FT Says “Anti-Vax Sentiment” in the West Being Fueled by Russia & China
Advocates governments using “psychological operations” against their own people
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 13, 2022
In a report that advocates governments using “psychological operations” against their own population, the Financial Times asserts, with no proof, that Russia and China are responsible for pushing “anti-vax sentiment” and criticism of lockdown measures in the west.
The article quotes Mikael Tofvesson, head of the Swedish Navy’s new Psyops division, who says “foreign aggressors” are trying to “sow division by targeting areas of public concern such as crime, Covid vaccinations, the government’s response to the pandemic, and immigration.”
“The most important task in psychological defence is to inoculate the population against believing false information,” states the article, which is written by Elisabeth Braw of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-con think tank.
Such measures were deployed in the United Kingdom during the first lockdown, when scientists in the UK working as advisors for the government admitted using what they now admit to be “unethical” and “totalitarian” methods of instilling fear in the population in order to control behavior during the pandemic.
One scientist with the SPI-B admitted that, “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.”
Of course, contrary to the claims in the article, the primary goal of psychological operations, whether directed against an enemy or a domestic population, is to instill fear and change behavior – telling the truth is hardly a priority.
Far from dispelling “false information,” psychological operations routinely rely on using false information to influence and manipulate “the enemy.”
“Psychological operations have long been a part of military operations, and are typically defined as the use of propaganda and other methods to influence the attitudes and behavior of foreign adversaries,” writes Allum Bokhari.
“What the FT is advocating — and what many have long suspected — is the use of these techniques by western military, security, and intelligence forces against their own citizens.”
“Hostile states including Russia, China and Iran have increased their use of disinformation and online propaganda to amplify anti-vax sentiment and foment political tensions in Europe and the US,” Braw claims.
However, the report contains no evidence whatsoever that Russia and China are responsible for any coordinated attempt to sow doubts about COVID-19 vaccines or lockdown measures.
Indeed, the mere fact that the newspaper complains about “disinformation” in the context of COVID-19 conspiracy theories is pretty rich given that the constantly invoked ‘Russian collusion’ charge is itself a baseless conspiracy theory.
In reality, concerns about vaccine side-effects, giving vaccines to children and mandating vaccines and COVID passports as part of the growing bio-security police state are perfectly valid concerns shared by millions of people across the west.
The FT is a staunchly globalist newspaper of record for the international elite and is routinely represented at the annual Bilderberg conference.
It can hardly be trusted to represent the interests of the common man.
Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | December 19, 2012
Even after the Iraq War disaster and Barack Obama’s election in 2008, neoconservatives retained their influence over U.S. war policies in Afghanistan through their close ties to George W. Bush’s national security holdovers, such as Gen. David Petraeus who partnered with neocon war hawks in escalating the Afghan War.
How tight Petraeus’s relationship was with two neocons in particular, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, was explored in a Washington Post article by war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran who described how Petraeus installed the husband-and-wife team in U.S. offices in Kabul, granted them top-secret clearances and let them berate military officers about war strategy.
Though the Kagans received no pay from the U.S. government, they drew salaries from their respective think tanks which are supported by large corporations, including military contractors with interests in extending the Afghan War. Frederick Kagan works for the American Enterprise Institute, and Kimberly Kagan founded the Institute for the Study of War [ISW] in 2007 and is its current president.
According to ISW’s 2011 annual report, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provides training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplies software to U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan.
In her official bio at the ISW’s Web site, Kimberly Kagan touts her work “in Kabul for fifteen months in 2010 and 2011 as a ‘directed telescope’ to General David H. Petraeus and subsequently General John Allen, working on special projects for these commanders of the International Security Assistance Force.”
In the ISW’s 2011 annual report, Petraeus praises Kagan as “a barracuda at some times,” hails her leadership and poses with her for several photographs, including one in his dress uniform with the U.S. Capitol in the background.
The Post article noted that “For Kim Kagan, spending so many months away from research and advocacy work in Washington could have annoyed many donors to the Institute for the Study of War. But her major backers appear to have been pleased that she cultivated such close ties with Petraeus, who went from Kabul to head the CIA before resigning this fall over his affair with [biographer Paula] Broadwell. …
“On Aug. 8, 2011, a month after he relinquished command in Afghanistan to take over at the CIA, Petraeus spoke at the institute’s first ‘President’s Circle’ dinner, where he accepted an award from Kim Kagan. … ‘What the Kagans do is they grade my work on a daily basis,’ Petraeus said, prompting chortles from the audience. ‘There’s some suspicion that there’s a hand up my back, and it makes my lips talk, and it’s operated by one of the Doctors Kagan.’ …
“At the August 2011 dinner honoring Petraeus, Kagan thanked executives from two defense contractors who sit on her institute’s corporate council, DynCorp International and CACI International. The event was sponsored by General Dynamics. All three firms have business interests in the Afghan war.
“Kagan told the audience that their funding allowed her to assist Petraeus. ‘The ability to have a 15-month deployment essentially in the service of those who needed some help — and the ability to go at a moment’s notice — that’s something you all have sponsored,’ she said.”
Earlier Warning Signs
Though the Post article provides new details about Petraeus’s coziness to Washington’s neocons, there have been warning signs about this relationship for several years. In 2010, I wrote articles describing how Petraeus and other holdovers from George W. Bush’s administration, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, had trapped the inexperienced Obama into expanding the Afghan War.
On Sept. 27, 2010, I noted that “after his solid victory in November 2008, Obama rebuffed recommendations from some national security experts that he clean house by installing a team more in line with his campaign pledge of ‘change you can believe in.’ He accepted instead the counsel of Establishment Democrats who warned against any disruption to the war-fighting hierarchy and who were especially supportive of keeping Gates. …
“Before Obama’s decision to dispatch [an additional] 30,000 troops [in an Afghan War ‘surge’ in 2009], the Bush holdovers … sought to hem in the President’s choices by working with allies in the Washington news media and in think tanks. …
“For instance, early in 2009, Petraeus personally arranged for Max Boot [a neocon on the Council on Foreign Relations], Frederick Kagan and Kimberly Kagan to get extraordinary access during a trip to Afghanistan. … Their access paid dividends for Petraeus when they penned a glowing report in the Weekly Standard about the prospects for success in Afghanistan – if only President Obama sent more troops and committed the United States to stay in the war for the long haul. …
“‘Fears of impending disaster are hard to sustain, … if you actually spend some time in Afghanistan, as we did recently at the invitation of General David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command,’ they wrote upon their return.
“‘Using helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and bone-jarring armored vehicles, we spent eight days traveling from the snow-capped peaks of Kunar province near the border with Pakistan in the east to the wind-blown deserts of Farah province in the west near the border with Iran. Along the way we talked with countless coalition soldiers, ranging from privates to a four-star general,’ the trio said.”
Update 2015: (Frederick Kagan is the brother of Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which began the drive in 1998 for invading Iraq. Robert Kagan, now with the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post, is married to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw last year’s coup in Ukraine. For more on the outsized influence of the Kagans, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”)
Trapping the President
How Obama was manipulated by Bush’s holdovers – with the help of the neocons – was chronicled, too, in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book, Obama’s Wars, which revealed that Bush’s old team made sure Obama was given no option other than to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan. The Bush holdovers also lobbied for the troop increase behind Obama’s back.
Woodward’s book notes that “in September 2009, Petraeus called a Washington Post columnist to say that the war would be unsuccessful if the president held back on troops. Later that month, [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Adm. Mike] Mullen repeated much the same sentiment in Senate testimony, and in October, [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal asserted in a speech in London that a scaled-back effort against Afghan terrorists would not work.”
This back-door campaign infuriated Obama’s aides, including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Woodward reported. “Filling his rant with expletives, Emanuel said, ‘Between the chairman [Mullen] and Petraeus, everyone’s come out and publicly endorsed the notion of more troops. The president hasn’t even had a chance!’” Woodward reported.
According to Woodward’s book, Gates, Petraeus and Mullen refused to even prepare an early-exit option that Obama had requested. Instead, they offered up only plans for their desired escalation of about 40,000 troops.
Woodward wrote: “For two exhausting months, [Obama] had been asking military advisers to give him a range of options for the war in Afghanistan. Instead, he felt that they were steering him toward one outcome and thwarting his search for an exit plan. He would later tell his White House aides that military leaders were ‘really cooking this thing in the direction they wanted.’”
