by Derek Davison

Fear was the word of the day at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, as former Vice President Dick Cheney talked about the nearly infinite number of grave threats he sees confronting the United States. Greeted by a standing ovation from the attendees, Cheney spent the bulk of his [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Derek Davison

Fear was the word of the day at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, as former Vice President Dick Cheney talked about the nearly infinite number of grave threats he sees confronting the United States. Greeted by a standing ovation from the attendees, Cheney spent the bulk of his roughly 30-minute remarks listing those threats and championing a much more hawkish American response to all of them.

Regarding the most immediate threat, the Islamic State or ISIS (“the situation is dire,” he commented), Cheney had suggestions for President Barack Obama—if you consider “recognize ISIS as a strategic threat” a suggestion. Cheney supported a commitment of additional arms, troops, advisors and trainers to Iraq, as well as “immediate, sustained action” in Syria. What form that action should take, and how it should be implemented without helping Bashar al-Assad (who Cheney also cited as a significant threat) or Iran (ditto), was not addressed in Cheney’s remarks. It probably goes without saying that the former vice president ignored the role his own administration’s ill-fated war on Iraq played in creating the ISIS threat in the first place. Nor did he spend any time engaging the reasoned argument that the Islamic State currently represents only a potential threat to the United States—not a realized, let alone “dire,” one.

If you’re trying to keep score at home, Cheney suggested at various points in his speech that America ought to commit substantial military forces toward countering threats in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, with no particular sense about which of these should take priority over the others. Oh, and maybe in Ukraine as well; that part wasn’t as clear.

At this point, Cheney is effectively the living, breathing embodiment of Maslow’s Hammer, only instead of a hammer his tool is an overwhelming commitment of American military forces—so to him every problem looks like an existential threat to the United States. Again and again he leveled harsh criticism at the Obama administration, particularly Obama himself, for failing to appreciate the magnitude of the many dangers America faces. He chided Obama for declaring in a 2012 speech that “the tide of war is receding,” a quote that must seem almost as untimely as Cheney’s 2005 declaration that the Iraqi insurgency was “in the last throes, if you will.” We were, but they weren’t.

Cheney also criticized the administration’s treatment of America’s Middle Eastern allies, noting in particular a perception in the region that the United States is working with the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a popular conspiracy theory in military-led Egypt and other regional anti-MB countries, and is rooted in a deliberate misreading of the administration’s initial response to the Arab Spring, when it tentatively supported democratization efforts even if they meant that moderate Islamist political parties would be the immediate winners. In reality, the US made a decision to accept the results of whatever elections the Arab Spring produced, not ally itself with the Muslim Brotherhood—but don’t try and tell that to Egyptian state-controlled media.

This is a policy, by the way, that regional experts now say the administration has dropped, and not for the better; the Arab Spring’s failure to bring about widespread democratic change in the region has actually empowered both Islamic extremists like ISIS and the authoritarian regimes opposing them.

Cheney characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as “the ideological source for most of the radical Islamist terrorists around the globe,” particularly Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and through it, al-Qaeda. This reading of history glosses over the fact that EIJ broke offfrom the Muslim Brotherhood over the latter’s commitment to nonviolence and to gaining power through peaceful means. Moderate Islamist political parties like the Brotherhood may not be ideal conduits for American interests in the region, and they can govern in anti-democratic ways, but when they are outlawed or suppressed those among them who support peaceful political change are only driven into extremist camps and potentially more violent organizations. And no matter how much the Muslim Brotherhood has been suppressed, it has always found a way back.

Speaking of Egypt, Cheney especially zeroed in on the administration’s response to the 2013 coup that toppled Egypt’s nascent democracy and brought back Mukbarak-era deep state governance, contending that America should have ignored the coup (which it pretty much did) and worked to strengthen ties with coup leader and now elected (well, sort of) Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. This, Cheney said, would have strengthened security in the region and diminished any talk that the US and Muslim Brotherhood were in cahoots. Cheney also remarked that he was “very impressed” with Sisi, which seems odd given that he was talking about a man who is responsible for the deaths of over a thousand of his fellow Egyptians, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Cheney also spent a considerable portion of his speech railing against cuts to the Defense budget, which is understandable given that he’s backing military commitments in at least ten different countries. He noted, for example, that “other major powers are seriously adding to their military capabilities” (maybe someday one of them will spend as much as half of America’s annual defense budget) while the US is making “irrational budget cuts” to its capabilities. Of course, it’s hard to take this argument seriously when the US is prepared, for example, to throw $1.5 trillion at an aircraft system that may be needed but definitely doesn’t work). Then again, if all you have is a hammer, it makes sense to seek the biggest hammer money can buy.

by Jim Lobe

Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. It also provides more details about the relationship between UANI and Harvard’s Belfer Center, a major beneficiary of Kaplan’s largesse, which hired UANI’s president, Gary Samore, shortly after he stepped down as a top proliferation adviser to Obama in 2012 (some prominent faculty members also serve on the group’s advisory board). We excerpted Eli’s original Salon piece on UANI’s ties to Kaplan last Friday.

Eli’s latest is based on a recent filing by the plaintiff, Greek shipowner Victor Restis, in his pending defamation case against UANI. It adds new layers of intrigue to the alleged connections between UANI and Kaplan:

[Kaplan] got his start with help from the family of Leon Recanati, a Greek-Israeli entrepreneur whose family owns and still operates Overseas Shipholding Group (“OSG”), a rival shipping company to Enterprises Shipping and Trading. See Exs. 4, 5. OSG operates oil tankers that compete directly with Mr. Restis’ tanker company, Golden Energy Maritime Corp., whose initial public offering had to be abandoned in 2013 when Defendants launched their defamation campaign that is at the heart of this litigation. See Am. Compl. ¶ 97. OSG would stand to profit if Mr. Restis and his companies were no longer able to operate. Kaplan married Leon Recanati’s daughter Dafna Recanati and was introduced to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, by Dafna Recanati’s mother.

If this allegation is true — that Kaplan and/or the Recanati family stood to gain a competitive advantage by publicly charging (through UANI) that Restis and his companies were violating sanctions against Iran — then UANI’s failure to publicly disclose any and all of its ties to Kaplan would obviously constitute a serious ethical breach.

(This is not the only example of billionaire financiers allegedly trying to benefit from Iranophobia. As Charles Davis wrote for IPS a year ago, when the fight between Argentina and Paul Singer and other hold-out, or “vulture” bondholders of the country’s debt was getting relatively little media notice, Singer and his fellow-holdouts founded the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which has led a lavishly funded public relations and lobbying campaign against the Kirchner government, including a host of full-page ads in national and Capitol Hill newspapers, at least two of which assailed Argentina’s ties to Iran and suggested that Kirchner was engaged in a cover-up of Tehran’s alleged — and highly doubtful — role in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. One even showed a photo of Kirchner alongside then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the headline, “A Pact with the Devil?” Singer, who has given millions of dollars to the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), stands to make tens of million dollars of dollars in profit if he and his other hedge-fund holdouts prevail in the case.)

