by Jim Lobe
Anyone who has followed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) knows it’s a neoconservative organization whose central purpose since its founding in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has less to do with democracy than with promoting the views of Israel as defined, in particular, by [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Anyone who has followed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) knows it’s a neoconservative organization whose central purpose since its founding in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has less to do with democracy than with promoting the views of Israel as defined, in particular, by Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. It is no wonder that Sheldon Adelson, who casually called this week for the nuking of Tehran if Iran doesn’t abandon its nuclear program, provided the group with more than $1.5 million in donations between 2008 and 2011, as we reported yesterday.
Now, it just so happened that was in the news this week on another front: Jofi Joseph, the White House staffer who worked on the proliferation file on the National Security Council and who was outed as the tweeter known as @NatSecWonk, served as a fellow at FDD in 2011. Here’s how the New York Times first reported his association and characterized FDD:
According to Mr. Joseph’s biography on the Web site of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative group where he was a fellow for 2011, “between his stints on Capitol Hill, Jofi was a senior consultant with a professional services firm, facilitating strategic planning and policy analysis for the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts on critical infrastructure protection.” (Emphasis added.)
The succeeding paragraph named FDD associates, including John Hannah, former national security adviser to Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (whose SuperPac, incidentally, received at least $5 million from Adelson in the last election cycle), Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Gary Bauer, the Christian Zionist leader who serves on the boards of the Christians United for Israel and the Emergency Committee for Israel — all neoconservatives.
One day later, the Times published a follow-up article on Joseph, but this time, the characterization of FDD changed rather remarkably. Here’s the new paragraph:
In 2011, Mr. Joseph also held a national security fellowship with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, which has a generally conservative bent. “Clearly, he had risen up through the Democratic ranks,” said Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the foundation, where fellowships are designed for “young and upcoming national security people in D.C.” of all views, Mr. Dubowitz said.
Well, all one can say is that the Times nailed it on the first go-round, but really blew it the second time. What does “a generally conservative bent” mean when attached to an organization whose principal purpose is the advocacy of the Likud Party’s foreign-policy views in the U.S.? I understand “generally conservative” as meaning someone like Brent Scowcroft or Robert Gates. Moreover, “neoconservative” as a description of FDD is not only accurate, it’s also very concise in contrast to “has a generally conservative bent,” which is quite vague and verbose in a way that newspapers try to avoid.
We can, of course, speculate as to why the change occurred. It could have been the decision of a copy editor who may have felt uncomfortable with “neoconservative” and thought that “generally conservative” sounded better. Or it could’ve been that Dubowitz strongly objected to the word “neoconservative” attached to his organization because it has taken on a rather pejorative meaning in popular parlance due to the critical role the neoconservatives played in promoting the Iraq war (which FDD actively promoted from the “get-go” after 9/11, running a TV ad produced by a former Israeli Embassy press official, for example, that suggested that Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were all part of the same threat.)
Indeed, I suspect that’s one very good reason why some readily identifiable neoconservatives who featured so prominently in promoting the Iraq war — people like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and Doug Feith — have been keeping such a low profile on Iran over the past year. They’re the ones who gave neocons a bad name, while Dubowitz wasn’t even on the scene back then.
]]>by Jim Lobe
For Taiwan that is. Our alumnus, Eli Clifton, makes a pretty good case below in his piece this week for The Nation, which we reprint with permission of the magazine.
Two quick points about the article:
1) For lack of space, Eli wasn’t able to expand [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
For Taiwan that is. Our alumnus, Eli Clifton, makes a pretty good case below in his piece this week for The Nation, which we reprint with permission of the magazine.
Two quick points about the article:
1) For lack of space, Eli wasn’t able to expand on Paul Wolfowitz’s status as both a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and as the chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council since 2008. The Business Council, like AEI, has, of course, been a major proponent of F-16 sales to Taiwan. At the time when I first noted Wolfowitz’s chairmanship of the group, the Council’s president, Rupert Hammond-Chambers, assured me that the Wolfowitz was not receiving any compensation from the Council in his new post. While I have no reason to doubt him, Eli’s investigation suggests that the government of Taiwan may be expressing its appreciation for Wolfowitz’s work in other ways or through other channels. In any event, neither AEI nor Wolfowitz is currently registered under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
2) AEI’s advocacy of F-16 sales to Taiwan and the substantial financial support it has received from Taiwan’s unofficial/official embassy here, TECRO, is perhaps a particularly crass example of lobbying activity by a think tank, but AEI is by no means alone among think tanks in accepting funds from foreign governments, as well as, for that matter, U.S.-based corporations that then expect the “scholars” or “fellows” at these institutions to speak out or write in ways that may be favorable to their interests. Indeed, in one recent New Republic article, entitled “Meet the Think Tank Scholars Who Are Also Beltway Lobbyists,” Brooke Williams and the venerable Ken Silverstein offered several notable examples. Read also Ken’s Nation article from last month entitled “The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks.” Not that some valuable research isn’t done at these institutions. But consumers of their work need always to be asking who’s paying the fiddler. And those think tanks that accept funding from foreign interests and then pursue policy work that could be seen as promoting those interests really should be required to register under FARA, just to keep things transparent, a concept which Wolfowitz was, rhetorically at least, promoted heavily during his aborted presidency of the World Bank.
In any event, here’s Eli’s article which was first published by The Nation.
The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute
Eli Clifton | June 25, 2013
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has emerged as one of the Beltway’s most consistent advocates for the sale of advanced fighter jets to Taiwan. Previously undisclosed tax filings reveal that while issuing research reports and publishing articles on US-Taiwan relations, AEI received a $550,000 contribution from the government of Taiwan, a source of funding the think tank has never publicly acknowledged.
