by Jim Lobe

If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as via Lobe Log

by Jim Lobe

If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as ideological as his deputy, Jackson Diehl (although he did hire Jennifer Rubin), his basic belief in U.S. exceptionalism, his rejection of “retrenchment” and “limitations” (on U.S. power), and, above all, his implicit equation of international “engagement” with military intervention demonstrates how his version of liberal internationalism is so easily co-opted by neo-conservatives:

But the dominant impression among foreign officials [read Hiatt himself] is of a policy of retrenchment. They see a steady reduction in the size of U.S. armed forces that will mean less ability to intervene and influence. They watched Obama withdraw all troops from Iraq, failing to negotiate an agreement that would have preserved some U.S. role in that now-unraveling country. They see him preparing to withdraw most — or all, his spokesman has said; the size of any residual force has not been announced — troops from Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Consider the logic of this passage. He seems to be saying (through his unnamed “foreign officials”) that U.S. influence in world affairs is directly correlated with the size of its military and the willingness of its commander-in-chief to use it to intervene in foreign countries. In this very Kaganesque view of the world, hard power is really the only power that really counts. The notion that military power must necessarily rest on a strong economic foundation — or even that “soft power” may also play an important role in gaining influence overseas — seems to him or his foreign officials to be secondary at best.

He goes on to cite the U.S. intervention in Libya as “a case study in the policy of limitations” to which Hiatt now strongly objects.

Obama acted only when pressed by French and British allies and then insisted on withdrawal instead of committing to help a new government establish itself. The predictable result is an unstable country, riven by militias and posing an increasing danger to its neighbors through the spread of arms.

And then, of course, he blames Obama’s failure to intervene decisively in Syria last year for “the degenerat[ion] [of the conflict] into something so savage that it’s no longer clear what, if anything, might help.”

The question these observations raise, of course, is what would Hiatt have Obama do? Does he seriously believe that the U.S., at this juncture in its history, has the resources to “nation-build” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria (presumably Mali now, too) all at the same time? And, given what the U.S. has accomplished with the hundreds of billions of dollars it has devoted to “nation-building” in Afghanistan and Iraq, does he really think that Washington — and especially the Pentagon, which has disbursed the great majority of those funds — even knows how to go about “building nations?” Has he read the reports of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), and his counterpart in Afghanistan? His assumption, of course, is that U.S. intervention — especially military intervention — must automatically make things better for the natives, even if the evidence consistently suggests that the natives may hold a different opinion.

Admittedly, Hiatt does insert a qualification:

During the Cold War, too, Americans fought bitterly over the size of the defense budget, the wisdom of interventions and the morality of supporting unsavory but friendly dictators. Over the decades the country made terrible mistakes overseas. But U.S. engagement and influence also helped to gradually open the world to more democracy and more prosperity.

Again, we see in this passage the assumption that big defense budgets, military or covert interventions, and U.S. support for friendly dictators — as controversial and even mistaken as those policies might have been — have all somehow contributed to a better world, that all’s well that ends well. But I think many Vietnamese, Cambodians, Iranians, Central Americans (especially Guatemalans), Brazilians, Chileans, Congolese, Iraqis, Indonesians, and citizens of other countries who have been on the receiving end of the U.S. defense budget, military or covert intervention, and those unsavory dictators may take exception to that conclusion. Certainly even a cursory reading of Shibley Telhami’s new book, The World Through Arab Eyes, which summarizes more than two decades of his work on public opinion in the Arab world, should disabuse him of how U.S. interventions in that part of the world has been perceived by the people there.

On this subject, Steve Walt’s latest on the “Top Ten Warning Signs of ‘liberal imperialism’”, which offers some sage observations, also notes that:

[L]ike the neocons, liberal imperialists are eager proponents for using American hard power, even in situations where it might easily do more harm than good. The odd-bedfellow combination of their idealism with neocons’ ideology has given us a lot of bad foreign policy over the past decade, especially to intervene militarily in Iraq or nation-build in Afghanistan, and today’s drumbeat to do the same in Syria.

