The neo-consevative factor

From AxisofLogic.com
Iran/Persia"The neo-conservative factor" By Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Dec 19, 2004, 23:16
What makes things easier for the neo-conservative-Likudnik coterie is that it is operating within a pre-existent "anti-Iranian" context."
In the absence of official inter-state relations between Iran and Israel on the one side and Iran and the United States on the other, there is no avoiding the fact that much of what is happening between the countries is influenced by the activities of "sub-state" institutional actors who have filled the political vacuum left behind by the governments. One side effect of this constellation is that the American foreign policy-making process vis-a-vis Iran is heavily penetrated by neo-conservative functionaries and activists with close links to Jewish lobbying organizations and the Likud party in Israel. Let me frame the review of the evidence for this statement with two concrete questions: How pervasive is the neo-conservative-Likudnik nexus? How much leverage does it have on the power elites in Washington?
One newly established link in the chain of neo-conservative think tanks tied to Jewish lobbying organizations is the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI). Founded in 2002 by Michael Ledeen and Morris Amitay, who used to be executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the organization aims to foster political support for regime change in Iran. Members include Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), itself an invention of AIPAC, Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and Rob Sohani who has close personal and political links to the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. Ledeen, Amitay and Sobhani joined forces at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in a seminar entitled "The Future of Iran", co-sponsored by the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. All three have connections with the media agency Benador Associates that manages both their op-ed placem! ents and television appearances. Eleana Benador represents Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Martin Kramer and other neo-conservatives tied to the Bush administration.
Influence on the levers of power in Washington is not only secured through lobbying efforts. There is also persuasive evidence for covert activity. In August 2004, it was revealed that classified documents including a draft National Security Presidential Directive devised in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith was shared with AIPAC and Israeli officials. The document set out a rather more aggressive US policy toward Iran and was leaked by Lawrence Franklin, an "expert" on Iran who was recruited to Feith's office from the Defense Intelligence Agency. An FBI counterintelligence operation revealed that the same Franklin met repeatedly with Naor Gilon, the head of the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and other officials and activists tied to the Israeli state and Jewish lobbying organizations, primarily AIPAC.
Feith himself has longstanding links to Zionist pressure groups. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), for example, honored him and his father for their service to Israel and the Jewish people in 1997. He is also cofounder of "One Jerusalem", a Jerusalem-based organization whose ultimate goal is securing "a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel." A second cofounder of this organization is David Steinmann who is chairman of another neo-conservative institution with close ties to Israel's Likud party, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He is also a board member of the CSP and chairman of the executive committee of the Middle East Forum. Two other cofounders of "One Jerusalem" are directly tied to the Likud party: Dore Gold is a top advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Natan Sharansky is Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs.
What makes things easier for the neo-conservative-Likudnik coterie is that it is operating within a pre-existent "anti-Iranian" context. Most analysts would agree that the image of Iran as a country in the grip of endemic revolutionary hysteria has been produced, reified and internalized by large segments of the American and Israeli public for quite some time now. That perspective has it that post-revolutionary Iran is monolithic, ruled by sword-swinging mullahs who are not to be trusted. It is a view openly articulated by many. Richard Perle, Harold Rhode, Michael Ledeen, David Frum and other activists and decision-makers tied to the neoconservative-Likudnik nexus are among them. For Iran, it is typically argued, there can be no reprieve. "When it is in our power and interest," pontificate Perle and Frum in their latest book An End to Evil, "we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker".
Given that the neo-conservative-Likudnik consensus has acquired all the qualities of a strategic, transnational alliance, it would be naive to assume that its mobile architects have not the means and determination to channel their campaigns into the power centers of Washington's foreign policy elite. Both the US and Israel are receptive to this kind of manipulation, because producing the image of Iran as a rogue actor serves the important function to legitimate their policies in West Asia (demonizing Israel and the United States is equally expedient for the Iranian state, of course). Yet, there is no escaping the fact that all three actors share a "common fate," that regional stability cannot be secured without a pragmatic consensus among them. This inevitable independence demands opening up communication channels for future dialogue. Reaching that stage is dependent on a) the willingness of the United States to engage Iran diplomatically and b) the ability of the Islamic Re! public to legitimate detente with both Israel and the United States on the level of ideological theorizing.-
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/12064/

