The always excellent National Journal has published a fairly lengthy profile, entitled “Betting Man,” of Freedom’s Watch sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson in its May 10 edition, which you can access here. Particularly interesting is the opening about last October’s private gathering of the “‘best and the brightest’ conservative voices talking about the terrorism threats posed by radical Islam and Iran,” including David Horowitz, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Clifford May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, all of whose groups, the Journal notes, have all benefited from Adelson’s largesse. The story brings in the Adelson’s Netanyahu-Likud and AIPAC connections, although it doesn’t break any new ground on those fronts. Much of the article is devoted to Adelson’s ties with and interest in China and his broader business ambitions in Asia.

A propos the latter, it appears that the president of the Las Vegas Sands, William Weidner, operates as a kind of alter ego for Adelson, not just in his business affairs, but in his philanthropy and politics, as well. During the Suen trial I wrote about last week, Weidner reportedly explained to the court why he was unable to identify a Chinese official whom he and Adelson allegedly dealt with in obtaining the Macau concession. “All Chinese look alike,” he said. You can read more about Weidner’s testimony here.

Gary Sick, who served as a top Gulf expert in the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, has written a brief essay for the Gulf/2000 project (which he directs at Columbia University) on the continuity of Washington’s approach to Iran from the Clinton through the Bush administrations and right into the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, as most recently enunciated by her declaration that she would “obliterate” Iran if it considered a nuclear attack on Israel some time in the next ten years. Normally, contributions to the project are made on an “off-the-record” basis, but he has given permission for it to published, which I have done in full because of the historical context and insight it provides at a critical moment in U.S.-Iranian relations. At the end of the essay, he indicates his preference — and the reasons for it — in this year’s presidential election at the end. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Wolfowitz’s admission that he and others were “clueless on counterinsurgency” at the Hudson Institute’s symposium on Douglas Feith’s “War and Decision” last week was certainly the lede as Eli Lake reported it in the New York Sun reported last week, but overlooked were the remarks on the same panel by Dan Senor who demolished — albeit very politely — just about everything Feith and Wolfowitz had to say.

I’m never been a fan of Senor — he has been a spokesman for Freedom’s Watch — and he was, of course, spokesman and a top adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief L. Paul (”Jerry”) Bremer to whom he obviously retains some sense of loyalty. But his responses to the most basic point made by Feith in his book and Wolfowitz during the symposium — that things went bad when the U.S. declared an “occupation” instead of turning over the government to and empowering an Iraqi authority dominated by “externals” like Ahmed Chalabi and other members of the so-called “London Group” — were clear and irrefutable (at least by Feith and Wolfowitz) and also served to point up once again how completely ignorant the administration’s leading hawks were both about Iraqi society and the likely impact on it of the U.S. invasion. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it possible that Freedom’s Watch has decided to focus on Republican Congressional campaigns, rather than the presidential campaign, because its principal funder, Sheldon Adelson, is worried that John McCain’s relative hawkishness toward China may be bad for his casino business in Macau? Adelson, who, according to the New York Times, has contributed virtually all of the $30 million Freedom’s Watch had spent on the current election cycle as of four weeks ago, has been blamed for much of the managerial chaos that in March prompted an exodus of senior staffers from the group, is known as a prickly character, so the group’s apparent decision to stay on the sidelines in the presidential race, at least for now, probably has nothing to do with future relations with Beijing.

Still, two articles forwarded by my former colleague here, Eli Clifton, certainly suggest that Adelson, whom Fortune magazine recently listed as the third wealthiest person in the U.S., has a lot invested in good relations with the Chinese Communist leadership, especially in regard to the Beijing Olympics. Read the rest of this entry »

Diane Zeleny is not exactly a household name, but she was last in the news in December 2006 when the Washington Post’s Al Kamen reported that her appointment to a top job under then-Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes as the head of the “Public Diplomacy Rapid Response” office in Brussels had been overturned by the State Department’s director general, George Staples, who found that normal personnel processes had been manipulated to ensure that she got the job. Staples made that determination after the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) formally protested her selection, calling it a “pre-cooked deal” that had violated personnel rules, in part by making it impossible for foreign service officers to apply for the post. Zeleny was described as a “talented …mid-level civil servant” by Kamen who noted that the appointment was particularly sensitive at a time when “career diplomats were seething over jumps by several other lower-level officers with political connections into top jobs that the career folks thought should have gone to senior officers.”

In Zeleny’s case, the political connection was through her husband, AEI senior fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, although, in an earlier article, Kamen had noted that Zeleny worked in Brussels with Victoria Nuland, wife of Robert Kagan, a Gerecht “pal.” In any event, Zeleny landed softly, and not too far from Brussels which she finally left last summer. Indeed, she was hired last September by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) president and AEI alumnus Jeffrey Gedmin to work as his director of Communications in Prague (which has really become the neo-con capital of Europe, particularly since last June’s Conference on Democracy and Security (about which I have written here, here, and here, among other places.) Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t miss the latest collection of advice — mostly from warhawks — in the New York Times “Week in Review’ section today which once again features what the Times calls “nine experts on military affairs” (in the March 16 edition, they were described “experts on military and foreign affairs.”) three of whom are American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellows Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka, and Richard Perle. Consistent with his previous contribution (about which I wrote here), Perle once again shows himself to be an exemplar of chutzpah when he argues that it’s “time to cut the cord” and let Iraqis figure out for themselves how to sort out their problems without the benefit of more U.S. advice. Here’s the money quote:

“Stop! Iraqis know far better than we what makes sense for them. When administration officials and members of Congress, with their diplomatic, intelligence and political advisers — whose knowledge of Iraq is often recent, shallow and wrong — hector and lecture the Iraqis who are struggling to find a way forward, I wonder whether we have learned anything from our past mistakes.” [Emphasis added.] Read the rest of this entry »

The recent escalation of the Pentagon’s rhetoric against Iran and its alleged “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, put it, has created new concerns about a possible military conflict before the end of the Bush administration, concerns fanned, as well, by the president’s own assertion during his press conference Tuesday that this week’s briefing on the Syrian reactor destroyed by Israel last September was designed in part to “send a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing a nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East.”