Woodward identified Gates, Petraeus and Mullen as “unrelenting advocates for 40,000 more troops and an expanded mission that seemed to have no clear end.”
The Bush holdovers even resisted passing along a “hybrid” plan that came from outside their group, from Vice President Joe Biden who had worked with JCS vice chairman, Gen. James Cartwright. The plan envisioned a 20,000 troop increase and a more limited mission of hunting Taliban insurgents and training Afghan government forces.
Woodward reported, “When Mullen learned of the hybrid option, he didn’t want to take it to Obama. ‘We’re not providing that,’ he told Cartwright, a Marine known around the White House as Obama’s favorite general. Cartwright objected. ‘I’m just not in the business of withholding options,’ he told Mullen. ‘I have an oath, and when asked for advice I’m going to provide it.’”
Rigged War Game
Later, Obama told Gates and Mullen to present the hybrid option as one possibility, but instead the Bush holdovers sabotaged the idea by organizing a classified war game, code-named Poignant Vision, that some military insiders felt was rigged to discredit the hybrid option, Woodward reported.
According to Woodward’s book, Petraeus cited the results of the war game to Obama at the Nov. 11, 2009, meeting as proof the hybrid option would fail, prompting a plaintive question from a disappointed President, “so, 20,000 is not really a viable option?” Without telling Obama about the limits of the war game, Mullen, Petraeus, Gates and then-field commander McChrystal asserted that the hybrid option would lead to mission failure.
“Okay,” Obama said, “if you tell me that we can’t do that, and you war-gamed it, I’ll accept that,” according to Woodward’s book.
Faced with this resistance from the Bush holdovers – and unaware that their war game may have been fixed – Obama finally devised his own option that gave Gates, Petraeus and Mullen most of what they wanted – 30,000 additional troops on top of the 21,000 that Obama had dispatched shortly after taking office.
Obama did try to bind the Pentagon to a more limited commitment to Afghanistan, including setting a date of July 2011 for the beginning of a U.S. drawdown. Though Obama required all the key participants to sign off on his compromise, it soon became clear that the Bush holdovers had no intention to comply, Woodward reported.
Backstabbing
The incoming Obama administration was warned of this possibility of backstabbing by Gates, Petraeus and other Bush appointees when it was lining up personnel for national security jobs.
As I wrote in November 2008, “if Obama does keep Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, ‘politicized intelligence.’ … It was Gates – as a senior CIA official in the 1980s – who broke the back of the CIA analytical division’s commitment to objective intelligence.”
More than any CIA official, Gates was responsible for the agency’s failure to detect the collapse of the Soviet Union, in large part because Gates had ridden roughshod over the CIA analysts on behalf of the Reagan administration’s desire to justify a massive military buildup by stressing Soviet ascendance and ignoring evidence of its disintegration.
As chief of the CIA’s analytical division and then deputy CIA director, Gates promoted pliable CIA careerists to top positions, while analysts with an independent streak were sidelined or pushed out of the agency.
“In the mid-1980s, the three senior [Soviet division] office managers who actually anticipated the decline of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s interest in closer relations with the United States were demoted,” wrote longtime CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman in his book, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Instead of heeding these warnings, Obama’s team listened to Establishment Democrats like former Rep. Lee Hamilton and former Sen. David Boren, who were big fans of Gates. [For more on Gates’s role, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
Petraeus was much the same story. A favorite of Official Washington and especially the influential neocons, he was credited with supposedly winning the war in Iraq by implementing the “surge” in 2007, which was advocated strongly by Frederick Kagan and other key neocons.
However, in reality, all Petraeus did was extend that misguided war for another few years – at the cost of nearly 1,000 more U.S. dead and countless more dead Iraqis – thus giving President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney time to get out of Washington before the ultimate failure of the mission became obvious. The last U.S. troops were forced to leave Iraq at the end of 2011.
Begging Boot
Petraeus had such close ties to the neocons that he relied on them to pull him out of difficult political spots. In one embarrassing example in 2010, e-mails surfaced showing the four-star general groveling before Max Boot, seeking the neocon pundit’s help heading off a controversy over Petraeus’s prepared testimony to Congress which contained a mild criticism of Israel.
The e-mails from Petraeus to Boot revealed Petraeus renouncing his own congressional testimony in March 2010 because it included the observation that “the enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests” in the Middle East.
Petraeus’s testimony continued, “Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. … Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”
Though the testimony was obviously true, many neocons regard any suggestion that Israeli intransigence on Palestinian peace talks contributed to the dangers faced by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan – or by the U.S. public from acts of terrorism at home – as a “blood libel” against Israel.
So, when Petraeus’s testimony began getting traction on the Internet, the general turned to Boot at the high-powered Council on Foreign Relations, and began backtracking on the testimony. “As you know, I didn’t say that,” Petraeus said, according to one e-mail to Boot timed off at 2:27 p.m., March 18. “It’s in a written submission for the record.”
In other words, Petraeus was saying the comments were only in his formal testimony submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee and were not repeated by him in his brief oral opening statement. However, written testimony is treated as part of the official record at congressional hearings with no meaningful distinction from oral testimony.
In another e-mail, as Petraeus solicited Boot’s help in tamping down any controversy over the Israeli remarks, the general ended the message with a military “Roger” and a sideways happy face, made from a colon, a dash and a closed parenthesis, “:-)”.
The e-mails were made public by James Morris, who runs a Web site called Neocon Zionist Threat to America. He said he apparently got them by accident when he sent a March 19 e-mail congratulating Petraeus for his testimony and Petraeus responded by forwarding one of Boot’s blog posts that knocked down the story of the general’s implicit criticism of Israel.
Petraeus forwarded Boot’s blog item, entitled “A Lie: David Petraeus, Anti-Israel,” which had been posted at the Commentary magazine site at 3:11 p.m. on March 18. However, Petraeus apparently forgot to delete some of the other exchanges between him and Boot at the bottom of the e-mail.
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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
CBS’s Face the Nation: Blatant Pro-Israel Pro-War Bias Revealed
By Michael Gillespie | Dissident Voice | September 9, 2013
CBS’s Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer brought together this morning what he characterized as “one of our best panels of analysts ever,” a group of five supposed experts, to discuss President Obama’s plan to launch military action against Syria: the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward, the Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol, the New York Times‘ David Sanger, the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)’s Danielle Pletka. Schieffer presented this group as if his audience might expect it to represent a range of views. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Daniel Pletka is vice president of AEI, a neoconservative think tank that was instrumental in dragging the US into the hideously expensive and stunningly counterproductive war in Iraq. Several AEI scholars—including Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen—were associated with war profiteering and the phony intelligence used by pro-Israel neoconservative operatives inside the Bush/Cheney administration to stampede the USA into war in Iraq. Pletka was last in the news for smearing the then-Secretary of Defense nominee, former Senator (R-NE) and decorated Vietnam War veteran Chuck Hagel, as an anti-Semite. (Secretary of Defense Hagel is reported to be privately unenthusiastic about plans for military action against Syria.)
David Ignatius routinely defends Israel and champions proposed Israeli solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict without letting facts get in the way. In 2009, Ignatius caused an international incident that adversely affected Turkish-Israeli relations when, during a panel discussion about the 2008-2009 Gaza War at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he allowed Israeli President Shimon Peres to speak twice as long as the other participants and then attempted to silence Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan. The panel featured two heads of state, the U.N. secretary-general, and the secretary of the Arab League, and it dealt with an extremely sensitive issue. In allowing Peres to go last, giving him twice as much time to speak, and then repeatedly attempting to cut off Erdogan’s response, Ignatius showcased his pro-Israel bias on a world stage.
David Sanger has long propagandized for a US war against Iran in the pages of the New York Times. According to SourceWatch: “A few days after Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense minister, admitted that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program, the New York Times ran a series of articles slighting Barak’s assertion all the way to confirming the opposite, i.e., that Iran was actually pursuing such weapons program. Sanger was key in the NYT’s drum beating.” Ray McGovern, a former CIA senior officer who briefed several US presidents, had this to say about Sanger’s articles: “Next it was time for the Times to trot out David Sanger from the Washington bullpen. Many will remember him as one of the Times’ stenographers/cheerleaders for the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in March 2003. An effusive hawk on Iran also, Sanger was promoted to a position as chief Washington correspondent, apparently for services rendered. In his Jan. 22 article, ‘Confronting Iran in a Year of Elections,’ Sanger pulls out all the stops, even resurrecting Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud” to scare all of us—and, not least, the Iranians.”
