by Marsha B. Cohen

Hours before the U.S. federal government shutdown, members of the House and Senate from both parties were with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a reception honoring outgoing Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Minority Leader Steny [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Marsha B. Cohen

Hours before the U.S. federal government shutdown, members of the House and Senate from both parties were with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a reception honoring outgoing Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Minority Leader Steny Hoyer spoke at the event, according to the Times of Israel. Others proudly gushed about their attendance to their constituents via e-mail. The office of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-F), Chair of the House Subcommittee, sent out the following message at 10:34 pm last night:

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, attended Ambassador Oren’s farewell event with Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro and Miami Beach native, and incoming Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer. Ambassador Oren was honored by Members of Congress for his years of service to Israel and for his advancing of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Ros-Lehtinen did not mention that she and her Republican colleagues would be shutting down the U.S. government in less than an hour and a half.

Ron Dermer, Israel’s new Ambassador to the U.S., was also introduced to the attending members of Congress at the reception. I discussed the likelihood of Dermer’s new position as far back as December 2012 when I wrote that Oren, who has been Israel’s top envoy to the U.S. since 2009, would be replaced by the American-born neoconservative who helped plan Mitt Romney’s 2012 visit to Israel prior to the U.S. presidential election. Dermer is believed to have convinced Netanyahu that Romney was going to win the election; his appointment is clearly a thumb in Obama’s eye. Not only has Netanyahu appointed another fellow Likudnik as Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., he has also appointed a strongly partisan Republican to the diplomatic post.

But Netanyahu isn’t worried about offending Obama. Despite the fulmination in his UN General Assembly speech on Monday about Israel standing alone against Iran, Bibi’s Gang remains on his side.

The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee (SFRC) also hosted its own event with Netanyahu on Sept. 30. Members were photographed with Oren and Netanyahu in a “class photo.” Netanyahu thanked them, according to Julian Pecquet of The Hill, “for their support of bills sanctioning Iran for its nuclear program, and urging them to continue to pressure the Islamic Republic.” Senators from both parties basked in Netanyahu’s praise and reciprocated it with their endorsement of what he had to say:

“Diplomacy without pressure is probably a futile exercise,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “He believes the sanctions are working, and I agree.” Graham said there’s consensus in the Senate to move ahead with a new round of sanctions, which the Senate Banking Committee is expected to take up shortly. The House passed similar legislation by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in July.

“During the meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, senators spoke with a unity of purpose, hopeful for a diplomatic outcome with Iran that leads to a verifiable termination of its pursuit of nuclear weapons program, but resolute that U.S. national security objectives can never be compromised,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the SFRC’s Chair, said in a statement following the meeting. “Our resolve to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability remains unchanged and we will not hesitate from proceeding with further sanctions and other options to protect U.S. interests and ensure regional security,” he said.

Graham and Menendez, two of the Senate’s most vociferous advocates of sanctions against Iran, jointly authored an op-ed in the Washington Post last week in which they declared, “In the coming days, we will be outspoken in our support for furthering sanctions against Iran, requiring countries to again reduce their purchases of Iranian petroleum and imposing further prohibitions on strategic sectors of the Iranian economy.”

(If only Graham and Menendez could apply their bipartisan resolve to convincing the hardliners in the House of Representatives to restore the functioning of the U.S. government.)

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) the SFRC’s top Republican, said Netanyahu gave “very detailed” answers about his views at the meeting. “Like all of us, I don’t think he wants the negotiations to go on forever,” Corker said. He continued: “Obviously letting up on the sanctions is not something any us are interested in. And like all of us, he understands that if there is an agreement it needs to be a full agreement.” The senator declined to state whether Netanyahu requested that the Committee pass more sanctions: “I’m not going to answer that,” he said.

On Tuesday, the Senate Banking Committee, of which Corker is also a member, decided to delay the consideration of a new package of Iran sanctions until after the mid-month talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany). Reuters reports that the sanctions issue has been slowed by congressional wrangling over the government funding bill that has led to our government’s shutdown. Nonetheless, it occurred to members of the Committee that “deliberately delaying new sanctions” might improve the mood at the talks with Iran in Geneva later this month. Corker is quoted as saying, “There’s been some discussion about whether it’s best right now, while the negotiations are occurring, just to keep the existing ones in place.” Corker also reiterated that Congress remains deeply suspicious of Iran and supportive of tougher sanctions.

Right-wing news sites, and even some elements of the mainstream media, have been echoing the complaints of Tea Party members of the House who are responsible for the current government shutdown, asking why President Obama is so willing to talk to Iran but not to them. As satirist Jon Stewart of the Daily Show pointed out on Monday night, the “why Iran and not us?” talking point doesn’t exactly work in their favor:

You’re not helping yourselves.  If it turns out that President Barack Obama can make a deal with the most intransigent, hardline, unreasonable, totalitarian mullahs in the world but not with Republicans, maybe he’s not the problem.

Part of the problem may be the willingness of members of both Houses, and both parties, to spend the hours before a government shutdown hobnobbing with a foreign leader — any foreign leader — and deferentially reveling in his advocacy of a foreign policy prescription that demeans, and seeks to undermine, the  diplomatic efforts of their own president.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has his Revolutionary Guards to contend with; Obama’s got Bibi’s Gang in Congress. Which one will prove to be the bigger challenge?

by Daniel Luban

For the last few weeks, Lobelog has been noting the continued disagreements among US neoconservatives over how to respond to the military coup in Egypt, with a few prominent neocons such as Robert Kagan denouncing it while many others are supporting it and calling on [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Daniel Luban

For the last few weeks, Lobelog has been noting the continued disagreements among US neoconservatives over how to respond to the military coup in Egypt, with a few prominent neocons such as Robert Kagan denouncing it while many others are supporting it and calling on the Egyptian military to finish off the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). These disagreements are continuing apace; yesterday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens offered the latest salvo with a call for the US to “Support Al Sisi“. The column is vintage Stephens: after offering his typical platitudes about the need to throw off comforting pieties and make the best of a set of bad options, he concludes: “Gen. Sisi may not need shiny new F-16s, but riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets and Taser guns could help, especially to prevent the kind of bloodbaths the world witnessed last week.” Evidently this clear-eyed apostle of Seeing The World As It Is has determined that the Egyptian military has been massacring protesters with live ammo only because it’s been running low on rubber bullets.

