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Wednesday, January 02,
2008   15:53 GMT

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POLITICS-U.S.:
All in the
Family
Analysis -
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 7 (IPS) -
When Vice President Dick Cheney's national
security adviser and fellow hawk Eric Edelman
was promoted to become the new U.S. ambassador
to Turkey last month, it was hardly a surprise
when Cheney tapped Victoria Nuland to take his
place.

Nuland, whose last post was
deputy U.S. ambassador to NATO, is just as well
known as the spouse of Robert Kagan, co-founder
of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), which nine days after the terrorist
attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, published an open
letter to President George W. Bush urging that
the war on terrorism include the removal of
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, ''even if
evidence does not link Iraq directly to the
attack''.

While Nuland enjoys a strong
reputation as an independent thinker, the family
connection to Kagan was typical of the
extraordinarily tight-knit nature of the regime
that has taken control of U.S. foreign policy
since 9/11.

When historians look back at
the major backers of an aggressive U.S. foreign
policy vis-a-vis Iraq and the ''war on
terrorism'', one of the more curious aspects
they are likely to find is the degree to which
key hawks both within and outside the
administration not only affirmed each other's
political views, but were actually related to
one another, as well.

Consider Kagan's
family: in addition to Robert, whose current
book 'Of Paradise and Power,' a meditation on
the notion that ''Americans are from Mars and
Europeans are from Venus'', there is his father,
Donald, a Yale University historian who also
signed the Sep. 20, 2001 letter, and his
brother, Frederick, a military historian at the
U.S. Army Academy, both prominent in the
neo-conservative cause.

On the eve of
the 2000 presidential elections, Donald and
Frederick published 'While America Sleeps'', a
clarion call on Washington - which was already
spending more on arms than the 13 next biggest
militaries combined - to increase its defence
spending sharply lest it find itself, like
Britain in the late 1930s, unable to face down a
new Hitler. Since then, both men have published
reams of columns warning that Washington must
immediately increase military spending by at
least 25 percent to keep up with its global
responsibilities.

Robert was also busy
in 2000, preparing the groundwork for the
neo-imperial policy of the post-9/11 period. In
addition to writing columns for the 'Washington
Post', he co-edited another book, 'Present
Dangers', about U.S. foreign policy - to which
both Frederick and Donald contributed chapters -
with his long-time collaborator and PNAC
co-founder, William Kristol.

Editor of
the Rupert Murdoch-owned, neo-conservative
'Weekly Standard', PNAC chairman, Kristol, who
first came to national prominence as a top aide
to then-vice president Dan Quayle, is the son of
Irving Kristol, the godfather of
neo-conservatism who waged cultural wars against
the Soviet Union in Europe in the 1950s, and who
has been calling for a new U.S. imperial role
since the late 1960s.

Irving, whose wife
Gertrude Himmelfarb, has also been a major
neo-con heavyweight for decades, played a key
role in steering the editorial pages of the
'Wall Street Journal' from a bland,
business-oriented conservatism into a mouthpiece
for the Israeli Likud Party and other far right
causes.

Just last week the elder Kristol
was honoured for his lifetime achievements at
the annual dinner at the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), where Bush himself laid out the
vision that tugs at the hearts of neo-cons
today: a ''liberated Iraq'' and a transformed
Arab Middle East prepared to make peace with
Israel on Likud terms.

As godfather of
the movement, Irving played mentor to Norman
Podhoretz, the long-time but now-retired editor
of 'Commentary', the influential monthly
publication of the American Jewish Committee
(AJC). Originally identified with the anti-war
left in the mid-1960s, Podhoretz converted to
neo-conservatism late in the decade and
transformed the magazine into a main source of
neo-conservative writing, despite the
overwhelming majority of the Jewish community
itself rejecting those positions.

Podhoretz and his spouse, Midge Decter,
a polemical powerhouse in her own right, created
a formidable political team in the 1970s as they
deserted the Democratic Party, and then, as
leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger -
like PNAC a coalition of mainly Jewish,
neo-conservatives and more traditional
right-wing hawks like Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld - helped lay the foreign-policy
foundation for the rise of Ronald Reagan. After
Reagan's victory, Decter and Rumsfeld co-chaired
the international offshoot of the committee,
called the Coalition for the Free World.

Podhoretz is the father of John
Podhoretz, a columnist for the Murdoch-owned
'New York Post', who also acts as a ubiquitous
booster of the hawks. And his son-in-law,
Elliott Abrams, who held a number of
controversial posts in Reagan's State Department
and was eventually convicted in the Iran-Contra
scandal for lying to Congress, now serves in
Bush's National Security Council as his top
Middle East adviser.

At 'Commentary',
Podhoretz offered considerable space to such
rising lights of the neo-conservative movement
as future U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick
(whose late husband Evron was a long-time
collaborator of Irving Kristol); Richard Pipes,
a Harvard University Soviet specialist and top
Reagan adviser; Pipes' son, Daniel, a staunch
Likud supporter who has long argued that
Washington has been too complacent about the
threat of Islamist radicalism both overseas and
at home; and all of the Kristols and Kagans.

Another key Irving Kristol disciple has
been Richard Perle, the influential and
ultra-hawkish chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense
Policy Board, whose main office is at AEI, where
PNAC and William Kristol are also based. His
spouse is the daughter of his teacher at the
University of Chicago, another neo-con hero and
strategic thinker who also favoured invading
Iraq, the late Alfred Wohlstetter, for whom the
AEI conference centre is named. Wohlstetter also
taught Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Perle has worked closely in the past
with Douglas Feith, Wolfowitz's deputy as
undersecretary of defence for policy under
Rumsfeld and known as the administration's most
ardent Likud supporter. Feith's father, Dalck, a
Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist, was
a follower of Betar, the militant Zionist
movement that became Likud in Poland in the
1930s.

Perle, Feith, and another AEI
''scholar'', David Wurmser, and his wife Meyrav,
in 1996 co-authored a memorandum for Likud
leader Binyamin Netanyahu on breaking with the
Oslo peace process and transforming the Middle
East by working to oust Saddam Hussein, a paper
which bears a remarkable resemblance to the
ideas set forth in the Sep. 20 PNAC letter.

David Wurmser is now a special adviser
in the State Department planning for
post-invasion Iraq, while Meyrav works with the
Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI) that
translates and distributes particularly virulent
anti-U.S. and anti-Israel articles appearing in
the Arab press to key U.S. media and
policy-makers.

AEI has been a major
nexus for these inter-familial relationships,
having served as home to Michael Ledeen, a
co-founder with Perle of the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (JINSA) whose wife
Barbara is a major player in the rightwing
Republican leadership on Capitol Hill; Jeane
Kirkpatrick; and Joshua Muravchik, whose father,
Emanuel, was also close to Podhoretz as he moved
rightward through the 1970s.

Though she
doesn't focus much on foreign-policy issues,
Lynne Cheney, the vice president's wife, also
hangs her hat at AEI, while the vice president's
daughter Elizabeth is now serving as deputy
secretary of state for near east affairs. While
the Cheneys, unlike the mostly Jewish
neo-conservatives who began their political
evolution on the left, have always been
rock-ribbed, right wing, Rocky Mountain
Republicans, it appears that they have joined
the larger family or are at least tying their
family fortunes together. (END/2003)

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