Lucius Battle, Robert Kaplan, Arabists

Confirming Jewish Prejudices, Zionist Victory
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

The recent Boston Globe New York Times obituary Lucius Battle; career diplomat helped reorganize State Dept. reminded me of the book The Arabists by Altantic Monthly editor Robert Kaplan, who represents a major voice of Jewish Zionist political orthodoxy in the print media along with Atlantic Monthly staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg, from whom Barak Obama recently sought a Zionist hekhsher.

The members of the Zionist intelligentsia have not been content with simply neutralizing or driving Arabists out of the State Department. They have worked to control the history and understanding of the struggle, which first became a major public issue during the Nixon administration.

The Arabists provided the kosher epitaph to Middle East area specialists that tried to understand Arab society, culture and politics in order to achieve US strategic goals and not in order to serve the interests of the hyperwealthy Zionist Jewish political economic elite.

In his 1993-4 review of the book for The Journal of Palestine Studies, Richard B. Parker, who had been an Arabist in the US State Department, pointed out Kaplan's questionable depiction of the facts (see The Arabists or The Arabists (PDF)):

Another piece of the mosaic that doesn't fit is Kaplan's statement on page 124 that Sisco was the first non-Arabist to head the [Bureau of Near Eastern South Asian Affairs]. The only Arabists who preceded him were Raymond Hare and Parker T. Hart. The others -- George McGhee, George Allen, Henry Byroade, William Rountree, Lewis Jones, Philip Talbot, and Lucius Battle -- had (except for Byroade) some experience in the area, but could hardly be called Arabists.

....

Talking to former colleagues I find that most have found statements about themselves in the book that are untrue or misleading or taken out of context. For instance, Kaplan writes that I have "ugly caricatures of Begin done by Arab artists" on my study walls. The caricatures are in fact of me, not Begin, and how did he know they were by Arab artists and not Israeli if he didn't ask me about them? He says that Seelye left the Foreign Service because he was not offered a promotion when in the fact he left to take advantage of an increase in the retirement pension. He reports as gospel a fictionalized version of obscene language attributed to Robert Paganelli in Damascus which Paganelli has denied using. He says that David Newsom recommended that we force our way through the Straits of Tiran in 1967, which Newson does not believe he did. Marshall Wiley finds Kaplan misconstrues a remark of his as justifying Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and so forth.

Parker framed Kaplan's thesis with appropriate sarcasm:

... Kaplan seems to believe that the Arabists dominated U.S. policy on the Palestine issue until the coming of Joseph Sisco to the Bureau of Near Eastern South Asian Affairs (NEA -- the successor to the old Near East division) as assistant secretary in 1969. Sisco allegedly broke up the nest of old-boy Arabists in NEA by sidelining Rodger Davies, the senior deputy assistant secretary, to Greek-Turkish Affairs and by exiling me, the United Arab Republic country director, to Morocco as deputy chief of mission. After that NEA was run by people more sympathetic to Israel and less encumbered by Arabist intellectual baggage. The transformation was made even more radical by Henry Kissinger, who became immersed in Middle East matters after the war of 1973 and whose shuttle diplomacy, as noted above, proved that one could be friends with both the Arabs and the Jews at the same time. Under the benign influence of their successors and the "democratization" of the Foreign Service in the 1980s, Jews and other ethnics were admitted to the Arabist ranks, and today policy on the Palestine issue is much sounder and freer of the WASP prejudices of the past, although some of the Arabists are still whining about favorable treatment of Israel.

Kaplan's thesis is supported by the fact that today U.S. policy on the Arab-Israel issue seems to be run largely by two Jews Dennis Ross of Policy Planning in State and Martin Indyk, the ex-AIPAC point man, in the White house -- and this has been accepted with alacrity by the Arabs, just as they accepted Kissinger. And why not? Education of American Jews to the intricacies of the Arab-Israel problem has always been one of the first requirements for progress on that issue, and the emergence of Jewish Arabists has been one of the more encouraging developments of recent years.

