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CounterPunch
December
13, 2002
A Rose By Another
Other Name
The
Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties
by KATHLEEN and BILL
CHRISTISON
former
CIA political analysts
Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's
Middle East policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists,
U.S. policy on Israel and the Arab world has increasingly become
the purview of officials well known for tilting toward Israel.
From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists, who had a personal
history and an educational background in the Arab world and were
accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward
Arab interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite
having limited power in the policymaking circles of any administration,
helped maintain some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy
from tipping over totally toward Israel. But Arabists have been
steadily replaced by their exact opposites, what some observers
are calling Israelists, and policymaking circles throughout government
now no longer even make a pretense of exhibiting balance between
Israeli and Arab, particularly Palestinian, interests.
In the Clinton administration, the three
most senior State Department officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli
peace process were all partisans of Israel to one degree or another.
All had lived at least for brief periods in Israel and maintained
ties with Israel while in office, occasionally vacationing there.
One of these officials had worked both as a pro-Israel lobbyist
and as director of a pro-Israel think tank in Washington before
 taking a position in the Clinton
administration from which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli
issues. Another has headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving
government.
The link between active promoters of
Israeli interests and policymaking circles is stronger by several
orders of magnitude in the Bush administration, which is peppered
with people who have long records of activism on behalf of Israel
in the United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of promoting
an agenda for Israel often at odds with existing U.S. policy.
These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are
now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense
Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense,
as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the
vice president's office.
We still tiptoe around putting a name
to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives'
agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con
universe there is little light between the two countries. We
talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make
wry jokes about Congress being "Israeli-occupied territory."
Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly
that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration
thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national
security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words
that best describe the real meaning of those observations and
wry remarks. It's time, however, that we say the words out loud
and deal with what they really signify.
Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing
with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties-the double
allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels
who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests,
who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between
the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving
policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give
the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who,
one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate
of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion
about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first
patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure
Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the
advancement of the U.S. imperium.
"Dual loyalties" has always
been one of those red flags posted around the subject of Israel
and the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that induces horrified
gasps and rapid heartbeats because of its implication of Jewish
disloyalty to the United States and the common assumption that
anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso facto an anti-Semite.
(We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term in
the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should
be identical and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews
to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to the United States.
But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the subject
of dual loyalties arises.)
Although much has been written about
the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, the treatment of
the their ties to Israel has generally been very gingerly. Although
much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq
both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the
neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration,
little has been said about the link between this goal and the
neo-cons' overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel.
But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration
policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network
of pro-Israel activists, and an examination of the neo-cons'
voluminous written record shows that Israel comes up constantly
as a neo-con reference point, always mentioned with the United
States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy, always linked
with the United States when national interests are at issue.
The Begats
First to the cast of characters. Beneath
cabinet level, the list of pro-Israel neo-cons who are either
policy functionaries themselves or advise policymakers from perches
just on the edges of government reads like the old biblical "begats."
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz leads the pack.
He was a protégé of Richard Perle, who heads the
prominent Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Policy Board.
Many of today's neo-cons, including Perle, are the intellectual
progeny of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson,
a strong defense hawk and one of Israel's most strident congressional
supporters in the 1970s.
Wolfowitz in turn is the mentor of Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief
of staff who was first a student of Wolfowitz and later a subordinate
during the 1980s in both the State and the Defense Departments.
Another Perle protégé is Douglas Feith, who is
currently undersecretary of defense for policy, the department's
number-three man, and has worked closely with Perle both as a
lobbyist for Turkey and in co-authoring strategy papers for right-wing
Israeli governments. Assistant Secretaries Peter Rodman and
Dov Zachkeim, old hands from the Reagan administration when the
neo-cons first flourished, fill out the subcabinet ranks at Defense.
At lower levels, the Israel and the Syria/Lebanon desk officers
at Defense are imports from the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, a think tank spun off from the pro-Israel lobby
organization, AIPAC.
Neo-cons have not made many inroads at
the State Department, except for John Bolton, an American Enterprise
Institute hawk and Israeli proponent who is said to have been
forced on a reluctant Colin Powell as undersecretary for arms
control. Bolton's special assistant is David Wurmser, who wrote
and/or co-authored with Perle and Feith at least two strategy
papers for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996. Wurmser's
wife, Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the media-watch website
MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which is run by
retired Israeli military and intelligence officers and specializes
in translating and widely circulating Arab media and statements
by Arab leaders. A recent investigation by the Guardian
of London found that MEMRI's translations are skewed by being
highly selective. Although it inevitably translates and circulates
the most extreme of Arab statements, it ignores moderate Arab
commentary and extremist Hebrew statements.