But the neocons are only one segment of the US right-wing coalition, and their disagreements may not be symptomatic of what’s happening in the rest of it. Indeed, a wider focus could suggest that US right-wing support for the Egyptian military is even stronger than it might otherwise appear.

One particular aspect of the story that we might miss by focusing only on the neocons is the religious angle. Read National Review, still the flagship of the right and a place where various elements of the coalition mingle, and you will find very little on the killing of MB supporters, the rumored release of former President Hosni Mubarak, or other stories that have dominated mainstream coverage of Egypt. Instead, there’s a whole lot of coverage — and I do mean a whole, whole lot of coverage — of the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. The Copts are facing a “jihad,” a “pogrom,” a “Kristallnacht“; unsurprisingly, the magazine’s editors have urged the US to “back Egypt’s military,” in large part to protect the Copts, whose status is “a good bellwether for whether progress is being made in Egyptian society.”

Meanwhile, other NR commentators are going farther. Witness David French (former head of Evangelicals for Mitt [Romney] and prominent Christian Zionist) demanding that the US leverage its aid to force the Egyptian military to step up its anti-MB campaign in defense of Christianity: “The Muslim Brotherhood is our enemy, the Egyptian Christians are victims of jihad, and the American-supplied Egyptian military can and should exercise decisive force.” While French does not spell out exactly what he means by “decisive force,” given the current political context it can only be taken as a show of support for the military’s indiscriminate massacres of MB supporters.

None of this, of course, is to diminish the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians — those of us living in security elsewhere should not scoff at the justified fear and foreboding that they must feel. It’s merely to say that reports on their predicament, like Andrew Doran’s, which make claims like “bizarrely, Western media have largely portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood [rather than Christians] as the victims of violence” — while making no mention whatsoever of the hundreds of MB supporters who have been killed in recent weeks — give readers a rather skewed perspective on the current situation.

Yet this is a perspective that we discount at our own peril. The foreign policy commentariat may tend to view the situation in Egypt through the lens of realism versus neoconservatism, or democracy promotion versus authoritarianism. But for large segments of the US public, the situation in Egypt is first, foremost and last a struggle between Muslims and Christians, and when viewed through this lens their unstinting support for the coup leaders is all but guaranteed.

Photo Credit: Mohamed Azazy

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 [...]]]> via Lobe Log

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.

Well, here it is, the day after. The Israeli elections are over, but the form of the next government is not at all clear. Most likely, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Beiteinu party will form a government with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party being the main partner. This is by far the most [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Well, here it is, the day after. The Israeli elections are over, but the form of the next government is not at all clear. Most likely, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Beiteinu party will form a government with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party being the main partner. This is by far the most likely scenario, though others possibilities exist, even a million-to-one long shot that Lapid could form a government. Labor is likely to be leading the opposition, unless Lapid surprises everyone and stays out of a Netanyahu-led government.

The new Knesset will be somewhat less tilted to the right than the last one, but this is not likely to make a big difference in terms of Israel’s approach to the Palestinians. Indeed, in some ways, it might serve Netanyahu to have a friendlier face in Lapid to cover policies that might be slightly different rhetorically but essentially the same on the ground. More than anything else, the shift in government is going to be felt domestically, in terms of greater attention to civic and economic issues. Indeed, no Israeli election in my memory compares to this one for the dominance of domestic over security issues.

Given that there’s still more to see before the full ramifications of the election are known, I’ll engage here with a few winners and losers.

Winners

Yair Lapid: Lapid comes out of this as a major power broker…for now. I suspect Bibi will try to convince him to take the Finance portfolio, because the looming budget cuts are very likely to undermine whoever takes that job. If Lapid has any sense, he will stay away from this job. Bibi might decide to make him Foreign Minister, allowing Lapid’s much more charming visage to replace both last term’s technical Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman (who had to quit when he was indicted) and the de facto one, a combination of Ehud Barak and Netanyahu. The idea is to improve Israel’s face in the international arena and stem of the criticism Israel has been facing, especially from Europe. Long-term, parties like Lapid’s, which are essentially cults of personality, tend to have a short shelf life. And Lapid doesn’t have much of a political program, as he wisely stuck to very broad, general and populist statements in his campaign. But for now, Lapid holds the key to Bibi’s ability to form a coalition, although it is possible for Bibi to form a government without him. Lapid had been doing well in polls and well exceeded those projections, so as of today, he is in really good shape.

Naftali Bennett/HaBayit HaYehudi: Many polls projected Bennett with the number of seats that Lapid got, so some see the 11 seats HaBayit HaYehudi won as a disappointment. But the party had all of three seats in the previous Knesset, and Bennett has put the national religious camp, as a distinct unit in the Israeli polity, back on the map. Bennett can now choose between a secondary role in the government or leading the rightward tug on Israel from outside the government. That’s not a bad place for him to be, long term. Bibi rebuilt Likud from that position after it was devastated by Ariel Sharon’s formation of Kadima nearly a decade ago. Either way, Bennett remains able to build himself into the face of the Israeli right for years to come.

Meretz: The only Zionist party that could remotely be called truly left-wing doubled its presence in the Knesset, from three seats to six. That’s the most seats it has won since the 1999 election. It’s still not a very influential party, but Zehava Gal-On has it back on track as the voice of the Jewish left, which has been terribly muted in Israel. Building on this momentum is likely to be just as difficult for Gal-On as halting Meretz’s downward spiral was. But she’s the best leader they’ve had in a long time, maybe ever. She is articulating a strong left-wing point of view, instead of mealy-mouthed political mumbo-jumbo, and that is bringing back leftist voters.

Barack Obama: No one will ever know how much of an effect Obama’s words to Jeffrey Goldberg, published mere days before the election, might have had on Netanyahu’s losses in this election. But count me among those who think it mattered. Yes, this was Israel’s most domestically focused election ever. And it’s also true that few Likud-Beiteinu voters like Obama. But Israelis are not fools; they know Israel needs to improve its relationship with both the White House and European leaders. Unlike most Americans, Israelis across the political spectrum know that Bibi actively interfered with the US election and, what’s worse, did so by backing the wrong horse. That has since faded from Israeli headlines, and Goldberg’s article didn’t make big news in Israel. But it did make news, and many Israelis follow the global and US media on Israel very closely. In any case, a second-term Obama will now be dealing with a chastened Netanyahu. At the very least, this was a pleasant night for Obama, and it could help support and embolden Obama if he decides to take Bibi on again.

