by Jim Lobe
Unsurprisingly, the same people who loudly championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq are clearly at it again, although this time they want not only to see US troops fighting in Iraq, but also in Syria.
Even while they insist that they don’t want a “new American ground war” in [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Unsurprisingly, the same people who loudly championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq are clearly at it again, although this time they want not only to see US troops fighting in Iraq, but also in Syria.
Even while they insist that they don’t want a “new American ground war” in the region, hard-line neoconservatives, led by “scholars” at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), are urging a commitment of “thousands” of “advisers and trainers” and Special Forces deployed to both countries to roll back and defeat ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State.
Writing in the London Telegraph over the weekend, AEI’s Fred Kagan made his recipe for victory quite clear.
Defeating the Islamic State…will certainly require a dramatic expansion of air strikes throughout Iraq and Syria.
It will also require the deployment of thousands of American forces – primarily Special Forces – to engage directly with moderate Sunnis in both countries and train the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the Syrian moderate opposition.
Effective trainers must fight alongside those they are training in order to sustain their respect and trust. Americans must work directly with local tribes to help them survive against the lethal threat that the Islamic State poses.
Similarly, AEI’s vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka, teamed up with Gen. Jack Keane (ret.)—widely regarded along with Kagan as a key architect of the fabled 2006-7 “Surge” in Iraq—to outline what they called a “comprehensive strategy” against ISIS (that also, curiously, targeted Qatar—more on that later) in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.
U.S. military support will be key: the U.S. Central Command has a list of ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq…. Advisers and trainers are also needed by the thousands, not hundreds, to assist the Peshmerga, reconstitute the Iraqi army, and assist Sunni tribes now opposing ISIS who must join this fight. Close air support will also be vital.
Baghdadi and his senior leaders aren’t invulnerable, and U.S. special operations forces should be given the mission to target, kill and capture ISIS leaders. We targeted senior terrorist leaders once in Iraq and still do in Afghanistan and elsewhere. ISIS should be no different, particularly after its brutal murder of [James] Foley.
How many “thousands” are they talking about? Well, they don’t say, but a close collaborator organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI)—successor to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)—put out a policy paper Monday that cited the recommendations of another big Iraq War booster, Max Boot, who, in an op-ed published by The Spectator last week called for a “western advisory and special operations presence in Iraq [alone] to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10,000 to 15,000 personnel.”
Advisers should be evenly distributed between the Kurdish peshmerga, the Sunni tribes and some of the more capable units of the Iraqi security forces in order to make clear that we are not playing favourites among Iraq’s sectarian groups. Simply having western advisers present alongside anti-Isis fighters will greatly enhance their morale, professionalism and effectiveness. [Of course, that’s only Iraq; Boot doesn’t address the need for ground troops, advisers, or trainers in Syria].
In other words, almost exactly four years after the last US combat brigade left Iraq, these analysts are calling for US ground forces to play a key combat role alongside whatever presumably friendly forces can be mustered to fight ISIS in Iraq, if not Syria. Without US troops fighting by their side, the implication goes, our putative allies will simply fold, even if US warplanes and drones are striking the enemy from above.
We are supposed to be reassured that the objective of deploying so many US ground forces in both countries is limited, presumably to ISIS’s military defeat. “…[T]his is not a plan for a new American ground war in Iraq seeking to reconstitute a failed state,” argue Pletka and Keane. “It is a mission to help Iraqis and Syrians on the ground help themselves.” To which one must ask, what does that mean?
After all, the aim of the Surge, which has long been extolled as a great success by these same commentators (who have never been shy about taking credit for it), was not just to isolate and defeat ISIS’s predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Its strategic objective was to achieve national reconciliation precisely to preserve and rebuild the Iraqi state. It seems now that the neocons are implicitly conceding that the Surge, despite its tactical success, was a strategic failure.
Does Pletka and Keane’s reference to Iraq as a “failed state” mean the neocons are giving up on the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq (especially now that Netanyahu has endorsed Kurdish independence) or Syria? Under their plan, the objective seems limited to defeating ISIS by arming and fighting with whatever buyable or “moderate” groups are willing to join the effort. But what happens when those groups’ broader strategic aims are found to be mutually incompatible? (It bears recalling that the Kurds took advantage of ISIS’s rout of the Iraqi army in the north to send the peshmerga forces into Kirkuk.) Then again, the neocons have never excelled at providing persuasive answers to Gen. David Petraeus’s legendary challenge during the first days of the Iraq invasion: “Tell me how this ends.”
But neocons don’t like people to ponder such questions. Instead, they count on their ability to reduce extremely complicated and difficult situations to urgent, black-and-white choices that appeal more to fear than to reason. “Much will depend on the effectiveness of the combined ground force backed by consistent air power,” write Pletka and Keane in presenting their “comprehensive plan” in which the military component is predictably dominant. “[F]ailure means the destabilization of the Middle East, terrible bloodshed and, ultimately, the murder of more Americans.” Or, as stated even more apocalyptically by FPI and PNAC founder Bill Kristol in his Weekly Standard editorial, “Perhaps the choice is between a new American century or a newly barbaric century.”
Of course, while Obama is clearly pondering further military action against ISIS, including possible air strikes in Syria, the notion of sending 10,000-15,000 US troops to Iraq and Syria appears far-fetched at this point, and it seems clear that the administration is very much aware of the dangers of the kind of “slippery slope” that the neocons are now pushing Washington to plunge down.
Even Richard Haass, the generally hawkish president of the Council on Foreign Relations who acts as a reliable weathervane for elite Republican opinion, describes the introduction of US ground forces as “a political non-starter [that] …is not going to happen,” suggesting instead that the US work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in fighting ISIS—an anathema to the neocons. And, while we may soon hear echoes of the neocon agenda from prominent hawks like Sens. McCain and Graham when Congress returns to Washington after the Labor Day recess, it seems very likely that, when push comes to shove, the notion of putting thousands of US “boots on the ground” is not going to prove very popular on Capitol Hill.
