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AIPAC Probe intensifies
JTA News
FBI agents searched AIPAC’s headquarters here Wednesday, seizing files associated with two senior staffers who were interviewed in August amid allegations that a classified Pentagon document was leaked and passed on to Israel.
The agents also served subpoenas on four other senior staffers to appear before a grand jury later this month. The four were Howard Kohr, the group’s executive director; Richard Fishman, the managing director; Renee Rothstein, the communications director; and Raphael Danziger, the research director.
Though some AIPAC officials and lay leaders in past months sought to portray the investigation as dying down, sources told JTA that federal investigators have interviewed several former AIPAC employees in recent weeks.
This had indeed disappeared from the news completely, and it is interesting to see it popping up again. Any of you have any additional news on the topic? Any expectations on where this may go? Any chance in hell to lead to a real discussion of US-Israeli policies?
Rant away!
Creating a U.S. Policy of Constructive Disengagement in the Middle East, by Leon Hadar of The Cato Institute (www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=985&full=1). Published Dec. 29, 1989, and instructive as ever – even more thought-provoking in light of events of the past 15 years.
…For several months an “iron triangle” consisting of prominent American journalists, the “peace process” partisans in the Bush administration, and their allies–including Middle East specialists in various interest groups and think tanks–have been outlining a scenario that most pundits and insiders now accept as a given. According to that scenario, the intifada–the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip–is the first stage of a process that will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state headed by the “kinder and gentler” Palestine Liberation Organization.
The implicit message is that the administration should elevate the search for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the top of its foreign policy agenda. Toward that end, it should press Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, negotiate with the PLO, and reach an agreement that might provide for the creation of a Palestinian state.[1]
The only members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who seem to have resisted that argument are the neo-conservatives. Some of them regard the advocacy of an independent Palestinian state as part of a liberal conspiracy; others attribute it to naive do-goodism or pure anti-Semitism. Such a proposal, the neoconservatives claim, would be a Munich-like betrayal whose effect would be to weaken and eventually destroy the state of Israel.[2]
The neoconservative prescription is more of the same policy that the United States has pursued since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Although neoconservatives may seem to advocate a hands-off policy toward Arab-Israeli issues, they do not contemplate a reduction in U.S. economic and military aid to Israel, which now totals more than $3 billion a year. Indeed, because they consider Jerusalem a strategic asset in Washington’s campaign against Moscow-sponsored international terrorism, they would strengthen the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
The United States, argue the neoconservatives, should regard Israel as its only real military and diplomatic ally in the Middle East and should therefore elevate its relationship with that country to the level of its alliances with Western Europe and Japan. Such critics view the intifada as nothing more than a devious attempt by the PLO, supposedly a Soviet surrogate, to manipulate the American media and weaken the public’s support for Israel.
There may appear to be an unbridgeable conflict between the peace process partisans, who insist that the United States should play a diplomatic role in ending the intifada, and their Commentary-based adversaries, who advocate U.S. support for an Israeli suppression of the uprising. In reality, however, they are rival intellectual twins whose shared assumptions have influenced U.S. policy toward the Middle East for four decades.[3]
[…]
Ironically, the strategic alliance between Israel and the United States has weakened Israel’s position in the Middle East as well as America’s. At the end of the Reagan presidency Israel found itself totally dependent on the United States politically, militarily, and economically. Likewise, Washington’s dominance gives Israel little room to maneuver in the diplomatic arena. It has an unstable domestic economy and is increasingly unable to compete in the international market. Finally, Israel has been rent by deep internal political divisions as a result of its invasion of Lebanon and its response to the intifada and faces an unprecedented challenge to its diplomatic sovereignty as Washington begins an open dialogue with the PLO.
“Israel’s major problem after 42 years of independence is that the intifada is hurting America’s regional interests,” which Jerusalem was expected to secure, maintained a prominent Israeli columnist in the daily Ha’aretz.[9] The intifada, he argued, is threatening Jordan’s pro-American regime and weakening the pro-American elements in Cairo and Riyadh. In short, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza is serving as a catalyst for radical changes throughout the Middle East. If the intifada escalates, the United States might eventually find itself in the center of a new Middle Eastern war in which the Soviets are also involved. Such a war could entail the use of chemical and even nuclear weapons.