Bill Kristol is the chairman and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel. Author David Corn has referred to Kristol as “the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq War.” Kristol was one of the architects of the blueprint for regime change and “creative destruction” in the Middle East dreamed up by PNAC. Kristol signed the September 20, 2001, PNAC letter endorsing President George W. Bush’s “admirable commitment to ‘lead the world to victory’ in the war against terrorism.” Kristol said in a January 14, 2003, PBS Frontline interview “that the significance of President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002 (the ‘axis of evil’ speech) is too easily forgotten—that it was a rare moment, ‘the creation of a new American foreign policy’—and that Bush deserves credit for realizing very quickly after Sept. 11 that his presidency would be judged by how he handled the post-9/11 threat of weapons of mass destruction.” Weapons of mass destruction that, as it happened, could not be found because they did not exist.
Bob Woodward is yet another pro-Israel propagandist for executive power and for war. Andrew Bacevich, an accomplished author, Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, and a retired career officer in the United States Army has described Woodward this way: “Once a serious journalist, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward now makes a very fine living as chief gossip-monger of the governing class. … Back in 2002, for example, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Woodward treated us to Bush at War. Based on interviews with unidentified officials close to President George W. Bush, the book offered a portrait of the president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the book’s real juice came from what it revealed about events behind the scenes. ‘Bush’s war cabinet is riven with feuding,’ reported the Times of London, which credited Woodward with revealing ‘the furious arguments and personal animosity’ that divided Bush’s lieutenants. Of course, the problem with the Bush administration wasn’t that folks on the inside didn’t play nice with one another. No, the problem was that the president and his inner circle committed a long series of catastrophic errors that produced an unnecessary and grotesquely mismanaged war,” wrote Bacevich. Somehow, Woodward missed all of that and a great deal more. “That war has cost the country dearly—although the people who engineered that catastrophe, many of them having pocketed handsome advances on their forthcoming memoirs, continue to manage quite well, thank you,” declared Bacevich.
This then is “one of our best panels of analysts ever,” according to Bob Schieffer, who once might have rightly claimed to be something other than a stooge for the Israeli foreign ministry. What CBS’s collection of well-heeled pro-Israel propagandists all agree on is this: The US government should launch military action in Syria in order to maintain political and military pressure on Iran, which Israel views as enemy No. 1 (though Iran has not attacked another country in well over 200 years).
One detail the panelists didn’t mention is that Syria is in the Russian sphere of influence and Russia has warships stationed in the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria. Another thing the panelists didn’t mention is that Israeli air and sea forces attacked a lightly armed US Navy signals intelligence vessel, the USS Liberty, in the eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967, killing 34 US personnel and wounding 171. Nor did the panelists mention that in the middle 1980s Israeli spies handling an American-Jewish traitor, Jonathan Pollard, stole thousands of highly classified intelligence documents from the US Navy counter-terrorism intelligence facility where Pollard was employed, or that Israel provided many of those documents to the Soviet Union causing great harm to US intelligence capabilities and interests.
What CBS panelists didn’t say is that Syria is the next stop on Israel’s road to a US war against Iran. What they dare not say is that a US attack on Syria might well draw the USA into a much wider war in a region already severely destabilized by more than a decade of enormously expensive, ill-conceived, poorly managed, hideously destructive, and extraordinarily counterproductive US military actions undertaken largely at the insistence of pro-Israel neoconservatives whose wildly inordinate influence over the Washington foreign policy establishment poses an imminent threat to a great many legitimate US national interests, if not to the uninterrupted progress of human civilization.
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Michael Gillespie, in addition to his regular freelance work for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is also a contributing editor and the Des Moines, IA correspondent for The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans, published by Sami Mashney in Anaheim, CA.
Related article
- Neocons Take Flight Over Syria (lobelog.com)
Norman Finkelstein and Neocon Denial
By Stephen J. Sniegoski | The Passionate Attachment | October 7, 2012
While a number of mainstream media pundits have acknowledged that the neocons played a major role in bringing about the war on Iraq (though usually without mentioning their connection to Israel or their predominantly Jewish ethnicity), there are stringent critics of Israel and US policy in the Middle East who totally reject this interpretation. One of the most notable of these is Norman Finkelstein, who expounds on his view in his latest book, “Knowing Too Much.” Because I must limit the length of this article, my argumentation must be kept to a minimum. My book, “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel,” provides a detailed and extensively-documented account of all the issues covered here. It should be added that Finkelstein has labeled my book as conspiratorial—which is just the opposite of what the word “transparent” in the title conveys and what is explicitly stated in the book—and he denies that there is any evidence for my contentions. It does not appear that Finkelstein has actually read my book; he probably considers it not worth reading.
Despite denying that the neocons had an effect on US Middle East policy, Finkelstein does grant that the “Jewish neocons pushed long and hard for an attack on Iraq.” (p. 75, “Knowing Too Much”) Contrary to Finkelstein, the very fact that for many years the neocons had been the major exponents of an attack on Iraq, which did become US policy, is at least prima facie evidence for their vital role in bringing about the war. Finkelstein, however, firmly holds that the neocon agenda was irrelevant to US policy, and that what was achieved was done by others and would have occurred even if the neocons had not existed.
Finkelstein does accurately point out that “Every reconstruction of the 2003 war places Cheney and Rumsfeld at the helm of the decision-making process.” (p. 76, “Knowing Too Much”) Then he devotes some space to refuting John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s alleged insinuation that the two officials were “duped” by the neoconservatives. (The two academic scholars wrote the bombshell essay, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” later expanded into a book. And I should add that it is not apparent from my reading of their book that Mearsheimer and Walt necessarily imply that Cheney and Rumsfeld were “duped.”) Finkelstein maintains that “Cheney and Rumsfeld did not only partake of the ‘belief’ of Jewish neoconservatives that Saddam posed a mortal danger. Their own ‘American nationalist’ strategic vision also largely coincided with the neoconservative agenda.” In essence, they “shared basic assumptions.” (p. 78, “Knowing Too Much”) From these claims, which I would qualify but not fundamentally differ with, Finkelstein manages to derive the idea that Cheney and Rumsfeld were not influenced by the neocons, but somehow came up with the same war agenda independently. Evidence would indicate that this is highly unlikely to have been the case.
Undoubtedly, Cheney and Rumsfeld, rather than being tricked by the neocons, were in league with them, but it also seems almost certain that they were actually influenced by the neocon agenda. For Rumsfeld and, even more so, Cheney were personally close to the neocons. Prior to the start of the George W. Bush administration, Cheney, for example, was involved in a number of key neoconservative organizations: the board of advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); the board of trustees of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). It would seem reasonable to believe that, instead of independently fashioning their own “strategic vision” that harmonized completely with that of the neocons, Cheney and Rumsfeld were influenced by the neocons’ well-developed positions, including specific strategies for action, which meshed with their own more general foreign policy attitudes—e.g., a proclivity for unilateral, aggressive action.
Although Cheney had for years identified with a tough-minded, militaristic foreign policy, he had, as Secretary of Defense, loyally adhered to the George H.W. Bush administration policy in 1991 of eschewing an occupation of Iraq, and continued to identify with that position after the end of the administration. As late as a 1996 interview for a documentary on the 1991 Gulf War for PBS’s “Frontline” program, Cheney declared: “Now you can say well you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam, I don’t think so [rather] I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.”
In short, it seems reasonable to conclude that during the latter 1990s, Cheney was persuaded by neocon claims backed by numerous facts and factoids that Saddam was dangerous—though whether he really believed that Saddam was a “mortal danger” is questionable—and that his removal would be good thing for the United States that would outweigh the costs of a war. Although Cheney undoubtedly must have realized that the neocons had cherry-picked and exaggerated the intelligence claims, his involvement in the highest levels of government and partisan politics for many years had habituated him to having the truth twisted to advance policy goals.