In addition to the connections between Kaplan and UANI, which Eli had previously documented in his Salon article, the plaintiff’s filing alleges that UANI operates out of offices at Rockefeller Center. Those offices are provided rent-free by Continental Properties, whose managing director, Mark Fisch, co-funds an NYU fellowship with Kaplan, and whose staff member, Kim Hillman, has served as an UANI director. The filing also notes that UANI’s CEO, Mark Wallace, serves not only as CEO of Kaplan’s Tigris Financial Group as Eli reported last week, but also as an officer and/or director of at least five other Kaplan enterprises, as well. It concludes:

Wallace has not drawn a salary from UANI since 2009, so Wallace appears to be getting his financial benefit indirectly through UANI supporter Kaplan.

Read the rest of Eli’s piece here.

by James A. Russell

As the country makes a half-hearted attempt to sort through the wreckage of its experience in Iraq 10 years later, the country would do well to remind itself of a few central and searing uncomfortable truths.

While it is true that we got led down [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by James A. Russell

As the country makes a half-hearted attempt to sort through the wreckage of its experience in Iraq 10 years later, the country would do well to remind itself of a few central and searing uncomfortable truths.

While it is true that we got led down the path to war by officials that consciously lied about intelligence to justify it, concealed their real motivations and willfully ignored voices that questioned predictions of a quick and easy victory — the undeniable truth is that this country allowed itself to be led like lambs to the slaughter.

And it was a slaughter. The river of human blood — Iraqi and American, to say nothing of lasting injuries on the battlefield that have wrecked lives around the world — flows wide and deep as documented by the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General.

So who is really responsible for the catastrophe and what should we do about it? Thus far, this country has avoided looking too hard into the mirror and instead blames the small caste of ideologically motivated neoconservative advisers clustered in the Pentagon and White House who had their own reasons for wanting to get rid of Saddam Hussein and could have cared less about the potential costs.

There has been no truth commission, no calling to account for these officials, who all returned to their law offices, lobbying jobs, became scions at the Council on Foreign Relations or were rewarded the chance to pollute the minds of students at Harvard and elsewhere.

These advisers took a free pass while our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines picked their way through the wreckage of their comrades’ body parts and dead Iraqis that littered the landscapes of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and a host of other places that most Americans had never heard of.

However, it wasn’t just the Bush administration that took a free pass. An uncomfortable truth is that Americans, like those advisers, have also chosen to avoid taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

As much as this country wants to avoid it, the fact is that the war and the way it was launched says more about this country than those who sold the war with their public relations blitz.

If there is an abiding truth for this country and its citizenry, it’s that this kind of mistake should never happen again. Alas, we were also confronted with this truth after the Vietnam War — some lessons need to be learned over and over.

Looking in the rearview mirror is important because it can prepare us for how to proceed. The main lesson of the Iraq war should compel this country to sit up, pay attention and stop believing that the rest of the world is like a reality TV show or video game. We must exercise our obligations as citizens in the world’s greatest democracy when our politicians tell us it’s time for another war.

If the country were paying attention, it would know that many of the same ideologues that brought on the Iraq war are cheerleading and chanting for another one — this time with Iran.

Like the last time, many of these commentators are – albeit more subtly this time around — trying to sell us another public relations package to justify a war. As was the case with the unstated neoconservative justifications for the Iraq war, a main reason these people want us to attack Iran is to protect Israel.

Luckily for us, this time we have some actual adults in charge at the White House and a president that, whatever his faults, won’t be as easily convinced to start another catastrophe. That wouldn’t have been the case if Mitt Romney had won the election, with the inmates once again in control of the asylum. The politics of this potential new war, however, are complicated and difficult for our president — however reluctant a warrior he may be.

Consider, for example, that some senators want us to outsource the decision to start the war to the trigger-happy Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been restrained so far not by his main benefactor and ally, the United States, but by reasonable and sensible Israelis who are refreshingly unafraid to express their reservations in print and on the airwaves.

The image in the rearview mirror should be telling us to start seeing like those retired Israeli security and intelligence members who have told Bibi to cool it. One glance back should help us understand that instead of letting the neoconservative cheerleaders and members of the Congress who are beholden to the Israel lobby chart a path to another war, we should exercise our obligations as citizens and probe them with questions and protest.

Another go-to-war drama is quietly playing itself out again in this country, whether we notice it or not. Ten years from now, will we once again be averting our gaze from the mirror and blaming the war on a select few while avoiding our own responsibility?

How we choose to understand the images in today’s rearview mirror, and whether we decide on another war tomorrow, will say more about our country than the neoconservatives and hawks with their pompoms and war chants.

by Daniel Luban

This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Daniel Luban

This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the first place? Even a decade later, there’s still not much of a consensus — although Jim’s piece from 2003, reposted yesterday, provides as good a contemporaneous account as you’ll find. Is there anything more we can say with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight?

I tried to sort through possible war motives in a piece I wrote several years ago. (Space constraints meant that the final version was cut rather heavily, and I’d be happy to provide the original version, which included more evidence and fuller argumentation.) I argued there against the somewhat conspiratorial notion that there was a single “real motive,” concealed from the public and shared by all administration backers. The Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) argument was clearly far from the whole story, as Paul Wolfowitz himself conceded. But individual actors and factions within the administration had their own reasons for wanting war.

More to the point, the motives tended to overlap: most war-backers would not have said that invading Iraq was desirable to stabilize oil supplies but not to spread democracy, or to improve Israel’s security but not to deter nuclear terrorism. Rather, they tended to hold a rather utopian belief that invading Iraq would further all of these goals simultaneously. For that reason, assessing motives is more a matter of teasing out emphasis and priority than of reaching categorical judgments about which motives were or were not in play.

With all that said, however, I think we can identify at least four relatively distinct motives that played a role. I provide more in-depth evidence in my RightWeb piece, so I’ll just sketch out some of the conclusions here.

Oil. The allegation that Iraq was a “war for oil” was one of the most frequently leveled charges against it, and one that clearly has some legs. (Just yesterday, for instance, Glenn Greenwald touched on the theme.) However, the notion of a “war for oil” is an imprecise one. It can mean two different things, one less plausible and one more so.

The first (and seemingly most widespread) meaning is that the Iraq war was primarily intended to allow the US (or US oil companies) to get their hands on oil reserves located on Iraqi soil. This is largely unpersuasive. There’s evidence (some of which Greenwald cites) that US policymakers such as Dick Cheney hoped that a post-reconstruction Iraq would greatly step up oil production and provide an alternative to Saudi oil, but there’s little evidence that this was regarded as a primary reason for invasion rather than simply a welcome collateral benefit. US oil companies themselves were lukewarm about the invasion, fearing that it might destabilize the region — and indeed, they haven’t been the primary beneficiaries of oil development in postwar Iraq.

The second (and more plausible) meaning is that the Iraq war was centrally concerned with preserving the stability of US oil supplies in the broader Gulf region as a whole. Here, the evidence is stronger: such “wars for oil” have been semi-official US policy since the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, and this was certainly a primary motive for the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam Hussein was regarded with more alarm than similarly brutal dictators elsewhere in the world largely because the risks of aggression in a geopolitically vital region like the Gulf were viewed as so much higher. Whether or not protecting the Gulf oil supply from Saddam was the primary reason for war, it was certainly an important one.