But the neocons are nothing if not dogged.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Along with AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), one of the most active groups that have promoted a policy of confrontation with Iran has been United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), headed by a former Bush administration representative (under John Bolton) to the UN, Mark Wallace. According to a recent [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Along with AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), one of the most active groups that have promoted a policy of confrontation with Iran has been United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), headed by a former Bush administration representative (under John Bolton) to the UN, Mark Wallace. According to a recent story in the New York Times, UANI, which has specialized in mounting public campaigns against foreign companies allegedly violating US or other sanctions against Iran, recently benefited from an intervention by the Justice Department in a defamation suit against one of its targets, a Greek ship-owner, by asking the trial court to prevent the disclosure of the identity of its donors, as well as other internal UANI documents, arguing that such disclosure could jeopardize ongoing law-enforcement activities.
The intervention was highly unusual, according to some experts, as well as the trial judge himself, who nonetheless bowed to the government’s request.
The story piqued the interest of the intrepid LobeLog alumnus, Eli Clifton, who has uncovered some rather interesting facts about UANI in a piece he just published on Salon. The whole article is well worth reading, but its focus is the curious business relationship between Wallace and billionaire-philanthropist Thomas S. Kaplan, one of the world’s biggest investors in precious metals. As noted by Eli:
The nature of Kaplan’s ties to UANI aren’t entirely clear, but the links are apparent: Kaplan’s investment operations have shared several employees with UANI over the past six years, notably including UANI’s Wallace, who controls several mining ventures through the Tigris Financial Group with the billionaire. Together, the pair are betting big on investments in precious metals they say will retain or appreciate in value in an unstable economic and geopolitical environment. By Tigris’ own account, it stands to make money in the case of “political unrest in the Middle East” — exactly the kind of instability many experts think will become inevitable if naysayers of diplomacy with Iran have their way.
Wallace, according to UANI’s website, is CEO of the Tigris Financial Group, which happens to be controlled by Kaplan. Eli points out that both men have described the prospects for investors in silver, as bright, particularly given the possibility of global unrest, especially in the Middle East. He quotes a 2002 annual report for Kaplan’s Apex Silver Mines Ltd asking investors to consider “destabilization in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, tensions between India and Pakistan, the potential for nuclear confrontation with North Korea and Iran, […] religious extremism and terrorism on a global scale and hooliganism.” Similarly, in a 2011 prospectus for the Sunshine Silver Mine Corp. in Idaho, Tigris CEO Wallace noted that “investment demand for silver exposure remains strong” given “continued U.S. dollar weakness, ongoing economic uncertainty in Europe and political unrest in t he Middle East.”
Eli writes:
Though Kaplan isn’t listed anywhere on UANI’s public disclosures or on the gorup’s website, he acknowledged his connection to the anti-Iran group while receiving the French Legion of Honor insignia from French Ambassador Francois Delattre in April in New York.
“A friends’ comment that one day our kids might ask what our generation did when we knew what the Iranians’ intentions were prompted me to become part of something bigger,” he said, his words appearing only in a video recording of the event. “Hard to know what the outcome will be but I do know that as much as United Against Nuclear Iran may not have had Tomahawk missiles and aircraft carriers at its disposal, we’ve done more to bring Iran to heel than any other private sector initiative and most public ones.”
The published transcript of his remarks contained no mention of UANI or the comparison of the group’s work to advanced weaponry, presumably to be directed at Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Photo: Thomas S. Kaplan (Credit: YouTube/The Economist)
]]>by Jim Lobe
Just as this week marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as noted Wednesday by Amb. Hunter, it also marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the “Great War” that, among other things, began the long (and often bloody) process of dismantling the imperial [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Just as this week marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as noted Wednesday by Amb. Hunter, it also marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the “Great War” that, among other things, began the long (and often bloody) process of dismantling the imperial system that had dominated the pre-war international system. The war had many causes, but historians have generally ranked excessive nationalism — and the militarism that went along with it — pretty high on the list. While reactionary and conservative forces in each country were clearly bullish on the war from the outset, the speed and enthusiasm with which liberals and socialists throughout Europe rallied to the cause, in spite of the universalist principles that they had long espoused, offered testimony to the extraordinary magnetism of the nationalist impulse.
As I have argued previously, most neoconservatives, despite their mainly opportunistic avowals of democracy and universal rights, are exceedingly nationalistic, not to say downright chauvinist, with regard both to the United States — whose moral “exceptionalism” they believe should exempt it from the constraints of international institutions (like the UN) and international law — and to Israel, which they routinely depict as a lonely island of “democracy” and “civilization” surrounded by a raging sea of barbarism and extremism, struggling against all odds simply to survive. Virtually any means the latter’s leaders deem necessary, including violations of the laws of war as documented by independent human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (as we have seen over the past several weeks in the third Israeli war in Gaza in six years), to defeat its enemies are not only defensible, but, in the words of neocon princeling Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel, “just,” as well.
Coinciding with the Great War’s centenary, the expression of this kind of militaristic nationalism — and the mantras about “civilization” versus the ”barbarism” or “terror” of the enemy — vividly recalls the rhetoric used by both the western imperialist powers whenever they encountered violent resistance by the “natives” as they conquered most of what is now referred to as the “Global South” from the “Age of Discovery” onwards, as well as the propaganda offices of the main combatants during the war itself (just check out the war posters) would seem potentially embarrassing to the core neocon messages about the exceptional nature of the United States and Israel.
And thus it was particularly notable when, in the very first issue of the Weekly Standard of 2014, Kristol carried out what might be called a pre-emptive strike against what he thought might prove to be a major theme — the futility and stupidity of nationalism and war — in this year’s commemoration of the Great War. In the lead editorial entitled “Pro Patria,” he rued the impact of the war on the West’s morale, blaming it for what he called “civilizational decline” and quoting with approval the ode by Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”), which had been bitterly denounced in a famous poem by Wilfred Owen, a British soldier-poet, as an “old lie.” Kristol warned:
This year, a century later, the commemorations of 1914 will tend to take that [Owen’s] rejection of piety and patriotism for granted. Or could this year mark a moment of questioning, even of reversal?
