Hyping the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) threat risks generating flawed policies. The White House probably is a source of frustration, as its critics claim, but others seem too eager to commit US combat troops. Meanwhile, the administration, under constant pressure regarding the US effort, has not done enough to energize the anti-IS coalition that President Obama worked so hard to assemble. This inclines allies to believe Washington will do the heavy lifting for them. Although addressing IS full-bore (and unilaterally) might seem appealing to some, this urge undermines the patience needed for more sensible courses of action.
The Hagel Affair
The resignation of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last month resulted in criticism that the White House is unreceptive to outside views, such as expanding the US military effort against IS. Excessive micromanagement of military related issues by the White House (including the phone line to commanders in Afghanistan that bypassed Hagel) has also been cited.
Past Presidents have done likewise. In overseas crises, many presidents created their own channels, giving White House officials more power than cabinet secretaries. Franklin Roosevelt often relied on Harry Hopkins over Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Richard Nixon used Henry Kissinger in lieu of William Rogers, and Colin Powell found himself outside the Bush administration’s inner circle. Perhaps the most extreme example of presidential micromanagement was Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War.
The Obama White House has long had dicey relations with the Pentagon. This has been, according to the Pentagon’s side of the argument, the source of delays and confusing policy directions on several issues, with the White House accused of falling into “group think.” For his part, Hagel had complained in the early fall to National Security Advisor Susan Rice in a memo about a lack of cohesion in US policy toward IS.
Nonetheless, White House micromanagement or Pentagon-White House difficulties aside, Obama’s reluctance to ramp up the US military effort against IS excessively seems well founded. Of course, Hagel’s position is not entirely clear, but escalation had been advocated by Hagel’s two predecessors: Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.
Costs of US Escalation
IS appears ready to endure lopsided casualties to inflict some on American combat troops. And IS could follow through on this hope. Not only are its combatants fanatics, the radical Sunni militia also employs deadly suicide bombings against foes in close-up urban combat (as we’ve seen in Kobani). Additionally, IS likely hopes to get a hold of at least a few US military prisoners for filmed beheadings. So why hand IS exactly what it wants?
With large urban areas to be cleared just in Iraq—from Fallujah to Mosul—US combat troops would also likely incur casualties in excess of those suffered in 2003-08 against somewhat less fanatical Sunni Arab insurgents and Shi’a militias during the war.
American military difficulties could be further magnified by reduced interest on the part of Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated government in making the political concessions needed to split Sunni Arab tribes and other secular elements away from IS and marshal its own forces more swiftly. After all, why should Baghdad go the extra mile if the US seems willing to take care of Baghdad’s IS problem militarily?
Recently, despite lost ground in and around Ramadi west of Baghdad, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have made gains between Baghdad and Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) territory to the north. Moving up Iraq’s central line of communications, Iraqi forces have driven IS from some important territory. The siege of the vital Baiji refinery complex has been lifted, and gains have been made in the demographically mixed Diyala Governate northeast of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurds continue to push IS slowly westward. Baghdad and the KRG reached a temporary oil agreement yesterday that should clear the way for greater cooperation elsewhere, like battling IS. Bitter quarrelling under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki left Iraqi-KRG relations in shambles.
Struggling to rebound from severe reverses last summer, however, the Iraqi Army is in no position to mount a major offensive deep into IS holdings. However, successful Iraqi and Kurdish attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of IS’s vast perimeter. Strong IS forces cannot be everywhere at once to repel various challenges and adequately support ongoing attacks (such as its effort against Kobani).
In terms of a military threat, IS has been largely contained. It cannot advance northward against Turkey; isolated pro-IS sympathies exist in Jordan, but the highly professional Jordanian Army would be a tough nut to crack; and in Iraq, most all Shi’a and Kurdish areas lie outside IS control and are fighting hard to maintain this status. In Syria, IS could advance against weaker rebel forces like the Free Syrian Army, but it seems obsessed with seizing Kobani despite heavy losses.
Coalition and US Escalation
The anti-IS coalition the White House assembled is contributing relatively little to the overall military effort, despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s glowing rhetoric at today’s coalition conclave in Brussels. The air campaign is mainly an American show. Committing more US assets would make it easier for others already foot-dragging over contributions to continue dithering. Now is not the time to ramp up US military efforts, but rather to pressure allies to increase their own contributions.
