By: Brian Whitaker (2002)

 

 

A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue the US from liberal wimps at the state department who want to sign away America’s nuclear deterrent in a disarmament deal with the Russians.

Ten years on Mr Perle finds himself cast in the real-life role of his fictional hero - except that the Russians are no longer a threat, so he has to make do with the Iraqis, the Saudis and terrorism in general. In real life too, Mr Perle is not fighting his battle single-handed. Around him there is a cosy and cleverly-constructed network of Middle East “experts” who share his neo-conservative outlook and who pop up as talking heads on US television, in newspapers, books, testimonies to congressional committees, and at lunchtime gatherings in Washington.

The network centres on research institutes - thinktanks that attempt to influence government policy and are funded by tax-deductible gifts from unidentified donors.

When he is not too busy at the Pentagon, or too busy running Hollinger Digital - part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in Britain - or at board meetings of the Jerusalem Post, Mr Perle is “resident fellow” at one of the thinktanks - the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Mr Perle’s close friend and political ally at AEI is David Wurmser, head of its Middle East studies department. Mr Perle helpfully wrote the introduction to Mr Wurmser’s book, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein.

Mr Wurmser’s wife, Meyrav, is co-founder, along with Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence - of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), which specialises in translating and distributing articles that show Arabs in a bad light.

She also holds strong views on leftwing Israeli intellectuals, whom she regards as a threat to Israel.

Ms Wurmser currently runs the Middle East section at another thinktank - the Hudson Institute, where Mr Perle recently joined the board of trustees. In addition, Ms Wurmser belongs to an organisation called the Middle East Forum.

 

 

Michael Rubin, a specialist on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, who recently arrived from yet another thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assists Mr Perle and Mr Wurmser at AEI. Mr Rubin also belongs to the Middle East Forum.

Another Middle East scholar at AEI is Laurie Mylroie, author of Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, which expounds a rather daft theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

When the book was published by the AEI, Mr Perle hailed it as “splendid and wholly convincing”.

An earlier book on Iraq Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf which Ms Mylroie co-authored with Judith Miller, a New York Times journalist, became the New York Times’s No 1 bestseller.

Ms Mylroie and Ms Miller both have connections with the Middle East Forum. Mr Perle, Mr Rubin, Ms Wurmser, Ms Mylroie and Ms Miller are all clients of Eleana Benador, a Peruvian-born linguist who acts as a sort of theatrical agent for experts on the Middle East and terrorism, organising their TV appearances and speaking engagements.

Of the 28 clients on Ms Benador’s books, at least nine are connected with the AEI, the Washington Institute and the Middle East Forum.

Although these three privately-funded organisations promote views from only one end of the political spectrum, the amount of exposure that they get with their books, articles and TV appearances is extraordinary.

The Washington Institute, for example, takes the credit for placing up to 90 articles written by its members - mainly “op-ed” pieces - in newspapers during the last year.

Fourteen of those appeared in the Los Angeles Times, nine in New Republic, eight in the Wall Street Journal, eight in the Jerusalem Post, seven in the National Review Online, six in the Daily Telegraph, six in the Washington Post, four in the New York Times and four in the Baltimore Sun. Of the total, 50 were written by Michael Rubin.

Anyone who has tried offering op-ed articles to a major newspaper will appreciate the scale of this achievement.

The media attention bestowed on these thinktanks is not for want of other experts in the field. American universities have about 1,400 full-time faculty members specialising in the Middle East.

Of those, an estimated 400-500 are experts on some aspect of contemporary politics in the region, but their views are rarely sought or heard, either by the media or government.

“I see a parade of people from these institutes coming through as talking heads [on cable TV]. I very seldom see a professor from a university on those shows,” says Juan Cole, professor of history at Michigan University, who is a critic of the private institutes.

“Academics [at universities] are involved in analysing what’s going on but they’re not advocates, so they don’t have the same impetus,” he said.

“The expertise on the Middle East that exists in the universities is not being utilised, even for basic information.”

Of course, very few academics have agents like Eleana Benador to promote their work and very few are based in Washington - which can make arranging TV appearances , or rubbing shoulders with state department officials a bit difficult.

Those who work for US thinktanks are often given university-style titles such as “senior fellow”, or “adjunct scholar”, but their research is very different from that of universities - it is entirely directed towards shaping government policy.

What nobody outside the thinktanks knows, however, is who pays for this policy-shaping research.

Under US law, large donations given to non-profit, “non-partisan” organisations such as thinktanks must be itemised in their annual “form 990″ returns to the tax authorities. But the identity of donors does not need to be made public.

The AEI, which deals with many other issues besides the Middle East, had assets of $35.8m (£23.2m) and an income of $24.5m in 2000, according to its most recent tax return.

It received seven donations of $1m or above in cash or shares, the highest being $3.35m.

The Washington Institute, which deals only with Middle East policy, had assets of $11.2m and an income of $4.1m in 2000. The institute says its donors are identifiable because they are also its trustees, but the list of trustees contains 239 names which makes it impossible to distinguish large benefactors from small ones.

The smaller Middle East Forum had an income of less than $1.5m in 2000, with the largest single donation amounting to $355,000.

In terms of their ability to influence policy, thinktanks have several advantages over universities. To begin with they can hire staff without committee procedures, which allows them to build up teams of researchers that share a similar political orientation.

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