Views > March 13, 2007

For Israel’s Sake

By Salim Muwakkil

The more we examine the disaster that is the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, the more apparent becomes the corrosive influence of Israel, or more accurately, of those U.S. officials acting on what they construe as Israel’s best interests. Yet Congress is oddly unwilling to bring any investigative focus on the role of Israel’s fervent supporters in instigating this deepening debacle.

What makes this issue especially crucial is the well-established link between the Bush administration’s neoconservative brain trust and Israel’s right-wing government. Two members of Bush’s neocon corps are now in the news for their attempts to warp intelligence to justify a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. In the past, both men (like many neocons) publicly advanced attacking Iraq to benefit Israel. The same group also has put Iran in their bomb-sights.

The two are Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy between 2001 and 2005, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff

According to a February report by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, Feith’s Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon took “inappropriate” actions to advance the assertion that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein — assertions that were not backed up by the nation’s intelligence agencies. In other words, Feith manipulated intelligence to justify an invasion.

Feith is a co-author of “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing The Realm,” a strategy paper written in 1996 for Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu that urged a break away from the Oslo Peace Accords, a military defeat of the Palestinians, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and the installation of a Hashemite king on the Iraqi throne. A co-author of “A Clean Break” was David Wurmser, Feith’s chief aide at the Pentagon.

A long time activist in right-wing Israeli politics, Feith wrote his own prescription for the Jewish state in a 1997 paper titled “A Strategy for Israel,” in which he urged Israel to re-occupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control.” According to a 2005 book by New Yorker staff writer George Packer, a departing Colin Powell denounced Feith to President Bush as “a card-carrying member of the Likud.” Packer’s rigorously researched book, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, provides a careful anatomy of this network of American “Likudniks.”

Feith’s office was still reeling from an earlier scandal, in which aide Lawrence Franklin was charged with passing classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and to an intelligence official at the Israeli Embassy. The charge emerged from an extensive FBI investigation of the lobbying group.

Franklin, who worked in Feith’s Office of Special Plans, pleaded guilty and was convicted on three lesser charges in exchange for his cooperation in the FBI’s continuing probe. He was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison and fined $10,000.

Libby is officially charged with lying to the FBI and the grand jury about his talks with reporters outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. Unofficially, he is blamed for trying to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who, in February 2002, had investigated claims that Iraq sought uranium from Niger and found the story untrue. Wilson later wrote an op-ed in the New York Times suggesting Bush misled the American people to justify invading Iraq.

Libby, and by extension, Cheney’s office, sought to debunk Wilson by suggesting that Plame, his CIA-officer wife, sent him on a junket to Niger. This, of course, was to cast suspicions on his rejection of Bush’s alarmist claims about Iraq.

These are not just examples of neocon ideology gone wild, as Packer, himself a former supporter of the Bush invasion, points out in his somewhat rueful book. “The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud,” he writes. “And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the uncharted era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available.”

These polices were designed with Israel in mind, as well as the United States. In fact, writes Packer, “For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover.” Such talk invariably sparks charges of anti-Semitism for suggesting the canard about Jews’ dual loyalties. However, the connections between Bush’s influential corps of neocons and Israel’s expansionist Likud Party are too obvious to ignore. These neocon ideologues have transformed the United States into a rogue state that is an echo of Israel; locked in a vicious cycle of occupation-resistance-revenge, steeped in belligerent militarism, globally isolated and loathed.

Congress’ willful ignorance of these links is a grievous malfeasance of duty. Where are progressive Democrats on this issue?

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• Reader Comments

  Thanks for the comments here. Good piece.

  Posted by blondemike on Mar 13, 2007 at 11:37 AM

  You ask where are the progressive Democrats.  Where they’ve always been--in the pockets of the powerful Jewish lobby.  Any move to change this pattern will result in charges of anti-Semitism and angry, hateful, vengeful movements to oust them, and they know it.  Even Obama is careful to repeat the party line when it comes to Israel.

  Posted by thetopofherhead on Mar 13, 2007 at 3:21 PM

  Anyone who doubts the power of the hard-right Israeli lobby (whose tentacles reach deeply into BOTH parties) should witness what happened in Congress today. 