The bulk of IS’s reinforcements in the form of foreign fighters flow through NATO ally Turkey. The CIA in September and the UN more recently sharply increased their estimate of the number of foreign fighters reaching the Islamic State. To date, Turkey has been more helpful to IS than the coalition because of its passivity. If it cannot be pressured to vigorously interdict incoming fighters, IS would be able to replace many lost fighters—although with less experienced cadres.
The White House (and other allies) must press Turkey harder. President Obama delayed air support for beleaguered Syrian Kurds for two weeks in deference to Turkish concerns (allowing IS to gain a foothold inside Kobani). Even today’s 60-nation gathering seems short on clear goals, let alone a robust military agenda on contributions.
Admittedly, although the Administration has done too little diplomatic spadework, its leverage overseas probably has been undermined by American politicians, pundits, and many in the media demanding an expanded US effort.
Bottom Line
IS remains a daunting foe, so it will not be defeated easily, soon, or completely. To Americans pressing urgently for quick solutions, this is difficult to accept. But comments like one yesterday by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair of the House Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Sub-Committee, suggesting IS could damage everyone’s way of life are typical of exaggerations impeding objective policymaking.
Yet those claiming the air campaign has been ineffective are also naïve. IS has mostly ground to a halt. In some places, like Kobani, IS is hemorrhaging combat casualties. Meanwhile IS’s infrastructure, leadership, training camps, heavy weapons, oil refineries, and lines of communication have been hammered by the ongoing aerial bombardment. This week, assets in IS’s “capital” of Raqqa, Syria were also subjected to a wave of airstrikes.
Many want IS crushed quickly out of fear of IS attacks against the American homeland. Yet, as we saw in Afghanistan in 2001-02 with al-Qaeda, the combatants would not be completely rounded up should substantial US forces be sent in. Many hundreds at the very least would escape to find refuge elsewhere. In that scenario, IS would likely shift toward an international terrorist mode, posing an even greater threat to the United States. Therefore, a more collective effort—forcing IS to truly understand that it faces dozens of foes and not just a few—would be a wiser way forward. It is meanwhile imperative to strip IS of as many of its non-extremist Sunni Arab allies as possible, so they do not have to be dealt with militarily.
Photo: President Obama addresses reporters during a meeting with th anti-IS coalition on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2014
]]>by Jim Lobe
As I’ve written in the past, I have massive amounts of newspaper, magazine, and other assorted clippings in file cabinets that stretch virtually from one end of the IPS office in the National Press Building to the other. Some of it dates back to 1975, the fateful [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
As I’ve written in the past, I have massive amounts of newspaper, magazine, and other assorted clippings in file cabinets that stretch virtually from one end of the IPS office in the National Press Building to the other. Some of it dates back to 1975, the fateful year I started clipping about international events. While I’ve purged them from time to time over the years, I’m now doing so a bit more indiscriminately in anticipation of at least semi-retirement next year. It’s a sometimes wrenching process, because each clipping is meticulously underlined, and many of them — there must be tens of thousands at least — actually evoke memories of periods when I thought I understood how the world — or some specific countries — worked.
In any event, as I was going through my “Congress-Demos” in my Iraq file drawer yesterday, I found a little gem of a quote by then-Rep. Mark Kirk from just after the passage of the notorious resolution that gave President George W. Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq. It’s from the October 12, 2002 edition of Congressional Quarterly Weekly:
“Many people who never saw war are quick to urge military actions,” said Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, R-Ill., a Gulf War veteran who supported the resolution. “in my own experience, war has taught me to be the best friend of our State Department, a place where diplomacy is the preferred course of action.”
Not a bad position, even if he did vote for the resolution, as did many Democrats who believed (wrongly) that Bush wouldn’t actually invade Iraq unless and until all diplomatic efforts and UN inspections were exhausted. And, of course, at that time, Colin Powell, who appeared to be trying hard to slow the push toward war that had just been launched in earnest by Cheney & Co. the previous month, was in charge of the State Department — Kirk’s “best friend.”