Israel. For many neoconservatives in the Bush administration, a major (perhaps the major) reason for ousting Saddam was to improve Israel’s security. Since the 1990s, when several future Bush administration figures prepared the notorious “Clean Break” report for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, neoconservatives had been preoccupied with the notion that regime change in Iraq would touch off a broader regional transformation that would disempower Israel’s opponents in the Middle East.

There are some caveats that should be made. First, although neoconservatives were the leading proponents of war, the broader “Israel lobby” as conventionally conceived did not play a particularly strong role (a clear point of contrast with the current campaign for war against Iran). Second, the fact that many in the US pushed for war out of Israel-related concerns did not mean that Israelis themselves were necessarily strong proponents — although figures on the Israeli right with strong ties to neoconservatives, such as Netanyahu himself, certainly were.

Even if neoconservatives inside and outside the administration were motivated in large part by concerns about Israeli security, this still doesn’t answer the question of how influential they were. After all, we should be wary of turning the top leadership (especially Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) into mere vessels for neoconservative designs. As suggested below, I don’t think the Israel motive was paramount in the minds of this top leadership, although it was undoubtedly present. On the other hand, we shouldn’t downplay the instrumental role that neoconservatives played in setting the terms of debate over Iraq both before and after 9/11.

Payback. “We have been hit very hard,” a Cheney adviser told journalist Barton Gellman, “and we needed to make clear the costs to those who might have been supporting or harboring those who were contemplating those acts.” Or, as Jonah Goldberg (channeling Michael Ledeen) put it more bluntly, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” On this line of thought, 9/11 required the US to make an example out of someone to demonstrate its continued strength. The Taliban was too small and weak to serve this purpose, but Saddam — who had already been in the crosshairs for unrelated reasons — fit the bill nicely.

Many people seem hesitant to attribute the invasion to such a seemingly subjective and psychologized motive; it sounds more hardheaded to attribute it to a material interest like oil. But I think we underestimate the strength of this motive at our own peril, and that — particular for Cheney and Rumsfeld, who to my mind were the two critical decision-makers — it may even have been the primary one.

Democracy. The democracy promotion motive has become somewhat overemphasized in recent years, for several reasons. In the run-up to war, it was the motive that appealed most to pro-war liberal opinion-makers in the media, and thus received a disproportionate amount of discussion. Once the WMDs failed to materialize, the Bush administration fell back on democracy promotion as its main justification for the war, a trend that reached its height in Bush’s 2005 second inaugural address. And once the war went south, it became the easiest line of attack for critics who were eager to cast themselves as hardheaded skeptics and the Bush administration as wide-eyed utopians.

The fact of the matter is that democracy promotion was probably not the central motive for most of the war’s architects. This isn’t to say that it was always or totally insincere, however. Most notably, Bush himself seems genuinely to have bought into his own rhetoric. And although many (myself included) expected the administration simply to set up a friendly dictator to rule over postwar Iraq, this isn’t the course they followed or even really attempted. Whatever the many flaws of Nouri al-Maliki’s government, it is by no means a US puppet, and it did come to power through something resembling a democratic process (backed, to be sure, by a good bit of force).

To what extent were these four motives mutually exclusive? We should note, first of all, that the latter two flow in some sense out of the first two. The US had for decades regarded the Middle East as a geopolitically vital region, due both to its reliance on Gulf oil and its interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This intense focus on the Middle East helps explain why, in the significantly transformed post-9/11 landscape, the US seized on Saddam Hussein (rather than a figure with more significant ties to terrorism) as the proper test case for its efforts both at restoring deterrence and at democratic transformation. The hope was that success in Iraq would reverberate throughout the region.

At the same time, however, the tension between the final two motives (between payback and democracy) helps indicate some of the contradictions of the project. Thomas Friedman got at some of this tension when he suggested the “right reason” for war was “to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification,” but the “real reason” was “to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society.” In typical fashion, Friedman did not bother to question whether these two goals were complementary or contradictory, and whether “shock and awe” was reconcilable with “dehumiliation and redignification.” But we’ve witnessed the various contradictions between these motives play out for ten years now.

Photo: President George W. Bush signs H.J. Resolution 114 authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell, center, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, right, also attended the signing. White House photo by Paul Morse. 

by Jim Lobe

Apart from a few misjudgements, I think my explanation of the motivations and non-motivations of the invasion of Iraq on its eve stands up pretty well. But you should be the judge. Following is a piece I did on January 30, 2003 for IPS News.

by Marsha B. Cohen

Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is scheduled to meet with Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday morning, March 5. There’s more to this meeting than one might infer from harrumphing members of the right who see this meeting as one more opportunity [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Marsha B. Cohen

Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel is scheduled to meet with Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday morning, March 5. There’s more to this meeting than one might infer from harrumphing members of the right who see this meeting as one more opportunity to regurgitate smears against the former Nebraska Senator.

Barak congratulated Hagel on his appointment during his opening remarks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) 2013 Policy Conference, predicting that he “will no doubt serve his country in the same way in which he served both on the battlefield and in Congress.” Barak’s words were met with “uncharacteristically lukewarm applause from an enthusiastic audience that responded warmly to the rest of his speech,” according to Buzzfeed.

AIPAC remained officially neutral in the controversy surrounding the Hagel nomination, arousing ire and even eliciting mockery from pro-Israel right-wing ideologues — including the Middle East Forum’s Daniel Pipes, Washington Post ”Right Turn” blogger Jennifer Rubin and Lee Smith of Tablet Magazine – for not using its substantial congressional clout to firmly oppose Hagel. Nonetheless, ex-AIPAC Executive Director Morris Amitay was among the first voices to openly express antagonism toward Hagel in the Washington Free Beacon when the nomination was still just a rumor. And former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, who now heads The Israel Project but is still regarded by AIPAC as a major organizational player, also disseminated anti-Hagel sentiment.

Barak attended AIPAC in lieu of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who most attendees almost certainly would have preferred be there in person instead of via video conference. Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that this is the first time in at least seven years that AIPAC’s annual meeting was not attended by the Prime Minister of Israel or the US President.

Most AIPAC devotees have only sketchy insight into Israel politics and little idea of how Israel’s political system actually functions. They’re content with uncritically loving “Israel” and discriminating against Arabs and Iran (as well as Jewish “leftists”), with little or no concern for the knotty details of the wrangling required to build and maintain a coalition. Some may not even realize that Barak is a lame-duck — a man without a party or a place in Israel’s political structure. He will have no political standing in Israel once Netanyahu manages to whip-stitch together a crazy quilt government, comprised of a patchwork of parties with widely divergent political priorities that will enable his minority Likud party to govern with at least 61 of the 120 seats in Israel’s Parliament (Knesset). Once he does, Barak will be a nobody — at least in Israel.

Nevertheless, Barak is still Israel’s Defense Minister. AIPAC’s clueless minions can’t very well criticize Barak for meeting with the new Secretary of Defense, or Hagel for meeting with Barak. At the same time, Hagel’s meeting with Barak right now allows the Obama administration to connect with Israel’s defense establishment in a way that cannot be construed as endorsing or otherwise  interfering in Israeli domestic politics.

