News

No problem– Obama’s State Dep’t spokesperson is married to Romney’s neocon foreign policy adviser

Here is a crazy story no one is talking about that is evidence of the Israel lobby’s role in our politics. Last week, Mitt Romney announced a foreign policy team that includes Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq war.

But Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, who is a spokesperson for the State Department. Laurie Bennett notes the strangeness of this conjunction:

Victoria Nuland’s role as spokesperson for the State Department, deemed strange by some who remember her tenure as principal deputy national security adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, has become stranger yet.

Her husband, Robert Kagan, has joined Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser.

Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also advised the McCain campaign in 2008.

Ordinarily this would cause a lot of strain. Nuland would be under pressure. Chris Matthews would be asking what the heck she’s doing in a political job at State when her husband is preparing the opposition.

But in fact, Nuland’s Cheney resume and her marriage to Kagan are actually credentials in the Democratic Party: they demonstrate Obama’s sensitivity to the Israel lobby. And party bosses are happy to have these playing cards now that Obama is under siege from his own party about Israel.

Kagan pushed the Iraq war to George Bush as a battle to help Israel. He and his neocon friends wrote, “If we do not move against Saddam Hussein and his regime, the damage our Israeli friends and we have suffered until now may someday appear but a prelude to much greater horrors… Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight. Israel’s victory is an important part of our victory.”

So Nuland’s presence is like Dennis Ross’s presence in the same building as Middle East adviser–a man the ADL calls an “advocate” for Israel, who was lately chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute in Jerusalem. Or Stuart Levey’s former role in Obama’s Treasury department in the same position he had under George Bush– and Levey is a man whose college dissertation, written under Martin Peretz, was about the importance of preserving the Zionist dream.

All these appointments allow Israel advocates to say to lobbyists and donors: Obama loves Israel, look who he has serving him in these big jobs. 

At Salon, As’ad AbuKhalil gets at the same point in a piece on another Romney adviser, Walid Phares.

The appointment of Phares to a position in the Romney campaign is not surprising. In years past, such an appointment would have been considered extreme and cast doubt on the wisdom of the candidate– but no more. Middle East policymaking is now dominated by the Israel lobby and its affiliates. Advocacy of Israeli positions has replaced professional qualifications as the criteria for service.

Hat tip to Mark Wauck, who sent on Steve Sailer’s post on Romney’s team.

18 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

does this make anyone else feel sick?

and now the transparently fake “Iranian plot” is trotted out

OK, its the USA and all the politicians are (whenever Israel is concerned) “more Polish than the Pope.” (Sorry, “more Catholic than the Pope”.)

Is there only one pot to choose advisers from? The Israeli lobby pot? Kagan with Romney. Luti and Feith with Perry.

Just moving the lie manufacturers around from one administration after the next.
The Lie Factory
A Mother Jones Special Investigation
The inside story of how the Bush administration pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

—By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest

January/February 2004
DonateNewsletter
7 Comments | Post Comment..That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.

Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who’d spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances‚ — once in late 2001 and, again, last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a “rogue [intelligence] operation” outside official CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.

As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric “Office of Special Plans,” or OSP; the new unit’s director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department’s disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky’s OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts‚ — including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt‚ — who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House

To be fair, your commenters (especially Annie and Kathleen) have been expressing concern for some time about Toria Nuland’s marriage to Kagan and work with Cheney. It always comes up in the threads with partial transcripts of Matthew Lee’s questions at State Department press conferences. This is who they got rid of P.J. Crowley for.

i highly recommend checking out the comments on Steve Sailer’s post on Romney’s team. (last link in phil’s post)