Riskiest manifestation of the "neoconservative revolution": the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq

The Forward Newspaper Online: The Neoconservative Persuasion: "By Gal Beckerman | January 6, 2006

Acknowledging the Jewishness of neoconservatism has always triggered the red, flashing lights of antisemitism, especially since the start of the Iraq War (with extra points if it's Pat Buchanan doing the acknowledging). But there is some truth to the suspicion. If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren. Understanding what might be Jewish about this movement (or "persuasion" as its godfather, Irving Kristol, prefers it be called) should be possible without being accused of conspiracy theorizing about secret cabals pulling strings for Israel.
...

Strangely absent from Friedman's books is any discussion of the latest and certainly riskiest manifestation of the "neoconservative revolution": the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq. It's a strange oversight for a book published two years after the start of the war. Friedman wouldn't have needed even to introduce new characters. Among the war's most passionate supporters, after all, were Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol (son of Irving).

The omission is glaring. Not just because Iraq is the next chapter in the neoconservative story, but because it is in Iraq that neoconservatism will be either vindicated or buried forever. Maybe even more than Reagan's Cold War policies, the Iraq War was the most dramatic embodiment of two key Podhoretz tenets, the "aggressive" side that would keep America on the initiative, and the "idealistic" that dreams of making theworld safer by remaking it in our image. For neoconservatives, the 9/11 attacks signaled

the start of a new global war against an ideology as morally corrupt and potentially as apocalyptically destructive as Nazism and communism. Podhoretz famously dubbed it World War IV, the Cold War having been World World III. (It was 1939 again.) The threat had to be confronted head on. And this time the present danger had no one obvious home, other than where the peripatetic Osama bin Laden parked himself. Accordingly, a dramatic, history-altering gesture was necessary to reshape the entire Middle East. The intransigent Iraqi dictator appeared to be the perfect target and Iraq the perfect first domino that, once tipped, would remodel the region.
Afterward, however, with no weapons of mass destruction and no Iraqi connection to 9/11 in evidence, the more idealistic motives of the neoconservatives took center stage. Describing an "evil" that he named "Islamic Radicalism," "militant Jihadism" or, most expressively, "Islamo-fascism," President Bush spent almost the entirety of an October 2005 speech drawing connections between Nazism, communism and this new totalitarianism. Proclaiming that "our enemy is utterly committed," Bush said that "the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply." ...

Security adviser [Stephen Hadley] named as source in CIA scandal

Security adviser named as source in CIA scandal - Sunday Times - Times Online: "November 20, 2005

THE mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.

Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon out of office, has refused publicly to divulge the name of his informant without permission, which has thus far been withheld.
...
Two years ago, when Plame’s identity was first revealed, Hadley was Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the NSC. He is also thought to have been a key source for two books by Woodward on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. ...

Dual Disloyalty: Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq .... He pushed hard for both. Others are paying the price in blood.

The Village Voice: The Bush Beat: "Morning Report 8/19/05
Dual Disloyalty: Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq

He pushed hard for both. Others are paying the price in blood.

However, in all the stories about places like Kfar Darom, as in the recounting of the current misery in Baghdead, one reactionary gets little notice. No one is mentioning Doug Feith, who has been mostly successful in hiding his true colors as a right-wing Zionist while carrying out his fanatical wing's aims in Iraq.

The erstwhile Pentagon official is a key player in not only the disastrous occupation of Iraq but in trying to make sure Israel clung to the disastrous occupation of Gaza.

Feith is such a radical that he won't even refer to the West Bank as the West Bank — he uses the biblical names Judea and Samaria. And he doesn't even like to say "occupied territories," even though they are. In fact, our own government officially refers to them as "occupied" and freely uses the term "West Bank." Just look at the CIA map of Israel above, and you'll see that Gaza and the West Bank are separate from Israel, and each carries an asterisk.

But there's no asterisk attached to Feith's version of Israel. The son of a founder of Likud, he has pursued a radical Zionist policy at the expense of Israel's own Jews, a majority of whom don't favor the settlers.