While AIPAC conference-attendees may idolize Netanyahu, many probably don’t know — or don’t want to know — that Barak is less a fan than a “frenemy” of the Israeli Prime Minister. Beyond their political rivalry, Barak believes that Netanyahu botched relations with the US. Back in October, before Barak had announced his retirement, Isabel Kershner pointed out in the New York Times that Netanyahu had accused Barak of deliberately exacerbating “tensions between the prime minister and Washington in an attempt to make himself look like the moderate who can repair relations.” In response “Mr. Barak’s office issued a statement saying that the defense minister ‘works to strengthen relations with the United States and at their heart, the security relationship’,” wrote Kershner.

As it turned out, Netanyahu called elections in January and Barak declined to participate. Nonetheless, he has remained on as Defense Minister until Netanyahu, whose Likud party captured the largest number of parliamentary seats but nowhere near a majority, can put together a coalition of parties that will guarantee him at least 61 votes in Israel’s 120-seat Parliament (Knesset). Although some predicted that immediately after the Israeli election Netanyahu might attract an unprecedented “national unity government” with as many as 88 Knesset members, forming a governing coalition with even a simple majority is proving to be a major headache for for the Prime Minister. He even asked for a two week extension of the normal time permitted for a Prime Minister to form a coalition government from President Shimon Peres and now has until mid-March. Israeli media sources have reported that President Obama may cancel his trip if Netanyahu hasn’t formed a government by March 16.

Having Hagel meet with the outgoing Israeli Defense Minister now, before Netanyahu forms his next government — be it accidentally, coincidentally or deliberately — is a stroke of genius (or very good luck) on the part of the Obama administration regardless of whether it was Hagel’s own idea or not. Yes, the meeting coincides with the last day of AIPAC’s policy conference. More importantly, it brings together the independent-minded Hagel with an outgoing Israeli Defense Minister who has little love for Netanyahu.

One of AIPAC’s objectives is to assure that, no matter how deep the slashes to US government-spending in view of the sequester may be, a reduction in aid to Israel will be kept minimal to nonexistent. According to the Times of Israel, “Israeli defense planners are bracing for a potentially dramatic cut in US assistance that may slash as much as $300 million in aid over the next seven months due to sequestration.” Anticipated cost increases coupled with the reduction of US aid will mean “a painful squeeze on Israel’s defense budget, exacerbating an expected budget crunch for the IDF caused by government plans to cut Israel’s own defense-driven budget deficit of recent years.”

Such and similar claims about “a painful squeeze” will no doubt be both credible and popular at AIPAC, although there are strong grounds for skepticism about their underlying assumptions. Israeli security expert Reuven Pedatzur revealed in Haaretz last August that Israel’s defense budget has “actually swelled in the past few years,” and includes “some hugely expensive projects whose operational necessity is questionable.”

Barak not only knows how bloated Israel’s defense budget is, he’s largely responsible for it. Just recently, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a television interviewer that Israel had wasted nearly $3 billion on “harebrained adventures” to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” Barak defended the expenditures in a statement released by his office that stated, “Investment in fortifying military capabilities is not a waste; the capabilities that were built up serve the IDF in meeting current and future challenges.”

Barak may accordingly use his time with Hagel this week to lobby for continued funding of unnecessary military projects and Hagel, bludgeoned and bloody from his battle with the bullies of the self-described “pro-Israel community”, may oblige. But an alternative scenario is also possible. Barak is perfectly situated to privately point out to Hagel where judicious cuts in military support for Israel can best be made, without seriously jeopardizing Israel’s ability to defend itself. Such recommendations could provide Hagel with some much-needed political cover if and when the Obama administration surgically strikes at projects that are beneficial to Israel and dear to the hearts of numerous members of Congress but are — or ought to be — relatively low priority.

Barak also has no incentive at this point to keep any secrets about Netanyahu’s true intentions regarding Iran from the new Secretary of Defense. Although he had been vehement about not allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, Barak’s announced retirement from politics was viewed by some as a worrisome indicator that Israel would be edging closer to war with Iran after the election.

This author had the temerity to suggest back in December that Barak might be situating himself to “maintain his close ties with the Obama administration — and perhaps forge evens stronger ties — once he is unencumbered by his role as an Israeli politician.” During his visit to the Pentagon in December, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta awarded Barak the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service. If he plays his cards right, Barak might benefit in his post-political career by maintaining his close contacts within the US defense establishment.

Barak’s characteristic Cheshire-cat grin attests to his ability to continuously reinvent himself. The immediate upshot of the Hagel-Barak meeting will no doubt reiterate platitudes such as “all options are on the table,” that “Iran will not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons” and reaffirm the “unshakeable bond” between the US and Israel. The most interesting outcome of the meeting, however, probably won’t be publicized — at least not right away.

Photo: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Credit: DoD/Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo.

Ending a long and controversial battle, the U.S. Senate Tuesday voted 58-41 to confirm former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defence.

The confirmation, which followed a more-lopsided 71-27 vote to end a Republican-led filibuster against the decorated Vietnam War veteran, broke mainly along party lines, [...]]]> via IPS News

Ending a long and controversial battle, the U.S. Senate Tuesday voted 58-41 to confirm former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama’s new secretary of defence.

The confirmation, which followed a more-lopsided 71-27 vote to end a Republican-led filibuster against the decorated Vietnam War veteran, broke mainly along party lines, with four Republican senators joining the 52 Democrats and two independents in the chambre in voting to approve the nomination.

The vote marked a major defeat for hard-line neo-conservatives, notably the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, whose “Weekly Standard” magazine and website published a constant stream of charges against the former Nebraska senator, ranging from anti-Semitism to deep hostility toward Israel, since word that Hagel was Obama’s preferred candidate for the post in mid-December.

ECI and several other well-funded “astro-turf” groups tried first to pre-empt the nomination, which came in January, and then to derail it by promoting a filibuster by Republicans and persuading – albeit unsuccessfully — key Democratic senators considered susceptible to pressure by more-mainstream Israel lobby groups to defect.

In grueling eight-hour testimony late last month, as well as one-on-one meetings with senators, however, Hagel, who served in the Senate from 1997 to 2009, reassured doubters that he was both a strong supporter of Israel’s security and, despite a number of previous public statements suggesting that military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be grave mistake, he would indeed recommend such a course of action if all diplomatic efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme fell short.

In a statement issued after the vote, Kristol insisted that ECI was “proud” of its role during the confirmation battle, adding that, “We are heartened that that the overwhelming majority of senators from one of the major parties voted against confirming Mr. Hagel.”

Hagel will now join his fellow-Vietnam War veteran, Secretary of State John Kerry, as one of the three top national-security officials in the cabinet, along with Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, White House Chief of Staff and former deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, Vice President Joe Biden, as well as U.N. Amb. Susan Rice, as the president’s key foreign-policy advisers.

Yet to be confirmed is Obama’s choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Brennan, the top counter-terrorism official in the White House during most of Obama’s first term.