Parker the proceeds to shread Kaplan's claims:

The first problem with this exposition, however, is the implication that for three decades the Arabists dominated policy on the Arab-Israel question. If ever there was a body that was frozen out of the serious policy decisions it was the Arabists, who were regarded with suspicion by their American colleagues as well as by American Jews and other supporters of Israel, whose predominant influence in Congress and the White House on the Palestine issue has been well documented. Not only were the Arabists a fringe group within a Department of State that was itself largely powerless on this issue, but they were afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, the oil companies, which figure in some accounts as allies of the Arabists, were afraid of a Jewish boycott and refused to take positions that might expose them to criticism. That was not an unreasonable stand on their part, but it severely limited their influence.

The second problem with this narrative is that while there undoubtedly have been enormous changes in our vision of the Arab-Israel problem over the past twenty-five years, those changes have come about more because the Arabs and the Israelis have changed their perspectives than because of anything new and different that Americans did. This is not to diminish the accomplishments of Kissinger, or the efforts of Joseph Sisco, but it was the 1973 war and Sadat's decision to play the American card and his visit to Jerusalem, not shuttle diplomacy, that changed the givens. These were Sadat's initiatives, not ours, and the 1973 war, which broke the logjam, came in part because Sadat was frustrated with American unwillingness to take him seriously, in spite of urgings by Arabists Donald Bergus and Michael Sterner that we do so.

Parker provides a good summary of the influence of State Department Arabists over US foreign policy in the ME:

On page 169 he says. "The relationship between the American president and the Jewish community now (1969) loomed larger than the relationship between Arabists and their personal connections in the Levant." In fact, it had done so almost from the day Harry Truman became president, if not before, and it had nothing to do with Sisco or Kissinger or anyone else in the Nixon administration. It had long been a fact of life that all Arabists recognized. As Evan Wilson commented in Decision on Palestine (p.60), "the early months of the Truman presidency represented the last time that the Department of State exercised a dominant role in our Palestine policy".

In short, The Arabists is ridiculous as history and scholarship, but it has served to keep American Jews on the same page when they badger US political leaders:

Meanwhile, Daniel Pipes in the 15 September 1993 Wall Street Journal has what is surely the most paranoid review to date. He comments that "as the Arabists cohort at State became increasingly dominant, it also brought strange prejudices to the government...Bound up in their own small world, Arabists lacked the imagination to understand either the U.S. or American interests abroad. They loved a pristine Middle East and regretted its modernization. Against all evidence, Arabists quixotically sought to show the essential harmony of Western and Arab-Islamic culture.' They loathed Maronites and Greek Orthodox Christians, the French and Iranians. Most of all, they hated Israelis."

It is noteworthy that Kaplan's grant from the Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, which enabled him to write the book, was administered by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, which was directed by Daniel Pipes until 1993. Kaplan says in his foreword that the Institute gave him help whenever he needed it but otherwise gave him the intellectual freedom he needed to reach his own conclusions. I have no reason to doubt that, but if Pipe's review indicates what he got from the book, and given that he is no friend of either Arabists or Muslims, one wonders whether he may have influenced Kaplan's interpretations of what he saw and heard, or whether Kaplan merely reinforced his already well-established prejudices. In any event, we can be reasonably sure that the Pipes version of Kaplan's history will be what many neo-conservative American Jews will believe, and they will cite Kaplan as their evidence.

Kaplan was working overtime when he published The Arabists in 1993, for he also brought out Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History the same year. The latter book extended the Middle East to the Balkans. The idea is not unreasonable, for the Eastern Roman Empire and later the Ottoman Empire covered a large part of this territory, but Kaplan was really just spreading essentialist primordialist propaganda of ancient peoples and their ancient hatreds that are beyond any solution. Zionists like Kaplan have made this argument for decades to distract from the crimes that German Jewish and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi invaders and interlopers have been committing against the native population of Palestine for over 100 years.