While the saber-rattling, particularly from Pentagon chief Robert Gates and Mullen, who until recently had consistently downplayed prospects for war with Iran, was indeed disturbing, less-noticed was a follow-up statement by the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Geoff Morrell, on Wednesday. “I just want to be abundantly clear that there are no new directives, there are no new plans in the works, there is no new effort to prepare for a possible war with Iran,” he said. While that naturally has to be taken with a grain of salt, it’s also worth noting that ret. Adm. Bob Inman, a former deputy CIA director who is close to Gates, told reporters in a teleconference sponsored by Public Agenda this week that he was quite confident that Bush administration would maintain its second-term emphasis on diplomacy to its end, and that conflict with any country before then was very unlikely.

He did add this one caveat, however: “My only worry would be an [Iranian Revolutionary Guard attack] on a ship in the Gulf, and I think that could turn things upside down pretty quickly.” I believe that observation reflects Gates’ concerns as well and is another reminder of how he and ret. Adm. Fallon had pushed the White House unsuccessfully for authorization to pursue an “incidents-at-sea” agreement with Tehran precisely to prevent an incident from getting out of hand. In that connection, Christopher Dickey’s recent article in Newsweek about the dangers of such a conflict is particularly timely.

If that is the most likely scenario at this point for an eventual U.S.-Iranian conflict, you can imagine how easy it would be for a third party with an interest in such a war actually taking place precipitating an incident that could set off the desired escalation. A quite logical candidate is al-Qaeda which, according to Bruce Reidel, a former top CIA and NSC analyst on the Near East and South Asia, would be ecstatic over a U.S.-Iran war. He published an important article, “Al Qaeda Strikes Back,” on this theme a year ago in ‘Foreign Affairs’ in which he argued that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were almost certainly trying to figure out to how to “[trigger] an all-out war between the United States and Iran,” and, of course, al-Qaeda itself has become increasingly shrill in its denunciations of Tehran of late. Nor is al-Qaeda the only player in the region with such an interest….

While the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has been coping with the abrupt exodus in February of most of the Democratic members of its Board of Advisers (leaving only Sen. Joseph Lieberman, James Woolsey and Zell Miller as its only “Democratic” fig leaves), its Republican loyalties have become ever clearer. Virtually unnoticed in that regard, however, was a remarkable quote by FDD’s president, Clifford May, that appeared in a Washington Post article April 21, about how far behind the GOP is behind in raising money for the presidential campaign. “‘The folks on the right may have a rude awakening when they see how sophisticated the infrastructure is that’s been built up on the left,’ said Clifford May, who heads the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which could figure into the Republican effort [to catch up to the Democrats]. “May, who said he has discussed the imbalance with Rove, added: ‘We’re the little leagues compared to them.’”

The story goes on to recount the management problems recently endured by the Sheldon Adelson-fueled Freedom’s Watch, which many had assumed would be the McCain campaign’s principal 527 backer and its apparent decision,at least for now, to focus on Congressional seats instead. But May’s language, particularly his use of “we” in reference to Republicans should draw renewed scrutiny to FDD’s frantic legal maneuvers to retain its tax-exempt status. May, who used to be the Republican National Committee’s communications director and is vice chair of the decidedly Likudist Republican Jewish Coalition, also seemed to be inviting Republican donors to fund his new Defense of Democracies Action Fund, the FDD lobbying spin-off created after its Democratic advisers jumped ship. The Post’s suggestion that FDD “could figure into the Republican effort” to close the funding gap with Democratic groups presumably came from May himself.

Just to add a little to last month’s post, “Is the Pentagon Policy Shop Funding Likudist Fronts?”, on Devon Gaffney Cross’ London-based Policy Forum for International Security Affairs, Jeffrey Gedmin’s (?) Case for Freedom, and Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.org, all of which appear to have as a common denominator — and a common, Israel-based IP address — interlocking directorates, their participation at last June’s Prague Conference on Democracy and Security Conference (about which I’ve written twice, here and here) and OneJerusalem’s director, a New York-based attorney named Allen Roth, who, it turns out, is a long-time aide and adviser to Ronald Lauder. It was Lauder, a major supporter of former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chief Binyamin Netanyahu, who reportedly gave $1 million to OneJerusalem to launch a campaign against President Bush’s Annapolis conference last fall, apparently because he feared that renewed, U.S.-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians could lead to a divided Jerusalem. It was also in his capacity as president of the World Jewish Congress, a post to which he was elected in 2007, that Lauder appealed in a controversial open letter to the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, not to do anything that would compromise Israeli sovereignty over the entire city. Read the rest of this entry »

For those interested in more about J Street, the new lobby group I wrote about Tuesday, I highly recommend an oped published in Forward.com by the new group’s director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, entitled ‘For Israel’s Sake, Moderate American Jews Must Find Their Voice.’