views are held by a small, highly organized and well-disciplined elite.[7]

The think tank that is usually considered the nerve center for neoconservatism is the American Enterprise Institute. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) was founded in 1943 by anti-New Deal businessmen, long before the existence of neoconservatism, to promote conservative free-market economic views in an intellectual culture then in the thrall of statist liberalism. It remained a quite modest institution until the 1970s, dwarfed by such liberal Washington think tanks as the Brookings Institution. AEI began the 1970s with a budget of $1 million and a staff of only ten; at the decade’s end, it had a budget of $8 million and a staff of 125. Its explosive growth took place as neoconservatives, by virtue of their prestige and networking skills, moved into leading positions in conservatism. AEI especially sought a reputation for respectability. This gave the establishment-credentialed neoconservatives an advantage over traditional conservatives, who had been marginalized in mainstream circles. Neoconservatives would fill more and more of the positions in AEI until they came to dominate it, although the bulk of its major financial contributors have been neither Jewish nor particularly devoted to Israel. (The chairman of AEI’s board of trustees, however, is Bruce Kovner, a pro-Zionist Jewish billionaire.[8]) AEI would have among its staff such neocon luminaries as Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, and Jean Kirkpatrick. Staff from AEI would emerge as the leading architects of the Bush II administration’s foreign policy.[9]

In contrast to AEI, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) was set up in 1976 to put “the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship first.”[10] In the late 1980s, JINSA widened its focus to U.S. defense and foreign policy in general, without dropping its focus on Israel.[11]

Until the beginning of the Bush II administration, JINSA’s advisory board included such notable neocons as John Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, Max Kampelman, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Perle, Kenneth Timmerman, and R. James Woolsey. Dick Cheney was also a member of the board.[12]

In a seminal article in the September 2002 issue of The Nation, Jason Vest discussed the immense power held in the current Bush administration by individuals from two major neoconservative research organizations, JINSA and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). Vest detailed the close links among these organizations, right-wing politicians, arms merchants, military men, Jewish multi-millionaires/billionaires, and Republican administrations.[13]

Vest noted that “dozens” of JINSA and CSP

members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they’ve 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.

And Vest continued:

On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war – not just with Iraq, but “total war,” as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSA's in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, “regime change” by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative.[14]

Both JINSA and CSP, which is headed by Frank Gaffney, a protégé of Perle going back to their days as staffers for Senator Henry Jackson, have been heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a California business magnate whose money comes from bingo parlors. Moskowitz heavily funds right-wing American Zionist organizations such as the far-right settler group Ateret Cohanim. Ateret Cohanim believes that the acquisition of land in the now Muslim section of Jerusalem’s Old City and the concomitant rebuilding of the Jewish Temple at its former site will hasten the coming of the Messiah. The Temple Mount where the Temple stood, however, is sacred to Muslims and has been occupied for centuries by Muslim holy buildings – the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque. Moskowitz provided the money that enabled the 1996 reopening of a tunnel under the Temple Mount, which resulted in 70 deaths due to rioting.[15]

A major financier of CSP has been New York real estate investor Lawrence Kadish. Kadish has been one of the Republican Party’s leading donors giving some $500,000 during the 2000 presidential election campaign. Kadish served as chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which was closely allied to Israel’s Likud government and which supported the construction of the controversial Jewish settlement at Har Homa in East Jerusalem in the late 1990s, over Palestinian objections that the project jeopardized the peace process.[16]

Another major CSP financial backer has been Poju Zabludowicz, heir to a formidable diversified international empire that includes Israeli arms manufacturer Soltam.[17]

During the 1990s, the neoconservatives also greatly expanded into the media, once a preserve of mainstream liberalism. In 1995, the Weekly Standard was established, founded and edited by William Kristol, with financing from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a strong proponent of Israel and conservative causes. The Weekly Standard immediately became the leading voice of the neoconservatives, moving ahead of Commentary because of its greater frequency of publication. As Jonathan Mark wrote in the Jewish Week: “Murdoch’s Weekly Standard has been at the epicenter of the neocon political movement that has urged a Middle Eastern policy premised on Israel’s security.”[18]

Despite a relatively small circulation of around 55,000, the Weekly Standard has had a major impact. With the Murdoch subsidy, the magazine could achieve a broad newsstand presence and provide thousands of complimentary issues, especially to influential figures.[19] “Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America,” wrote Eric Alterman in the Nation magazine. “Their circulation may be small but they are not interested in speaking to the great unwashed. The magazine speaks directly to and for power.”[20]

While not appealing directly to the general public, the Weekly Standard served to credential its writers for roles in the mass media. As Halper and Clarke point out in America Alone: the Weekly Standard

has succeeded in a main purpose, namely to provide legitimacy for its staffers in their role as “experts” on Fox and MSNBC television where Weekly Standard contributors have become recognized faces. These platforms have, in turn, allowed neo-conservatives to establish themselves as experts providing an important perspective on the major networks’ Sunday talk shows.[21]

Most especially, the editorship of the Weekly Standard brought William Kristol into the limelight of the Washington media/political world. In 2000, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz described Kristol as having “become part of Washington’s circulatory system, this half-pol, half-pundit, full-throated advocate with the nice-guy image” who is “wired to nearly all the Republican presidential candidates.”[22] Kristol was a leading media advocate of war against Iraq. In 1997, the Weekly Standard became one of the first publications to publicly call for regime change in Iraq. Referring to Kristol’s numerous articles and media appearances in support of the Iraq war, Washington Post syndicated columnist Richard Cohen in mid-2002 dubbed it as “Kristol’s War.”[23]

While the Weekly Standard is oriented to the political and intellectual class, neoconservative views reach the more general public through other instruments of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire, with its vast holdings in the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, and China. Murdoch’s News Corporation is the largest English language news group in the world. In 2004, it consisted of more than 175 newspapers (40 million papers sold each week) and 35 television stations. That Murdoch’s media outlets have been noted for their sensationalism has made them popular with the mass public.[24]

Of Australian birth, Murdoch has been an American citizen since 1985, but he also has strong political and business attachments to Israel and was a close friend of Ariel Sharon. As Murdoch put it:

I’ve always had sympathy for Israel, but it certainly intensified when I moved to New York [from Australia] in 1973. I got to know Prime Minister Sharon, way back in the late ’70s. Through the years, the support intensified. It was just a matter of thinking about it. I’ve been [to Israel]. I liked it. I felt a tremendous excitement.[25]