In 2009, AEI, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, received the contribution from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO), Taiwan’s equivalent to an embassy.
The think tank couches its hard-nosed advocacy of arms sales and trade agreements with Taiwan as a strategic necessity for the United States. “Withholding needed arms from Taiwan in the present makes a future conflict—and US intervention therein—more likely,” wrote AEI senior research associate Michael Mazza in an October 2011 article [1] in The Diplomat.
But AEI’s undisclosed source of foreign funding raises ethical and legal questions about AEI’s Taiwan-policy work.
“Any organization that’s trying to influence public policy should disclose its donors so the public can know who the money behind these institutions is,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based organization that advocates for increased transparency and accountability in government. “It’s critical for the public to know this.”
AEI’s “schedule of contributors [2],” a form typically not intended for public disclosure but acquired through a filing error, names TECRO as the organization’s fourth-largest contributor during the 2009 tax year, following Donors Capital Fund ($2,000,000), Paul Singer ($1,100,000) and the Kern Family Foundation ($1,071,912). The US Chamber of Commerce contributed $473,000, making it AEI’s seventh-largest donor.
When asked about the contribution, TECRO spokesperson Lishan Chang acknowledged the transaction and explained that TECRO was helping to facilitate a Taiwanese university’s donation to AEI.
“The contribution was given by the Institute of International Relations of the National Chengchi University to AEI’s Asian Studies Program,” said Chang. “It was therefore an act of scholarly cooperation between the two research organizations with the goal of promoting academic exchanges and research on issues concerning Asia.”
The Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University, a top public university in Taiwan, did not respond to a request for comment.
What “scholarly cooperation” was undertaken by AEI remains unexplained by either AEI or the university, but Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, made no secret of his government’s warm relationship with AEI during a February 2009 meeting with AEI president Arthur Brooks and former AEI president Christopher DeMuth.
“[Ma] noted that the AEI has deep ties with the ROC [Republic of China] and has long supported the various policy stances of the ROC government,” said a TECRO press release [3].
“AEI President Brooks expressed his appreciation to President Ma for taking time out of his busy schedule to meet with him and his predecessor,” the release noted. “He added that the AEI is delighted to maintain relations with Taiwan given the values of democracy, peace and freedom that are shared by the two. He said he looks forward to continuing the friendship in the future and engaging in further cooperation.”
In 2009, the same year in which Ma hosted the delegation from AEI and the think tank reported the $550,000 contribution from TECRO, AEI employees issued a number of written products praising Taiwan’s government and urging the White House to approve arms sales to the island state.
In a November 3, 2009, article [4] for ForeignPolicy.com, AEI resident fellow Daniel Blumenthal, the current director of the think tank’s Asian Studies group, slammed the Obama administration’s Asia policy for “the absence of any agenda on Taiwan.”
Blumenthal accused the White House of failing to uphold an “implicit bargain” in which Ma would “ease tensions with the Mainland” in exchange for Washington’s “strengthen[ing] Ma’s hand by strengthening our ties to Taiwan.”
“The Obama team is not helping Ma,” wrote Blumenthal. “We have not sold any arms to Taiwan even as China has continued its arms buildup across the Strait. And Obama has no plans of yet to deepen economic ties as Taiwan goes forward with a China [free trade agreement].”
In a November 18, 2009, article [5] for ForeignPolicy.com, Blumenthal continued his push for arms sales. “China has built a military capable of destroying the island if America does not assist Taiwan. Though obligated by law, the Obama administration has not sold a single weapon system to Taiwan,” a reference to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act [6], which requires the United States “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character.”
And Gary Schmitt, an AEI resident fellow, warned about the consequences of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with China (“an approach in which China is seen as a strategic interlocutor with the United States with something approaching equal status”) in an October 2009 AEI “National Security Outlook” paper [7].
“This of course will have an impact on U.S.-Taiwan relations. At a minimum, it will make the diplomatic hurdle of supplying needed, high-quality military systems and supplies—such as F-16s—even more difficult. (Remember, by this time in the Bush administration, the decision had already been made to make available $30 billion worth of arms and services to Taiwan.),” wrote Schmitt.
Even in 2011, after the White House agreed to upgrade the avionics systems of Taiwan’s aging F-16 fleet, the AEI’s Mazza accused the administration of making a “split the baby” decision by refusing to “sell Taiwan the 66 new F-16 C/D aircraft that Taipei has been requesting,” in an October 2011 article [1] in The Diplomat.
When contacted for comment, AEI declined to address questions about the independence of its Taiwan policy analysis or its funding from the Taiwanese government. “We do not discuss details of contributions beyond what is publicly available through our Form 990 and our Annual Report. AEI is an educational, non-partisan, non-profit, and operates in good standing and in compliance to the fullest letter of the law,” wrote Judy Mayka, AEI’s director of media relations.
While AEI insists its actions were lawful, legal and ethical questions still remain about the TECRO funding.
The Foreign Agent Registration Act is a 1938 federal law requiring the agents representing the interests of a foreign country in a “political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal.”
“Maybe this money [from TECRO] goes solely toward academic research and none of [the TECRO-funded research] is ever presented to a member of Congress, but for a Washington think tank that would be shocking,” said Allison. “Clearly AEI should disclose the contribution and probably should register under FARA.”
Most FARA registrants are law firms, public relations agencies and lobbyists representing foreign countries. When asked if a nonprofit think tank could have an obligation to register under FARA, Justice Department spokesperson Andrew Ames responded that “it is possible.”
“As with any organization or individual, we would look at the specific elements and facts to determine whether organizations are required to file,” said Ames. “Without all the facts, it is impossible to determine. The department has no record of [AEI] filing with the FARA unit.”
