New Conservative Campaign For War on Terrorism

Jim Lobe, AlterNet

March 12, 2002

At a Tuesday gathering of the National Press Club, members of the new Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT) declared their intention to "take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing."

The newly-formed organization is headed by a half a dozen right-wing luminaries, including its chairman, the former Secretary of Education and drug czar William Bennett. AVOT is a "project" of Empower America, which Bennett co-directs with former Republican vice presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, and former U.N. Ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a major architect of the Reagan administration's more violent escapades in the Third World. While Bennett not known for his foreign policy expertise, he has never hesitated to attach himself to the more bellicose positions of the Republican Party. Two senior advisers to Bennett include two other prominent neo-conservatives: former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director R. James Woolsey; and former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney.

Gaffney is the president of the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy (CSP) which has long led the inside-the-Beltway campaign for Star Wars. Its board of advisers consists of a who's who of retired right-wing policymakers and defense analysts, along with top defence industry executives. Past members if the advisory board include top Pentagon officials in the Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, as well as the arch-unilateralist Undersecretary of state for arms control and international security John Bolton, top national security council staff, including Elliott Abrams and Peter Rodman, and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Gaffney, known as a no-holds-barred infighter in Capital politics, recently attacked Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in an article titled "Defending Deception" published in the National Review Online late last month for promising not to use disinformation in response to the controversy over the presumably now-defunct Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). His other controversial views include a 1999 campaign to persuade the government and the public that two long-term leases taken out on ports at either end of the Panama Canal by Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa was a Chinese plot to take it over.

Gaffney was the most strident of the speakers at the National Press Club Tuesday, urging skepticism about all of Washington's Arab allies in the war on terror and accusing the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt of using their control over their countries' media in ways that "create problems" for the larger effort. He warned that criticism of the administration"s conduct of the war could be "interpreted in such a way as to hurt national resolve...(and) embolden the enemy."

AVOT is being funded initially primarily by Lawrence Kadish, a real estate investor in New York and Florida and chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), who has given the party some $532,000, making him one of the Republican's largest individual contributors. The RJC, which has tried to build links between the Republican Party, including its Christian Right component, and American Jews, has long supported a hard-line approach to negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. It strongly supported the construction by the right-wing Likud government of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of the controversial Har Homa settlement in East Jerusalem. It also has urged successive U.S. administrations and lawmakers to move Washington's embassy

in Israel to Jerusalem which it insists must be the undivided capital of Israel.

AVOT's self-declared aim is to counter both internal and external threats to the nation. A full-page advertisement carried in the Sunday New York Times over the weekend pointed to radical Islam as "an enemy no less dangerous and no less determined than the twin menaces of fascism and communism we faced in the 20th century." Former CIA director Woolsey appeared to expand that definition somewhat Tuesday when he lumped Iraq's Ba'ath Party with the "angry ends" of Sunni and Shia Islam as the enemy which Washington faces. "We are at war with an ideology," he said, appearing to suggest that that there were no essential differences between the three groups he mentioned.

Bennett, Gaffney, and Woolsey are all veteran members of a neo-conservative network of groups with overlapping boards of directors that have long championed right-wing governments in Israel and, among other things, urged strong U.S. action against both Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Islamic government in Iran, as well as Palestine Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Both Gaffney and Bennett, for example, were two of about three dozen mainly neo-conservative signers of an open letter sent to Bush in the name of the "Project for a New American Century" nine days after the Sep 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It called not only for the destruction of Osama bin Laden"s Al Qaeda network, but also for extending the war to Iraq, and possibly to Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestine Authority unless they ceased their alleged support of terrorist groups opposed to Israel.

Woolsey, who reportedly declined to sign the letter due to qualms about its not-so-subtle attack on Secretary of State Colin Powell, was sent shortly afterwards as a member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, which is chaired by another top neo-conservative, Richard Perle, to Britain to gather evidence linking Iraq to the Sep 11 attacks. While the evidence he collected apparently satisfied him, intelligence analysts at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) found it woefully lacking. Nonetheless, Woolsey has become one of the most visible commentators in the media in favour of extending the war there.