Furthermore, Cheney was known to pick up newer views expressed in conservative circles that entailed marked changes in his actual policy prescriptions, though leaving his overall conservative attitude unaffected. For example, in regard to economic policy, he moved from being a budget-balancer to a supply-sider willing to tolerate large budget deficits. (Barton Gellman, “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” 2008, pp. 257-259) And, as Vice President, Cheney specifically relied on advice from the eminent historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, a right-wing Zionist and one of the neocons’ foremost gurus, who strongly advocated war against Iraq and other Middle Eastern states. (Gellman, “Angler,” p. 231) So while the neocon Middle East war agenda did resonate with Cheney’s general militant stance on foreign policy, there is little reason to think that he would have come up with the specifics of the policy, including even the identification of Iraq as the target, if it had not been for neocon influence.
The influence of ideas per se was not the only factor that likely motivated Cheney. The fact that Cheney and his wife, Lynne, who was with the American Enterprise Institute (known as “neocon central”), had close personal and professional relations with the neocons also would have predisposed him to give his support to the neoconservatives and their agenda.
There is certainly no inherent reason why “American nationalists” (as Finkelstein styles Cheney and Rumsfeld) qua “American nationalists” would identify with Israeli interests and pursue wars in the Middle East against the Islamic states. If global power were the American nationalist goal, one could easily argue that supporting the Islamic world would best serve its advancement. For by pursuing such an alternative policy, the United States would have the support of the major oil-producing region of the world. And if the more than one billion Muslims were friendly to the United States, they could be used, if such a weapon were necessary, to undermine America’s most powerful military adversaries—Russia and China—since both have restive Muslim populations.
It should be noted that representatives of the “realist” camp of foreign policy, which focuses on concrete national interests rather than ideals—and includes such luminaries as Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor for George H. W. Bush; James Baker, Secretary of State for George H. W. Bush; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter—did not push for the war on Iraq, and Brzezinski and Scowcroft openly opposed it.
Furthermore, large numbers of nationalist conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and other traditional conservatives, have opposed globalist American intervention and believed from the outset that wars in the Middle East were not in America’s interest. These conservative nationalists had supported a hard-line Cold War policy long before the neoconservatives came onto the scene—though while opposing Communism they were wary of American global involvement, especially nation-building, perceiving the global policy against Communism as a something of a necessary evil. During most of the Cold War, they had been the dominant face of American conservatism, but the neocons, by the end of the 1980s, would achieve a leading position in the conservative movement. They quickly purged or marginalized those who dissented from their positions, especially in regard to Israel, and mainstream conservatism itself was transformed in a neoconservative direction, a change which has been lauded by the neocons and lamented by those purged and marginalized conservatives and their followers, now called paleoconservatives. The upshot of all of this is that being an “American nationalist” did not ipso facto make one a supporter of the neoconservative Middle East agenda, as Finkelstein would imply.
Being in charge of the incoming Bush administration transition team, Cheney used that position to staff national security positions in the government with his neocon associates. While the neocons could not actually make the ultimate decisions in the Bush administration, they were in sufficiently authoritative positions inside the administration to influence the decisions that would be made. And the anger and fear resulting from the 9/11 terror attacks enabled the neocons, with their already existing war agenda, to markedly increase their influence in the administration. Significantly, the administration’s neocons were not only providing what was regarded by President Bush as expert advice but, as mentioned above, they also cherry-picked the spurious intelligence that depicted Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States.
The formidable power of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration derived from the fact that they worked in unison to advance their war agenda and override and marginalize all opposition. Not only was there no consensus for war in the foreign policy and national security components of the executive branch, but crucial aspects of the neocon war agenda were opposed by significant elements of the military brass, the State Department, and the CIA.
Bob Woodward in his “Plan of Attack” (p. 292) notes that Secretary of State Colin Powell saw a “separate little government,” consisting of “Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith,” and what Powell privately called Feith’s “Gestapo office.” According to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell’s chief of staff, “There were several remarkable things about the vice president’s staff. One was how empowered they were, and one was how in sync they were. In fact, we used to say about both [Rumsfeld’s office] and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy . . . . They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make [it] in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government – and the rest of the government is all confused.”
Regarding the concomitant loss of power by the State Department, Wilkerson remarked: “I’m not sure the State Department even exists anymore.”
Also of vital importance was a cohesive neocon network outside the Bush administration, which helped to mobilize crucial public support for the war. Social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her book, “The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market,” provides a detailed description of the neoconservatives as an example of an interlocking network of organizations, agencies, and think tanks united behind a shared agenda that was capable of driving government policy.
It seems apparent that without all-out support from the neocon network, Cheney and Rumsfeld could not have brought about the attack on Iraq, even if that had been their goal. For the neocon network had to overcome significant opposition to achieve the implementation of their war agenda, as well as generate public and congressional support for war. For example, the neocons had championed Ahmed Chalabi and enabled much of his spurious intelligence to receive the imprimatur of the US government—though the established intelligence community regarded him as a con man.
Although Cheney and Rumsfeld could not have brought off the war without the neocon network, those two were not indispensable to the neocons, who could have likely achieved war with other individuals at the helm. For example, the hawkish pro-Israel John McCain was the favorite Republican candidate for numerous neocons in 2000 (and, of course, was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008). Given McCain’s penchant for neoconservative foreign policy advisors, his advocacy of forcible regime change in Iraq prior to 2001, and his staunch support for the attack on Iraq during the war build-up (and his later hawkishness on Iran), there is no reason to think that a President McCain, surrounded by neocon advisers, would have avoided a war on Iraq.
Nothing of what I have written is intended to imply that the neoconservatives were the sole cause for the war on Iraq or that they single-handedly drove the country to war. While neoconservatives spearheaded the war on Iraq, and without the neoconservatives the war would have been highly improbable, they obviously needed auxiliary support, in which category I would include Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most significantly, the 9/11 terror attacks created the ideal milieu to generate government and popular support for such a military endeavor, as those attacks certainly enabled the neocons’ Iraq war agenda to move to the forefront in the Bush administration. Without the popular fear and anger generated by the 9/11 attacks, it is unlikely that the neocons would have been able to successfully promote a war on Iraq. Nonetheless, the neoconservatives were the primary actors. It was they who created the war agenda, and it was they who played a key role in its implementation.
The Neocons… They’re Back
AMEU | May 27, 2012
Between June 5 – 6, 2007, an international gathering called the Democracy & Security Conference took place in Prague, the Czech Republic. Sponsored, in part, by the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, its List of Participants included Sheldon Adelson, the casino and hotel magnate, worth an estimated $21.5 billion, who, with his wife Miriam, recently gave $22 million to Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, a campaign in which the former speaker referred to Palestinians as “an invented people.”
Other participants included: Natan Sharansky, a member of the Likud party who, in 2006, formed the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies and who, in 2009, became chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the organization in charge of immigration and absorption of Jews worldwide into the Jewish state; Richard Perle, former chair of the Bush administration’s Defense Policy Board during the invasion of Iraq in 2003; Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, who actively encouraged and supported the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq; and U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, also an outspoken supporter of the Iraq invasion.
There, too, was Reza Pahlavi, identified on the List of Participants as “Opposition Leader to Clerical Regime of Iran.” He is Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Iranian dictator Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi and heir to the Peacock throne, who now lives in Maryland, from where he calls for regime change in Iran. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., and the conservative Washington D.C. think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), have both come out for regime change in Iran, and AIPAC has indicated its support for the return of Reza Pahlavi to the throne.
Once again the drums of war are beating to topple yet another Middle East leader. In our Sept.-Oct. 2004 Link “Timeline for War,” we traced the buildup to President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Now, in this issue, we go back to look at the protagonists of that war—often referred to as neoconservatives or neocons—and we ask what are they up to now?
Richard N. Perle
Our 2004 Link traced Richard Perle’s pivotal role among the neocons in launching President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Dubbed “The Prince of Darkness,” he was chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB), which provided the rationale for war and coordinated public opinion both inside and outside the administration.
In 2006, Perle traveled to Libya twice to meet with Col. Qadhafi. He went as a paid senior adviser to the Monitor Group, a Boston-based consulting firm, whose project was to enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi. Other prominent figures the Monitor recruited to travel to Libya were Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis and Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of John Negroponte, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and first ever director of national intelligence. The Monitor group charged the government of Libya $250,000 per month ($3-million per year), plus expenses that were not to exceed $2.5 million.