It should also be added that it has been alleged that Murdoch’s mother, Elisabeth Joy Greene, was an Orthodox Jew, which would make him Jewish by Jewish standards, although Murdoch does not publicly mention this.[26]

Murdoch enforces a pro-Israel line in his publications. As one reporter, Sam Kiley, who resigned in protest from the Murdoch-owned Times (London), exclaimed: “No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.” Pro-Israel groups have honored Murdoch for his support. In 1982, the American Jewish Congress voted Murdoch the “Communications Man of the Year.”[27] In 1997, the United Jewish Appeal Federation bestowed upon Murdoch its “Humanitarian of the Year” award.[28] Murdoch’s News Corporation was one of three U.S. companies lauded for its support of Israel at the America-Israel Friendship League Partners for Democracy Awards dinner in June 2001. Murdoch himself co-chaired the dinner.[29]

During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favor of the war.[30] Murdoch’s most important outlet for disseminating neoconservative views is Fox News, which has been the most popular cable news network, according to some rating criteria. Although its motto is “fair and balanced,” it has relied heavily on neoconservatives for its news experts and is slanted in a neoconservative direction.[31]

Neoconservatives in the media provided the cultural preparation for an American war in the Middle East. While it cannot be said that prior to 2001 their views dominated the media, neocons definitely had an important presence. Most importantly, the neoconservatives were perfectly situated in the media to be able to exploit the post-911 environment and thus manipulate the American public in their desired direction. As Halper and Clarke note in their America Alone:

Neo-conservatives had built up a range of media outlets and national fora that enabled them to underpin their policy interpretations to the many constituents of the American public. The cable networks, the conservative talk radio shows, and the conservative print outlets were all in place to carry the abstract war into the governing philosophy of American foreign policy by inundating people with the discursive reality created by neo-conservatives. The neo-conservatives, both in and out of the administration, inserted themselves into this environment before 9/11 and benefited from it afterward. It was the arm with which they represented their views to the larger segments of the American body politic. It was the machinery that synthesized the popular mindset that proved so critical in making war with Saddam Hussein.[32]

The neocons’ presence in the mainstream media was significantly enhanced because of the existence of their think tanks and their media outlets. In short, the neocon apparatus served to credential them for the mainstream media.[33]

Although there is much talk of a neoconservative cabal and a neoconservative conspiracy, usually in an effort to discredit the idea that neocons could have been a major influence behind the war, secrecy did not envelop the neocons’ war strategy. During the 1990s, the neoconservatives were quite open about their goal of war in the Middle East to destabilize Iraq and other enemies of Israel. A clear illustration of the neoconservative thinking on this subject – and the intimate connection with Israeli security – was a 1996 paper entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Included in the study group that produced the report were figures who would loom large in the Bush II administration’s war policy in the Middle East – Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser. (Wurmser was then actually affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.) Perle was listed as the head of the study group. Others included in the study group were James Colbert (JINSA), Charles Fairbanks, Jr. (Johns Hopkins University), Robert Loewenberg (President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies), Jonathan Torop (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and Meyrav Wurmser (Johns Hopkins University).[34]

The “realm” that the study group sought to secure was that of Israel. The purpose of the policy paper was to provide a political blueprint for the incoming Israeli Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper stated that Netanyahu should “make a clean break” with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel’s claim to the West Bank and Gaza. It presented a plan by which Israel would “shape its strategic environment,” beginning with the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. Significantly, the report did not present Saddam Iraq as the major threat to Israel. Rather, Iraq was more like the weak link among Israel’s enemies. By removing Saddam, the study held that Israel would be in a strategic position to get at its more dangerous foes. In short, elimination of Saddam was a first step toward reconfiguring the entire Middle East for the benefit of Israel. “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria,” the study maintained. “This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”[35]

A Hashemite[36] kingdom in Iraq would enable Israel to weaken Syria and Iran, and cut off support for Hezbollah, which threatened Israel from its bases in Lebanon. “The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [Najaf], Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which – and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows – is King Hussein.”[37]

It should be emphasized that the same people – Feith, Wurmser, Perle – who advised the Israeli government on issues of national security would later advise the George W. Bush administration to pursue virtually the same policy regarding the Middle East. In 2004, political observer William James Martin would astutely comment about “A Clean Break”: “This document is remarkable for its very existence because it constitutes a policy manifesto for the Israeli government penned by members of the current U.S. government.”[38] Martin next pointed out that the similarity between that document’s recommendation for Israel and the neocon-inspired Bush administration policy, purportedly for the benefit of American interests, was even more remarkable. “It is amazing how much of this program, though written for the Israeli government of Netanyahu of 1996, has already been implemented, not by the government of Israel, but by the Bush administration.”[39]

Similarly, Craig Unger wrote in the March 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, “Ten years later, ‘A Clean Break’ looks like nothing less than a playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many of the initiatives outlined in the paper have been implemented – removing Saddam from power, setting aside the ‘land for peace’ formula to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon – all with disastrous results.”[40]

What was dramatically similar between the “Clean Break” scenario and actual Bush II administration Middle East policy was not only the objectives but the sequence of events. It is notable that the “Clean Break” report held that removing Saddam was the key to weakening Israel’s other enemies; while the United States would quickly threaten Iran and Syria and talk of restructuring the entire Middle East after removing Saddam in 2003.[41]

The “Clean Break” scenario would combine the attack on Israel’s external enemies with efforts to undermine the Palestinians. The study urged Israel to abandon any thought of trading land for peace with the Arabs, which it depicted as a “cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat.” It implied that there could be little or no compromise on the issue of land. “Our claim to the land – to which we have clung for hope for 2,000 years – is legitimate and noble.” It continued: “Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, ‘peace for peace,’ is a solid basis for the future.”In short, the fundamental need was for the Palestinians to abandon violent resistance, without Israel offering any territory as a quid pro quo. This approach would entail nurturing alternatives to Arafat. Significantly, this approach to peace was basically implemented after the 9/11 terrorist attack.[42]

Notably, the authors of the study presented it as a policy of “preemption” – analogous to the way the neocons would present the American war in the Middle East, with the United States, of course, replacing Israel as the preemptor. And the strategy presented in the “Clean Break” was openly motivated by the strategic interests of Israel, which, if carried out, would allegedly revitalize the nation. “Israel’s new agenda,” the document stated,

can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.

