via Tom Dispatch
The abiding defect of U.S. foreign policy? It’s isolationism, my friend. Purporting to steer clear of war, isolationism fosters it. Isolationism impedes the spread of democracy. It inhibits trade and therefore prosperity. It allows evildoers to get [...]]]>
via Tom Dispatch
The abiding defect of U.S. foreign policy? It’s isolationism, my friend. Purporting to steer clear of war, isolationism fosters it. Isolationism impedes the spread of democracy. It inhibits trade and therefore prosperity. It allows evildoers to get away with murder. Isolationists prevent the United States from accomplishing its providentially assigned global mission. Wean the American people from their persistent inclination to look inward and who knows what wonders our leaders will accomplish.
The United States has been at war for well over a decade now, with U.S. attacks and excursions in distant lands having become as commonplace as floods and forest fires. Yet during the recent debate over Syria, the absence of popular enthusiasm for opening up another active front evoked expressions of concern in Washington that Americans were once more turning their backs on the world.
As he was proclaiming the imperative of punishing the government of Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry also chided skeptical members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “this is not the time for armchair isolationism.” Commentators keen to have a go at the Syrian autocrat wasted little time in expanding on Kerry’s theme.
Reflecting on “where isolationism leads,” Jennifer Rubin, the reliably bellicose Washington Post columnist, was quick to chime in, denouncing those hesitant to initiate another war as “infantile.” American isolationists, she insisted, were giving a green light to aggression. Any nation that counted on the United States for protection had now become a “sitting duck,” with “Eastern Europe [and] neighbors of Venezuela and Israel” among those left exposed and vulnerable. News reports of Venezuelan troop movements threatening Brazil, Colombia, or Guyana were notably absent from the Post or any other media outlet, but no matter — you get the idea.
Military analyst Frederick Kagan was equally troubled. Also writing in thePost, he worried that “the isolationist narrative is rapidly becoming dominant.” His preferred narrative emphasized the need for ever greater military exertions, with Syria just the place to launch a new campaign. For Bret Stephens, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, the problem was the Republican Party. Where had the hawks gone? The Syria debate, he lamented, was “exposing the isolationist worm eating its way through the GOP apple.”
The Journal’s op-ed page also gave the redoubtable Norman Podhoretz, not only still alive but vigorously kicking, a chance to vent. Unmasking President Obama as “a left-wing radical” intent on “reduc[ing] the country’s power and influence,” the unrepentant neoconservative accused the president of exploiting the “war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment… on the left and right” to bring about “a greater diminution of American power than he probably envisaged even in his wildest radical dreams.”
Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, “got” Osama bin Laden, toppled one Arab dictator in Libya, and bashed and bombed targets in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Even so, it turns out he is actually part of the isolationist conspiracy to destroy America!
Over at the New York Times, similar concerns, even if less hysterically expressed, prevailed. According to Times columnist Roger Cohen, President Obama’s reluctance to pull the trigger showed that he had “deferred to a growing isolationism.” Bill Keller concurred. “America is again in a deep isolationist mood.” In a column entitled, “Our New Isolationism,” he decried “the fears and defeatist slogans of knee-jerk isolationism” that were impeding military action. (For Keller, the proper antidote to isolationism is amnesia. As he put it, “Getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.”)
For his part, Times staff writer Sam Tanenhaus contributed a bizarre two-minute exercise in video agitprop — complete with faked scenes of the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor — that slapped the isolationist label on anyone opposing entry into any war whatsoever, or tiring of a war gone awry, or proposing that America go it alone.
When the “New Isolationism” Was New
Most of this, of course, qualifies as overheated malarkey. As a characterization of U.S. policy at any time in memory, isolationism is a fiction. Never really a tendency, it qualifies at most as a moment, referring to that period in the 1930s when large numbers of Americans balked at the prospect of entering another European war, the previous one having fallen well short of its “War To End All Wars” advance billing.
In fact, from the day of its founding down to the present, the United States has never turned its back on the world. Isolationism owes its storied history to its value as a rhetorical device, deployed to discredit anyone opposing an action or commitment (usually involving military forces) that others happen to favor. If I, a grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, favor deploying U.S. forces to Lithuania to keep that NATO ally out of Vladimir Putin’s clutches and you oppose that proposition, then you, sir or madam, are an “isolationist.” Presumably, Jennifer Rubin will see things my way and lend her support to shoring up Lithuania’s vulnerable frontiers.