Also in 2006, Perle received a phone call from an Iranian prisoner, a 30-year-old “student” by the name of Amir-Abbas Fakhravar. From his cell in the notorious Evin prison in Iran, Fakhravar had been phoning the pro-monarchist satellite station in Los Angeles. How he came by a phone in prison is unknown. Equally astonishing is his explanation that the prison authorities, after torturing him, let him out of prison to take a university exam, expecting him to return voluntarily. Instead, he went on the lam for 10 months before showing up in Dubai, where Perle was there waiting for him.
From Dubai, Perle arranged Fakhravar’s entry into the United States, and commenced his public relations tour with a private lunch at the American Enterprise Institute, where the “opposition leader” met State Department and Pentagon officials, as well as the neoconservative hawk, Michael Ledeen.
The celebrated dissident was interviewed by Perle in a 2007 documentary, “The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom,” part of a PBS series “America at the Crossroads.” In it, Fakhravar called upon Americans to send the Marines into his country to stop the Hitler-like dictators from making nuclear bombs.
In a Jan. 20, 2007 interview with Ynet, Fakhravar predicted that, if the West did launch a military attack on Iran, “the top brass will flee immediately … many of the mid-level officials will shave off their beards, don ties, and join the (civilians) in the street.”
And in meetings with members of the U.S.-Iranian community, Fakhravar said that he respected Reza Pahlavi and would support the people of Iran if they voted for a constitutional monarchy.
Likewise, in a visit to Israel, he assured his television audience that the Iranians loved Jews.
During this time, more than one commentator observed that Richard Perle, who was promoting Amir-Abbas Fakhravar, was the same Richard Perle who had boosted the cause of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who provided much of the misinformation that had led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
These days Perle criticizes the Obama administration for not supporting Iranian dissidents in exile and anti-government protesters on the inside. Why? Because it is in America’s interest to do so. And why is that? Because, as he explained in a Feb. 18, 2011, Newsmax interview, “The Iranians are killing Americans at every opportunity in the places we are now fighting. They support terrorism around the world, and they’re headed toward nuclear weapons.”
In a Dec. 15, 2011 interview with Kurt Nimmo of Infowars.com, he put it bluntly: “I do not think there is any question about it, I am willing to accuse Iran of building nuclear weapons.”
And what if we don’t act? The Prince of Darkness offered his own Occam’s choice in a 2004 book, “An End to Evil”: “There is no middle way for Americans,” warned Perle, “it is either victory or holocaust.”
Paul D. Wolfowitz
Four days following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush gathered his national security team at Camp David for a war council. Years later, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would recall that the first person in the room to bring up going after Iraq was his deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz.
Wolfowitz’s determination to topple Saddam was reinforced by an unlikely foreign national by the name of Shaha Riza. Paul and Shaha had met in 1999 and had become romantically involved, even though each at the time was married. A British national and Muslim, with family roots in Libya, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia, Shaha held a degree in International Relations from Oxford University, with a focus on spreading democracy in Middle Eastern countries.
After the 2000 election, Wolfowitz was on the short-list to head the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). That was until his wife of 30 years, Clare Wolfowitz, wrote a letter to president-elect George Bush telling him that her husband’s extra-marital affair with a foreigner posed a national security risk. A mutual friend of the Wolfowitzes, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, tried to dissuade Clare from sending the letter, but she sent it. And it worked. Wolfowitz’s name was removed from consideration. Again, Scooter Libby, at the time Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, intervened to have his boss recommend Wolfowitz for deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld.
From this post Wolfowitz would emerge as the most hawkish of the administration’s Iraq policy advocates. Bringing democracy to Saddam’s dictatorship was, he insisted, “doable;” the U.S. would be greeted as liberators; Iraqi oil would pay for the reconstruction costs, and military estimates of needing several hundred thousand troops to do the job were “widely off the mark.”
By March 2005, the “doable war” in Iraq had resulted in the killing of over 1,000 U.S. soldiers and an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Iraqi civilians. It was at this time that President Bush promoted his deputy secretary of state by nominating him to head the World Bank. On March 31, 2005 Paul Wolfowitz was unanimously approved as the Bank’s president. Two years later, he was forced to resign.
The issue, again, was Shaha Riza. She was already employed by the World Bank when Paul took over, which presented a problem since the Bank’s ethic rules precluded sexual relationships between a manager and a staff member, even if one reports to the other indirectly through a chain of supervision. So Riza was assigned a job at the State Department under Liz Cheney, the daughter of the vice-president, with the task of promoting democracy in the Middle East. To compensate her for any potential disruption in her career prospects, Wolfowitz directed the Bank’s human resources chief to increase her salary from $132,660 to $193,590 per year, tax-exempt.
When news of this broke in the Washington Post on March 28, 2007, it sparked calls for the resignation of the Bank’s president. An investigation was launched at the Bank and Wolfowitz handed in his resignation on April 28, 2007.
Today Paul Wolfowitz works for the American Enterprise Institute, known to Washington insiders as Neocon Central.
And he continues the drumbeat for war. In a June 19, 2009 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, the intellectual godfather of the Iraq war criticized Obama for not imposing democracy in Iran, warning, “It would be a cruel irony if, in an effort to avoid imposing democracy, the United States were to tip the scale towards dictators who impose their will on people struggling for freedom.”
By this time 4,315 U.S. military had been killed in the Iraq war, along with some 1.3 million Iraqis.
Lewis “Scooter” Libby
He’s known as “Scooter “— once, when his father watched him crawling across his crib as a baby, he exclaimed, “he’s a scooter!” and the name stuck. True to his name, as Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, he paid multiple visits to the C.I.A. prior to the Iraq war in order to strong-arm its analysts into reporting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as well as links to al-Qaeda. He also provided classified government information to The New York Times reporter Judith Miller that formed the basis of her front-page articles highlighting Iraq’s WMDs. And it was Libby who prodded then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to include in his Jan. 29, 2003 U.N. speech specious reports from a disreputable Iraqi source code-named Curveball about the existence of mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq.
As in the case of Paul Wolfowitz, however, what ultimately got Libby into trouble was a woman. Her name was Valarie Plame Wilson.
In February 2002, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, was asked by the C.I.A. and other agencies to investigate claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. Wilson returned saying the claims were false.
In a July 6, 2003 op-ed for The New York Times, Wilson faulted President Bush for saying in his Jan. 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq sought to buy nuclear material in Niger. He went on to warn that, if his report had been ignored because it didn’t fit preconceptions about Iraq, “a legitimate case can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”
Several days later, columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valarie Plame, was an undercover C.I.A. operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
Joseph Wilson shot back that the outing of his wife was retaliation for his article and that revealing Valarie’s cover effectively ended her career, not to mention putting in jeopardy the lives of her covert contacts.
An investigation ensued to find out who leaked the name to Novak. The New York Times produced documents that showed that Scooter Libby may have first learned of Plame’s covert identity from Vice President Cheney. Libby denied under oath he had anything to do with it.
Ultimately, Libby was found guilty on four felony counts of making false statements to the F.B.I., lying to a grand jury and obstructing a probe into the leak. He was acquitted of one count of lying to the F.B.I. On June 8, 2007, he was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000. Soon after, he resigned his post as Cheney’s chief of staff.
On July 2, 2007, President Bush commuted his sentence but, despite strong urging from his vice president, he did not grant Scooter a presidential pardon before leaving office. On March 20, 2008, I. Lewis Libby was disbarred from the practice of law, at least until 2012.
Still he speaks out. In a Sept. 7, 2010 interview on Fox TV, he warned that he didn’t think sanctions would work, and that Iran would have the bomb within a year.
Douglas J. Feith
He graduated magna cum laude both from Harvard University and, in 1981, from Georgetown University Law Center. That year he joined President Reagan’s National Security Council (N.S.C.) as a Middle East analyst. A year later he was fired after becoming the focus of an F.B.I. inquiry into his giving classified N.S.C. information to an Israeli embassy official in Washington.
Soon after, Douglas Feith was rehired as special counsel to then-Assistant Secretary to the Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle.
In 2001, with help from Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, Feith joined the Bush administration as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the third most senior official in the U. S. Department of Defense. Returning the favor, Feith then worked to have Perle chosen as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
During this time, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence, whose purpose was to influence policymakers by submitting biased news stories into the foreign media as a build-up to the Iraq war.