Israel’s new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to refocus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel’s socialist foundations with a more sound footing; and to overcome its “exhaustion,” which threatens the survival of the nation.[43]

While neocons present American policy in a very idealistic light, their policy prescriptions for Israel, which involved similar concrete policy objectives, were devoid of such sentiment. Written in terms of Israeli interest, the study made little mention of the benefits to be accrued by Israel’s neighboring countries, such as the establishment of democracy. The goal of creating a Hashemite kingdom was certainly a non-democratic approach. Moreover, the study made no mention of fundamentalist Islam or Al Qaeda.

Regarding the United States, the report did discuss tactics as to how Israel could get American sympathy and support for the proposed policy to advance Israel’s interests. To prevent the debilitating American criticism of Israeli policy that took place during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the “Clean Break” report advised Netanyahu to present Israeli actions “in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the cold war which apply well to Israel.” For example, the report stated that

Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense.[44]

Israel could also gain American support, the report maintained, by appealing to Western ideals. The Netanyahu government should “promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach . . . will be well received in the United States.” The appeal to American values loomed large in the reference to Syria and the key role of Lebanon. “An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon.” In short, the report saw the use of moral values in largely utilitarian terms. References to moral values were for American consumption and would serve as a means to obtain American support for a policy whose sole purpose was to advance Israeli national interests.[45]

While the authors of “A Clean Break” saw the vital need to win over American sympathy and support, the purpose of their strategy was simultaneously to free Israel from American pressure and influence. “Such self-reliance,” the report explained, “will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of [United States] pressure used against it in the past.” It was highly noteworthy that Americans would advise the Israeli government how to induce the United States to support Israeli interests and how to avoid having to follow the policies of the United States government.[46]

In sum, the “Clean Break” study was an astounding document that has been given insufficient attention by the mainstream American media. Though written to advance the interests of a foreign country, it appears to be a rough blueprint for actual Bush administration policy, with which some of the “Clean Break” authors – Perle, Feith, and Wurmser – were intimately involved. The question that immediately arises concerns the loyalty and motives of the three authors. When formulating and implementing American policy for the Bush II administration, were they acting in the interests of America or of Israel?

Crucial parts of the “Clean Break” study show that Israeli interests trumped American ones. For the “Clean Break” study called for presenting actions to advance Israel interests under the cover of American interests and American morality. Moreover, one of the objectives of the “Clean Break” was to free Israel from American influence. In short, Israeli policy should become independent of American interests.

Finally, all of this leads to the ultimate question: If the “Clean Break” authors discussed ways to masquerade from the American public the purpose of the proposed Israeli policy, did administration neocons use a similar type of deception in publicly justifying the Bush administration’s Middle East war policy? Certainly, the alleged “mistakes” regarding WMD and Saddam’s ties to Al Qaeda would point in that direction. (The issue of this deception and the neocon role in the matter of war propaganda will be developed in later chapters.)

In its concern about presenting Israeli preemptive actions to Americans in ways that would gain their sympathy and support, the “Clean Break” study can be seen as a transitional evolutionary stage from Oded Yinon’s thinking in the 1980s to the neocon-directed U.S. policy of the Bush II administration. Yinon thought in terms of Israeli action, with only a little mention of the United States beyond a general reference to couching Israel’s actions in terms of the Cold War and Western values. The “Clean Break” provided much greater emphasis on the need to have United States support for what was still Israeli military action, and it also prescribed specific tactics to achieve this support. As a transitional stage, it was a mild uptick compared with what would come about in the post-911 Bush II administration when the United States itself would engage in the military action in the Middle East. (This would parallel evolution in nature, as described by the now-popular punctuated equilibrium version, with its long periods of very small changes interrupted by short, sudden periods of rapid transformation, usually after a catastrophic event.)

It should be emphasized that the proposed strategic actions and military targets for all three evolutionary stages were similar and the fundamental beneficiary was identical – Israel. Again, since neocons assume, or at least publicly proclaim, that Israeli interests are American interests (a claim that will be discussed at length in chapter 11), the American interest presumably would be enhanced in each case. Certainly, Bush policy has been presented to the American people as advancing American interests – though sometimes the alleged reasons later turned out to be bogus.

David Wurmser authored a much longer follow-up document to “A Clean Break” for the same Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, entitled “Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant.” In this work, Wurmser emphasized the fragile nature of the Middle Eastern states and linked the U.S. and Israel together in dealing with security matters in the region. As in the more general “Clean Break” document, control of Iraq was presented as the strategic key to the entire Middle East region, at least as far as Israeli interests were involved. As the subtitle stated, Israel’s fundamental security concern was its close neighbors in the Levant, but Wurmser emphasized that the correlation of power in that area was critically impacted by developments in the broader Middle East region.[47]

It was notable that rather than presenting Iraq as a powerful aggressor, Wurmser characterized the country as weak and breaking apart, with the state ideology of Baathism failing to serve as a unifying force. “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by extreme repression of the state,” Wurmser asserted.

While there is a sense of common destiny among many Iraqis in ousting Saddam, the mechanism for doing so most reliably remains working through clan, family, and tribal connections. Indeed, only the most primordial, almost instinctual ties, manage to survive the watchful eye and heavy hand of Saddam.

Nonetheless, Iraq played a pivotal role in Israeli security. The “battle to dominate and define Iraq,” Wurmser 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” should fight this battle together. Wurmser saw the United States and Israel confronted with a “Saudi-Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-PLO axis.” In Wurmser’s view, the Levant consisted of “crumbling states, like Syria, locked in bitter rivalries over a collapsing entity (Iraq).” He opined that

Given the cross-border alliances of tribes and the fragility of the secular-Arab nationalist states in the Levant, strategic competition over Iraq may well lead to the collapse of some of the engaged regimes. Thus, whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically.[48]

The danger to Israel arose from the fact that Iraq might fall under the control of Syria. Wurmser pointed out that Syria was trying to topple Saddam and gain dominance over Iraq by working with various Iraqi Shiite groups. Syrian ties to these groups derived from the leverage it had with Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite organization, which operated in Syrian-occupied Lebanon.[49]

If Iraq fell under the sway of Hashemite Jordan, however, Syria would be imperiled. Wurmser maintained that “events in Iraq can shake Syria’s position in Lebanon.” Wurmser held that Syria’s leader, then Hafez al-Assad,

works primarily through the strong Shiite presence in the South to maintain his pressure on Israel. This pressure is necessary to preempt the Israelis from engaging more deeply in Lebanese affairs and undermining Syria in its Sunni or Christian core.

