Israeli-Palestinian Peace – What’s Iraq got to do with it?

South Bay JVP –Feb. 27, 2003

The connections between the Bush administration’s drive to war with Iraq and its failure to promote Palestinian-Israeli peace are linked by the administration’s foreign and military policy, the domestic social base for that policy, and the convergence of the world views of the US and Israeli governments. Since the 1980s an Israel-centered view of the Middle Easthas become so entrenched in Washingtonand the mass media that it is now politically impossible for an American president – to say nothing of Congress – to effectively oppose Israeli policy, whether Labor or Likud is in power. In the 1990s, during the administrations of President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak, key members of the Bush II administration national security apparatus were installed in think tanks with links to the Israeli right wing: JINSA, CSP, PNAC, Hudson Institute, AEI. There they elaborated what has become our country’s radical new national security doctrine. Now that the Likud is back in power in Israel, its approach to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians has meshed with the foreign and military policy outlook of the Bush administration. Following the September 11 attacks on the WorldTradeCenter and the Pentagon a shared discourse on terrorism proliferated in both the US and Israel. The Bush administration accepted Israel’s definition of the second Palestinian intifada as consisting entirely of premeditated acts of terror inspired by Yasir Arafat. Under the guise of combating terror Israel has, with no significant criticism from the US, expanded its settlement activities in the West Bank, making a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict even more difficult.

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The Israel lobby became a significant force in shaping public opinion and US Middle East policy after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Its power was simultaneously enabled and enhanced by Israel’s emergence as a regional surrogate for US military power in the Middle East in the terms outlined by the 1969 Nixon Doctrine. In the 1970s the lobby was already able to unseat representatives and senators who could not be counted on to support Israel without qualification. (Senator Percy in Illinois, Rep. Findley in Ohio, Rep. Pete McCloskey in Bay Area_

The establishment of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in 1985 greatly expanded the lobby’s influence. WINEP’s founding director,Martin Indyk, had previously been research director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which focused much of its efforts on Congress. Indyk developed WINEP into a highly effective think tank devoted to maintaining and strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance targeting the media and the executive branch.

On the eve of the 1988 presidential elections, as the first Palestinian intifada was underway, WINEP made its bid to become a major player in U.S. Middle East policy discussions by issuing a report entitled Building for Peace: An American Strategy for the Middle East. The report urged the incoming administration to “resist pressures for a procedural breakthrough [on Palestinian-Israeli peace issues] until conditions have ripened.”[1] Six members of the study group responsible for the report joined the Bush I administration, which adopted this stalemate recipe not to change until change was unavoidable. Hence, it acceded to Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization despite the PLO’s recognition of Israel at the November 1988 session of the Palestine National Council.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush I administration felt obliged to offer a reward to its Arab wartime allies by making an effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. It convened a one-day international conference at Madrid in October followed by eleven sessions of bilateral Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Washington. These talks were fruitless, in part because Israel still refused to negotiate with Palestinians who were official representatives of the PLO. Then, as now, Israel preferred to choose the Palestinians with whom it would negotiate.

When Israel became serious about attempting to reach an agreement with the Palestinians it circumvented the U.S.-sponsored negotiations in Washington and spoke directly to representatives of the PLO in Oslo. The result was the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles. Thus, the adoption of WINEP’s policy recommendation to “resist pressures for a procedural breakthrough” by both the Bush I and Clinton administrations delayed the start of meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, contributed to the demonization of the PLO, and multiplied the casualty rate of the first Palestinian intifada.

Despite what might reasonably be judged as a major policy failure, WINEP’s influence grew, especially in the mass media. Its associates, especially deputy director Patrick Clawson, director for policy and planning Robert Satloff, and senior fellow Michael Eisenstadt, appear frequently on television and radio talk shows as commentators on Middle East issues. Its board of advisors includes Mortimer Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, and Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic.

