Q: What Do Sarah Palin, Ahmad Chalabi, and the NRA Have in Common?

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Q: What Do Sarah Palin, Ahmad Chalabi, and the NRA Have in Common?

News: A: McCain's top foreign policy adviser has tried to sell America on all of them.

By Laura Rozen

October 9, 2008

In the fall of 2002, the man who would become the John McCain campaign's top foreign policy adviser was tasked with a sensitive project at the behest of the White House. It began when President Bush's then deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley asked neoconservative activist and Lockheed Martin lobbyist Bruce Jackson to set up a committee that could mobilize public opinion for war with Iraq.

"Jackson said he was happy to do this, but he didn't know what the real motive for the war was about," says journalist Aram Roston, who first told the story of the meeting in his biography of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, The Man Who Pushed America to War. "And Hadley didn't provide him that much clarification." Nor, Jackson told Hadley, did he know very much about the Middle East.

So Jackson turned to Randy Scheunemann, a longtime lobbying partner and fellow senior officer in a series of interconnected neoconservative advocacy groups: the Project for the New American Century, the US Committee on NATO, and the Project on Transitional Democracies. Scheunemann would set up and run the new group, called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; unlike Jackson, he knew a lot about the hawks' case for war and ran in neoconservative circles where Chalabi (whom Scheunemann had met at a Hill event in the '90s) was a household name.

For their committee, Scheunemann and Jackson recruited a range of politicians and thinkers from both parties: Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), former drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, writer Christopher Hitchens, neoconservative intellectual Robert Kagan, former Pentagon official Richard Perle, and former CIA director Jim Woolsey. McCain was also a member, and honorary cochair, and he would go on to hire Scheunemann as his top foreign policy adviser for both his 2000 presidential campaign and his current bid; Scheunemann's tasks this fall have included schooling VP candidate Sarah Palin on foreign policy, and even standing in for Sen. Joe Biden during debate preparation.

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http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/10/scheunemann.html