It is significant to note that Wurmser portrayed the Syrian actions as a largely defensive in order to prevent Israel from going on the offensive in Lebanon and Syria itself.[50]

Moreover, Wurmser pointed out that “one of the most important bolts Assad retains in his arsenal to retain his strong grip on Lebanon is Hezbollah,” explaining that “As long as Hezbollah is the primary force in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Shia are linked ideologically to Iran.” That situation would change radically if the Hashemites gained control of Iraq. “A Hashemite presence in Iraq, especially within the Shia centers in Najaf,” Wurmser maintained, “could break Iran’s and Syria’s grip on the Shiite community of Lebanon.” The result would be a major strategic benefit for Israel. “Close cooperation between Israel and Jordan could undermine Syria’s pressure on Israel’s northern border as the local Shia are weaned from Hezbollah’s domination. In short, developments in Iraq could potentially unravel Syria’s structure in Lebanon by severing the Shia-Syrian-Iranian axis.” The power of Israel’s enemies would be dissipated while Israeli hegemony would be augmented.[51]

As in the general “Clean Break” study, Wurmser in his “Coping with Crumbling States” presented Iraq as a strategic regional key to controlling the Middle East. The value of attacking of Iraq was set in geostrategic terms, not in terms of any special danger coming from Saddam’s power; in fact, Iraq was described as being especially weak, which was one fundamental reason for targeting it.

While this portrayal of Iraq’s provocative weakness would carry weight among strategic thinkers concerned about Israel’s regional security, such a geostrategic analysis would have little impact with the general American public, whose support would be essential if America itself were to be actively involved in the planned war. To achieve the latter, it would be necessary to show that Saddam was some type of lethal threat to America. And this is what the neocons would proceed to do.

Wurmser himself would turn to emphasizing the danger of Saddam Hussein to the United States. In Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published in 1999 by AEI, Wurmser expanded on his “Coping with Crumbling States” thesis with a focus on the need to militarily remove Saddam’s regime. Wurmser claimed that Saddam’s Iraq was a definite a threat to the United States because it was “a totalitarian tyranny. Such tyranny is, by its very nature, violent, aggressive, and rabidly anti-Western.”[52]

Wurmser contended that America’s failure to bring down Saddam during the Gulf War had allowed for his revival, and the concomitant strengthening of all America’s enemies in the Middle East, which would ultimately mean defeat for the United States in the region. “The longer Iraq remains under Saddam’s control and the more his power revives,” Wurmser stated, “the brighter the prospects and the stronger the resilience of the anti-western alliance.”[53]

In calling for an American militant strategy toward the Middle East, Wurmser presented the major enemy as secular, pan-Arabic nationalism, which he described as totalitarian. This differed radically from the post-9/11 emphasis on the danger of Islamism – though Wurmser maintained that the elimination of Saddam’s regime would likewise bring about the destruction of the Islamic Republic in Iran.[54] Furthermore, Wurmser held that the destabilization of the existing governments of the Middle East would actually improve the lives of its people because “for much of the Arab world, factionalism constitutes the sole barrier against the absolute power of its tyrants.” Wurmser, though an advocate of “American values,” proposed not an advance to modern democracy – the dominant neoconservative theme since the build-up of the war on Iraq – but rather a return to the rule of the Hashemites and the powerful traditional families. And he presented Ahmed Chalabi as representing this viable, positive tradition. “He, his family, and the organization he created represent an older Iraq and a traditional elite that have been battered, oppressed, and enslaved by pan-Arabic nationalist governments for forty years.”[55] While Wurmser depicted decentralization as a means of advancing liberty for the Arab people, such a dissolution of centralized states, of course, coincided with the Israeli security goal of surrounding itself with fragmented, powerless statelets.

Significantly, in regard to the role of Israel in his thinking, Wurmser alleged that Saddam was the key to PLO strength. “Saddam views his connection with the PLO and Arafat as a valuable strategic asset,” Wurmser asserted. “Any U.S. policy that allocates a higher priority to the Arab-Israeli peace process than to the Iraqi challenge leaves the United States vulnerable to an Iraqi veto or sabotage, as long as the PLO responds to Saddam’s direction.”[56] In essence, Wurmser was correctly pointing out that without external support the Palestinians would be less able to resist Israeli policy. His assumption, of course, was that Israel should have a free-hand to deal with the Palestinians and that the United States should simply support Israeli policy.

In the book’s acknowledgments, Wurmser praised the key neoconservatives who influenced his work, which provides a good illustration of the closeness of the neoconservative network. Wurmser was most lavish with his praise for Richard Perle, who wrote the foreword for the book. Wurmser credited Perle with liberating Eastern Europe from Soviet Communism.

Richard showed the world how to successfully convert theory into practice in confronting tyranny. It is thus a singular honor for me to have earned his continuing support, suggestions, and encouragement – without which I would neither have arrived at AEI nor been given opportunity to write.

Wurmser also lauded AEI scholar Michael Ledeen, who had “continually reinforced the centrality of promoting freedom and combating tyranny.” Wurmser paid tribute to the notorious Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, “who guided my understanding of the Middle East,” and praised Douglas Feith and R. James Woolsey. Wurmser also gave special thanks to Irving Moskowitz, the long-time funder of Israel’s settlement movement, whom he described as a “gentle man whose generous support of AEI allows me to be here.”[57]

While Wurmser focused on the danger of Saddam, he still did not go so far as to portray him as a diabolical terrorist threat to the American homeland, which would be necessary to rouse the American people to support a war. The key figure who moved to this level was Laurie Mylroie, also of the American Enterprise Institute. She served as the neocons’ leading expert on Saddam Hussein. From the time of the World Trade Tower bombing in 1993, Mylroie developed a complex conspiracy theory which identified Saddam as the mastermind behind that action and numerous other terrorist activities directed against the United States, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000.[58]

Mylroie presented her thesis in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, which was published by the AEI in 2000. “It is the contention of this book,” Mylroie wrote,

that the rash of terrorist attacks directed at the United States, beginning with the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center, does not represent an amorphous . . . new kind of terrorism. Rather, the United States is involved in a new kind of war – an undercover war of terrorism, waged by Saddam Hussein. Or, perhaps, the terrorism is best characterized as a phase in a conflict that began in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that has not ended.[59]

Mylroie’s Saddam conspiracy theory was far outside mainstream thinking, and she would have been considered something of an oddball if it were not for her connections to people with power.[60] Peter Bergen in the Washington Monthly in 2003 dubbed her “the neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist.”[61] The Study of Revenge had considerable input from the neocon network. In her acknowledgements, Mylroie credited Paul Wolfowitz for providing “crucial support” and his then-wife Clare Wolfowitz as having “fundamentally shaped the book.” Mylroie also thanked three individuals who would become top aides to Vice President Cheney – chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby and foreign-policy advisors John Hannah and David Wurmser – as well as Bush II Under Secretary of State (later Ambassador to the United Nations) John Bolton. She would also credit Michael Ledeen.[62] Once published, other neocons praised the work. Richard Perle described the book as “splendid and wholly convincing.” R. James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick also gave their plaudits.[63]