by Jim Lobe

Jackson Diehl, the deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Post who also writes a weekly foreign affairs column, generally stands at the intersection of neo-conservatism and liberal interventionism and, in my view, holds a lot of the responsibility for the paper’s neo-conservative editorial drift over the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

by Jim Lobe

Jackson Diehl, the deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Post who also writes a weekly foreign affairs column, generally stands at the intersection of neo-conservatism and liberal interventionism and, in my view, holds a lot of the responsibility for the paper’s neo-conservative editorial drift over the past decade. Of course, it was neo-conservatives, combined with aggressive nationalists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Christian Zionists (who tend to defer to neo-cons on foreign policy), who led the march to war in Iraq. But too many liberal interventionists also championed the war and helped provide the ideological cover for Democratic members of Congress who should have known better, to rally behind it. In any case, Diehl, in many ways a classic liberal in his strong support for civil and political rights and general disdain or disregard for economic and social rights (see any of his prolific and often obsessive editorials and columns on Latin America, especially on Hugo Chavez or other populist leaders in the region), has moved the Post’s editorial line ever closer to that of the Wall Street Journal, which, as many have observed, has a habit of ignoring its own generally solid news reporting in favor of its hard-line neo-conservative foreign policy agenda.

Since Syria’s civil war began in earnest nearly two years ago, Diehl has been especially outspoken in favor of US intervention (albeit, of course, not with “boots on the ground.”). On Monday, he used the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion to add yet another outraged column about the failure of the Obama administration to do more to support the rebels and thus — presto! — end the conflict. The column headline (in the print edition) told the story: “Lessons from Iraq …and why that war shouldn’t stop us from aiding Syria.” Its conclusion:

“The problem here is not that advocates of the Iraq invasion have failed to learn its lessons. It is that opponents of that war, starting with Obama, have learned the wrong ones.”

The column bears close reading, and you can find what lessons Diehl, who admitted outright that he had supported the war and that it “hasn’t turned out, so far, as we war supporters hoped” [emphasis added], extracted from that debacle and how they purportedly do or don’t apply to Syria. I found the column extremely aggravating. Among its more startling assertions: “In Iraq, the United States faced down al Qaeda and eventually dealt it a decisive defeat” — a particularly ironic notion, not only because al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq when US troops arrived there, but also because of its recent resurgence in apparently close collaboration with the Nusra Front in Syria.

Fortunately, however, I don’t have to respond in detail. Two former senior CIA intelligence analysts apparently also felt sufficiently provoked by Diehl’s misreading of history to do so themselves. Paul Pillar, who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, devoted a characteristically devastating point-by-point critique of Diehl’s analysis appropriately entitled “Unlearned Lessons and the Syrian Civil War.” It’s well worth a read.

Then Nada Bako, a former CIA analyst who served on the team charged with analyzing the purported relationship between Iraq, al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, and was the chief targeting officer following Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born head of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia until his targeted killing in a US bombing run in 2006, also decided enough was enough. Her article, ”Humility Now! The Miseducation of Jackson Diehl,” was published on the Foreign Policy website. I especially appreciated her conclusion, given the enduring fantasies held by neo-cons and liberals hawks like Diehl about Washington’s — and especially its military’s — ability to positively transform extremely complex societies with internal dynamics that we know so little about it:

The argument that unleashing the U.S. military industrial complex can bring about desired results during a conflict should have been deflated, beaten, and buried by now. The winner of the Iraq War was humility, and it is a prerequisite for a wiser foreign policy. That’s the only lesson that matters.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Diehl and ideologues like him are particularly open to that lesson.

The New York Times reports that despite US reluctance to arm Islamist actors in Syria, that’s happening as the US does little to vet the actions of its partners Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Though the amount of aid flowing to the badly-equipped rebels is still relatively small as other on-the-ground [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The New York Times reports that despite US reluctance to arm Islamist actors in Syria, that’s happening as the US does little to vet the actions of its partners Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Though the amount of aid flowing to the badly-equipped rebels is still relatively small as other on-the-ground reports have reiterated, the Times suggests that unless the US takes a more direct route, the situation will come to favor the Islamists:

“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.

The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists.

Jackson Diehl, the Washington Post‘s editorial pages hawkish deputy editor, expanded on the argument that Obama’s skittishness is leading the US to disaster in Syria. Diehl has been a forceful advocate of non-engagement with Assad since before the Syrian uprising began, and has called for more assertive US policy to help remove Assad from power:

…. Obama rejected suggestions by several senators that he lead an intervention. Instead he committed a second major error, by adopting a policy of seeking to broker a Syrian solution through the United Nations. “The best thing we can do,” he said last March, “is to unify the international community.”

