Powerful in Vegas, hawkish toward Iran

Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

Sheldon Adelson, chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp., is among a group of conservatives embarked on an effort to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, including the possibility of military action.

Adelson, who according to Forbes magazine is the world's sixth-richest man, has been a major contributor to Freedom's Watch, a conservative advocacy group formed to counteract resurgent American liberalism, and particularly MoveOn.org.

Freedom's Watch was established with the help of Las Vegas image maven Sig Rogich, a Sands consultant, and its five board members include Sands President William Weidner.

The group's first public action was to air $15million in ads last summer in tossup congressional districts urging that America stay in Iraq until victory is achieved. Now the group is shifting its focus to Iran, which has nuclear intentions and which the State Department calls a state sponsor of terrorism.

Freedom's Watch is sponsoring a colloquy this month at which 20 experts will argue for a more assertive policy toward Iran, including a military option. Among those attending will be scholars from the American Enterprise Institute, which has close ties to the Bush administration and has long been the outpost of neoconservatives who advocated war with Iraq before turning their attention to Iran.

"Freedom's Watch believes Iran poses a significant threat to the United States, which is why we've assembled a forum to discuss the issues and the threat," spokesman Matt David said. He emphasized the group has taken no official position on a war.

The group ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times last month that condemned Columbia University for inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak . The Iranian president "threatens our nation and the freedoms we value," the ad read. "He has supported attacks on our soldiers and our allies. He should be treated as the terrorist that he is."

Bradley Blakeman, the president of Freedom's Watch , who ran the Republican communications strategy during the disputed 2000 presidential election recount, has compared Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler before the start of World War II.

Adelson did not respond to two Sun requests for an interview. In remarks at a recent fundraiser for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that honored Adelson and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Adelson said he was "very, very, very outraged and incensed at the fact that Ahmadinejad went to Columbia University , where he has no right of free speech in this country, he's not a citizen, he has no right of free speech ..."

At Columbia, Adelson continued, the university president asked Ahmadinejad whether any homosexuals lived in Iran.

"He said, 'We don't have one.'

"I said to myself, 'That's because he killed them all.' "

Gingrich made similar comments at the Las Vegas banquet.

Indeed, the new direction of Freedom's Watch , emphasizing the Iranian threat , apparently is part of a larger communications strategy that resembles, in style if not in scope, the campaign used to sell the Iraq war beginning in fall 2002.

Speculation in Washington is rampant about whether the effort is being directed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, who has the closest administration ties to the neoconservative community and the American Enterprise Institute.

Given the tax-exempt status of Freedom's Watch, the group is not required to reveal its donors, but a source with knowledge of the group's finances said Adelson is a "significant contributor." A recent New York Times report said several of the group's founding donors had given $1 million each.

The idea for Freedom's Watch arose out of the American Enterprise Institute and, specifically, at a Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in March at which Cheney was keynote speaker, according to the recent New York Times article.

If war with Iran is approaching, the run-up to the war in Iraq could serve as a guide.

In summer 2002, Cheney made a speech to a veterans group that made plain the government's intentions toward Iraq. It was the beginning of a campaign against Iraq that went into effect in earnest after Labor Day that year.

This August, President Bush said, "Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere." He said Iran with a nuclear weapon would place the Mideast in "the shadow of a nuclear holocaust."

Before the Iraq campaign, Americans were told by a number of administration officials not to allow the "smoking gun" to be "a mushroom cloud."

Bush and other government figures have accused the Iranian government of killing American soldiers in Iraq by assisting Shiite militias there.

Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert and senior fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, has blogged that friends in Washington think tanks had been given marching orders: "They have 'instructions' (yes, that was the word used) from the office of the vice president to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day" to be coordinated with friendly media.

"Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this - they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is 'plenty,' " Rubin wrote.

There's at least some evidence that this is happening:

At least some of the rationale for the new tactic, Hersh recently said on CNN, is an easier sell to the public: "You can also sell counterterror - it's much more logical. You can say to the American people, we're only hitting these people that are trying to kill our boys and the coalition forces and so that seems to be more sensible. The White House thinks they can actually pitch this, this would actually work "

According to Hersh's sources, Cheney is committed to the plan, although Bush hasn't given a go-ahead.