Mylroie’s book was originally published by the AEI, but after September 11, 2001, Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, released the book in paperback, with the new title, The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, and with an introduction by R. James Woolsey. HarperCollins was owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News, in turn, booked Mylroie as an Iraq expert during the build-up to the war.[64]

Interestingly, there is substantial evidence that in the late 1980s Mylroie had served as a go-between in secret contacts between Israel and Iraq. At that time, elements in the Israeli government were interested in improving relations with Iraq, which ultimately came to naught. Mylroie was then publicly espousing a position favorable to Iraq, which she said had become friendlier toward Israel.[65]

Perhaps the most significant figure in the Bush II administration who argued at length for Saddam’s forcible removal by the United States was Paul Wolfowitz, a firm adherent of Mylroie’s views. His first direct expression of that view was the article “Overthrow Saddam,” co-authored by Zalmay Khalilzad, which appeared in the December 1, 1997 issue of the Weekly Standard. In that work, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad held that American military force should focus on creating a liberated zone in southern Iraq that could aid the Iraqi resistance in overthrowing Saddam’s regime.[66]

A key neoconservative umbrella group that would be in the forefront of urging war on Iraq was the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which was founded in 1997 to promote a strategy for American military dominance of the globe. PNAC was initiated by the New Citizenship Project (NCP), which was an affiliate of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative Republican think tank founded by William Kristol. Kristol was the chairman of PNAC, and Robert Kagan, one of Kristol’s close associates as a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard, was one of the directors. NCP and PNAC were headquartered at 1150 17th St., NW, Washington, D.C., which was also the headquarters of AEI.[67] Many figures who would become prominent war hawks in the Bush II administration were associated with PNAC: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and Zalmay Khalilzad.[68]

On January 26, 1998, PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton urging him to take unilateral military action against Iraq to overthrow Saddam and offering a plan to achieve that objective. It especially counseled the president to avoid involving the UN Security Council. “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council,” the letter said. Among the letters’ eighteen signatories were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, R. James Woolsey, and Richard Perle.[69] The letter was privately delivered by Perle and former Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz to Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser.[70]

After the Clinton administration failed to take action on the suggestions, a second open letter to Clinton, dated February 19, 1998, was made public. It included an expanded list of forty names; among those signers added were Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik and David Wurmser. It was sent under the banner of the resurrected Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, which had played a major role in promoting the 1991 Gulf War. The letter was more detailed than the one of January 26, proposing “a comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime.” It continued: “It will not be easy – and the course of action we favor is not without its problems and perils. But we believe the vital national interests of our country require the United States to [adopt such a strategy].”[71]

Unsatisfied with Clinton’s response, PNAC wrote another letter on May 29, 1998, to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, with almost the same signatories as its January letter to the President, saying that

U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime.[72]

Numerous bills were put forward in Congress to provide aid to the Iraqi opposition to Saddam’s regime. Ultimately, President Clinton would only go so far as to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in September 1998, which called for the United States “to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein,” but limited that support to an allocation of 97 million dollars for training and military equipment for the Iraqi opposition. Neoconservatives regarded that response as woefully insufficient. As Richard Perle wrote: “the administration refused to commit itself unequivocally to a new strategy, raising questions as to whether any meaningful shift had occurred in U.S. policy.”[73]

The Iraq Liberation Act did not imply a military attack on Iraq. Ambassador Joseph Wilson noted:

American administrations have long had regime-change policies in place toward countries whose leaders we did not like – Cuba, Libya, and Sudan, for instance. There had been a number of precedents for effecting regime change without resorting to war, including successful efforts during the Reagan administration in Poland and in the southern Africa countries of Namibia and South Africa.

But Wilson added that, unrealized at the time by most observers, the legislation would serve as a “rallying point for the prowar crowd. It was a preliminary stride toward invasion, not just another small step in the political campaign to undermine Saddam.”[74] The Iraq Liberation Act was sometimes cited by war proponents as a legal justification for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.[75]

In September 2000, PNAC issued a report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” which envisioned an expanded global posture for the United States. In regard to the Middle East, the report called for an increased American military presence in the Gulf, whether Saddam was in power or not, maintaining:

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The report struck a prescient note when it observed that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”[76]

It was apparent that during the Clinton years the neocons had formulated the entire plan for a Middle East war and had established the mechanisms, with their think tanks and media outlets, to disseminate this view to politicians and the public at large.

They had become wedded to the idea, developed earlier by Likudnik thinkers, that it was necessary to bring about a reconfiguration of the Middle East, not only by removing those regimes that opposed Israel but also by fragmenting some of those countries. And they perceived Iraq as the initial target for the overall Middle East effort. Significantly, they saw the need for American involvement – quickly moving from the idea that the United States would be supportive of Israeli military action to the point where the United States would initiate military action itself. To achieve such American involvement it would be necessary to show how the United States itself was directly threatened; thus, by the end of 1990s the neocons were portraying Saddam as an especially lethal threat to the American homeland. In actuality, however, the removal of Saddam was simply intended to be the beginning phase in the overall restructuring of the Middle East.

The neocons were quite unified in presenting the danger Saddam allegedly posed to the United States and their thinks tanks and media outlets could effectively disseminate this view. However, they could not achieve their goal by simply being a “shadow defense department;” what was needed was to gain a prominent role in the foreign policy/national security apparatus of the next administration, and then perhaps await a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” (as the PNAC report deemed necessary) to fully implement their program. All of this would soon come to pass.

Notes Chapter 5

[1] Tilley, One-State Solution, p. 106.

[2] Peter L. Hahn, “The Suez Crisis: A Crisis That Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East,” eJournal USA, April 2006, http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/0406/ijpe/hahn.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[3] Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 14–5.

[4] Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup,” Washington Post, December 30, 2002, p. A-1; Malcolm Byrne, Introduction, “Saddam Hussein: More Secret History,” December 18, 2003, National Security Archives, George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB107/index.htm, accessed November 18, 2007.

[5] Hiro, Longest War, p. 119.

[6] Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup,” Washington Post, December 30, 2002, p. A-1.

