by Derek Davison
One of the unintended consequences of the decision to extend the international talks on Iran’s nuclear program is the growing number of neoconservative calls for even more pressure on Iran. So it was on July 28 that the Gemunder Center Iran Task Force, a creation of the Jewish [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
One of the unintended consequences of the decision to extend the international talks on Iran’s nuclear program is the growing number of neoconservative calls for even more pressure on Iran. So it was on July 28 that the Gemunder Center Iran Task Force, a creation of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), hosted a panel discussion, “The Elusive Final Deal with Iran: Developments and Options Going Forward,” the participants of which all agreed on the need to “pressure” Iran now, and presumably forever, or at least until a new regime takes over in Tehran (which will be any day now, surely).
The substance of the discussion closely mirrored JINSA’s July 17 report, “Improving the Prospects for an Acceptable Final Deal with Iran,” which also focused on “pressure.” The panel repeatedly made the case for more pressure, which highlighted the shifting goalposts that have marked the neocon approach to the talks between Iran and the P5+1 (US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany) since they began.
America and its allies were supposed to pressure Iran into negotiating and bringing its nuclear program into compliance with international expectations. Now that Iran is (again) negotiating and is in compliance, the calls for increasing pressure continue from neoconservative think tanks and certain actors on Capitol Hill.
When Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations talks about the importance of increasing pressure on Iran while “giving them a way out,” it’s not quite clear how that differs from what has already happened up until this point. Now American pressure is supposed to leverage not just Iran’s participation in the talks, not only its compliance with its NPT obligations, but also inspire Iranian capitulation to the agenda of American hawks. Iran’s failure to capitulate is proof positive that it hasn’t been pressured enough. Either the Iran hawks aren’t getting the hang of this “negotiating” thing or they consider “pressuring” Iran the end, not the means.
So what should pressure amount to when it comes to Iran and the nuclear talks? According to the JINSA report, Iran “respects only strength” (that really is a direct quote), so naturally a “credible” military threat is required. This requires more public threats of a military response, more public pledges to defend America’s regional allies from alleged Iranian aggression, more public tests of US “bunker buster” weaponry like the Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP), and more weapons sales, including MOPs, to Israel.
The panel also heavily emphasized the idea that America must “compete” with Iran regionally, “interdicting Iranian actions” as Ambassador Dennis Ross put it. This would presumably ratchet up the “pressure” on Iran. But the chaotic state of affairs throughout the Middle East right now makes it almost impossible for the US to adopt an across-the-board policy of opposing Iranian action everywhere. There are three regional flashpoints where Iran is currently active: Gaza, where it may be strengthening its support for Hamas; Syria, where it supports Bashar al-Assad against the rebel factions trying to unseat him; and Iraq, where it supports the Shia-led government (even if its support for Nouri al-Maliki is waning) and opposes the Islamic State (IS).
In Gaza, the US can and will oppose Iranian activity that might harm Israeli interests, but in Syria the picture becomes muddled, since America supports some of the rebels fighting Assad (the Free Syrian Army) but opposes others (the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front and IS, also opposed by Iran). Meanwhile, in Iraq, for all practical purposes the US and Iran are on the same side, backing Maliki (or at least Baghdad) against IS and the Baathist Naqshbandi Army, though Washington has emphasized the need for a policy of reconciliation between Baghdad and Iraq’s disaffected Sunnis. JINSA’s report notes, in something of an understatement, that “the United States has been reticent to counter Iranian attempts to bolster its Shiite allies” in Syria and Iraq. Well, there’s a reason for that; doing so would materially damage US interests in Iraq and would risk the rise of a greater threat in Syria.
The panelists disagreed somewhat on the ideal length of a comprehensive deal. Ross, somewhat more realistically than his fellow panelists, suggested that an acceptable deal would sunset after 20 years, whereas former George W. Bush officials Stephen Rademaker and Eric Edelman seemed to be unhappy with a deal that would ever sunset. Rademaker specifically objects to language in the JPOA indicating that at the conclusion of a comprehensive solution, “the Iranian nuclear programme will be treated in the same manner as that of any non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT.” While this would still leave Iran subject to Article III of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, specifically its requirement that states comply with safeguards negotiated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to prevent the development of a nuclear weapon, Rademaker insists that Iran should remain under the terms of a comprehensive deal indefinitely. This is certainly a non-starter for the Iranians, who have been clear that they will only accept a deal under which Iran will ultimately be treated like any other NPT-signatory, but maybe they’re only insisting on that point because the US hasn’t “pressured” them enough yet.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry shake hands after world powers reached an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program on November 24, 2013. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
]]>by Tyler Cullis
Earlier this week the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the US drone program and expressing its concern over the desire of some European states to build a program of their own. Here in the US few have paid attention. But if the resolution signals a [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
Earlier this week the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the US drone program and expressing its concern over the desire of some European states to build a program of their own. Here in the US few have paid attention. But if the resolution signals a more serious commitment on the part of Europe to publicly disclaim the legal and policy architecture of the US’s “targeted killing” program, then the White House’s legal footing, which is already on thin ice, could become untenable in the face of near-unanimous global opposition.
The resolution, which is non-binding as a matter of European law, “expresses…grave concern over the use of armed drones outside the international legal framework,” which goes against US pretensions of acting within the bounds of law in conducting its “targeted killing” program. In doing so the European Parliament rejects the novel legal doctrines that the US has used to support its activities in the “global war on terror,” arguing that traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello rules do not need to be revised in light of the threat posed by transnational terror groups (as the US has long alleged). This is a striking challenge to the United States and its claims to compliance with international norms, and is a sharp reminder of the twin reports from UN Special Rapporteurs last year (whose work is cited in the resolution itself).
This also comes on the heels of a New York Times report that the US is considering adding a US citizen, Abdullah al-Shami, to the White House’s “kill list”. Besides the significant constitutional issues at stake in a unilateral presidential decision to kill a US citizen without due process, international human rights law is implicated as well. The focus on human rights law as the appropriate legal frame, which is evident throughout the Parliament’s resolution, thus takes on added significance in the wake of this report.
More importantly, the resolution signals to other EU bodies that now is the time for unified European action to publicly oppose the US’s “targeted killing” program; to limit the use of drones both globally and in a distinctly European context; and to hold criminally responsible those that assist what the Parliament regards a potentially criminal action on the part of the United States. In fact, as part of its “action program” the Parliament’s resolution “urges the [European] Council to adopt an EU common position on the use of armed drones,” which would be binding on all EU member-states. Such a legislative gambit could include provisions providing for “judicial review of drone strikes…and effective access to remedies [for victims].” Both have thus far largely been barred in European courts.
Such would spell serious trouble for the United States and its continued ability to conduct drone warfare across international borders. It is one thing for official criticism to be done in private and for US and European legal scholars to haggle over applicable laws in the US’s conflict with al-Qaeda. It is entirely another thing for the US’s closest allies to so publicly rebuke the White House (especially one that professes to care as much about toeing the line of the law as this one does) and to threaten to open its court system to the victims of what it regards as “unlawful drone strikes.” While legislative action from the European Council and Commission remains unlikely, the vote count on the Parliament’s resolution (534-49) suggests that sentiment against “targeted killings” has begun to overcome Europe’s squeamishness about upsetting its powerful ally.
This week also saw the respected British human rights organization, Reprieve, submit a communication to the International Criminal Court to start an investigation of NATO personnel complicit in the CIA drone program. Of course, none of this bodes well for the United States. Whereas the Bush administration expressed contempt towards international law and thus was treated in kind from its practitioners, the Obama administration has at least demonstrated concern for international norms and struggled to describe its drone policies as compliant with the law. But as US allies and human rights NGOs close in on the White House, the Obama administration will be forced to either proclaim its adherence to international law and end its “targeted killing” policies, or abandon any pretension to international law-compliance altogether. The sooner the better, too, because the growing outcry against the US’ drone policies shows no signs of losing steam.