Dramatic changes in the international arena, including the political and economic reforms in the Soviet Union, the rise of Japan and other East Asian nations as economic powers, and the planned political and economic integration of Western Europe, have led to a major reevaluation of America’s foreign policy agenda. But that reevaluation has not encompassed America’s policy toward the Middle East– especially its relationship with Israel. Washington should undertake such a reassessment and should focus on four crucial questions.
The Limits of America’s Influence
The first question that should be considered is whether the United States, or any outside actor, for that matter, has the means and the will to produce a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.S. policymakers must determine whether the potential benefits of America’s efforts to oversee the peace process are worth the political, economic, and military costs.
An analysis of those issues should begin with the realization that the Middle East is probably the most internationalist, or what political scientists call “penetrated,” system in the world. Numerous national, regional, and extraregional political actors combine and divide in shifting patterns of alliances. The diplomacy of the region is characterized by a mishmash of local and global issues.
As L. Carl Brown observed, “The politics of a thoroughly penetrated system is not adequately explained–even at the local level–without reference to the influence of the intrusive outside system.”[10] Yet an outside actor cannot always control the politics of such a system and frequently becomes involved in issues that have nothing to do with its original interest in the region. A major power’s ability to impose policies on local actors or exclude other major powers is limited. Even a superpower sometimes becomes the hostage of local powers.
The political elites of both the Arab world and Israel use outside powers, including the United States, to advance their domestic and regional interests. Most of the Middle Eastern states lack stable, legitimate political regimes, economic structures capable of sustaining their bottomless budgets, or both. It is largely external, especially American, support that allows the political elites of those states to perpetuate their control.
[…]
Posted by: Pat | Dec 5 2004 22:35 utc | 13
Something shocking (and good) that could make the world (esp. the middle east) more stable, imo, would be for the United States, Israel, Pakistan, India, Korea, Iran, Russia, and whereever else to agree to nuclear disarmament…negotiated by third parties.
I realize this has a tissue’s chance in hell, but it would change the tenor of current conflict and would give peacemaking inspectors more importance than bellicose politicians as the world’s people, in the majority it would seem to me, want a reduction in the threats of attacks on nations around the world.
Nations would have to start by changing their rhetoric…and so, right there we know this is nearly impossible to achieve while things exist as they do, since each plays to the security fears of its base to hold its power.
Yet, the idea that nations could freeze their nuclear development was unthinkable until it began to happen earlier, too, so maybe there is a possibility. Since so many govts, like Musharref’s, are unstable, wouldn’t it be in the long-term interests of most govts to remove the threat of nukes in the hands of extremist fundies, whether they’re American of Pakistani?
I wonder if such a scenario might occur if the U.S. does have a severe economic meltdown? but that would also have to coincide with some scandal that pushed the neocons out of power and allowed a more moderate republican (I do not think a democrat could do this in the current climate), ala Nixon, to negotiate.
Or maybe such a meltdown would bring the Buchanan faction, with its populism, forward. Not saying that’s necessarily a good thing overall, but I wonder if it’s the lesser of two evils. Buchanan could and would make the case for isolationism, which could be a cover for the U.S. extracating itself from military involvement in places in the world that give bin Laden a grievance list.
And the plan of withdrawal would put other govts on alert that they had to institute reforms to deal with their own demographic problems…Israel, Saudi Arabia, and on and on.
Maybe if an economic meltdown occurs near the midterm elections, the right wingers will suffer in Congress, for a start, making it possible to bring charges against the current executive branch.
This relates to Israel by way of the U.S. fundies’ absolute support for the most radical extremist settler version of Israel. Buchanan does traffic in some anti-semitism, but I think most Americans are more willing to scapegoat Muslims at this time. Maybe Buchanan-ites would have to create a coalition with republican foreign policy realists to wrest control from the neocons.
Michelle Malkin is writing about Internment, fer crying out loud, she doesn’t mean Jewish academics. But if there is a large-scale attack in the U.S., I think people will call for some sort of expulsion or something other, because of their fears.
If the American people begin to glom the diaster that is Iraq, right wingers will no doubt try to blame liberals who undermined the troops by not supporting an invasion, and the “liberal media” for showing pictures of carnage. Covering their butts, imo, is one reason why the media is so complicit now. Don’t think they’d be able to get away with internment talk, beyond the real fringe, on that one, but such an event would definitely feed the polarization here.
I never thought I could make a case for Buchanan, and I’m certainly not saying I support him, but in the current impasse…
…does anyone want to snap me out of this moment? I’m scaring myself.
Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 6 2004 15:15 utc | 21
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