[7] Dobbs, ibid. Documents revealing administration efforts to downplay Iraq’s use of chemical weapons are presented at Malcolm Byrne, “Introduction,” Saddam Hussein: More Secret History, December 18, 2003, National Security Archives, George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB107/index.htm, accessed November 18, 2007.

[8] Stephen R. Shalom, “The United States and the Iran-Iraq War,” Z Magazine, February 1990, online; Jeremy Scahill, “The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet,” Znet.org, August 2, 2002, online; Chris Bury, ” U.S.-Iraq Relations, Part 1: Lesser Evil,” Nightline (ABC), September 18, 2002, online; Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup,” Washington Post, December 30, 2002, p. A-1.

[9] William Blum, “Anthrax for Export,” Progressive, April 1998, online.

[10] Dobbs, “U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup,” p. A-1.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Hiro, The Longest War, pp. 83, 117–8; Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), pp. 294–5; Avi Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 440–1; Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 104–5, 112.

[13] Stephen Green, Living by the Sword: America and Israel in the Middle East 1968–87 (Brattleboro, Vermont: Amana Books, 1988), pp. 193–212.

[14] Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 440–1; Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, pp. 110–26. The U.S. diverted the proceeds from the secret weapons sale to fund the Contras – anti-Communist guerrillas engaged in an insurgency against the socialistic, pro-Soviet Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Funding of the Contras had been prohibited by Congress, so it was necessary to take this secret indirect approach. The policy was presented as being in the American interest – or at least in line with the Cold War position of the Reagan administration – because it would serve to free Western hostages taken by Hezbollah, counter Soviet influence with Iran, and aid the anti-Soviet Contras.

[15] Green, Living by the Sword, pp. 193–6, 212–8; Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, p. 117.

[16] Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, p. 297.

[17] Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, p. 110.

[18] U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Preliminary Inquiry Into the Sale of Arms to Iran and Possible Diversion of Funds to the Nicaraguan Resistance,” February 2, 1987, No. 100–7, pp. 3–4, quoted in Green, Living by the Sword, p. 195.

[19] Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, p. 298. The U.S. move to help Iran was not presented as a way to advance Israel foreign policy interests, but rather as a means of preventing Iran from falling under the sway of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it was argued that such a policy would strengthen Iranian “moderates,” who would be able to overthrow the rule of the radical Ayatollahs (Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, pp. 299–301).

[20] Michael Ledeen, “Let’s Talk with Iran Now,” New York Times, July 19, 1988, quoted in Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, p. 242.

[21] Michael A. Ledeen, The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007). See also Chapters 12 and 16.

[22] Steven Hurst, The Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration: In Search of a New World Order (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 86.

[23] Jackson Diehl, “New Arab Arsenals Challenge Israel’s Long Regional Dominance,” Washington Post, April 3, 1990, p. A-35.

[24] Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, “Iraq’s Arsenal of Horrors: Baghdad’s Growing Menace Alters Israeli Strategy,” Washington Post, April 8, 1990, p. B-1.

[25] Jackson Diehl, “New Arab Arsenals Challenge Israel’s Long Regional Dominance,” Washington Post, April 3, 1990, p. A-35.

[26] Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 351–2.

[27] Majid Khadduri and Edmund Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, 1990–1991: The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 99–100.

[28] Khadduri and Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, pp. 100.

[29] Hurst, Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration, pp. 29–34, 72–6.

[30] Ibid., pp. 29–34, 72–6.

[31] William Safire, “Bush Versus Israel,” New York Times, March 26, 1990, p. A-17.

[32] Ibid..

[33] “The Gulf Wars, 1990–1991,” History of the Middle East Database, http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/gulf_war.htm,accessed November 16, 2007; Sam Husseini and Jim Naureckas, “Zuckerman Unbound,” FAIR, January/February 1993, http://www.fair.org/extra/9301/zuckerman.html, accessed November 16, 2007.

[34] Murray Waas, “Who lost Kuwait?,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 30, 1991, online.

[35] Dilip Hiro, Iraq in the Eye of the Storm (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), pp. 32–4; Khadduri and Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, pp. 105–8.

[36] Hiro, Iraq in the Eye of the Storm, pp. 32–4; Khadduri and Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, pp. 105–8.

[37] Khadduri and Ghareeb, War in the Gulf, pp. 234–36.

[38] Hurst, Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration, p. 88.

[39] Charles Krauthammer, “Nightmare From the ’30s,” Washington Post, July 27, 1990, p. A27.

[40] Hurst, Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration, p. 90; H. Rahman, Making of the Gulf War: Origins of Kuwait’s Long-Standing Territorial Dispute with Iraq ( Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1997), pp. 298–99.

[41] John Edward Wilz, “The Making of Mr. Bush’s War: A Failure to Learn from History? ” Presidential Studies Quarterly, Summer 1996, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/wilz.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Mitchel Cohen, “How the War Party Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to U.S.,” Antiwar.com, December 30, 2002, online.

[44] William Thomas, Bringing The War Home (Anchorage, AK : Earthpulse Press, 1998), http://www.earthpulse.com/src/subcategory.asp?catid=2&subcatid=3, accessed November 16, 2007.

[45] Scott Peterson, “In war, some facts less factual,” Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002, online; Jon Basil Utley, “Questions About the Supposed Iraqi Threat to Saudi Arabia in l990 – Aerial Photos Were Never Released!!,” Americans Against Bombing, http://www.againstbombing.org/bush.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[46] Jackson Diehl “Gulf Crisis Boosts Israeli Confidence Over Relations With U.S.,” Washington Post, August 5, 1990, p. A-13.

[47] Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 473–74, 483–84.

[48] Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, pp. 353, 356.

[49] Diehl, “Gulf Crisis Boosts Israeli Confidence Over Relations With U.S.,” p. A-13.

[50] Washington Post, “Solarz Forms Group Backing Gulf Policies,” Washington Post, December 9, 1990, p. A-36.

[51] Christopher Layne, “Why the Gulf War was Not in the National Interest,” Atlantic, July 1991, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/layne.htm, accessed November 18, 2007.

[52] E. J. Dionne Jr., “Gulf Crisis Rekindles Democrats’ Old Debate but with New Focus,” Washington Post, January 3, 1991, p. A-16.

[53] Patrick J. Buchanan, “A. M. Rosenthal’s Outrage Reeks of Fakery,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 1990, p. 3C.

[54] Richard Cohen, “Those Calls for War,” Washington Post, August 28, 1990, p. A-17.

[55] Thomas L. Friedman, “Confrontation in the Gulf: Behind Bush’s Hard Line,” New York Times, August 22, 1990, p. A-1.

