A new group made up largely of former Pentagon and White House officials is urging the Bush administration to abandon its evenhanded Middle East policy in favor of a more pro-Israel tilt.
The group, calling itself the Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East, claims it will be able to strengthen U.S.-Israeli relations in part because it is independent of what Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan has dubbed Israel’s “amen corner” here.
Frank Gaffney, coordinator of the committee, was a deputy assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration. Gaffney said his group takes no position on whether President Bush or Buchanan would make a better president in terms of Israel’s interests.
Gaffney said that the group, which is a mix of Democrats and Republicans, will refrain from commenting on the presidential contenders from either major party.
The 40-member committee also includes Stuart Eizenstat, a former White House aide to President Jimmy Carter, and Elliott Abrams and Richard Perle, Reagan administration assistant secretaries of state and defense, respectively.
Non-Jewish members of the committee include William Bennett, President Bush’s former drug czar and also a former education secretary; John Lehman, who was Reagan’s secretary of the Navy; and former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.).
The group was formed several weeks ago in response to the controversy on Capitol Hill surrounding Israel’s request for $10 billion in loans guaranteed by the U.S. government, to help absorb immigrants, said Morris Amitay, a Washington lobbyist who is a committee member.
OPPOSES LINKAGE ON LOAN GUARANTEES
The committee took out an advertisement in Wednesday’s New York Times saying its members “believe that the essence of U.S. national security policy should be the protection and expansion of the community of nations that (1) safeguard the personal and property rights of their citizens, (2) limit their own governments’ powers within the rule of law, (3) respect the rights of other nations and (4) otherwise apply to themselves the standards of democracy that are the pride, but not the exclusive province, of Western civilization.”
The group rejects “the notion of moral equivalency that underlies current U.S. policy toward Israel and her Arab enemies,” the advertisement said.
In a statement released on that same day, Gaffney argued that the United States should not link the loan guarantees to a halt in Jewish settlements in the administered territories, as the Bush administration has tried to do.
Instead, he said, the Bush administration should approve the loan guarantees, with the sole proviso that the loans encourage “privatization and other structural economic reforms” in the Israeli economy.
Former Rep. Jim Courter (R-N.J.), another committee member, expressed regret over the Bush administration’s linkage of the guarantees to Israeli settlement activity in the territories.
He argued that Jews in Israel have a “God-given right to go where they want to go.”
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