Today, after all, we see the full consequences of that rejection in a way Owen and his contemporaries could not. Can’t we acknowledge the meaning, recognize the power, and learn the lessons of 1914 without succumbing to an apparently inexorable gravitational pull toward a posture of ironic passivity or fatalistic regret in the face of civilizational decline. No sensitive person can fail to be moved by Owen’s powerful lament, and no intelligent person can ignore his chastening rebuke. But perhaps a century of increasingly unthinking bitter disgust with our heritage is enough.
Kristol goes on to contrast Owen’s denunciation of war and nationalism to the concluding stanza of the “Star-Spangled Banner” penned 200 years ago by Francis Scott Key in celebration of the Battle of Fort McHenry — “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just/ And this be our motto: “In God is our trust” — and asks:
A century after World War I, two centuries after Fort McHenry, do we dare take our bearings not from Owen’s bitter despair but from Francis Scott Key’s bold hope?
The essay, of course, raises not a few questions about what exactly Kristol — the quintessential chicken hawk – has in mind. No doubt he sees the “full consequences” of Owen’s attitude as including the reigning anti-war sentiment that facilitated the rise of Fascism and German Nazism in Europe in the 1930s, which, in turn, eventually resulted in an even greater war. But the “full consequences” also included the beginning of the end of European imperialism — a very oppressive system for the vast majority of the world’s population. Of course, true to his neoconservative worldview — and the fact that the State of Israel was made possible by that same system (the Balfour Declaration and all that) — Kristol clearly sees the decline of western imperialism (“civilizational decline”) as a great tragedy.
Similarly, Kristol’s celebration of the theo-nationalist spirit expressed in what became the US national anthem as an unreservedly healthy tonic for today’s popular disillusionment with wars, especially those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and over Libya, all of which he so ardently championed, is subject to different understandings. While he no doubt sees Key’s exhortation to “conquer” as applying solely today to the US, Israel, and “the West” more generally, there is no reason to think that the sentiment expressed therein is not shared by Palestinians, including Hamas militants, Arab nationalists, or, frankly, any jihadis who claim that God, or Allah, and justice are on their side. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria [and deus] mori” was not only a Roman proverb frequently invoked by denizens of the British Empire many centuries later; it’s been an inspiration to ardent nationalists and believers of all nations, creeds and religious persuasions, especially those, one might observe, who face tremendous odds in overcoming a far more powerful foreign oppressor. Indeed, is Horace’s (and Kristol’s) affirmation, conceptually at least, so very different from that line in the Islamic Resistance Movement’s (a/k/a Hamas) charter that asserts: “Death for the sake of Allah is its most coveted desire,” as was noted most disapprovingly just this week by Kristol’s fellow-Likudist, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, in one of a flood of neocon and Israeli efforts to justify Israel’s hugely destructive campaign in Gaza?
For those who are more interested in Kristol’s notions of nationalism and its importance, it’s worth noting that he will be offering an intensive course entitled “The Case for Nationalism” on the subject from Dec. 8-12 for just $3,000 for non-Israelis. The course, which is co-sponsored by the Hertog Foundation — Roger Hertog is a board member of both the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Commentary magazine, among other neoconservative associations — and the Tikvah Fund, whose faculty and speakers constitute a veritable who’s who of the Jewish neoconservative world, will take place at (and given his nostalgia for the British Empire, Kristol will love this) King George Street 44 in (West) Jerusalem.
Here’s the rather bewildering, not to mention historically and intellectually dubious (but rhetorically very Straussian), course description, which I necessarily quote at length:
Led by Dr. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the leading public intellectuals in America, this institute will examine the political and moral questions surrounding nationalism and nation-states. The course will begin by examining the case for and against nationalism, drawing upon some of the major works of modern political theory. It will then look in detail at three “regimes”—Europe, America, and modern Israel—drawing upon a mix of classic texts, speeches, and case studies.
In Europe, we see the dominant moral and political idea of our age—“human rights”—in its most advanced form. All persons everywhere are entitled to equal dignity and equal protections. The most dangerous threats to human rights—terror and empire, religious extremism, natural catastrophe, market dysfunction—all transcend national borders. Human rights cannot be secured by nations, and excessive national pride is a threat to the new ideal of the free, sovereign, cosmopolitan individual. The nation must be overcome and replaced by a centralized governing body that is large enough to protect global citizens from global threats.
In America, we see the ideals of universal liberty and natural rights combined with a belief in the exceptional character and special responsibilities of the American nation. Does American power serve the interests of world order? Do Americans believe in their own exceptionalism, or do they seek to become a nation among the nations?
The question of nationalism takes on special significance for citizens of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Zionism is a form of nationalism, and the founding of Israel represents the culmination of ancient longings for the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. But it was also founded in partial response to World War II and the Shoah it perpetrated on European Jewry. If the intellectual architects of the European Union believe that the national form causes violence and stands in the way of a more harmonious world, the intellectual architects of the State of Israel believed the opposite—that only a state dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people will ensure their welfare and prosperity.
Taken together, these urgent questions invite us to think about the deepest meaning and true character of political life, returning us yet again to the great texts and thinkers who illuminated the problems of politics with greatest clarity and force.
Of course, the belief by the architects of the European Union that nationalism can contribute to violence and “stands in the way of a more harmonious world” is based in large part on the lessons drawn from both the Great War and its successor. And doesn’t a state “dedicated to the protection” of one people foster violence and stand in the way of a more harmonious world if that “protection” translates into actively defeating the legitimate national aspirations of another people, denying their own self-determination, and occupying them militarily and colonizing their territory in violation of international law? Isn’t that the kind of question we should be pondering in this centenary year?
If you can’t get to the seminar, Kristol’s latest editorial offers what I suppose is his much-abbreviated lesson in the form of an extended quotation by Douglas Murray, the associate director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society of which Kristol, among many other prominent US neoconservatives, is an “International Patron:”
Israel is surrounded by enemies, as we have been for much of our history. But today we like to think that enemies are a thing of the past. There are no enemies, just phobias we haven’t been cured of yet.