In the vice president's office, Cheney
has established his own personal national security staff, run
by aides known to be very pro-Israel. The deputy director of
the staff, John Hannah, is a former fellow of the Israeli-oriented
Washington Institute. On the National Security Council staff,
the newly appointed director of Middle East affairs is Elliott
Abrams, who came to prominence after pleading guilty to withholding
information from Congress during the Iran-contra scandal (and
was pardoned by President Bush the elder) and who has long been
a vocal proponent of right-wing Israeli positions. Putting him
in a key policymaking position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
is like entrusting the henhouse to a fox.
Pro-Israel activists with close links
to the administration are also busy in the information arena
inside and outside government. The head of Radio Liberty, a
Cold War propaganda holdover now converted to service in the
"war on terror," is Thomas Dine, who was the very active
head of AIPAC throughout most of the Reagan and the Bush-41 administrations.
Elsewhere on the periphery, William Kristol, son of neo-con
originals Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, is closely
linked to the administration's pro-Israel coterie and serves
as its cheerleader through the Rupert Murdoch-owned magazine
that he edits, The Weekly Standard. Some of Bush's speechwriters
including David Frum, who coined the term "axis of
evil" for Bush's state-of-the-union address but was forced
to resign when his wife publicly bragged about his linguistic
prowess have come from The Weekly Standard. Frank
Gaffney, another Jackson and Perle protégé and
Reagan administration defense official, puts his pro-Israel oar
in from his think tank, the Center for Security Policy, and through
frequent media appearances and regular columns in the Washington
Times.
The incestuous nature of the proliferating
boards and think tanks, whose membership lists are more or less
identical and totally interchangeable, is frighteningly insidious.
Several scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, including
former Reagan UN ambassador and long-time supporter of the Israeli
right wing Jeane Kirkpatrick, make their pro-Israel views known
vocally from the sidelines and occupy positions on other boards.
Probably the most important organization, in terms of its influence
on Bush administration policy formulation, is the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Formed after the 1973
Arab-Israeli war specifically to bring Israel's security concerns
to the attention of U.S. policymakers and concentrating also
on broad defense issues, the extremely hawkish, right-wing JINSA
has always had a high-powered board able to place its members
inside conservative U.S. administrations. Cheney, Bolton, and
Feith were members until they entered the Bush administration.
Several lower level JINSA functionaries are now working in the
Defense Department. Perle is still a member, as are Kirkpatrick,
former CIA director and leading Iraq-war hawk James Woolsey,
and old-time rabid pro-Israel types like Eugene Rostow and Michael
Ledeen. Both JINSA and Gaffney's Center for Security Policy
are heavily underwritten by Irving Moskowitz, a right-wing American
Zionist, California business magnate (his money comes from bingo
parlors), and JINSA board member who has lavishly financed the
establishment of several religious settlements in Arab East Jerusalem.
By Their Own
Testimony
Most of the neo-cons now in government
have left a long paper trail giving clear evidence of their fervently
right-wing pro-Israel, and fervently anti-Palestinian, sentiments.
Whether being pro-Israel, even pro right-wing Israel, constitutes
having dual loyalties that is, a desire to further Israel's
interests that equals or exceeds the desire to further U.S. interests
is obviously not easy to determine, but the record gives
some clues.
Wolfowitz himself has been circumspect
in public, writing primarily about broader strategic issues rather
than about Israel specifically or even the Middle East, but it
is clear that at bottom Israel is a major interest and may be
the principal reason for his near obsession with the effort,
of which he is the primary spearhead, to dump Saddam Hussein,
remake the Iraqi government in an American image, and then further
redraw the Middle East map by accomplishing the same goals in
Syria, Iran, and perhaps other countries. Profiles of Wolfowitz
paint him as having two distinct aspects: one obessively bent
on advancing U.S. dominance throughout the world, ruthless and
uncompromising, seriously prepared to "end states,"
as he once put it, that support terrorism in any way, a velociraptor
in the words of one former colleague cited in the Economist;
the other a softer aspect, which shows him to be a soft-spoken
political moralist, an ardent democrat, even a bleeding heart
on social issues, and desirous for purely moral and humanitarian
reasons of modernizing and democratizing the Islamic world.