Opposition to an Iran attack: This was actually taking shape in the election campaign. Iran was not a prominent issue at all. Israel still wants the US to take care of Iran, but the opposition to a unilateral Israeli strike among the military and intelligence brass remains just as strong as ever. A move toward the political center and, more importantly, an election that reflects looking within the country rather than outside it when identifying Israel’s biggest challenges blunts even farther the threat of Israeli action, which means less pressure on the US to act militarily. With Iranian elections looming in a few months, and the accompanying end of the Ahmadinejad era, an attack has almost certainly been pushed back, quite possibly to the point where an agreement can be reached to entirely avert one. Netanyahu’s need to use glamorous government positions like the Defense Ministry to entice coalition partners likely means Ehud Barak’s minimal chances of staying in his present job have been reduced to zero. An attack on Iran is considerably less likely today than it was before.

Losers

The Palestinians: The occupation was, at best, a minor question in Israel’s 2013 election. There were many pro forma statements from Labor’s Shelly Yachimovitch, HaTnuah’s Tzipi Livni and Lapid about supporting the two-state solution, usually with something like the Clinton Parameters outline or some such. But it was always an afterthought. Livni and Yachimovitch occasionally attacked Netanyahu for letting Israel’s global image suffer due to his intransigence on the Palestinian issue, while Lapid’s Yesh Atid platform had support for two states as its final plank. What seems to be looming is a Netanyahu who might moderate some of his public statements on the subject, but will head a government that will stick to the same policies of obstructionism that it has held to these past four years, but with a less confrontational tone when it comes to the US and Europe. That’s not a recipe for progress, but rather for maintaining the status quo while blunting the only pressure that could conceivably bring about change. If Naftali Bennett is in a prominent role in the government that might have some effect on the Palestinians (Interior Minister, perhaps) it just might mean that this new government is the same as the old one. In any case, Netanyahu remains in office, leading a party that is explicitly opposed to a two-state solution and has moved to the right. A coalition partner can push the weak-willed Bibi, but Lapid has shown little interest in this issue at all, and to the extent he has, he doesn’t sound much different from Netanyahu. Yachimovitch has stayed away from the entire Palestinian issue and Livni, who engaged it more than any other “centrist” candidate, had turned down a Palestinian offer that included most of East Jerusalem, full capitulation on the right of return and Israel keeping all three of the major settlement blocs. The Palestinians are, as usual, the biggest losers in this election, but that was always a sure thing from the very beginning.

Benjamin Netanyahu: The day Bibi announced that Likud and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party would run a joint ticket, I said it was a panicked move and a big mistake. I had no idea how big. The combined party has lost 11 seats. The merger was far from the only reason. Likud’s sharp tilt even further to the right, with the accompanying loss of some of its more pragmatic and well-known leaders like Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, chased some of their voters to Lapid. Bennett’s rise allowed some national religious voters to feel they could credibly express that identity in their vote for the first time in years, and that certainly cost Likud Beiteinu. Lieberman’s indictment and the in-fighting within his party certainly didn’t help. Bibi also ran a terrible campaign, one where he almost ignored the budget crisis that prompted his move toward early elections in the first place. In fact, he dealt very little with substantive issues at all, trying to run on slogans and his experience. And the fact is, Israel is facing the same budget cuts it was before and Bibi now has a government that will not share his priorities about where the cuts should come. His obnoxious manner in international affairs will be harder for him to maintain with less of a mandate at home. Every part of this gambit came up snake eyes for Bibi who came into this being sure that no matter what, he would still have his job and today is only barely going to hold on to it. Netanyahu has confirmed his legacy as a weak-willed leader, a venal politician and a poor strategist.

Shelly Yachimovitch/Labor Party: Some will say that Labor was revitalized in this election. Surely Yachimovitch will spin it that way. But this was a big bust. Keep in mind, Kadima had essentially supplanted Labor’s role in Israeli politics. In 2009, Labor won 13 seats, but this was splintered when Barak formed his Atzmaut party, leaving Labor with only eight seats. So, Yachimovitch can claim she doubled Labor’s representation, but that’s nonsense. With Atzmaut disappearing and Kadima either missing the Knesset (which is still possible) or winning only two seats, there was a major opportunity for Labor to regain the center. They finished second, in large measure because Yachimovitch is not an inspiring leader. She has almost nothing to say about security and international issues, which matter to the centrist voters in general. On economic and social issues she has more appeal, but has not proven herself to be a strong leader who can build support for her ideas, nor as someone whose ideas on implementing a social-democratic program are particularly advanced. The election result reflects the lukewarm reaction Yachimovitch produces, as opposed to the charm that Lapid reflected, despite his not having much better ideas than Yachimovitch.

Yisrael Beitienu: Avigdor Lieberman maintained his reputation as a loudmouth by predicting that Likud-Beiteinu would win 40 or more seats in the election. Oops. Lieberman also lost his position as the voice of a “new right” to Naftali Bennett. Still dealing with criminal charges of corruption, Lieberman might yet get a prominent Ministry due to his position as the #2 on the Likud-Beiteinu list, but that is less of a sure thing than that position should imply. Lieberman still holds the Russian community, but his appeal beyond that is diminishing. Yisrael Beiteinu rose to prominence by appealing to the larger right wing. That is receding at a breakneck pace and it will be heading back to being an ethnic party. It won’t disappear, but its days of being the kingmaking party are over.

The Republican Party: Netanyahu’s major setback mirrors, in many ways, the losses the Republicans took in the US in November. Bibi’s party moved further right, and like the GOP, it went further right than mainstream voters wanted. Bibi ran his campaign in a similar way to Mitt Romney’s as well, and it had a similar feel: lots of style, little substance and less reason for those not already beholden to him to vote for him. But most importantly, the whole Netanyahu-neocon-GOP nexus has been rebuked in both countries. The Republicans tried to define themselves as the “pro-Israel” party, but both American Jews and Israelis made it clear that they don’t agree and don’t want to see the issue turned into partisan football. In some ways, that is unfortunate. It would be useful to get rid of the “bipartisan consensus” and have a real debate about the US’ special relationship with Israel. But the GOP attempt to own Israel through its close ally Netanyahu has, at this point, failed.

Photo: A Likud-Beitenu supporter. Credit Pierre Klochendler/IPS. 

