On Thursday, September 18, 2014
Denis V., wrote:
An
amazing revelation, indeed, from Zalmi U
Denis
The New
York Times recently published
a long investigative report by
Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas
Confessore on how foreign countries buy
political influence through Washington think
tanks. Judging from Twitter and other
leading journalistic indicators, the paper’s
original reporting appears to have gone
almost entirely unread by human beings
anywhere on the planet. In part, that’s
because the Times’
editors decided to gift their big
investigative scoop with the dry-as-dust
title “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think
Tanks,” which sounds like the headline for
an article in a D.C. version of The
Onion. There is also the fact
that the first 10 paragraphs of the Times piece
are devoted to that highly controversial
global actor, Norway, and its attempts to
purchase the favors of The Center for
Global Development, which I
confess I’d never heard of before, although
I live in Washington and attend think-tank
events once or twice a week.
Except, buried deep in
the Times’
epic snoozer was a world-class scoop related
to one of the world’s biggest and most
controversial stories—something so
startling, and frankly so grotesque, that I
have to bring it up again here: Martin
Indyk, the man who ran John Kerry’s
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, whose
failure in turn set off this
summer’s bloody Gaza War,
cashed a $14.8 million check from Qatar.
Yes, you heard that right: In his capacity
as vice president and director of the
Foreign Policy Program at the prestigious
Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk took an
enormous sum of money from a foreign
government that, in addition to its
well-documented role as a funder of Sunni
terror outfits throughout the Middle East,
is the main patron of Hamas—which happens to
be the mortal enemy of both the State of
Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.
But far from trumpeting
its big scoop, the Times seems
to have missed it entirely, even allowing
Indyk to opine that the best way for foreign
governments to shape policy is “scholarly,
independent research, based on objective
criteria.” Really? It is pretty hard to
imagine what the words “independent” and
“objective” mean coming from a man who while
going from Brookings to public service and
back to Brookings again pocketed $14.8
million in Qatari cash. At least the Times might
have asked Indyk a few follow-up questions,
like: Did he cash the check from Qatar
before signing on to lead the peace
negotiations between Israel and the
Palestinians? Did the check clear while he
was in Jerusalem, or Ramallah? Or did the
Qatari money land in the Brookings account
only after Indyk gave interviews and
speeches blaming the Israelis for his
failure? We’ll never know now. But whichever
way it happened looks pretty awful.
Or maybe the editors
decided that it was all on the level, and
the money influenced neither Indyk’s
government work on the peace process nor
Brookings’ analysis of the Middle East. Or
maybe journalists just don’t think it’s
worth making a big fuss out of obvious
conflicts of interest that may affect
American foreign policy. Maybe Qatar’s $14.8
million doesn’t affect Brookings’ research
projects or what the think tank’s scholars
tell the media, including theNew
York Times, about subjects
like Qatar, Hamas, Israel, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, and other related areas in which
Qatar has key interests at stake. Maybe the
think tank’s vaunted objectivity, and
Indyk’s personal integrity and his pride in
his career as a public servant, trump the
large piles of vulgar Qatari natural gas
money that keep the lights on and furnish
the offices of Brookings scholars and pay
their cell-phone bills and foreign travel.
But people in the Middle
East may be a little less blasé about this
kind of behavior than we are. Officials in
the Netanyahu government, likely including
the prime minister himself, say they’ll
never trust Indyk again, in part due to the article by
Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea in which an
unnamed U.S. official with intimate
knowledge of the talks, believed to be
Indyk, blamed Israel for the failure of the
peace talks. Certainly Jerusalem has good
reason to be wary of an American diplomat
who is also, or intermittently, a highly
paid employee of Qatar’s ruling family.
Among other things, Qatar hosts Hamas’
political chief Khaled Meshaal, the man
calling the shots in Hamas’ war against the
Jewish state. Moreover, Doha iscurrently Hamas’
chief financial backer—which
means that while Qatar isn’t itself
launching missiles on Israeli towns, Hamas
wouldn’t be able to do so without Qatari
cash.