He also headed the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, a unit he and Wolfowitz created that was closely tied to a parallel intelligence unit within the Israeli prime minister’s office. Its purpose was to provide key Bush administration people with raw intelligence on Saddam’s Iraq, much of it coming from Ahmad Chalabi, the opportunistic head of the exiled Iraqi National Council.
On Aug. 27, 2004, CBS News broke the story about an F.B.I. investigation of a possible spy for Israel who was working for the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith. The spy, later identified as Lawrence Franklin, was caught passing classified presidential directives and other sensitive documents to an AIPAC lobbyist who, in turn, passed them on to Israel. Franklin pled guilty to several charges of espionage, for which he received a sentence of just under 13 years in prison— later reduced to 10 months house arrest. Two AIPAC employees were also indicted, but their cases were dismissed.
In Jan. 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that his undersecretary would be “stepping down.” Later that year, Feith joined the faculty of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Services at Georgetown University as a Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy; the appointment created an uproar among the school’s faculty. Two years later, the school opted not to renew his contract.
In Feb. 2007, the Pentagon’s inspector general issued a report charging that Feith’s office “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.”
Currently, Douglas Feith is director of the Center for National Security Strategies and a Senior Fellow at the conservative think-tank, the Hudson Institute.
Dalck Feith, Douglas’s father, was a Holocaust survivor, and a member in Betar, the militaristic, pre-Likud Zionist youth movement in Poland founded by Ze’ev (Vladmir) Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky, whose assistant was Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, declared that every Jew had the right to enter Palestine, that a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan was the only guarantee of Jewish survival, that all Arabs hate Jews, and that active retaliation and overwhelming Jewish armed force were needed to ensure that the displaced population did not fight to retake their land, a reaction he considered quite natural.
Dalck’s son Douglas has hewed to the Likud worldview—both in calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi government, and now for regime change in Iran. In a Winter 2010 inFocus article entitled “Obama’s Failure to Lead,” he argued passionately that the time for talk was past: “There is no realistic prospect that Iran’s leaders can be negotiated out of their determination to obtain nuclear weapons.”
Condoleezza Rice, it is reported, made the comment, following one of Douglas Feith’s presentations to the National Security Council, “Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we’ll invite the ambassador.”
David Wurmser
In fact, according to a June 2, 2007 New York Times article, Condoleezza Rice, at the time secretary of state, was pressured to play down the hawkish talk circulating in Washington of a military option against Tehran. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had called those wanting to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities the “new crazies.” The Times article went on to note that such hawkish statements had been made by a former Pentagon official who was then principal deputy assistant for national security affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney.
His name was David Wurmser.
We first met David Wurmser in our “Timeline for War” Link, on July 9, 1996, when he and his wife Meyrav joined with Douglas Feith and Richard Perle to develop a foreign policy paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which called for Israel to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a pro-Israel regime in his place.
Wurmser next showed up in our July 31, 1998 entry, when he met with Israel’s U.N. representative Dore Gold in an effort to get Israel to put pressure on the U.S. Congress to approve a $10 million grant to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, whose goal was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
In a Nov. 1, 2000 op-ed piece in the Washington Times, Wurmser, now at the American Enterprise Institute, called on the U.S. and Israel to broaden the conflict in the Middle East. The United States, he argued, needs “to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza—in order to reestablish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
Shortly after that piece, Wurmser was named by the incoming Bush administration to the post of principal deputy assistant for national security affairs in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
On Sept. 12, 2001, the day following the 9/11 attacks, Douglas Feith, now Rumsfeld’s undersecretary of defense for policy, tasked Wurmser to form a secret intelligence unit that would report directly to him; called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, its purpose was to find loose ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in order to counter C.I.A. analysts who had found no credible links between the two.
In July 2007, with the war in Iraq well underway, Wurmser left his position with Dick Cheney to found Delphi Global Analysis, a risk-assessment consulting business, with offices in Washington and Israel. While its clients include hedge fund managers and investment bankers, the firm, we are told, also handles a few “sensitive” projects in Israel.
Delphi’s co-founder is David’s wife, Dr. Meyrav Wurmser. Born in Israel and a member of the Likud party, she wrote her doctoral thesis on Revisionist Zionism behind the Herut and Likud parties. She is co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which critics have accused of disseminating the most extreme, often inaccurate, views from the Arabic and Persian media. In 2008, she was listed as a member of the board of advisors of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a group that was involved in the distribution of 28 million DVDs of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” a film in which parallels are drawn between Nazi Germany and a monolithic Islam. Twenty-eight million DVDs of the film were provided to at least 70 newspapers that placed them at the doorstep of subscribers in swing states prior to the 2008 presidential election.
Also listed on Delphi’s brochure as a Visiting Scholar is Lee Smith, senior editor at the Weekly Standard. In a Feb. 23, 2012 article in The Tablet, Smith quoted David Wurmser as saying that Israel’s war against Iran’s nuclear program was well under way, with lots of money over the past decade having been spent on all sorts of anti-Iranian options, such as computer worms like Stuxnet, covert operations like the assassination of nuclear scientists, sabotage of military installations, and, possibly, commando raids and air strikes.
Yet as prepared as Israel is, according to Wurmser, it is the United States that should use its military might to topple Tehran. Why? Because Iran is America’s enemy. And how does America go about doing this? Just before he left Vice President Cheney’s office, Wurmser wrote a paper advocating that the U.S. must go to war with Iran, not to set back its nuclear program, but to achieve regime change. To establish a casus belli, the U.S. would launch airstrikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps training camps in Iran in retaliation for their smuggling explosives into Iraq that kill and maim Americans fighting there. Iran then would retaliate, which would allow for a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. Cheney acted on Wurmser’s advice and tried to get Bush to provoke a war with Iran over Iraq. But Pentagon officials turned it down.
Now, the head of Delphi Global Analysis warns, it’s “crunch time” for Israel’s leaders. He notes a marked shift in Israel’s security establishment, the surest sign being President Shimon Peres’s warning that a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to Israel and is “a real danger to humanity as a whole.” And he adds this about his personal friend, Prime Minister Netanyahu, “It’s not just about Bibi and his historical legacy anymore. He doesn’t need to be a leader in a Churchillian mode, because the consensus on attacking Iran is broad-based.”
In the presidential campaign of 2011-2012, candidate Newt Gingrich revealed the names of his foreign policy advisors. Among them was David Wurmser.
William Kristol
On June 18, 2007, the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam arrived in the port of Juneau. On board were three of the Weekly Standard’s top writers: Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor, Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President Bush, and the magazine’s founder William Kristol.
Upon disembarking, they went straight for lunch to the newly elected governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns. By the time they returned to the cruise ship, the conservative pundits had fallen in love with Sarah Palin.
And no one more than William Kristol. It did not go unnoticed that the Alaskan governor displayed the flag of Israel in her office, nor that she attended Protestant evangelical churches that believe the preservation of the state of Israel is a biblical imperative, nor that she understood Israel’s fear of an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons. Months before John McCain picked her for his running mate, Kristol predicted on Fox News Sunday that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin … on the ticket.” As one commentator put it: “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms … and things always work out so well when Kristol engages his pom-poms.”
Bill Kristol received his PhD from Harvard University. He is the son of Irving Kristol, long associated with the American Enterprise Institute and Commentary magazine, and considered by many the godfather of neoconservatism.
Kristol is one of three board members of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney, which includes former McCain campaign managers Michael Goldfarb and Aaron Harrison. Formed to counter what it considers Obama’s undercutting of America’s war on terror, it promotes the foreign policy objectives of the former vice president, including his support for enhanced interrogation techniques.
Kristol is also co-founder and board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel (E.C.I.). Launched in 2010 as the most pro-Israel of all pro-Israel groups, it was first located in the same office as the old Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, whose Washington, D.C., address happens to be that of Orion Strategies, a consultancy run by Randy Scheunemann—once Sarah Palin’s chief foreign policy advisor. Much of E.C.I.’s initial funding came from hedge fund managers, including $100,000 from Daniel Loeb and $50,000 from Jonathan Jacobson.
E.C.I.’s favorite tactic is publishing ads that attack politicians and political analysts who question America’s unconditional support for Israel. Its campaign to push the U.S. into war with Iran was highlighted in a recent 30-minute video that mocked President Obama’s “unshakeable” commitment to Israel’s security, particularly his record on Iran. Prior to the March 2012 meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama, E.C.I.’s Super PAC spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to intimidate critics of the Israeli prime minister and his call to attack Iran sooner rather than later. This included a full-page ad in The New York Times that went after two liberal advocacy groups, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, denouncing their work as anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, and disclosing the phone numbers of the groups’ donors.