Evildoers, here we come

The road to Damascus is the key node in the Bush/neo-con roadmap for a newMiddle East.
by Pepe Escobar

Washington is faced with two options. It could restore the draft - provoking aminor social earthquake in the US. Or it could develop - and deploy - tacticalnuclear weapons, mini-nukes. Fallujah - flattened by "conventional" means - wasjust a test. On the road to Damascus, the road to Tehran, the road to Riyadh,the neo-cons would be much more tempted to go nuclear. http://207.44.245.159/article7493.htm===

Iranian manchurian

Iranian Manchurian
December 16, 2004
So now the Iraqi defense minister is the latest to say that Abdel Aziz Hakim and Ayatollah Sistani’s Shiite fascist party is a Trojan Horse for Iran.
The statement from Defense Minister Hazim Shalaan is a stunner, and the fact that he is a chief actor in the puppet U.S. interim government doesn’t take away from the fundamental truth of what he had to say.
Most of today’s papers cover Shalaan’s remarks, but without the prominence they deserve.
The Sistani-backed Shiite party, organized by Hussein Shahristani, a Sistani acolyte, is the “Iranian list,” says Shalaan. “Iran is the big link in terrorism in Iraq. … I want to warn you that Iran is the most dangerous enemy to Iraq and to all Arabs. Shahristani went to Iran after 1991 and worked on building an Iranian nuclear reactor. We will not let him come back and become an Iraqi prime minister.” He warned that Iran and Sistani want “turbaned clerics to rule.”
He is exactly right—and the neoconservatives backing the rise of Shiite fascism in Iraq are to blame.
Incredibly, SCIRI—the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdel Aziz Hakim, a semi-ayatollah—is leading the Sistani list, despite its official backing from Iran. And Al Dawa (The Call) is another Shiite fascist party. Its members actually blew up the American embassy in Kuwait in 1983, with Iranian help, and carried out hundreds of assassinations and terrorist acts in Iraq between 1969 and 2003, also backed by Iran. These are the parties that President Bush wants to rule Iraq? Their leaders ought to be arrested for espionage and put on trial for terrorism by the Iraqi authorities. Hopefully, Shalaan will do just that, but Prime Minister Iyad Allawi isn’t there yet.
Unraveling all this is too complicated for a blog entry. But the important thing to understand is that the forces in Iran supporting Sistani, Shahristani, Hakim and Al Dawa are a faction of Iranians amenable to collaboration with the United States, Israel and the neocons. They are still (of course) Islamic revolutionaries, but slightly more moderate than the hardest of hardliners in Iran. They are the faction of illusory moderates that Bill Casey, Ollie North and Michael Ledeen courted during Iran-Contra in the mid-1980s, and I believe that Hashemi Rafsanjani—who is now contemplating a run for the presidency of Iran—is one of them. As I reported in yesterday’s entry (see below), this is a Big Mistake by the neocons, who seem to relish making Big Mistakes.Thursday 11:30 AM

