Foreign Policy
Steve Rosen, Middle East Forum
For a year or two at an early stage in his career, I commuted to and from our adjacent offices each morning and evening with Martin Indyk, later a top peace-process official of the Clinton administration at the Camp David negotiations and now vice president for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. I had just left the Rand Corporation to work at AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington.
Even in those pre-Oslo days of 1982 to 1983,Martin was a True Believer in the idea of a grand land-for-peace bargain between Israel and moderate Palestinians. Reviewing each day the latest installments in the Middle East epic as we rolled down Rock Creek Parkway, we argued all the way. I heaped scorn on any solution that required Israel to trust Palestinian intentions, and I held that Israel’s security could only be based on a qualitative military edge and the balance of power. I told Martin that he and our mutual friends Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller, and Dan Kurtzer, though with the noblest of intentions, were pursuing an illusion.
Grant Smith, IRmep
Americans need to know more about those idyllic drives with Martin Indyk. At that time Rosen and Indyk were both elbow deep in a little known espionage/theft of government property incident investigated by the FBI. AIPAC obtained classified US gov’t information about American industries negotiating against a so called “free trade” agreement from Israeli minister of economics Dan Halpern. Their ability to use it against the industry of their fellow countrymen cost the US $71 billion, 100,000 jobs a year and severely corrupted the sanctity of advice and consent process of governance.
Until AIPAC, Rosen and Indyk (and Israel’s other unregistered foreign agents) are held accountable for such ongoing transgressions against the American people, there won’t be any peace in the Middle East. Just an ongoing theater of blood, despair and corruption, with taxpayers footing the production costs.