http://h2oman.blogspot.com/Friday, August 12, 2005
Who is Steven J. Rosen, the "former" AIPAC official who is charged with espionage in the neocon spy scandal? That is an important question. Rosen is called "the Karl Rove of Israeli-American" politics.
Because discussions of Israeli-American politics is a sensitive subject, this examination of Rosen will avoid commenting on them. I think that it important to be able to speak about extremists in any nation -- including the USA, China, England, Iraq, Iran, Israel, and I don't want to forget Poland -- without that discussion being viewed as being pro- or anti- that nation. My belief that Karl Rove should be frog-marched from the White House is not an anti-American emotion, for example.
That said, when I read that a person is compared with Karl Rove, I have immediate concerns. And when I read that Mr. Rosen, who joined AIPAC in the early 1980s, was good friends with Senator Jesse Helms, my concerns double.
Until the 1980s, most Americans associated Jewish American politics with liberal causes. The single best example, in my opinion, was the Civil Rights movement. Not only did Jewish Americans help to finance many of the organizations that were the foundation of the movement, and march arm-in-arm with black Americans long before it became "in style" .... but the Jewish experience served as a model for progressive black leaders to use in terms of learning self-sufficiency within the greater society. More, Jewish Americans were willing to absorb much of the hostility and hatred of the racist, ignorant forces that sought to crush the Civil Rights movement.
And so it was a curious thing, in the early 1980s, that Steven Rosen was intent upon moving AIPAC from the democratic mainstream to the far right of the republican party. His friends and admirers say that he recognized then that there was a major political shift occuring within the United States. However, I think that a study of Rosen indicates that he wasn't simply a person looking to see which side the bread was buttered on, but instead was one of the original neocon activists, with an agenda that he knew was achievable.
He is called a genius at political strategy and subterfuge. I do not think this is exaggeration. He was a student of Nixon-style politics. For example, he kept a detailed "enemies list" of journalists and politicians. He would send AIPAC student interns to work "under cover" for politicians or organizations that he thought were pro-Arab. He was an extremely capable fund-raiser, who invested money to his best advantage, which was always to promote the neoconservative agenda within the United States.
Conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan has often called Washington DC "Israeli-occupied territory" in specific reference to AIPAC's influence in both the democratic and republican parties. Rosen's influence was not limited to the Jewish community; in fact, many of the more liberal Jewish-American activists say that Rosen isn't pro-Israel at all, and that he is simply an extremist. In fact, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin specifically asked Rosen to butt out of the peace process in the Middle East, because it had become apparent that Rosen was an agitator who was not interested resolving the conflicts between Israel and Palestine.
After Rabin's request, Rosen became focused on two nations in the Middle East: Iraq and Iran. He has advocated that the United States take an aggressive policy aimed at regime change in both countries. This has included his attempting to strengthen ties between the US and such characters as Ahmed Chalabi and Manucher Ghorbanifar.
While we are all entitled to our own political beliefs, Mr. Rosen has long been in possession of classified intelligence documents that it is illegal for him to have. Included among these are numerous ones that he got from Lawrence Franklin. More, Rosen acted in a manner that indicates he was confident that he could influence the structure and policy-making of the federal government. For one example, the FBI has tapes of him saying he was going to get Franklin promoted to the NSC, where he would be "at the president's side," and able to exercise more direct influence.
The FBI has information that shows that Rosen himself exercised an unhealthy and direct influence on every administration since Reagan was president. One of the building-blocks of the FBI's case against him, which will be made public in an edited form fairly soon, is a 1983 Rosen memo that states that he had channels to classified documents which would help AIPAC influence US policy in the Middle East.
When the public finds out who was channeling these classified documents to Mr. Rosen, it will not be pretty for the current administration.
on edit: inserted spaces between paragraphs for improved readability
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