Over at the National Interest Jacob Helibrunn wonders whether neoconservative pundit William Kristol’s advising of Mitt Romney and influence over Republican party foreign policy thinking has contributed to their respective decline:

What about the GOP? It’s soul-searching time. A good case could be made that the author, [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Over at the National Interest Jacob Helibrunn wonders whether neoconservative pundit William Kristol’s advising of Mitt Romney and influence over Republican party foreign policy thinking has contributed to their respective decline:

What about the GOP? It’s soul-searching time. A good case could be made that the author, in many ways, of the GOP’s problems is William Kristol. Kristol saddled John McCain with Sarah Palin. He’s the biggest backer of Paul Ryan, a Washington creature, who is being talked up as a potential presidential candidate in 2016–when was the last time a Congressman won the presidency? And Kristol, of course, has dominated foreign policy debate in the GOP by ceaselessly purveying neocon malarkey about American militarism abroad, but Romney’s bluster about a new American century went nowhere. Had Romney shunned the neocon bluster and campaigned as a Massachusetts moderate, he would have posed a much greater threat to Obama than he did.

The temptation, of course, will be to blame Romney, and Romney alone, for the defeat. This is nonsense. Yes, Romney was always an unpromising candidate, but of the Republican primary candidates Romney was the most formidable. The campaign he waged was far superior to John McCain’s in 2008. But ultimately the positions that Romney was forced to adopt undid his campaign. He never really recovered from pandering to a base that never fully accepted him. From calling himself “severely conservative” to the Todd Akin disaster, Romney was crippled by the radicalism of the GOP…

In the wake of President Obama’s decisive election victory, we’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about how it demonstrates the powerlessness, or spinelessness, of the anti-war left. Some of this commentary (like this piece by Jason Brennan) comes from libertarians and anti-interventionists who are genuinely concerned about Obama’s [...]]]> via Lobe Log

In the wake of President Obama’s decisive election victory, we’ve seen a fair amount of commentary about how it demonstrates the powerlessness, or spinelessness, of the anti-war left. Some of this commentary (like this piece by Jason Brennan) comes from libertarians and anti-interventionists who are genuinely concerned about Obama’s record on civil liberties and national security. Much of the commentary, however, is clearly “concern trolling” — it comes from people who are seeking primarily to vindicate the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror by suggesting that Obama has adopted it wholesale. (Jim Lakely’s piece from today is one example.) Regardless, the general outlines of the argument are clear: by (for the most part) falling in line behind Obama’s reelection, despite policies like his expansion of the drone war and his failure to close Guantanamo, those who criticized Bush’s foreign policy have demonstrated the basic hypocrisy of their position.

The argument has both important elements of truth and notable overstatements. As I’ve written before, it has been genuinely dismaying to see the lack of concern about the drone war among most liberal commentators, and the failure to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on drone strikes (and the administration’s policy of assassinations more generally) has been striking and frequently shameful. On the other hand, while Obama’s record on civil liberties is certainly nothing to be proud of, the notion that he has been “no different from Bush” is exaggerated. On some issues, like banning waterboarding, he has reversed Bush administration policies. On others, like the failure to close Guantanamo, his maintenance of the status quo has stemmed more from demagogic opposition from congressional Republicans than from a desire to continue current policies. (Many of the people who now cite Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo as vindication of Bush’s policies are the same ones who screamed bloody murder about terrorists running loose on American soil when Obama initially attempted to close the prison.)

But in assessing the support for Obama’s reelection among what has been clumsily labeled the “antiwar left,” the real question we should consider is what alternatives were on offer. (I find the term “antiwar left” unhelpful because it runs together several distinct groups united only by their distaste for Bush’s foreign policy — genuine leftists who never really supported Obama, liberals who did, paleoconservatives who increasingly came to.) One could always vote for Jill Stein or another third-party protest candidate, or not vote at all. But if one accepted that either Obama or Romney was going to win, and decided to choose the candidate most aligned with antiwar principles, who would it be?

The charge of hypocrisy would stick better if Romney had run on a platform criticizing Obama’s conduct of the drone war, or his record on civil liberties. Notably, however, Romney chose not to do so. The level of agreement between the two candidates during the final debate in Boca Raton was one sign of Romney’s decision not to attack Obama from the left on foreign policy. On Afghanistan, his campaign vacillated between vague criticisms without ever offering a coherent critique of Obama. On the issues of torture and civil liberties, Romney made clear that he would be far more authoritarian than even Obama — for instance, his famous pledge to “double Guantanamo” during the 2008 campaign, or his advisors’ call to rescind Obama’s executive order banning torture.

The main issue where Romney differentiated himself from Obama on foreign policy was the Middle East, where Romney pledged to basically outsource US foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu and take a far more hawkish line against Iran. To what extent he would have followed through on this will remain a mystery. One plausible line of argument suggested that his Iran rhetoric was mostly bluster, and that in office he would follow the more realist line of a Robert Zoellick rather than the bellicosity of a John Bolton. Still, it’s easy to understand why few anti-interventionists would want to invest all their hopes in the possibility that Romney might be lying about his hawkish intentions.

So what was the “antiwar left” to do? Romney basically endorsed every Obama policy that they found troubling, distinguishing himself only by being more openly contemptuous of civil liberties for alleged terrorists and more publicly eager to start a war with Iran. In these circumstances, the left’s support of Obama could be read as hypocrisy — or it could be read as a perfectly defensible willingness to hold one’s nose and vote for the lesser evil.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The latest Dispatch Books volume, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare,is now available at Amazon for those who buy there and can also be purchased directly at the website of our independent political publisher, Haymarket Books.  In addition, [...]]]> via Tom Dispatch

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The latest Dispatch Books volume, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare,is now available at Amazon for those who buy there and can also be purchased directly at the website of our independent political publisher, Haymarket Books.  In addition, for those in the mood to help this site stay afloat, a signed, personalized copy of his book is available for a contribution of $75 (or more) via our donation page (as are various books of mine and the last pre-signed copies of Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects). Tom]

The Obama administration has engaged in a staggering military build-up in the Persian Gulf and at U.S. and allied bases around Iran (not to speak of in the air over that country and in cyberspace).  Massive as it is, however, it hasn’t gotten much coverage lately.  Perhaps, after all the alarms and warnings about possible Israeli or U.S. military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities this election season, it’s become so much the norm that it doesn’t even seem like news anymore.  Still, two recent stories should jog our memories.