As countless observers correctly predicted, the subsequent U.N. mission of Kofi Annan was doomed from the beginning. When the White House could no longer deny that reality, it turned to an equally fantastical gambit: Vladi­mir Putin, it argued, could be persuaded to abandon his support of Assad and force him to step down. The nadir of this diplomacy may have been reached on June 30, when Clinton cheerfully predicted that the Kremlin had “decided to get on one horse, and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan” removing Assad.

Needless to say, Putin did no such thing. The war went on; thousands more died. For the past three months, Obama’s policy has become a negative: He is simply opposed to any use of U.S. power. Fixed on his campaign slogan that “the tide of war is receding” in the Middle East, Obama claims that intervention would only make the conflict worse — and then watches as it spreads to NATO ally Turkey and draws in hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.

Al Qaeda’s presence in Syria has often been cited both for and against the case for direct Western intervention. But the number of foreign fighters in Syria is not known. According to Max Rodenbeck, “by no current estimate does the number of foreign fighters in Syria — young men who mostly see themselves as part of a Spanish Civil War–style international brigade rather than as terrorist ninjas — surpass a thousand, out of at least 50,000 armed men on the rebel side.” The Times itself adds that some militias appear to be falsely burnishing “Salafist” credentials in order to woo donors.

Though non-governmental rebel advocates like the Syrian Support Group have downplayed the question of where the militias fall ideologically, the Wall Street Journal, TIME and Real Clear Politics report that rivalries among Islamist factions for arms procurement are undermining their nominal joint effort against the Syrian Army. The Times has reported before that even the rebels’ Gulf backers are starting to consider the possibility of  ”blowback.”

The Times adds that even though Obama’s course is being criticized by interventionists, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has not offered the sort of direct military aid some in the Beltway would prefer:

But Mr. Romney stopped short of saying that he would have the United States provide those arms directly, and his aides said he would instead rely on Arab allies to do it. That would leave him, like Mr. Obama, with little direct control over the distribution of the arms.

Diehl also blames Obama for “reversing Bush’s policy of distancing the United States from strongmen like Assad and Hosni Mubarak.”

The drama never stops unfolding around the Clarion Fund, the operation behind a string of movies dubbed “anti-Muslim” by critics.

The group’s latest salvo is an hour-long documentary called “Iranium”, which more or less gives airtime to a gaggle of neoconservatives and their [...]]]> This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The drama never stops unfolding around the Clarion Fund, the operation behind a string of movies dubbed “anti-Muslim” by critics.

The group’s latest salvo is an hour-long documentary called “Iranium”, which more or less gives airtime to a gaggle of neoconservatives and their allies on the Israeli right to advocate for a hawkish posture against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While warning of an ideologically-driven, religiously-inspired Iran, however, the filmmaker behind the movie himself comes from among the religious extremes of another Middle Eastern state.

The writer and director of “Iranium”, Alex Traiman, hails from the Israeli West Bank settlement of Beit El, one of the ideological religious Jewish outposts in occupied Palestinian territory bedeviling U.S.-Israel relations.

I spoke to Traiman, who sported a black kippah and a bright red tie, after a screening of “Iranium” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, where neoconservative don Richard Perle introduced the film.

“That’s where I live,” Traiman told me, after a deep breath, when I asked him if he lived in Beit El. “I just live there.”

Traiman worked for four years for the Beit El-based Arutz Sheva, or Channel Seven, also known as Israel National News, a former pirate radio station aligned with Israel’s religious settlers. He has in the past referred to Beit El as “a Jewish settlement… located in the Biblical province of Samaria, commonly referred to today as the West Bank.” Settlers refer to the West Bank by the Biblical “Judea and Samaria.”

On Tuesday at Heritage, Traiman, who has also written for a U.S.-based conspiracy website, called the World Net Daily, and presumably other occupied Palestinian territories, as “disputed territories in Israel.”

Beit El is a religious nationalist settlement near Ramallah in the West Bank, where some 5,500 settlers live, Founded in 1977, the settlement is built in land seized in 1970 by the military on what Israeli courts, according to Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, later deemed to be bogus security justifications.

Unlike their secular counterparts, who usually move into settlements to take advantage of government housing subsidies, the enclave of Beit El is a religious-nationalist settlement where residents think that God gave them the land that Palestinians lived on.

Palestinians view settlements as gobbling up land on which they hope to eventually build their state. In a peace deal, the border between Israel and Palestine would likely be doctored to include large settlement blocks in Israel.

