Payvand news
July 28, 2006
The Israel Lobby and US – Iran Foreign Policy
By Akbar Nourozi
This article is an abstract from an academic paper (
http://tinyurl.com/pb87h) by the professors
John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard
University which has been turned into an essay by Michael Massing. The article
shed some light on how American Israel Public Affair Committee (AIPAC) tries to
influence the government foreign policies and public opinion in United States.
Here a section of the article that deasl with the activities related to Iran has
been presented. It is obvious that what happened in Iraq and is now happening in
Lebanon and what is planed for Iran is part of a grand vision of Israel on how
the political map of Middle East should look like. Time would tell to
what degree a long lasting peace can be achieved without addressing the root
causes of instabilities and lack of a fair settlement.
Any discussion of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's
activities must begin with the policy conference it sponsors each year in
Washington, a combination of trade show, party convention and Hollywood
extravaganza that seems designed to show AIPAC’s national power. On Sunday,
March 5, 2006, the start of this year’s gathering, 5000 pro-Israel activities
from across the U.S. crowded into the Washington Convention Centee. Over the
next three days, they listened to speeches, sat in panels, chatted at reception
and attended a book signing by Nathan Sharansky.
The conference ended the next day with a speech by Dick Cheney. The
vice-president used the occasion to deliver administration’s sternest warning
yet to the government of Iran, promising that it would face "meaningful
consequences" if it continued to pursue nuclear technology. "We join other
nations in sending that regime a clear message: We will not allow Iran to
have a nuclear weapon", Cheney declared to loud applause. For the AIPAC
faithful, Cheney ranks as a true hero.
AIPAC claims to represent most of the Jewish community. Its executive
committee has a couple of hundred members representing a wide spectrum of
American Jewish opinion, from the dovish American for Peace Now to the military
right wing Zionist Organization of America.
Four times a year this group meets to decide AIPAC policy. The executive
committee has little power. Rather, power rests with 50-odd-memebrs board of
directors, which is selected not according to how well they represent AIPAC’s
members but according to how much money they give and raise. Within the board
itself, power is concentrated in an extremely rich subgroup, known as the
"minyan club". And, within that group, four members are dominant: Robert Asher,
a retired lighting fixtures dealer in Chicago; Edward Levy, a building supplies
executive in Detroit; Mayer "Bubba" Mitchell, a construction materials dealer in
Mobile, Alabama; and Larry Weinberg, a real estate developer in Los Angeles (and
a former owner of the Portland Trail Blazers). Asher, Levy and Mitchell are
loyal Republicans; Weinberg is a Scoop Jackson Democrat who has moved rightward
over the years.
The "Gang of Four", as these men are known, do
share the general interest of a large part of the Jewish community, they seek to
keep Israel strong, the Palestinians weak and stop the U.S. from exerting
pressure on Israel.
AIPAC’s defenders like to argue that its success is explained by its
ability to exploit the organizing opportunities available in democratic America.
To some extent, this is true. AIPAC has a formidable network of supporter
throughout the U.S. Its 100,000 members – up 60% from five years ago – are
guided by AIPAC's nine regional offices, its 10 satellite offices and its
100-person plus Washington staff, a highly professional group that includes
lobbyists, researchers, analysts, organizers and publicists, backed by an
enormous $47 million annual budget.
AIPAC’s staff is famous on Capitol Hill for its skill in gathering
up-to-the minute information on Middle Eastern affairs and working it up into
neatly digestible and carefully slanted policy packages, on which many
congressional staffers have come to rely.
Such an account, however, overlooks a key element in AIPAC itself is
not a political action committee. Rather, by assessing voting records and public
statements, it provides information to such committees, which donate money to
candidates; AIPAC helps them to decide who Israel’s friends are according to
AIPAC's criteria.
The Centre for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that analyses
political contributions, list a total of 36 pro-Israel PACs, which together
contributed $3.14 million to candidates in the 2004 election cycle. Pro-Israel
donors give many millions more. Over the past five years, for instance, Robert
Asher, together with his various relatives (a common device used to maximize
contributions) has donated $148, 000, mostly in sums of $1000 of $2000 to
individual candidates.
