A key, but less well-known, Cheney advisor on the Middle East is John Hannah, a former Soviet expert. He had been part of a policy group assembled by Cheney when he was secretary of defense, in 1989, under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. Hannah was distinguished for his distrust of Soviet reformist Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, according to the New Republic.

Hannah then came to head the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a stridently pro-Israel think tank that has gained enormous influence in Washington. WINEP had been founded in the 1980s with the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the legendarily powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. The initial impetus for it was that think tanks like the Brookings Institution were felt to be insufficiently pro-Israel. Initially WINEP tended to support the government in power in Israel, but in the past 15 years it has increasingly been drawn into the orbit of the right-wing, expansionist Likud Party.

WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a governmental entity. The director of a private consulting firm with a contract from the Department of Defense that involved trying to think about the future of the main political parties in Iraq told me in 2004 that he was specifically instructed, as part of his contract, to depend on the material at the WINEP Web site. State Department officials and U.S. military officers are detailed to WINEP to learn about the Middle East and are indoctrinated into a pro-Likud point of view at taxpayers' expense. Despite its highly political activities, WINEP has the status for tax purposes of a nonprofit charitable foundation.

When Hannah was at WINEP, he was still deeply concerned with post-Soviet Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East. The Soviets had been major patrons of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Syria and Iraq, all of whom Hannah viewed as enemies. In a 1993 interview with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, another pro-Israel, right-wing organization, Hannah expressed anxiety about the rise of Russian nationalists who, he claimed, sought to undermine United Nations sanctions against Libya and to position Russian companies to invest in Iraq should the sanctions on that country begin to slip. For figures such as Hannah, Russian nationalism and Middle Eastern rogue states like Libya and Iraq represented unfinished business left over from the Cold War. For the Israeli hawks and their American supporters, the Cold War was not really over as long as the former Soviet allies in the Middle East continued to express enmity to Israel.

As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher once remarked, the U.S. State Department probably owes WINEP a finder's fee for providing it with key personnel. From the institute, Hannah came to work for Christopher (who served from 1993 to 1997). During this period, Hannah cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, an expatriate group funded by the CIA and the State Department to overthrow Saddam. One of the things that made Chalabi attractive to Hannah and other neocons was that he promised them that if he came to power he would recognize Israel and take Iraq in the same direction as Turkey, a Muslim country allied with the Zionist state.

We next meet Hannah as an aide to John Bolton. Bolton, a curmudgeonly lawyer who helped stop the Florida recount in 2000, was rewarded by Bush by being made undersecretary of state for arms control and international proliferation. Bolton detailed Hannah to Cheney's office as chief adviser on the Middle East. (Hannah actually knew little about the Middle East and knows no Arabic, being primarily an old Russia hand.)

Cheney's other major advisor besides Libby on Middle East affairs is David Wurmser, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. in international relations. He served as project officer at the congressionally funded U.S. Institute of Peace, from 1988 to 1994. He then moved for two years to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was director of institutional grants until 1996. In the latter year he co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others, a now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," that advocated a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating the Shiites of the region and securing "the realm" of Israel. Since post-Khomeini Shiites despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites, who used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this plan was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often involves some actual knowledge.

The neoconservatives were actually more concerned with Syria initially than Iraq, since it more directly threatened Israeli security. Indeed, "A Clean Break" advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way of pressuring Damascus. The policy paper said, with astonishing ignorance, "Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [sic] Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which  and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows  is King Hussein."

This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and ignorant assumptions. Saddam Hussein's branch of the Baath Party was a rival of the Syrian Baath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined Bush I's coalition against Iraq, allying with the Americans in 1990-91. Removing the Iraqi Baath would more likely strengthen Syria than weaken it. As for the Shiites in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is incompatible with Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and reinstalled in revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in Baghdad might have any appeal to the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who favored Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would only occur to someone completely ignorant of the actual politics of Tyre and Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of hallucination appears actually to have underpinned real policy moves by the neoconservatives as they became powerful in Washington under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

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