(a fine example of synergy)
In the Fall of 2004, Public Affairs Books publishes Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy: the power of freedom to overcome tyranny and terror;"
Enter The Washington Post who "broke the story" of the Bush and Sharansky meeting just after the election (The Washington Post is the former employer of Public Affairs CEO, Peter Osnos);
Then there's Newsweek-- who reported on Sharansky's influence on the Inauguration speech-- and who also has a new book release from Public Affairs on the 2004 Election;
Throw in Yale, Hollywood, the Texas Rangers, the Holocaust Museum and the World Trade Center redevelopment (911!)-- all connected via "Democrat" and friend-of-Bush/Bush pioneer, Tom A. Bernstein (who had earlier provided the Bernstein-earned Disney funds that made Bush a Texas millionaire)-- who "suggested" that Bush read the Osnos-recommended Sharansky book just prior to its publication;
Don't forget Cheney & Rice-- along with the entire Reagan-era neocon team at the Defense Dept-- who brought fresh, new vocabulary words to our president who is now enthusiastically singing the praises of freedom against tyranny-- a philosophy he claims to have come up with on his own;
And there is now an even greater influence of far-right Israeli politics on American foreign policy (oops!)
Nice work, Mr. Osnos-- your book(s) are sure to be bestsellers by the end of the week-- if not sooner.
And special thanks to William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (standing just beyond the limelight, as usual) who are said to have "assisted" Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson in crafting the lyrics of Bush's new song.
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A cute Condi story- via Joel Rosenberg of the New Zoo Revue
When Natan Sharansky stepped into Condoleezza Rice's West Wing office at 11:15 last Thursday morning, he had no idea the national security advisor would soon be named the next secretary of state. He was just glad to see her holding a copy of his newly published book, "The Case for Democracy."
"I'm already half-way through your book," Rice said. "Do you know why I'm reading it?"
Sharansky, a self-effacing man who spent nine years in KGB prisons (often in solitary confinement) before becoming the first political prisoner released by Mikhail Gorbachev, hoped it had to do with his brilliant analysis and polished prose.
Rice smiled. "I'm reading it because the president is reading it, and it's my job to know what the president is thinking."
A close friend of the president had sent over a copy several weeks earlier with a note urging him to take a close look. The president nearly polished it off during a weekend at Camp David, then suggested to Rice that she read it as well.
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(right... that's how it happened.)
Confused? Read on (and don't forget to google).
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An Israeli Hawk Accepts the President's Invitation
23 November 2004, Dana Milbank, Washington Post
excerpts:
Those looking for clues about President Bush's second-term policy for the Middle East might be interested to know that, nine days after his reelection victory, the president summoned to the White House an Israeli politician so hawkish that he has accused Ariel Sharon of being soft on the Palestinians.
Bush met for more than an hour on Nov. 11 with Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident now known as a far-right member of the Israeli cabinet. Joined by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., incoming national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and administration Mideast specialist Elliot Abrams, Bush told Sharansky that he was reading the Israeli's new book, "The Case for Democracy," and wanted to know more. Sharansky, with co-author Ron Dermer, had a separate meeting with Condoleezza Rice, later chosen by Bush to be the next secretary of state.
Sharansky made waves this spring when he rallied with Jewish settlers to oppose the Likud prime minister's plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza -- a plan that Bush had endorsed. Sharansky, head of a Russian immigrant political party, said Sharon's plan, though supported by a number of Likud hard-liners, would be "encouraging more terror." A figure who has previously railed against the "illusions of Oslo" and described that famous accord as "one-sided concessions," Sharansky resigned in 2000 from Ehud Barak's government over the Labor prime minister's plan to attend a peace summit in Washington.
"He's been suffering in the political wilderness in Israel with these ideas for some time," Dermer said of his co-author. But when it came to Bush, Dermer said, "I didn't see a lot of daylight between them."