A gap may well be emerging. But not because Israel has drifted away from the West. Rather because today in much of the West, as we bask in the afterglow of our achievements—eager to enjoy our rights, but unwilling to defend them—it is the West that is, slowly but surely, drifting away from itself.
Today Israel is also distinguished by a deep sense of its values and ethics as well as a profound awareness of their source—things we also used to have. Deep questions of survival, the tragedy and triumph of the past, present and future remain the stuff of every Israeli house I have ever been to. . . .
[I]t is Israel that remains the truly western country. It is Israel which takes its history seriously, thinks deeply about where it is going and what it exists for. It is Israel which takes western values seriously and fights for the survival of those values. . . . [I]t is Israel that is still truly a western country. Far more than many parts of western Europe now are.
Wow. Today’s Israel apparently would have felt right at home in August 1914.
Photo: Willy Werner’s depiction of “Flanders Fields.” Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Canadian Press
]]>With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there [...]]]>
With the rumored extension of the negotiations in Vienna on Iran’s nuclear program hanging in the air, a group of legislators and right-wing thinkers gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about what they believe a comprehensive deal with Iran should entail.
Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) told the assembled crowd that he was there to “ring the alarm” about the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran, and, indeed, that alarm rang over and over again throughout the event. The afternoon’s speakers were clear on one thing: nothing short of total Iranian capitulation would be an acceptable outcome to the talks, and even that would really only be acceptable if it came in the aftermath of regime change in Tehran. They were decidedly less clear as to how that outcome might be achieved.
The forum, “High Standards and High Stakes: Defining Terms of an Acceptable Iran Nuclear Deal,” was sponsored by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) (successor to the now-defunct Project for the New American Century), the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), which specializes in finding Democrats who agree with the neoconservative agenda when it comes to Iran. The speakers broadly agreed on the need to maintain and even increase sanctions to encourage the Iranians to negotiate, which seemingly ignores the fact that the Iranians are already negotiating and that the sanctions are in place precisely so that they can be traded away in exchange for Iranian concessions.
Among the materials distributed at the session was a paper by a group called the “Iran Task Force,” which has a few members in common with the “Iran Task Force” formed within the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs but nonetheless seems to be a different group. The paper was titled, “Parameters of an Acceptable Agreement,” though it might better have been called “Parameters of a Deal That Would Certainly Be Rejected by Iran.”
The task force’s “acceptable agreement” requires, among other items, the complete dismantling of Iran’s enrichment capabilities and extraordinary monitoring requirements that would remain in place permanently. Again, this would not be a deal so much as it would be unconditional surrender by the Iranians, and would impose restrictions on Iran that even retired Israeli generals don’t seem to believe are necessary. If this is how the “Iran Task Force” defines an “acceptable agreement,” it seems fair to ask if they want any agreement at all.
One of the legislators who spoke at the forum was Brad Sherman (D-CA), who has endorsed the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, (aka MEK, MKO, PMOI and NCRI), which lobbied itself off the US terrorist organizations list in 2012, and whose desire for regime change is quite explicit.
Congressman Sherman offered some of the most colorful (or maybe terrifying) remarks. For example, he declared that Iran’s “breakout” period must be “years,” which would presumably involve subjecting all of Iran’s nuclear scientists to some kind of amnesia ray to make them unlearn what they already know about enriching uranium. He then argued that Iran’s ultimate goal was not a nuclear missile, but a device that could be smuggled into a major city and detonated without directly implicating Tehran. Most Iran hawks assume (based on questionable evidence) that Iran’s nuclear program is ipso facto a nuclear weapons program. But Sherman apparently believes that Iran doesn’t only crave a nuclear weapon, but will obviously use that weapon once it’s built to bring destruction upon the world. Sherman closed by proposing that the United States arm Israel with advanced “bunker buster” bombs and surplus B-52 bombers, which would surely ensure peace in that region.
After the legislators had their say, it was time for the expert panel, featuring FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, Ray Takeyh from the Council on Foreign Relations, and Stephen Rademaker from the BPC. Gerecht argued that Iran has a “religious” need to acquire nuclear weapons, which might come as a shock to the Iranian religious establishment, and criticized the Obama administration’s unwillingness to apply “real” economic pressure to force Iranian concessions. He never got around to describing what “real” economic pressure looks like, or how much different it could be from what Iran is currently experiencing. It was also unclear why, if Iran does have such a strong need to develop a nuclear weapon, and if it hasn’t yet felt any “real” economic pressure, it agreed to, and has by all accounts complied with, the terms of the interim Joint Plan of Action reached in Geneva last year.
But it was Rademaker who came closest to openly admitting the theme that underpins the hawks’ entire approach to these talks: that no nuclear deal will ever be acceptable without regime change. He criticized last year’s historic deal for its promise that a comprehensive deal would remain in place for a specified, limited duration, and that Iran would be treated as any other Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signatory at the conclusion of the deal. Rademaker later compared Iran to Brazil and Argentina, whose nuclear programs were both abandoned after their military regimes gave way to democratic governments. At that point the suggestion that regime change, which didn’t exactly work out the way the US envisioned in Iran (1953) and Iraq (2003), must precede any normalization of Iran’s nuclear program was obvious.
]]>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 [...]]]>
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 Mitchell Plitnick
When is a coup not a coup? When calling it that carries repercussions that make a bad situation worse.
US President Barack Obama is struggling with recent events in Egypt. Once again he’s presented with a situation in the Middle East where he has few good options but is [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
When is a coup not a coup? When calling it that carries repercussions that make a bad situation worse.
US President Barack Obama is struggling with recent events in Egypt. Once again he’s presented with a situation in the Middle East where he has few good options but is still facing expectations based on a long history of US influence over events — an influence that is no longer situated in reality.
In contrast to the revolution that deposed Hosni Mubarak two years ago, the ouster of Mohammed Morsi raises some profound questions, not only for foreign powers, but for Egyptians themselves. There is no doubt that Morsi brought a lot of this on himself. He neglected the major issue for almost all Egyptians, the economy; he shamelessly tried to grab dictatorial powers; he did not follow through on his campaign promises to include the widest spectrum of Egyptians in his government; and, when confronted with all of this, he remained obstinate.