]]>by Charles Davis
The only thing the outside world really knows about Waziristan is that it is dangerous. Since 2004, there have been hundreds of US drone strikes there, which government officials assure are killing dangerous people. But no foreign journalist travels to the most-bombed region of Pakistan to separate dead mother [...]]]>
by Charles Davis
The only thing the outside world really knows about Waziristan is that it is dangerous. Since 2004, there have been hundreds of US drone strikes there, which government officials assure are killing dangerous people. But no foreign journalist travels to the most-bombed region of Pakistan to separate dead mother from militant; not even other Pakistanis can travel there without first getting special approval from the government. And so the news that gets out is, “Danger!”; a 20- second story on CNN about “bad people dying over there.”
Waziristan may be the region of the world most reported on by reporters who will never go there. Exempt from Pakistani law, the semi-autonomous north is completely blockaded, and a journalist can only visit the south embedded with the military. What we know is what we are told by government officials who tell us what they want us to know. So we hear of terrorists and “senior Taliban commanders” killed by Hellfire missiles — some even have names and faces — but the the majority of those made deceased by US drones are as anonymous as the people briefing the press on their demise. They don’t have friends or loved ones or basic biographic information: they were bad, probably, and now they are dead.
If the people of Waziristan wish to tell their side of the story, they generally need to leave Waziristan. But disputing official accounts can be dangerous: In 2011, 16-year-old Tariq Khan traveled to Islamabad to brief human rights activists on what life was like in a place where unmanned military aircraft are omnipresent (he reported seeing more than 10 a day). After pledging to go back home and gather evidence proving wrong the official account of the drone war — that only evil people need fear the US president’s unilateral execution orders — he and his 12-year-old cousin were promptly killed in a CIA drone strike.
Still, the people of Waziristan continue to speak out; the issue is that few people have bothered speaking to them. Pakistani-American journalist Madiha Tahir addresses that problem in her new half-hour documentary, Wounds of Waziristan. In the film, which aired on a recent broadcast of Democracy Now!, Tahir does something out of the usual: instead of asking a pasty white panel of Washington-based experts to opine on remote-controlled warfare, she let those living under the constant threat of death by drone speak for themselves. What she learned is that drones don’t just kill. The haunt and terrorize the living — to the point that sometimes those who survive a drone strike begin to wish they hadn’t. Inter Press Service asked Tahir about her experience making the film.
Like most people, including many Pakistanis, you weren’t very familiar with Waziristan before making this film. What do you think most people would find most surprising about the region?
The lives of people in FATA [federally administered tribal areas] are marked by an inordinate amount of violence from several sources: the Pakistani military, militants and American drones. I think what has impressed me is that they endure these conditions with grace and dignity. For all the talk about how tribal Pashtuns fetishize revenge, people I’ve spoken with who’ve lost family members simply want the Pakistani government to do its job and to treat them as citizens. Some of the drone survivors I have spoken with display an incredible amount of perseverance. They persist in seeking restitution through the courts knowing the process could take years and may very well fail.
A major theme in your documentary is that survivors of drone strikes are continually haunted by the dead — and continually reminded of their deaths by the omnipresence of drones in Waziristan’s skies. One young boy recounts that while he barely survived a drone attack that killed both his sister-in-law and baby niece, he doesn’t feel lucky to be alive. Indeed, “Death would have been better than this kind of life,” he tells you. Why would he say that?
When I asked him why he said that, Saddam responded that he was tired of the drone attacks and that he felt ill every time he heard a drone had bombed somewhere. I think this is part of what’s critical to understand about drone attacks: they don’t just kill people. They destroy lives. We, those of us who don’t have to suffer through these bombings, have been so disciplined to think in terms of the numbers dead and whether they were “civilians” or “militants” that I think we miss the broader, deeper and long-lasting effects of drone policy. We miss the fact that deaths resound and echo through the social fabric for long after. We miss the fact the bombing destroys communities. The focus on numbers alone has been successful in narrowing the terms of the debate around drones. I wanted to broaden the discussion.
The US isn’t the first Western nation to bomb Waziristan. As you note, the British did it in the 1920s. Do these campaigns have anything in common?
Yes, there are some things in common. Let me point out a difference first: the historian Priya Satia has observed that for the British creating terror through “air policing” — what it was called then — was considered humane because it would terrorize people into submission and therefore minimize the number of people they’d actually have to kill, or so they reasoned. For the US, that discourse has been replaced by claims about precision, accuracy and surgical strikes.
But, of course, the buzzing of the drones does create terror, particularly among those who have already been attacked or seen an attack. That’s the simplest link. More interestingly, there’s a kind of technophilia that’s part of the British and American effort. It has been part of the fantasy of empire ever since flight became a possibility. It’s the belief that flight — whether by airplanes or drones — can make total control of a territory possible. It’s the idea that flight equals omniscience, that territory is transparent, and that all one needs to do in order to understand it, is to see it by air. The British made that mistake, and the Americans are making it now. They have their heads in the clouds. They have failed to grasp the link between the violence they inflict and the response that they get. The British wrote off rebellions as part of the alleged innate savagery of Pashtuns rather than a reaction to their brutal colonial rule. The US now presumes the right to be the global policeman, to occupy and destroy entire countries, but then wonders “why do they hate us?” This is a question that reflects the utter, willful blindness of American power.
This is not to say that those fighting against the Americans in Afghanistan are simply anti-colonial warriors, because the insurgents have been ruthless to Waziris and Pakistanis more generally. But, at the level of imperial politics, there is a definite link between what the British did and what the US is attempting to do now.
Drones are often cast as the “least-bad” option and certainly preferable to ground operations by either the US or Pakistani military, which would likely kill scores of civilians. Among the people you interviewed, did you encounter any support for drone operations based on that calculation?
Yes, given a series of bad choices — military operations or drones — many people will choose drones. That is because the Pakistani security establishment and the military have been brutal towards Pakistanis in FATA. The security forces attack villages; they kill at random or place sporadic curfews that can stretch into months destroying businesses and livelihoods. They subject people there to daily petty humiliations at, for instance, checkpoints. So, people, understandably and legitimately, have no love for the Army.
The question, however, for the rest of us is why people in FATA, particularly in Waziristan, are forced to choose between these two awful options.
A man you interview in the film poses the question, “What is the definition of terrorism or terrorist?” Could you explain what he and others you spoke to think of those words?
I think much ink has been spilled on these terms, which are fairly ideological, and I find them suspect, particularly when coming from people for whom terrorism expertise has become a career. Karim, who asked me this question, however, is not one of these people. What I found interesting about Karim’s statement, in which he calls Obama and Bush “terrorists,” is that he changes how these terms are often deployed. Usually, when these words are thrown out, they are used to refer to the violence of non-state actors. Waziris, more generally, have been consistently dehumanized not only by the governments of the US and Pakistan but also by western media. They are constantly marked as suspect. So, when Karim calls the heads of the US state, Obama and Bush, “terrorists”, he turns this terrorism talk on its head. He implies that we, as tax-paying, voting citizens are complicit in a chain of terrorism that is the calculated, systematic work of a superpower. He points out the very obvious but little stated fact that this superpower is bombing Waziris while the latter sit in their own homes. He notes that terrorism also comes in the form of advanced-weapons systems. Our technological prowess doesn’t make our violence any more humane. It makes it all the more horrifying.
]]>by Andrew J. Bacevich
via Tom Dispatch
For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?
It did at the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in [...]]]>
by Andrew J. Bacevich
via Tom Dispatch
For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name?
It did at the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in announcing that the U.S. was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT. With few dissenters, the media quickly embraced the term. The GWOT promised to be a gargantuan, transformative enterprise. The conflict begun on 9/11 would define the age. In neoconservative circles, it was known as World War IV.