His behavior as a Pentagon official toward the Arabs in Iraq is one of the shameful legacies of our unjustified invasion. We know quite a lot — although not enough — about Feith's role in propelling the U.S. into war and beyond. As one of the most prominent neocons, he hammered away at the need for regime change. And of course, he was one of the key Pentagon officials who didn't plan for the aftermath. He was in charge, however, of figuring out how to handle our Arab prisoners.

Bad idea. He's almost as anti-Arab as the fanatical anti-Semites over in the Arab camp are anti-Jewish.

Does Feith have divided loyalties? That's a common allegation leveled against those neocons and others who seem to put Israel's interests before those of the United States. It's clear, though, that Feith doesn't. His loyalty belongs to Israel and to its extremist politicians like Bibi Netanyahu, for whom he was an adviser.

Maybe the details of Feith's loyalties will emerge in the unfolding of the AIPAC spy scandal. One of Feith's direct subordinates, Larry Franklin, has already been charged with leaking U.S. secrets to Israel, and two major AIPAC officials (fired only after the scandal broke) have also been indicted. ...

The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War .... Cheney stacked asministration with hardline neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience

The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War: "By Michael Lind | 04/07/03 'New Statesman (UK)' -- --

America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.
...
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.

The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con 'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.

The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'

The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government. ...
...
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.

The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. ...

What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?'

The Washington Note Archives: "From 'Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?', Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 31 October 2005
...
Scowcroft on Iraq and Neocon Idealism

A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President."
...
Scowcroft on Iraq & Israel

"The obsession of the region . . . is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Scowcroft wrote in the Journal. "If we were seen to be turning our back on that bitter conflict -- which the region, rightly or wrongly, perceives to be clearly within our power to resolve -- in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us." Scowcroft went on to say that the United States was capable of defeating Saddam's military. "But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive -- with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy -- and could as well be bloody. In fact, Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses."
...
Scowcroft on Cheney: "The Real Anomaly"

"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." He went on, "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.'" Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism.
...
The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council.

Scowcroft found her bright -- "brighter than I was" -- and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. "She said, 'How could you do this to us?'" a Scowcroft friend recalled. "What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say."
...
Yet the two do not see each other much anymore. According to friends of Scowcroft, Rice has asked him to call her to set up a dinner, but he has not, apparently, pursued the invitation. The last time the two had dinner, nearly two years ago, it ended unhappily, Scowcroft acknowledged.

"We were having dinner just when Sharon said he was going to pull out of Gaza," at the end of 2003. "She said, 'At least there's some good news,' and I said, 'That's terrible news.' She said, 'What do you mean?' And I said that for Sharon this is not the first move, this is the last move. He's getting out of Gaza because he can't sustain eight thousand settlers with half his Army protecting them. Then, when he's out, he will have an Israel that he can control and a Palestinian state atomized enough that it can’t be a problem." Scowcroft added, "We had a terrible fight on that."

They also argued about Iraq. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, "But we've had fifty years of peace."
...
Scowcroft said of Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic. He is a tough-minded idealist, but where he is truly an idealist is that he brushes away questions, says, 'It won't happen,' whereas I would say, 'It's likely to happen and therefore you can't take the chance.' Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts."

Wolfowitz, for his part, said to me, "It's absurdly unrealistic, demonstrably unrealistic, to ignore how strong the desire for freedom is." Scowcroft said that he is equally concerned about Wolfowitz's unwillingness to contemplate bad outcomes and Kagan's willingness to embrace them on principle. "What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," he said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."

He added, "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature."
...

Powell's Chief of Staff: Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus

FT.com / World / US - Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy: "Published: October 20 2005 00:00 | Last updated: October 20 2005 00:19

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

“Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.” ...

Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved?- Italians name Michael Ledeen as conduit ... former CIA officers Clarridge and Wowlf were the principal forgers?