All of that led to the June 30 demonstrations, organized by young Egyptians of the grassroots Tamarod (Rebel) movement, which included both the liberal and Salafist camps. That is a wide spectrum of Egyptians demanding Morsi to resign. The military — the power that controlled Egypt until Mubarak’s fall — stepped in very quickly and gave Morsi two days to respond before removing him from the presidency. It is not unreasonable to say that the military action was hasty. It certainly was likely, from the onset, to split Egypt between Mulsim Brotherhood supporters (even if they agreed that Morsi had bungled the job and needed to go, an opinion that was far from rare among those who opposed the military action) and those supporting the military’s action.
The military removed a sitting and democratically elected president; that’s a coup, and everyone knows it. Whether or not it should be officially dubbed as such, with all the accompanying policy ramifications, is a different matter. For the radical neoconservative, Elliott Abrams, US aid to Egypt should be cut off, as US law demands when a coup occurs. In this, Abrams stands against the desires of the Israeli government as well as the Obama administration. But he does not stand alone.
Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican Senator John McCain are also calling for the suspension of aid to Egypt. The concern, which they share with Abrams, is that the Egyptian military needs a stern warning in order to move with all deliberate speed toward restoring a civilian government. Elections are the key.
By contrast, many other members of Congress from both parties are supporting Obama in his determination not to cut funds for Egypt. The reasoning here is that the Egyptian economy is already reeling badly and cutting off US aid would not only exacerbate that situation, it also removes what leverage we might have in pushing the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) toward relinquishing power.
Both bits of thinking are misguided. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already moved to bolster their position in Egypt by pledging $8 billion to help Egypt weather its economic crisis. The gift is being given for reasons beyond promoting Egyptian stability. The Saudi/UAE rivalry with Qatar took a strong pro-Saudi turn with the deposition of Morsi. Qatar had backed him, as they had backed the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of that brand of Islamism throughout the region. But even before this, the succession of power in Qatar was already leading to Qatari adventurism’s end in the region. The Saudi/UAE support is meant to push that process along and cement Egypt against a Brotherhood revival.
This is surely met with approval in virtually all corners of Washington and Jerusalem, and, it should be added, within significant segments of Egypt. The SCAF wants the Brotherhood marginalized, as does the United States. But with the SCAF bringing this about in such a direct and draconian manner – mass arrests, heavy-handed use of force and shutting down media outlets deemed pro-Brotherhood — there is a real risk of undermining fragile hopes for stability in Egypt.
Obama is right in resisting calls to label the coup a coup. Yes, it’s playing fast and loose with both the truth and with US law, but no good is going to come out of alienating the SCAF and cooling our relationship with it. The plan the SCAF has in place is actually a pretty good one, if it plays out as written. The Western myopia that defines democracy through the ballot box will not serve well in Egypt. Before new elections, a constitution must be at least provisionally in place, lest we witness a repeat of June 30. It was this lack of structure that allowed Morsi to abuse his power and gave the Egyptian people no recourse to address that abuse but to march for his ouster.
But for even a constitutional structure to bring stability to Egypt, it will need to be as inclusive a process as possible, and that means finding a way to include the Muslim Brotherhood. Right now, the SCAF seems intent on marginalizing and radicalizing them. No doubt, the Saudis and other Gulf states are not unhappy with that state of affairs. Israel, too, is probably content with seeing the SCAF undermine not only the Brotherhood in Egypt, but pushing back the regional aspirations of the other Brotherhood branches and similar Islamist parties (not least the one in Turkey, the ruling AKP, whose own increasing lean toward Islamism could be discouraged by these events).
Less value is being placed on finding a way to reset the Egyptian revolution while not radicalizing the Brotherhood. It’s a complicated issue. The Brotherhood’s own behavior, even before June 30, indicates the comfort level they have with their familiar position of a besieged and persecuted opposition, a role they are quickly assuming once again. Right now, they’re assuming that role in isolation, but if Egypt’s economy continues to flounder, if the SCAF continues its heavy-handed approach and, most especially, if whatever government finally takes hold is deemed as inadequate as Morsi’s, they could find themselves in a popular position once again, as in 2011.
The US, and the Europeans, are in a position to influence some method of including the Brotherhood in Egypt’s future government. Indeed, the US seems to have already begun trying, though the approach was ham-handed and the Brotherhood interpreted the effort, not surprisingly, as an attempt to get them to legitimize the coup.
It is not the time for the US to try to bully Egypt or to taint whatever good relationships it has, and it still has a good one with the SCAF. But the US must recognize that a lot of its friends are holdovers from the Mubarak regime and that too much interference is very likely to backfire. A gentle and understated hand is necessary to help convince the SCAF and the currently forming technocratic government to work hard to include the Brotherhood as partners while still bringing in a government that will be very different from the one that was just toppled. That needs to be the key feature of the constitutional process. It is possible that this is what the Obama administration intends and, if so, they must stand fast against foolhardy voices like those of Levin, McCain and especially Abrams.
Photo Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Ron Dermer, the man who is rumored to be the replacement for Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren (who resigned today), has been compared to Karl Rove. The comparison is an apt one.
Oren, an academic who easily slipped into the role of Israeli Prime Minister [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Ron Dermer, the man who is rumored to be the replacement for Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren (who resigned today), has been compared to Karl Rove. The comparison is an apt one.
Oren, an academic who easily slipped into the role of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s lead US propagandist, projected an image that was a bit friendlier in its Americanism. His academic stature, his experience of having written a best-selling book on the 1967 war that was very well-received in popular circles (less so in more critical academic environments) and his general demeanor was meant to soften the hardline Israeli leader’s image while still representing the Likud’s hawkish views in the US.
Dermer, whose experience is much more imbued in politics, will likely cast a different, more Machiavellian shadow. He is steeped with neoconservative connections, comes from a family that was heavily involved in politics and is undoubtedly reflective of the more hawkish strains even among the Likud. When rumors of his likely appointment first surfaced at the end of 2012, Marsha Cohen wrote this excellent and concise profile of Dermer for LobeLog.
Unlike Oren, Dermer is opposed to a two-state solution, having referred to it as a “childish matter,” though he later backed off the statement. But Dermer, who has long been a political adviser to Netanyahu and his lead speech writer, was also a key figure in arranging the controversial trip to Israel taken by then-Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney prior to last year’s election. In fact, despite his father having been a Democratic mayor in Florida, Dermer’s Republican and neoconservative roots run very deep.
But Dermer understands very well the need to work in a bipartisan fashion as an Israeli representative in Washington. “I haven’t encountered [ideology] as being much of an obstacle. We don’t get into deep conversations about our world views,” Dermer told the Washington newspaper, Politico. “Did Churchill and Roosevelt have a good relationship? You have foreign affairs, and you work together on issues where you agree.”
Also unlike Oren, Dermer is prone to more direct language. When New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the self-evident truth that the US Congress is “bought and paid for” by Israel’s lobby, Oren said that “…Unintentionally, perhaps, Friedman has strengthened a dangerous myth.” Dermer, on the other hand, went on the warpath against the Times as a whole, saying the paper, well-known for its long-standing editorial support of Israel but not necessarily its settlements, “…consistently distort(s) the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole.”
That is likely to be a good snapshot of the differing styles of Oren and Dermer, the latter being much less inclined to diplo-speak, but with a much keener knowledge of conservative US politics. This will likely to serve him well as Israel becomes more and more a right-wing issue, a shift that Netanyahu embraces. While bi-partisanship remains the byword for pro-Israel lobbying, the money from the Jewish community, which is key and which continues to pour into the political coffers of Democrats, is increasingly coming from Jews who are either Republicans or whose views on Israel break with those of many Democrats. This split among Democrats was laughably visible during the spat at the Democratic National Convention last year over the forced inclusion of a plank in the party platform opposing the division of Jerusalem.
Oren was certainly no bridge-builder. He was sharply critical of the centrist group J Street and feuded with them off and on during his tenure. Dermer will likely be even more disdainful of even the tepid criticism of Israeli policies that J Street offers, much less groups that are more forthright.
But Netanyahu is well aware that the Palestinian issue, despite John Kerry’s many travels, is dropping farther and farther down on the list of US priorities. And the likely appointment of someone like Dermer is further evidence that Netanyahu also is willing to see the US right-wing take more ownership of the pro-Israel agenda, while campaign contributions and the continuing illusion that Jewish money is closely tied to a pro-Israel agenda keeps the Democrats toeing the line.
In the long run, this sort of characterization of the Israeli image is likely to alienate more and more US citizens, including a majority of Jews. But Bibi has never cared much about the long-term view, as the comeuppance will hit Israel long after he has left office. Ron Dermer, who shares a similar outlook, is Bibi’s kind of guy.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Outside of Iran, there is no doubt that the biggest losers in Iran’s election this past weekend were the Likud government in Israel and its supporters, especially neoconservatives, in the United States.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister to the election of centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani as [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Outside of Iran, there is no doubt that the biggest losers in Iran’s election this past weekend were the Likud government in Israel and its supporters, especially neoconservatives, in the United States.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister to the election of centrist candidate Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next President was almost comical in its sharp reversal from the rhetoric of the past eight years. As was widely reported, Benjamin Netanyahu said that it was Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the president who set nuclear policy.
That is, of course, true, and it is precisely what opponents of an attack on Iran have been saying for the past eight years. Netanyahu and his neocon allies, on the other hand, were repeatedly pointing to outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the fearsome specter, the man who wanted to “wipe Israel off the map” and must be prevented from acquiring the means to do so. With Ahmadinejad gone, and, much to the surprise of many observers, not replaced by someone from the arch-conservative (or, in Iranian political terms, principlist) camp, the hawks have lost their best tool for frightening people and getting them behind the idea of attacking Iran.
So, Netanyahu has stepped up his push for a hard line on Iran, saying, “The international community must not become caught up in wishful thinking and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program.” Netanyahu is admitting that all the rhetoric around Ahemdinejad was insincere, and that the Iranian president is only relevant insofar as his visage can be used to whip people into a frenzy behind his call for war.
He has plenty of support in the United States. As the Iranian election results were coming in on Saturday, the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Josh Block of The Israel Project and other, similar sources tweeted incessantly about how meaningless the elections were. Ahmadinejad was exactly what the hawks wanted, an Iranian leader who displayed fiery rhetoric, was confrontational with the West and expressed hostility toward Israel and even Jews more broadly (though his frequently cited statement about wiping Israel off the map was fabricated, he did host a conference of leading Holocaust deniers, for instance, among other incidents). Rouhani, a man determined to project an air of reasonableness, makes the drumbeat for war harder to sustain.
Recognizing this, Netanyahu, his friends at Commentary Magazine, and similar extremists have warned against getting “caught up in wishful thinking” regarding Rouhani. Already, there have been declarations that Israel’s hoped-for attack on Iran has been set back by at least another year. And even the tentative, merely polite response from US President Barack Obama has been met with apoplexy from the radical hawks.
So, what does Rouhani mean for US and Israeli policy? Of course, it is very true, as opponents of war on Iran have been saying for years, that the Supreme Leader, not the President, makes the major decisions in Iran. But, just as the Likud/Neocon campaign to use Ahmadinejad as the face of Iran was disingenuous, so too is their current attempt to contend that the Iranian president, and this election is meaningless.
The Iranian President is not like the Israeli one or the British monarchy; that is, it is not a merely ceremonial role. As we have seen repeatedly, the President of Iran handles quite a bit of the public diplomacy of the Islamic Republic, and he has considerable influence over domestic issues, appointments and other facets of government. When the Iranian people made their choice, it was far from a meaningless one.
One event, prior to the election, was particularly telling. A few days before, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on all Iranians to vote. This was not just a “get out the vote” pitch, as we see so often in the United States. After the events of 2009, there was, quite understandably, widespread cynicism among moderates and reformists in Iran. Khamenei drove the point home by encouraging even those who “do not support the Islamic system” to cast their ballots. The result was a fantastically high voter turnout: 72.7% according to the Iranian Interior Ministry, a figure that was supported by virtually all reports from the ground. Combined with the eleventh hour joining of forces behind Rouhani, this turned into a mandate for centrism over the hardline conservative views that Khamenei himself holds and that have dominated Iranian politics for most of the past decade.
While it’s a little much to assume that Khamenei’s call to vote would bring victory to a man who, while hardly a radical reformist, clearly sees things differently than Iran’s Supreme Leader, he surely knew it was a possibility. Why would he do that?
The events of 2009 are quite likely the answer. The contested presidential election of that year, and the protests, violence and national schism it produced did a lot of harm to Khamenei and Iran. The interior breech has not yet healed; more than that, the Green Movement and the Islamic Republic’s response damaged Iran in the international arena. It made it much easier to ratchet up the calls for war in the US (even if they have not reached the tipping point Netanyahu and his neocon friends hoped) and, with the subsequent events of the Arab Awakening, it undermined Iran’s efforts to usurp Saudi Arabia’s position in the region. Instead of the image Iran wants to portray — that of an Islamic Republic whose 1979 revolution threw off Western domination — it appeared more like the Arab regimes whose time seems to have finally run out.
There can be little doubt that Khamenei’s willingness to risk a new president who holds different views about Iran’s domestic politics and international strategy was meant to address those wounds from 2009. And therein lies the real opportunity.
Rouhani was elected by promising to fix the economy, improve Iran’s international standing, including with the West, and relaxing some social laws. Both of the first two are inseparable from the standoff with the US and Israel. How far is Khamenei willing to go to break that impasse?
On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Iran was willing to stop its enrichment of uranium to 20% levels, if “substantial reciprocal steps” were forthcoming. No doubt, the hawks consider this more deception, but Rouhani has also called for greater transparency for the Iranian nuclear program as well.
This is a real opportunity, and one that the United States and Europe must explore to the fullest. If the hawks are right, then this is the easiest way to prove that. Which, conversely, makes it all the more encouraging that Iran seems to be making the first move toward accommodation.
This is not speculation that Khamenei has suddenly had a radical shift in outlook. After all, his call to vote came after the usual politicking, and political shenanigans, that trims the list of candidates to one that the Guardian Council, and by extension, Khamenei approves of. Still, that list included not only Rouhani, but also Mohammadreza Aref, a reform-minded candidate than Rouhani who withdrew voluntarily to increase Rouhani’s chances of winning.
And it is not at all difficult to believe that, after eight years of increasing tension, declining Iranian prestige in the Middle East and an economy reeling under the weight of Western sanctions, Khamenei may wish to pursue a new strategy, one which holds the possibility of reversing those trends and perhaps resolving, or at least significantly ameliorating, some of the vexing problems that Iran faces and which, eventually, could destabilize his regime.
It is perfectly sensible, politically. Now is the time for Barack Obama to close his ears to a Congress that frames the issue as an Iranian choice between war and total capitulation and ignores even the experts it calls to its hearings, in favor of Netanyahu’s paranoia, and his lunatic demands. Obama has an opportunity to test Iranian intentions right away, and very possibly, to march the region back from yet another bloody misadventure.
]]>by Jim Lobe
As Republican lawmakers and Fox News have been claiming that the Benghazi “cover-up” scandal will prove even bigger than the Iran-Contra and Watergate scandals combined, Elliott Abrams – who, faced with a slew of felony charges by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor while serving as Assistant Secretary [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
As Republican lawmakers and Fox News have been claiming that the Benghazi “cover-up” scandal will prove even bigger than the Iran-Contra and Watergate scandals combined, Elliott Abrams – who, faced with a slew of felony charges by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor while serving as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs (1985-89), quickly pled guilty to two counts of misleading Congress — seemed to be a particularly poor choice by the Wall Street Journal to comment on this week’s hearings by the House Oversight Committee and decry the partisanship and viciousness of “Washington politics.”
It’s not just that Abrams has a rather dubious reputation for truth-telling dating back to even before Iran-Contra, to his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights (1981-5), when his efforts to downplay or cover up serious human rights atrocities (some of which certainly match or even exceed the worst attributed to Assad’s forces in Syria) committed by “friendly authoritarians” in South and Central America were routinely denounced by human-rights activists and their supporters in Congress. As for his lying about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, it’s quite something when a lawmaker as gentle and bipartisan as former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell threatens to eject you from a hearing room if you even try to testify because of your performance at previous hearings. (During one exchange in Dec 1986, after Iran-Contra hit the headlines after it had become clear that Abrams had lied to Congress about his role in fund-raising for the Contras, Sen. Tom Eagleton ended an exchange with Abrams by saying “I’ve heard [your testimony], and I want to puke.”)
It’s also that if you’re going to complain about the “vicious political culture of Washington,” your own contribution to that culture and its conventions should somehow be acknowledged. It was Abrams, after all, who repeatedly argued recently that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was an anti-Semite (or, more precisely, has “a thing about ‘the Jews’”). During the Reagan administration, he, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, was not shy about accusing human-rights activists, pro-poor clerics, and sympathetic Democratic lawmakers with whom he clashed on Central America of being fellow-travelers or dupes. As noted by Jefferson Morley back in 1987, he also adopted a more-sophisticated PR strategy designed to
dominate the conventions of Washington debate — epitomized on talk shows with speakers pro and con. Knowing these shows need federal officials, Abrams regularly refused to appear with selected opponents of Administration policy. He usually got his way. In declining to appear, Abrams labeled his critics, including respected diplomats, as ‘vipers’ beyond ‘the borders of responsible criticism.’
“Vipers” was also a word he reportedly used to describe foreign service officers who he felt were insufficiently loyal to the Reagan administration’s policies. Which brings me to the passage that really stuck out in Abram’s op-ed in the Journal, entitled “Benghazi Truths vs. Washington Politics.” The article concluded:
This hearing did not ascertain where the buck should stop, but it was a step forward in getting the facts. And it was a reminder that in Washington we should not permit people with political motives to blight the careers of civil servants and blame them for failures of management and policy at the top.