[56] Sami Yosif, “The Iraqi-U.S. War: a Conspiracy Theory,” in The Gulf War and the New World Order, eds. Haim Bresheeth and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1991), pp. 51–59.

[57] Hurst, Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration, pp. 95–96.

[58] Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 394.

[59] Ibid., p. 393.

[60] Ibid., pp. 393–94.

[61] Bruce Fein, “No quarrel with the people of Iraq?,” Washington Times, February 20, 1991, p. G-4. Fein was a long-time proponent of neoconservative positions although he became strongly critical of the Bush II administration’s diminution of civil liberties and expansion of presidential power (phone interview with Paul Gottfried, historian of modern American conservatism, November 2, 2007).

[62] Arnold Beichman, “How the divide over Iraq strategies began,” Washington Times, November 27, 2002, p. A-18.

[63] George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 489.

[64] James A. Baker III, with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 435.

[65] Podhoretz, “World War IV.”

[66] A. M. Rosenthal, “Why the Betrayal?,” New York Times, April 2, 1991, p. A-19.

[67] A. M. Rosenthal, “The Way Out,” New York Times, April 23, 1991, p. A-21.

[68] A. M. Rosenthal, “The Fear of Morality,” New York Times, April 16, 1991, p. A-23.

[69] William Safire, “Bush’s Moral Crisis,” New York Times, April 1, 1991, p. A-17; see also William Safire, “Follow the Kurds to Save Iraq,” New York Times, March 28, 1991, p. A-25, and William Safire, “Bush’s Bay of Pigs,” New York Times, April 4, 1991, p. A-23.

[70] Charles Krauthammer, “After Winning Big, Bush Ran Away Fast,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 5, 1991, p. 3-B.

[71] Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, Bushes, p. 399.

[72] Tom Diaz, “Israelis aren’t making Baker’s job any easier,” Washington Times, April 8,1991, p. A-9.

[73] Warren Strobel, “Baker condemns Israeli settlement policy,” Washington Times, May 23, 1991, p. A-8.

[74] George H. W. Bush, “The President’s News Conference, September 12, 1991,” Public Papers of George Bush: 1989–1993, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19969&st=&st1=,accessed November 16, 2007; Warren Strobel, “Bush won’t back loan to Jewish state,” Washington Times, March 18, 1992, p. A-7; Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, pp. 218–23.

[75] Warren Strobel, “Bush won’t back loan to Jewish state,” Washington Times, March 18, 1992, p. A-7; Michael Hedge, “Israeli lobby president resigns over promises,” Washington Times, November 4, 1992, p. A-3; “Loan Guarantees for Israel,” Washington Times, September 11, 1992, p. F-2; Frank Gaffney, Jr., “Neocon job that begs for answers,” Washington Times, October 13, 1992, p. F-1; Andrew Borowiec, “Group counters Bush on Israel,” Washington Times, February 27, 1992, p. A-1; Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, pp. 218–23; Baker quoted in Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, p. 197; Goldberg, Jewish Power, p. xxii. An interesting side note, Goldberg in Jewish Power, observes (p. 234) that “In 1991, at the height of the Bush administration’s confrontation with Israel, no fewer than seven of the nineteen assistant secretaries in the State Department were Jews.”

[76] Goldberg, Jewish Power, pp. xxii.

[77] Ibid., p. xxvi.

[78] “Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East,” SourceWatch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Committee_on_U.S._Interests_in_the_Middle_East, accessed November 22, 2007; “New Committee Explains Israel as U.S. Asset, April 1, 1992 in Security Affairs Archive: U.S.-Israel Strategic and Defense Cooperation – Security Affairs Archive, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, http://www.jinsa.org/articles/articles.html/function/view/categoryid/109/documentid/289/history/3,653,109,289,accessed November 16, 2007.

[79] “The Complete Unexpurgated AIPAC Tape,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December/January 1992/93, online (pp. 13–6).

[80] Ibid.

[81] Robert I. Friedman, “The Wobbly Israel Lobby,” Washington Post, November 1, 1992, p. C-1; Cathryn Donohoe, “Defection of the Neocons,” Washington Times, October 27, 1992, p. E-1.

[82] Fred Barnes, “Neocons for Clinton: They’re Back!” New Republic, March 7, 1992, pp. 12–14; Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “Return of the Neocons,” Washington Post, August 28, 1992, p. A-23.

[83] Charles Krauthammer, “Name Neocon to Post at State Dept.,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 19, 1993, p. 27; “America and Israel: For love of Zion,” The Economist,November 14, 1992, p. 27.

[84] Daniel Pipes, “Bush, Clinton, and the Jews: A Debate,” Commentary October 1992, online.

[85] “Jewish Vote In Presidential Elections,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/U.S.-Israel/jewvote.html,accessed November 16, 2007.

[86] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 199.

[87] For a discussion of the Defense Planning Guidance issue, see Dorrien, Imperial Designs, pp. 38–43.

Chapter6

[1] John M. Goshko, “Neoconservative Democrats Complain of Big Chill: Clinton Allies Decry Appointments Tally,” Washington Post, March 15, 1993, p. A-17; see also, “Foreign Policy Previewed;

Christopher Favors Promotion of Democracy,” Washington Post, January 9, 1993, p. A-9.

[2] Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, pp. 203–206.

[3] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 109.

[4] Jim Lobe, “The Neocon Web,” LewRockwell.com, December 23, 2003, http://www.lewrockwell.com/ips/lobe40.html, accessed November 16, 2007.

[5] The neoconservative takeover of the mainstream conservative intellectual movement is presented by Paul Gottfried in Conservative Movement.

[6] Brian Whitaker, “U.S. thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy,” Guardian, August 19, 2002, online.

[7] Jim Lobe, “The War Party Gets Organized,” AlterNet.org, November 14, 2002, http://www.alternet.org/story/14547/, accessed November 16, 2007.

[8] Gottfried, Conservatism in America, pp. 59–60; See, also: Philip Weiss, “George Soros’s Right-Wing Twin,” New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12353/, accessed November 22, 2007.

[9] Gottfried, Conservative Movement, p. 92; American Enterprise Institute, “AEI’s Diamond Jubilee, 1943–2003,” American Enterprise Institute 2003Annual Report, http://www.aei.org/about/contentID.20031212154735838/default.asp,accessed November 16, 2007; Halper and Clarke, America Alone, pp. 47–48, 107–108, 195.

[10] “Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” Right Web, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/jinsa.php, accessed November 16, 2007.