Well before most Americans took note of radical Islam as a potential threat to their security, WINEP and its associates were promoting the notion that Israel is a reliable U.S. ally against radical Islam. After Israel expelled over 400 alleged Palestinian Islamic activists from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in December 1992, Israeli television Middle East analyst and WINEP associate Ehud Yaari wrote an op-ed in the New York Times summarizing his Hebrew television report of a vast U.S.-based conspiracy to fund Hamas.[2] WINEP’s 1992 annual Soref symposium - “Islam and the U.S.: Challenges for the Nineties” – focused on whether or not Islam was a danger to the United States. At that event Martin Indyk argued that the United States ought not to encourage democracy in countries that were friendly to Washington, like Jordan and Egypt, and that political participation should be limited to secular parties.[3] This is a policy Indyk would never dream of proposing such a policy for Israel,where ultra-nationalist religious parties are a regular and often decisive feature of the political arena. Moreover this seems like a formula for ensuring that Islamic forces would forsake the political arena and engage in armed struggle. And, to the extent that the U.S. was identified with this policy, it might be targeted as well. This is, in fact, what happened in Egypt from 1992 to 1997.

The Clinton administration was even more thoroughly colonized by WINEP associates than its predecessor. Eleven signatories of the final report of WINEP’s 1992 commission on U.S.–Israeli relations, Enduring Partnership, joined the Clinton administration. Among them were NationalSecurityAdvisorAnthonyLake, UN Ambassador and later Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart Eizenstat, and Secretary of Defense, the late Les Aspin.

Shortly after assuming office in 1993, the Clinton administration announced a policy of “dual containment” aimed at isolating Iran and Iraq. The principal formulator and spokesperson for that policy was Martin Indyk in his new role as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.[4] As Indyk was raised and educated in Australia, he had to be quickly naturalized as an American citizen in order to join the Clinton administration. After his stint on the National Security Council, Indyk subsequently served as U.S. ambassador to Israel, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and then a second tour as ambassador to Israel. In all these positions Indyk was a significant player in Clinton administration policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations misleadingly known as the Oslo “peace process.”

Another WINEP affiliate with major responsibility for Palestinian-Israeli issues in the Clinton administration was Dennis Ross. Ross had been a key aide to Secretary of State James Baker in formulating Middle East policy during the Bush I administration and then became President Clinton’s special coordinator for the “peace process.” After retiring from government service, Ross assumed the directorship of WINEP.

As in the Bush II administration, more sophisticated voices in the Clinton administration repeatedly stated that “Islam is not the enemy.” However the “dual containment” policy of the Clinton administration and its overall Middle East policy record - the most pro-Israel of any U.S. administration to date since 1948 - were the forerunners of President Bush II’s “axis of evil” policy. Nonetheless, WINEP has not been as prominent a presence in the Bush II administration as it was in the previous two.

It has been replaced by individuals linked to more monolithically neo-conservative and hawkish think tanks like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), which are very closely linked and the Project for a New American Century.[5] Before they entered the Bush II administration, JINSA’s board of advisors included Vice President Dick Cheney, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Twenty-two CSP associates secured positions in the Bush II national security apparatus. PNAC affiliates include Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, special envoy to the Middle East Zalmay Khalizad, Colin Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage, and Eliot Abrams, a rehabilitated Iran-Contra criminal who now serves as National Security advisor for the Middle East.

Richard Perle who is ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute, is a member of the JINSA board as well as the WINEP advisory board. He now chairs the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Department of Defense and reports to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz sat on the WINEP advisory board with Perle until he joined the Bush administration. Perle and Wolfowitz have been the loudest and most persistent proponents of a war with Iraq within the Bush administration.

As early as July 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and special assistant to John Bolton, David Wurmser, sought to make common cause with Israel’s Likud for a war against Iraq. They, along with Paul Wolfowitz,concluded that the Bush I administration erred in failing to remove Saddam Hussein from power after the first Gulf War. On July 8, 1996,Perle presented a position paper prepared in consultation with Feith, Bolton, Wurmser, and others to newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The paper,written under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies based in Washington, DC and Jerusalem and entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, advocates: repudiation of the Oslo accords and permanent annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Even more provocatively, it urges Israel to support Jordan in advocating restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraqand elimination of the regime of Saddam Hussein - “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.”[6]

Two days after receiving a copy of the Clean Breakpaper, Netanyahu delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress embracing several of its propositions. The Wall Street Journal published excerpts from the paper the same day and editorially endorsed it on July 11.

