Month: October 2008

After Georgetown University decided against renewing his contract, a brief stay as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and his efforts to get a post at the Brookings Institution came to naught, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have found a new home at the Hudson Institute, another predominantly neo-conservative “think tank” that tends to lie in the shadow of the much more media-prominent American Enterprise Institute (AEI). According to Hudson’s latest News & Review, Feith, whose self-serving memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism pretty much bombed with the few credible critics who reviewed it, will be the Institute’s Director for National Security Strategies.

Hudson, of course, was the first refuge of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby after his 2005 indictment for perjury, but he apparently left after his conviction (and despite Bush’s commutation), and I’ve completely lost track of him now. (Does anyone know what he’s doing?)

Feith will join other leading Likudist lights at Hudson, including Meyrav Wurmser (wife of former Cheney aide David Wurmser), who heads the Institute’s Middle East Studies department; Hillel Fradkin; Laurent Murawiec; Anne Bayefsky; Norman Podhoretz (not in residence); and Nina Shea, among others. It’s interesting to note that the two Wurmsers, as well as Feith and another Hudson Senior Fellow, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., made up half of the eight members of the task force sponsored by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (IASPS) that produced the 1996 “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that many analysts believe helped plant the seed for the Iraq invasion eight years later. (That alone suggests how dangerous it might be to put Feith in charge of developing any kinds of “strategies,” as Hudson seems to have done.) The other task force members included IASPS’s highly eccentric (check its website) president, Robert Loewenberg, James Colbert, then-Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) researcher Jonathan Torop; and the nominal chairman, Richard Perle, from whom not much has been heard lately — another sign that, with the exception of Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and the Kagan boys, neo-cons have been lying rather low during the election campaign.

Feith’s former boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, has also not been heard from recently, which in many ways is very strange, given that his last public post was president of the World Bank and his official at AEI (where he has been a Visiting Scholar since his ignominious resignation 18 months ago) stresses his interest in development and trade. You would think that, given the current financial crisis and its potentially disastrous ripple effects on emerging economies and poor countries (for which he has expressed particular sympathy in the past), he would not have been shy about offering his advice about how to protect them. But, apart from his advocacy of business and defense ties with Taiwan (he’s chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council), he seems to have largely disappeared from the public sphere. In the realm of economic development and aid, Hudson has acquired a far more credible figure in the person of former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, who joined the Institute at the same time as Feith.

“Patriotism is not pinning a flag pin to one lapel to free up both hands, so you can tear up the U.S. Constitution.”
-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in The Warning.

The new production company/website Truthtopower.tv has just released its powerful first film, The Warning, featuring exclusive interviews with five recently-published authors Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Crimes Against Nature), Naomi Wolf (The End of America), Chris Hedges (American Fascists), Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and Joe Conason (It Can Happen Here). Director/Writer/Producer J.P. Sottile wisely steers clear of cinematic fireworks, keeping a tight focus on the writers’ frightening observations about the subversion and erosion of American Democracy in recent years. Privatized warfare, illegal torture and wiretapping, corporate and religious influence, the ballooning power of the Executive and more are exposed as the film warns just how slippery a slope the U.S. is sliding down. The Warning is an excellent example of the kind of patriotic dissent the country needs right now.
Find out more and get your own copy here.

Check the preview below:

Obsession, the Islamophobic video that has been distributed via newspaper inserts to some 28 million households in key swing states this fall, is getting some overdue negative attention from the mainstream media at last. The Washington Post carried an article about the video Sunday that made it clear that the mass distribution was intended to influence the election in the Republicans’ favor. And Monday’s Atlantic online blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg, entitled “The Jewish Extremists Behind Obsession” was particularly notable.

He casts a remarkably negative light on Aish HaTorah, the Israeli organization whose U.S.-based officials, in Goldberg’s words, “are up to their chins in this project.” (I think IPS was the first news source to point out the connection between Aish and Obsession in an article published back in March, 2007, although more has since come out, including a recent IPS update in September which noted other Israeli connections to the video and its distribution.)

I especially appreciated Goldberg’s identification of the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick as one of his “favorite hysterics” — I posted on one of her fulminations last June — and as those behind the project as representing the “lunatic fringe.” In addition to Glick, who also heads the Middle East program at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, Goldberg would presumably apply that description to Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who played prominent roles in the video. It was Goldberg, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), who wrote that passionate indictment, “Israel’s ‘America Problem’” in the Washington Post’s Outlook section last May of the major national Jewish organizations, particularly the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC, for confusing “pro-Israel” with being pro-settler in their advocacy efforts.

Of course, the producer/distributor of Obsession was the still-mysterious Clarion Fund, which has just released a sequel, The Third Jihad about which my colleague Eli Clifton posted earlier this month. The new video, originally intended for distribution before next week’s election, according to the Post’s article, suffered production delays (hence, the distribution of Obsession instead).

While I haven’t yet seen it, I understand that it features commentary by Clifford May of the Likudnik Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and, more prominently, Princeton historian and neo-con icon Bernard Lewis, who, according to various accounts, helped persuade Dick Cheney, among others, that the Iraq invasion would be a very good thing for all concerned. It was also Lewis who on August 8, 2006, predicted on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would very possibly launch an attack on Israel exactly two weeks later, on August 22, to mark “the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This [date],” he went on, “might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.” Goldberg’s words about “hysterics” and “the lunatic fringe” come to mind.

Nonetheless, it was just six months later that, with Cheney in attendance, Lewis delivered the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) annual Irving Kristol Lecture — in which he warned that militant Islam was launching its third attempt to conquer Europe and the West through “terror and migration.” And it was presumably after that that he sat down for a long interview with the Islamophobic makers of Obsession and The Third Jihad.

Incidentally, for a penetrating analysis of Obsession, read a review by David Shasha featured on Richard Silverstein’s blog at the Tikun Olam site.