For this very reason, the term isolationism is not likely to disappear from American political discourse anytime soon. It’s too useful. Indeed, employ this verbal cudgel to castigate your opponents and your chances of gaining entrée to the nation’s most prestigious publications improve appreciably. Warn about the revival of isolationism and your prospects of making the grade as a pundit or candidate for high office suddenly brighten. This is the great thing about using isolationists as punching bags: it makes actual thought unnecessary. All that’s required to posture as a font of wisdom is the brainless recycling of clichés, half-truths, and bromides.
No publication is more likely to welcome those clichés, half-truths, and bromides than the New York Times. There, isolationism always looms remarkably large and is just around the corner.
In July 1942, the New York Times Magazine opened its pages to Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who sounded the alarm about the looming threat of what he styled a “new isolationism.” This was in the midst of World War II, mind you.
After the previous world war, the vice president wrote, the United States had turned inward. As summer follows spring, “the choice led up to this present war.” Repeat the error, Wallace warned, and “the price will be more terrible and will be paid much sooner.” The world was changing and it was long past time for Americans to get with the program. “The airplane, the radio, and modern technology have bound the planet so closely together that what happens anywhere on the planet has a direct effect everywhere else.” In a world that had “suddenly become so small,” he continued, “we cannot afford to resume the role of hermit.”
The implications for policy were self-evident:
“This time, then, we have only one real choice. We must play a responsible part in the world — leading the way in world progress, fostering a healthy world trade, helping to protect the world’s peace.”
One month later, it was Archibald MacLeish’s turn. On August 16, 1942, theTimes magazine published a long essay of his under the title of — wouldn’t you know it — “The New Isolationism.” For readers in need of coaching, Timeseditors inserted this seal of approval before the text: “There is great pertinence in the following article.”
A well-known poet, playwright, and literary gadfly, MacLeish was at the time serving as Librarian of Congress. From this bully pulpit, he offered the reassuring news that “isolationism in America is dead.” Unfortunately, like zombies, “old isolationists never really die: they merely dig in their toes in a new position. And the new position, whatever name is given it, is isolation still.”
Fortunately, the American people were having none of it. They had “recaptured the current of history and they propose to move with it; they don’t mean to be denied.” MacLeish’s fellow citizens knew what he knew: “that there is a stirring in our world…, a forward thrusting and overflowing human hope of the human will which must be given a channel or it will dig a channel itself.” In effect, MacLeish was daring the isolationists, in whatever guise, to stand in the way of this forward thrusting and overflowing hopefulness. Presumably, they would either drown or be crushed.
The end of World War II found the United States donning the mantle of global leadership, much as Wallace, MacLeish, and the Times had counseled. World peace did not ensue. Instead, a host of problems continued to afflict the planet, with isolationists time and again fingered as the culprits impeding their solution.
The Gift That Never Stops Giving
In June 1948, with a notable absence of creativity in drafting headlines, theTimes once again found evidence of “the new isolationism.” In an unsigned editorial, the paper charged that an American penchant for hermit-like behavior was “asserting itself again in a manner that is both distressing and baffling.” With the Cold War fully joined and U.S. forces occupying Germany, Japan, and other countries, the Times worried that some Republicans in Congress appeared reluctant to fund the Marshall Plan.
From their offices in Manhattan, members of the Times editorial board detected in some quarters “a homesickness for the old days.” It was incumbent upon Americans to understand that “the time is past when we could protect ourselves easily behind our barriers behind the seas.” History was summoning the United States to lead the world: “The very success of our democracy has now imposed duties upon us which we must fulfill if that democracy is to survive.” Those entertaining contrary views, the Times huffed, “do not speak for the American people.”
That very month, Josef Stalin announced that the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin. The U.S. responded not by heading for the exits but by initiating a dramatic airlift. Oh, and Congress fully funded the Marshall Plan.
Barely a year later, in August 1949, with Stalin having just lifted the Berlin Blockade, Times columnist Arthur Krock discerned another urge to disengage. In a piece called “Chickens Usually Come Home,” he cited congressional reservations about the recently promulgated Truman Doctrine as evidence of, yes, a “new isolationism.” As it happened, Congress duly appropriated the money President Truman was requesting to support Greece and Turkey against the threat of communism — as it would support similar requests to throw arms and money at other trouble spots like French Indochina.
Even so, in November of that year, the Times magazine published yet another warning about “the challenge of a new isolationism.” The author was Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, then positioning himself for a White House run. Like many another would-be candidate before and since, Stevenson took the preliminary step of signaling his opposition to the I-word.
