David Wurmser

David Wurmser replaced Eric Edelman as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs in the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney in early September 2003, after Edelman was named Ambassador to Turkey. [1] [2]

Contents

Background

Wurmser, a neo-conservative, previously served as a "special assistant" to John R. Bolton at the State Department[3] and was a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) [4].

Wurmser has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to roll back the Ba'ath-led government in Syria. For the latter part of the 1990s, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez Assad in hopes of destroying Ba'athist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by "tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments".

Indeed, it was precisely because of the strategic importance of the Levant that Wurmser advocated overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in favor of an Iraqi National Congress (INC) closely tied to the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan.

"Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically," he wrote in one 1996 paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS). [5][6]

Wurmser has written extensively (books and articles) on the Middle East. His credits include: Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal Europe, Washington Times, Weekly Standard, New Republic, SAIS Review, Middle East Quarterly, Perspectives on Political Science, Strategic Review, Jobs & Capital, and The World and I.

David Wurmser is married to Israeli born Meyrav Wurmser, who co-authored a 1996 report by a task force convened by the IASPS and headed by Perle, called the 'Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000'.

The paper, called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, was directed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

It featured a series of recommendations designed to end the process of Israel trading 'land for peace' by transforming the 'balance of power' in the Middle East in favor of an axis consisting of Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

To do so, it called for ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a Hashemite leader in Baghdad. From that point, the strategy would be largely focused on Syria and, at the least, to reducing its influence in Lebanon.

Among other steps, the report called for Israeli sponsorship of attacks on Syrian territory by "Israeli proxy forces" based in Lebanon and "striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper". [7][8]

Wurmser is a close friend and political ally at the AEI with Richard N. Perle. Perle wrote the introduction to Wurmser's book "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein." [9]

Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, in a January 2004 article in Mother Jones that shortly after September 11, 2001, Douglas Feith and Harold Rhode had recruited David Wurmser to be a member of a unit in the Pentagon "which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington." [10]

They noted that in 1997, Wurmser penned a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution".

The following year he co-signed a letter with Perle promoting an insurgency in Iraq and support for the Ahmad Chalabi-led Iraqi National Congress (INC).

Affiliations=

• Fellow, American Enterprise Institute (emeritus)
• "Golden Circle" Member, United States Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL)[11]
• Research Fellow, American Institute for Public Policy Research (AIPPR), December 20, 2000[12]
• Director of Research in Strategy and Politics Program, Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (Jerusalem) (1996)[13]
• Director of Institutional Grants, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1994-96)[14]
• Project Officer, United States Institute of Peace (1988-94)[15]

Other Related SourceWatch Resources

• Eleana Benador
• funders
• Michael Rubin
• think tank

External links

Articles/Publications by David Wurmser

• Middle East Forum articles.
• American Enterprise Institute publications.

Articles

• Seth Gitell, Free Iraqi Resistance Calling on Jewry For Support in Quest to Depose Saddam. Allies of Chalabi Meet Ambassador Gold, Warn of White House Folly, Forward, July 31, 1998: "An adviser to INC chairman Ahmad Chalabi, Francis Brooke, and a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, David Wurmser, met with Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations, Dore Gold, last Friday to begin the process of getting Israel to back the" Iraqi National Congress (INC).
• America Attacked: The Middle East. With David Wurmser, Director of Middle East studies for the American Enterprise Institute, Live Online Interview with The Washington Post, September 24, 2001.
• http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_krystol.html
• Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, "The Lie Factory, Mother Jones, January 26, 2004.
• Jill Junnola, "Campus Watch: Perspective: Who funds whom?", Energy Compass, October 4, 2002.
• Ira Chernus, (Professor of Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder), ":U.S. Arms Control Hypocrisy is the Real Threat to Security", undated.