AEI has a track record of providing an institutional base for individuals who are supportive of Taiwan.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz joined AEI as a “visiting scholar” in 2007 and, in 2008, was named chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council.
James Lilley, the US Ambassador to China from 1989 to 1991, received a fellowship at AEI after his retirement in 1991.
Lilley, who served as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial US diplomatic mission in Taiwan, from 1981 to 1984, famously clashed with the State Department when US diplomats attempted to set a cutoff date for arms sales to Taiwan. He died on November 12, 2009.
“[President Ma Ying-jeou] said Ambassador Lilley was a strong supporter of freedom, democracy, prosperity and security throughout his life, and in his diplomatic and scholarly work he was extremely friendly to Taiwan,” said a press release [9] from the Taiwanese president’s office, following a January 2010 meeting with an AEI delegation.
Joseph Sandler, a FARA expert and former Democratic National Committee staff counsel, explained that the legality of AEI’s FARA compliance hinges on whether the think tank’s staff took direction from the government of Taiwan.
“Presumably AEI has been supportive of Taiwan. The question is: To what extent have they consulted with the Taiwanese government?”
Sandler added, “If they in fact were taking some sort of direction or honoring requests in any way on behalf of the Taiwanese government, it would not only raise FARA questions but also questions about the academic integrity of their work.”
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/174980/secret-foreign-donor-behind-american-enterprise-institute
Links:
[1] http://thediplomat.com/china-power/dangerous-imbalance-on-taiwan/
[2] http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/AEI_2009_schedule.pdf
[3] http://www.taiwanembassy.org/US/MKC/fp.asp?xItem=79576&ctNode=2761&mp=47
[4] http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/03/the_one_year_review_obamas_asia_policies
[5] http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/18/obamas_asia_trip_a_series_of_unfortunate_events
[6] http://www.taiwandocuments.org/tra01.htm
[7] http://www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/asia/the-obama-administrations-approach-to-asia-early-signals/
[9] http://english.president.gov.tw/Default.aspx?tabid=491&itemid=20047
by Jim Lobe
I stopped reading neo-con and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson, “the Sage of Fresno”, after the Bush administration, largely because almost everything he wrote sounded exactly the same (cranky), and he offered no insight into what influential people were thinking. Instead, he simply repeated — in [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
I stopped reading neo-con and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson, “the Sage of Fresno”, after the Bush administration, largely because almost everything he wrote sounded exactly the same (cranky), and he offered no insight into what influential people were thinking. Instead, he simply repeated — in his own kind of world-weary, father-knows-best way — whatever the neo-con echo chamber was expounding on.
This week, however, I made an exception because his latest piece in The National Review, “Iran’s North Korean Future”, addressed an emerging neo-con meme designed to take full advantage of the ongoing crisis over North Korea. To wit, if you think a nuclear Pyongyang is bad, wait until Tehran goes nuclear. (Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is trying to become for Iran what the American Enterprise Institute was for Iraq, wrote on the same topic in the Review on the same day.)
Hanson’s Review piece was subsequently published in the Washington Times and the Chicago Tribune and, to my despair, reprinted in the Early Bird edition of the Pentagon’s Current News. The central argument of the article is that a nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous than “other nuclear rogue states” such as Pakistan and North Korea. Why? Pakistan is deterred by a far larger and more powerful India, according to Hansen, while “North Korea can be “muzzled once its barking becomes too obnoxious” to China on whose patronage and support Pyongyang so clear depends. (Hansen also somewhat dubiously claims that Beijing “enjoys the angst that its subordinate causes its rivals.”)
Unlike Pakistan and North Korea, however, Iran has “no commensurate regional deterrent” that would constrain its behavior, according to Hanson. “If North Korea has been a danger, then a bigger, richer and undeterred nuclear Iran would be a nightmare,” he concludes.
Except that earlier in the same op-ed, Hansen notes that Iran would be most unlikely to attack Israel precisely because Israel’s nuclear arsenal is indeed a deterrent. Here’s the relevant passage:
Iran could copy Mr. Kim’s model endlessly — one week threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map, the next backing down and complaining that problems in translation distorted the actual, less-bellicose communique. The point would not necessarily be to actually nuke Israel (which would translate into the end of Persian culture for a century), but to create such an atmosphere of worry and gloom over the Jewish state as to weaken the economy, encourage emigration and erode its geostrategic reputation.” [Emphasis added.]
So, even while insisting that Iran would not be deterable (because it doesn’t have a powerful next-door enemy like nuclear Pakistan has in India or a powerful patron like nuclear North Korea has in China) Hanson says in virtually the same breath that it is deterable. And this kind of analysis is rewarded by publication in the Current News!
Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz somewhat belatedly added his Iraq War retrospective, entitled (predictably) “Iraq: It’s Too Soon to Tell,” to the flurry of op-eds that came out at the end of March to mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion he fought so hard to realize.
Thankfully, it was not published in a U.S. medium beyond the AEI website but rather in the London-based Saudi daily, Asharq Al-Awsat. It appears primarily to be an (extremely lame) exercise in self-exculpation but is nonetheless well worth reading if for no other reason than he is probably the most high-ranking and influential policy-maker to offer an assessment on this occasion.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go into specific details, but you will see some rather obvious problems in the recitation of the facts and logic.
One example: Saddam “also posed a more immediate danger [than his presumed plans to rebuild his WMD capabilities after sanctions were lifted] because terrorists, including Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, had already begun operating from Iraqi territory to plan terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East [at the time of the invasion].” If that is the definition of the kind of imminent threat that justifies a U.S. invasion, what other country in the region, leave aside Pakistan, would not qualify?
