The journalist in question is Max Boot. Who is Max Boot and just how does he get access to high brass military personnel like David Petraeus?
Wikipedia describes Boot as…..”a Senior Fellow at the ,Council on Foreign Relations a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to other publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. He blogs for Commentary Magazine on its page Contentions. He serves as a consultant to the U.S. military and as a regular lecturer at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College.”
Right Web, a website which “tracks militarists’ efforts to influence US foreign policy,” however, writes this about Boot: “Max Boot is an award-winning writer who promotes militant U.S. security policies similar to those backed by Neoconservative writers like Charles Krauthammer and Michael Ledeen. Boot holds privileged perches in the U.S. news media and foreign policy communities…. An example of Boot’s inflammatory writing style was his review of the “Goldstone Report,” the UN investigation led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone whose report was released n late 2009.”
In short, Max Boot is a pro-Israel Neoconservative, and in this story, we have General Petreus answering to him on matters related to his recent comments concerning the fact that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is endangering the lives of American soldiers in the field in Iraq and Afganistan.
Philip Weiss got inside this story:
Last March General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, sought to undercut his own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that was critical of Israel by intriguing with a neoconservative writer, Max Boot of Commentary, to put out a different story, in emails obtained by Mondoweiss.
The emails show Petraeus encouraging Boot to write a story– and offering the neocon details about his views on the Holocaust:
Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-April at the Capitol Dome…
I obtained the emails because Petraeus passed them along himself in a careless manner last March. He pasted a Boot column from Commentary’s blog into in an “FYI” email he sent to an activist who is highly critical of the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel. Some of the general’s emails to Boot were attached to the bottom of the story. The activist, James Morris, shared the emails with me.
The tale:
Back on March 13, Mark Perry broke the explosive story that Gen. David Petraeus was echoing Joe Biden’s view that the special relationship with Israel is endangering Americans. Perry said that Petraeus had sent aides to the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the White House to tell him that the U.S.’s inability to stand up to Israel was hurting Americans across the Middle East. Perry reported that Petraeus was asking that Israel and Palestine be included under his Central Command (rather than under Europe, as they are now).
On March 16, neocon Max Boot, who is on the Council of Foreign Relations and holds militarist pro-Israel views (he’s an American Jew born in Russia), sought to refute Perry’s post at the Commentary blog:
“I asked a military officer who is familiar with the briefing in question and with Petraeus’s thinking on the issue to clarify matters. He told me that Perry’s item was ‘incorrect.'”
Boot quoted the unnamed officer at some length apologizing for Israel:
….he did not suggest that Petraeus was mainly blaming Israel and its settlements for the lack of progress. They are, he said, “one of many issues, among which also is the unwillingness to recognize Israel and the unwillingness to confront the extremists who threaten Israelis.” That’s about what I expected: Petraeus holds a much more realistic and nuanced view than the one attributed to him by terrorist groupie Mark Perry.
I suspect this unnamed officer was Petraeus himself– based on the emails. But we’ll get to them in a minute.
That same day, Tuesday, March 16, Petraeus testified before Congress, and on Thursday the 18th, MJ Rosenberg at Media Matters wrote a piece celebrating Petraeus’s realist views on Israel/Palestine. He noted that Petraeus is spoken of as a Republican candidate for President and contrasted Petraeus’s views to Sarah Palin’s .
Speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian issue before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Petraeus said:
“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests… Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas….”
So Petraeus is telling us that American interests — and Americans in uniform — are threatened by the Israeli-Palestinian status quo and that Iran, Hizballah, and Hamas benefit from it.
That’s pretty straightforward.
Now we get to the emails. At 2:18 pm. the day Rosenberg’s story ran, Michael Gfoeller, a State Department Policy Advisor who serves the Central Command, forwarded the story to David Petraeus, “Subject: FW: On the Middle East: It’s Palin vs Petraeus.”
Gfoeller’s message was short: “Sir: FYI. Mike.”