Now compare his statement back then with those he made in a private call with donors last November 18 just after he announced his intention to introduce amendments to the defense bill that would increase sanctions against Iran as reported by Eli and Ali for Salon on the eve of talks between world powers and Iran that culminated in the Joint Plan of Action. In that call, he complained bitterly about State Department diplomats whose main objective in talking with Iran, he claimed, was “desperately want(ing) a New York Times article saying how great they are.”
“If you see the administration’s negotiating team lined up in these classified briefings, not one of them speaks a word of Farsi or brings any expertise on Iran to the table. If I was going to run a Democratic primary I would definitely hire our current negotiating team. And that would be Kerry and Wendy [Sherman] and the president’s sole qualification for getting on this team is whether you can be a reliable partisan or not.”
Of course, team-member Alan Eyre, the State Department’s Persian-language spokesperson, is so fluent that even Iranians are impressed when they hear him speak, so much so that during the Geneva talks the director of the hard-line Iranian Fars News actually requested a picture with him. In any case, Kirk was apparently particularly upset with a briefing in which he and Sherman tangled, heatedly suggesting that she defer to Israel’s alleged intelligence findings, rather than those provided to her by the US intelligence community, no doubt including the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research:
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer gave me the collective estimate of Israeli intelligence as to where the Iranians are, and Wendy Sherman said, ‘Don’t look at that. Israeli intelligence is not correct.’ So Wendy Sherman would tell me not to believe Israel’s intelligence service, and I took her on pretty strongly. The message that I gave to her was, ‘If you tell the American people that Israeli intelligence is bad, that’s not gonna be a dog that will hunt very well.’
Well, I guess now-Sen. Mark Kirk’s faith in the State Department has been diminished somehow, but one wonders why. What happened in the 12 years between the time when he considered the institution and its diplomatic skills as his “best friend” and now when it seems he thinks of its leaders as a bunch of partisan, glory-seeking, uninformed, Israeli intelligence-deniers?
Of course, it could be because the State Department is no longer run by Republicans like Powell, but I offered one other possible explanation in a piece I posted on this blog on the same day that Ali and Eli published their piece in Salon that suggested his motivation may relate to campaign finance, specifically the fact that he has received more financial support from PACs associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other member of Congress during the last 12 years. According to opensecrets.org, “pro-Israel” groups gave Kirk’s campaigns (rounded to nearest $1,000):
$95,000 in 2002
$136,700 in 2004
$315,000 in 2006
$445,000 in 2008
$640,000 in 2010 (when he ran for Senate)
I thank Eli, in particular, for jogging my memory about his and Ali’s findings.
In 2006, a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England accidentally became an artwork. Let’s call him Dude Descending a Staircase in honor of that merry prankster Marcel Duchamp. This particular visitor tripped over his feet as he was going down the museum stairs. As he fell, he knocked into three [...]]]>
In 2006, a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England accidentally became an artwork. Let’s call him Dude Descending a Staircase in honor of that merry prankster Marcel Duchamp. This particular visitor tripped over his feet as he was going down the museum stairs. As he fell, he knocked into three large Qing Dynasty vases that rested on their mounts in a recess.
All three vases fell to the ground and smashed into countless pieces.
In a current exhibit on violence and art in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima–“Damage Control” at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC–the German artist Thomas Demand has turned this act of destruction into a work of art. It is a single photograph of the fragments of the vase on the landing, with a hint of orderly English landscaping visible through the window. The work, “Landing,” is a recreation of the damage, a reminder that sometimes all that remains of Humpty Dumpty when he falls from the wall is the forensic reconstruction.
As I stood in front of this photograph, I thought about Colin Powell and Iraq. You might remember Powell’s famous quip about Pottery Barn. In his advice to President George W. Bush prior to the Iraq invasion, Powell warned the president of the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. The United States would be responsible, Powell implied, for whatever wreckage the military incurred in its headlong dash to unseat Saddam.
Pottery Barn actually has no such a rule, and it was Thomas Friedman who “made up the whole thing.“ But Powell, who apologized to Pottery Barn, still embraces the message.