Niger Uranium Forgery Mystery Solved?- by Justin Raimondo: "October 19, 2005 | The Fitzgerald/Plame investigation goes in a new direction

Amid all the brouhaha over whether I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, or any number of Bush administration insiders had a hand in leaking the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, the essential crime at the core of the investigation – and its probable starting point – often gets lost in the shuffle. ...
...
In early October 2002, Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, a writer for Italy's Panorama magazine, delivered some documents to the U.S. embassy in Rome: a cache of letters and other papers purporting to be correspondence between officials of the Niger government and the Iraqis relating to the acquisition of uranium "yellowcake." The documents soon found their way to Washington, D.C., where key administration officials were quick to incorporate them into their "talking points" for war with Iraq – and into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 speech.

When the IAEA asked to see evidence of the administration's contentions, they were put off, until finally the Niger uranium documents were handed over. It took IAEA scientists just a few hours to demonstrate that the documents were not only forgeries, but were particularly crude ones at that – an amateur could have debunked them using Google. As the Washington Post reported, one administration official's response was "We fell for it."
...
Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report:...

"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."
...
I am hardly the first to implicate Ledeen in connection with the Niger uranium forgeries. Former CIA counterterrorism officials Vince Cannistraro and Larry Johnson have pointed the finger in Ledeen's direction. As the latter put it:

"Italy's SISME [sic] also reportedly had a hand in producing the forged documents delivered to the U.S. embassy in Rome in early October 2003 [sic: should be 2002 – Ed.] that purported to show a deal with Iraq to buy uranium. Many in the intelligence community are convinced that a prominent neocon with long-standing ties to SISME played a role in the forgery. The truth of that proposition remains to be proven. This much is certain, either SISME or someone with ties to SISME, helped forge and circulate those documents which some tried to use to bolster the case to go to war with Iraq."

Cannistraro, asked by an interviewer if Ledeen was involved with the forgers, said "you'd be very close." ...

Good news ... as long as Ambassador Bolton is in New York [at the UN], he will not be wreaking diplomatic havoc anywhere else.

Ambassador Bolton - New York Times: Published: August 2, 2005

If there's a positive side to President Bush's appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations yesterday, it's that as long as Mr. Bolton is in New York, he will not be wreaking diplomatic havoc anywhere else. Talks with North Korea, for instance, have been looking more productive since Mr. Bolton left the State Department, and it's hard not to think that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's generally positive performance in office is due, in part, to her canniness in dispatching Mr. Bolton out of Washington.

But the appointment is, of course, terrible news for the United Nations, whose diplomats have heard weeks of Senate testimony about Mr. Bolton's lack of respect for their institution and his deeply undiplomatic, bullying style of doing business. Senator George Voinovich, the Ohio Republican who became one of Mr. Bolton's strongest critics, said yesterday that he planned to send the new ambassador a book on how to be an effective manager. It couldn't hurt, but this may be the first time a world superpower has used its top United Nations post as a spot for the remedial training of a troublesome government employee.
...
The problem here from the beginning has been that Mr. Bush clearly has little respect for either the United Nations or international diplomacy in general.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush bypasses Senate to install neo-con at UN

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush bypasses Senate to install neo-con at UN: "James Sturcke and agencies | Monday August 1, 2005

The US president, George Bush, today bypassed the senate and installed the controversial neo-conservative John Bolton as ambassador to the UN.

Mr Bush took advantage of his power to fill vacancies without senate approval while Congress is in recess. Under the constitution, Mr Bolton's recess appointment during the senators' August break will last until the next session of Congress, which begins in January 2007.
...
Mr Bolton's appointment ends a five-month impasse between the administration and Senate Democrats. The battle grabbed headlines in April amid accusations that Mr Bolton abused subordinates and twisted intelligence to shape his conservative ideology. ...

State Dept admits Bolton gave inaccurate answers: nominees swear out affidavits stating the information is true and accurate.

Excite News: "State Dept admits Bolton gave inaccurate answers | Jul 28, 10:52 PM (ET) | By Vicki Allen and Saul Hudson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department reversed itself on Thursday night and acknowledged that President Bush's U.N. ambassador nominee gave Congress inaccurate information about an investigation he was involved in.