Of course, I personally couldn’t agree more with this appeal. But I find Abram’s invocation of it particularly ironic (not only because of the fact that neo-conservatives, including Abrams, and other hawks who marched the U.S. to war in Iraq are now finding it ever-so-convenient to blame the intelligence agencies for what was the worst debacle in U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War). It was also ironic because, during the Reagan administration, Abrams did not hesitate to retaliate against career officers who, in his opinion, failed to align their views with his own political interests. Consider these excerpts from a March 7, 1987, New York Times article, entitled “Abrams Under Fire at Senate Hearing.”
Just before [Abrams] was questioned, the subcommittee heard testimony from Francis J. McNeil, a former Ambassador to Costa Rica and 31-year-veteran of the State Department, who acknowledged under questioning that he quit his job because he was ”fed up” with being undermined by Mr. Abrams.
Mr. McNeil said that when as Deputy Director of Intelligence he gave discouraging assessments of the ability of the Nicaraguan rebels, Mr. Abrams translated that into ”not being on the team.” He said Mr. Abrams then made clear his belief that ”I was untrustworthy and a leaker.”
He said that Department investigators cleared him of the charge that he leaked a document to The Washington Post and that on resigning he wrote Mr. Abrams saying he had conducted an ”exercise in McCarthyism.”
When Mr. Abrams replaced Mr. McNeil at the witness chair, he appeared to try to face him as if to nod in recognition. But Mr. McNeil sought to avoid that by walking away with his head averted.
Under questioning from Senator Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, Mr. Abrams acknowledged that the investigators were unable to show that Mr. McNeil had leaked any documents. ”Well, they never discovered any leaker,” Mr. Abrams said.
Mr. Abrams characterized Mr. McNeil’s letter of resignation as ”character assassination” and said he did not respond because ‘I consider it to be a nasty note of a personal nature.”
He acknowledged interceding to prevent Mr. McNeil from being named Ambassador to Peru. He said that when assistant secretaries take such actions, Foreign Service officers object. ”They hate our guts,” he said.
I don’t know if Abrams’ views of foreign service officers and other career civil servants have changed since then, although the neo-conservative disregard for — not to say hatred of — “Arabists” in the State Department and the intelligence community was certainly evident during the Bush administration in which Abrams served as the senior Near East staffer on the National Security Council. Who can forget Pat Lang’s retelling of his interview with Doug Feith, an Abrams protege, to head up the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations?
So, it’s especially ironic to read Abrams’ denunciation of the “chasm between the culture of career civil servants ready to risk their lives and the vicious political culture of Washington” to which he has contributed so much over the past several decades.
But for more on what Abrams’ really thinks about the relationship between politics and the career civil service (and their feeding and care), you should read his recent essay, “The Prince of the White House.“
]]>via IPS News
Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.
While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the [...]]]>
via IPS News
Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.
While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.
“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”
The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.
Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel.
War-weariness and public disillusionment with U.S. interventions they championed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as President Barack Obama’s oft-expressed reservations about the wisdom of engaging in yet another war in a predominantly Muslim country, had kept the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks at bay.
But a combination of an ever-climbing death toll, Hezbollah’s increased involvement, the rise of radical Islamist groups within the insurgency, and the initial –albeit yet to be confirmed — estimates by U.S., Israeli, and Western European intelligence agencies that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, as well as Obama’s apparently offhand public warnings during last year’s election campaign that such use would cross a “red line”, have propelled some prominent liberals – most recently, New York Times columnist Bill Keller and former senior Obama policy official Anne Marie Slaughter — into their camp.
Led by the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives remain the most aggressive among the hawks in their advice, just as they were in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Thus, providing weapons to selected rebel groups – an option which the administration is considered most likely to exercise if the evidence of chemical weapons use by government forces is confirmed – is no longer considered sufficient.
“At this stage, (a better outcome of the conflict), this would require more than arming some rebels,” according to the Journal editorial. “It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces.
“We would not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons,” the editorial writer added in a notable deviation from assurances offered by the hawks’ two most prominent Congressional champions – Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham – who, in deference to public opinion, have said repeatedly that putting U.S. “boots on the ground” should be off the table.
This echoed Kristol’s own editorial in the Standard published on the weekend. Arming the rebels, he wrote, “could well be too little, too late. …It’s hard to see what a serious response would be short of direct American engagement – perhaps a combination of enforcement of a no-fly zone and aerial attacks. And no serious president would rule out a few boots on the ground…”
The Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-policy columnist, Bret Stephens, weighed in with even more specific advice Tuesday.
He called for Obama to “disable the runways of Syrian air bases, including the international airport in Damascus; …[u]se naval assets to impose a no-fly zone over western Syria; …[s]upply the Free Syrian Army with heavy military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and light tanks; [and b]e prepared to seize and remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, even if it means putting boots (temporarily) on the ground.”
Liberal hawks have been less precise about what needs to be done, but their sense of urgency in favour of escalating U.S. military intervention – beginning with supplying the rebels with weapons – appears no less intense.
Slaughter, who served for two years as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning chief and, as an influential Princeton University international-relations professor, urged U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Libya, publishedan op-ed in the Washington Post that warned that Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria brought forth the spectre of the Rwandan genocide.
“For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act,” she wrote, without prescribing precisely what he should do.
Keller, who described himself as a “reluctant hawk” in an influential 1,500-word op-ed on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, provided somewhat more detailed advice in 1,300-word, very prominently placed op-ed entitled “Syria is Not Iraq” Wednesday in which he quoted Slaughter, among other liberal hawks.
“The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels – funnelling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiation an orderly transition to a non-sectarian Syria,” he wrote.
“We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”
Keller, who several years after the Iraq invasion offered a somewhat muted apology for supporting that war, stressed that he did not “mean to make this sound easy,” but stressed that a disastrous outcome “is virtually inevitable if we stay out [of the conflict]. …Why wait for the next atrocity?” he asked.
“Iraq should not keep us from doing the right thing in Syria…,’’ according to the op-ed’s subhead.
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