“We were essentially the new government until a government could be put in place,” he told David Samuels in The Atlantic. “And in the second phase of this conflict, which was beginning after the statue fell, we made serious mistakes in not acting like a government. One, maintaining order. Two, keeping people from destroying their own property. Three, not having in place security forces–either ours or theirs or a combination of the two to keep order.”
We did none of those things, and Iraq, as a result, is broken. Nor has the United States made much effort to own it—that is, to own up to our responsibility for breaking the country. We gave up trying to sweep up the pieces. At this stage, all we do is take photographs of the damage, putting them in the newspaper accompanied by descriptions of the carnage. We mull over the consequences. We hope that our chickens don’t come home to roost.
The real Pottery Barn rule—the same rule that all retailers have–is to write off the broken merchandise as a loss. And that is what we have done to Iraq.
The latest violence in Iraq rivals the levels last seen during wartime. Last year, between 8,000 and 10,000 civilians were killed, the highest number since 2008. According to one recent study, half a million Iraqis have died from war-related causes since the 2003 invasion, a figure that includes indirect casualties from the breakdown of the country’s social structure.
Recently, U.S. newspapers have paid particular attention to the successes of al-Qaeda-linked insurgents in Fallujah and Ramadi because of the role played by U.S. soldiers in earlier fighting in those two places. Remarkably, a relatively small number of insurgents–120 in Ramadi and 200 in Fallujah–seem to have been enough to take those towns. But the insurgents are sufficiently well equipped to make the Iraqi government worry that they could take over Baghdad as well.
The persistent chaos in Iraq is partly a function of continued sectarian divisions between a Shiite-dominated al-Maliki government and Sunni insurgents. What passes for reconciliation these days in Iraq is the government’s attempt to reproduce the Sunni Awakening in Anbar by paying Sunni tribesmen to fight against the insurgents. After all, al-Qaeda is as unpalatable to most Sunnis as it is to most Shiites. There is also the larger geopolitical context in which Iraq is crumbling, including the regional struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia and their proxies. The disintegration of Syria plays into the conflict as well, for the al-Qaeda militants in Iraq have received a boost from their campaign against the Assad government.
The effort to replay the Sunni Awakening, which the United States used to its advantage in 2006, will be a great deal more difficult the second time around. “From 2006 to 2008, tribesmen were able to beat Al Qaeda with the cooperation of American forces and the support of the Iraqi government,” Sunni politician Osama al-Nujaifi told The New York Times. “After gaining victory over Al Qaeda, those tribesmen were rewarded with the cutting of their salaries, with assassination and displacement.” Many Iraqis complain that the United States has not done enough to pressure the al-Maliki government to heal the rift with the country’s Sunni minority.
The last U.S. combat troops left Iraq at the end of 2011. Washington failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement with Baghdad and so followed through on its threat of a “zero option.” Only about 300 U.S. soldiers remain at the U.S. embassy—mostly guarding the complex—and another 100 oversee the supply of the Iraqi army. The Pentagon just recently broached the possibility, in addition to upping the flow of arms to Iraq, of sending over some trainers.
The prospect of reengaging militarily with Iraq is far from appealing. “Having unleashed an unexpected insurgency, the U.S. felt obliged to deal with it, at a cost of thousands of American lives,” editorializes the Los Angeles Times. “But the statute of limitations on that obligation has run out, and when U.S. forces left in 2011, Iraqis were happy to see them go.”
This is true–to a point. Inserting U.S. troops in Iraq–even as trainers–makes no sense. We would just tumble down the staircase and break a few more vases. But is that all we have, an impoverished choice between troops and no troops.
I recently stumbled across a powerful article by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker about the impact of the country’s implosion, not only on Iraqis but also on U.S. soldiers. In “Atonement,”he writes of a fatal collision in Baghdad between a contingent of U.S. Marines and a family of Iraqi-Armenians trying to flee the violence. Mistaking the family for a carful of insurgents, the Marines opened fire, killing the husband and two sons. Eight years later, one of those Marines, Lu Lobello, beset by guilt and nightmares, tracked the family down to their California exile. He met them. He tried to explain himself. He apologized.