(Wolfowitz also seems to put a lot of the blame on former Secretary of State James Baker for allegedly failing to heed Saudi appeals for the U.S. to intervene on behalf of the Shi’a uprising against Saddam in southern Iraq after the first Gulf war.)
The closest he gets to expressing regret is the following passage.
There are many things that one could wish had been done differently in Iraq. Even supporters of the war can make a long list. My own list stars with the US decision to establish an occupation government instead of handing to sovereignty to Iraqis at the outset, and with the four-year delay in implementing a counter-insurgency strategy. It was already clear, soon after we got to Baghdad, that the enemy was pursuing an urban guerilla strategy — in order to prevent a new Iraqi government from succeeding and so that the US would give up and leave — and an appropriate counter-insurgency strategy should have been developed much sooner.
Notice the absence of self in this passage. It wasn’t Wolfowitz who was involved in these decisions; the implication is that he opposed them. It wasn’t even the administration of President George W. Bush in which he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an architect of the invasion. It was “the US” that made these decisions.
In fact, it was Wolfowitz who championed de-Baathification within the administration, a policy that, combined with the reigning insecurity and de facto dissolution of the Iraqi army, made an occupation necessary. Indeed, Wolfowitz’s whole argument about the occupation was demolished by none other than Dan Senor, the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), at a Hudson Institute Forum five years ago, as I noted in a blog post at the time.
As for Wolfowitz’s complaint about failure to implement a counter-insurgency strategy, he, of course, has no one to blame but himself. It was he who publicly ridiculed Gen. Eric Shinseki’s warnings about the size of the force that would be needed after the invasion, and it was he who failed to read the intelligence studies that predicted the emergence of an insurgency. That he tries now to somehow separate himself from these failures by referring to the “US” rather than to the specific decision-makers (including himself) responsible for these disasters reflects, in my opinion, a certain lack of moral integrity.
Now, to be fair, a pretty big chunk of the op-ed consists of an appeal for the Sunni-led Gulf Cooperational Council (GCC) countries to do more to support Iraq, whose government is dominated by Shi’a parties. And the fact that he is making that appeal in a Saudi newspaper strongly suggests that the op-ed was consciously written with that purpose foremost in mind. “…(T)he way to keep Iraq out of Iran’s embrace is by supporting Iraq’s new government, not by distancing oneself from it,” he wrote. “This isolation, not a love of Persians, is what has pushed Iraq too close to Iran.”
Still, given Wolfowitz’s heavy responsibility for what took place a decade ago and the series of disasters that befell Iraq while he was still in a key policy-making position — he didn’t leave until 2005 — his efforts at justifying the invasion without acknowledging his personal failures and offering advice appear unseemly at best.
Photo: Former President George W. Bush (right), former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (center) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (left). DoD photo March 25, 2003 by R.D. Ward.
]]>by Daniel Luban
This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the [...]]]>
by Daniel Luban
This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the first place? Even a decade later, there’s still not much of a consensus — although Jim’s piece from 2003, reposted yesterday, provides as good a contemporaneous account as you’ll find. Is there anything more we can say with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight?
I tried to sort through possible war motives in a piece I wrote several years ago. (Space constraints meant that the final version was cut rather heavily, and I’d be happy to provide the original version, which included more evidence and fuller argumentation.) I argued there against the somewhat conspiratorial notion that there was a single “real motive,” concealed from the public and shared by all administration backers. The Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) argument was clearly far from the whole story, as Paul Wolfowitz himself conceded. But individual actors and factions within the administration had their own reasons for wanting war.
More to the point, the motives tended to overlap: most war-backers would not have said that invading Iraq was desirable to stabilize oil supplies but not to spread democracy, or to improve Israel’s security but not to deter nuclear terrorism. Rather, they tended to hold a rather utopian belief that invading Iraq would further all of these goals simultaneously. For that reason, assessing motives is more a matter of teasing out emphasis and priority than of reaching categorical judgments about which motives were or were not in play.
With all that said, however, I think we can identify at least four relatively distinct motives that played a role. I provide more in-depth evidence in my RightWeb piece, so I’ll just sketch out some of the conclusions here.
Oil. The allegation that Iraq was a “war for oil” was one of the most frequently leveled charges against it, and one that clearly has some legs. (Just yesterday, for instance, Glenn Greenwald touched on the theme.) However, the notion of a “war for oil” is an imprecise one. It can mean two different things, one less plausible and one more so.
The first (and seemingly most widespread) meaning is that the Iraq war was primarily intended to allow the US (or US oil companies) to get their hands on oil reserves located on Iraqi soil. This is largely unpersuasive. There’s evidence (some of which Greenwald cites) that US policymakers such as Dick Cheney hoped that a post-reconstruction Iraq would greatly step up oil production and provide an alternative to Saudi oil, but there’s little evidence that this was regarded as a primary reason for invasion rather than simply a welcome collateral benefit. US oil companies themselves were lukewarm about the invasion, fearing that it might destabilize the region — and indeed, they haven’t been the primary beneficiaries of oil development in postwar Iraq.
The second (and more plausible) meaning is that the Iraq war was centrally concerned with preserving the stability of US oil supplies in the broader Gulf region as a whole. Here, the evidence is stronger: such “wars for oil” have been semi-official US policy since the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, and this was certainly a primary motive for the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam Hussein was regarded with more alarm than similarly brutal dictators elsewhere in the world largely because the risks of aggression in a geopolitically vital region like the Gulf were viewed as so much higher. Whether or not protecting the Gulf oil supply from Saddam was the primary reason for war, it was certainly an important one.
Israel. For many neoconservatives in the Bush administration, a major (perhaps the major) reason for ousting Saddam was to improve Israel’s security. Since the 1990s, when several future Bush administration figures prepared the notorious “Clean Break” report for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, neoconservatives had been preoccupied with the notion that regime change in Iraq would touch off a broader regional transformation that would disempower Israel’s opponents in the Middle East.