[11] Bulent Yusuf, “Battle-tanks in the war of ideas,” Observer, September 1, 2002, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,781387,00.html,accessed November 16, 2007; Center for Media and Democracy, “Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” SourceWatch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=JINSA, accessed November 16, 2007

[12] Jason Vest, “The Men From JINSA and CSP,” Nation, September 2, 2002, online.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens and Jerusalem, “Gambling on Extremism: How Irving Moskowitz took over a small California town to bankroll Israel’s anti-peace settlers,” December 15, 2003, http://www.stopmoskowitz.org/gamble.pdf, accessed November 19, 2007; Margot Patterson, “Bingo tycoon subsidizes extremism in Israel,” National Catholic Reporter, October 18, 2002, online; Vest, “The Men From JINSA and CSP.”

[16] Interhemispheric Resource Center, “Lawrence Kadish,” Right Web, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1237, accessed November 16, 2007.

[17] Vest, “The Men From JINSA.”

[18] Jonathan Mark, “Murdoch’s News: Fighting ‘Fair’ For Israel,” Jewish Week, November 26, 2004, online.

[19] Scott McConnell, “The Weekly Standard’s War,” American Conservative, November 21, 2005, online.

[20] Quoted in David Carr, “When this weekly speaks, White House listens,” New York Times, March 11, 2003, p. E-1.

[21] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 188.

[22] Howard Kurtz, “Right Face, Right Time,” Washington Post, February 1, 2000, p. C-1.

[23] Scott Sherman, “Kristol’s War,” Nation, August 30, 2004, online.

[24] Jonathan Mark, “Murdoch’s News: Fighting ‘Fair’ For Israel,” Jewish Week, November 26, 2004, online.

[25] Mark, “Murdoch’s News.”

[26] Richard H. Curtiss, “Rupert Murdoch and William Kristol: Using the Press to Advance Israel’s Interests,” Washington Report on the Middle East, June 2003, pp. 24–26, online.

[27] Curtiss, “Rupert Murdoch and William Kristol.”

[28] Norman Solomon, “Kissing the Boots of the Media Goliath,” AlterNet.org, Posted April 26, 2000, http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/5842/, accessed November 19, 2007; James Surowiecki, “Murdoch Knows Best,” Salon, June 19, 1997, online.

[29] Israel Update, June 27, 2001, http://www.israelemb.org/chicago/Israel%20Update/2001/06/IU%2006-27-01.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[30] Roy Greenslade, “Their master’s voice,” Guardian, February 17, 2003, online.

[31] Rogel Alper, “Foxa Americana,” Ha’aretz, April 10, 2003, online.

[32] Halper and Clarke, America Alone, pp. 199–200.

[33] Grant F. Smith, Deadly Dogma: How the Neoconservatives Broke the Law to Deceive America (Washington, DC: Institute for research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2006), pp. 82–85.

[34] Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000 at The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” 1996, http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[35] Ibid.; Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Inc., “Clean Break or Dirty War? Israel’s Foreign Policy Directive to the United States,” Middle East Foreign Policy Policy Brief, March 27, 2003,http://www.irmep.org/Policy_Briefs/3_27_2003_Clean_Break_or_Dirty_War.html,accessed November 16, 2007.

[36] The Hashemites are believed to be direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Members of the family currently rule the kingdom of Jordan and they were installed as the rulers of the state of Iraq, created after World War I, and continued to rule until their overthrow in 1958.

[37] The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000,” “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” 1996 http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm, accessed November 16, 2007; Institute for Research, “Clean Break or Dirty War?”

[38] William James Martin, “Clean Break with the Road Map,” CounterPunch.org, February 14/15, 2004, online.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Craig Unger, “From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq,” Vanity Fair, March 2007, online.

[41] IASPS, “A Clean Break”; Institute for Research, “Clean Break or Dirty War?”

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] David Wurmser, “Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant,” Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996, http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat2.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Ibid.

[52] David Wurmser, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein(Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1999), p. 42.

[53] Ibid., p. 118.

[54] Ibid., pp. 70–71.

[55] Ibid., pp. 87, 93, 128.

[56] Ibid., p. 98.

[57] Ibid., pp. xxi-xxii.

[58] Isikoff and Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), pp. 71–76.

[59] Laurie Mylroie, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War against America (Washington: AEI Press, 2000), p. 251.

[60] Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 71–76.

[61] Peter Bergen, “Armchair Provocateur: Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist,” Washington Monthly, December 2003, online.

[62] Mylroie, Study of Revenge, pp. ix-xi.

[63] Ibid., cover; Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 75–76.

[64] David Plotz, “Osama, Saddam, and the Bombs,” Slate, September 28, 2001, online.

[65] Isikoff and Corn, Hubris, pp. 67–70; Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, p. 350.

[66] Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 235–37: Packer, Assassins’ Gate, p. 28.

[67] Center for Media and Democracy, “New Citizen’s Project,” SourceWatch, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=New_Citizenship_Project,accessed November 19, 2007; American Enterprise Institute, “AEI’s Organization and Purposes,” http://www.aei.org/about/filter.all/default.asp, accessed November 19, 2007.

[68] PNAC describes itself as follows: “Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project (501c3); the New Citizenship Project’s chairman is William Kristol and its president is Gary Schmitt.” Project for the New American Century, “About PNAC,” http://www.newamericancentury.org/aboutpnac.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[69] PNAC Letter to President William J. Clinton, January 26, 1998, PNAC, http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[70] Richard Perle, “Foreword,” Wurmser, Tyranny’s Ally, p. xi.

[71] Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, “Open Letter to the President,” February 19, 1998, Center for Security Policy Decision Brief, February 24, 1998, http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/Modules/NewsManager/ShowSectionNews.aspx?CategoryID=140&SubCategoryID=141&NewsID=1461, accessed Februery 8, 2008. “Open Letter to the President,” February 19, 1998, http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/rumsfeld-openletter.htm, accessed November 16, 2007; Frank Gaffney, “End Saddam’s Reign of Terror: Better late than never,” National Review Online, February 21, 2002, online.

[72] PNAC Letter to Gingrich and Lott, May 29, 1998, PNAC, http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[73] Richard Perle, “Foreword” in Wurmser, Tyranny’s Ally, p. xii.

[74] Wilson, Politics of Truth, p. 289.

[75] Ibid., p. 290; Seymour Hersh, “The Iraq Hawks,” New Yorker, December 20, 2001, online.

[76] Neil Mackay, “Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President,” Scottish Sunday Herald, September 15, 2002, online; Project for the New American Century, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” September 2000, http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf,accessed February 8, 2008, pp. 14, 51.

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