Noel Malcom describes the antithetical view of connected populations cohabiting more or less peacefully in genuine multinational empires in Kosovo: A Short History  (p. 110-111):

The seed which Pavle had planted in the minds of the Ottoman rulers bore fruit in 1557, when one of the senior viziers, Mehmed Sokolović (Trk.: Mehmet Sokollı), officially reinstated the Patriarchate at Peć. Sokolović was from an Orthodox family in Hercegovina; taken to Istanbul in the devşirme, he rose rapidly in government service, becoming an admiral, then beylerbeyi of Rumeli (1551-5), then a member of the council of viziers, and finally Grand Vizier (1565-79). He furnishes conclusive proof that boys seized in the devşirme did not lose all their family links, since the person he appointed Patriarch, a Serb archimandrite on Mount Athos, was his own brother, Makarije. But we need not suppose that Mehmed Sokolović's principal motive was either neportism or secret Christian sentiment: there were good political reasons for this move. It was clearly in the interests of the Ottoman state to enjoy better relations with its Orthodox subjects, now that the main enemy powers ranged against the Empire in the West were all Roman Cahtolic. A Patriarch dependent on Ottoman good will would be a useful instrument of control, especially in sensitive areas with mixed Catholic-Orthodox populations, such as parts of Montenegro. And the choice of Makarije was evidently also a good one: all the evidence indicates that he was a serious and energetic man who furthered the interests of his Church. One example of his successful efforts is given by a document of 1570/1 (shortly before Makarije resigned on health grounds; he died in 1574), preserved in the Istanbul archives: it refers to the properties of an abandoned monastery near Peć which had become 'scattered', and declares that 'they have now been joined to the property of the monastery of the Saviour and given in usufruct to the said monk Makarije.'

The Zionist effort to control American thinking about nations, nationality and ethnonational conflict is unceasing.

During a recent visit to Harvard Daniel Pipes explained that his efforts result from worry that Islamofascist or Islamofascism-sympathetic thinking would find a place in American university and then spread to US government policy-making circles.

---

Lucius Battle; career diplomat helped reorganize State Dept.

By David Stout, New York Times News Service  |  May 19, 2008

WASHINGTON - Lucius D. Battle, a career diplomat who was special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the administration of President Harry S. Truman, led a reorganization of the State Department under President Kennedy, and later served as ambassador to Cairo, died May 13 at his home in Washington. He was 89.

The cause was Parkinson's disease, his daughter Lynne said.

Luke Battle, as he was known, was Acheson's right-hand man from 1949 to 1953. According to one account, Acheson once said that Mr. Battle was indispensable because he had "nerves of steel, a sense of purpose, and a Southern accent."

Born in Dawson, Ga., on June 1, 1918, Lucius Durham Battle received his bachelor of arts and law degrees from the University of Florida. After naval service in the Pacific during World War II, he joined the Foreign Service. He served as first secretary and chief of the political section of the US embassy in Denmark in 1953 and 1954.

Mr. Battle left the State Department to become vice president of the Colonial Williamsburg project in Virginia, then returned to government in 1961 as special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. His main mission was to shake things up in a department that President Kennedy was known to regard as too tradition-ridden and too slow to react to crisis.

One of Mr. Battle's innovations was the creation of an operation center to maintain a round-the-clock watch to inform the secretary and other top officials of sudden and important developments anywhere in the world.

Mr. Battle was appointed assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs in 1962. In September 1964, President Johnson named him ambassador to what was then the United Arab Republic, the temporary union of Egypt and Syria. Barely two months later, Mr. Battle encountered his first crisis, as anti-American demonstrators attacked and burned much of the US embassy in Cairo.

Mr. Battle and Marine embassy guards fought the blaze in vain with extinguishers until firetrucks finally pulled up. In his official protest to the Cairo government, he noted that he had arrived at the fire scene before the firemen, even though he lived a quarter-mile from the site and a fire station was just 200 yards away.

Early in 1967, Johnson chose Mr. Battle to be assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, a position he held until September 1968, when he resigned to become a vice president of Communications Satellite Corp.

Mr. Battle was active in the Middle East Institute, the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and several other organizations dedicated to promoting peace in the Middle East. From 1995 until recently, he was chairman of the advisory board of the National Council on US-Arab Relations.

His wife, Betty, whom he married in 1949, died in 2004. He leaves two sons, John of Concord, Mass., and Thomas of Belmont, Mass.; two daughters, Lynne of Bethesda, Md., and Laura of Rhinebeck, N.Y.; and eight grandchildren. 

 

 

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