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The
Andean condor among the hawks
By Jim
Lobe
WASHINGTON -
When historians look back on the United States war in
Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a
small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and
activists outside the  administration were able to shape the
US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so
much easier than it might have been.
Part of their success, of course,
is attributable to their own close ties to the
administration. Some, such as former Central
Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey, and American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Richard Perle, for
example, used their access as members of the Defense
Policy Board (DPB) to enhance their credibility as
players with inside information.
And many of the
same group could credit their polish and polemical
skills with dominating the talk shows on television and
radio and the opinion pages in the nation's major
newspapers.
It also no doubt helped that most of
the group had known each other for many years, often
worked with the same organizations and think tanks, and
subscribed to the same basic ideology that had a clear
and consistent story line: Saddam Hussein is evil and
dangerous; the US is good and benign; and if we don't
get him first, he will try to kill us.
The
simplicity and consistency of that message - however
questionable the evidence to support it may turn out to
be - were appealing in themselves, particularly to
television, on which about 80 percent of the public
relies for their international news.
But
historians would be negligent if they ignored the
day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone
outside the administration, made their media ubiquity
possible.
Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born
publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank
Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives
whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for
anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed
pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months.
Also found among her client list are other major
war-boosters, including former New York Times executive
editor and now New York Daily News columnist, A M
Rosenthal; Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer; the Council on Foreign Relations' resident
imperialist, Max Boot; and Victor Davis Hanson, a
blood-and-guts classicist and one of Vice President Dick
Cheney's favorite dinner guests.
Aside from her
success in getting her clients distributed all over the
television dial at critical moments in the march to war,
what is particularly remarkable about Benador is the
speed with which she has built what is obviously a
thriving business, based on 17 to 18-hour work days, the
personal attention she gives to both her clients and her
media contacts, and her conviction that what her clients
say is true and right.
"In general, I do agree
with their views," Benador told Inter Press Service
during an interview this week in the plush lobby of what
is Washington's only grand hotel in the European style,
the Willard. "So when I represent them, I can really
convince another person."
New York-based Benador
Associates is less than two years old, but has a
star-studded client roster of 38 people, most of them
Middle East specialists. Benador estimates that she
arranges for her clients each week between 15 and 30
interviews on US and foreign television. In the same
period, she places an average of about five op-eds by
them in the most influential newspapers, such as the
Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los
Angeles Times. And none of that includes what she
considers her main responsibility - to get her clients
influential and, if possible, lucrative speaking
engagements.
She downplays her achievements and
importance, noting that media demand for prominent
neo-conservatives was spurred "not because of Eleana
Benador, but because of the long overdue need to address
the threat of terrorism".
Benador was born in
Lima, where she was crippled by polio while very young.
At the age of seven she moved with her family to Paris,
where she remained when they returned to Peru when she
was 16. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris and the
Catholic University in Lille and later studied and
worked in Vienna and Geneva, where she met her husband,
a Swiss art dealer. After nine years of raising their
now 14-year-old son, Benador returned to work, dividing
her time between "anti-terrorism" and art history.
She then joined the Middle East Forum (MEF), a
Philadelphia-based think tank headed by neo-con Daniel
Pipes, whose recent nomination by President George W
Bush to the board of the US Institute for Peace has
stalled as a result of strong criticism from
Arab-American, Muslim and civil-rights groups, who
accuse him of inciting hatred against Muslims.
Benador left the MEF in October 2001 to create
Benador Associates, and credits Woolsey and Rosenthal,
in particular, with helping her get started. "Woolsey
really opened his doors for his other friends," she
said. Woolsey has long been close to Perle, who has his
own network of neo-cons based at AEI, including Ledeen,
Hillel Fradkin, Michael Rubin, Meyrav Wurmser and Laurie
Mylroie, all of whom have been outspoken and influential
hawks on Iraq. And all are Benador clients.
Her
client list also includes a number of Muslims, such as
Amir Taheri, Ismail Cem, Fereydoun Hoveyda, Tashbih
Sayyed and Mansoor Ijaz, all of whom supported the war
and have called for Bush to extend the "war on
terrorism" to other Middle Eastern countries. Another
prominent Muslim represented by Benador, Shaykh Kabbani,
created an uproar in the Muslim community in 1999 by
charging that most US mosques were preaching extremist
views.
Benador also represents two controversial
Iraqis - Kanan Makiya and Khidhir Hamza - associated
with the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi,
who has been strongly supported by neo-conservatives in
the administration and the DPB. Hamza, a former nuclear
scientist, has been especially controversial due to his
repeated warnings in the media about Iraq's alleged
reconstitution of a nuclear-weapons program. Hamza and
Makiya, says Benador, are "really my most powerful
voices right now".
The publicist says that she
sees her work as "more of a mission than a business", a
mission in which her Muslim clients play a key role.
"I'm totally convinced that in our world to get peace we
need to make peace with moderate Muslims," according to
Benador. "If they are not our allies, we will never have
peace. They are the ones who can defeat their own
extremists, and they are the first victims of Muslim
extremists. This is something I'm very firmly fighting
for."
Nor are all her clients dyed-in-the-wool
neo-cons. She also represents columnist Arnaud de
Borchgrave, a right-winger who has opposed the neo-cons'
Mideast policy as tilted too far toward Israeli
interests.
Benador says that she is now trying
to work more with companies that are investing in the
Middle East and need up-to-date analysis of the
situation there from her clients. She has also launched
an effort to present programs on "anti-Americanism" on
US university campuses using her clients as featured
speakers.
(Inter Press Service)
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