But his interest in Israel always crops
up. Even profiles that downplay his attachment to Israel nonetheless
always mention the influence the Holocaust, in which several
of his family perished, has had on his thinking. One source
inside the administration has described him frankly as "over-the-top
crazy when it comes to Israel." Although this probably
accurately describes most of the rest of the neo-con coterie,
and Wolfowitz is guilty at least by association, he is actually
more complex and nuanced than this. A recent New York Times
Magazine profile by the Times' Bill Keller cites critics
who say that "Israel exercises a powerful gravitational
pull on the man" and notes that as a teenager Wolfowitz
lived in Israel during his mathematician father's sabbatical
semester there. His sister is married to an Israeli. Keller
even somewhat reluctantly acknowledges the accuracy of one characterization
of Wolfowitz as "Israel-centric." But Keller goes
through considerable contortions to shun what he calls "the
offensive suggestion of dual loyalty" and in the process
makes one wonder if he is protesting too much. Keller concludes
that Wolfowitz is less animated by the security of Israel than
by the promise of a more moderate Islam. He cites as evidence
Wolfowitz's admiration for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for
making peace with Israel and also draws on a former Wolfowitz
subordinate who says that "as a moral man, he might have
found Israel the heart of the Middle East story. But as a policy
maker, Turkey and the gulf and Egypt didn't loom any less large
for him."
These remarks are revealing. Anyone
not so fearful of broaching the issue of dual loyalties might
at least have raised the suggestion that Wolfowitz's real concern
may indeed be to ensure Israel's security. Otherwise, why do
his overriding interests seem to be reinventing Anwar Sadats
throughout the Middle East by transforming the Arab and Muslim
worlds and thereby making life safer for Israel, and a passion
for fighting a pre-emptive war against Iraq when there
are critical areas totally apart from the Middle East and myriad
other broad strategic issues that any deputy secretary of defense
should be thinking about just as much? His current interest
in Turkey, which is shared by the other neo-cons, some of whom
have served as lobbyists for Turkey, seems also to be directed
at securing Israel's place in the region; there seems little
reason for particular interest in this moderate Islamic, non-Arab
country, other than that it is a moderate Islamic but non-Arab
neighbor of Israel.
Furthermore, the notion suggested by
the Wolfowitz subordinate that any moral man would obviously
look to Israel as the "heart of the Middle East story"
is itself an Israel-centered idea: the assumption that Israel
is a moral state, always pursuing moral policies, and that any
moral person would naturally attach himself to Israel automatically
presumes that there is an identity of interests between the United
States and Israel; only those who assume such a complete coincidence
of interests accept the notion that Israel is, across the board,
a moral state.
Others among the neo-con policymakers
have been more direct and open in expressing their pro-Israel
views. Douglas Feith has been the most prolific of the group,
with a two-decade-long record of policy papers, many co-authored
with Perle, propounding a strongly anti-Palestinian, pro-Likud
view. He views the Palestinians as not constituting a legitimate
national group, believes that the West Bank and Gaza belong to
Israel by right, and has long advocated that the U.S. abandon
any mediating effort altogether and particularly foreswear the
land-for-peace formula.
In 1996, Feith, Perle, and both David
and Meyrav Wurmser were among the authors of a policy paper issued
by an Israeli think tank and written for newly elected Israeli
Prime Minister Netanyahu that urged Israel to make a "clean
break" from pursuit of the peace process, particularly its
land-for-peace aspects, which the authors regarded as a prescription
for Israel's annihilation. Arabs must rather accept a "peace-for-peace"
formula through unconditional acceptance of Israel's rights,
including its territorial rights in the occupied territories.
The paper advocated that Israel "engage every possible
energy on rebuilding Zionism" by disengaging from economic
and political dependence on the U.S. while maintaining a more
"mature," self-reliant partnership with the U.S. not
focused "narrowly on territorial disputes." Greater
self-reliance would, these freelance policymakers told Netanyahu,
give Israel "greater freedom of action and remove a significant
lever of pressure [i.e., U.S. pressure] used against it in the
past."
The paper advocated, even as far back
as 1996, containment of the threat against Israel by working
closely with guess who? Turkey, as well as with Jordan,
apparently regarded as the only reliably moderate Arab regime.
Jordan had become attractive for these strategists because it
was at the time working with opposition elements in Iraq to reestablish
a Hashemite monarchy there that would have been allied by blood
lines and political leanings to the Hashemite throne in Jordan.