The acknowledgment came after the State Department had earlier insisted nominee John Bolton's "answer was truthful" when he said he had not been questioned or provided information to jury or government investigations in the past five years.

"When Mr. Bolton completed his form during the Senate confirmation process he did not recall being interviewed by the State Department inspector general. Therefore his form as submitted was inaccurate in this regard and he will correct the form," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Earlier, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware said he had information Bolton was interviewed as part of a State Department-CIA joint investigation on intelligence lapses that led to the Bush administration's pre-Iraq war claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.

Biden, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said that should have been noted on the questionnaire, for which nominees swear out affidavits stating the information is true and accurate.

"It now appears that Mr. Bolton's answers may not meet that standard," Biden wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Republicans prodding Bush to yield documents on Bolton

Republicans prodding Bush to yield documents on Bolton: "Thursday, June 23, 2005 | BY JAMES KUHNHENN | KRT NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- A growing number of Senate Republicans say John Bolton won't be confirmed as United Nations ambassador unless the White House turns over documents that Democrats say they need to assess his fitness for the post.

Though the White House continued yesterday to demand an up- or-down vote on Bolton, these Republican senators say the Senate is in a standoff that only President Bush can resolve.

'I hope the president will take a very hard look at the documents,' Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview with Knight Ridder.

"Unless we resolve this dilemma quickly, Mr. Bolton is not going to be the U.N. ambassador. ... The president should understand that we're at an impasse. It may be more important to preserve the doctrine of separation of powers than to have John Bolton in the U.N."

Alexander's comments came after Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the former Senate majority leader, urged the White House to turn over documents to Bolton's two leading Democratic foes, Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. Another Republican, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, also called for the White House to relent.

Bush says Democrats stalling on Bolton; Yale classmates call U.N. ambassador nominee unfit

Bush says Democrats stalling on Bolton; Yale classmates call U.N. ambassador nominee unfit: "'I view that as just another stall tactic, another way to delay, another way to not allow Bolton to get an up-or-down vote,' Bush said.

'I would hope that when they get back that they stop stalling and give the man a vote. Just give him a simple up-or-down vote.'

Meanwhile, Yale classmates of Bolton's wrote to senators to oppose the nomination.

The 76 signers include cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who lampooned Bolton in his 'Doonesbury' strip in May. Others were fellow members of the Class of 1970 who participated in a 35th reunion over the Memorial Day weekend.

'We are embarrassed and ashamed that the Bush administration has nominated someone so manifestly unsuited to represent our country at the United Nations,' the Yale classmates wrote.

'As his classmates, we do not believe that Mr. Bolton has exhibited the values of civility, light and truth which our shared institution represents.'

Bush also attended Yale and graduated in 1968."

Analysts Behind Iraq Intelligence Were Rewarded

Analysts Behind Iraq Intelligence Were Rewarded: "By Walter Pincus | Washington Post Staff Writer | Saturday, May 28, 2005; Page A01

Two Army analysts whose work has been cited as part of a key intelligence failure on Iraq -- the claim that aluminum tubes sought by the Baghdad government were most likely meant for a nuclear weapons program rather than for rockets -- have received job performance awards in each of the past three years, officials said.

The civilian analysts, former military men considered experts on foreign and U.S. weaponry, work at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), one of three U.S. agencies singled out for particular criticism by President Bush's commission that investigated U.S. intelligence."

MSN Money - Financial Times Business News: Voinovich continues campaign against Bolton nomination

MSN Money - Financial Times Business News: Voinovich continues campaign against Bolton nomination: "May 24, 2005 11:42 PM ET

The Republican senator who snubbed the White House by opposing John Bolton's nomination for US ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday took the unusual move of asking his colleagues to vote against Mr Bolton.

George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, wrote a letter to his fellow senators, arguing that the appointment of Mr Bolton, the outgoing undersecretary of state for arms control, would hurt US efforts to improve relations with its allies.