While Hagel is the only Republican among the top national-security officials, he is widely seen as generally sharing their worldview on key foreign-policy and defence issues – notably, the desirability of maintaining a “light military footprint”, especially in the Middle East; “engaging” actual and potential geo-political foes through diplomacy; using military power only as a last resort; and relying more on multilateral institutions, such as the U.N. and NATO, and regional actors, to address key crisis situations, sometimes derisively referred to by neo-conservatives and other hawks as “leading from behind”.

One basic tenet of their beliefs was expressed by former Pentagon chief Robert Gates two years ago when he told Army cadets: “Any future defence secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. (Douglas) MacCarthur so delicately put it.”

As Vietnam veterans who came to believe that the war in Indochina was a major strategic error – as well as a waste of U.S. blood and treasure – Hagel and Kerry are regarded as particularly sceptical of the effectiveness of military action and of “nation-building” and counter-insurgency strategy – a scepticism also shared by Biden, whose influence on foreign policy is seen as having risen over the past two years.

Biden’s top foreign-policy aide for many years, Tony Blinken, has now taken McDonough’s place as deputy national security adviser.

Indeed, in a column published over the weekend, foreign-policy insider par excellence, David Ignatius, warned that Obama’s second-term team is so unified in their general foreign-policy outlook that Obama “is perilously close to groupthink”.

While both Kerry, who hails from the liberal-international wing of the Democratic Party, and Hagel, who is close to the rapidly disappearing “realist” wing of the Republican Party (of which Gates was also a part), both voted in 2002 to give George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq, they did so with considerable reservations at the time and, within a year of the invasion, began criticising what Obama himself called a “dumb” war.

Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq war – as well as his neutrality in the 2008 race between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain – has been cited as a major reason why most Republicans opposed his nomination, although not to the extent of supporting an indefinite filibuster against it.

But most political analysts here believe most Republican senators would have gone along with the nomination – as is customary for most presidential cabinet appointees – had the neo-conservatives and their funders, as well as elements of the more-mainstream Israel lobby, not mounted such a vigorous and expensive effort to defeat him.

Unlike most members of Congress, for whom the influence of the Israel lobby looms very large, Hagel spoke out publicly about what he believed were Israel’s poor treatment of Palestinians, the urgent necessity of a two-state solution, the importance of engaging Hamas in a peace process, and the potentially catastrophic dangers of an Israeli or U.S. military attack on Iran.

In at least one interview, he also spoke out against the “intimidate(ing)” influence of what he called the “Jewish lobby” – a phrase for which he was later accused of anti-semitism, and for which he subsequently apologised. (A major component of the Israel lobby consists of evangelical Christians, a core Republican constituency.)

Indeed, during his grueling and less-than-impressive eight-hour confirmation hearing, Republicans focused their questioning almost exclusively on his views regarding Israel and Iran.

Indeed, “Israel” was mentioned 179 times (Iran 171) – more often than Iraq (30), Afghanistan (27), Russia (23), Palestine or Palestinian (22), Syria (18), North Korea (11), Pakistan (10), Egypt (9), China (5), NATO (5), Libya (2), Bahrain (2), Somalia (2), Al-Qaeda (2), and Mali, Jordan, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea (once each) combined.

The questioning was so Israel-centred that the popular satirical weekly television programme, Saturday Night Live, even devoted a skit broadcast over the web depicting Hagel’s Republican inquisitors competing to avow their devotion to the Jewish state.

But whether Hagel will indeed play a key role in determining U.S. policy toward Israel remains to be seen. For now, the much bigger challenge he faces is the implications of the so-called budget sequestration that appears certain to take effect Mar. 1 and as a result of which the Pentagon could face as much as 600 billion dollars in cuts to its budget over the next 10 years in addition to the almost-500 billion dollars in cuts that have already been mandated.

Ironically, the impact of the sequestration on the Pentagon’s budget is also seen as potentially disastrous to the neo-conservatives who opposed Hagel.

Given their strong conviction that Israeli security and global stability rests primarily on U.S. military power, they have spoken out strongly against growing Republican complacency about the effects of sequestration on the Pentagon, fearing that it heralds a resurgence of isolationist sentiment in the party. But instead of focusing primarily on rallying Republicans to compromise with Obama on the budget, they spent significantly more time and resources on defeating Hagel.

Photo: Senator Charles T. Hagel smiles with Senator John Warner, retired, (left) and Senator Sam Nunn, retired, (right). Credit: DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

via IPS News

Despite an appeal Thursday by 15 right-wing Republican senators for President Barack Obama to withdraw the nomination of Chuck Hagel as his next defence secretary, the former Republican senator from Nebraska appears virtually certain to be confirmed as Pentagon chief by the full Senate next week.

The fact [...]]]> by Jim Lobe

via IPS News

Despite an appeal Thursday by 15 right-wing Republican senators for President Barack Obama to withdraw the nomination of Chuck Hagel as his next defence secretary, the former Republican senator from Nebraska appears virtually certain to be confirmed as Pentagon chief by the full Senate next week.

The fact that his arch-foes – almost all of them from staunchly “red” U.S. states in the South and Rocky Mountain West – were able to get only 15 out of the 40 Republicans who used a filibuster threat to prevent a confirmation vote last week suggested that the anti-Hagel campaign, launched with a bang of anti-semitism accusations more than two months ago, is ending with more of a whimper.

Indeed, Thursday’s announcement by Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, a senior member of the crucial defence appropriations subcommittee, that he will vote to confirm Hagel delivered a major blow to his foes.

With two other Republican senators already pledged to vote “aye” and more than half a dozen other Republicans, including Sen. John McCain, who have promised not to delay a final vote any longer, it appears all but certain that Hagel will be confirmed with a healthy majority of as least 58 votes in the 100-seat chamber.

That effort, however, has so far come up short. Apart from a fraudulent rumour that he had once spoken before a non-existent “Friends of Hamas” organisation, the only “new” evidence they were able to find was that Hagel had once warned Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state” – something that at least two Israeli prime ministers have also recently warned about — if it did not settle with the Palestinians.

They also found that he may once have complained that the State Department sometimes acts as if it were an “adjunct of the Israeli foreign ministry”, an assessment shared by several former senior U.S. diplomats who have worked on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

While both statements were cited by neo-conservatives as proof that Hagel hated Israel, and even a couple of mainstream Jewish organisations – the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League – suggested such remarks bore further scrutiny, they didn’t get much traction.

In any event, they don’t appear to have had had their intended effect: to peel off one or two key pro-Israel – preferably Jewish — Democrats who have so far stuck with Obama’s choice despite their discomfort with Hagel’s Republican affiliation and his view that U.S. and Israeli interests are not always one and the same.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer has been a particular target of the neo-conservative campaign, but he re-affirmed his support for the decorated Vietnam veteran Wednesday, much to the disgust of William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog, and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, all of whom have played key roles in trying to rally opposition to the nomination.

In their letter to Obama, the 15 senators, who included the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, James Inhofe, as well as a senior party foreign-policy spokesman, Lindsay Graham, and rising stars Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (whose McCarthyesque interrogation of Hagel during his confirmation hearing drew rebukes from party elders, including McCain), argued that the likelihood that Hagel will only get a handful of Republican votes should disqualify him.

