Shoshana Bryen, a director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), served as JINSA's executive director from 1981 to 1991 after taking over from her husband, Stephen Bryen, who left the helm of the hawkish pro-Israel group in the early 1980s to work under Richard Perle in the Reagan administration Defense Department.
According to journalist Mark Milstein, during Shoshana Bryen's tenure JINSA went from being a small networking group to "the mouse [that] finally learned how to roar." She was instrumental in establishing relations between JINSA and a number of other influential political actors in Washington, he reported. Wrote Milstein: "With Bryen at the helm, JINSA sent out the likes of former AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] Executive Director Morris J. Amitay, now a lobbyist and director of the rightist pro-Israel Washington political action committee, attracted well-known military commentators like Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and produced influential papers such as those that many credit for keeping the joint U.S.-Israeli Arrow missile project afloat. 'This is how it works,' said Russell Warren Howe, author of The Power Peddlers, a book on lobbying in Washington. 'They don't actually go into someone's office and ask them to do this or that. Instead, they make friends with them, suggest ideas, educate them, and hope they'll make decisions in keeping with JINSA's philosophy'" (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1991.)
Founded in 1976 by a group of mainly neoconservative elites (including current American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Ledeen) who worried that the United States might not aid Israel in the event of a war with its neighbors, JINSA aims to ensure "strategic cooperation" between the United States and Israel. The group specializes in connecting former U.S. military brass with their counterparts in Israel through organized trips and meetings. David Steinmann is chairman of JINSA's board, which includes a number of hardline and neoconservative figures, such as Anne Bayefsky, Phyllis Kaminsky, Max Kampelman, Jack Kemp, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Perle, and James Woolsey. The group's agenda includes pushing U.S.-Israeli weapons contracts, nurturing military-to-military relations between the two countries, and pushing a hardline on Mideast peace. As journalist Jason Vest writes, "JINSA relishes denouncing virtually any type of contact between the U.S. government and Syria and finding new ways to demonize the Palestinians."
Bryen has been a vocal supporter of Likudnik policies regarding the Palestinians and of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Commenting on the Israeli government's decision in September 2003 to expel Yasser Arafat, Bryen said: "As long as Yasser Arafat is in control of the Palestinian Authority—in control of the politics, in control of the weapons and the forces—nobody who's named prime minister will be able to accomplish what the United States wants that person to accomplish" (Chad Groening, Bill Fancher, and Fred Jackson, "As Some Applaud Ousting Arafat, Others Call for Execution," Agape Press, 2003).
During the lead up to the Iraq War, Bryen served as a mouthpiece for a number of objectives long on the neoconservative wish list. She argued that a U.S. invasion was "probably going to spell the end of OPEC" and championed the cause of installing Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile and close associate of Richard Perle, as head of Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, saying in an interview, "Chalabi is the one that we know the best" (quoted in Robert Dreyfuss, "Tinker, Banker, Neocon, Spy," American Prospect, November 18, 2002).
In a September 2006 JINSA "Viewpoint" posted on the group's website, Bryen addressed the fallout from the Summer 2006 war between Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel. In contrast to other neoconservative pundits, like the Hudson Institute's Meyrav Wurmser, Bryen argued that it was too early to declare the war a failure from the Israeli point of view. Instead, she argued: " The Summer War was, in fact, a battle in the larger war against terrorists and the states that harbor and/or support them. There was no possibility of a final military victory in August; long-term success or failure in the process remains at issue." She added: "Hezbollah is an arm of Iran via the Syrian pipeline, running a state-within-a-state in Lebanon from among a generally-but-not-totally-supportive Lebanese civilian population that receives little help from the Beirut government. Israel is an integral part of the economic, political, and social fabric of the West, threatened at several levels by violent Islamic radicalism and nationalist irredentism orchestrated and funded by Iran."
Bryen also contributes her writing, on an infrequent basis, to outlets such as the National Review and the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Sun.
Bryen regularly donates to the Washington Political Action Committee and in 2003 gave $500 to then-Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-PA) "Weldon Victory Committee" campaign (Newsmeat.com). Weldon lost the 2006 mid-term election apparently in part because of a corruption scandal involving his connections to Finmeccanica , an Italy-based defense contractor for which Bryen's husband serves as a president (see Jeffrey Klein and Paolo Pontoniere, "Weldon Case Recalls Ike's Warning: Corrupting Power of Military-Industrial Complex," New America Media, October 31, 2006).
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Affiliations
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA): Director; Former Executive Director (1981-1991)
National Review: Contributor
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