Barely a week ago, the commander of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis was temporarily replaced and called home to face an investigation into “inappropriate leadership judgment.” What this means is unclear, but it happened while the Stennis and its attending strike group including destroyers, guided missile cruisers, and other ships, were deployed in the Persian Gulf.  We forget just what an “aircraft carrier” really is.  It’s essentially a floating U.S. airbase and small town with a crew of about 5,000.  As it happens, the Stennis was sent back to the Persian Gulf four months early to join the U.S.S. Eisenhower, because Washington wanted two such strike groups in the area.  Even if there were no other build-up, this would be impressive enough.

At about the same time, what might be thought of as the creepy story of that week surfaced.  Behind the scenes, reported the Guardian, the British government had rejected Obama administration requests for access to some of its bases as part of preparations for a possible war with Iran. (“The Guardian has been told that U.S. diplomats have also lobbied for the use of British bases in Cyprus, and for permission to fly from U.S. bases on Ascension Island in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, both of which are British territories.”) The rejection — “the government does not think military action is the right course at this point of time” — was not, of course, the creepy part of the story. For some strange reason, British officials don’t feel that war is the optimal approach to Iran and, stranger yet, don’t want to be dragged into a potential regional conflagration.  The creepy part of the story was the request itself, given the traffic jam of basesWashington already has access to in the region.

And remember, this is the Obama administration, not the Romney one!  As TomDispatch regularJeremiah Goulka makes clear, we’re talking about the party of “restraint” in Washington.  If that doesn’t make your heart sink, I don’t know what would.

Tom

The Dogs of War Are Barking

Mitt Romney’s Team Wants to Let ‘Em Loose in Iran

By Jeremiah Goulka

It’s the consensus among the pundits: foreign policy doesn’t matter in this presidential election.  They point to the ways Republican candidate Mitt Romney has more or less parroted President Barack Obama on just about everything other than military spending and tough talk about another “American century.”

The consensus is wrong. There is an issue that matters: Iran.

Don’t be fooled.  It’s not just campaign season braggadocio when Romney claims that he would be far tougher on Iran than the president by threatening “a credible military option.”  He certainly is trying to appear tougher and stronger than Obama — he of the drone wars, the “kill list,” and Bin Laden’s offing — but it’s no hollow threat.

The Republican nominee has surrounded himself with advisors who are committed to military action and regime change against Iran, the same people who brought us the Global War on Terror and the Iraq War.  Along with their colleagues in hawkish think tanks, they have spent years priming the public to believe that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program, making ludicrous claims about “crazy” mullahs nuking Israel and the United States, pooh-poohing diplomacy — and getting ever shriller each time credible officials and analysts disagree.

Unlike with Iraq in 2002 and 2003, they have it easier today.  Then, they and their mentors had to go on a sales roadshow, painting pictures of phantom WMDs to build up support for an invasion.  Today, a large majority of Americans already believe that Iran is building nuclear weapons.

President Obama has helped push that snowball up the hill with sanctions toundermine the regime, covert and cyber warfare, and a huge naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Iran has ratcheted up tensions via posturing military maneuvers, while we have held joint U.S.-Israeli exercises and “the largest-ever multinational minesweeping exercise” there.  Our navies are facing off in a dangerous dance.

Obama has essentially loaded the gun and cocked it.  But he has kept his finger off the trigger, pursuing diplomacy with the so-called P5+1 talks and rumored future direct talks with the Iranians.  The problem is: Romney’s guys want to shoot.

Unlike Iraq, Iran Would Be an Easy Sell

Remember those innocent days of 2002 and 2003, when the war in Afghanistan was still new and the Bush administration was trying to sell an invasion of Iraq?  I do.  I was a Republican then, but I never quite bought the pitch.  I never felt the urgency, saw the al-Qaeda connection, or worried about phantom WMDs.  It just didn’t feel right.  But Iran today?  If I were still a Republican hawk, it would be “game on,” and I’d know I was not alone for three reasons.

First, even armchair strategists know that Iran has a lot of oil that is largely closed off to us.  It reputedly has the fourth largest reserves on the planet.  It also has a long coastline on the Persian Gulf, and it has the ability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, which would pinch off one of the world’s major energy arteries.

Then there is the fact that Iran has a special place in American consciousness.  The Islamic Republic of Iran and the mullahs who run it have been a cultural enemy eversince revolutionary students toppled our puppet regime there and stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.  The country is a theocracy run by angry-looking men with long beards and funny outfits. It has funded Hezbollah and Hamas.  Its crowds call us the “Great Satan.” Its president denies the Holocaust and says stuff about wiping Israel off the map.  Talk about a ready-made enemy.

Finally, well, nukes.

The public appears to be primed.  A large majority of Americans believe that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program, 71% in 2010 and 84% this March.  Some surveys even indicate that a majority of Americans would support military action to stop Iran from developing nukes.

That’s remarkable considering how much less certain most experts seem.  Take, for example, the National Intelligence Council, the senior panel that issues the government’s National Intelligence Estimates.  It continues to stick with itsopinion that Iran once had such a program, but closed it down in 2003. U.S., European, and Israeli officialsconsistently say that Iran does not have an ongoing program and hasn’t even decided to pursue one, that at most the Iranians are hanging out near the starting line.  Iran’s supreme leader himself issued a fatwa against building nukes.  Why, then, is the American public so certain?  How did we get here?

There are three main reasons, only one of which is partially innocent.

What’s in a Name?

The first is linguistic and quite simple.  Say these words out loud: Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

Does that sound familiar?  Do those words look normal on the page?  Chances are the answer is “no,” because that’s not how the media, public officials, or political candidates typically refer to Iran’s nuclear activities.  Iran has a civilian nuclear power program, including a power plant at Beshehr, that was founded with the encouragement and assistance of the Eisenhower administration in 1957 as part of its “Atoms for Peace” program.  Do we hear about that?  No.  Instead, all we hear about is “Iran’s nuclear program.”  Especially in context, the implied meaning of those three words is inescapable: that Iran is currently pursuing nuclear weapons.

Out of curiosity, I ran some Google searches.  The results were striking.

