David Wurmser

David Wurmser,

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.

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." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."

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