|
|
|
|
JINSA/CSP advisers Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have spent the past fifteen years
working quietly to keep the US arms sluice to Turkey open.
Click here.
|
lmost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks
found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee
on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States
was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and
whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military
budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and
zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in
its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power.
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.
Indeed, there are some in military and intelligence circles who have
taken to using "axis of evil" in reference to JINSA and CSP, along with
venerable repositories of hawkish thinking like the American Enterprise
Institute and the Hudson Institute, as well as defense contractors,
conservative foundations and public relations entities underwritten by
far-right American Zionists (all of which help to underwrite JINSA and
CSP). It's a milieu where ideology and money seamlessly blend: "Whenever
you see someone identified in print or on TV as being with the Center
for Security Policy or JINSA championing a position on the grounds of
ideology or principle--which they are unquestionably doing with
conviction--you are, nonetheless, not informed that they're also
providing a sort of cover for other ideologues who just happen to stand
to profit from hewing to the Likudnik and Pax Americana lines," says a
veteran intelligence officer. He notes that while the United States has
begun a phaseout of civilian aid to Israel that will end by 2007,
government policy is to increase military aid by half the amount of
civilian aid that's cut each year--which is not only a boon to both the
US and Israeli weapons industries but is also crucial to realizing the
far right's vision for missile defense and the Middle East.