There was nothing about apologies in the Pottery Barn rule. It was all about objects and ownership. But Iraq has never been simply a china shop. It is a country of people. When you break a person, do you own them? Of course not. And what we did in Iraq was far from accidental.
I’m not aware of any U.S. administration that has apologized for our military involvement in that country. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein does not excuse us of responsibility for what happened afterwards. So, we could start by apologizing for our mistakes.
But when it comes to countries, apologies are not sufficient. There should also be an element of restitution.
In Prague, I recently learned of a plan that a Charter 77 member had for dealing with all the Communist apparatchiks who had interrogated and imprisoned and immiserated his colleagues. “Send them to the forest,” the fellow recommended. I had visions of a firing squad executing its own form of retribution. But no, he meant something entirely different. The Communist system had made a mess of nature during its four decades of headlong industrialization. Those responsible should simply spend a year cleaning up the forests and waterways. After a year, he imagined, they would be clean: the forests and the apparatchiks alike.
Alas, the Czech Republic never did follow this sensible plan. Could the United States send all the Lu Lobellos back to Iraq to clean up the environment, rebuild schools, and repair what has been broken? Many U.S. veterans would likely welcome such a program, for both its employment and mental health benefits.
We can never reconstruct those Qing vases. But surely we can do more than just mourn their passing and stare at the wreckage.
Photo: Thomas Demand’s “Damage Control”
– John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
*This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com
]]>via IPS News
While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.
On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility [...]]]>
via IPS News
While some kind of U.S. military action against Syria in the coming days appears increasingly inevitable, the debate over the why and how of such an attack has grown white hot here.
On one side, hawks, who span the political spectrum, argue that President Barack Obama’s credibility is at stake, especially now that Secretary of State John Kerry has publicly endorsed the case that the government of President Bashar Al-Assad must have been responsible for the alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb that was reported to have killed hundreds of people.
Just one year ago, Obama warned that the regime’s use of such weapons would cross a “red line” and constitute a “game-changer” that would force Washington to reassess its policy of not providing direct military aid to rebels and of avoiding military action of its own.
After U.S. intelligence confirmed earlier this year that government forces had on several occasions used limited quantities of chemical weapons against insurgents, the administration said it would begin providing arms to opposition forces, although rebels complain that nothing has yet materialised.
The hawks have further argued that U.S. military action is also necessary to demonstrate that the most deadly use of chemical weapons since the 1988 Halabja massacre by Iraqi forces against the Kurdish population there – a use of which the US. was fully aware but did not denounce at the time – will not go unpunished.
Military action should be “sufficiently large that it would underscore the message that chemical weapons as a weapon of mass destruction simply cannot be used with impunity,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told reporters in a teleconference Monday. “The audience here is not just the Syrian government.”
While the hawks, whose position is strongly backed by the governments of Britain, France, Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel, clearly have the wind at their backs, the doves have not given up.
Remembering Iraq
Recalling the mistakes and distortions of U.S. intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, some argue that the administration is being too hasty in blaming the Syrian government.
If it waits until United Nations inspectors, who visited the site of the alleged attack Monday, complete their work, the United States could at least persuade other governments that Washington is not short-circuiting a multilateral process as it did in Iraq.
Many also note that military action could launch an escalation that Washington will not necessarily be able to control, as noted by a prominent neo-conservative hawk, Eliot Cohen, in Monday’s Washington Post.
“Chess players who think one move ahead usually lose; so do presidents who think they can launch a day or two of strikes and then walk away with a win,” wrote Cohen, who served as counsellor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “The other side, not we, gets to decide when it ends.”
“What if [Obama] hurls cruise missiles at a few key targets, and Assad does nothing and says, ‘I’m still winning.’ What do you then?” asked Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served for 16 years as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Do you automatically escalate and go up to a no-fly zone and the challenges that entails, and what then if that doesn’t get [Assad's] attention?
“This is fraught with tar-babiness,” he told IPS in a reference to an African-American folk fable about how Br’er Rabbit becomes stuck to a doll made of tar. “You stick in your hand, and you can’t get it out, so you then you stick in your other hand, and pretty soon you’re all tangled up all this mess – and for what?”