Neocons in Black Turbans
December 15, 2004
Not many neoconservatives are descended from the Prophet Mohammed. But you wouldn’t know it from the way many neocons—and their puppet in the White House—are backing the Iraqi Shiites.
The black turbans, of course, are the Shiites (mostly clergy) who make the spurious claim that they are descended in a direct bloodline from the prophet himself. Now, unless they’ve hired the genealogical whizzes from the Mormons, it’s not likely that they can prove any such thing. But among the credulous faithful, it’s a big deal. One of those who makes that claim is Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Iranian-connected “Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.” You wouldn’t think that anyone whose party calls for “Islamic revolution” would be invited to the White House, but Hakim has cozied up with President Bush himself in the Oval Office. Hakim also loves to snuggle with Iranian ayatollahs, and his paramilitary praetorian guard, the Badr Brigades, were armed and trained since the 1980s by Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard.
Lots to say on this today.
The New York Times has a he-said, she-said page one article on Hakim today, raising some concerns about Hakim and then knocking them down. It’s a horrible article, full of contradictions and with little to none investigative content. (Where, oh where, have the investigative reporters gone?) One glaring contradiction, unremarked on, is that it quotes Ghazi Yawar, the president of Iraq, warning that more than a million people from Iran have crossed the border to vote in the election and than Iranian money and agents are being mobilized to tilt the vote. It then reports: “But American and Iraqi officials say that many of the migrants crossing the largely unmonitored border are Iraqi Shiite families that fled Saddam Hussein’s repression.” I would point out that Yawar, the president, is not so sanguine, and he counts as an Iraqi official.
In the Washington Times today, Arnaud de Borchgrave, conservative but no neocon, says that Jordanian intelligence reports that three million Iranians have entered Iraq since 2003.
The New York Times piece goes on to tell readers to relax—that Shiites in Iraq don’t like Iran, that they don’t believe clerics should run the government, and that there are bitter rivalries among them. (Indeed, Hakim’s brother was blown up last year in Iraq.) All true. Yet there is no question that a great Shiite fundamentalist power is arising in Iran, Iraq and surrounding areas, and it’s all happening with American support.
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute takes all this on in a piece called: “Will Iran Win the Iraq War?” The heart of Gerecht’s piece is this: That a Shiite power in Iraq will undermine the clergy’s rule in Iran, and is part of a needed Bush administration offensive against the hard-liners in Teheran. Quote: “Such a government supported by Iraq’s Shiite establishment is a dagger aimed at Teheran’s clerical dictatorship.”
This theory, now official doctrine for the neocons, is at the heart of their Iran strategy. It counts as second Big Mistake of the Iraq war. Big Mistake No. 1 was the neocon belief that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms—instead, they welcomed us with arms. Big Mistake No. 2, now taking shape, is that Iraq’s Shiites are Good Guys who will lead a pro-American Iraq against Iran’s “clerical dictatorship.” I believe that they really believe this. But the reality is that in a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the hard-liners and the people with guns (i.e., the Badr Brigades) will take over, and they will make common cause with some of the clergy in Iran. It will be a dagger all right, but one aimed at Saudi Arabia’s Sunni state. Of course, that too is part of the long-term Israeli-neocon strategy, to overthrow the Saudi king. It’s a regional regime-change strategy (one that includes Syria of course) and it has been central to their whole Middle East policy for a decade. It is also a fantasy, with a thousand possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. Big Mistake No. 1 led to the Iraqi insurgency. Big Mistake No. 2 could lead to a Middle East inflamed by Islamic revolution in spades.Wednesday 10:39 AM

Bolton's War
December 14, 2004
It might be a long way away—I’d guess 2006—but the war-on-Iran hawks in the Bush administration, led by John Bolton of the State Department, are rattling sabers. The Los Angeles Times has a good piece describing the escalating rhetoric around Iran, and it starts with an anecdote about Bolton sabotaging talks with Europe over Iran:
Top diplomats from the United States and its closest allies gathered this fall in Washington to hammer out a common approach to Iran's nuclear ambitions. But the mood quickly soured.Dispensing with the usual diplomatic niceties, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton simply read aloud a U.S. position paper. In it, the administration refused to back European negotiations with Iran and instead insisted that Tehran be dragged before the United Nations Security Council to condemn it for concealing a nuclear weapons program.Irked, the Europeans demanded to know what good it would do to bring Iran before the U.N. when Washington knew it could not muster enough Security Council votes even to slap Tehran's wrist.Bolton referred them to another U.S. position paper."He was not willing to discuss anything," said one stunned participant.
Meanwhile, the neocons are waiting for the “end of the day”:
Other officials said the United States and its allies have many options short of military action with which to isolate and punish a government that they believe persists in trying to develop nuclear weapons."At the end of the day we may have to do it," said another senior official, referring to military action. "We're not at the end of the day yet."Tuesday 10:12 AM