World War II, he wrote, had “not only destroyed fascism abroad, but a lot of isolationist notions here at home.” War and technological advance had “buried the whole ostrich of isolation.” At least it should have. Unfortunately, some Republicans hadn’t gotten the word. They were “internationally minded in principle but not in practice.” Stevenson feared that when the chips were down such head-in-the-sand inclinations might come roaring back. This he was determined to resist. “The eagle, not the ostrich,” he proclaimed, “is our national emblem.”
In August 1957, the Times magazine was at it once again, opening its pages to another Illinois Democrat, Senator Paul Douglas, for an essay familiarly entitled “A New Isolationism — Ripples or Tide?” Douglas claimed that “a new tide of isolationism is rising in the country.” U.S. forces remained in Germany and Japan, along with Korea, where they had recently fought a major war. Even so, the senator worried that “the internationalists are tiring rapidly now.”
Americans needed to fortify themselves by heeding the message of the Gospels: “Let the spirit of the Galilean enter our worldly and power-obsessed hearts.” In other words, the senator’s prescription for American statecraft was an early version of What Would Jesus Do? Was Jesus Christ an advocate of American global leadership? Senator Douglas apparently thought so.
Then came Vietnam. By May 1970, even Times-men were showing a little of that fatigue. That month, star columnist James Reston pointed (yet again) to the “new isolationism.” Yet in contrast to the paper’s scribblings on the subject over the previous three decades, Reston didn’t decry it as entirely irrational. The war had proven to be a bummer and “the longer it goes on,” he wrote, “the harder it will be to get public support for American intervention.” Washington, in other words, needed to end its misguided war if it had any hopes of repositioning itself to start the next one.
A Concept Growing Long in the Tooth
By 1980, the Times showed signs of recovering from its brief Vietnam funk. In a review of Norman Podhoretz’s The Present Danger, for example, the noted critic Anatole Broyard extolled the author’s argument as “dispassionate,” “temperate,” and “almost commonsensical.”
The actual text was none of those things. What the pugnacious Podhoretz called — get ready for it — “the new isolationism” was, in his words, “hard to distinguish from simple anti-Americanism.” Isolationists — anyone who had opposed the Vietnam War on whatever grounds — believed that the United States was “a force for evil, a menace, a terror.” Podhoretz detected a “psychological connection” between “anti-Americanism, isolationism, and the tendency to explain away or even apologize for anything the Soviet Union does, no matter how menacing.” It wasn’t bad enough that isolationists hated their country, they were, it seems, commie symps to boot.
Fast forward a decade, and — less than three months after U.S. troops invaded Panama – Times columnist Flora Lewis sensed a resurgence of you-know-what. In a February 1990 column, she described “a convergence of right and left” with both sides “arguing with increasing intensity that it’s time for the U.S. to get off the world.” Right-wingers saw that world as too nasty to save; left-wingers, the United States as too nasty to save it. “Both,” she concluded (of course), were “moving toward a new isolationism.”
Five months later, Saddam Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait. Instead of getting off the world, President George H.W. Bush deployed U.S. combat forces to defend Saudi Arabia. For Joshua Muravchik, however, merely defending that oil-rich kingdom wasn’t nearly good enough. Indeed, here was a prime example of the “New Isolationism, Same Old Mistake,” as his Timesop-ed was entitled.
The mistake was to flinch from instantly ejecting Saddam’s forces. Although opponents of a war against Iraq did not “see themselves as isolationists, but as realists,” he considered this a distinction without a difference. Muravchik, who made his living churning out foreign policy analysis for various Washington think tanks, favored “the principle of investing America’s power in the effort to fashion an environment congenial to our long-term safety.” War, he firmly believed, offered the means to fashion that congenial environment. Should America fail to act, he warned, “our abdication will encourage such threats to grow.”
Of course, the United States did act and the threats grew anyway. In and around the Middle East, the environment continued to be thoroughly uncongenial. Still, in Times-world, the American penchant for doing too little rather than too much remained the eternal problem, eternally “new.” An op-edby up-and-coming journalist James Traub appearing in the Times in December 1991, just months after a half-million U.S. troops had liberated Kuwait, was typical. Assessing the contemporary political scene, Traub detected “a new wave of isolationism gathering force.” Traub was undoubtedly establishing his bona fides. (Soon after, he landed a job working for the paper.)