• “Iran’s disputed nuclear weapons program”: 4 hits
• “Iran’s possible nuclear weapons program”: about 8,990 hits
• “Iran’s civil nuclear program”: about 42,200 hits
• “Iran’s civilian nuclear program”: about 199,000 hits
• “Iran’s nuclear weapons program”: about 5,520,000 hits
• “Iran’s nuclear program”: about 49,000,000 hits

Words matter, and this sloppiness is shaping American perceptions, priming the public for war.

Some of this is probably due to laziness.  Having to throw in “civilian” or “weapons” or “disputed” or “possible” makes for extra work and the result is a bit of a tongue twister.  Even people with good reasons to be precise use the shorter phrase, including President Obama.

But some of it is intentional.

The Proselytizing Republican Presidential Candidates

The second reason so many Americans are convinced that Iran is desperately seeking nukes can be attributed to the field of Republican candidates for the presidency.  They used the specter of such a weapons program to bash one another in the primaries, each posturing as the biggest, baddest sheriff on the block — and the process never ended.

The hyperbole has been impressive.  Take Rick Santorum: “Once they have a nuclear weapon, let me assure you, you will not be safe, even here in Missouri.”  Or Newt Gingrich: “Remember what it felt like on 9/11 when 3,100 Americans were killed. Now imagine an attack where you add two zeros. And it’s 300,000 dead. Maybe a half million wounded. This is a real danger. This is not science fiction.”

And then there’s Mitt Romney: “Right now, the greatest danger that America faces and the world faces is a nuclear Iran.”

The Regime-Change Brigade

Even if they’re not exactly excusable, media laziness and political posturing are predictable.  But there is a third reason Americans are primed for war: there exists in Washington what might be called the Bomb Iran Lobby — a number of hawkish political types and groups actively working to make believers of us all when it comes to an Iranian weapons program and so pave the way for regime change.  It should be noted that while some current and former Democrats have said that bombing Iran is a good idea, the groups in the lobby all fall on the Republican side of the aisle.

Numerous conservative and neoconservative think tanks pump out reports, op-eds, and journal articles suggesting or simply stating that “Iran has a nuclear weapons program” that must be stopped — and that it’ll probably take force to do the job.  Just check out the flow of words from mainstream Republican think tankslike the Heritage Foundation and AEI. (“It has long been clear that, absent regime change in Tehran, peaceful means will never persuade or prevent Iran from reaching its nuclear objective, to which it is perilously close.”)  Or take theClaremont Institute (“A mortal threat when Iran is not yet in possession of a nuclear arsenal? Yes…”) or neoconservatives who sit in perches in nonpartisan instituteslike Max Boot at the Council on Foreign Relations (“Air Strikes Against Iran Are Justifiable”).

You can see this at even more hawkish shops like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, with its “campaign to ensure that Iran’s vow to destroy Israel and create ‘a world without America’ remains neither ‘obtainable’ nor ‘achievable.’”  (According to one of its distinguished advisors, a Fox News host, Iran has “nuclear weapons programs” – plural).  At the old Cold War group the Committee on the Present Danger, Iran is “marching toward nuclearization.”  Retired general andChristian crusader Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council even told Glenn Beck, “I believe that Iran has a nuclear warhead now.”

There are also two organizations, much attended to on the right, whose sole goal is regime change.  There’s the Emergency Committee for Israel, a militantly pro-Israel group founded by Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer that links the Christian right with the neocons and the Israel lobby.  It insists that “Iran continues its pursuit of a nuclear weapon,” and it’s pushing hard for bombing and regime change.

No less important is the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian dissident cult groupthat was recently, amid much controversy, removed from the official U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.  The MEK brought Israeli intelligence about Iran’s then-active nuclear weapons program into the public eye at a Washington press conference in 2002.  Since then, it has peppered the public with tales of Iranian nuclear chicanery, and it ran a major lobbying campaign, paying dozens of formerU.S. anti-terrorism officials – several of whom are now in the defense industry — to sing its praises.

It wants regime change because it hopes that the U.S. will install its “president-elect” and “parliament-in-exile” in power in Tehran.  (Think of Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, who played a similar role with the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.  They even have some of the same boosters.)

And then there are the groups who want war with Iran for religious reasons.  Take Christians United For Israel (CUFI), an End-Times politico-religious organization run by John Hagee, pastor of the Cornerstone megachurch in San Antonio.  As scholar Nicholas Guyatt shows in his book Have a Nice Doomsday, Hagee’s organization promotes the belief, common among fundamentalist Christians, that a war between Israel and Iran will trigger the Rapture.

Hagee’s own book, Countdown Jerusalem, suggests that Iran already has nuclear weapons and the ability to use them, and he aggressively advocates an attack on that country.  To many mainstream Americans, Hagee, his followers, and others with similar religious views may seem a bit nutty, but he is not to be discounted: his book was a bestseller.

The Supporting Cast

Republican-friendly media have joined the game, running blustery TV segments on the subject and cooking the books to assure survey majorities that favor military action.  Take this question from a March poll commissioned by Fox News: “Do you think Iran can be stopped from continuing to work on a nuclear weapons program through diplomacy and sanctions alone, or will it take military force to stop Iran from working on nuclear weapons?”  Absent priming like this, a majority of Americans actually prefer diplomacy, 81% supporting direct talks between Washington and Tehran.

And don’t forget the military-industrial complex, for which the fear of a nuclear-armed Iran means opportunity. They use it to justify that perennial cash cow andRepublican favorite: missile defense (which the Romney campaign dutifullypromotes on its “Iran: An American Century” webpage).  It gives the Pentagon a chance to ask for new bunker busting bombs and to justify the two new classes of pricey littoral combat ships.

If the U.S. were to bomb Iranian facilities — and inevitably get drawn into a more prolonged conflict — the cash spigot is likely to open full flood.  And don’t forget the potential LOGCAP, construction, and private security contracts that might flow over the years (even if there isn’t an occupation) to the KBRs, SAICs, DynCorps, Halliburtons, Bechtels, Wackenhuts, Triple Canopies, and Blackwater/Academis of the world.  (Too bad there aren’t meaningful transparency laws that would let us know how much these companies and their employees have contributed, directly or indirectly, to Romney’s campaign or to the think tanks that pay and promote the convenient views of professional ideologues.)

The Problem With Romney

All of this means that the public has been primed for war with Iran.  With constant media attention, the Republican candidates have driven home the notion that Iran has or will soon have nuclear weapons, that Iranian nukes present an immediate and existential threat to Israel and the U.S., and that diplomacy is for sissies.  If Obama wins, he will have to work even harder to prevent war.  If Romney wins, war will be all the easier.  And for his team, that’s a good thing.

The problem with Romney, you see, is that he hangs out with the wrong crowd — the regime-change brigade, many of whom steered the ship of state toward Iraq for George W. Bush.  And keep in mind that he, like Romney (and Obama), was an empty vessel on foreign affairs when he entered the Oval Office. Even if Iran has been nothing more than a political tool for Romney, regime change is a deep-seated goal for the people around him.  They actually want to bomb Iran.  They’ve said so themselves.

Take Robert Kagan.  His main perch is at the non-partisan Brookings Institution, but he has also been a leader of the neocon Project for a New American Century and its successor organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). “Regime change in Tehran,” he has written, “is the best nonproliferation policy.”

Kagan’s fellow directors at the FPI are also on Romney’s team: Bill Kristol, Eric Edelman (former staffer to Cheney and Douglas Feith’s successor at the Pentagon), and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor, who has become Romney’s most trusted foreign policy advisor and a rumoredcontender for national security advisor.  The FPI’s position? “It is time to take military action against the Iranian government elements that support terrorism and its nuclear program. More diplomacy is not an adequate response.”

Or how about John Bolton, Bush’s U.N. ambassador and a frequent speaker on behalf of the MEK, who has said, “The better way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to attack its nuclear weapons program directly and break their control over the nuclear fuel cycle,” and that “we should be prepared to take down the regime in Tehran.”

And the list goes on.

It is, of course, theoretically possible that a President Romney would ignore his neocon team’s advice, just as George W. Bush famously ignored the moderate Republican advice of his father’s team.  Still, it’s hard to imagine him giving the cold shoulder to the sages of the previous administration: Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.  Indeed, Romney is said to turn to the “Cheney-ites” when he seeks counsel, while giving the more moderate Republican internationalists the cold shoulder.  And Cheney wanted to bomb Iran.

In a Romney administration, expect this gang to lobby him hard to finish the job and take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, or at least to give Israel the green light to do so.  Expect them to close their eyes to what we have learned in Iraq and Afghanistan when it comes to “blood and treasure.”  Expect them to say that bombing alone will do the trick “surgically.”  Expect them to claim that the military high command is “soft,” “bureaucratic,” and “risk-averse” when it hesitates to get involved in what will inevitably become a regional nightmare.  Expect the message to be: this time we’ll get it right.

Kenneling the Dogs of War

No one likes the idea of Iran getting nukes, but should the regime decide to pursue them, they don’t present an existential threat to anyone.  Tehran’s leaders know that a mushroom cloud in Tel Aviv, no less Washington, would turn their country into a parking lot.

Should the mullahs ever pursue nuclear weapons again, it would be for deterrence, for the ability to stand up to the United States and say, “Piss off.”  While that might present a challenge for American foreign policy interests — especially those related to oil — it has nothing to do with the physical safety of Israel or the United States.

War with Iran is an incredibly bad idea, yet it’s a real threat.  President Obama has come close to teeing it up.  Even talk of a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities is delusional, because, as just about every analyst points out, we wouldn’t know if it had worked (which it probably wouldn’t) and it would be an act of war that Iran wouldn’t absorb with a smile.  In its wake, a lot of people would be likely to die.

But Romney’s guys don’t think it’s a bad idea.  They think it’s a good one, and they are ready to take a swing.

Jeremiah Goulka, a TomDispatch regular, writes about American politics and culture, focusing on security, race, and the Republican Party.  He was formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a Hurricane Katrina recovery worker, and an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. You can follow him on Twitter @jeremiahgoulka or contact him through his website jeremiahgoulka.com.

Copyright 2012 Jeremiah Goulka

With the widely touted shift in the public opinion polls after the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney is no longer an underdog. That being the case, his pronouncements are attracting some well-deserved scrutiny from mainstream media sources. Romney’s major foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Oct. 8 [...]]]> via Lobe Log

With the widely touted shift in the public opinion polls after the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney is no longer an underdog. That being the case, his pronouncements are attracting some well-deserved scrutiny from mainstream media sources. Romney’s major foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Oct. 8 is being  fact-checked — and castigated —  by the Associated Press, CNN, and even by Fox News.

Among the more egregious calumnies in the speech is Romney’s mischaracterization of Obama’s response to the 2009 election in Iran.

… when millions of Iranians took to the streets in June of 2009, when they demanded freedom from a cruel regime that threatens the world, when they cried out, “Are you with us, or are you with them?”—the American  President was silent.

CNN has done a remarkably good job of laying out and scrutinizing Romney’s accusations, and the harsh Republican and neoconservative criticism of President Obama’s response to the Iranian election in mid-June 2009. Are Romney’s accusations factual? No, according to CNN: “During the first couple of days of the protests and violence, Obama did not weigh in publicly, but by a few days in, he was not “silent”– and a week later, took a tougher stance.”

As Glenn Kessler pointed out in a Washington Post article from June 19, 2009, “President Obama and his advisers have struggled to strike the right tone, carefully calibrating positive messages about the protests in an effort to avoid giving the government in Tehran an excuse to portray the demonstrators as pro-American.” Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi told Kessler in a telephone interview that she had no complaints about Obama’s response. “What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard,” she said.

This past January, former GOP-nomination contender Rick Santorum also assailed Obama’s response to the post-election protests in Iran, as 2008 presidential rival John McCain had. Santorum’s Jan. 1, 2012 exchange with David Gregory on Meet the Press provides the blueprint for the charges Romney hurled at Obama at VMI. Whoever is prepping the President for the upcoming foreign policy debate might find Gregory’s tough, pointed and well-informed questions a useful model for dealing with Romney’s dissembling:

MR. GREGORY: Before you go, I want to ask you about foreign policy. You’ve been very critical of the president, particularly on the issue of Iran, which has been a big issue of debate here in Iowa. Let me play a portion of that.

(Videotape, December 7, 2011)

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: And this president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he has had nothing but appeasement. We saw that during the lead up to World War II. Appeasement.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: How can that possibly be accurate, if you’ve taken an objective look at the foreign policy of this administration? What on Iran specifically separates the approach that President Obama has taken and that of President Bush?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Number one, he didn’t support the pro-democracy movement in Iran in 2009 during the Green Revolution. Almost immediately after the election, I mean, excuse me, like with hours after the, the polls closed, Ahmadinejad announced that he won with 62 percent of the vote. Within a few days, President Obama basically said that that was–election was a legitimate one.