There are some caveats that should be made. First, although neoconservatives were the leading proponents of war, the broader “Israel lobby” as conventionally conceived did not play a particularly strong role (a clear point of contrast with the current campaign for war against Iran). Second, the fact that many in the US pushed for war out of Israel-related concerns did not mean that Israelis themselves were necessarily strong proponents — although figures on the Israeli right with strong ties to neoconservatives, such as Netanyahu himself, certainly were.
Even if neoconservatives inside and outside the administration were motivated in large part by concerns about Israeli security, this still doesn’t answer the question of how influential they were. After all, we should be wary of turning the top leadership (especially Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) into mere vessels for neoconservative designs. As suggested below, I don’t think the Israel motive was paramount in the minds of this top leadership, although it was undoubtedly present. On the other hand, we shouldn’t downplay the instrumental role that neoconservatives played in setting the terms of debate over Iraq both before and after 9/11.
Payback. “We have been hit very hard,” a Cheney adviser told journalist Barton Gellman, “and we needed to make clear the costs to those who might have been supporting or harboring those who were contemplating those acts.” Or, as Jonah Goldberg (channeling Michael Ledeen) put it more bluntly, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” On this line of thought, 9/11 required the US to make an example out of someone to demonstrate its continued strength. The Taliban was too small and weak to serve this purpose, but Saddam — who had already been in the crosshairs for unrelated reasons — fit the bill nicely.
Many people seem hesitant to attribute the invasion to such a seemingly subjective and psychologized motive; it sounds more hardheaded to attribute it to a material interest like oil. But I think we underestimate the strength of this motive at our own peril, and that — particular for Cheney and Rumsfeld, who to my mind were the two critical decision-makers — it may even have been the primary one.
Democracy. The democracy promotion motive has become somewhat overemphasized in recent years, for several reasons. In the run-up to war, it was the motive that appealed most to pro-war liberal opinion-makers in the media, and thus received a disproportionate amount of discussion. Once the WMDs failed to materialize, the Bush administration fell back on democracy promotion as its main justification for the war, a trend that reached its height in Bush’s 2005 second inaugural address. And once the war went south, it became the easiest line of attack for critics who were eager to cast themselves as hardheaded skeptics and the Bush administration as wide-eyed utopians.
The fact of the matter is that democracy promotion was probably not the central motive for most of the war’s architects. This isn’t to say that it was always or totally insincere, however. Most notably, Bush himself seems genuinely to have bought into his own rhetoric. And although many (myself included) expected the administration simply to set up a friendly dictator to rule over postwar Iraq, this isn’t the course they followed or even really attempted. Whatever the many flaws of Nouri al-Maliki’s government, it is by no means a US puppet, and it did come to power through something resembling a democratic process (backed, to be sure, by a good bit of force).
To what extent were these four motives mutually exclusive? We should note, first of all, that the latter two flow in some sense out of the first two. The US had for decades regarded the Middle East as a geopolitically vital region, due both to its reliance on Gulf oil and its interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This intense focus on the Middle East helps explain why, in the significantly transformed post-9/11 landscape, the US seized on Saddam Hussein (rather than a figure with more significant ties to terrorism) as the proper test case for its efforts both at restoring deterrence and at democratic transformation. The hope was that success in Iraq would reverberate throughout the region.
At the same time, however, the tension between the final two motives (between payback and democracy) helps indicate some of the contradictions of the project. Thomas Friedman got at some of this tension when he suggested the “right reason” for war was “to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification,” but the “real reason” was “to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society.” In typical fashion, Friedman did not bother to question whether these two goals were complementary or contradictory, and whether “shock and awe” was reconcilable with “dehumiliation and redignification.” But we’ve witnessed the various contradictions between these motives play out for ten years now.
Photo: President George W. Bush signs H.J. Resolution 114 authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell, center, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, right, also attended the signing. White House photo by Paul Morse.
]]>The event [...]]]>
The event was co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, two U.S. think tanks that have taken hawkish positions on a variety of U.S. foreign policy issues. The “questions from the audience” were in fact provided by think tank members such as Bush Administration neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, and David Addington, one of the authors of the infamous “torture memos”.
There were a number of serious fact check moments, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann’s declaration that President Obama has “essentially handed over our interrogation of terrorists to the ACLU” and the “CIA has no ability to have any form of interrogation for terrorists.” Read about some of them here. Also following are some points worth noting about the candidates’ positions on U.S.-Pakistan and Mideast policy.
Pakistan: Texas Gov. Rick Perry said the U.S. shouldn’t be writing “blank checks” to Pakistan because it has been uncooperative with regard to U.S. military initiatives on its territory. While calling Pakistan “a nation that lies” and “does everything possible that you can imagine wrong”, Bachmann said U.S. aid to the country “is helping the United States.”
Iran: All candidates accepted a question from the Heritage Foundation that cited Ehud Barak’s claim that Iran is “less than a year away” from creating a nuclear weapon and apart from congressman Ron Paul, no one took issue with the U.S. supporting “regime change” or using military force against the country. Leading candidate Newt Gingrich said war should be a “last recourse” to bring about regime change, an outcome which he strongly endorsed. He said the U.S. “could break the Iranian regime” in a year by “cutting off the gasoline supply to Iran and then, frankly, sabotaging the only refinery they have.”
Perry called for sanctioning Iran’s central bank to “shut down that economy” but his most important statement about Iran came later on when he asserted twice that the reason the U.S. should intervene in Syria is not because of the massive human rights violations that are taking place, but because taking out Bashar al-Assad’s government would weaken Iran and strengthen Israel:
I think you need to leave [a no-fly zone] on the table to make sure, because this is not just about Syria. This is about Iran and those two as a partnership, and exporting terrorism around the world. And if we’re going to be serious about saving Israel, we better get serious about Syria and Iran, and we better get serious right now.