“It would be unprecedented for a Secretary of Defense to take office without the broad base of bipartisan support and confidence needed to serve effectively in this critical position,” they wrote. “…(I)n the history of this position, none has ever been confirmed with more than 11 opposing votes. The occupant of this critical office should be someone whose candidacy is neither controversial nor divisive.”

On more substantive issues, they complained that Hagel has “proclaimed the legitimacy of the current regime in Tehran, which has violently repressed its own citizens, rigged recent elections, provided material support for terrorism, and denied the Holocaust.

“Any sound strategy on Iran must be underpinned by the highly credible threat of U.S. military force (to attack Tehran’s nuclear facilities),” they argued. “If Senator Hagel becomes Secretary of Defense, the military option will have near zero credibility. This sends a dangerous message to the regime in Tehran, as it seeks to obtain the means necessary to harm both the United States and Israel.”

The letter’s focus on both Israel and the alleged threat posed to it by Iran – the same issues that overwhelmingly dominated Hagel’s confirmation hearing last month – reflected the degree to which defence of the Jewish state has become a litmus test for core Republican constituencies in the Rocky Mountain states and the so-called “Bible Belt” that stretches from Texas and Oklahoma to the southeastern Atlantic seaboard.

Christian Zionists, who play an out-sized role in Republican primary campaigns, are especially strong and politically engaged in these states.

Indeed, Rubio, who gave the official Republican reply to Obama’s State of the Union address last week, departed immediately afterward for a visit to Israel.

“Any Republican candidate wants to plant his flag in Israel, not just in Iowa and New Hampshire (early primary election states),” Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, told the Washington Times. “Christian conservatives are a big chunk of (Republican) primary voters in a large majority of states, and they care about Israel as much as Jewish Americans do.”

Indeed, Lindsay Graham, normally seen as a relative moderate in the party, has been particularly harsh in attacking Hagel, due reportedly in important part to pre-empt a challenge next year by a more right-wing candidate in his state of South Carolina.

Israel’s centrality for the red-state Republicans in the debate over Hagel is particularly remarkable given the extraordinarily strong support his nomination has received from virtually every veteran’s group in the country.

In a highly unusual statement last month, the traditionally hawkish, but officially non-partisan Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) called Hagel “uniquely qualified to lead the Department of Defense”. Veterans groups have historically been a key Republican constituency, especially in the South.

Former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who was himself badly wounded in World War II and has long been a favourite of the VFW and other veterans’ groups, used similar language in endorsing Hagel’s nomination here Thursday.

According to some analysts, the senators who have been most outspoken in opposing Hagel, especially those from Texas, Oklahoma, and other states with a disproportionate number of big military bases and defence-manufacturing facilities, may yet regret their stance, particularly in light of the anticipated defence cuts caused by the so-called sequestration.

“While Hagel had to play defense during the (confirmation) hearing, that will change when he gets to the Pentagon,” noted former senior Ronald Reagan defence official Lawrence Korb and Lauren Linde in an article on foreignpolicy.com this week.

“Based upon his past experiences in business, the non-profit world, and the Senate, he will be a take-charge leader, and one of his challenges will be reducing defense spending. And his choices could hurt the constituents of the very officials who have done the most to hurt him.”

Indeed, that may help to explain Shelby’s decision to vote for Hagel’s nomination, according to Joel Rubin, a Capitol Hill veteran at the Ploughshares Fund.

“Shelby seems to be making a very pragmatic choice about wanting to have a relationship with the new defense secretary in this era of tightening budgets – budgets that could also potentially affect projects back at home.”

Photo: Sen. Chuck Hagel addresses audience members at the nomination announcement for Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan (right) as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 7, 2013. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley)

by Farideh Farhi

During my childhood days in pre-revolutionary Iran, I played the game Telephone often. It began with one kid whispering a phrase to the person beside them. Each child then whispered the same phrase until it reached the last person, who revealed a phrase invariably quite different from the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Farideh Farhi

During my childhood days in pre-revolutionary Iran, I played the game Telephone often. It began with one kid whispering a phrase to the person beside them. Each child then whispered the same phrase until it reached the last person, who revealed a phrase invariably quite different from the original. We had good fun.

I thought about that game when I read Elliott Abrams’s piece about having Breakfast with the Supreme Leader. My curiosity naturally peaked at the thought of neoconservative extraordinaire Abrams having breakfast with Iran’s leader. Wouldn’t I want to be a fly on the wall for that conversation! But alas, no such event took place at all.

Abrams merely reported what Rafael Bardaji — former national security advisor to the Spanish Prime Minister — said at a joint meeting hosted by the Henry Jackson Society and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in London last week. According to Abrams, this is the story:

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, invited then-Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to breakfast while he was visiting Iran.  The Spanish official party decided to begin by asking the ayatollah a friendly or neutral question rather than a hostile or critical one. The idea was to get the meeting off on a better footing, so they began with a question about the complex government and religious power structure in Iran. Given all the official civil and religious bodies and positions and their various responsibilities, they asked him to describe what exactly is his job.  ‘My job’, the Supreme Leader replied, ‘is to set Israel on fire.’

Wow! Abrams claims this happened in 2001, but it should have been 2000, since Aznar visited Iran in October of that year (well before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran) and yet, we hear about this rather nasty stuff now? Abrams assures us that there was previous reporting of this event “elsewhere”. But “elsewhere” was merely May of 2012 when Mr. Aznar spoke to journalists and diplomats at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and said this:

Israel to him [Khamenei] was a kind of historical cancer and anomaly, a country … condemned to disappear. At some point he said very clearly, though softly as he spoke, that an open confrontation against the US and Israel was inevitable, and that he was working for Iran to prevail in such a confrontation. It was his duty as the ultimate stalwart of the Islamic global revolution.

And this:

Khamenei said Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution sought to rid the world of two evils, the US and Israel, “and to preserve unhurt the virtues of the religious regime of the ayatollahs,” according to Aznar. The existence of Israel and the US seriously threatened to pervert the religious society the Supreme Leader envisioned for Iran, and that is something he could not allow to happen, Aznar continued.

There is nothing about setting Israel on fire in this Times of Israel piece, though it’s still pretty damning. One doesn’t need private reference to know that Khamenei likes to use the cancerous tumor analogy for Israel. In fact, a couple of months ago he repeated it during a public speech. But describing “his job” as committed to the destruction of Israel to a European leader is pretty out there and Abrams wants us to accordingly think through “the likelihood of arriving at a good negotiated solution with Iran, and the possibility of persuading and pressuring the Supreme Leader to abandon his nuclear weapons program,” while “keeping this rare encounter with him by a Western democratic leader very much in mind.”

Still, I remained curious as to whether Aznar had spoken of this encounter before. And indeed, in 2006, according to Haaretz, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Aznar five years ago that “setting Israel on fire” was the first order of business on the Iranian agenda.

Haaretz chose to pursue the veracity of this rather inflammatory comment with Aznar’s aides, who apparently refused to provide the exact quote, but mentioned that Aznar had written about his meeting with Khamenei in the past:

“He received me politely,” Aznar wrote, “and at the beginning of the meeting he explained to me why Iran must declare war on Israel and the United States until they are completely destroyed. I made only one request of him: that he tell me the time of the planned attack.”

I am unable to find the source from which this quote is taken, but there is no prior reference to Aznar’s meeting with Khamenei and anything that was said between them prior to 2006.