But at a recent Washington Institute forum on potential maps for a peace deal, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, a Middle East hawk, said Israeli annexation of Beit El is not realistic in a final peace deal: “Beit El dominates the road between the two major Palestinian towns of Ramallah and Nablus… This type of scenario is unacceptable to Palestinians.”

Last fall, a diplomatic row erupted when Israel refused a U.S. request for a three-month extension of a settlement construction freeze. The freeze extension was aimed at rescuing peace talks, and when Israel refused, with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in the thrall of his pro-settler coalition members, the U.S.-sponsored talks collapsed.

The crumbling of the settlement freeze was celebrated in Israel’s settlements, whese construction boomed.

Other characters in and around “Iranium” come from the hardest of the hard-line ‘pro-Israel’ camp and the Israeli right, those who have long opposed Israel relinquishing control of the West Bank in any peace deal.

Not surprisingly, the Capitol Hill premiere in February is being hosted by a group, EMET, whose president and advisors worked together in the 1990s, behind the backs of Israeli and American leadership, to spike the Oslo process. Indeed, EMET’s Hill activism for a Greater Israel seems to be matched only by the efforts of key people from the Clarion Fund.

Ties between Clarion and Aish Hatorah, an evangelist Israeli ultra-orthodox group, are well know and long-established through Clarion’s founder and executive producer of its movies, Canadian-Israeli Raphael Shore, not to mention a host of registration and tax documents that make Clarion appear to be little more than an Aish off-shoot.

But Traiman, a former radio host and PR flak brought on board by Clarion to write and direct “Iranium,” appears is literally on the frontiers of the Israeli right.

According to social networking websites, Traiman worked at Arutz Sheva for four years, editing, writing, hosting a show, and acting as marketing director. In 2006, Traiman did a fundraising junket for the channel that brought him to New York and New Jersey, where he went to high school. (Arutz Sheva also raises money from U.S. Christian Zionists.)

Just two months before that trip, Traiman wrote an article for the U.S.-based conspiracy website World Net Daily (WND), where he gave space and sympathetic coverage to several Rabbis who theorized that the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war — then still raging — was caused by a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. At the end of the article, Traiman was listed as a writer for the Jerusalem bureau of WND, which has published articles about how Al Qaeda has 40 nukes (some already in the U.S.) and how “soy is making kids ‘gay’.”

The current chief WND‘s Jerusalem bureau is Aaron Klein, a birther and the New York Times best-selling author of “The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists”. (Klein also conducted the interview where Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf refused to condemn Hamas.)

Klein and Traiman co-edited their college paper when they were both at New York City’s Yeshiva University. “Following his completely secular education, Traiman decided to pursue a Jewish education at the only first tier university that could provide one,” says an article from the paper of the modern-orthodox Jewish university. If and how long Klein and Traiman worked together at WND is not clear.

Leaving WND aside, Arutz Sheva, where Traiman hosted a show, wrote and edited, and directed marketing efforts, has some conspiracy theory issues of its own. Last year, to celebrate the anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the “settler news organization,” as the New York Times labeled it, held a contest to find the best conspiracy theory providing a version of events different from the accepted history.

The accepted history, of course, is that religious Zionist Yigal Amir killed Rabin at a peace rally in 1995. In their 2009 book, “Jewish Terrorism in Israel”, Professors Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger wrote that Amir would have been inspired by the religious edicts from rabbis in West Bank settlements declaring Rabin din rodef, or a Jew who was willing to harm other Jews, a judgement punishable by death according to Jewish law. The professors also drop this nugget while recalling Amir’s machinations: “Only a fellow law school student, Margalit Har-Shefi—resident of one of the most prestige settlements, Beit El, and daughter of settler nobility—was let in on the finer details of the plan.” Har-Shefi even tried to break into the Beit El armory to get a weapon for the plot.

Arutz Sheva was founded by, according to various sources, either Beit El-based extremist Rabbi Zalman Melmand or Yaakov Katz, a politician from Israel’s National Union party, which has been accused of having ties to Israel’s banned extremist Kahanist political faction. Rabbi Meir Kahane was thought to be the “spiritual guide of those who allegedly conspired to kill Rabin.”

“There is a clear irony in having Israeli settler religious extremists urging the U.S. to bomb religious extremists in Iran,” said Lara Friedman, an expert on settlements and U.S. policy in the Middle East with American’s for Peace Now, in an interview.

Ali Gharib is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a regular contributor to the LobeLog.