AIPAC Undermining America and Israel’s Best Interests

by Randy Shaw, 2007-03-21

The current issue of J., the Jewish news weekly of Northern California, has an illuminating article on the misguided agenda of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The article describes AIPAC’s “consensus issue” as Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, and states how Dick Cheney and others won applause by linking the Iraq war to combating the “menace that is posed by the Iranian regime.” But AIPAC members appear to have forgotten that the chief enemy of Iran was Saddam Hussein, who the U.S. overthrew to install an pro-Iranian Iraqi government. And Iran’s other chief opponent in the region was the Taliban of Afghanistan, also overthrown by the Bush Administration. With half the US Senate and more than half of the House attending AIPAC’s dinner, you would think that someone would have offered the group a recent history lesson.

While progressives frequently criticize AIPAC, nobody has accused the group of being politically naïve. But that’s the only conclusion that can be reached after many of the group’s members gave huge applause to the Bush Administration warmongers who linked the Iraq war and “surge” to the struggle to contain Iran.

Bush’s role in eliminating Iran’s enemies is undisputed, but the media has failed to connect the Iraq war to White House claims that the Iranian “threat” is escalating. Nor have many politicians. For example, longtime Iraq war backer Hilary Clinton announced last week that American should keep troops permanently in Iraq, precisely because of this alleged threat from Iran.

But the media may finally be catching on. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a scathing column on March 20 describing how the Iraq war has empowered Iran. In “Iran’s Operative in the White House,” Kristof wondered if Dick Cheney is “an Iranian mole,” given how much his agenda has helped Iran.

As Kristof puts it in describing the U.S. invasion and the pro-Iranian policies that followed, “If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better---so maybe they did write the script…”

Kristof has never been accused of being an Israel-basher. And he does not connect his analysis of how “we fought Iraq and Iran won” to AIPAC’s recent convention.

But what in heavens has happened to Israel’s hawkish wing both at home and in the United States? Has the same intellectual debilitation that has destroyed the conservative movement in America struck hard-line, pro-war Israel backers as well?

The United States failure in Iraq, and Israel’s acknowledged disastrous war in Lebanon, shows that on Middle Eastern strategic issues, neither AIPAC nor Joe Lieberman speak for America or Israel’s best interests.

As Kristof puts it, “our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage.” By continuing to endorse the US war in Iraq, and America’s propping up of a pro-Iranian, anti-Israel government, AIPAC has descended to a level of strategic incompetence likely surprising to even its harshest detractors.

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