Round two about to begin:

Preemptive strike

Even if the United States had "five CIA's" it would not be able to get the high-quality information it received from Israel. That's what General George Keegan, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence chief, said in 1986. "The ability of the U.S. Air Force in particular, and the army in general, to defend whatever position it has in NATO owes more to the Israeli intelligence input than it does to any single source of intelligence," he said.

This is a winning quote, dropped into the battle that will shortly break out once more over the nature of the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States. That comment and many similar ones appear in a new position paper published by Dore Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and political adviser to then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who now heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Gold recently hired the services of American public relations firm Shirley and Bannister to market his wares in Washington. He will be visiting the United States next week to talk about his paper. Think of it as a preemptive strike ahead of the publication of the controversial book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by two political science professors, Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer.

And Gold will not be alone. September 4th will see the American release of a book by Anti-Defamation League national director Abe Foxman called "The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control." In his book, Foxman warns of the possible consequences of such theories of Jewish influence which he calls "old anti-Semitic canard" in respectable disguise. Foxman succeeded in getting former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz to write an introduction to the book...[Open in new window]