  “Who Killed the Iran Provision?”

  “...We worked so hard to get one provision in a bill that says that President Bush must get Congressional approval before he launches an attack against Iran. And they killed it in secret—within the Democratic caucus!

  The provision didn’t say we could never attack Iran. Or that we would be taking that option off the table in negotiations. It said the president must get congressional approval. You know, like it says in the constitution...”

  For the entire article, see:

  http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6042

  It amazes me that a group (like AIPAC) can so openly advocate the interests of a foreign power (often to the detriment of our national interests) and not be monitored more closely and/or exposed for what it really is, especially as their machinations in the Iraq debacle are coming to light.  And in light of today’s congressional action, an Iran debacle is on the way (you just know that Bush will take this act as congressional authorization for war with Iran).

  “Where are the progressive Democrats,” indeed.

  Imran

  Posted by Imran on Mar 13, 2007 at 4:13 PM

  I was in the process of writing off In These Times, when this article jumped out at me. 

  Not enough is said about the exaggerated influence that the Israeli lobby has in this country, on our congress, on our white house.  Foreign powers should not be allowed to hijack our political processes.  And we need to stop funding Israeli military aggression and war crimes.  Stop the “aid.” Period.

  My latest article about Israeli spying connected to September 11th will probably ruffle a few, for those who are intersted:

  The Limits of Ketcham’s / Counterpunch’s Israeli Hangout
  http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/

  Posted by johndoraemi on Mar 14, 2007 at 12:55 AM

  One big part of the problem here is the engrained political habit of permitting someone else to draw the line in the rhetorical sand to force a false dichotomy, such that anyone who makes a pointed criticism of Israel can be unjustly tagged as a racist when they’re most likely nothing of the sort. The same kind of thing can be observed in discussions of illegal immigration, affirmative action, etc. The instant these and other issues arise, unsubstantiated charges of “Racism!” are tossed about with really chilling frequency, whether they’re well-founded (rarely) or not.

  The point of doing so, of course, is to produce exactly that kind of chill, the kind that stifles substantive debate and forces people in the public eye to become mealy-mouthed in order to avoid the poisoned moniker.

  It means that anyone with an ambition for public office has to tread so lightly when addressing some very complex national and foreign policy issues, they end up saying next to nothing, or simply endorsing the status quo because it represents safer political ground. Maybe the only safe political ground, for now.

  The fear of being slandered with the name “racist” ends up hobbling those who may have innovative and worthwhile ideas about how to deal with these and other contentious issues. We don’t hear enough of their ideas because they’re silenced by their very real concern over the power of hostile pundits to make them look bad. The real shame is how quickly we accept the charge of racism, so unquestioningly, so mindlessly. We judge a man or woman to be the ideological equivalent of an ignorant, hating slob simply because someone called them a bad name. We should be smarter than that, more discerning!

  It probably will cost the political careers of some aspirants to office who actually do have the courage to try to confront this situation, to demystify Israel and its place among the priorities of the American government. That will be unfortunate, but it is predictable. However, a certain number of such instances, brought to light especially when well-qualified, high-potential candidates go down in flames because their stated agendas vis a vis Israel are not “politically correct” enough (to recast that term), might enable a future candidate to break the pattern of trepidation and lack of candor, if he or she has the guts to throw down with their detractors. It means that those slandered as racists have to be ready to fight back, and show in no uncertain terms that they are not, and that they’ve been the victim of a politically calculated smear job.

  In the meantime, it shouldn’t be too hard for anyone, aspirant or not, to demonstrate that they are not anti-Jewish, even if they take Israel to task when they judge its policies to be unacceptable. Their broader pattern of statements, attitudes, and actions really tell the story, not their skepticism of the exalted specialness of what, after all, is just another nation-state, albeit an ally (friend? hmm...).

  People (potential candidates or not) ought to be able to face down those who try to control them with slanderous insults, which are really just techniques used to control whatever debate happens to be in hand, which in this case is the disproportional influence of Israeli interests upon the American government.

  People who glibly cast aspersions like that generally have a single issue that drives them, and that they feel compelled to have their way in, therefore their underhanded tactics.

  Posted by Kuya on Mar 14, 2007 at 2:52 AM

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