by Jim Lobe
In light of the chorus of criticism and contempt by neoconservatives and other hawks (like the Washington Post’s editorial board) leveled at President Barack Obama’s West Point speech last week, I found striking the similarities in basic viewpoints between his address and the concluding pages of Robert [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
In light of the chorus of criticism and contempt by neoconservatives and other hawks (like the Washington Post’s editorial board) leveled at President Barack Obama’s West Point speech last week, I found striking the similarities in basic viewpoints between his address and the concluding pages of Robert Gates’ memoir, Duty. Gates, of course, was the one major hold-over from the Bush administration, and, despite his service under Obama, was very, very rarely criticized by the usual suspects, particularly the neocons and their right-wing allies in Congress. Here he is on pages 591-3 in his book:
My time as secretary of defense reinforced my belief that in recent decades, American presidents, confronted with a tough problem abroad, have too often been too quick to reach for a gun — to use military force, despite all the realities I have been describing. They could have done worse than to follow the example of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his presidency, the Soviet Union became a thermonuclear power, China became a nuclear power, and there were calls for preventive war against both; the Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended that he use nuclear weapons to help the French in Vietnam; there were several crises with China related to Taiwan; a war in the Middle East; a revolution in Cuba; and uprisings in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. And yet after Eisenhower agreed to the armistice in Korea in the summer of 1953, not one American soldier was killed in action during his presidency. [Bear this passage in mind if you read Bob Kagan's most recent treatise on how international peace and stability has depended and should continue to depend on U.S. military power since 1945.]
Too many ideologues call for the use of the American military as the first option rather than a last resort to address problems. On the left, we hear about the “responsibility to protect” as a justification for military intervention in Libya, Syria, the Sudan, and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to use military force in Libya, Syria, or Iran is deemed an abdication of American leadership and a symptom of a ‘soft’ foreign policy. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia was framed almost entirely in military terms as opposed to economic and political priorities. And so the rest of the world sees America, above all else, as a militaristic country too quick to launch planes, cruise missiles, and armed drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. [Emphasis added.]
I strongly believe America must continue to fulfill its global responsibilities. We are the “indispensable nation,” and few international problems can be addressed successfully without our leadership. But we also need to better appreciate that there are limits to what the United States — still by far the strongest and greatest nation on earth — can do in an often cruel and challenging world. The power of our military’s global reach has been an indispensable contributor to peace and stability in many regions and must remain so. But not every outrage, every act of aggression, every oppression, or every crisis can or should elicit an American response.
I wrote in my first book in 1996 that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the biggest doves in Washington wear uniforms. This is because our military leaders have seen the cost of war and its unpredictability, and they have too often sent their troops in harm’s way to execute ill-defined or unrealistic presidential objectives, with thin political support that evaporated when the going got tough or the fight became prolonged. Just as it did in “the necessary war” in Afghanistan.
There is one final lesson about war that we too often forget. We are enamored of technology and what it can do because of advances in precision, sensors, information, and satellite technology. A button is pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. A bomb destroys the targeted house on the right, leaving intact the one on the left. War has become for too many — among them defense “experts,” members of Congress, executive branch officials, and the American public as well — a kind of arcade video game or action movie, bloodless, painless, and odorless. But as I told a military audience at the National Defense University in September 2008, war is “inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain.” I warned them to be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. “Look askance,” I said, “at idealized, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war, where the enemy is killed, but our troops and innocent civilians are spared: where adversaries can be cowed, shocked, or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.” I quoted General William T. Sherman that “every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” And I concluded with General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s warning that “no matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out — there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.”
We must always be prepared and willing to use our military forces when our security, our vital interests, or those of our allies are threatened or attacked. But I believe the use of military force should always be a last resort and our objectives clearly and realistically defined (as in the Gulf War). And presidents need to be more willing and skillful in using tools in the national security kit other than hammers. Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents. [Emphasis added.]
It seems to me that, if anything, the principles laid out by Obama in his West Point speech actually makes him more hawkish than Gates. Which makes me wonder once again why the hawks were so reluctant to attack Gates.
Photo: President Barack Obama talks with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, left, and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outside the Oval Office in the White House, June 16, 2009. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>by Jim Lobe
A short item just to note that Bill Kristol, in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous”, crystallized (shall we say) the internal split among neoconservatives over how to react to the military coup and subsequent repression against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
A short item just to note that Bill Kristol, in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous”, crystallized (shall we say) the internal split among neoconservatives over how to react to the military coup and subsequent repression against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Breaking with his fellow-neoconservative princeling, Robert Kagan (with whom he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and its successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Kristol came out against cutting military aid to Egypt. Here’s the relevant exchange:
Stephanopoulos: Bill Kristol: one country that has not said [this was a coup and aid should be cut] is Israel. Israel, ironically, actually wants to keep the aid flowing.
Kristol: Well, I think they prefer the military to rule to the Muslim Brotherhood ruling. And I think an awful lot of people in the region prefer that. You know, an awful lot of the Arab governments prefer it. And it’s not clear to me that we shouldn’t prefer it.
