David Wurmser

David Wurmser is the former Middle East adviser to Dick Cheney.David Wurmser, who was an adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, told me Tuesday he has a different term for what he thinks Iran is becoming: "a theo-fascist state."

"There is still theological overlay but it's a different group of theologians," Wurmser said, pointing to a cleric named Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi as one of the religious leaders who stand to gain if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has obtained greater power over the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council.

At a recent retrospective, at the Brookings Institution, The main target for neocons is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose ideology of “realism” was a counterweight to neoconservatism in the administration. “My greatest frustration is with Condi Rice,” David Wurmser said. “I thought she would get it, that ultimately her approach would melt down. But it didn’t.” He saw the new wisdom coming from outside Washington: “I can see neocons reaching out to governors and seeing them as the future hard-line leaders,” he said. Some names already thrown out include Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, a 2008 vice presidential candidate. “She is very smart,” Wurmser said, though he admits she needs “to acquire more foreign policy understanding.”

the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.

Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, 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. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.

Clean Break

Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm."

WSJ, INC, AEI

In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.

David Wurmser, Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser, is a neocon ideologue who has participated in several key reports outlining the neoconservative agenda in the Middle East. In 1996 he helped write a report for Israel's Likud party that urged Israel to break off then-ongoing peace initiatives. The report, which was titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" and was published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (an Israeli- and DC-based think tank) advised then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "to work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back" regional threats, help overthrow Saddam Hussein, and strike "Syrian military targets in Lebanon" and possibly in Syria proper. Coauthors of the report included Richard Perle, Meyrav Wurmser, and Douglas Feith. (6)

In 2000, Wurmser worked on a strategy document published by Daniel Pipe's Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon that advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon. The study, "Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?" called for the United States to force Syria from Lebanon and to disarm it of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. It also argued that "Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals" and criticized the United States for engaging rather than confronting the regime. Among the documents signers were several soon-to-be Bush administration figures, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, and Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Other signers included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney. (1, 3)

Wurmser is married to Meyrav Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies at the right-wing Hudson Institute.

• Institutional Affiliations

1. U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon: Member of Board of Directors (5)
2. American Enterprise Institute: Former Research Fellow and Director of Middle East Studies Program (2)
3. Lebanon Study Group Report: Signatory (2000) (3)
4. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies: Director of Research in Strategy and Politics Program (1996) (2, 4)
5. Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Director of Institutional Grants (1994-1996) (2)
6. Middle East Forum: Member, Lebanon Study Group (3)

• Government Posts/Panels/Commissions

1. Office of the Vice-President: Middle East Adviser (2003-current) (1)
2. U.S. Department of State: Special Adviser to Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (2001-2003) (1)
3. U.S. Institute of Peace: Project Officer (1988-1994) (2)

• Education

1. Johns Hopkins University: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (2, 4