The paper's authors saw the principal threat to Israel coming,
we should not be surprised to discover now, from Iraq and Syria
and advised that focusing on the removal of Saddam Hussein would
kill two birds with one stone by also thwarting Syria's regional
ambitions. In what amounts to a prelude to the neo-cons' principal
policy thrust in the Bush administration, the paper spoke frankly
of Israel's interest in overturning the Iraqi leadership and
replacing it with a malleable monarchy. Referring to Saddam
Hussein's ouster as "an important Israeli strategic objective,"
the paper observed that "Iraq's future could affect the
strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly" meaning
give Israel unquestioned predominance in the region. The authors
urged therefore that Israel support the Hashemites in their "efforts
to redefine Iraq."
In a much longer policy document written
at about the same time for the same Israeli think tank, David
Wurmser repeatedly linked the U.S. and Israel when talking about
national interests in the Middle East. The "battle to dominate
and define Iraq," he wrote "is, by extension, the battle
to dominate the balance of power in the Levant over the long
run," and "the United States and Israel" can fight
this battle together. Repeated references to U.S. and Israeli
strategic policy, pitted against a "Saudi-Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-PLO
axis," and to strategic moves that establish a balance of
power in which the United States and Israel are ascendant, in
alliance with Turkey and Jordan, betray a thought process that
cannot separate U.S. from Israeli interests.
Perle gave further impetus to this thrust
when six years later, in September 2002, he gave a briefing for
Pentagon officials that included a slide depicting a recommended
strategic goal for the U.S. in the Middle East: all of Palestine
as Israel, Jordan as Palestine, and Iraq as the Hashemite kingdom.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seems to have taken this aboard,
since he spoke at about the same time of the West Bank and Gaza
as the "so-called occupied territories" effectively
turning all of Palestine into Israel.
Elliott Abrams is another unabashed supporter
of the Israeli right, now bringing his links with Israel into
the service of U.S. policymaking on Palestinian-Israeli issues.
The neo-con community is crowing about Abrams' appointment as
Middle East director on the NSC staff (where this Iran-contra
criminal has already been working since mid-2001, badly miscast
as the director for, of all things, democracy and human rights).
The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes has hailed his
appointment as a decisive move that neatly cocks a snook at the
pro-Palestinian wimps at the State Department. Accurately characterizing
Abrams as "more pro-Israel, less solicitous of Palestinians"
than the State Department and strongly opposed to the Palestinian-Israeli
peace process, Barnes gloats that the Abrams triumph signals
that the White House will not cede control of Middle East policy
to Colin Powell and the "foreign service bureaucrats."
Abrams comes to the post after a year in which it had effectively
been left vacant. His predecessor, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been
serving concurrently as Bush's personal representative to Afghanistan
since the fall of the Taliban and has devoted little time to
the NSC job, but several attempts to appoint a successor early
this year were vetoed by neo-con hawks who felt the appointees
were not devoted enough to Israel.
Although Abrams has no particular Middle
East expertise, he has managed to insert himself in the Middle
East debate repeatedly over the years. He has a family interest
in propounding a pro-Israel view; he is the son-in-law of Norman
Podhoretz, one of the original neo-cons and a long-time strident
supporter of right-wing Israeli causes as editor of Commentary
magazine, and Midge Decter, a frequent right-wing commentator.
Abrams has written a good deal on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
opposing U.S. mediation and any effort to press for Israeli concessions.
In an article published in advance of the 2000 elections, he
propounded a rationale for a U.S. missile defense system, and
a foreign policy agenda in general, geared almost entirely toward
ensuring Israel's security. "It is a simple fact,"
he wrote, that the possession of missiles and weapons of mass
destruction by Iraq and Iran vastly increases Israel's vulnerability,
and this threat would be greatly diminished if the U.S. provided
a missile shield and brought about the demise of Saddam Hussein.
He concluded with a wholehearted assertion of the identity of
U.S. and Israeli interests: "The next decade will present
enormous opportunities to advance American interests in the Middle
East [by] boldly asserting our support of our friends"
that is, of course, Israel. Many of the fundamental negotiating
issues critical to Israel, he said, are also critical to U.S.
policy in the region and "require the United States to defend
its interests and allies" rather than giving in to Palestinian
demands.