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In his book, Sharansky echoes many of Bush's favorite lines, talking of the need for "moral clarity" in fighting evil. Likening the fight against terrorism to the struggle with Nazism and communism, he described a world "divided between those who are prepared to confront evil and those who are willing to appease it" -- a common Bush dichotomy. "I am convinced that all peoples desire to be free," Sharansky writes. "I am convinced that freedom anywhere will make the world safer everywhere. And I am convinced that democratic nations, led by the United States, have a critical role to play in expanding freedom around the globe."
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Sharansky had previously met with Rice and Vice President Cheney, but Dermer said this was his first meeting with Bush as president.
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Sharansky's publisher, Peter Osnos of Public Affairs, gave galleys of the book to Tom Bernstein, a former partner of Bush in the Texas Rangers, who forwarded the galleys to the president. A few weeks later, Sharansky got his White House invitation.
FULL ARTICLE
From left: Peter Osnos, publisher and chief executive of PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group; Tom A. Bernstein, CEO and founder of the International Freedom Center; Marvin Josephson, founder and president of ICM [ & chairman of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces]; Natan Sharansky; and NYU President John Sexton.
Closing the Neocon Circle
25 January 2005, Michael Hirsh, MSNBC
excerpts:
Why is Sharansky’s influence so deep? In part because he didn’t pop out of nowhere. Sharansky has been speaking out in neocon forums for years, stiffening the spines of his former allies from the Reagan era. Chief among them is Perle who, in an interview, identified Sharansky as one of his two “heroes,” together with his old mentor, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Their relationship is decades old. Back in the 1970s, when the Israeli was still a Russian named Anatoly Sharansky, Perle was the notorious attack dog for Jackson, fighting for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union by pushing through the famous 1974 Jackson-Vanik bill, the opening shot fired against Cold War détente.
That was the first big battle over human rights in American foreign policy. Until then, the Cold War had been about realpolitik and detente, mainly “managing” the Soviet Union. Both men had been irrevocably changed by the experience of taking on what their mutual hero, Ronald Reagan, called the “evil empire.” Now each is in the midst of a new incarnation, fighting against Arab terror, yet they are animated by the same ideas as in the old days. Sharansky’s personal suffering under tyranny—and triumph over it—has made him a zealous campaigner for democracy in the Arab world, to the right even of his fellow Likudnik hawks in Israel. Perle and a small group of fellow neoconservatives have made it their mission to drag along Washington’s remaining “realists.”
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So Sharansky’s influence represents a closing of the circle for the neocons who began battling for their ideas in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Sharansky himself says it is all a continuum, including the cast of characters, among them Abrams, Perle, Defense Department senior officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby. “If you check their background, most of them were connected either to Senator Jackson or to the Reagan administration or to both,” says Sharansky. “And that’s why, by the way, many of them are my friends from those years. And in the last 15 years, we kept talking to one another.”
It is possible that America’s new embrace of Sharanskyism will also prove to be a recipe for eternal conflict. America will now be accused of hypocrisy every time it fails to live up to Bush’s promise “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture.”
FULL ARTICLE
White House takes a page out of Sharansky's democracy playbook
20 January 2005, Hilary Leila Kriege, Jerusalem Post
and for balance, from the Israeli Left:
King George
22 January 2005, Uri Avnery, Gush-Shalom
excerpt:
"A friend of mine asserts that there are two souls residing in the American nation, a good and a bad one. That may be true for every nation, including even Israel and Palestine, but in America it is much more extreme. There is the America of Thomas Jefferson (even if he liberated his slaves only on his death), Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, the America of ideals, the Marshall Plan, science and the arts. And there is the America of the genocide perpetrated against the Native Americans, the country of slave traders and the Wild West myth, the America of Hiroshima, of Joe McCarthy, of segregation and of Vietnam, the violent and repressive America.
During Bush’s second term, this second America may reach new depths of ugliness and brutality. It may offer the whole world a model of oppression. I would not want my country, Israel, to be identified with such an America. Any advantage we can derive from it may well turn out to be short-term, the damage long-lasting, and perhaps irreversible."
FULL ARTICLE
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