"John Bolton's nomination sends a negative message to the world community," Mr Voinovich wrote.

"In these dangerous times, we cannot afford to put at risk our nation's ability to successfully wage and win the war on terror with a controversial and ineffective Ambassador to the United Nations."

Rice congratulates Chalabi, who fell from US favor

Reuters AlertNet - Rice congratulates Chalabi, who fell from US favor: "04 May 2005 22:16:58 GMT | Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - Ahmad Chalabi, the one-time Pentagon favorite who fell from grace in Washington amid accusations that he gave U.S. intelligence to Iran, has received a congratulatory call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about his new Iraqi Cabinet posts.

U.S. officials said Rice called the secular Shi'ite politician on Tuesday to congratulate him on becoming deputy prime minister and acting oil minister in Iraq's first elected government since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003."

'Rock Solid' Evidence [neocon favorite] Chalabi Spied for Iran

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - 'Rock Solid' Evidence Chalabi Spied for Iran: "'Friday, May 21, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. officials believe they have "rock solid" evidence that Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi (search), once a darling of the American government, passed secrets to Iran, Fox News has learned.

"There is no need for an investigation because we're quite certain he did it," one senior Bush administration official said.

Bush is intent on painting allies and enemies in the Middle East as evil

Bush is intent on painting allies and enemies in the Middle East as evil: "By Robert Fisk | 09/10/02 'The Independent' - -
...
Only The Nation among all of America's newspapers and magazines has dared to point out that a large number of former Israeli lobbyists are now working within the American administration and the Bush plans for the Middle East – which could cause a massive political upheaval in the Arab world – fit perfectly into Israel's own dreams for the region. The magazine listed Vice-President Dick Cheney – the arch-hawk in the US administration – and John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for Arms Control, with Douglas Feith, the third most senior executive at the Pentagon, as members of the advisory board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) before joining the Bush government. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is still an adviser on the institute, as is the former CIA director James Woolsey.

Michael Ledeen, described by The Nation as "one of the most influential 'Jinsans' in Washington" has been calling for "total war" against "terror" – with "regime change" for Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Mr Perle advises the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld – who refers to the West Bank and Gaza as "the so-called occupied territories" – and arranged the anti-Saudi "kernel of evil" briefing by Laurent Murawiec that so outraged the Saudi royal family last month. The Saudi regime may itself be in great danger as the princes of the House of Saud attempt to seize more power for themselves in advance of the depart-ure of the dying King Fahd.

Jinsa's website says it exists to "inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East". Next month, Michael Rubin of the right-wing and pro-Israeli American Enterprise Institute – who referred to the outgoing UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson as an abettor of "terrorism" – joins the US Defence Department as an Iran-Iraq "expert".

According to The Nation, Irving Moskovitz, the California bingo magnate who has funded settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories, is a donor as well as a director of Jinsa.

President Bush, of course, will not be talking about the influence of these pro-Israeli lobbyists when he presents his vision of the Middle East at the United Nations on Thursday.

Arrest of Pentagon Official May Help Unravel Neo-Conservative Cabal

Arrest of Pentagon Official May Help Unravel Neo-Conservative Cabal: "This article appears in the May 13, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. | by Jeffrey Steinberg

Pentagon Iran desk officer and neo-con patsy Larry Franklin was arrested on May 4, on charges that he passed classified information based upon secret Pentagon documents to two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) officials in June 2003, at a restaurant in Arlington, Va. The two AIPAC officials, who were not named in the complaint, were Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were both fired by AIPAC in recent weeks.

A number of senior intelligence sources, reached for comment on the Franklin charges, all had the same essential reading: The FBI has a prima facie case against Franklin. In FBI raids on his home, Federal agents confiscated 83 classified documents, which he was not authorized to have there. The case is cut and dried, and a charge of mishandling classified documents carries a ten-year Federal jail sentence. Franklin is being squeezed to provide prosecutors with a complete picture on the AIPAC/Israel espionage operation, including Pentagon officials who were part of the effort. These include, but are not limited to: Doug Feith, William Luti, Harold Rhode, and Abram Shulsky.