Like the others, Woolsey is closely associated with a pro-Likud position on the Middle East and sits on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA), a hawkish pro-Likud group. On Tuesday, he told reporters he agreed with those who are "calling the war we're in now World War IV."

Perle, who, like Woolsey, holds a unique position as both chairman of the Pentagon"s Defence Policy Board, which gives him unmatched access to classified information and top policymakers, and as an independent commentator, a position of which he has made full use in leading the charge to war against Iraq. Like Kirkpatrick, his main perch is at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-conservative think tank which also includes such incendiary polemicists as Michael Ledeen, an important figure in the Iran part of the Iran-Contra scandal and a co-founder with Perle of JINSA, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer in the Mideast and South Asia, as well as a novelist writing under the pen name Edward Shirley. Like Gaffney, both men have agitated strongly against Iraq and Iran and have displayed little but contempt for Washington's Arab allies. David Frum, the White House speechwriter credited for the "axis of evil" phrase in Bush's State of the Union address, is expected to take up residence at AEI shortly.

Perle, however, is probably without peer as the key link in what might be called an "axis of incitement;" that is, the small but politically potent neo-conservative network of like-minded utlra-hawkish, pro-Likud administration officials, analysts, and opinion-makers. A former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, Perle, along with Wolfowitz, was a student of the ultimate Cold War hawk, Albert Wohlstetter back in the 1960s, and, like many other neo-cons, subsequently worked to dismantle détente as Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson's top foreign-policy aide. Gaffney worked under him both in Jackson's office and later in the Pentagon.

As with AVOT's principals, the network shares a passionate belief in the inherent goodness and redemptive mission of the United States; the moral cowardice of liberals and "European elites;" the existential necessity of supporting Israel in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the face of "implacable" Arab hostility; and the primacy of military power.

AVOT's creation coincides with new polls showing continued strong popular support for the Bush Administration's global war against terrorism, which has expanded beyond Afghanistan to include sending hundreds of military advisers to the Philippines and Yemen and proposed strikes against Iraq.

However, in their $128,000 advertisement, the group warned that "While support for U.S. policies is at present very high, we believe that unless public opinion is reinforced, our national resolve will weaken over time." And this "resolve" is mainly threatened by internal critics, "who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of 'blame America first.'" Bennett opened the press conference by noting gravely that, "Professional and amateur critics of America are finding their voice."

In this category, the group includes a number of other statements by professors, legislators, authors and columnists as examples of those "who blame America first and who do not understand - or who are unwilling to defend - our fundamental principles."

AVOT's strategy appears similar to an earlier effort to monitor controversial statements about the war on terrorism on university campuses by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), on whose board Bennett also serves.

ACTA, which was founded by Lynne Cheney, the vice president's wife, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, produced a much-criticised report last November entitled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America," which detailed 117 incidents on campuses around the country of alleged anti-Americanism. It claimed that "colleges and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response to" the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

AVOT's list includes statements by congresswoman Maxine Waters, author of "Prozac Nation" Elizabeth Wurtzel, American Prospect columnist Robert Kuttner, and African American novelist John Edgar Wideman, among others.

In his remarks, Bennett also cited former President Jimmy Carter, who recently assailed Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil," as "overly simplistic and counter-productive." He suggested that such remarks give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Another target included on AVOT's list is Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine. In a recent editorial wrote suggestively about the elasticity of the word "terrorism" and cited examples where Washington itself has used terrorist tactics during the 1990s, including the bombing of civilian targets in Baghdad and the Balkans.

In response to the AVOT's criticism, Lapham said Bennett is a "wrong-headed jingo and an intolerant scold." He described the group's comparison of the threat posed by Al Qaeda with those of fascism and communism as a "grotesque exaggeration."

AVOT, he said, appeared to be a new "front organisation for the hard neo-con (neo-conservative) right."

Jim Lobe writes on international affairs for Inter Press Service, Oneworld.net, Foreign Policy in Focus and AlterNet.org.