This time, according to Traub, the problem was the Democrats. No longer “the party of Wilson or of John F. Kennedy,” Democrats, he lamented, “aspire[d] to be the party of middle-class frustrations — and if that entails turning your back on the world, so be it.” The following year Democrats nominated as their presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who insisted that he would never under any circumstances turn his back on the world. Even so, no sooner did Clinton win than Times columnist Leslie Gelb was predicting that the new president would “fall into the trap of isolationism and policy passivity.”
Get Me Rewrite!
Arthur Schlesinger defined the problem in broader terms. The famous historian and Democratic Party insider had weighed in early on the matter with a much-noted essay that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly back in 1952. He called it – you guessed it — “The New Isolationism.”
In June 1994, more than 40 years later, with the Cold War now finally won, Schlesinger was back for more with a Times op-ed that sounded the usual alarm. “The Cold War produced the illusion that traditional isolationism was dead and buried,” he wrote, but of course — this is, after all, the Times – it was actually alive and kicking. The passing of the Cold War had “weakened the incentives to internationalism” and was giving isolationists a new opening, even though in “a world of law requiring enforcement,” it was incumbent upon the United States to be the lead enforcer.
The warning resonated. Although the Times does not normally givecommencement addresses much attention, it made an exception for Madeleine Albright’s remarks to graduating seniors at Barnard College in May 1995. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations had detected what she called “a trend toward isolationism that is running stronger in America than at any time since the period between the two world wars,” and the American people were giving in to the temptation “to pull the covers up over our heads and pretend we do not notice, do not care, and are unaffected by events overseas.” In other circumstances in another place, it might have seemed an odd claim, given that the United States had just wrapped up armed interventions in Somalia and Haiti and was on the verge of initiating a bombing campaign in the Balkans.
Still, Schlesinger had Albright’s back. The July/August 1995 issue of Foreign Affairs prominently featured an article of his entitled “Back to the Womb? Isolationism’s Renewed Threat,” with Times editors publishing a CliffsNotes version on the op-ed page a month earlier. “The isolationist impulse has risen from the grave,” Schlesinger announced, “and it has taken the new form of unilateralism.”
His complaint was no longer that the United States hesitated to act, but that it did not act in concert with others. This “neo-isolationism,” he warned, introducing a new note into the tradition of isolationism-bashing for the first time in decades, “promises to prevent the most powerful nation on the planet from playing any role in enforcing the peace system.” The isolationists were winning — this time through pure international belligerence. Yet “as we return to the womb,” Schlesinger warned his fellow citizens, “we are surrendering a magnificent dream.”
Other Times contributors shared Schlesinger’s concern. On January 30, 1996, the columnist Russell Baker chipped in with a piece called “The New Isolationism.” For those slow on the uptake, Jessica Mathews, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, affirmed Baker’s concerns by publishing anidentically titled column in the Washington Post a mere six days later. Mathews reported “troubling signs that the turning inward that many feared would follow the Cold War’s end is indeed happening.” With both the Times and the Post concurring, “the new isolationism” had seemingly reached pandemic proportions (as a title, if nothing else).
Did the “new” isolationism then pave the way for 9/11? Was al-Qaeda inspired by an unwillingness on Washington’s part to insert itself into the Islamic world?
Unintended and unanticipated consequences stemming from prior U.S. interventions might have seemed to offer a better explanation. But this much is for sure: as far as the Times was concerned, even in the midst of George W. Bush’s Global War in Terror, the threat of isolationism persisted.
In January 2004, David M. Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, worried in a Times op-ed “that the United States is retracting into itself” — this despite the fact that U.S. forces were engaged in simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among Americans, a concern about terrorism, he insisted, was breeding “a sense of self-obsession and indifference to the plight of others.” “When Terrorists Win: Beware America’s New Isolationism,” blared the headline of Malone’s not-so-new piece.
Actually, Americans should beware those who conjure up phony warnings of a “new isolationism” to advance a particular agenda. The essence of that agenda, whatever the particulars and however packaged, is this: If the United States just tries a little bit harder — one more intervention, one more shipment of arms to a beleaguered “ally,” one more line drawn in the sand — we will finally turn the corner and the bright uplands of peace and freedom will come into view.
This is a delusion, of course. But if you write a piece exposing that delusion, don’t bother submitting it to the Times.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.
