The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) is surely one of the more bizarre pro-Israel think tanks doing business in Washington. Its sage advice pops up here and there, most recently in The Wall Street Journal, where it advocated giving Israel tanker aircraft so its warplanes can fly to Iran, bomb the hell out of that country’s nuclear facilities, and make it safely back. The BPC’s National Security Project is headed by Charles Robb, a former senator and governor from Virginia and living proof that you can fool most people more than once. Robb argues that enabling a devastating Israeli attack on Iran would create a credible deterrent to Tehran’s misbehavior and maintains that his judgment is derived from a “fact-driven consensus.”
But perhaps more interesting than the center itself is the reaction to the horse manure that it was trying to sell in the Journal. It is worth looking at the comments on the op-ed, which are generally hostile to the idea of a new war on behalf of Israel. It is refreshing to think that maybe Americans, even readers of The Wall Street Journal, are actually wising up to the con job they have been subjected to, even if it is a bit late to do anything about it.
The BPC claims to be bipartisan because it includes both Democrats and Republicans, but that does not mean that it is objective. More than three years ago it produced a “task force” report on the Iranian threat called “Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” It concluded that Iran has no right to enrich nuclear fuel for any purpose and predicted that Tehran would have sufficient highly enriched uranium in a year’s time to build a bomb. It advocated talking to Tehran to give it a chance to surrender on all key issues before attacking it, and it urged newly elected but not yet inaugurated President Barack Obama to build up forces for the assault. The task force recommended that the U.S. military should, after bombing Iran into submission, remain in the area, vigilant and ready to react to any attempt at retaliation by Tehran.
Now, long after the alarming report, Iran still has neither a nuclear device nor any weapons-grade fuel, and there is no actual evidence that it has a program to produce a bomb, meaning that a war would have been another case of “preemption” of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, reminiscent of the deceptions that led to the invasion of Iraq. And call for a U.S. attack could hardly have been otherwise based on the makeup of the Bipartisan Policy Center task force that produced it. It included Dennis Ross, who has been described as the State Department’s “lawyer for Israel”; Steve Rademaker, husband of Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); Michael Rubin of AEI; Kenneth Weinstein of the Hudson Institute; and Kenneth Katzmann of the Congressional Research Service. Rubin drafted the report with project director Michael Makovsky, brother of David Makovsky, the senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank that was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. No one on the task force was an independent expert on Iran who might have been willing or able to express Iran’s concerns or point of view. Indeed, apart from Rubin, no one on the task force knew anything about Iran at all, except possibly that it was supposed to be part of the axis of evil.