So I’m a little — I’m — most of my friends in the foreign policy world are for cutting off aid. I’m much more uncertain about it at this point. I mean, this is a trigger we can only pull once. You can only cut off the aid once. And what’s the point of — what would happen concretely? What better thing is going to happen in Egypt or in the region if, tomorrow morning, the president got on TV and said we’re cutting off the aid?
I’m very doubtful about that, and I think there’s a lot we can do with our relationship with the Egyptian military that will be harder to do once we cut off the aid.
Of course, in referring to his friends, Kristol no doubt had Kagan in mind. For his part, Kagan, who has been by far the most outspoken neoconservative calling for an aid cut-off — even to the extent of accusing Washington of being “complicit” in the massacres that have taken place over the last two weeks — had just signed off on a statement last Friday by the “Working Group on Egypt” (which he co-chairs with Michele Dunne of the Atlantic Council) calling on Obama to immediately suspend military aid to Egypt and stating that a failure to do so would be a “strategic error.” The same statement called for Washington to use its influence to block funding by international financial agencies until the interim government reverses course. In addition to a number of liberal internationalists, other neocons who signed the statement included Elliott Abrams, Ellen Bork, and Reuel Marc Gerecht.
It’s a remarkable moment when the two arguably most influential neocons of their generation disagree so clearly about something as fundamental to US Middle East policy, Israel and democracy promotion. They not only co-founded PNAC and the FPI; in 1996, they also co-authored “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in Foreign Affairs, which among other things, advocated “benevolent global hegemony” as the role that Washington should play in the post-Cold War era. But they now appear to have a fundamental disagreement about how that benevolence should be exercised in a strategically significant nation which is also important to Israel’s security.
Of course, this disagreement highlights once again the fact that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. It also suggests that the movement itself is becoming increasingly incoherent from an ideological point of view. Granted, Kagan considers himself a strategic thinker on the order of a Kissinger or Brzezinski, while Kristol is much more caught up in day-to-day Republican politics and consistently appears to align his views on the Middle East with those of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Likud-led Israeli Government. But what is especially interesting at this moment is the fact that Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham — both leaders of what could be called the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party — are moving into Kagan’s camp.
]]>He writes:
But the real test of whether the president can make progress toward clinching a deal is whether he uses the next year to bring clarity to the regional challenge that poses the most serious consequences for Middle East security and the overall U.S. position in the region: Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
and
To his credit, the president seems to have abandoned the loopy thesis that Arab-Israeli peace is a prerequisite for resolving the Iranian nuclear problem.
While one might disagree with Satloff’s conclusions, he’s consistent in his thinking.
On October 3, 2001 Satloff employed a similar argument in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.
When Saddam Hussein gobbled up a neighboring state and posed a threat to international security unseen since World War II, Bush the elder received numerous messages from Arab and Muslim leaders demanding U.S. intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian arena as the price for support in the campaign against Iraq. He refused to be drawn in prematurely, confident that victory in Desert Storm would deflate the region’s radicals, embolden the moderates and create the conditions to invigorate the search for Arab-Israeli peace.
In November, 2001, in a response to Colin Powell’s November 19, 2001 Louisville speech on the peace process, Satloff said:
A new era in Arab-Israeli peacemaking has almost surely not been opened by this speech—that will likely have to await a change in the objective circumstances of the regional situation (i.e., a change in leadership, a stunning defeat for regional radicals like Iraq, etc.). While U.S. diplomacy can play some part in creating a more positive environment for the eventual return to active peacemaking, U.S. victory in the war on terror is a more critical element in achieving that goal.
And on April 27, 2003, Satloff, in a Baltimore Sun op-ed on the Mideast Roadmap, wrote:
Victory in Iraq provides a rare opportunity to have Arabs make important movement on both fronts. That, in turn, would limit the near-term damage of the roadmap, encourage Israelis and Palestinians to meet their own responsibilities for peacemaking and raise the chance for success of U.S. engagement in Arab-Israeli diplomacy down the road.
Satloff, much like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol (see their April 15, 2002 Weekly Standard article, “Remember the Bush Doctrine“), have been harping at the reverse linkage argument since before the invasion of Iraq. In many ways their advice was followed and their theory tested.
While pundits like Satloff promised big changes if Saddam Hussein was removed from power, the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza and the winter 2008-2009 Gaza War all occurred after the U.S. had been victorious in Iraq. Their claim that toppling Saddam Hussein would bring Israel and its neighbors closer to peaceful coexistence appears to have been, at best, a tenuous link.
But that doesn’t deter the proponents of reverse linkage from trying their luck a second time. This time the target is Iran, and Satloff promises that although Obama is entering Arab-Israeli diplomacy with a “weak hand,” if he “…rebuilds a sense of U.S. strength by dealing resolutely with the approaching crisis point over Iran’s nuclear program, he can reverse this dynamic.”
It sounds all too familiar.
]]>On a nearly daily occurrence, neoconservative op-ed columns and blogs are recycling the worn talking point, with hawks [...]]]>
On a nearly daily occurrence, neoconservative op-ed columns and blogs are recycling the worn talking point, with hawks reiterating peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis are doomed as long as Iran continues its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Back in April 2002, a year prior to the invasion of Iraq, Foreign Policy Initiative and PNAC co-founders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote that Middle East peace would be unattainable unless Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
Their Weekly Standard article “Remember the Bush Doctrine” read:
… President Bush needs to stay focused on Iraq. Many of those who want him to become deeply and personally involved in the Middle East peace process also want him to do nothing about Saddam Hussein. In the Arab world, in Europe, in Washington and New York, and in some corners of the administration itself, there is the hope that Bush will become so immersed in peace-processing that he’ll have neither the time, the energy, nor the inclination to tackle the more fundamental problem in the Middle East. By turning Bush into a Middle East mediator, they think they can shunt him off the road that leads to real security and peace–the road that runs through Baghdad. We trust the president will see and avoid this trap.
Looking through the rear view mirror with 20/20 hindsight, it’s hard to detect much truth in Kagan and Kristol’s assertion. Although they called Saddam Hussein “the fundamental problem in the Middle East”, the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza and the winter 2008-2009 Gaza War all occurred after he had been removed from power.
Now they want to drive down their newest repaved “road that leads to real security and peace,” because the last road doesn’t seem to have led anyone there. Their utter failure to chart a sound course in the first decade of the century hasn’t stopped the blustering of Iran hawks throughout Washington. Neoconservatives and their allies still employ the thoroughly debunked “road to peace through [insert Muslim capitol]” argument to redirect public attention away from negotiations over borders and towards the Iranian “existential threat.”
On August 31st, Benjamin Weinthal wrote on the The National Review’s blog, The Corner:
…[T]the Obama administration plans to ignore the 800-pound gorilla — the Islamic Republic of Iran. While the Obama administration is fixated on what will probably turn out to be an empty round of negotiations, Iran’s drive to develop nuclear weapons continues on an accelerated track. A nuclear-armed Iran will only bolster the reactionary Islamic Hamas and its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon. And Iranian nuclear missiles will further destabilize a region already filled with enormous instability.
On September 1st, the JINSA newsletter noted:
Iran is the elephant in the Israel-Palestinian “peace” talks. Iran provides funds and ideological support to Hamas, while Hamas and Fatah are engaged in a civil war that has moved from Gaza (where Fatah supporters have been pushed underground by brutal attacks) to the West Bank, where Hamas supporters are increasingly visible – including in yesterday’s murder of four Israelis. It should be impossible for the Administration to propose a “two state solution” while the Hamas government wages war on both Israel and Fatah.
In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), fresh off his first trip to the Middle East, started his op-ed by writing:
Those of us who hope for peace in the Middle East applaud the meeting of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The fact that Palestinians finally agreed to direct negotiations, without preconditions, is a positive step. But let’s not delude ourselves: There can never be peace in the Middle East with a nuclear-armed Iran.
Commentary‘s Jennifer Rubin ran with Brown’s argument, blogging “The Key to Middle East Peace is in Tehran.”
Rubin writes:
From the start of his presidency, Obama has had linkage backward — making the unsupportable claim that Iran can be disarmed only in the aftermath of a successful peace process. It is actually the reverse — toppling the mullahs would be the best encouragement (other than the Palestinians’ renunciation of violence and a one-state solution) to a true peace process. Ironically, doing what Obama loathes (attacking Iran, adopting regime change as our official policy) may be the only way for him to get what he desperately wants but cannot achieve (resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict).
This “reverse linkage” runs counter to much of the conventional wisdom in Washington. Many liberals, progressives, realists and notably, many in the highest echelons of the military establishment, agree U.S. strategic objectives in the Middle East will be easier to accomplish once Israeli-Arab peace (particularly with Palestinians) is achieved. This list includes maintaining stability in Iraq, defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, smothering Al Qaeda and deterring Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
Last month’s 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll, an annual public opinion survey of residents in five Arab countries conducted by by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution and the Zogby International polling firm, found that 61 percent of respondents cited the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as their biggest policy disappointment with the Obama administration and the percentage supporting an Iranian nuclear weapons program went up from 53 to 77 percent over the past year.
Back in March, David Petraeus, one of the most influential generals in strategic circles inside and outside the Pentagon, made the military’s position on linkage crystal clear. At the time he was heading up Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia.
In his Senate testimony he said:
Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the [CENTCOM's Area of Responsibility]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
Mark Perry reported in Foreign Policy earlier this year that General Petraeus took the extraordinary step in January of requesting Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, currently under European Command, be moved into his CENTCOM purview.
The reverse linkage argument — where neocons tell the American public not to worry about Arab-Israeli peace but to focus instead on Iraq, Iran or another country yet to be named on their map — has been tried, tested and failed. Reverse linkage looks like it’s here to stay no matter how disastrous and ineffective the notion’s implementation has been. Perhaps the best counterargument against those who promote reverse linkage is in the title of Kagan and Kristol’s 2002 article, “Remember the Bush Doctrine.”
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