“Certainly there are more vital interests in Iran than in Syria,” he added. “You can’t negotiate with Iran if you start bombing Syria,” he said, a point echoed by the head of the National Iranian American Council, Trita Parsi.
“There is a real opportunity for successful diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue, but that opportunity will either be completely spoiled or undermined if the U.S. intervention in Syria puts the U.S. and Iran in direct combat with each other,” he told IPS. Humanitarian concerns and U.S. credibility should also be taken into account when considering intervention, he said.
Remembering Kosovo
Still, the likelihood of military action – almost certainly through the use of airpower since even the most aggressive hawks, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, have ruled out the commitment of ground troops – is being increasingly taken for granted here.
Lingering questions include whether Washington will first ask the United Nations Security Council to approve military action, despite the strong belief here that Russia, Assad’s most important international supporter and arms supplier, and China would veto such a resolution.
“Every time we bypass the council for fear of a Russian or Chinese veto, we drive a stake into the heart of collective security,” noted Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Long-term, that’s not in our interest.”
But the hawks, both inside the administration and out, are urging Obama to follow the precedent of NATO’s air campaign in 1999 against Serbia during the Kosovo War. In that case, President Bill Clinton ignored the U.N. and persuaded his NATO allies to endorse military intervention on humanitarian grounds.
The 78-day air war ultimately persuaded Yugoslav President Milosovic to withdraw his troops from most of Kosovo province, but not before NATO forces threatened to deploy ground troops, a threat that the Obama administration would very much like to avoid in the case of Syria.
While the administration is considered most likely to carry out “stand-off” strikes by cruise missiles launched from outside Syria’s territory to avoid its more formidable air-defence system and thus minimise the risk to U.S. pilots, there remains considerable debate as to what should be included in the target list.
Some hawks, including McCain and Graham, have called not only for Washington to bomb Syrian airfields and destroy its fleet of warplanes and helicopter and ballistic capabilities, but also to establish no-fly zones and safe areas for civilians and rebel forces to tilt the balance of power decisively against the Assad government. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, have urged the same.
But others oppose such far-reaching measures, noting that the armed opposition appears increasingly dominated by radical Islamists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, and that the aim of any military intervention should be not only to deter the future use of chemical weapons but also to prod Assad and the more moderate opposition forces into negotiations, as jointly proposed this spring by Moscow and Washington. In their view, any intervention should be more limited so as not to provoke Assad into escalating the conflict.
Photo: Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Syria at the Department of State in Washington, DC, on August 26, 2013. Credit: State Department
]]>Perhaps that’s why, just in time for the holidays, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) launched a scathing attack on some of the most prominent — and pro-Israel– [...]]]>
Perhaps that’s why, just in time for the holidays, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) launched a scathing attack on some of the most prominent — and pro-Israel– Jewish Senators and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Noah Silverman, RJC’s Congressional Affairs Director since 2006, may have been moved by the sight of boiling oil when he made his debut as an official RJC blogger. No sooner writ than said, Silverman’s pontifications splattered over to RJC’s e-mail list on Thursday night.
Silverman attacks Jews and Jewish organizations who have come out in support of the immediate ratification of the New START Treaty. Picking up where the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and JINSA left off, Silverman’s rails against “an unprecedented effort to ‘make START a Jewish issue‘ by pressuring Jewish communal organizations to advocate for the treaty’s ratification.”
He’s irate with the ADL and the American Council of World Jewry, both of whom objected when Senate Republicans made it known that they would use member prerogative to block ratification: “We are deeply concerned that failure to ratify the new START treaty will have national security consequences far beyond the subject of the treaty itself,” a Nov. 19 letter from the ADL to all members of the Senate asserted. ”The U.S. diplomatic strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons requires a U.S.-Russia relationship of trust and cooperation.”
Granted that the ADL was speaking from the perspective of its anti-Iran agenda. Nonetheless — and perhaps especially so — it’s bizarre to hear the RJC’s Silverman challenging the right of Jewish organizations to weigh in on issues other than Israel. And Silverman is livid that Senate Democrats would dare to use an argument about Israel’s security to enlist AIPAC in the effort to get START ratified.