There is no evidence to back up Bachmann’s claim that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran will attack Israel with a nuclear weapon. Even the Atlantic’s anti-Iran agitator Geoffrey Goldberg tweeted that “Ahmedinejad has not stated that he would use a nuclear weapon to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Just sayin.’”
Former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman criticized Obama’s Iran sanctioning policy, stating that “the Chinese aren’t going to play ball. And the Russians aren’t going to play ball, and I believe the mullahs have already decided they want to go nuclear.”
Businessman Herman Cain said he would support an Israeli attack on Iran as long as they had “a credible plan for success.” He also seemed fixed on the fact that Iran is a “mountainous region” and stressed that its terrain should be calculated into any attack plan.
Israel: Mitt Romney declared that his foreign trip as president would be to Israel “to show we care about them.” Paul reminded everyone that former Mossad leader Meir Dagan said attacking Iran would be “the stupidest thing to do in the world” and argued Israel is “not about to do this.” Paul added that
Israel has 200, 300 nuclear missiles, and they can take cares of themselves. We don’t even have a treaty with Israel. Why do we have this automatic commitment that we’re going to send our kids and send our money endlessly to Israel? So I think they’re quite capable of taking care of themselves.
Huntsman tried to outdo Romney’s declaration of allegiance to the Israelis by saying that “our interest in the Middle East is Israel.”
Obama’s Foreign Policy: Obama’s foreign policy record was consistently bashed but Huntsman essentially argued that he would continue his policy in Pakistan by using special operation forces along with drone bombing campaigns:
]]>Pakistan is a concern. That’s the country that ought to keep everybody up at night…It’s a haven for bad behavior, it’s a haven for training the people who seek to do us harm. And an expanded drone program is something that would serve our national interests.
WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.
The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Warning that Libya stood “on the threshold of a moral and humanitarian catastrophe”, the letter, which was addressed to President Barack Obama, called for specific immediate steps involving military action, in addition to the imposition of a number of diplomatic and economic sanctions to bring “an end to the murderous Libyan regime”.
In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to “develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters” to “aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;” as well as “(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians.”
Among the letter’s signers were former Bush deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush’s top global democracy and Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney‘s former deputy national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI’s four directors: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman.
It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush’s term in 2005.
The letter comes amid growing pressure on Obama, including from liberal hawks, to take stronger action against Gaddafi.
Two prominent senators whose foreign policy views often reflect neo-conservative thinking, Republican John McCain and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, called Friday in Tel Aviv for Washington to supply Libyan rebels with arms, among other steps, including establishing a no-fly zone over the country.
On Wednesday, Obama said his staff was preparing a “full range of options” for action. He also announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet fly to Geneva Monday for a foreign ministers’ meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council to discuss possible multilateral actions.
“They want to keep open the idea that there’s a mix of capabilities they can deploy – whether it’s a no-fly zone, freezing foreign assets of Gaddafi’s family, doing something to prevent the transport of mercenaries (hired by Gaddafi) to Libya, targeting sanctions against some of his supporters to persuade them to abandon him,” said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who took part in a meeting of independent foreign policy analysts, including Abrams, with senior National Security Council staff at the White House Thursday.
During the 1990s, neo-conservatives consistently lobbied for military pressure to be deployed against so-called “rogue states”, especially in the Middle East.
After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, many “neo-cons” expressed bitter disappointment that U.S. troops stopped at the Kuwaiti border instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.
When the Iraqi president then unleashed his forces against Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia insurgents in the south, they – along with many liberal interventionist allies – pressed President George H.W. Bush to impose “no-fly zones” over both regions and take additional actions – much as they are now proposing for Libya – designed to weaken the regime’s military repressive capacity.
Those actions set the pattern for the 1990s. To the end of the decade, neo-conservatives, often operating under the auspices of a so-called “letterhead organisation”, such as PNAC, worked – often with the help of some liberal internationalists eager to establish a right of humanitarian intervention – to press President Bill Clinton to take military action against adversaries in the Balkans (in Bosnia and then Kosovo) as well as Iraq.
Within days of 9/11, for example, PNAC issued a letter signed by 41 prominent individuals – almost all neo-conservatives, including 10 of the Libya letter’s signers – that called for military action to “remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”, as well as retaliation against Iran and Syria if they did not immediately end their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
PNAC and its associates subsequently worked closely with neo-conservatives inside the Bush administration, including Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Edelman, to achieve those aims.
While neo-conservatives were among the first to call for military action against Gaddafi in the past week, some prominent liberals and rights activists have rallied to the call, including three of the letter’s signatories: Neil Hicks of Human Rights First; Bill Clinton’s human rights chief, John Shattuck; and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, who also signed the PNAC Iraq letter 10 years ago.
In addition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, until last month the influential director of the State Department’s Policy Planning office, cited the U.S.-NATO Kosovo campaign as a possible precedent. “The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters,” she wrote on Twitter. “In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted.”
Such comments evoked strong reactions from some military experts, however.
“I’m horrified to read liberal interventionists continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional conflicts can be solved by the application of military power,” wrote Andrew Exum, a counter-insurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, about Wieseltier. “To speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of contemporary military operations.”
Other commentators noted that a renewed coalition of neo- conservatives and liberal interventionists would be much harder to put together now than during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
“We now have Iraq and Afghanistan as warning signs, as well as our fiscal crisis, so I don’t think there’s an enormous appetite on Capitol Hill or among the public for yet another military engagement,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
“I support diplomatic and economic sanctions, but I would stop well short of advocating military action, including the imposition of a no-fly zone,” he added, noting, in any event, that most of the killing in Libya this week has been carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries on foot or from vehicles.
“There may be some things we can do – such as airlifting humanitarian supplies to border regions where there are growing number of refugees, but I would do so only with the full support of the Arab League and African Union, if not the U.N.,” said Clemons.
“(The neo-conservatives) are essentially pro-intervention, pro-war, without regard to the costs to the country,” he told IPS. “They don’t recognise that we’re incredibly over- extended and that the kinds of things they want us to do actually further weaken our already-eroded stock of American power.”
]]>A recent neoconservative meme has been to assert that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that are imperiling dictatorial regimes owe a debt of gratitude to President George W. Bush’s efforts to bring democracy [...]]]>
A recent neoconservative meme has been to assert that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that are imperiling dictatorial regimes owe a debt of gratitude to President George W. Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to Iraq by making war on it.
This rather silly talking point (a partisan one, of course) has been promulgated by hard-liners like Elliott Abrams and Jennifer Rubin, and ably beaten back by Matt Duss.
But, lo, here comes Rubin and Abrams’s comrade to put them in their place: none other than Paul Wolfowitz. Rubin recently asked, ”How much did the emergence of a democratic Iraq have to do with this popular revolt in Tunisia?”
Her and Abrams’ revisionism contends that the rise of democratic Iraq was the central tenant of Bush’s unyielding campaign to invade the country. Actually, Wolfowitz tells us, it was an afterthought:
We did not go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan to promote democracy, but rather to remove regimes that were dangerous to us and to the world. Having done that, we have attempted to enable the Iraqi and Afghan people to enjoy the benefits of free and representative government.
And, in case you didn’t get the point, he adds:
It is wrong to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought to promote democracy. Whether right or wrong, they were fought to protect ourselves and others from dangerous regimes, but once those regimes were removed we could not reimpose dictators. At the same time, we did believe that peaceful democratic change, of the kind I’ve mentioned earlier, could help to change the conditions in the Middle East that were breeding terrorists and support for terrorism.
(FYI, Paul, they were wrong: The Iraqi ‘threat’ was predicated on non-existent WMDs.)
But Wolfowitz is not finished. Rubin wants to justify invasion of a country as a way of bringing about democratic reform — that’s at the heart of her Iraq revisionism and recommendations for Iran policy. For the latter, she claims that democratic aspirations of Iranians are paramount, second even to nuclear concerns (the latter merely accelerates the need for the former).
Wolfowitz, however, is not backing down, exposing Rubin’s dishonesty (as well as others) that we can somehow drop democracy bunker-busting bombs:
Support for peaceful reform by the people themselves is the right way to promote democracy, not the use of force. To repeat again, we did not go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to promote democracy.
I look forward to Rubin and Abrams explaining away Wolfowitz’s perspective on their blogs.
]]>Others have [...]]]>
Others have also described Ross as more skeptical [than Mitchell] about the chances of peace, based on his decades-long experience with trying to bring together the parties.
I don’t want to get all new-agey, but if you think something is difficult or impossible to do, the chances of being able to do it are greatly diminished from the get-go.
So why does this Ross guy keep getting jobs that he doesn’t think are possible? I picked up Ross’ book off of my shelf here in D.C., and it amazed me how many times he says you cannot make any kind of deal with the Iranians. Then, Obama put him in charge of making a deal with the Iranians. Ross, we now learn, doubts that a peace deal can be reached in Israel-Palestine, and Obama gives him a job making peace in Israel-Palestine.
On the Middle Eastern conflict, Ross’s credentials for the job are impeccable. After all, he’s been involved in decades — decades! — of failed peace processes. Ross has worked at the Washington Institute (WINEP), an AIPAC-formed think tank, and also chaired the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israeli organization dedicated to “ensur(ing) the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization.” (The organization seems to oppose intermarriage with racist-sounding statements like “cultural collectivity cannot survive in the long term without primary biological foundations of family and children.”)
Ross was thought responsible for crafting Obama’s presidential campaign AIPAC speech — yes, the one with the line about an “undivided” Jerusalem that would spike a peace deal if implemented. Ross later reiterated the notion of an undivided Jerusalem as a “fact” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Ross was recently in the news following a secret but not-so-secret visit to the Middle East, which was fleshed out on Politico by Laura Rozen. Rozen was the reporter who carried a rather shocking anonymous allegation about Ross:
“[Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”
In an update, Rozen carried NSC CoS Denis McDonough’s defense of Ross:
“The assertion is as false as it is offensive,” McDonough said Sunday by e-mail. ”Whoever said it has no idea what they are talking about. Dennis Ross’s many decades of service speak volumes about his commitment to this country and to our vital interests, and he is a critical part of the president’s team.”
But the new Forward article, as MJ Rosenberg points out, backs up the notion that Ross was extremely concerned with “advocat[ing]” for Israel. The source is none other than Israel-advocate extraordinaire Abe Foxman (who doesn’t negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government):
“Dennis is the closest thing you’ll find to a melitz yosher, as far as Israel is concerned,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who used the ancient Hebrew term for ‘advocate.’”
Do you get the feeling that Ross advocated for Iran? Or, as the Forward article put it (with my strikethrough), has “strong ties to Israel” Iran? Guttman writes that Ross is considered to have a “reputation of being pro-Israeli.” As for Iran? Not quite: Ross’s Iran experience seems to boil down to heading United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group that pushes for harsher, broad-based sanctions against Iran (despite a stated goal to not hurt ordinary Iranians) and that has criticized Obama’s policy of engagement. Ross left the gig, as with JPPI, when he took the job with the administration.
The group also launched an error-filled fear-mongering video (while Ross was still there; he appears in the video) and a campaign to get New York hotels to refuse to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he comes to town each year for the U.N. General Assembly, which hardly lays the groundwork for good diplomacy.
Oh, and about the Iran engagement designed by Ross: The administration’s approach has been questioned by several leading Iran experts. “It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed. In December, Ross publicly defended the administration against charges that engagement was less than sincere from the U.S. side. But it is Ross himself who has apparently long held a pessimistic outlook on engagement.
Ross’s 2007 book, “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World“, is fascinating in light of where Ross has come from, and where he’s taken Iran policy. I was struck at a five-page section of the first chapter called “Neoconservatism vs. Neoliberalism,” in which Ross writes, “[Neoconservatism's] current standard-bearers — such as Richard Perle, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan — are serious thinkers with a clear worldview,” (with my links).
Later, in several long sections about the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Ross notes that Paul Wolfowitz was highly focused on Iraq before and after 9/11. He also mentions “political difficulties” in the push for war: “Once [Bush] realized there might be a domestic problem in acting against Iraq, his administration focused a great deal of energy and effort on mobilizing domestic support for military action.”
But Ross never acknowledges that some of his neoconservative “serious thinkers” — such as Kristol and his Weekly Standard magazine — were involved in the concerted campaign to mislead Americans in an effort to push the war… just as the same figures are pushing for an attack on Iran. Frum, who does seem capable of serious thinking, was the author of the “axis of evil” phrasing of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. The moniker included both Iraq and Iran, despite the fact that the latter was, until the speech, considered a potential ally in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Marsha Cohen chronicled an Israeli effort to squash the alliance, culminating in Frum’s contribution to the Bush speech.)
Ross never mentions that neocon Douglas Feith, a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), was responsible for cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq within the administration, and whose office was feeding cooked information to the public via Scooter Libby in Vice President Dick Cheney‘s office. Through Libby, the distorted information made its way into the hands of the Standard and sympathetic journalists like ideologue Judith Miller at the New York Times. In August of 2003, Jim Lobe wrote (with my links):
[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA [the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. …
Other appointees who worked with… both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Ross has personal experience with many OSP veterans, working with them at WINEP and signing hawkish reports on Iran authored by them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross was a member of a task force that delivered a hawkish report apparently co-authored by two veterans of OSP, Rubin and Michael Makovsky. (Ross reportedly recused himself as the presidential campaign came into full swing.) Lobe, noting Ross’s curious involvement, called the report a “roadmap to war with Iran,” and added, a year later, that the group that put out the report was accelerating the plan, calling for a military build-up and a naval blockade against Iran.
After taking his position within the Obama administration, Ross released a book, co-authored with David Makovsky, that was skeptical of the notion that engagement could work. Nathan Guttman, in a review of the book for the Forward, wrote:
The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”
The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration.
OSP, Feith, the Makovsky brothers, and Rubin are not listed in the index of “Statecraft,” nor have they appeared in the many sections that I’ve read in full.
In his book, Ross does have many revealing passages about concepts that have been worked into the Obama administration’s Iran policy. One such ploy, which has not been acknowledged or revealed publicly, is using Israel as the crazy ‘bad cop’ — a potentially dangerous game. Ross also writes that international pressure (through sanctions) must be made in order to cause Iran “pain.” Only then, thinks Ross, can concessions such as “economic, technological and security benefits” from the U.S. be offered:
Orchestrating this combination of sticks and carrots requires at this point some obviously adverse consequences for the Iranians first.
This view does not comport with the Obama plan for a simultaneous dual-track policy toward Iran — which holds that engagement and pressure should occur simultaneously — and serves to bolster critics who say that engagement has not been serious because meaningful concessions have not been offered. But it does hint at another tactic that Ross references at least twice in the book: the difference between “style” and “substance.” With regard to Iran, he presents this dichotomy in relation to public professions about the “military option” — a euphemism for launching a war. But publicly suppressing rhetoric is only used as a way to build international support for pressure — not also, as one might expect, a way to assuage the security fears of Iran.
But those aren’t the only ideas from the 2007 book that seem to have made their way into U.S. policy toward Iran. In “Statecraft,” Ross endorses the use of “more overt and inherently deniable alternatives to the use of force” for slowing Iran’s nuclear progress. In particular, he mentions the “fragility of centrifuges,” which is exactly what is being targeted by the Stuxnet virus, a powerful computer worm thought to be created by a state, likely Israel, and perhaps with help from the U.S., according to the latest revelations.
Some critics of this website complain that the level of attention given to neoconservatives is too great, but they should consider this: Look at Dennis Ross. He works extensively with this clique, and no doubt has the occasional drink or meeting with them. And, most importantly, he writes approvingly about neoconservatives, noting that their viewpoint affects political considerations of “any political leader.” Because of these neocon “considerations,” he writes, this is how we should view the Islamic Republic: “With Iran, there is a profound mistrust of the mullahs, and of their perceived deceit, their support for terror, and their enduring hostility to America and its friends in the Middle East. … No one will be keen to be portrayed as soft on the Iranian mullahs.”
This from the man that formulated a policy that has offered “adverse consequences” but so far no “carrots.” Ross’s predictions are a self-fulfilling prophecy — and since he gets the big appointments, he gets to fulfill them. Taking reviews of his book with Makovsky, the Bipartisan Policy Committee report, and “Statecraft” as a whole, I’m not at all surprised that little progress has been made with Iran.
But, at least, that was his first try. He’s a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making. With Iran, I had to put the pieces together, whereas with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, his record is right there for all to see. Putting Ross in charge of peace-making between the two seems to perfectly fit Einstein’s definition of insanity.
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