In addition, one source emphasized the importance of Franklin's December 2001 trip to Rome, accompanied by Rhode and Michael Ledeen. The trip centered around a meeting with former Iran-Contra swindler Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom Ledeen sought to reactivate as a Pentagon channel to the Iranian government, and as a source on activities inside Iraq and Afghanistan. The Rome trip coincided with the surfacing of the forged Niger government documents, falsely charging that Saddam Hussein was seeking large quantities of yellow cake uranium from the African nation.

Franklin was arrested on a criminal complaint, even as a grand jury continues to consider his case. He is widely considered to be providing information to prosecutors. A closer look at his associations with the neo-con crowd shows that by targetting him, FBI officials might be able to unravel a whole skein of wrongdoing, which could help bring down the inner circle linked to Vice President Dick Cheney."

Bolton prevented a State Department memo accusing Israel of violating American arms-export laws reaching Colin Powell?

Forward Newspaper Online: "Senate Probes Bolton's Pro-Israel Efforts | By Ori Nir | May 6, 2005

WASHINGTON — John Bolton, President Bush's embattled choice to serve as American ambassador at the United Nations, is widely seen in Washington as a strong supporter of Israel. But recent media reports suggest that his support for the Jewish state goes further than previously believed.

Senate staffers are reportedly probing many allegations regarding Bolton's management style, including claims that Bolton took part in unauthorized meetings with Israeli officials and prevented a State Department memo accusing Israel of violating American arms-export laws from reaching the desk of then secretary of state Colin Powell."
...
According to a report in U.S. News & World Report, senate staffers are investigating suspicions that Bolton, in his current position of under secretary of state for arms control, shelved the memo suggesting that Israel violated American laws with its July 23, 2000, assassination of Salah Shehada, a senior Hamas activist in Gaza City.

Israel's air force used an American-made F-16 bomber to drop a one-ton bomb on a house in a densely populated part of Gaza, where Shehada was staying. The bomb killed him, as well as 14 civilians, and injured more than 100 people. According to U.S. News, several offices of the State Department, including the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and the legal office, issued a report saying that the attack represented a violation of America's Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits American weapons from being used for nondefensive purposes.
...
Late one evening, U.S. News reported, Bolton recalled the report, just as it was about to make its way to Powell's office, and allegedly replaced it with a new memo. That memo supposedly did not mention the assessment that Israel may have violated American laws. As a result, Powell never learned that some of his staffers disagreed with Bolton, officials told U.S. News.

"Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] Egypt as the prize."

The Nation | Article | The Men From JINSA and CSP | Jason Vest: "August 15, 2002 | by Jason Vest"
...
Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core.

On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war--not just with Iraq, but "total war," as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action.

For example, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--chaired by JINSA/CSP adviser and former Reagan Administration Defense Department official Richard Perle, and stacked with advisers from both groups--recently made news by listening to a briefing that cast Saudi Arabia as an enemy to be brought to heel through a number of potential mechanisms, many of which mirror JINSA's recommendations, and which reflect the JINSA/CSP crowd's preoccupation with Egypt. (The final slide of the Defense Policy Board presentation proposed that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] Egypt as the prize.") Ledeen has been leading the charge for regime change in Iran, while old comrades like Andrew Marshall and Harold Rhode in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment actively tinker with ways to re-engineer both the Iranian and Saudi governments. JINSA is also cheering the US military on as it tries to secure basing rights in the strategic Red Sea country of Eritrea, happily failing to mention that the once-promising secular regime of President Isaiais Afewerki continues to slide into the kind of repressive authoritarianism practiced by the "axis of evil" and its adjuncts.

Powell Playing Quiet Role in Bolton Battle : former chief of staff: Bolton would be an "abysmal ambassador."