Soon after the September 11 attacks, the Defense Policy Board, chaired by Richard Perle, convened a two-day seminar. The consensus of those attending was that removing Saddam Hussein from power should be an objective in the U.S. war on terrorism despite the lack of any evidence linking Iraq to the attacks or to al-Qa’ida. The Defense Policy Board then sent former CIA director and JINSA board member James Woolsey to London to gather evidence linking Iraq to the terrorist attacks. He announced that Muhammad Atta, the alleged ring leader of the September 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmad al-Ani in Prague. That claim has been repeatedly discredited, most recently by Czech president Vaclav Havel.[7]

On September 20 Perle and several other Defense Policy Board members sent an open letter to President Bush. "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [September 11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," they wrote. "Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."[8]

Perle presided over the July 10, 2002 briefing of the Defense Policy Board at which RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec argued that Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the United States, "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East.[9] This opinion ignores the historically close relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the enormous profits of U.S. corporations from oil and commercial exports to Saudi Arabia. It highlights the particular way that Usama Bin Laden and his followers appropriated the Wahhabi Islamic doctrine, which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. Although the Bush administration repudiated his views, the hawkish pro-Israel, neoconservative media echoed Murawiec’s arguments shortly after the briefing.[10]

Murawiec’s opinions are taken seriously by members of Vice President Cheney’s staff and the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. They are especially attracted by his argument that regime change in Iraq is the key to altering Saudi behavior. “The road to the entire Middle East goes through Baghdad,” said one anonymous administration official, who favored a war on Iraq. “Once you have a democratic regime in Iraq, like the ones we helped establish in Germany and Japan after World War II, there are a lot of possibilities.”[11] It is probably not accidental that Murawiec’s briefing was held and its contents leaked as the Bush II administration began seriously beating the drums for a war on Iraq.

Another source of pressure for a war on Iraq coming from neo-conservatives closely linked to the Israeli right wing is the Project for a New American Century – A neo-conservative think tank established in 1997 and chaired by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard – the most influential neo-conservative publication of its sort. On January 26 1998 PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton urging that he launch a war against Iraq. The signers included Kristol, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalizad and Richard Armitage. This is a familiar cast of characters linked to JINSA, WINEP and other neo-conservative thing tanks. Unhappy that President Clinton did not take their advice, the same group repeated their proposals in letters to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott on May 29, 1998. The result of efforts by PNAC and others was the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act of November 1998. This legislation announced that disarming Iraq was no longer US policy. Rather, it was to be regime change. This legislation was adopted weeks before the United States ordered the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq and launched Operation Desert Fox – four days of intensive bombing. The absence of UN supervised weapons inspections between December 1998 and December 2002 is entirely due to Anglo-American policy. Thus, there is a strong element of continuity between the policies of the late Clinton administration and the Bush II administration.

Let me be clear that I am not suggesting that Israel or its supporters in the Bush II administration have somehow hijacked US Middle East policy to promote a war with Iraq. Many of those involved in promoting an attack on Iraq are not Jewish – most prominently Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The link between Israel and the Bush II administration is based on interests and ideology, not ethnicity.

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The underlying foreign and military strategy of the Bush administration is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority. That strategy waselaborated and advocated throughout the 1990s by a group of policy intellectuals in the administration including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condoleeza Rice, and Douglas Feith. Colin Powell, who is usually cast as the moderate in contrast to thesehard liners, shares their basic objective. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell declared in 1992 that the US requires sufficient power “to deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.”

Despite the campaign rhetoric of adopting a more humble foreign policy, the advisors and associates of both the president and the vice-president were committed to this grand strategy well before the Supreme Court installed the Bush II administration in office. Early in the campaign,George W’s tutor in foreign affairs, Condoleeza Rice, elaborated the foreign policy vision of a Republican administration in an article in Foreign Affairs.[12] Its underlying convictionis that “the United States and its allies are on the right side of history.” She argues against multilateralism and asserts that America is unique among nations because “America’s pursuit of the national interest will create conditions that promote freedom, markets, and peace.” This is because “American values are universal.” “Iraq is the prototype” of states not on board with this program. Therefore, “the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can to remove [Saddam Husayn].”