Upon succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare junked Bush’s formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense University last week). Yet if the appellation went away, the conflict itself, shorn of identifying marks, continued.
Does it matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so.
Names bestow meaning. When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about. To specify when a war began and when it ended is to privilege certain explanations of its significance while discrediting others. Let me provide a few illustrations.
With rare exceptions, Americans today characterize the horrendous fraternal bloodletting of 1861-1865 as the Civil War. Yet not many decades ago, diehard supporters of the Lost Cause insisted on referring to that conflict as theWar Between the States or the War for Southern Independence (or even theWar of Northern Aggression). The South may have gone down in defeat, but the purposes for which Southerners had fought — preserving a distinctive way of life and the principle of states’ rights — had been worthy, even noble. So at least they professed to believe, with their preferred names for the war reflecting that belief.
Schoolbooks tell us that the Spanish-American War began in April 1898 and ended in August of that same year. The name and dates fit nicely with a widespread inclination from President William McKinley’s day to our own to frame U.S. intervention in Cuba as an altruistic effort to liberate that island from Spanish oppression.
Yet the Cubans were not exactly bystanders in that drama. By 1898, they had been fighting for years to oust their colonial overlords. And although hostilities in Cuba itself ended on August 12th, they dragged on in the Philippines, another Spanish colony that the United States had seized for reasons only remotely related to liberating Cubans. Notably, U.S. troops occupying the Philippines waged a brutal war not against Spaniards but against Filipino nationalists no more inclined to accept colonial rule by Washington than by Madrid. So widen the aperture to include this Cuban prelude and the Filipino postlude and you end up with something like this: The Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippines War of 1895-1902. Too clunky? How about the War for the American Empire? This much is for sure: rather than illuminating, the commonplace textbook descriptor serves chiefly to conceal.
Strange as it may seem, Europeans once referred to the calamitous events of 1914-1918 as the Great War. When Woodrow Wilson decided in 1917 to send an army of doughboys to fight alongside the Allies, he went beyond Great. According to the president, the Great War was going to be the War To End All Wars. Alas, things did not pan out as he expected. Perhaps anticipating the demise of his vision of permanent peace, War Department General Order 115, issued on October 7, 1919, formally declared that, at least as far as the United States was concerned, the recently concluded hostilities would be known simply as the World War.
In September 1939 – presto chango! — the World War suddenly became theFirst World War, the Nazi invasion of Poland having inaugurated a Second World War, also known as World War II or more cryptically WWII. To be sure, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin preferred the Great Patriotic War. Although this found instant — almost unanimous — favor among Soviet citizens, it did not catch on elsewhere.
Does World War II accurately capture the events it purports to encompass? With the crusade against the Axis now ranking alongside the crusade against slavery as a myth-enshrouded chapter in U.S. history to which all must pay homage, Americans are no more inclined to consider that question than to consider why a playoff to determine the professional baseball championship of North America constitutes a “World Series.”
In fact, however convenient and familiar, World War II is misleading and not especially useful. The period in question saw at least two wars, each only tenuously connected to the other, each having distinctive origins, each yielding a different outcome. To separate them is to transform the historical landscape.
On the one hand, there was the Pacific War, pitting the United States against Japan. Formally initiated by the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, it had in fact begun a decade earlier when Japan embarked upon a policy of armed conquest in Manchuria. At stake was the question of who would dominate East Asia. Japan’s crushing defeat at the hands of the United States, sealed by two atomic bombs in 1945, answered that question (at least for a time).
Then there was the European War, pitting Nazi Germany first against Great Britain and France, but ultimately against a grand alliance led by the United States, the Soviet Union, and a fast fading British Empire. At stake was the question of who would dominate Europe. Germany’s defeat resolved that issue (at least for a time): no one would. To prevent any single power from controlling Europe, two outside powers divided it.
This division served as the basis for the ensuing Cold War, which wasn’t actually cold, but also (thankfully) wasn’t World War III, the retrospective insistence of bellicose neoconservatives notwithstanding. But when did theCold War begin? Was it in early 1947, when President Harry Truman decided that Stalin’s Russia posed a looming threat and committed the United States to a strategy of containment? Or was it in 1919, when Vladimir Lenin decided that Winston Churchill’s vow to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” posed a looming threat to the Russian Revolution, with an ongoing Anglo-American military intervention evincing a determination to make good on that vow?
Separating the war against Nazi Germany from the war against Imperial Japan opens up another interpretive possibility. If you incorporate the European conflict of 1914-1918 and the European conflict of 1939-1945 into a single narrative, you get a Second Thirty Years War (the first having occurred from 1618-1648) — not so much a contest of good against evil, as a mindless exercise in self-destruction that represented the ultimate expression of European folly.
So, yes, it matters what we choose to call the military enterprise we’ve been waging not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in any number of other countries scattered hither and yon across the Islamic world. Although the Obama administration appears no more interested than the Bush administration in saying when that enterprise will actually end, the date we choose as its starting point also matters.
Although Washington seems in no hurry to name its nameless war — and will no doubt settle on something self-serving or anodyne if it ever finally addresses the issue — perhaps we should jump-start the process. Let’s consider some possible options, names that might actually explain what’s going on.
The Long War: Coined not long after 9/11 by senior officers in the Pentagon, this formulation never gained traction with either civilian officials or the general public. Yet the Long War deserves consideration, even though — or perhaps because — it has lost its luster with the passage of time.
At the outset, it connoted grand ambitions buoyed by extreme confidence in the efficacy of American military might. This was going to be one for the ages, a multi-generational conflict yielding sweeping results.
The Long War did begin on a hopeful note. The initial entry into Afghanistan and then into Iraq seemed to herald “home by Christmas” triumphal parades. Yet this soon proved an illusion as victory slipped from Washington’s grasp. By 2005 at the latest, events in the field had dashed the neo-Wilsonian expectations nurtured back home.
With the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, “long” lost its original connotation. Instead of “really important,” it became a synonym for “interminable.” Today, the Long War does succinctly capture the experience of American soldiers who have endured multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
For Long War combatants, the object of the exercise has become to persist. As for winning, it’s not in the cards. The Long War just might conclude by the end of 2014 if President Obama keeps his pledge to end the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan and if he avoids getting sucked into Syria’s civil war. So the troops may hope.
The War Against Al-Qaeda: It began in August 1996 when Osama bin Laden issued a “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” i.e., Saudi Arabia. In February 1998, a second bin Laden manifesto announced that killing Americans, military and civilian alike, had become “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
Although President Bill Clinton took notice, the U.S. response to bin Laden’s provocations was limited and ineffectual. Only after 9/11 did Washington take this threat seriously. Since then, apart from a pointless excursion into Iraq (where, in Saddam Hussein’s day, al-Qaeda did not exist), U.S. attention has been focused on Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have waged the longest war in American history, and on Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, where a CIA drone campaign is ongoing. By the end of President Obama’s first term, U.S. intelligence agencies were reporting that a combined CIA/military campaign had largely destroyed bin Laden’s organization. Bin Laden himself, of course, was dead.
Could the United States have declared victory in its unnamed war at this point? Perhaps, but it gave little thought to doing so. Instead, the national security apparatus had already trained its sights on various al-Qaeda “franchises” and wannabes, militant groups claiming the bin Laden brand and waging their own version of jihad. These offshoots emerged in the Maghreb, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and — wouldn’t you know it — post-Saddam Iraq, among other places. The question as to whether they actually posed a danger to the United States got, at best, passing attention — the label “al-Qaeda” eliciting the same sort of Pavlovian response that the word “communist” once did.
Americans should not expect this war to end anytime soon. Indeed, the Pentagon’s impresario of special operations recently speculated — by no means unhappily — that it would continue globally for “at least 10 to 20 years.” Freely translated, his statement undoubtedly means: “No one really knows, but we’re planning to keep at it for one helluva long time.”
The War For/Against/About Israel: It began in 1948. For many Jews, the founding of the state of Israel signified an ancient hope fulfilled. For many Christians, conscious of the sin of anti-Semitism that had culminated in the Holocaust, it offered a way to ease guilty consciences, albeit mostly at others’ expense. For many Muslims, especially Arabs, and most acutely Arabs who had been living in Palestine, the founding of the Jewish state represented a grave injustice. It was yet another unwelcome intrusion engineered by the West — colonialism by another name.
Recounting the ensuing struggle without appearing to take sides is almost impossible. Yet one thing seems clear: in terms of military involvement, the United States attempted in the late 1940s and 1950s to keep its distance. Over the course of the 1960s, this changed. The U.S. became Israel’s principal patron, committed to maintaining (and indeed increasing) its military superiority over its neighbors.
In the decades that followed, the two countries forged a multifaceted “strategic relationship.” A compliant Congress provided Israel with weapons and other assistance worth many billions of dollars, testifying to what has become an unambiguous and irrevocable U.S. commitment to the safety and well-being of the Jewish state. The two countries share technology and intelligence. Meanwhile, just as Israel had disregarded U.S. concerns when it came to developing nuclear weapons, it ignored persistent U.S. requests that it refrain from colonizing territory that it has conquered.
When it comes to identifying the minimal essential requirements of Israeli security and the terms that will define any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal, the United States defers to Israel. That may qualify as an overstatement, but only slightly. Given the Israeli perspective on those requirements and those terms — permanent military supremacy and a permanently demilitarized Palestine allowed limited sovereignty — the War For/Against/About Israel is unlikely to end anytime soon either. Whether the United States benefits from the perpetuation of this war is difficult to say, but we are in it for the long haul.
The War for the Greater Middle East: I confess that this is the name I would choose for Washington’s unnamed war and is, in fact, the title of a course I teach. (A tempting alternative is the Second Hundred Years War, the “first” having begun in 1337 and ended in 1453.)
This war is about to hit the century mark, its opening chapter coinciding with the onset of World War I. Not long after the fighting on the Western Front in Europe had settled into a stalemate, the British government, looking for ways to gain the upper hand, set out to dismantle the Ottoman Empire whose rulers had foolishly thrown in their lot with the German Reich against the Allies.
By the time the war ended with Germany and the Turks on the losing side, Great Britain had already begun to draw up new boundaries, invent states, and install rulers to suit its predilections, while also issuing mutually contradictory promises to groups inhabiting these new precincts of its empire. Toward what end? Simply put, the British were intent on calling the shots from Egypt to India, whether by governing through intermediaries or ruling directly. The result was a new Middle East and a total mess.
London presided over this mess, albeit with considerable difficulty, until the end of World War II. At this point, by abandoning efforts to keep Arabs and Zionists from one another’s throats in Palestine and by accepting the partition of India, they signaled their intention to throw in the towel. Alas, Washington proved more than willing to assume Britain’s role. The lure of oil was strong. So too were the fears, however overwrought, of the Soviets extending their influence into the region.
Unfortunately, the Americans enjoyed no more success in promoting long-term, pro-Western stability than had the British. In some respects, they only made things worse, with the joint CIA-MI6 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 offering a prime example of a “success” that, to this day, has never stopped breeding disaster.
Only after 1980 did things get really interesting, however. The Carter Doctrine promulgated that year designated the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest and opened the door to greatly increased U.S. military activity not just in the Gulf, but also throughout the Greater Middle East (GME). Between 1945 and 1980, considerable numbers of American soldiers lost their lives fighting in Asia and elsewhere. During that period, virtually none were killed fighting in the GME. Since 1990, in contrast, virtually none have been killed fighting anywhere except in the GME.
What does the United States hope to achieve in its inherited and unending War for the Greater Middle East? To pacify the region? To remake it in our image? To drain its stocks of petroleum? Or just keeping the lid on? However you define the war’s aims, things have not gone well, which once again suggests that, in some form, it will continue for some time to come. If there’s any good news here, it’s the prospect of having ever more material for my seminar, which may soon expand into a two-semester course.
The War Against Islam: This war began nearly 1,000 years ago and continued for centuries, a storied collision between Christendom and the Muslim ummah. For a couple of hundred years, periodic eruptions of large-scale violence occurred until the conflict finally petered out with the last crusade sometime in the fourteenth century.
In those days, many people had deemed religion something worth fighting for, a proposition to which the more sophisticated present-day inhabitants of Christendom no longer subscribe. Yet could that religious war have resumed in our own day? Professor Samuel Huntington thought so, although he styled the conflict a “clash of civilizations.” Some militant radical Islamists agree with Professor Huntington, citing as evidence the unwelcome meddling of “infidels,” mostly wearing American uniforms, in various parts of the Muslim world. Some militant evangelical Christians endorse this proposition, even if they take a more favorable view of U.S. troops occupying and drones targeting Muslim countries.
In explaining the position of the United States government, religious scholars like George W. Bush and Barack (Hussein!) Obama have consistently expressed a contrary view. Islam is a religion of peace, they declare, part of the great Abrahamic triad. That the other elements of that triad are likewise committed to peace is a proposition that Bush, Obama, and most Americans take for granted, evidence not required. There should be no reason why Christians, Jews, and Muslims can’t live together in harmony.
Still, remember back in 2001 when, in an unscripted moment, President Bush described the war barely begun as a “crusade”? That was just a slip of the tongue, right? If not, we just might end up calling this one the Eternal War.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a TomDispatch regular. His next book, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, will appear in September.
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Copyright 2013 Andrew J. Bacevich
]]>by Jim Lobe
I stopped reading neo-con and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson, “the Sage of Fresno”, after the Bush administration, largely because almost everything he wrote sounded exactly the same (cranky), and he offered no insight into what influential people were thinking. Instead, he simply repeated — in [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
I stopped reading neo-con and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson, “the Sage of Fresno”, after the Bush administration, largely because almost everything he wrote sounded exactly the same (cranky), and he offered no insight into what influential people were thinking. Instead, he simply repeated — in his own kind of world-weary, father-knows-best way — whatever the neo-con echo chamber was expounding on.
This week, however, I made an exception because his latest piece in The National Review, “Iran’s North Korean Future”, addressed an emerging neo-con meme designed to take full advantage of the ongoing crisis over North Korea. To wit, if you think a nuclear Pyongyang is bad, wait until Tehran goes nuclear. (Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is trying to become for Iran what the American Enterprise Institute was for Iraq, wrote on the same topic in the Review on the same day.)
Hanson’s Review piece was subsequently published in the Washington Times and the Chicago Tribune and, to my despair, reprinted in the Early Bird edition of the Pentagon’s Current News. The central argument of the article is that a nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous than “other nuclear rogue states” such as Pakistan and North Korea. Why? Pakistan is deterred by a far larger and more powerful India, according to Hansen, while “North Korea can be “muzzled once its barking becomes too obnoxious” to China on whose patronage and support Pyongyang so clear depends. (Hansen also somewhat dubiously claims that Beijing “enjoys the angst that its subordinate causes its rivals.”)
Unlike Pakistan and North Korea, however, Iran has “no commensurate regional deterrent” that would constrain its behavior, according to Hanson. “If North Korea has been a danger, then a bigger, richer and undeterred nuclear Iran would be a nightmare,” he concludes.
Except that earlier in the same op-ed, Hansen notes that Iran would be most unlikely to attack Israel precisely because Israel’s nuclear arsenal is indeed a deterrent. Here’s the relevant passage:
Iran could copy Mr. Kim’s model endlessly — one week threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map, the next backing down and complaining that problems in translation distorted the actual, less-bellicose communique. The point would not necessarily be to actually nuke Israel (which would translate into the end of Persian culture for a century), but to create such an atmosphere of worry and gloom over the Jewish state as to weaken the economy, encourage emigration and erode its geostrategic reputation.” [Emphasis added.]