A March 18, 2012 New York Times article cited critics who warned that hawkish voices like E.C.I.’s were indeed pushing the United States closer to military action against Iran and closer to yet another war in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Bill Kristol, the pundit who, 11 years ago, said that President Bush had to attack Iraq because “Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight,” now tells Fox News Sunday, “It would be much better if we use force to delay the Iranian nuclear program than if Israel did.”
John R. Bolton
On May 1, 2005, the London Sunday Times published a leaked document in which the chief of Britain’s intelligence agency MI6, Richard Dearlove, advised Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush had decided on attacking Iraq, even though the case for WMDs was “thin.” This, according to the British intelligence head, was not a problem, because “intelligence and facts were being fixed [by the U.S.] around the policy.”
Who was cooking the books?
This was a question that the House Government Reform Committee Member Rep. Henry Waxman wanted answered. Following an investigation that included “sensitive and unclassified” papers provided by the State Department, Waxman fingered John Bolton.
Bolton, known as the neocons’ neocon, was at the time the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. According to Waxman, in December 2002, Bolton arranged for false information about Iraq’s procurement of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be put in a Fact Sheet that went out to the United Nations and the media, despite the fact that the information had been assessed to be false in C.I.A. intelligence evaluations. Bolton, under oath, denied he had anything to do with the Fact Sheet, to which Waxman replied: “When you’re in charge of arms control and the biggest issue is whether we were going to war against Iraq on the issue of nuclear weapons … don’t you think you have some responsibility to know what’s going on?”
In another case involving the undersecretary of state, the May 6, 2006 issue of the Jewish publication The Forward reported that Bolton had been reprimanded for having unauthorized contacts with officials of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad without seeking “country clearance” from the State Department. And in its May 9, 2005 edition, US News and World Report carried the story that Bolton allegedly used his position as the Bush administration’s top arms control official to shield Israel from charges of violating U.S. laws that prohibit the use of U.S. arms for “non-defensive” purposes. The case involved Israel’s July 23, 2000 use of a U.S.-made F-16 bomber to drop a one-ton bomb on a house in a densely populated area of Gaza, killing 14 civilians and injuring more than 100.
In 2005, Bolton was nominated by President Bush to the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—the same institution he allegedly fed false information to. Due to a Democratic filibuster, however, Bush had to wait until congress adjourned before making a recess-appointment. Bolton resigned his U.N. post in December 2006, when the recess-appointment ran out and it was clear he would not receive Senate confirmation.
Before joining the Bush administration, Bolton was at the American Enterprise Institute, which is where he is today. He opines from time to time as a Fox News Channel commentator, and he is involved with other conservative think tanks such the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). In 2010, he contemplated running for president of the United States in 2012, but later thought better of the idea.
Meanwhile, the neocons’ neocon continues boldly on the warpath. In 2009, he suggested to a University of Chicago audience that Israel should consider a nuclear strike against Iran. And in a Feb. 22, 2012 Washington Times article, he promised that a world where Iran has nuclear weapons will be far more dangerous than a world after an Israeli military strike.
Michael A. Ledeen
If Bolton arranged for the false information to go into the Fact Sheet, who falsified the information?
Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism operations at the C.I.A., was asked in a 2005 interview if the man behind the forging of the Niger documents that President Bush used to launch a preemptive war against Iraq was Michael Ledeen, then assistant to Undersecretary of State Douglas Feith. Cannistraro replied: “You’d be very close.” Philip Giraldi, former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer, confirmed that Ledeen was the logical intermediary in coordinating the falsification of the documents. Ledeen has denied he had anything to do with it.
Michael Ledeen, a leading neo-conservative, left the American Enterprise Institute in 2008, where he had been for 20 years, to take a fellowship at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (F.D.D.). Other neocons affiliated with the F.D.D. include Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, and Douglas Feith’s father, Dalck who gave the F.D.D. $100,000. Additional donors to the F.D.D. are: Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare, whose family foundation gave over $800,000 between 2001-2004; the Seagram company heirs, Edgar and Charles Bronfman, who have given over $1 million; and Home Depot cofounder Bernard Marcus, who contributed $600,000 between 2001-2003. A 2003 investigative report in The American Conservative put F.D.D.’s annual budget at close to $3 million. In 2008, an F.D.D. spokesman, Brian Wise, confirmed that the foundation had received at least one grant from the U.S. State Department worth $487,000.
Ledeen believes that trying to negotiate with the Iranian regime is nothing short of appeasement. The U.S., he advocates, should work closely with the “Iranian people” to bring about regime change by arming opposition forces inside the country, by acts of sabotage, by targeted assassinations, by sanctions, by rallying the Iranian community in exile. The most promising ally in this last effort, according to Ledeen, is the former shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi.
The crown prince, in turn, has sought closer ties with the neocons, particularly with Ledeen. He addressed the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which Ledeen cofounded and whose members at one time or another included Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, and Douglas Feith. The prince had also met privately with top Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, his links to Israel go back to the early 1980s, when he had approached Ariel Sharon with a plan to overthrow the mullahs in Iran.
On May 19, 2003, at a press conference attended by Ledeen, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback announced that he would introduce a bill, the Iran Democracy Act, seeking $50 million dollars to promote democracy in Iran and to fund Iranian opposition groups. Supporters of the Iran Democracy Act included the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Commenting on this support, former AIPAC director, Morris Amitay, noted that it was natural for Jewish groups to openly back regime change in Iran.
The introduction of such a bill was significant because it would extend financial support to Iranian opposition groups, much as the congress did in the case of Ahmed Chalabi’s National Iraqi Congress. Washington, in effect, would be taking a decisive step towards making regime change in Iran official U.S. policy.
Prior to congressional action, Reza Pahlavi spoke at a private briefing on Capitol Hill organized by the Iranian Jewish Public Affairs Committee (IJPAC). In it he urged Hill staffers to support the idea of funding the Iranian opposition. Later, the president of IJPAC in Los Angeles, Pooya Dayanim, observed in the The Forward: “There is a pact emerging between hawks in the administration, Jewish groups and Iranian supporters of Reza Pahlavi to push for regime change.” Jews, he added, were “in love with Pahlavi” because they saw his father’s reign as a golden era for Jews.
In the end, the bill did not pass. Enough senators apparently were able to recall America’s disastrous role in bankrolling Ahmed Chalabi. The bill did pass, however, as a non-binding Sense of the Senate Resolution, denouncing Iran’s lack of democracy. As such it achieved its main goal of hindering the State Department from exploring further dialogue with Tehran.
Most recently, Michael Ledeen was heard commenting on a March 12, 2012 60 Minutes interview with Israel’s ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, in which the former spymaster urged that Iran’s dissidents be better supplied militarily, its nuclear labs sabotaged and more of its scientists targeted for assassination. Ledeen praised the interview. No one, however, noted the inconvenient fact that it was Dagan’s organization, the Mossad, that had built the shah’s hated SAVAK police apparatus—that led to the anti-shah revolution.
Security & Democracy
Those two words—the words chosen for the title of that 2007 conference in Prague—are key to understanding how the Jewish state is portrayed today.
Most Americans know Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” And, because it is surrounded by undemocratic, despotic regimes, its security necessitates having military hegemony in the area, which includes its own arsenal of over 200 nuclear bombs, as well as the full force of the U.S. military. Americans get it when Prime Minister Netanyahu comes before them and says that he, as the leader of a sovereign state, has the duty to make sure that Iran does not get the bomb that would threaten to wipe out his small democracy.
Zionists, particularly pro-Likud Zionists, see it differently.
Israel is not a democracy. No one put this more bluntly than Ariel Sharon. Quoted in an article entitled “Democracy and the Jewish State,” in Yedioth Ahronoth, May 28, 1993, the former prime minister noted that it is no accident that the words “democracy” or “democratic” are absent from Israel’s Declaration of Independence. What did the framers of Israel’s constitution have in mind? Sharon answers: “The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Israel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. That is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.” Eretz-Israel, by the way, here refers to the biblical land area roughly corresponding to what is known today as Palestine, Canaan, the Promised Land and the Holy Land; it includes all of the West Bank.
Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper pointed out in our April-May 2012 Link that Israel began exercising its exclusive claim over Eretz-Israel in 1948 when, after seizing half of the partition area allocated to the Arabs, it reduced the Palestinian population living within its expanded borders from 950,000 to 154,000—a drop of 80%. Then, following the occupation of 1967, it established “facts on the ground” to foreclose any coherent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state. In fact, Israel denies even having an occupation, since it believes all Palestinian lands are part of its biblical inheritance. Those Palestinians who were living on Eretz-Israel in 1948 were caretakers, waiting for the owners to return. And those currently living in Israel or on the West Bank are there at the sufferance of the Jewish people.
So what causes the hostility of Arabs toward Israel? Again, the clearest answer comes from the Zionist militant Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader for whom Benjamin Netanyahu’s father worked. Jabotinsky saw the Zionist movement as a colonial project, no different from European colonialism. In his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” he argued that attempts at dialogue with the Arabs are fantasy, as no nation—and he recognized the Palestinian people as such—would agree to a foreign entity being established on its lands. His conclusion: Jews must be so dominant militarily as to make it impossible for any of its neighbors to impede its colonial ambitions. Part of this strategy is keeping those neighboring regimes weak. Iraq is a case in point.
Iran is another. In April 1951, the shah of Iran, then the constitutional monarch, appointed Mohammad Mosaddegh prime minister. He turned out to be an exceptionally popular social reformer, introducing unemployment compensation, healthcare benefits, land reform laws, and public works projects. He also strengthened democratic political institutions by limiting the monarchy’s powers, cutting the shah’s personal budget, and transferring royal lands back to the state.
He also called for the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry. On May 1, 1951, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), later known as British Petroleum or BP, which was the pillar of Britain’s economy and its influence in the Middle East. In response, the British government announced a blockade of all Iranian oil, reducing Tehran’s income to near zero.
The prime minister also severed all relations with Israel. The shah had welcomed the Jewish state as a “little America” in the heart of the Middle East, and he pursued a policy of friendship in order to keep in good with the Zionist lobby in the U.S., which he saw as wielding great influence in the congress and in the media. Mosaddegh, on the other hand, saw Israel as the tool of Anglo-American hegemony in the Middle East. His popularity rose.
In August 1953, the shah, who opposed many of his prime minister’s reforms, including his nationalization of AIOC, dismissed him. Mosaddeqh refused to go, his followers rioted, and the shah fled to Rome.
Winston Churchill called his war-time friend, now U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower and suggested that Mosaddegh, despite his disgust with socialism and all his democratic reforms, was, or would become, dependent on the Soviet Union. Eisenhower agreed that the Iranian prime minister should go. Under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior C.I.A. officer, the C.I.A. and British intelligence funded and led a covert operation to depose Mosaddegh with the help of military forces loyal to the shah.
The plot, called “Operation Ajax,” hinged on orders signed by the shah to dismiss the prime minister and replace him with Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans. Mosaddegh was deposed and on August 22, 1953, the shah returned in triumph. A few weeks later, the U.S. government granted Iran a $45-million emergency loan. Two months after that, Iran resumed diplomatic relations with Great Britain. On August 5, 1954, a new compact was made with the AIOC, and the oil company was compensated for its seized property. The following year the Iranian government and American oil interests in Iran concluded an agreement for an unprecedented 25-75 percent division of profits in favor of Iran.
With the monarchy restored, relations with Israel strengthened. In July 1960, Iran recognized the Jewish state. Israelis, in turn, used their influence in Washington to convince congress to continue the sale of American military equipment to Tehran, while, at the same time, the shah, using his vast oil revenues, purchased up to $500,000,000 worth of arms and police equipment from Israel in an arrangement called “Project Flowers.”
And the shah was buying something else. In 1957, he enlisted Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, and the C.I.A., to create SAVAK, the dreaded secret police force, whose personnel was trained by Mossad to suppress all opposition to the shah, with no limits on the use of torture tools to break dissenters. Over the years SAVAK killed and tortured thousands of Iranians.
It took some 27 years before an exiled cleric, who had been smuggling anti-shah, anti-U.S., anti- Zionist audiocassette sermons into Iran—the precursor of today’s social media uprisings—returned in triumph to establish an Islamic republic.
In March 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed her regret that Mosaddegh had been ousted, admitting that “the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America.”
Following the shah into exile was his son Reza Pahlavi, born October 31, 1960, who, upon his father’s death in 1980, became heir apparent to the Peacock throne. This is the man, now 51 years old, who participated in the pro-Likud sponsored conference in Prague. Beginning in 2003, the heir began addressing the Iranian community via the internet and satellite television, earning him the sobriquet “The Internet Prince.”
The activism of the exiled, pro-Israel shah-in-waiting did not go unnoticed by the neoconservatives.
Back to the Future
In our Link “Timeline” article, it was on Oct. 1, 2002 that the C.I.A. delivered to the White House its National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) on the case for war with Iraq. This was a classified report reflecting the consensus of analysts from 16 agencies, and we now know that in it the C.I.A. hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, admitting it wasn’t sure he had them.
Three days later, C.I.A. director George Tenet issued an unclassified white paper, with 79 of the original 93 pages whitened out. This report concluded that Baghdad in fact had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.
Over the next two weeks, a joint resolution authorizing the use of force was passed by both houses of congress.
We now come to the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran released in 2010. In it the analysts found credible evidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 at the direction of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who issued a fatwa—recently reaffirmed—against the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. According to a March 18, 2012 front-page article in The New York Times, “American intelligence analysts still believe that the Iranians have not gotten the go-ahead from Ayatollah Khamenei to revive the program.”
Israeli intelligence experts also warn against attacking Iran. In April of this year, Yuval Diskin, recently retired chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s FBI, accused the Netanyahu government of “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Such a strike, warned Diskin, would dramatically accelerate Iran’s nuclear program.
Even the present head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, concluded in an April 25, 2012, interview with Haaretz that he did not think Iran’s top leadership would risk building a nuclear weapon.
Not to be deterred, Netanyahu sounds the alarms of war at every opportunity. At an AIPAC gathering on March 12, 2012, the Israeli prime minister warned that “time was running out to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and diplomacy wasn’t working.” And his recently formed unity government with Shaul Mofaz, the Iranian-born head of Kadima, the nation’s largest opposition party, has heightened fears of an Israeli attack on Iran. On May 11, 2012, Israel’s TV Channel 10 reported that authorities in Washington, D.C., were worried that the Netanyahu/Mofaz alliance brought together two influential party leaders who would both favor an attack on Iran.
Meanwhile, the neocons here at home issue their own dire warnings.
John Bolton has dismissed the N.I.E. assessment as “famously distorted.” In a March 28, 2012 posting on GerardDirect.com, he wrote that diplomacy and sanctions were not working and that the only real alternative left to a nuclear Iran was “a pre-emptive military force.”
And Douglas Feith, writing in the February 12, 2012 National Review Online, concluded: “There is no realistic prospect that Iran’s leaders can be negotiated out of the determination to obtain nuclear weapons.”
William Kristol continues to chide President Obama for putting off action against Iran. In an Oct. 24, 2011 issue of the Weekly Standard, he declared: “It’s long since time for the United States to speak to this [Iranian] regime in the language it understands, force … We can strike at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back. And lest the administration hesitate to act out of fear of lack of support at home, congress should consider authorizing the use of force against Iranian entities that facilitate attacks on our troops … and against the regime’s nuclear weapons program.”
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, calls these neocons the new crazies. But are they? They are well educated, most with post-graduate degrees, many from ivy-league colleges. They are passionately dedicated to advancing the best interests of Israel; Sheldon Adelson, one of the few neocons to have served in the U.S. military, regrets that the uniform he wore was not an Israeli uniform. They have vast sums of money to spend on think-tanks, media outlets—and politicians.
And, despite their championing of a calamitous war in Iraq, and notwithstanding the most recent N.I.E. report, and even assessments from Israeli intelligence agencies, they believe they can convince Americans, and certainly most members of congress, that the United States should send its young men and women yet again into another Middle East war.
Truth is, they are not the crazies.
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Book Excerpt
The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order
By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 23, 2024
The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.
The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.
The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states. … continue
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