Neo-cons in
the Henhouse
The neo-con strategy papers half a dozen
years ago were dotted with concepts like "redefining Iraq,"
"redrawing the map of the Middle East," "nurturing
alternatives to Arafat," all of which have in recent months
become familiar parts of the Bush administration's diplomatic
lingo. Objectives laid out in these papers as important strategic
goals for Israel including the ouster of Saddam Hussein,
the strategic transformation of the entire Middle East, the death
of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, regime change wherever
the U.S. and Israel don't happen to like the existing government,
the abandonment of any effort to forge a comprehensive Arab-Israeli
peace or even a narrower Palestinian-Israeli peace have
now become, under the guidance of this group of pro-Israel neo-cons,
important strategic goals for the United States. The enthusiasm
with which senior administration officials like Bush himself,
Cheney, and Rumsfeld have adopted strategic themes originally
defined for Israel's guidance and did so in many cases well
before September 11 and the so-called war on terror testifies
to the persuasiveness of a neo-con philosophy focused narrowly
on Israel and the pervasiveness of the network throughout policymaking
councils.
Does all this add up to dual loyalties
to Israel and the United States? Many would still contend indignantly
that it does not, and that it is anti-Semitic to suggest such
a thing. In fact, zealous advocacy of Israel's causes may be
just that zealotry, an emotional connection to Israel that
still leaves room for primary loyalty to the United States
and affection for Israel is not in any case a sentiment limited
to Jews. But passion and emotion and, as George Washington
wisely advised, a passionate attachment to any country
have no place in foreign policy formulation, and it is mere hair-splitting
to suggest that a passionate attachment to another country is
not loyalty to that country. Zealotry clouds judgment, and emotion
should never be the basis for policymaking.
Zealotry can lead to extreme actions
to sustain policies, as is apparently occurring in the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith
Defense Department. People knowledgeable of the intelligence
community have said, according to a recent article in The
American Prospect, that the CIA is under tremendous pressure
to produce intelligence more supportive of war with Iraq
as one former CIA official put it, "to support policies
that have already been adopted." Key Defense Department
officials, including Feith, are said to be attempting to make
the case for pre-emptive war by producing their own unverified
intelligence. Wolfowitz betrayed his lack of concern for real
evidence when, in answer to a recent question about where the
evidence is for Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction,
he replied, "It's like the judge said about pornography.
I can't define it, but I will know it when I see it."
Zealotry can also lead to a myopic focus
on the wrong issues in a conflict or crisis, as is occurring
among all Bush policymakers with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. The administration's obsessive focus on deposing Yasir
Arafat, a policy suggested by the neo-cons years before Bush
came to office, is a dodge and a diversion that merely perpetuates
the conflict by failing to address its real roots. Advocates
of this policy fail or refuse to see that, however unappealing
the Palestinian leadership, it is not the cause of the conflict,
and "regime change" among the Palestinians will do
nothing to end the violence. The administration's utter refusal
to engage in any mediation process that might produce a stable,
equitable peace, also a neo-con strategy based on the paranoid
belief that any peace involving territorial compromise will spell
the annihilation of Israel, will also merely prolong the violence.
Zealotry produces blindness: the zealous effort to pursue Israel's
right-wing agenda has blinded the dual loyalists in the administration
to the true face of Israel as occupier, to any concern for justice
or equity and any consideration that interests other than Israel's
are involved, and indeed to any pragmatic consideration that
continued unquestioning accommodation of Israel, far from bringing
an end to violence, will actually lead to its tragic escalation
and to increased terrorism against both the United States and
Israel.
What does it matter, in the end, if these
men split their loyalties between the United States and Israel?
Apart from the evidence of the policy distortions that arise
from zealotry, one need only ask whether it can be mere coincidence
that those in the Bush administration who most strongly promote
"regime change" in Iraq are also those who most strongly
support the policies of the Israeli right wing. And would it
bother most Americans to know that the United States is planning
a war against Iraq for the benefit of Israel? Can it be mere
coincidence, for example, that Vice President Cheney, now the
leading senior-level proponent of war with Iraq, repudiated just
this option for all the right reasons in the immediate aftermath
of the Gulf War in 1991? He was defense secretary at the time,
and in an interview with the New York Times on April 13,
1991, he said:
"If you're going to go in and try
to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've
got Baghdad, it's not clear what you will do with it. It's not
clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one
that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime,
a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward
the Ba'athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists.
How much credibility is that government going to have if it's
set up by the United States military when it's there? How long
does the United States military have to stay to protect the people
that sign on for the government, and what happens to it once
we leave?"