What AIPAC wants can be summed up very succinctly: a powerful Israel
free to occupy the territory it chooses; enfeebled Palestinians; and
unquestioning support for Israel by the U.S. AIPAC is skeptical of negotiations
and peace accords, along with the efforts by Israeli doves, the Palestinians and
Americans to promote them.
But if Israel did manage to withdraw behind a security fence and
allowed such a state to emerge, what would AIPAC have left to do? Plenty. While
pursing its traditional concerns about Israel, the lobby in recent years has
been steadily expanding its mission, becoming a strong force in the extended
network of national security groups and leaders who have used September 11, the
war on terrorism and Israel as a basis for seeking a more aggressive U.S. stance
in the world.
This is especially apparent in AIPAC’s work on Iran. Since the mid
1990s, AIPAC has been devoting much of its energy to warning against Iran’s
development of nuclear weapons, to denouncing the mullahs in Tehran, and to
seeking their overthrow.
Mearsheimer and Walt place much emphasis on the lobby’s support for war in
Iraq, but AIPAC’s work on Iran has had far more impact in Washington (assisted
as it is by the aggressive rhetoric and actions of President Ahmadinejad). The
network with which AIPAC is associated, it should be said, does not constitute
any sort of conspiracy or cabal; its various parts and members work
independently and often take positions at odds with one another as they agitate
for a more muscular U.S. pressure in the Middle East and beyond.
One key part of the network is the Jewish-Washington Institute for Near
East Policy (WINEP). AIPAC helped to create this think tank in 1985, with Martin
Indyk, AIPAC’s research director, becoming its first director.
Today, the Washington Institute is fully independent of AIPAC, and there is
some diversity among its fellows (Dennis Ross is one). Overall though, its
policies mirror AIPAC’s. Its executive director, Robert Satloff, is a
neoconservative with very hawkish views on the Middle East. Its deputy director
of research, Patrick Clawson (
http://tinyurl.com/hd3xc), has been a
leading of regime change in Iran and of a U.S. confrontation with Tehran over
its nuclear program. (AIPAC features him as an expert on its website).
Members of the Washington Institute’s board of advisers
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile) include Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Mort Zuckerman and Max Kampelman; its single most important source
of funding is Larry Weinberg, one of AIPAC’s Gang of four, and his wife
Barbi.
Kampelman, Kirkpatrick, Perle and Woolsey also sit
on the advisory board of Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA),
which, as its website notes, seeks "to inform the American defense and foreign
community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering
democratic interests in the Mediterranean and Middle East".
To describe its program more bluntly, JINSA
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1508) seeks to educate gentile members of the Pentagon in the
strategic value of Israel to the U.S. About half its 56 board members are U.S.
generals and admirals. Other members include Stephen Solarz, who while a New
York Congressman worked tirelessly on Israel’s behalf; Eric Cantor, the only
Jewish Republican in the House, who in 2002 was named the chief deputy majority
whip – part of republican program to lure pro-Israel dollars from the Democrats;
and Stephan Bryen, a neoconservative who served under Perle in Ronald Reagan’s
Pentagon and who is now a defense contractor.
Richard Perle. In addition to sitting on boards of both the Washington
Institute and JINSA, is a resident fellow at the Jewish-American Enterprise
Institute AEI). So are Joshua Muravichik, a neocon who’s also an adjunct scholar
at the Washington Institute; Michael Rubin, an up-and-coming neocon who worked
in the in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) before becoming a
political advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and Michael
"P2" Ledeen, who helped to set up JINSA and who has spent the several years
seeking official backing for regime change in Iran. Together with Morris Amitay,
a former executive director of AIPAC, Ledeen is an important force at the CDI or
the Coalition for Democracy in Iran
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alliance_for_Democracy_in_Iran), another advocate for overthrowing the Iranian government.
Joshua Muravchik, Raymond Tanter and James Woolsey are all listed as
supporters on that CDI's website.
The nasty campaign waged against John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt has itself provided an excellent example of the bullying
tactics used by the lobby and its supporters. The wide attention their argument
has received shows that, in this case, those efforts have not entirely
succeeded. Despite many objections, their essay has performed a very useful
service in forcing into the open a subject that has for too long remained
taboo.