The Money Train

One interesting thing from the Tony Cordesman op-ed I linked to yesterday was this disclosure statement:

Disclosure: the nonprofit organization I work for receives financing from many sources, including the United States government, Saudi Arabia and Israel. No one from any of those sources has asked me to write this article.

I often think the people who make these kind of conflict-of-interest disclosures often protest too much. It would be pretty ridiculous to think that Ehud Olmert or Crown Prince Whomever called Cordesman up on the phone and asked him to defend the Saudi/Israel arms package. The significance of looking into who funds foreign policy research in the United States is simply that funders in this field -- as in any other field -- are going to want their funds to flow toward people with congenial ideas. People with perspectives that aren't congenial to anyone who invests money in foreign policy think tanks, meanwhile, aren't going to be able to get think tank jobs.

Comments

Sheeze! Haven't you kids today read Ike's famous speech?

Ike didn't say "people will make a conscious effort to support policies benefitting the military/industrial complex 'cause they are on the take". He said that when a certain group is payin' the bills, people will naturally be inclined to be a little bit more favorable to policies benefiting those payin' the bills.

The issue isn't quid pro quo; it's influence. Certain groups have influence ... perhaps more than they should.

Note to the "you must hate Israel which means you hate the Jews" crowd -- as a Jew, in the run up to the Iraq war, I got to hear a lot of my fellow Jews bragging about the influence we had on US foreign policy in moving towards a war against one of Israel's enemies. Personally, I am inclined to think that the Iraq war has nothing to do with Israel and that claiming it did was actually just a way to sell the war to another group of people (as well as to conflate opposition to the war with anti-Zionism and hence allow for the tarring of war opponants as anti-Semites). However, you cannot on the one hand brag about your ethnic/religious group having influence and then on the other hand complain that people have paranoid delusions about the influence of your people.

Posted by DAS | August 21, 2007 11:43 AM

I wonder if he put that in there specifically in contrast with O'Pollohack, who didn't make such a statement?

Posted by Jon H | August 21, 2007 11:51 AM

Matt, that would be all nice and good except for the fact that James Glassman has made millions planting just such Op-eds on the behalf of his clients. Now I'm not saying Cordesman is in that position, I'm saying that many times those disclosures actually do tell us who bought and paid for that view point. Which is why Glassman avoids telling us as much as possible.

Posted by Rob | August 21, 2007 11:53 AM

Of course Olmert didn't call him up and ask him to write it. Being the good little boy Cordesman is(most of the time), he knew what to write with out being told. Do you really think Olmert or Bandar want to waste their time calling someone up and telling them to pen a positive op-ed? They want someone to do it with out having to be told all the time. Plausible deniability and all that.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | August 21, 2007 12:44 PM

The wording of this disclosure is a bit odd. So are his financiers in Israel and Saudi Arabia government-backed or not? If they're just a random collection of citizens, it seems odd to mention them. If, like FoxNews, they receive money from members of the House of Saud, then that should be mentioned. This is just vage enough to be unhelpful.

Posted by Reality Man | August 21, 2007 12:47 PM

What does it take to receive funding from states like Israel? Does this disclosure mean old Tony is a lobbyist?

Posted by Rula Lenska | August 21, 2007 1:07 PM

Uh, no, it seems to me such disclosures are proper and I'm glad Cordesman did it. Conspiracy theories flourish in a lack of transparency; light helps kill them. In any case, I'm sure there are plenty of scientists who genuinely believed in the '80s that the evidence for global warming was thin who wound up on the payroll of the American Petroleum Institute. The problem, no doubt, would have been that as the evidence mounted, their funding streams would have made it very difficult for them to revisit their conclusions in an unbiased fashion. Ditto with Cordesman re: independence of opinion on Israel, the US or SA -- or with any of us, for that matter, on issues which affect us financially or institutionally. That's why I post under a web moniker: as a journalist, my job could be affected if I posted political opinions too openly.

Posted by brooksfoe | August 21, 2007 1:18 PM

OT: It might be just me, but I remember when the word "conflate" first started appearing with regularity in the press coverage about Al-Qaeda and Iraq, I had to look it up, having forgotten all my SAT words.

The word really seems to capture the moment in way few synonyms do, as "confusion" does not connote an intentional act. The connection to "inflation" and its use to describe foundry fires, also helps connote the incendiary, exaggerated nature in how it is used. 9/11 conflated with whatever. It really depends on the ignorance of the intended audience.

I wonder if the new vocabulary of Newspeak and the words describing how influential people use Newspeak will be Bush's enduring legacy.

Posted by Harry | August 21, 2007 1:30 PM

A few questions here that might be interesting to hear answers to (maybe you've already looked into them):

How many non-aligned think tanks are there vs. right, vs. left? (I bet the place tilts right.)

Where are most of the grants? Is there pressure toward certain policy goals? Even for a non-aligned think tank? (I can guess which interests give the fattest grants. Energy interests? Defense contractors, perhaps?)

What are the pressures to be "diplomatic"? Are they financial? Careerist? (For instance, who's on Brookings list of grant-givers? Are these grants at risk with anti-interventionist positions?)

Which think tanks are more "self-marketing" oriented? (I bet they're much more on the right.) What are the pressures and incentives that make them that way? (I bet the high-rollers are much more interested in this sort of thing.)

Does the media make any effort to balance off their guests? Or do they just want the guests who are the most colorful, "sexiest"? The easiest to get? Are anti-interventionists seen as "not sexy"?

Posted by JJ | August 21, 2007 2:31 PM

"For instance, who's on Brookings list of grant-givers? Are these grants at risk with anti-interventionist positions?"

Yes.

Posted by Reality Man | August 21, 2007 3:26 PM

Ya know, it seemed to me that this article was probably the dumbest I've ever read by Cordesman.

But tonight I got to thinking. He put that disclaimer in there for a reason.

What if he put it there to HIGHLIGHT the fact that what he was writing was what he HAD to write BECAUSE his organization is financed by these sorts of people?

In other words, he put that in because he knew people who knew his work wouldn't buy this crap he was pushing - and therefore would know from whence it REALLY came...

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 22, 2007 2:21 AM

While in general Matt's point is true--funders seek out those scholars that already agree with them rather than trying to corrupt those that don't. On the other hand, funders are not shy about flexing their muscles when someone they thought they owned turns on them. I have personal experience in this area.

Anyway, no funder would ever contact a scholar directly. It would go through channels--a word might be spoken to a board member at a social function who will pass it along to the president of the think tank who will raise questions with the VP in charge of the scholar's department who will suggest that the scholar turn his attention elsewhere and so on.

Posted by Bruce Bartlett | August 22, 2007 8:53 AM