THE RENTED STATE

The Document That Predicted Everything "We must make clear to ourselves and to others that there is no Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian problem." , Golda Meir, 1969 On a July morning in 1996, a paper was handed to a newly elected prime minister in Jerusalem. It was not long, twenty-three pages in its original form, and it was written in the direct, unadorned language of men who are accustomed to being taken seriously. Its title was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Its audience was Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just won Israel's general election and was preparing to form his government. Its authors were Americans. Not American Jews with dual loyalties, not informal advisors maintaining plausible distance, not academics moonlighting as consultants. The lead author was Richard Perle, who had served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987, who sat on the boards of major defense contractors, who was one of the most well-connected men in Washington's permanent national security establishment. The co-authors included Douglas Feith, a lawyer and defense intellectual who had previously served in the Reagan National Security Council; David Wurmser, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who had written extensively on Middle East policy; and Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American academic and co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute. These were not fringe figures. They were not outsiders. They were the American national security establishment, writing strategy documents for a foreign government. The document opened with a frank assessment of Israel's strategic situation and an equally frank prescription. It called for Israel to make a clean break, the phrase gave the document its name, from the land-for-peace framework that had governed Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since the Oslo Accords of 1993. It called for securing the realm through a policy of preemption rather than negotiation. And then it described, in terms that would have been remarkable for their explicitness had anyone been paying sufficient attention, the specific regional changes that this policy required and the instrument by which those changes were to be achieved. That instrument was the United States of America. The document called for the removal of Saddam Hussein, the destabilization of Syria, and the rollback of Iranian regional influence, all using American military power as the primary instrument. Its authors were in the rooms where those decisions were made five years later. The document called explicitly for "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq" as "an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right." It called for working closely with Turkey and Jordan to "contain, destabilize, and roll-back" Syria. It called for challenging Iran's regional ambitions across the Middle East. These were not suggestions framed in diplomatic language. They were strategic objectives, plainly stated, for a foreign government, describing how the military power of the United States should be deployed to achieve them. Read this again: American citizens, several of whom held or had held senior positions in the American government and would hold senior positions again within five years, wrote a document for the government of Israel describing specific ways in which American military force should be used to reshape the Middle East in Israel's strategic interest. They then returned to American public life. And when a new administration took office in January 2001, they occupied the precise positions from which those objectives could be executed. Richard Perle became chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a senior advisory body to the Secretary of Defense. Douglas Feith became Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the third-highest position in the Pentagon, with authority over the strategic planning and intelligence activities of the entire Department of Defense. David Wurmser became Special Assistant to John Bolton at the State Department before moving to become Middle East Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz, who had not co-authored the Clean Break document but whose strategic alignment with its framework was documented in his own writings, became Deputy Secretary of Defense. None of this was hidden. The Clean Break document was publicly available. The positions these men occupied were matters of public record confirmed by Senate confirmation hearings. The relationship between what they had written for the Israeli government in 1996 and what they would do from their American government positions after 2001 was available to be observed by anyone who chose to observe it. Almost nobody in the mainstream American press chose to observe it.

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