Of course, Hamas, which
Qatar proudly sponsors, is a problem not
just for Israel but also the Palestinian
Authority. Which means that both sides in
the negotiations that Indyk was supposed to
oversee had good reason to distrust an
American envoy who worked for the sponsor of
their mutual enemy. In retrospect, it’s
pretty hard to see how either side could
have trusted Indyk at all—or why the
administration imagined he would make a good
go-between in the first place.
Indeed, the notion that
Indyk himself was personally responsible for
the failure of peace talks is hardly
far-fetched in a Middle East wilderness of
conspiracy theories. After all, who benefits
with an Israeli-PA stalemate? Why, the
Islamist movement funded by the Arab emirate
whose name starts with the letter “Q” and,
according to the New
York Times, is Brookings’
biggest donor.
There are lots of other
questions that also seem worth asking, in
light of this smelly revelation—like why in
the midst of Operation Protective Edge this
summer did Kerry seek to broker a Qatari-
(and Turkish-) sponsored truce that
would necessarily come at the expense of
U.S. allies, Israel, and the PA, as well as
Egypt, while benefiting Hamas, Qatar, and
Turkey? Maybe it was just Kerry looking to
stay active. Or maybe Indyk whispered
something in his former boss’ ear—from his
office at Brookings, which is paid for by
Qatar.
It’s not clear why Indyk
and Brookings seem to be getting a free pass
from journalists—or why Qatar does. Yes, as
host of the 2022 World Cup and owner of two
famous European soccer teams (Barcelona and
Paris St. Germain), Doha projects a fair
amount of soft power—in Europe, but not
America. Sure, Doha hosts U.S. Central
Command at Al Udeid air
base, but it also hosts Al
Jazeera, the world’s most famous anti-American
satellite news network. The
Saudis hate Doha, as does Egypt and
virtually all of America’s Sunni Arab
allies. That’s in part because Qataris back
not only Hamas, but other Muslim Brotherhood
chapters around the region and Islamist
movements that threaten the rule of the
U.S.’s traditional partners and pride
themselves on vehement anti-Americanism.
Which is why, of course,
Qatar wisely chose to go over the heads of
the American public and appeal to the policy
elite—a strategy that began in 2007, when
Qatar and Brookings struck a deal to open a
branch of the Washington-based organization
in Doha. Since then, the relationship has
obviously progressed, to the point where it
can appear, to suspicious-minded people,
like Qatar actually bought and paid for John
Kerry’s point man in the Middle East, the
same way they paid for the plane that flew
U.N. Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-Moon around the region
during this summer’s Gaza war.
Indeed, the
Doha-Brookings love affair has gotten so hot
that it may have pushed aside the previous
major benefactor of Brookings’ Middle East
program, Israeli-American businessman Haim
Saban. The inventor of the Power Rangers
will still fund the annual Saban forum, but
in the spring Brookings took his name
off of what was formerly the
Haim Saban Center for Middle East Policy, so
that now it’s just Center for Middle East
Policy. Maybe the Qatari Center For Middle
East Policy didn’t sound objective enough.
Another fact buried deep
inside the Times piece
is that Israel—the country usually portrayed
as the octopus whose tentacles control all
foreign policy debate in America—ranks
exactly 56th in foreign donations to
Washington think tanks. The Israeli
government isn’t writing
checks or buying dinner
because—it doesn’t have to. The curious
paradox is that a country that has the widespread
support of rich and poor
Americans alike—from big urban Jewish donors
to tens of millions of heartland Christian
voters—is accused of somehow improperly
influencing American policy. While a country
like Qatar, whose behavior is routinely so
vile, and so openly anti-American, that it
has no choice but to buy influence—and
perhaps individual policymakers—gets off
scot free among the opinion-shapers.
It turns out that, in a
certain light, critics of U.S. foreign
policy like Andrew Sullivan, John J.
Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt were correct:
The national interest is vulnerable to the
grubby machinations of D.C.
insiders—lobbyists, think tank chiefs, and
policymakers who cash in on their past and
future government posts. But the culprits
aren’t who the curator of “The Dish” and the
authors of The Israel Lobby say
they are. In fact, they got it backwards.
And don’t expect others like Martin Indyk to
correct the mistake, for they have a vested
interest in maintaining the illusion that
the problem with America’s Middle East
policy is the pro-Israel lobby. In Indyk’s
case, we now know exactly how big that
interest is.
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