Powell Playing Quiet Role in Bolton Battle (washingtonpost.com): "GOP Senators Sought Views on Nominee |
By Jim VandeHei and Robin Wright | Washington Post Staff Writers | Friday, April 22, 2005; Page A01

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell is emerging as a behind-the-scenes player in the battle over John R. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations, privately telling at least two key Republican lawmakers that Bolton is a smart but very problematic government official, according to Republican sources.
...
[Powell's] former chief of staff, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, recently told the New York Times that Bolton would be an "abysmal ambassador."

"On two occasions, he has let it be known that the Bolton nomination is a bad one, to put it mildly," a Democratic congressional aide said. "It would be great to have Powell on the record speaking for himself, but he's unlikely to do it."

Wanted: Complete Asshole for U.N. Ambassador: John Bolton as a "quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy" ... a "bully"

village voice > news > Wanted: Complete Asshole for U.N. Ambassador by Jason Vest: "John Bolton has left a trail of alienated colleagues and ridiculed ideas. He's a shoo-in for Senate confirmation. | by Jason Vest | April 14th, 2005 12:19 PM

Truly righteous indignation is rare in Washington, and in that respect former State Department intelligence chief Carl Ford Jr.'s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday was about as good as it gets. Ford's sterling reputation as analyst—coupled with his staunchly conservative, pro-Bush/Cheney credentials—made it impossible for anyone to question his veracity or his judgment as he described U.N. ambassador hopeful John Bolton as a "quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy" and a "bully" whose "serial abuse" of subordinates causes so much "collateral damage and personal hurt" that he's unworthy of any high office.

[Bush mentor] Sharansky’s Double Standard: Zionism trumps all else for human right advocate ... refused two charged with massacring dozens

March 28, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative | Sharansky’s Double Standard | For the advocate of universal democracy, human rights don’t begin at home. | by Michael C. Desch

In 1973, after being denied permission to emigrate to Israel, he became one of the leading Jewish refuseniks lobbying for greater human rights in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. After four years of waging this campaign, constantly harried and harassed by the KGB, he was arrested in 1977 and tried and convicted of being an American spy in 1978.
...
But in real political life, moral clarity between liberty and despotism is not so easy to come by—and perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in Sharansky’s own path since he entered Israeli politics. For there his career has been marked not by moral clarity but rather by moral ambiguity and inconsistency in his advocacy of democracy and human rights, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
...
In the years since then, these suspicions have spread widely. As former America-Israel Public Affairs Committee official M.J. Rosenberg observed in a letter to the Washington Post in response to a review of Sharansky’s new book, “The test of whether one is a human rights activist or one who simply uses the issue for political ends is that person’s willingness to apply the human rights measuring stick to his own people. It is pretty easy to limit your calls for human rights to nations other than your own. For Sharansky, concern for Palestinians is the test of whether or not his claim to the mantle of human rights activist is genuine. As this book demonstrates, he fails—big time.”
...
Nor has Sharansky been a consistent advocate of democracy and the rule of law within Israel itself. As minister of the interior in 1999, he refused to extradite two Russian Jews living in Israel who were former NKVD officers charged with massacring dozens of civilians in Lithuania prior to World War II. In December 2003, Sharansky addressed a rally in Jerusalem where some other speakers advocated disenfranchising Israeli Arabs.
...
Finally, Sharansky told an American interviewer that he saw no incompatibility between his ardent Zionism and his commitment to the struggle for universal human rights and democracy. But when push comes to shove, Zionism trumps all else for him. Sharansky entertains few doubts about the Jews’ exclusive claim to the biblical land of Israel. In a recent Ha’aretz interview, he maintained the “Jews came here 3,000 years ago and this is the cradle of Jewish civilization. Jews are the only people in history who kept their loyalty to their identity and their land throughout the 2,000 years of exile, and no doubt that they have the right to have their place among nations—not only historically but also geographically. As to the Palestinians, who are the descendants of those Arabs who migrated in the last 200 years, they have the right, if they want, to have their own state... but not at the expense of the state of Israel.”
...
This divergence —between Sharansky’s rhetoric and real-world political behavior—suggests that he is not the reliable beacon for American foreign policy that the Bush administration so desperately seeks.