As I mentioned above, Aznar did go to Iran in October 2000, and apparently had a lovely time, saying in a joint press conference with then president Mohammad Khatami that “fruitful” negotiations “on objectives pursued by Tehran and Madrid” were held. He appreciated “the initiative of Dialogue among Civilizations put forward by President Khatami” and discussions on “political, economic, cultural and scientific areas.” He said that progress had been made in relations and that he hoped they “will become even better.”

Aznar apparently appreciated his two-day visit to Iran (including his sightseeing trip to beautiful Isfahan) so much that he forgot all about the stuff Khamenei had told him for a good 6 years. Perhaps Ahmadinejad’s infamous words about Israel, which went viral in 2005, jolted his memory!

But going back to Abrams’ reporting of Aznar’s words, it’s interesting that the former somehow manages to avoid mentioning that even in the Times of Israel article he refers to, when Aznar was reportedly pressed by the audience, Aznar somewhat changed his tune:

Pressed by members of the audience to specify whether Khameini explicitly called for Israel’s destruction, Aznar said the Iranian leader told him it was necessary to eliminate the threat that Israeli [sic] poses. “And that means obviously the elimination of Israel,” said Aznar. “If Israel is alive the threat survives. They’re trying to eliminate the threat. The elimination of the threat means Israel must be eliminated.”

So Khamenei told him that it was necessary to eliminate the threat that Israel poses. And this, in Aznar’s telling, must have meant eliminating Israel “since the elimination of threat means Israel must be eliminated.”

But wait, did Khamenei really use the word eliminate? Affirmative is the answer, Aznar noting “however that he spoke to the Iranian leader through an interpreter.”

And there you have it! After 12 years, a whisper that possibly began with a translation about the need to eliminate the Israeli threat, with the help of Aznar, his aides and advisors, and now Abrams, turns into “Khamenei said it is my job to set Israel on fire.”

Some people apparently never outgrow the game of Telephone.

by Marsha B. Cohen

The hearings to confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense seem to have been obsessively focused on Israel, and on the threat Iran poses to Israel, with little interest on the part of most senators on Hagel’s views of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea. Several senators seemed [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Marsha B. Cohen

The hearings to confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense seem to have been obsessively focused on Israel, and on the threat Iran poses to Israel, with little interest on the part of most senators on Hagel’s views of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea. Several senators seemed clueless that many of the candidate’s views, expressed in speeches, votes, etc. were the purview of the Secretary of State, not the Secretary of Defense.

Why the obsession with Israel? The quick and easy answer  is AIPAC, which claims the title of “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby” on every page of its website and in all of its publicity. But there’s more to pro-Israel lobbying than AIPAC. Unless you live in New Jersey or Rockland County, New York, and read the New Jersey Jewish Standard – or are a member of the House or Senate — you’ve probably never even heard of NORPAC.

NORPAC is a proudly bipartisan, relatively small and somewhat obscure Political Action Committee (PAC) which has been supporting pro-Israel congressional candidates from both parties for nearly two decades that has joined ranks with right-wing, rabidly partisan Republican neoconservative groups such as the Emergency Committee for Israel in opposition to Hagel’s nomination.

But there’s something truly, totally and uniquely bizarre about NORPAC’s anti-Hagel stance. In order to fully appreciate its monumental cognitive dissonance, it’s necessary to know a bit more about NORPAC, AIPAC and the internal politics of the “pro-Israel community.”

AIPAC

AIPAC, which boasts 100,000 members, receives most of the credit — and blame — for the legislation agenda of “the Israel Lobby.” Despite the widespread misperception — based largely upon the last three letters of the acronym — AIPAC isn’t a Political Action Committee. Contributions to AIPAC go toward the organization’s lobbying activities on behalf of its legislative agenda, not to specific candidates. AIPAC’s Press Office “assists the media with frequently updated briefs on important issues affecting the Middle East and United States/Israel relations” (i.e. churning out statements, memos and tweets that reduce the messy complexities of Middle East politics to straightforward AIPAC talking points) and getting college students of all faiths and backgrounds “politically engaged.”

AIPAC provides seminars in Washington, DC, and trips to Israel for members of Congress and even has its own spinoff think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which regularly participates in AIPAC briefings. It anticipates that its 2013 Annual Policy Conference in Washington, DC, (on March 3-5) will be “the largest gathering of the pro-Israel movement,” to which “thousands of participants come from all 50 states to take part in ‘three of the most important days affecting Israel’s future.’”

But there are things that AIPAC does not do, which NORPAC does, fitting it neatly into the “pro-Israel lobbying” matrix. As an organization, AIPAC doesn’t endorse political candidates, and it doesn’t give them any money. AIPAC also “does not take positions on presidential nominations,” according to spokesman Marshall Whitman. Eli Lake of the Daily Beast reports that AIPAC is staying officially neutral on the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, much to the outraged chagrin of Breitbart’s Joel Pollak.

AIPAC was badly burned and its reputation tarnished in 1992 when its president, David Steiner, resigned after an an audiotape of a secretly recorded telephone conversation surfaced shortly before the presidential election. A businessman named Harry Katz had phoned Steiner to ask for recommendations on how to apportion the $150,000 that Katz wanted to give to pro-Israel political candidates. During the course of the conversation, Steiner boasted about the extent of his influence with the Bill Clinton campaign and the role he would have in shaping the new administration’s cabinet choices if Clinton was elected.

Steiner’s bragging and subsequent downfall wasn’t the first disaster to hit AIPAC that year, as Robert Friedman recounted in detail in “The Wobbly Lobby” for the Washington Post. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir asked the Bush administration for $10 billion for absorbing immigrants and Bush said he wouldn’t approve it unless the Israelis stopped building settlements in the occupied territories, AIPAC officials assured Shamir that AIPAC had the votes in Congress to override a presidential veto. Shamir’s party lost the Israeli election in June, and by August, Israel’s first native born Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel’s Labor Party had been elected and crossed swords with AIPAC. Adding to AIPAC’s woes that August was an expose by the Village Voice revealing that AIPAC’s Policy Analysis division (previously known as “Opposition Research”) had been monitoring, harassing and discrediting anyone expressing what the organization deemed as “anti-Israel” or “pro-Arab” views. Michael Lewis (the son of historian Bernard Lewis) who headed — and still heads — AIPAC’s Policy Analysis office, wrote in an internal memo,”There is no question that we exert a policy impact, but working behind the scenes and taking care not to leave fingerprints, that impact is not always traceable to us.”

NORPAC

The North Jersey PAC (NORPAC) was founded in 1992 by Rabbi Menachem Genack, the rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox Union’s kashrut division, just as AIPAC’s political fortunes seemed headed into a tailspin from which many feared (and others dared hope) it might not recover. By 1993, AIPAC was refocusing its attention on lobbying Congress, leaving the presidency to Israel’s Prime Minister, and building an infrastructure for “grass roots lobbying.”