So, even while insisting that Iran would not be deterable (because it doesn’t have a powerful next-door enemy like nuclear Pakistan has in India or a powerful patron like nuclear North Korea has in China) Hanson says in virtually the same breath that it is deterable. And this kind of analysis is rewarded by publication in the Current News!
Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz somewhat belatedly added his Iraq War retrospective, entitled (predictably) “Iraq: It’s Too Soon to Tell,” to the flurry of op-eds that came out at the end of March to mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion he fought so hard to realize.
Thankfully, it was not published in a U.S. medium beyond the AEI website but rather in the London-based Saudi daily, Asharq Al-Awsat. It appears primarily to be an (extremely lame) exercise in self-exculpation but is nonetheless well worth reading if for no other reason than he is probably the most high-ranking and influential policy-maker to offer an assessment on this occasion.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go into specific details, but you will see some rather obvious problems in the recitation of the facts and logic.
One example: Saddam “also posed a more immediate danger [than his presumed plans to rebuild his WMD capabilities after sanctions were lifted] because terrorists, including Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, had already begun operating from Iraqi territory to plan terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East [at the time of the invasion].” If that is the definition of the kind of imminent threat that justifies a U.S. invasion, what other country in the region, leave aside Pakistan, would not qualify?
(Wolfowitz also seems to put a lot of the blame on former Secretary of State James Baker for allegedly failing to heed Saudi appeals for the U.S. to intervene on behalf of the Shi’a uprising against Saddam in southern Iraq after the first Gulf war.)
The closest he gets to expressing regret is the following passage.
There are many things that one could wish had been done differently in Iraq. Even supporters of the war can make a long list. My own list stars with the US decision to establish an occupation government instead of handing to sovereignty to Iraqis at the outset, and with the four-year delay in implementing a counter-insurgency strategy. It was already clear, soon after we got to Baghdad, that the enemy was pursuing an urban guerilla strategy — in order to prevent a new Iraqi government from succeeding and so that the US would give up and leave — and an appropriate counter-insurgency strategy should have been developed much sooner.
Notice the absence of self in this passage. It wasn’t Wolfowitz who was involved in these decisions; the implication is that he opposed them. It wasn’t even the administration of President George W. Bush in which he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an architect of the invasion. It was “the US” that made these decisions.
In fact, it was Wolfowitz who championed de-Baathification within the administration, a policy that, combined with the reigning insecurity and de facto dissolution of the Iraqi army, made an occupation necessary. Indeed, Wolfowitz’s whole argument about the occupation was demolished by none other than Dan Senor, the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), at a Hudson Institute Forum five years ago, as I noted in a blog post at the time.
As for Wolfowitz’s complaint about failure to implement a counter-insurgency strategy, he, of course, has no one to blame but himself. It was he who publicly ridiculed Gen. Eric Shinseki’s warnings about the size of the force that would be needed after the invasion, and it was he who failed to read the intelligence studies that predicted the emergence of an insurgency. That he tries now to somehow separate himself from these failures by referring to the “US” rather than to the specific decision-makers (including himself) responsible for these disasters reflects, in my opinion, a certain lack of moral integrity.
Now, to be fair, a pretty big chunk of the op-ed consists of an appeal for the Sunni-led Gulf Cooperational Council (GCC) countries to do more to support Iraq, whose government is dominated by Shi’a parties. And the fact that he is making that appeal in a Saudi newspaper strongly suggests that the op-ed was consciously written with that purpose foremost in mind. “…(T)he way to keep Iraq out of Iran’s embrace is by supporting Iraq’s new government, not by distancing oneself from it,” he wrote. “This isolation, not a love of Persians, is what has pushed Iraq too close to Iran.”
Still, given Wolfowitz’s heavy responsibility for what took place a decade ago and the series of disasters that befell Iraq while he was still in a key policy-making position — he didn’t leave until 2005 — his efforts at justifying the invasion without acknowledging his personal failures and offering advice appear unseemly at best.
Photo: Former President George W. Bush (right), former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (center) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (left). DoD photo March 25, 2003 by R.D. Ward.
]]>by Charles Naas
The second round of talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan between the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) and Iran ended just about where they started — no advance from the March talks and the glimmer of hope that perhaps some kind of momentum could be established. Unlike Almaty [...]]]>
by Charles Naas
The second round of talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan between the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) and Iran ended just about where they started — no advance from the March talks and the glimmer of hope that perhaps some kind of momentum could be established. Unlike Almaty I, no date was set for a continuation of the negotiations. Western diplomats offered mixed messages about what happened during the two lengthy sessions. In fact, there should be no mystery about the sick snail pace of the negotiations The two sides are not on the same page and are talking past each other. As long as this continues, an understanding will be highly unlikely.
The P5+1 are focused on an agreement that is limited to the nuclear issue and as restrictive as possible on Iran’s program in the future. When negotiations began during the Bush administration, the US demanded that Iran cease all uranium enrichment which Iran was producing at the reactor fuel level of 3.5-4% as a condition for the talks. That was a non-starter and quickly put aside when Iran decided to enrich uranium to 20% at its Fordow facility, which is buried deeply in a mountain near the holy city of Qom. Twenty percent enriched uranium can be enriched to explosive level in as quickly as 3 months or less if Iran decides to race for a bomb. Fordow has, therefore, become the central concern of the P5+1, though the revised proposal reportedly softened the demand for its total closure. It’s unclear whether the 6 powers have explicitly or implicitly recognized Iran’s right to enrich uranium to fuel its future power reactors. The Six have reportedly offered small-scale sanctions relief and the sale of selective goods to Iran, but otherwise continue to take a hard line on keeping the talks tightly tied to nuclear affairs.
It has become clear that Iran’s position is based on the principle that it’s a fully independent and equal member of the world community and will go to extreme lengths to avoid accepting a lesser status. Call it Iranian pride, self respect, history and ambitions for the future. The two times in modern history that Iran was forced to accept foreign dictate — the 1907 Russian-UK Agreement on spheres of influence and the World War II occupation — still rankle, as does the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953. In line with this principle, Iran insists that it has all the rights of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — to which it was an early member — and that this includes the full fuel-cycle from enrichment to reprocessing of spent fuel.
Iran has been consistent. In the mid-1970s, the US and Iran engaged in lengthy talks about a new treaty to permit US cooperation on the sale of reactors to the Shah’s very ambitious power reactor program. Iran’s negotiators adamantly assumed the same position that they operate on now: Iran should be regarded and treated as the proud and sovereign nation that it is. Iran has, therefore, rejected any restrictions on its civilian power reactor program but has apparently indicated some willingness to cooperate on the output of Fordow. But this was likely expressed in an ambiguous manner and remains insufficient for the P5+1. The Six’s offer of slight sanctions relief has also been implicitly spurned.
By its mere presence at the meetings, Iran has accepted the premise that its nuclear program is both important and contentious, but its objectives are far-reaching in contrast to the Six’s aim of restricting discussions to nuclear affairs. Iran will not move far, if at all, without significant sanctions relief, and, as a final step, the conclusion of all UN and other sanctions against it. Beyond these measurable aims, Iran has indicated that negotiations should be expanded to include an examination of the power realities within the region and on how Iran is perceived by major powers. The more ambitious Iranians who are involved with the country’s international concerns see Iran’s long history; its central geographic position; the size of its population; its realizable great wealth from petroleum; and the potential from its rapidly growing, educated population (particularly in the sciences), as inevitably leading it to a form of regional hegemony. These negotiators have carefully and with some subtlety melded their objectives.
The strenuous diplomatic process with Iran has been taking place in the background of more than thirty years of enmity and decades of steadily increasingly, painful sanctions. American threats of “all options are on the table”, cyber warfare directed at Iran’s enrichment facilities and substantial US and allied military forces in the Gulf, have added to ongoing tension and feed Iran’s concern that we really are aiming for regime change. Our strong ties with Israel, which compel us to support the notion that an Iranian ability to build a nuclear explosive poses an existential threat, also amplifies Iran’s distrust.
On the other hand, the US and others have alleged that Iran is a major supporter of international terrorism and that it has the intention of at least getting to the point where it could rapidly create a nuclear weapon. Iranian denials of such plans, and Leader Ali Khamenei’s Fatwa, have had no resonance in the Obama administration. Add to this an emerging friction in current political alliances within the Middle East. Iran — and the Russians – support the other Shi’a states, Syria and Iraq, and parties such as Hezbollah. The US, UK, France and Germany have sided with the Arab Sunni monarchies, the Syrian rebels and Israel.
At this point, neither side has moved significantly from its opening position. Unless both sides give their negotiators new and more flexible instructions, movement towards an agreement is highly unlikely. Meaningful change is domestically difficult, but it may be worth continuing talks simply to have an established site for future exchanges as problems arise. So far, perhaps the main positive result has been the seemingly successful process of breaking ice between Iran and the US.
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
I wanted Iraq to dominate our postings this week, the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of the country. The work of Daniel, Jim and James received ample attention, though Americans don’t appear to have much of an appetite for remembering the disastrous [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
I wanted Iraq to dominate our postings this week, the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of the country. The work of Daniel, Jim and James received ample attention, though Americans don’t appear to have much of an appetite for remembering the disastrous decision that the war was. While nothing will do justice to the lives that the Iraq war took and irreparably damaged, I want to complete our coverage with the Iraq-focused portion of a jarring speech by Chas Freeman, a US diplomat and author who has decades of experience with the feats and failures of US foreign policy. Not more on Iraq, you may be thinking. After all, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re undoubtedly more aware of the reality of the situation than the majority of Americans. But this is something different. Read ahead or listen to find out why. (The full text of Amb. Freeman’s speech, “Change without Progress in the Middle East”, is available here.)
Almost a decade ago, the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. Advocates of the operation assured us that this would be “a cakewalk” that would essentially pay for itself. The ensuing war claimed at least 6,000 American military and civilian lives. It wounded 100,000 U.S. personnel. It displaced 2.8 million Iraqis and – by conservative estimate – killed at least 125,000 of them, while wounding another 350,000. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq will ultimately cost American taxpayers at least $3.4 trillion, of which $1.4 trillion represents money actually spent by the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and intelligence agencies during combat operations; $1 trillion is the minimal estimate of future interest payments; and $1 trillion is future health care, disability, and other payments to the almost one million American veterans of the war.The only way to assess military campaigns is by whether they achieve their objectives. Outcomes – not lofty talk about a tangle of good intentions – are what count. In the case of Iraq, a fog of false narratives about weapons of mass destruction, connections to al Qaeda, threats to Iraq’s neighbors, and so forth left the war’s objectives to continuing conjecture. None of the goals implied by these narratives worked out. Instead, the war produced multiple “own goals.”Those who urged America into war claim Iraq was a victory for our country. If so, judging by results, the Bush administration’s objective must have been to assure the transfer of power in Iraq to the members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, all of whom had spent the previous twenty years in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The former “Decider” made doubly sure of this outcome when Sunni and Shiite nationalist forces, like those of Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr, threatened the pro-Iranian politicians the United States had installed in Baghdad. Bush “surged” in additional troops to ensure that these politicians remained in office. And there they abide.
The neoconservative authors of the “surge” claim to have produced an important American victory through it. Certainly, in terms of its immediate objective of tamping down violent opposition to the regime, the “surge” was a tactical success. Still, one can only wonder about the sanity of people who argue that consolidating ethnic cleansing in Baghdad while entrenching a pro-Iranian government there represented a strategic gain for our country. The very same band of shameless ideologues, militarists, and armchair strategists who brought off that coup now clamor for an assault on Iran. One wonders why anyone in America still listens to them. Anywhere else, they would have been brought to account for the huge damage they have done.
If the United States invaded Iraq to demonstrate the capacity of our supremely lethal armed forces to reshape the region to our advantage, we proved the contrary. We never lost a battle, but we put the limitations of U.S. military power on full display.
If the purpose was to enhance U.S. influence in the Middle East, our invasion and occupation of Iraq helped bring about the opposite. Iraq is now for the most part an adjunct to Iranian power, not the balancer of it that it once was. Baghdad stands with Tehran in opposition to the policies of the United States and its strategic partners toward Bahrain, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Iran itself, including Iran’s nuclear programs. Iraq’s oil is now propping up the Assad regime in Syria. Iraq bought a big package of American weapons and training as we withdrew. But it’s already clear that its future arms purchases will come mainly from Russia and other non-American sources.
If the point was to prove that secular democracy is a viable norm in the Middle East, events in Iraq have borne savage witness to the contrary. The neoconservatives asserted with great confidence that the fall of a corrupt and tyrannical regime would pave the way for a liberal democratic government in Iraq. This was a profound misreading of history as well as Iraqi realities. The Salafist awakening and the sectarian conflagration kindled by our attempted rearrangement of Iraqi politics have not abated. Sectarian conflict continues to scorch Iraq and to lick away at the domestic tranquility of its Arab neighbors in both the Levant and the Gulf.
If the aim of our invasion and occupation of Iraq was to eliminate an enemy of Israel and secure the neighborhood for the Jewish state, we did not succeed. Israel’s adversaries were strengthened even as it made new enemies – for example, in Turkey – and began petulantly to demand that America launch yet another war to make it safe, this time against Iran. Mr. Netanyahu wants America to set red lines for Iran. Everyone else in the region wishes the United States would set red lines for Israel.
If the idea was to showcase the virtues of the rule of law and American-style civil liberties, then our behavior at Abu Ghraib, our denial of the protections of the Geneva Conventions to our battlefield enemies, and our suspension of habeas corpus (as well as many other elements of the Bill of Rights) at home put paid to that. These lapses from our constitution and the traditions of our republic have left us morally diminished. They have greatly devalued our credibility as international advocates of human freedoms everywhere, not just in the Middle East. We have few ideological admirers in the Arab or broader Islamic worlds these days. Our performance in Iraq is part of the reason for that.
All this helps to explain why most Americans don’t want to hear about Iraq anymore. A few weeks ago, the Congress failed to authorize funding for the continuation of the U.S. military training mission in Iraq, forcing the Pentagon to come up with the money internally. Almost no one here noticed.
On one level, the failure to fund a relationship with the Iraqi military through training represents a shockingly casual demonstration of the willingness of American politicians to write off the many sacrifices of our troops and taxpayers in our Iraq war. On another, it is an example of America’s most endearing political characteristic: our capacity for nearly instant amnesia. (“Iraq war? What Iraq war? You mean we sacrificed the lives and bodies of over one hundred thousand Americans and took on debt equivalent to one fourth of our GDP to occupy and refashion Iraq? Really? Why?”) They say the test for Alzheimer’s is whether you can hide your own Easter eggs. Apparently, we Americans can do that.
Failure is a much better teacher than success, but only if one is willing to reflect on what caused it. Our intervention in Iraq was a disaster for that country as well as for our own. It reshaped the Middle East to our disadvantage. Yet, we shy away from attempting to understand our fiasco even as those who led us into it urge us to reenact it elsewhere.
The military lessons we took away from Iraq have so far also proved hollow or false. When applied in Afghanistan, where we have now been in combat for more than eleven years, they haven’t worked. Analogies from other conflicts are not a sound basis for campaign plans, especially when they are more spin than substance. “In for a billion, in for half a trillion” is no substitute for strategy, let alone grand strategy.
Communities engaged in resistance to the imposition of government control where it has never before intruded do not see themselves as insurgents but as defenders of the established order. Counterinsurgency doctrine is irrelevant when there is no state with acknowledged legitimacy against which to rebel, no competent or credible government to buttress in power, and no politics untainted by venality, nepotism, and the drug trade to uphold. Pacification by foreign forces is never liberating for those who experience it. Foreign militaries cannot inject legitimacy into regimes that lack both roots and appeal in the communities they seek to govern.
Photo: English: US Marines cover each other as they prepare to enter one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Baghdad as they takeover the complex during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Credit: Lance Corporal Kevin C. Quihuis Jr. (USMC), 9 April 2003.
]]>by James A. Russell
As the country makes a half-hearted attempt to sort through the wreckage of its experience in Iraq 10 years later, the country would do well to remind itself of a few central and searing uncomfortable truths.
While it is true that we got led down [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
As the country makes a half-hearted attempt to sort through the wreckage of its experience in Iraq 10 years later, the country would do well to remind itself of a few central and searing uncomfortable truths.
While it is true that we got led down the path to war by officials that consciously lied about intelligence to justify it, concealed their real motivations and willfully ignored voices that questioned predictions of a quick and easy victory — the undeniable truth is that this country allowed itself to be led like lambs to the slaughter.
And it was a slaughter. The river of human blood — Iraqi and American, to say nothing of lasting injuries on the battlefield that have wrecked lives around the world — flows wide and deep as documented by the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General.
So who is really responsible for the catastrophe and what should we do about it? Thus far, this country has avoided looking too hard into the mirror and instead blames the small caste of ideologically motivated neoconservative advisers clustered in the Pentagon and White House who had their own reasons for wanting to get rid of Saddam Hussein and could have cared less about the potential costs.
There has been no truth commission, no calling to account for these officials, who all returned to their law offices, lobbying jobs, became scions at the Council on Foreign Relations or were rewarded the chance to pollute the minds of students at Harvard and elsewhere.
These advisers took a free pass while our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines picked their way through the wreckage of their comrades’ body parts and dead Iraqis that littered the landscapes of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and a host of other places that most Americans had never heard of.
However, it wasn’t just the Bush administration that took a free pass. An uncomfortable truth is that Americans, like those advisers, have also chosen to avoid taking a long, hard look in the mirror.
As much as this country wants to avoid it, the fact is that the war and the way it was launched says more about this country than those who sold the war with their public relations blitz.
If there is an abiding truth for this country and its citizenry, it’s that this kind of mistake should never happen again. Alas, we were also confronted with this truth after the Vietnam War — some lessons need to be learned over and over.
Looking in the rearview mirror is important because it can prepare us for how to proceed. The main lesson of the Iraq war should compel this country to sit up, pay attention and stop believing that the rest of the world is like a reality TV show or video game. We must exercise our obligations as citizens in the world’s greatest democracy when our politicians tell us it’s time for another war.
If the country were paying attention, it would know that many of the same ideologues that brought on the Iraq war are cheerleading and chanting for another one — this time with Iran.
Like the last time, many of these commentators are – albeit more subtly this time around — trying to sell us another public relations package to justify a war. As was the case with the unstated neoconservative justifications for the Iraq war, a main reason these people want us to attack Iran is to protect Israel.
Luckily for us, this time we have some actual adults in charge at the White House and a president that, whatever his faults, won’t be as easily convinced to start another catastrophe. That wouldn’t have been the case if Mitt Romney had won the election, with the inmates once again in control of the asylum. The politics of this potential new war, however, are complicated and difficult for our president — however reluctant a warrior he may be.
Consider, for example, that some senators want us to outsource the decision to start the war to the trigger-happy Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been restrained so far not by his main benefactor and ally, the United States, but by reasonable and sensible Israelis who are refreshingly unafraid to express their reservations in print and on the airwaves.
The image in the rearview mirror should be telling us to start seeing like those retired Israeli security and intelligence members who have told Bibi to cool it. One glance back should help us understand that instead of letting the neoconservative cheerleaders and members of the Congress who are beholden to the Israel lobby chart a path to another war, we should exercise our obligations as citizens and probe them with questions and protest.
Another go-to-war drama is quietly playing itself out again in this country, whether we notice it or not. Ten years from now, will we once again be averting our gaze from the mirror and blaming the war on a select few while avoiding our own responsibility?
How we choose to understand the images in today’s rearview mirror, and whether we decide on another war tomorrow, will say more about our country than the neoconservatives and hawks with their pompoms and war chants.
]]>via IPS News
A review of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett’s “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran” (Metropolitan Books, 2013)
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus [...]]]>
via IPS News
A review of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett’s “Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran” (Metropolitan Books, 2013)
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony.
Both wrote memoranda in 2003 urging the George W. Bush administration to take the Iranian “roadmap” proposal for bilateral negotiations seriously but found policymakers either uninterested or powerless to influence the decision. Hillary Mann Leverett even has a connection with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), having interned with that lobby group as a youth.
After leaving the U.S. government in disagreement with U.S. policy toward Iran, the Leveretts did not follow the normal pattern of settling into the jobs where they would support the broad outlines of the U.S. role in world politics in return for comfortable incomes and continued access to power.
Instead, they have chosen to take a firm stand in opposition to U.S. policy toward Iran, criticising the policy of the Barack Obama administration as far more aggressive than is generally recognised. They went even farther, however, contesting the consensus view in Washington among policy wonks, news media and Iran human rights activists that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in June 2009 was fraudulent.
The Leveretts’ uncompromising posture toward the policymaking system and those outside the government who support U.S. policy has made them extremely unpopular in Washington foreign policy elite circles. After talking to some of their antagonists, The New Republic even passed on the rumor that the Leveretts had become shills for oil companies and others who wanted to do business with Iran.
The problem for the establishment, however, is that they turned out to be immune to the blandishments that normally keep former officials either safely supportive or quiet on national security issues that call for heated debate.
In “Going to Tehran”, the Leveretts elaborate on the contrarian analysis they have been making on their blog (formerly “The Race for Iran” and now “Going to Tehran”) They take to task those supporting U.S. systematic pressures on Iran for substituting wishful thinking that most Iranians long for secular democracy, and offer a hard analysis of the history of the Iranian revolution.
In an analysis of the roots of the legitimacy of the Islamic regime, they point to evidence that the single most important factor that swept the Khomeini movement into power in 1979 was “the Shah’s indifference to the religious sensibilities of Iranians”. That point, which conflicts with just about everything that has appeared in the mass media on Iran for decades, certainly has far-reaching analytical significance.
The Leveretts’ 56-page review of the evidence regarding the legitimacy of the 2009 election emphasises polls done by U.S.-based Terror Free Tomorrow and World Public Opinon and Canadian-based Globe Scan and 10 surveys by the University of Tehran. All of the polls were consistent with one another and with official election data on both a wide margin of victory by Ahmadinejad and turnout rates.
The Leveretts also point out that the leading opposition candidate, Hossein Mir Mousavi, did not produce “a single one of his 40,676 observers to claim that the count at his or her station had been incorrect, and none came forward independently”.
“Going to Tehran” has chapters analysing Iran’s “Grand Strategy” and on the role of negotiating with the United States that debunk much of which passes for expert opinion in Washington’s think tank world. They view Iran’s nuclear programme as aimed at achieving the same status as Japan, Canada and other “threshold nuclear states” which have the capability to become nuclear powers but forego that option.
The Leveretts also point out that it is a status that is not forbidden by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – much to the chagrin of the United States and its anti-Iran allies.
In a later chapter, they allude briefly to what is surely the best-kept secret about the Iranian nuclear programme and Iranian foreign policy: the Iranian leadership’s calculation that the enrichment programme is the only incentive the United States has to reach a strategic accommodation with Tehran. That one fact helps to explain most of the twists and turns in Iran’s nuclear programme and its nuclear diplomacy over the past decade.
One of the propaganda themes most popular inside the Washington beltway is that the Islamic regime in Iran cannot negotiate seriously with the United States because the survival of the regime depends on hostility toward the United States.
The Leveretts debunk that notion by detailing a series of episodes beginning with President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s effort to improve relations in 1991 and again in 1995 and Iran’s offer to cooperate against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and, more generally after 9/11, about which Hillary Mann Leverett had personal experience.
Finally, they provide the most detailed analysis available on the 2003 Iranian proposal for a “roadmap” for negotiations with the United States, which the Bush administration gave the back of its hand.
The central message of “Going to Tehran” is that the United States has been unwilling to let go of the demand for Iran’s subordination to dominant U.S. power in the region. The Leveretts identify the decisive turning point in the U.S. “quest for dominance in the Middle East” as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they say “liberated the United States from balance of power constraints”.
They cite the recollection of senior advisers to Secretary of State James Baker that the George H. W. Bush administration considered engagement with Iran as part of a post-Gulf War strategy but decided in the aftermath of the Soviet adversary’s disappearance that “it didn’t need to”.
Subsequent U.S. policy in the region, including what former national security adviser Bent Scowcroft called “the nutty idea” of “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran, they argue, has flowed from the new incentive for Washington to maintain and enhance its dominance in the Middle East.
The authors offer a succinct analysis of the Clinton administration’s regional and Iran policies as precursors to Bush’s Iraq War and Iran regime change policy. Their account suggests that the role of Republican neoconservatives in those policies should not be exaggerated, and that more fundamental political-institutional interests were already pushing the U.S. national security state in that direction before 2001.
They analyse the Bush administration’s flirtation with regime change and the Obama administration’s less-than-half-hearted diplomatic engagement with Iran as both motivated by a refusal to budge from a stance of maintaining the status quo of U.S.-Israeli hegemony.
Consistent with but going beyond the Leveretts’ analysis is the Bush conviction that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had shaken the Iranians, and that there was no need to make the slightest concession to the regime. The Obama administration has apparently fallen into the same conceptual trap, believing that the United States and its allies have Iran by the throat because of its “crippling sanctions”.
Thanks to the Leveretts, opponents of U.S. policies of domination and intervention in the Middle East have a new and rich source of analysis to argue against those policies more effectively.
*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Photo: Tehran skyline in Iran.
]]>Neo-Cons Hit Post-Cold War Low
Nearly six weeks after launching their campaign to derail the prospective nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Obama’s second-term secretary of defense, hard-line neo-conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, and Washington Post blogger
Neo-Cons Hit Post-Cold War Low
Nearly six weeks after launching their campaign to derail the prospective nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Obama’s second-term secretary of defense, hard-line neo-conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin find themselves more isolated – and, in their words, further “outside the mainstream” of U.S. foreign policy thinkers than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and possibly longer. I say that not only because they have failed to enlist the main organizations in the Israel lobby (of which they consider themselves the rightful vanguard) in their cause, but also because Hagel is supported by virtually everyone who is anyone in what could be called the foreign policy establishment of both parties.
This was made abundantly clear by the publication by ABC News Thursday of a new letter — a copy of which is reproduced below — of endorsements by 13 former top Republican and Democratic national-security officials. While almost all of the signatories have previously come out in support of Hagel, the list includes two who have not spoken out before and who, while not neo-cons themselves, have cooperated closely with them in the past – former Secretary of State George Shultz and former National Security Adviser Robert “Bud” McFarlane. Both, of course, served under Ronald Reagan.
Of the two, Shultz is particularly significant because, in many ways, he has been a hero and mentor to key neo-cons, notably Abrams, who prospered under Shultz’s stewardship – first as assistant secretary for human rights and then for Inter-American Affairs – at least until he was indicted for lying to Congress, and Bob Kagan, who served as Shultz’s speechwriter. Initially distrusted by the neo-cons and the Israel lobby when he succeeded Al Haig because of his service on the board of Bechtel (which was close to the Saudi royal family), he became much-admired by them as a result of his strong stand against terrorism, his battles with then-Pentagon chief Casper Weinberger over the use of military force, his deep hostility toward Syria, and his enduring support for Israel (despite the fact that he laid the groundwork for U.S. recognition of the PLO). More than anyone else in the Reagan administration, Shultz espoused the kind of “moral clarity” in foreign policy that neo-cons love to extol when they talk about the Reagan administration.
After 9/11, he also worked closely with them, agreeing to serve as one of six co-chairs of the Committee for the Present Danger (CPD) – which was big on the concept of “World War IV” against “Islamofascism” – and as honorary co-chair of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a Bush administration front group to mobilize support for the invasion. Some idea of the appreciation felt by neo-cons for Shultz at the time is suggested by the fact that, in an editorial published by Kristol’s Weekly Standard in May, 2002, both Kristol and Kagan called for him to co-chair (with Sam Nunn) a “blue-ribbon commission” to investigate the government’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. That Shultz should now come out in favor of Hagel’s nomination – particularly given accusations by the Standard and his former protégé Abrams that the nominee is an anti-Semite – has to be considered a body blow to the neo-conservative cause.
McFarlane, who was forced to resign as NSA as a result of his extremely ill-considered trip to Tehran (facilitated by Michael Ledeen) as part of the Iran component of the Iran-Contra scandal, is naturally less significant given the relatively short time (two years) he served in that position. But his ties to the neo-cons are even more extensive: he serves on the advisory boards of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Foreign Policy Council and also served as a member of the board of directors of the Committee for the Present Danger and the Set America Free Foundation of which Frank Gaffney is one of the principals. He was also associated with Kristol’s and Kagan’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That he, too, should now turn his back on the neo-cons is particularly surprising.
Look at the names on the letter below and try to think of a still-sentient cabinet-level foreign-policy Republican, apart from Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who has not endorsed Hagel’s nomination. So what does that mean for the neo-conservatives’ place in the mainstream foreign-policy community?
Here’s the letter:
January 24, 2013
To Members of the United States Senate:
We, as former Secretaries of State, Defense, and National Security Advisors, are writing to express our strong endorsement of Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense.
Chuck Hagel has an impeccable record of public service that reflects leadership, integrity, and a keen reading of global dynamics. From his time as Deputy Veterans Administrator managing a quarter of a million employees during the Reagan presidency, to turning around the financially troubled World USO, to shepherding the post-9/11 GI Bill into law as a United States Senator, and most recently through his service on the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon and as co-Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, Chuck Hagel is uniquely qualified to meet the challenges facing the Department of Defense and our men and women in uniform. As President Obama noted in announcing the nomination, this twice-wounded combat veteran “is a champion of our troops and our veterans and our military families” and would have the distinction of being the first person of enlisted rank and the first Vietnam veteran to serve as Secretary of Defense.
His approach to national security and debates about the use of American power is marked by a disciplined habit of thoughtfulness that is sorely needed and these qualities will serve him well as Secretary of Defense at a time when the United States must address a range of international issues that are unprecedented in scope. Our extensive experience working with Senator Hagel over the years has left us confident that he has the necessary background to succeed in the job of leading the largest federal agency.
Hagel has declared that we “knew we needed the world’s best military not because we wanted war but because we wanted to prevent war.” For those of us honored to have served as members of a president’s national security team, Senator Hagel clearly understands the essence and the burdens of leadership required of this high office. We hope this Committee and the U.S. Senate will promptly and favorably act on his nomination.
Sincerely,
Hon. Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State
Hon. Samuel Berger, former National Security Advisor
Hon. Harold Brown, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor
Hon. William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. James Jones, former National Security Advisor
Hon. Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Robert McFarlane, former National Security Advisor
Hon. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
Hon. George Shultz, former Secretary of State
Hon. Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor
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