Dissident Voice Excerpt from the book “Foreign Agents”
By targeting and taking over Middle East policy at Brookings in 2002, Saban and Indyk were able to “leapfrog” AIPAC messaging from second to last in the think tank market (WINEP had only 2%) to first place. Taking over Brookings also made it appear to Americans that there was now an “expert consensus” from “right to left” on the key Middle East policy issue of the year: the US invasion of Iraq on weapons of mass destruction pretexts. Brookings is often portrayed as a “centrist to left think tank” in the corporate news media. According to FAIR, “Progressive or Left-Leaning” media citations were a small but important segment of the marketplace of ideas, but combined with “centrist”, they represented the majority. For Saban and Indyk, taking over Brookings Middle East policy in 2002 meant penetrating the 63% of the marketplace of ideas that was generally not beating a drum for war in Iraq.