MR. GREGORY: But what would that have done specifically to disarm Iran?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Well, well, I understand why the president would, would understand that, you know, someone announcing the minute after the polls closed that he won, I mean, he comes from Chicago, so I get it. But the problem is that this was an illegitimate election. The people in the streets were rioting saying, please support us, President Obama. We are the prodemocracy movement. We want to turn this theocracy that has been at war with the United States, that’s developing a nuclear weapon, that’s, that’s killing our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq with IEDS. And the president of the United States turned his back on them. At the same time, a few years–a year later, we have the same situation where Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists are in the streets of, of Egypt opposing an ally of ours, not a sworn enemy like Iran, but an ally of ours in Mubarak…

 MR. GREGORY: I’m sorry. The question I asked you…

MR. SEN. SANTORUM: …and he joins the radicals instead of…

MR. GREGORY: Wait a second.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: …standing with our friends.

MR. GREGORY: The–first of all, that’s patently contradictory. If you say you support democracy, there was a democratic movement in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood got elected. So how could you be for democracy in some countries and not others?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: I don’t, because, because…

MR. GREGORY: Which is inconsistent.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: No. The Muslim Brotherhood is not–is not about democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood are Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood are going to impose Sharia law.

MR. GREGORY: They were popularly elected, I think. Isn’t that what democracy is about?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: No. No.

The day after Santorum’s appearance on Meet the Press, FactCheck critiqued his claims:

Iran’s presidential election was June 12, 2009, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory — triggering protests in Tehran. On June 15, Obama said at a press conference: “We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can’t state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election. But what I can say is that there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.”

Obama issued a statement five days later again condemning Iran’s post-election “violent and unjust actions against its own people” and asserting that the U.S. “stands with all who … exercise” the “universal rights to assembly and free speech.” It was one of many such statements.

FactCheck also noted that the Washington Times had reported on June 27, 2009 that Obama was being cautious in what he said about the election results because he didn’t want to be accused of interfering and providing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a propaganda “tool.”

While other leaders have been more out front in their criticism, Mr. Obama has taken pains not to appear to meddle in the debate on the actual election results, arguing he doesn’t want his words to become propaganda for the Iranian regime. “Only I’m the president of the United States, and I’ve got responsibilities in making certain that we are continually advancing our national security interests and that we are not used as a tool to be exploited by other countries,” he said at a press conference Tuesday.

Fact checkers Brooks Jackson and Eugene Kiely concluded that, in comparing Obama’s handling of the elections in Iran and Egypt, “Obama treated both cases similarly: condemning the governments’ use of violence against their own citizens and supporting the protesters right to protest.”

Progressives and conservatives can find many faults with the Obama’s administration’s handling of foreign policy in general and dealings with Iran in particular. The question in the upcoming election is whether Mitt Romney could or would do any better. Daniel Larison, a staunch conservative, doesn’t seem to think so. In “Mitt Romney’s Vapid, Misleading Foreign Policy Speech” Larison writes:

The failings of Romney’s foreign policy arguments are not entirely his. Boxed in by his party’s hawks and most Republicans’ unwillingness to acknowledge Bush administration blunders, Romney’s script was to some extent written for him before he became a candidate. Not being in a position to lead his party in a new direction on this or any other issue, he had already embraced the worldview that he found among Republican hawks in an effort to become acceptable to them. Unfortunately for the country, Americans could have used a credible opposition party and presidential candidate to hold the administration accountable for its real mistakes.

Amen.

The National Review Online has run an advance copy of the foreign policy speech GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will give today in Virginia. In it, the former governor is expected to lay out his “red lines” for Iran that will be closer to Congress and the Israeli government’s position [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The National Review Online has run an advance copy of the foreign policy speech GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will give today in Virginia. In it, the former governor is expected to lay out his “red lines” for Iran that will be closer to Congress and the Israeli government’s position than the Obama Administration’s. Romney has expressed differing red lines on Iran in the past. Romney is also expected to express support for US arming of Syrian rebels:

It is time to change course in the Middle East. . . .

I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear-weapons capability. I will not hesitate to impose new sanctions on Iran, and will tighten the sanctions we currently have. I will restore the permanent presence of aircraft-carrier task forces in both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf region—and work with Israel to increase our military assistance and coordination. For the sake of peace, we must make clear to Iran through actions—not just words—that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated.

…. In Syria, I will work with our partners to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets. Iran is sending arms to Assad because they know his downfall would be a strategic defeat for them. We should be working no less vigorously with our international partners to support the many Syrians who would deliver that defeat to Iran—rather than sitting on the sidelines. It is essential that we develop influence with those forces in Syria that will one day lead a country that sits at the heart of the Middle East.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sunday, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney outlined how the US can implement “A New Course for the Middle East”. The article was lacking in terms of substantive policy planning. Its most detailed commentary is reserved for US-Israel relations, but even then it does little [...]]]> via Lobe Log

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sunday, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney outlined how the US can implement “A New Course for the Middle East”. The article was lacking in terms of substantive policy planning. Its most detailed commentary is reserved for US-Israel relations, but even then it does little more than advance the campaign’s talking points:

The same incomprehension afflicts the president’s policy toward Israel. The president began his term with the explicit policy of creating “daylight” between our two countries. He recently downgraded Israel from being our “closest ally” in the Middle East to being only “one of our closest allies.” It’s a diplomatic message that will be received clearly by Israel and its adversaries alike. He dismissed Israel’s concerns about Iran as mere “noise” that he prefers to “block out.” And at a time when Israel needs America to stand with it, he declined to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Aaron David Miller, who has been critical of the “daylight” between Obama and Netanyahu, wrote in Foreign Policy that the op-ed offers nothing to show what Romney would do differently from Obama if elected with Iran or other issues in the region:

Even by the standards of political silly season and in the heat of battle weeks before an election — when exaggeration, obfuscation, and willful distortion become the orders of the day — this article sets a new bar for its vacuity, aimlessness and lack of coherence. There’s nothing “new” in it, and it provides no “course for the Middle East.” If anything, it takes us back to the kind of muscular nonsense and sloganeering that has wreaked havoc on our credibility in recent years.