Since Cheney clearly changed his mind
between 1991 and today, is it not legitimate to ask why, and
whether Israel might have a greater influence over U.S. foreign
policy now than it had in 1991? After all, notwithstanding his
wisdom in rejecting an expansion of the war on Iraq a decade
ago, Cheney was just as interested in promoting U.S. imperialism
and was at that same moment in the early 1990s outlining a plan
for world domination by the United States, one that did not include
conquering Iraq at any point along the way. The only new ingredient
in the mix today that is inducing Cheney to begin the march to
U.S. world domination by conquering Iraq is the presence in the
Bush-Cheney administration of a bevy of aggressive right-wing
neo-con hawks who have long backed the Jewish fundamentalists
of Israel's own right wing and who have been advocating some
move on Iraq for at least the last half dozen years?
The suggestion that the war with Iraq
is being planned at Israel's behest, or at the instigation of
policymakers whose main motivation is trying to create a secure
environment for Israel, is strong. Many Israeli analysts believe
this. The Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar recently observed
frankly in a Ha'aretz column that Perle, Feith, and their
fellow strategists "are walking a fine line between their
loyalty to American governments and Israeli interests."
The suggestion of dual loyalties is not a verboten subject in
the Israeli press, as it is in the United States. Peace activist
Uri Avnery, who knows Israeli Prime Minister Sharon well, has
written that Sharon has long planned grandiose schemes for restructuring
the Middle East and that "the winds blowing now in Washington
remind me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies
got their ideas from him . But the style is the same."
The dual loyalists in the Bush administration
have given added impetus to the growth of a messianic strain
of Christian fundamentalism that has allied itself with Israel
in preparation for the so-called End of Days. These crazed fundamentalists
see Israel's domination over all of Palestine as a necessary
step toward fulfillment of the biblical Millennium, consider
any Israeli relinquishment of territory in Palestine as a sacrilege,
and view warfare between Jews and Arabs as a divinely ordained
prelude to Armageddon. These right-wing Christian extremists
have a profound influence on Bush and his administration, with
the result that the Jewish fundamentalists working for the perpetuation
of Israel's domination in Palestine and the Christian fundamentalists
working for the Millennium strengthen and reinforce each other's
policies in administration councils. The Armageddon that Christian
Zionists seem to be actively promoting and that Israeli loyalists
inside the administration have tactically allied themselves with
raises the horrifying but very real prospect of an apocalyptic
Christian-Islamic war. The neo-cons seem unconcerned, and Bush's
occasional pro forma remonstrations against blaming all Islam
for the sins of Islamic extremists do nothing to make this prospect
less likely.
These two strains of Jewish and Christian
fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial
project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced
by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs
and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil.
All of these factors the dual loyalties of an extensive
network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of
a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil
probably factor in more or less equally to the administration's
calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war
with Iraq. But the most critical factor directing U.S. policymaking
is the group of Israeli loyalists: neither Christian fundamentalist
support for Israel nor oil calculations would carry the weight
in administration councils that they do without the pivotal input
of those loyalists, who clearly know how to play to the Christian
fanatics and undoubtedly also know that their own and Israel's
bread is buttered by the oil interests of people like Bush and
Cheney. This is where loyalty to Israel by government officials
colors and influences U.S. policymaking in ways that are extremely
dangerous.
Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with
the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle
East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning
in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer,
dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her
book, "Perceptions
of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy,"
was published by the University of California Press and reissued
in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The
Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story,"
was published in March 2002.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit. They can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
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December 1,
2002
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal
Gabriel Kolko
Another
Century of War?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies: The Attack on the Liberty Revisited
Steve Perry
Spank
the Democrats
M. Shahid
Alam
A Predatory
Orientalism
Kurt Nimmo
The Murder
of Iain Hook
Ali Abunimah
Death
& Lies in Palestine
Anthony Gancarski
The
Return of Al Gore?
Joanne Mariner
In Defense
of the Filibuster
Ahmad Faruqui
The Apocalyptic
Vision of the Neo----Con Ideologues
Dave Marsh
Eminem's
Body & Soul
David Vest
On the Lam
from Uncle Sam
Julian Samuel
Bowling
for Columbine
Adam Engel
Piss Off,
NSA!
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Grassroots
Challenge to Iran's Theocracy
Wayne Saunders
This
Mad, Limitless War
Dan Brook
Celebrate
Genocide!
Uri Avnery
"Likud
Has Failed"
Philip Farruggio
Turkeys
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