US Policy
Gulf War Journalism
John J. Fialka, Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War (Woodrow Wilson Center, 1991).
John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Hill and Wang, 1992).
Jacqueline Sharkey, Under Fire: US Military Restrictions on the Media from Grenada to the Persian Gulf (Center for Public Integrity, 1992).
Israel Stonewalls US Aid Investigation
An Israeli general and a General Electric official diverted more than $40 million in US military aid to Israel from 1984 to 1990 for unauthorized military projects, according to an ongoing investigation by the House Commerce and Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
Presenting his panel’s preliminary findings at a July 23, 1992, hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) asserted that Brig. Gen. Rami Dotan conspired with Harold Katz, a dual citizen of Israel and the US, and Herbert Steindler, a senior General Electric official, to launder about $40 million in US military assistance funds, earmarked for Israel, through General Electric.
Money, Media and Policy Consensus
Although the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) was established only in 1985, by the time the Bush administration came to office in January 1989 it had become the non-governmental organization with the greatest influence over US Middle East policy. WINEP built its success on ample funding; an extensive network of relations with the media, policymakers and academics; and dogged focus on its central policy objective — keeping the strategic relationship with Israel at the center of US Middle East policy, a goal that resonates with the anti-Arab and Islamophobic premises of the conventional wisdom on Middle East affairs.
From the Editors (January/February 1993)
“Propaganda to Journalism” was the New York Times headline on a year-end story about mass media in former Socialist countries, without the slightest self-consciousness about how US coverage of events like the Somalia intervention exemplifies “journalism to propaganda.” Perhaps there have been equally bizarre landings in the history of the US Marines — Beirut, for instance, in July 1958, when they splashed onto a beach full of sunbathers and Coca-Cola vendors. In this latest patriotic spectacle, troops landed in camouflage uniforms and greased faces, only to find their high-tech night vision goggles rendered useless, even hazardous, by the glare of the television camera lights.
The News Industry
Over the past few months, a couple of stories have crossed our desk that merit more attention than they got. These stories tell us some important things about how the US news industry operates, especially its willingness to follow the administration’s cues on major issues.
Making War Difficult: Cooperative Security in the Middle East
John Steinbruner is director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Joe Stork and Yahya Sadowski spoke with him in March 1992.
Could you describe the concept of cooperative security? How is it different from collective security?
They are not mutually exclusive, but they are different. Cooperative security is designed to control the circumstances of military deployment in advance of any actual use. It does so by enforcing rules about the size of forces and by requiring transparency, making it difficult for states to organize an offensive operation.
Reversing the Middle East Nuclear Race
“The Middle East has entered the nuclear age,” said Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens in October 1991, as he surveyed the region’s strategic environment in the aftermath of the Gulf war and just days before the opening session in Madrid of the Arab-Israeli peace talks. [1] Arens may merely have been reflecting on a reality that needs to be addressed. Or he may have been staking out a preemptive position in advance of demands for arms controls and territorial concessions, by seeking to make the Israeli nuclear monopoly an explicit component of the regional strategic equation. Between the two interpretations lies the key to the impact of non-conventional weapons proliferation on Middle East stability.
Document: One World, No Rivals
Excerpts from the Pentagon’s February 18, 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994-1999.
Defense Strategy Objectives
Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
How Bush Backed Iraq
An ongoing House Banking Committee’s investigation into US policy toward Iraq, led by chair Henry Gonzalez (D-TX), sheds new light on the role of George Bush in pressing for strong US support of the Baath regime in Iraq. Documents released by the committee reveal that at critical moments Bush intervened on Iraq’s behalf during and after the Iran-Iraq war.
New Enemies for a New World Order
There is considerable evidence that the Bush administration saw the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 as, among other things, the conflict that could define a new politico-military strategy for the 1990s. The war with Iraq would be the emblematic contest for the post-Cold War period, what the Korean War of 1951-1952 had been for the Cold War era.
How Israel Gets Its Credit Rating
A “C” rating from the US government credit evaluators, coming after Washington has held up the $10 billion loan guarantee for more than four months, must come as something of a shock for Israel. Only last September Jacob Frenkel, governor of the Bank of Israel, told the Financial Times that a “good borrower like Israel” needed the loan guarantees to “go to the marketplace with an implicit vote of confidence in the economy, its prospects, and in the economic strategy that it has.”
The Iraq Sanctions Catastrophe
The continuing public health emergency in Iraq is taking a higher toll in civilian lives than the coalition bombing last January and February. This emergency could have been over by now if the Bush administration and its allies at the United Nations had accepted recommendations on humanitarian needs and monitoring safeguards made by UN relief officials last July.