MJ Rosenberg — citing Nathan Guttman in the Forward and Ron Kampeas at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — suggests that
AIPAC is in agony. It desperately wants to support the US-Russia START treaty aimed at limiting nuclear warheads because the treaty would greatly advance Israel’s security.
But it is afraid of defying right-wing Republicans in the Senate. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), in particular, is telling AIPAC “don’t you dare.” His reason is simple: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has ordered Republicans to block anything the President submits to the Senate except, of course, tax cuts for millionaires. That includes START.
Tight-with-the-right Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is Silverman’s source that the involvement of AIPAC in a non-Israel issue is shocking. Rubin writes, “An experienced Israel hand tells me, ‘Well, they of course claim there is a direct link to Israeli security. But, no, this must be very rare.’ A Capitol Hill adviser from another office says ‘I’ve never seen this done with AIPAC on a non-Israel issue.’”
But it’s not all that rare, according to Rosenberg:
AIPAC argues that it does not get involved in congressional battles that do not directly involve Israel. Of course, they do. They always have. Even when I worked at AIPAC decades ago, they put their full lobbying weight behind a then-controversial plan to establish a military base on the Pacific island of Diego Garcia.
Why? Because the Republican President at the time asked them to. More recently, AIPAC made sure that its friends in Congress knew that the “right vote” for Israel was supporting both Iraq wars. (Had AIPAC not indicated its support for war, far fewer Democrats would have voted for the second Iraq war.)
Silverman frames the effort to pass START as evidence of “a panicked White House is scrambling to salvage what it can of its legislative agenda before its influence in Congress is diminished next year.” But the letter to AIPAC which so outrages Silverman was written by two longtime senators who supported arms control long before Barack Obama was elected president.
Michigan Democrat Carl Levin was first elected to the Senate in 1978, where he’s Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He’s been consistently supportive of conventional forces and basic, reliable weapons systems to protect national security. His support for START is anything but last minute. In a column in the Niles Daily Star on July 9, Levin wrote:
As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described it, New START will “make our country more secure and advance our core national security interests.” This treaty is in keeping with a long tradition of bilateral, verifiable arms control agreements with Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, and it strengthens the U.S. commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
Silverman not only ignores Mullen’s endorsement of START, he seems completely oblivious to the support expressed by Republicans for “resetting” the Treaty. They include what Jim Lobe calls are the “big guns in what remains of the Republican foreign policy Establishment, including five former secretaries of state whose service spanned the last five Republican administrations.” They include Colin Powell, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Lawrence Eagleburger, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that there are “compelling reasons” for Republicans to approve ratification of START.
Bloomberg News reports that several Republican senators — among them Richard Lugar, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, Bob Bennett, John McCain, and Kyl himself, are hinting they could support the reset of START in the lame-duck Senate session if (and perhaps only if) the Senate voted to extend the expiring Bush-era tax cuts to cover Americans in all income groups. So it’s domestic politics, not national security, that may determine the fate of START, JINSA notwithstanding. MJ Rosenberg also thinks that “Kyl may come around and then AIPAC can too.”
Silverman, who worked for seven years as a legislative aide in Kyl’s office, also uses his first blogpost to defend Kyl against what he deems to be assaults on his former boss’s reputation. He is no doubt bristling at the thought that his former boss will give in on START out of political expediency. Although the RJC launched some of the most vicious ad hominem attack ads against Obama before the 2008 election, Silverman huffs that “Pro-Obama commentators attacked Kyl in the most demeaning and personal terms — including calling him unpatriotic.”
The “demeaning” attack on Kyl to which Silverman links is a Huffington Post rhymed rant by self-described Ranting Political Poet Jim Parry. The personal attack: a single Tweet by Washington Monthly contributor and blogger Steve Benen. And the accusation of Kyl’s being “unpatriotic”? A tweet by actress Elizabeth Banks, co-star of the frat-boy comedy film Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Does Silverman really consider two tweets and a rant “pro-Obama news commentary”? If so, it explains alot.
Like why, after 25 years of Republican Jewish Coalition activism, there is only one single Jewish Republican to be found in the U.S. Congress — in either the upper or lower chamber.
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