Although the two organizations have remained separate and distinct, there’s been an overlap of talking points, priorities and modus operandi. NORPAC’s leaders describe it as a “single issue” organization, dedicated exclusively to promulgating the passage of Israel-related legislation, of which anti-Iran sanctions have become an integral part. NORPAC has an annual Mission to Washington each May that brings busloads of activists — well over a thousand participants in recent years — to Washington, DC, to meet personally with members of Congress, armed with NORPAC’s talking points and an agenda of legislative priorities on behalf of the “pro-Israel community.”

NORPAC hosts fundraisers for candidates of both parties, and, unlike AIPAC, doesn’t restrict itself to members of Congress. It also provides AIPAC members, and anyone else with money to give to “pro-Israel” candidates, with a long list of members of the House and Senate whose records are considered kosher from a pro-Israel perspective, or, in NORPAC’s words, “who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security, and survival of Israel.” NORPAC doesn’t endorse challengers, preferring to show appreciation to sitting members of Congress for their pro-Israel votes.

AIPAC’s ex-president David Steiner was among the very earliest donors to funnel a portion of his campaign contributions through NORPAC, according to the organization’s FTC filing in 1993. The Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website shows Steiner contributing $40,000 to political candidates through NORPAC between 1995 and 2007 — not quite 10% of the political largesse he’s donated over the past two decades. Several presidents of AIPAC, including its current president, Michael Kassen, have channeled a portion of their personal political contributions through NORPAC as well.

Here’s how it works: donors give up to the maximum individual contribution of $2,500 to a political candidate through NORPAC, which aggregates it with other donations that are earmarked for that candidate. A single larger and therefore more significant check, channeled through a pro-Israel organization, is then sent to the candidate, with expectations and an agenda.

In terms of dollars expended, NORPAC is generally bipartisan, although more often than not the numbers tilt in favor of Democrats. Nevertheless, the single biggest recipient, who remained on NORPAC’s approved list for the 2012 election cycle even though he was defeated in the Republican primary, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), received a $20,000 contribution from NORPAC in the 2012 election cycle, more than any other candidate from either party. (NORPAC has been Lugar’s top donor over the past five years, from whom he received $40,000 between 2007-2012.) Typical NORPAC contributions average around $3,000 for House members and $5,000 for senators, with $10,000 nearly always being the most given.

Chuck Hagel

Which brings us back to Chuck Hagel…

While AIPAC as an organization has not weighed in on Hagel, a former Executive Director, Morris Amitay, was among the first to sound the anti-Hagel alarm bells even before his nomination was official. Numerous anti-Hagel smears have been sourced to AIPAC’s former spokesman, Josh Block. But AIPAC itself? No fingerprints.

In contrast, NORPAC has been vocal, even shrill, in its opposition to the nomination, launching an Action Alert against Hagel on its website:

Dear NORPAC Members

NORPAC is opposing the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense. This position represents the single most important Cabinet and Administrative position other than the President. Senator Hagel’s history on opposing action on the threat of Iran can be best described as a fringe position. His refusal to acknowledge the danger of a Nuclear Armed Iran to America and all it’s allies, and his consistent opposition to every legislative effort to contain Iran is in contrast to almost every other member of the Senate. We are concerned that his judgment on these matters is either severely flawed or affected by prejudices. We are asking you to call the legislative leaders outlined at the bottom of this email to ask them to oppose this nomination.

Beneath this call to arms is a letter, to be sent to the NORPAC member’s senators, urging them to oppose Hagel’s nomination with a rehashing of the six-week-old talking points churned out by neoconservatives since mid-December. These same talking points are echoed in a recent op-ed by NORPAC’s president, Ben Chouake, in the New Jersey Jewish Standard. The veracity of these assertions, most of which have been made by William Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, and Emergency Committee ads, among others, have been scrutinized, called into question and dismissed as only “half true,” “mostly false,” and “overblown” most recently by PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, the Associated Press, and J Street – the much maligned liberal Zionist organization (whose support for Hagel has probably contributed to the opposition to Hagel emanating from right-wing pro-Israel organizations).

But here’s the kicker: NORPAC’s Action Alert letter and Chouake’s op-ed fault Hagel for most of the same positions taken by Richard Lugar, who, as noted above, has not only been endorsed by NORPAC but received more funding in 2012 than any other single candidate.  For example, the letter and op-ed state:

In October 2000, when Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA) launched a terror war against Israel after rejecting without counter-offer a plan for Palestinian statehood accepted by Israel, Hagel was one of only four senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.

Richard Lugar didn’t sign that letter either.

In July 2001, Hagel was in a minority of only two senators to vote against extending the original Iran-Libya sanctions bill, designed to deny both regimes revenues that would assist their weapons of mass destruction programs.

The other “no” vote? Richard Lugar.

In April 2002, Hagel was one of only 10 senators to oppose banning the import to America of Iraqi oil until Iraq stopped compensating the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

So was Lugar.

In 2006, at the outbreak of the Lebanon war, Hagel argued against giving Israel the time to break Hezbollah, urging instead an immediate ceasefire. The following month, he was one of only 12 Senators who refused to formally call upon the European Union to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

Another one of the 12 was Lugar.

In 2007, Hagel declined to support the bipartisan Iran Counter Proliferation Act aimed at targeting governments and businesses that assist Iran’s nuclear program.

In 2004, a New York Sun op-ed railed against the almost identical foreign policy positions of Lugar and Hagel, which it dubbed  as “Lugar-Hagelism,” in an effort to defame John Kerry for sharing them. Yet in Chouake’s op-ed, headlined as “Senator Hagel’s Divisive Nomination,” he writes that several of Obama’s cabinet appointments “make sense,” including his choice of John Kerry as Secretary of State:

Senator John Kerry, set to replace Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, is the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has built tremendous crossroads with his Republican neighbors across the aisle by working hand in hand with Ranking Republican Member Senator Richard Lugar on important issues.

The absurdity of vilifying Hagel for taking the same positions as Lugar, who received more cash from NORPAC than any other candidate in the last election cycle, has apparently eluded NORPAC’s members. So too, apparently, does the fact that in adding its voice to the vitriol over the Hagel nomination, by echoing accusations emanating from the Jewish Republican right-wing, NORPAC is contributing to both the “divisiveness” Chouake bemoans and the demise of the last vestiges of bipartisanship that the organization made its hallmark for two decades. An observation in an obituary to Lugar’s political career by Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last May pointed out:

Israel advocates and GOP insiders explained that Lugar represented a breed of lawmaker who pro-Israel groups see as valuable to their cause and disappearing: One who reaches across the aisle.

“Lugar wasn’t actively pro-Israel, but he wasn’t anti either,” said Mike Kraft, a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1970s and 1980s who now is a consultant on counterterrorism. “But generally losing a good, balanced, thoughtful guy on foreign policy is a real tragedy,” said Kraft, who worked for a number of pro-Israel lawmakers. “It weakens the American political system.”

It’s interesting that NORPAC-supported candidates were among the more reasoned and moderate members of the Armed Services Committee. The more vicious of Hagel’s critics didn’t make the list. Perhaps they are hoping, by their professed fealty to Israel, that they might be on that list for the next election cycle?

Photo: Former Sen. Chuck Hagel answers a question at his confirmation hearing in the Senate Armed Service Committee at the Dirksen Senate Building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 31, 2013. DoD photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo.