The Passionate Attachment

America's unrequited love for Israel

Pro-Israel Saban Center Proposes New Framework for Persian Gulf Security

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By Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
July 3, 2012

In the Saban Center for Middle East Policy’s newest Middle East Memo, “Security in the Persian Gulf: New Frameworks for the Twenty-First Century,” Kenneth Pollack proposes “a new security architecture for the region.” According to a summary on the center’s site:

Pollack analyzes security arrangements in other parts of the world and focuses on two options: expanding the GCC and turning it into a formal military alliance and creating an arrangement modeled on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. In weighing each option, Pollack finds that the latter can better furnish a path toward peace and security.

Any consideration of how likely Pollack’s CSCE model would contribute to “peace and security” in the Persian Gulf requires an understanding of whose interests the author and his employer represent.

The Saban Center was established in 2002 with a pledge of nearly $13 million from the Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban to the Brookings Institution. Having once admitted to the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,” Saban told an Israeli conference in 2010 that establishing think tanks was one of his “three ways to be influential in American politics” — along with making donations to political parties and controlling media outlets — so that he could “protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.”

Before becoming a senior fellow at the Saban Center, Kenneth Pollack was a member of the U.S. National Security Council. While advising on American security, Pollack was mentioned in relation to the 2005 criminal indictment against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman as one of the government officials who provided classified information to the two former AIPAC employees about Washington’s Iran policy. Presumably, all three were motivated, like Saban, by their overriding concern for the security of the Jewish state.

In light of Saban and Pollack’s profound concern for Israel’s security, “Security in the Persian Gulf” should be seen as yet another attempt to advance Israeli interests in the region by influencing American politics.

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Written by Maidhc Ó Cathail

July 3, 2012 at 8:44 am

Posted in Uncategorized

4 Responses

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  1. Last month Lebanese interior minister told RT that Zionist entity is the only one benefitting from the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. America’s drive to bring the ME under Israeli feet is being blocked by the Islamic Republic and Hizbullah.

    Jewish think tank, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution is more hawkish than the AIPAC itself. One of its ‘senior expert’ on Iran and former US State Department Mideast analyst, Suzanne Malloney, in an article captioned, ’How to Contain a Nuclear Iran’, published in ‘The American Prospect’ on March 5, 2012, too admitted that a regime change in Iran is Zionists’ pipe dream. However, with her article’s title, she, like British prime minister David Cameron, leaves with her readers the impression that Iran already has acquired a nuclear bomb.

    http://rehmat1.com/2012/03/12/brookings-regime-change-in-iran-is-a-pipe-dream/

    rehmat1

    July 3, 2012 at 1:01 pm

  2. [...] Maidhc Ó Cathail The Passionate Attachment July 3, [...]

  3. [...] research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. As I noted previously: The Saban Center was established in 2002 with a pledge of nearly $13 million from the [...]

  4. [...] at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. As I noted previously: ‘The Saban Center was established in 2002 with a pledge of nearly $13 million [...]


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