Anti-Islamic Crusade Gets Organized: Pipes moves on after Bush “recess appointment” to U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP)

Right Web | Analysis | Anti-Islamic Crusade Gets Organized: "By Jim Lobe | March 2, 2005

Daniel Pipes, the founder of the Middle East Forum and an anti-Islamist activist, is working to organize a new policy institute, which will be called the Anti-Islamist Institute (AII). According to Pipes, “In the long term ... the legal activities of Islamists pose as much or even a greater set of challenges than the illegal ones.” His new institute will expose legal “political activities” of “Islamists,” such as “prohibiting families from sending pork or pork by-products to U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq,” according to the draft of a grant proposal by Pipes' Middle East Forum (MEF).

Pipes is also working with Stephen Schwartz on a new “Center for Islamic Pluralism” (CIP) whose aims are to “promote moderate Islam in the U.S. and globally” and “to oppose the influence of militant Islam, and, in particular, the Saudi-funded Wahhabi sect of Islam, among American Muslims, in the America media, in American education ... and with U.S. governmental bodies...”

Schwartz, a former Trotskyite militant who became a Sufi Muslim in 1997, has received seed money from MEF, which is also accepting contributions on CIP's behalf until the government gives it tax-exempt legal status.

Pipes, who created MEF in Philadelphia in 1994, has long campaigned against “radical” Islamists in the United States , especially the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and several other national Islamic groups.

Long before the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, he also raised alarms about the immigration of foreign Muslims, suggesting that they constituted a serious threat to the political clout of U.S. Jews, as well as a potential “fifth column” for radical Islamists.

In addition, Pipes has been a fierce opponent of Palestinian nationalism. He told Australian television earlier this month, for example, that the Israeli Prime Minister's Gaza disengagement plan and his agreement to negotiate with the new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, were a “mistake” because 80% of the Palestinian population, including Abbas, still favor Israel 's destruction.

In 2002, Pipes launched Campus Watch, a group dedicated to monitoring and exposing alleged anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and Islamist bias in teachers of Middle Eastern studies at U.S. colleges and universities. The group, which invites students to report on offending professors, has been assailed as a McCarthyite tactic to stifle open discussion of Middle East issues.

Pipes' nomination by Bush in 2003 to serve as a director on the board of the quasi-governmental U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), a government-funded think tank set up in 1984 to “promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts,” moved the controversy over his work from academia into the U.S. Senate, where such appointments are virtually always approved without controversy.

Pipes' nomination, however, offered a striking exception. Backed by major Muslim, Arab-American, and several academic groups, Democratic senators--led by Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, and Tom Harkin--strongly opposed the nomination as inappropriate, particularly in light of some of his past writings. Pipes has asserted that Muslim immigrants were “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.”

Several Republican senators subsequently warned Bush that they would oppose the nomination if it came to a vote, and, in the end, the president made a “recess appointment” that gave him a limited term lasting only until the end of 2004. It appears now that, despite the enhanced Republican majority in the Senate, Bush does not intend to re-nominate him.

Indeed, both the USIP and Bush now probably regret having nominated him in the first place. During his board tenure, Pipes blasted USIP for hosting a conference with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, charging that it employed Muslim “radicals” on its staff.

59 American Ex-Diplomats Oppose Bolton

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | 59 American Ex-Diplomats Oppose Bolton: "Tuesday March 29, 2005 5:16 AM | By BARRY SCHWEID

WASHINGTON (AP) - Challenging the White House, 59 former American diplomats are urging the Senate to reject John R. Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

``He is the wrong man for this position,'' they said in a letter to Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Indiana Republican has scheduled hearings on Bolton's nomination for April 7.

``We urge you to reject that nomination,'' the former diplomats said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press and dated Tuesday.

The ex-diplomats have served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, some for long terms and others briefly. They include Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to France and the Soviet Union under Presidents Carter and Reagan and assistant secretary of state for European affairs under President Nixon."