Nineteen minutes later, at 2:37, Petraeus sent the story along to Max Boot (I’ve eliminated addresses):
From: Petraeus, David H GEN MIL USA USCENTCOM CCCC/CCCC
To: Max Boot
Subject: FW: On the Middle East: It’s Palin vs PetraeusAs you know, I didn’t say that. It’s in a written submission for the record…
Petraeus meant that the comments weren’t in his testimony. But they were in a 56-page document, titled “Statement of General David H. Petraeus, U.S. Army Commander, US Central Command before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the posture of US Central Command, 16 Mar 2010.”
Four minutes later, at 2:31, Boot responded to Petraeus. No need to say Sir:
Oh brother. Luckily it’s only media matters which has no credibility but think I will do another short item pointing people to what you actually said as opposed to what’s in the posture statement.
Six minutes pass.
From: Petraeus, David H GEN MIL USA USCENTCOM CCCC/CCCC
2:37Thx, Max. (Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…)
2:45, Boot:
No don’t think that’s relevant because you’re not being accused of being anti-Semitic.
2:57, Petraeus:
Roger! 🙂
That’s military talk. The emotion means, I’m running for President.
Max Boot is as quick as a duck on a junebug. By 3:11 he had filed a story on the Commentary blog, titled, “A Lie: David Petraeus, Anti-Israel.” It attacked “misleading commentary that continues to emerge, attributing anti-Israeli sentiment to Gen. David Petraeus.” It dismissed the Posture Statement as a filing from “Petraeus’s staff,” even though as Rosenberg emphasized to me, “That is his official statement, to be attributed to the record, and it was cleared.”
Instead, Boot offered Petraeus’s (mealymouthed) oral testimony at the hearing to a John McCain question, saying the transfer of Israel and Palestine to Central Command was just something staffers had discussed, downplaying Israel/Palestine as a source of tension, though allowing that he was encouraging the peace process because of the “effect that it has on particularly what I think you would term the moderate governments in our area.”
Boot, who seems to want Israel to hold the occupied territories forever, concluded,
“General Petraeus obviously doesn’t see the Israeli-Arab ‘peace process’ as a top issue for his command, because he didn’t even raise it in his opening statement. When he was pressed on it, he made a fairly anodyne statement about the need to encourage negotiations to help moderate Arab regimes. That’s it. He didn’t say that all settlements had to be stopped or that Israel is to blame for the lack of progress in negotiations. And he definitely didn’t say that the administration should engineer a crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations in order to end the construction of new housing for Jews in East Jerusalem.”
Enter activist James Morris.
Morris has long been a tiger on the question of whether Israel’s security motivated the disastrous decision to invade Iraq. I met him in 2005 or so when he got thrown out of an American Enterprise Institute function for asking Richard Perle and Dore Gold about the Israel agenda in the U.S. government. Morris runs the website “Neocon Zionist Threat to America” and is a regular call-in questioner on CSPAN and at public events. He sends long emails all the time to people in authority– network correspondents and policymakers. He is always polite, but his emails are pages and pages long. Sometimes people respond to him.
On March 19, Morris sent Petraeus an email congratulating him on his views on Israel/Palestine. And the same day, Petraeus responded to Morris with one word, “FYI”, and the Commentary piece by Boot.
The commanding general obviously didn’t realize it, but his copy of the Commentary piece was pasted in above his email correspondence with the author, Max Boot, and Gfoeller.
On March 20, James Morris wrote back to Petraeus to try and engage some more. This time Petraeus sent him this note:
“Thanks, James. Frankly, I’d like to let all this die down at this point, if that’s possible! All best -“
Morris wrote back, “I understand, but please keep in mind (which I am sure you do anyway) the consequences if the Israel lobby is successful in getting US into another war for Israel with Iran. Also please keep in mind that your staff was spot on with what was conveyed in that posture report….”
James Morris first shared the exchange with me in May. My bad; I didn’t read it. Then after the McChrystal blow-up last week, he bugged me in his subject line, Did you read my exchange with Petraeus, and this time I had a look.
Thanks to Phillip Weiss for giving us all a bit more insight: Neoconservatives have the ear of top American generals, Israel’s expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will continue without military criticism, Patraeus will run for president as a Republican candidate in 2012, and nothing in Washington has changed re. US-Israeli relations.