"The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence of the Military-Industrial Complex [MIC] -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government." President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, January 17, 1961.
Why exactly does the US government go to war with so many of Israel's enemies? Why has the US destroyed Iraq and half of Syria? The costs were enormous, the results horrible, the rewards imperceptible. The Iraq war not an outlier; it was the second in a long series of US invasions, bombings and destructions of majority-Muslim states. It's still going on, with Israel the only obvious beneficiary. How does this happen? Is the Israel lobby that powerful, and even if it is, why has the rest of the US establishment gone along?
The explanation lies in the MIC and the deeply sinister marriage that has grown between them and Israel. Israel's wars have become major parts of the MIC's business plan. Every bomb Israel drops; every missile the US fires, every Muslim country the US invades makes money for the MIC. Israel receives almost $4 billion in military aid from Washington every year, along with periodic large supplementals. Most of this money immediately returns to US military corporations to buy weapons. They're partners.
Eisenhower named the MIC on his last workday in office. Where most Americans heard Eisenhower's speech as a warning, Israeli leaders and their militant American supporters saw an opportunity. By allying with the MIC, this group, which became known as the Neoconservatives, set out to reshape the world. The Pentagon and military corporations already had powerful lobbying programs in place, but industry lobbying typically takes the form of 'Buy our product'; 'Try this weapon system'. They didn't lobby for new wars. Some Israel loyalists realized that if they could provide the wars, the MIC would reap the profits, strengthening Israel in the process.
From the '70s onward, the MIC and the Neoconservative s recognized and built on their mutual interest. The Neocons provided the intellectual and public relations muscle the MIC lacked. It is this alliance of corporations, think tanks, media organizations, and military agencies that pulls the US into war after war, specializing in destroying Israel's enemies, but by no means limited to them.
The Armchair Warriors' Club
The group that became the center of neoconservatism started with Jewish intellectuals, many of them followers of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago. Strauss was a philosopher who had escaped the Nazis in 1937 and had observed Stalin's purges of mostly Jewish Bolsheviks. Wohlstetter was a New York-born researcher who became a leading light at the RAND corporation, consulting with the Pentagon on intelligence and weapons systems. He was a constant advocate for more weaponry and a less conciliatory attitude toward the USSR.
From their beginning, the causes of America and Israel appeared inseparable in Neocon writings. According to former CIA officer Phil Giraldi of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), the neocons have two unshakeable beliefs: "First is their insistence that the United States has the right or even the responsibility to use its military and economic power to reshape the world to align with its own interests and values. The second principle, inextricably tied to the first, is that Washington must uncritically support Israel no matter what its government does, which makes the defense of all things Israeli an American value."
The neocons set out to popularize these ideas among the American people and government. Young disciples of the founders went to work for Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY,) both strongly pro-MIC Democrats. Wohlstetter, with his military connections, helped young neocons Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz get jobs with Jackson, known as the "Senator from Boeing" for his constant advocacy of increased military spending. He was also militantly pro-Israel, sharing all the core neocon foreign policy positions. Perle and Wolfowitz were soon followed by colleagues Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and Abram Shulsky.
As Senators Jackson and Moynihan's leadership shows, neoconservatism is not just a Jewish thing. Researchers Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould wrote on Truthdig "Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel's interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites." Many neocons have been non-Jewish, and their numbers grow year by year. Secretaries of Defense Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were early adopters, as were UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and by now thousands of others. Neoconservatism has become dominant in the Department of Defense and increasingly at the State Department and CIA and has tremendous influence in Israel and the UK.
Neoconservatism gained this influence through decades of setting up think tanks and commissions and serving on them as "fellows," "scholars," and directors. They move between these jobs and positions in the Departments of Defense and State, or in the White House or on Senators' staffs, or defense corporations, becoming known as "experts." They write position papers and op-eds; they appear on TV and testify before Congress. They lie. They work constantly to control the narrative.
Early neocon dominated formations were the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), founded in 1976 and the Committee for the Free World (CFW), founded in 1981. Both advocated strenuously for nuclear buildup aimed at the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, military spending dropped, threatening MIC profits. They needed new enemies to replace the USSR, and Israel was happy to provide theirs. Neocons set up new formations to target these enemies.
These think tanks collaborate with longer-standing Israel advocacy groups like AIPAC and Stand with Us. They share staff and funders and rent space from each other. One of the most influential, PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, met in offices rented from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI, another neocon operation) and included at least six men who later served in the Bush administration as well as Bush's brother Jeb.
Two Neocon documents that ended world peace
Neocons created two documents crucial to the endless 21st-century wars. In 1997, neocons meeting with the Jerusalem-based think tank Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies wrote a paper for the Likud Party called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Clean Break proposed that Israel no longer try to make peace with Arab neighbors such as Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, but push them back, destabilize them, and ultimately change their regimes for ones who embraced Israel. The recommendations in Clean Break have largely been carried out using Israeli and American military force.
In 1999, PNAC wrote a similar paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, advocating massive growth of the US military budget, seeking the ability to wage multiple simultaneous wars and police actions. Authors Donald Kagan, with former Pentagon consultant Gary Schmitt, and Thomas (now Giselle) Donnelly, a former director at Lockheed Martin, called the paper a "blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests."
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