Touching the third rail
By
Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
04/25/06 "UPI" -- -- WASHINGTON -- A quarter of a million people
marched in Manhattan. One hundred thousand squeezed into Madison
Square Garden, many of them in uniform. Over 100,000 telegrams
deluged the White House. All demanded the immediate recognition
of the about-to-be-born new state of Israel. Most of President
Truman's cabinet was against it. The most formidable naysayer
was then secretary of state Gen. George Marshall.
Following World War II, foreign policy professionals wrote
scores of position papers that warned that an independent Jewish
state would trigger a "reject phenomenon" throughout the Middle
East. David K. Niles, in charge of Jewish affairs at the White
House, was a persuasive advocate of, and organizer for, Israel.
The Holocaust of 6 million Jews, the telegrams and the marchers
in New York clinched it for Truman.
Israel was born at midnight (local time) May 14, 1948. US
recognition followed 11 minutes later. A geopolitical honeymoon
lasted until 1956 when Israel, France and Britain secretly
joined forces, without informing president Eisenhower, to invade
Egypt to wrest back control of the Suez Canal nationalized by
president Nasser, then a budding Soviet protégé.
The Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev seized the moment to invade
Hungary to suppress an anti-Communist revolution, and then
rattled his rockets at Eisenhower over Suez. Eisenhower, angry
and indignant at allied perfidy, and anxious to avoid a wider
conflict, told the three conspiring powers to clear out of Egypt
pronto.
The special US-Israel relationship encountered another major
hiccup during the 1967 Six-Day War when friend and foe alike
whistled with admiration after Israel decimated three Arab
armies in less than a week. Israeli warplanes repeatedly
attacked the USS Liberty, a ship intercepting tactical and
strategic communications from both sides, flying the US flag on
a clear day, 15 miles off the Sinai coast, killing 34 sailors,
wounding 171.
Since then Israeli and US interests have gradually merged, a
perception carefully nurtured by AIPAC, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, arguably Washington's most powerful
lobby, or at least co-equal in influence with the NRA (National
Rifle Association) and AARP (American Association of Retired
Persons).
With some 200 employees and 100,000 wealthy benefactors, AIPAC
claims that it doesn't have to register as a foreign agent
because all its funding comes from US sources. There are also
over 500,000 Israelis with dual citizenship, a number of them
AIPAC contributors.
Over the years, AIPAC has maneuvered to make Israel the third
rail of American foreign policy. The handful of Congressmen who
have been critical of Israel over the past 40 years have been
publicly chastised with a figurative dunce cap, or, worse, lost
their seats to AIPAC-backed opponents. Israel is an integral
part of America's body politic.
Yet the recent publication of "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign
Policy", an 83-page paper published on Harvard's Website by two
prominent academics, ran into a firestorm of vilification from
government, academia and the media for documenting what is
already well established.
The co-authors are neither neo-Nazi skinheads nor anti-Semites.
John J. Mearsheimer is a political science professor and
co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at
the University of Chicago. Stephen M. Walt is academic Dean and
a chaired professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Both are members of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign
Policy. Some of their conclusions about the Israel lobby's
goals:
- "No lobby has managed to divert foreign policy as far from
what the American national interest would otherwise suggest,
while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli
interests are essentially identical."
- American supporters of Israel promoted the war against Iraq.
The senior administration officials who spearheaded the campaign
were also in the vanguard of the pro-Israel lobby, e.g. then
deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Elliott Abrams, director of
Mideast affairs at the White House; David Wurmser, Mideast
affairs advisor to Vice-President Cheney; Richard Perle, first
among neocon equals, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an
influential advisory body of strategic experts.
- A similar effort is now underway to bomb Iran's nuclear
facilities.
- AIPAC is fighting registering as foreign agents because this
would place severe limitations on its Congressional activities,
particularly in the legislative electoral arena. American
politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions
and other forms of political pressure and major media outlets
are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it
does.
- The co-authors recall it was Perle, Feith and Wurmser who put
their names to a 1996 policy blueprint for the then incoming
Netanyahu government in Israel. Titled "A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm [Israel]", the three neocons
said that the rebuilding of Zionism must abandon any thought of
trading land for peace with the Palestinians (i.e., repeal the
Oslo accords). Next, Saddam Hussein must be overthrown and
democracy established in Iraq, which would then prove contagious
in Israel's other Arab neighbors.
- When NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" asked Perle about
his geopolitical laundry list for Israel's benefit, he replied,
"What's wrong with that?"
- For all this to succeed, the neocon strategic thinkers wrote,
"Israel would have to win broad American support." And to ensure
this support, they advised the Israeli prime minister to use
"language familiar to Americans by tapping into themes of past
US administrations during the Cold War, which apply as well to
Israel".
- An Israeli columnist in Ha'aretz said that Perle and Feith had
been "walking a fine line" between "their loyalty to American
governments" and "Israeli interests".
Clearly, the FBI did not understand the role and power of AIPAC
when it launched an investigation into espionage on behalf of
Israel. The accused was Larry Franklin, an Iranian expert in
Feith's 1,600-strong Pentagon shop.
Classified Pentagon documents on Iran had been shared with
senior AIPAC officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. An
Israeli diplomat was the ultimate recipient. When Franklin was
arrested, the Israeli was promptly recalled. AIPAC fired its two
senior officials who then were also indicted on charges of
receiving and transmitting classified defense information in
violation, not of the Espionage Act, but an obscure World War
I-era statute.
Franklin was sentenced to a prison term of almost 13 years - but
allowed to remain free with a promise of a much-reduced sentence
if he helped the prosecution of Rosen-Weissman. But Rosen, as
AIPAC's brilliant director of foreign policy issues, has a
global Rolodex of 6,000 influential friends. For the past 23
years, he has been the architect of numberless Congressional
initiatives to meet Israel's strategic and funding needs.
US District Judge T.S. Ellis III and prosecutors were running in
to an invisible buzzsaw of pressure for a dismissal motion.
Ellis authorized defense subpoenas for calling Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas
Burns, two ranking officials that Rosen claims also shared
classified information. Ellis then postponed the trial from May
17 to early August - when most chattering class cognoscente will
be on vacation and a motion to dismiss will hardly be noticed.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large at United Press
International
Copyright: UPI
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