War on Iran
December 13, 2004
Amid all the talk about the supposed crisis in Iran, I haven’t heard anyone say what the legal basis would be for an attack on Iran. Is there any? Is there an international lawyer in the house?
My guess is: No. The invasion of Iraq was the de facto implementation of the Bush administration’s preventive/pre-emptive war policy. But the neocons cooked up a legal justification, based on Iraq’s supposed violations of UN Security Council resolutions. (I personally interviewed the general counsel of the U.S. NSC about this, and listened in amazement as he spun the tale of how spurious Iraqi violations meant that the United States could invade Iraq in defiance of international law.)
Is this why the neocons are so hot to get the Iran nuclear issue to the UN? Usually they attack the UN lustily, but now they are pushing the issue there. Is it because they are seeking some vaguely worded UN resolution that they can use to invade or bomb Iran? As far as I can tell, Iran has every right in the world to develop nuclear weapons, since last time I checked it was a sovereign nation. We can be mad about it, but I don’t there is the slightest legal justification for an attack.
Of course, that doesn’t stop Bush and the denizens of Neocon World. Here’s the entire text of a UPI release today:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Department reportedly held simulations to determine the effectiveness of an attack on Iran, the Middle East Newsline reported SundayThe Atlantic Monthly revealed the Pentagon held simulations of a U.S. military strike on Iranian bases and nuclear facilities. The war games also included a ground invasion.
A silly piece in the New Republic—a cover story no less—by Franklin Foer, purports to be an account of how the neocons are divided about how to deal with Iran. Maybe they haven’t settled on a specific plan yet (though the outlines are pretty clear), but Foer goes on and on about some supposed big division among them. Perhaps Foer ought to interview the neocons that run the New Republic first.
As the Times reported over the weekend, the United States (led by neocon-in-chief at the State Department John Bolton) and Europe are still at loggerheads over Iran, with the United States still trying to undermine the deal that Europe is trying to consolidate with Teheran. The article included this stunner :
U.S. officials say, however, they are suspicious of any partial deals that do not encompass an end to Iran’s support of insurgents in Iran and to groups that carry out attacks on Israeli citizens, including Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and militant factions within the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Huh? So it’s not enough to get Iran’s agreement to slow down its nuclear program, but Washington wants Iran to change its whole foreign policy and to bail out the United States’ bungled war in Iraq? Including a poison pill like this is obviously designed to scuttle an agreement.Monday 10:43 AM
http://www.tompaine.com/archives/the_dreyfuss_report.php

Bolting on Iran

Bolting on Iran
Thu Dec 16,10:34 AM ET
Ari Berman
A reliance on dubious intelligence and contempt for international diplomacy has marked the Bush Administration's policy (or lack thereof) on Iran to date. And, in certain neoconservative circles, calls for military aggression are slowly surfacing.

"The clock is ticking for Iran," writes Michael Rubin, a former advisor to the Office of Special Plans--the outfit responsible for much of the US's faulty pre-war intelligence on Iraq (news - web sites). "Bush may have no choice but to order a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities." Neocon academics and policy advisors such as Reuel Marc Gerecht, Orde Kittrie and Norman Podhoretz have also called for decisive action.
Washington seems responsive. On a recent visit to the region, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith--Rumsfeld's number three man--told the Jerusalem Post that even the nuclear strike option remains on the table.
The de facto leader of the right's hawkish philosophy on Iran is John Bolton, a longtime hard-liner and current Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms called his protege, "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, or what the Bible describes as the final battle between good and evil."
Under Bolton's watch, North Korea (news - web sites) rapidly accelerated its nuclear weapons production (building as many as six new nukes), Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan sold nuclear secrets on the black market, and Iran may be closer to developing the bomb than ever before. Apparently, Bolton takes issue with the "Arms Control" part of his job title.
In recent meetings with the Europeans--who have taken the lead in pushing for a negotiated settlement with Iran--Bolton read a US position paper criticizing negotiations and calling on the UN Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the Islamic Republic. When the shocked Europeans inquired as to why Bolton wanted to engage the Security Council when he knew the US lacked votes and popular support, Bolton simply read another prepared US position paper. "He was not willing to discuss anything," one participant told the Los Angeles Times. (Asked about the possibility of military action at a recent conference at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs--a key neocon think tank--Bolton replied, "No options are off the table," before smiling broadly, The New Republic's Franklin Foer reports.)
In addition to becoming the Administration's bullying point-man on Iran, Bolton is frequently named as the possible second-in-command for Condi Rice's State Department. As the LA Times reported, a hawkish #2 at State could prompt a massive purge of moderate dissenters, modeled on Porter Goss's recent strong-arming at the CIA (news - web sites), or even the disastrous "de-Baathification" process in Iraq.
In a week in which Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the likes of Paul Bremer and George Tenet, a Bolton promotion would be the latest example of incompetence rewarded.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/thenation/20041216/cm_thenation/132075_1

Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran

Jim Lobe WASHINGTON -

When The Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl Rove, President George W Bush's closest advisor, regularly consults for advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international affairs analyst. "The two met after Bush's election," the Post reported cheerfully, quoting Ledeen about Rove's request that "any time you have a good idea, tell me". "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric," noted the newspaper. "When I saw that, I couldn't believe it," said one retired senior diplomat. "But then again, with this administration, it seemed frighteningly plausible." Michael A Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works closely with the better-known former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has been a fixture of Washington's neo-conservative community for more than 20 years. But he is now out front, in a public campaign for the United States to confront Iran, warning that Tehran will cause Washington problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that "the mullahs are determined to obliterate Israel". "We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network," he wrote in Monday's Post. "Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists." Along with Morris Amitay, a former top lobbyist for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Ledeen has already co-founded a new group, called the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), which is pressing Congress to approve a pending bill that would, among other things, provide some US$50 million in aid to both exile groups and opposition forces in Iran. To Ledeen, whose own contacts with the mullahs in the Iran-Contra affair 15 years ago remain the source of some mystery, Iran is "the mother of modern terrorism". And terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence, which in turn enabled him to expose Billy Carter's dealings with the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya to the great satisfaction of Republicans, who were revving up their campaign against Billy's brother, then president Jimmy Carter. Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections - including alleged ties to the P-2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s - have long been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" advisor to the new secretary of state, Al Haig. Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world's key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East. He was a heavy promoter of the thesis that it was the KGB that was behind the 1981 attempted assassination by Turkish right-winger, Mehmet Ali Agca, of Pope John Paul II, a view he continues to expound today and which also helps explain his contempt for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose analysts never accepted the "Bulgarian Connection", as it was called. In the mid-1980s, when Ledeen was working for the National Security Council, he tangled with the CIA again over his efforts with Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of US hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, in the opening stages of what would become the Iran-Contra affair. But Ghorbanifar did not come through. Despite Ledeen's assessment of the middleman as "one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known", he flunked four lie detector tests administered by the CIA, which had long warned that the Iranian "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance". Undaunted and untouched by the Iran-Contra investigation, Ledeen recorded his experience in Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair, one of more than 10 books he has written on US foreign policy, de Tocqueville, Machiavelli and terrorism, the latest of which is titled The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win. Ledeen has been no less prolific in his organizational work, although, besides AEI - where he works with fellow foreign policy neo-cons Perle, former United Nations ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Joshua Muravchik and Reuel Marc Gerecht - his main institutional forum over the past 25 years has been the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA), an activist group that promotes a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel. He has also served on the board of the US Committee for a Free Lebanon and has taken an organizing role in CDI. His co-founder there, Amitay, also works for JINSA. He is also close to key figures in the administration, particularly Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, whose pro-Likud politics he largely shares; Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff, I Lewis Libby; and Elliott Abrams, the director for the Near East on the National Security Council. To that list can now apparently be added Rove, who is as close to Bush as it is possible to get. Throughout his career, Ledeen has insisted that war and violence are integral parts of human nature and derided the notion that peace can be negotiated between two nations. He was a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process. "I don't know of a case in history where peace has been accomplished in any way other than one side winning a war [and] imposing terms on the other side," he said two years ago. He also has expressed little faith in traditional US allies, notably in "Old Europe", which he spent much of the 1980s attacking for being insufficiently anti-Soviet. As Washington moved toward war in Iraq, for example, he even questioned whether France and Germany were in league with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. "The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States," he wrote, suggesting three weeks later, as the US offensive stalled on its way to Baghdad, that France and Germany be treated as "strategic enemies". For Ledeen, Iraq was only the beginning of the broader struggle against the "terror masters". "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he told an interviewer in March. "Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia are the big four, and then there's Libya." "You can't solve all problems I grant that," he told the BBC. "I mean, I wrote a book about Machiavelli, and I know the struggle against evil is going to go forever."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html