Copyright 2013 Andrew Bacevich
]]>The New York Times columnist explains how and why the Israeli Prime Minister’s “blunders” on Iran are counter-productive and self-defeating:
Netanyahu has talked himself into a corner on Iran. He has set so many “red lines” on the Iranian nuclear program nobody can remember them. He has taken to fuming [...]]]>
The New York Times columnist explains how and why the Israeli Prime Minister’s “blunders” on Iran are counter-productive and self-defeating:
]]>Netanyahu has talked himself into a corner on Iran. He has set so many “red lines” on the Iranian nuclear program nobody can remember them. He has taken to fuming publicly over President Obama’s refusal to do the same. Of late he has juggled metaphors: Iran is now “20 yards” from “touchdown.” His cry-wolf dilemma comes right out of a children’s book. It was in 1992 that he said Iran was three to five years from nuclear capacity.
(One achievement of Netanyahu’s Iran obsession has been to relegate the critical question before Israel — the millions of Palestinian people on its doorstep — to somewhere between the back burner and oblivion. The best primer for Netanyahu’s thinking is these words from his coached buddy Mitt Romney: “I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, ‘There’s just no way.”’)
The mistake Netanyahu has made is to believe he can go over the head of President Obama. He has tried through Congress, where his speech last year earned 29 standing ovations. He has greeted Romney in Israel as if he were on a state visit. He has said those “who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.” He has given critical interviews on U.S. TV networks in the midst of a presidential campaign. And he hath protested far too much that he has no intention — none — of swaying the outcome.
Roger Cohen, my favorite columnist at the New York Times, combines the uncommon qualities of courage and analytical astuteness. He sees beyond the horizon and does not flinch from describing what he sees — even when that is disturbing or contrary to the conventional wisdom.
A classic example [...]]]>
Roger Cohen, my favorite columnist at the New York Times, combines the uncommon qualities of courage and analytical astuteness. He sees beyond the horizon and does not flinch from describing what he sees — even when that is disturbing or contrary to the conventional wisdom.
A classic example is his description of the U.S. “Doctrine of Silence.” All of us are aware of crypto-military campaigns by stealth drones, targeted assassinations, cyber sabotage, and massive intelligence surveillance. But Cohen goes a step further and identifies this post-modern warfare as a new approach to international conflict and a conscious alternative to George Bush’s War on Terror.
I find his argument entirely persuasive, and I also share his unease. When we appoint ourselves judge, jury and executioner, and when we go to war without public acknowledgement or authorization — and a near-total absence of accountability — we risk sliding into an illusion of impunity.
Cohen suggests that this is the “Likudization” of U.S. strategy, comparing it to the targeted assassinations conducted by Israel against its enemies. But it could also be seen as rule by impunity in any political system.
In Egypt, the corrupt Mubarak regime ruled by means of “emergency laws” that essentially lifted all legal and constitutional restraints in the name of national security. Is the United States — under whatever president or party — evading all meaningful public discourse and constitutional oversight by operating in the shadows?
Are we still a democratic society when the most important strategic decisions of life and death are made in secret, visible only to those initiated into the mysteries of the covert inner sanctum?
In the case of President Obama, this represents a less costly and less dangerous alternative to the Bush Doctrine of perpetual war. But what happens when the Bush wars are over — as they probably will be soon — and we still have both the culture and the instruments to disabuse ourselves of anyone or anything that disagrees with us, or perhaps simply annoys us?
The new tools at the command of the commander in chief make it possible to imagine international conflict as a video game — just zap anything that gets in your way. These tools may have been invented as a side product of the war against Al-Qaeda, but they will survive the annihilation of Al-Qaeda. They will be temptingly available to deal with any and all future challenges to U.S. power — real or imagined.
This Terminator Toolbox will be available to any future American leadership, for use in any conceivable set of circumstances. Already we find it being used against American citizens without benefit of due process. What would Richard Nixon have done with this stealth weaponry when confronted with popular opposition to his Vietnam policies, or out of paranoid fear of his political opponents?
Having created this extraordinarily powerful weapon, is it reasonable to expect that it will not be used? The attempt to impose restraints on the Executive Branch in the initiation and conduct of war has proved to be largely illusory. What is the prospect of public regulation of instruments that do not yet even have a name?
]]>WASHINGTON, Mar1, 2011 (IPS) – J Street, the Washington-based “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” advocacy group, drew a large crowd to its annual conference this year despite criticism over its controversial calls for the Barack Obama administration not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, Mar1, 2011 (IPS) – J Street, the Washington-based “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” advocacy group, drew a large crowd to its annual conference this year despite criticism over its controversial calls for the Barack Obama administration not to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank.
In the end, the administration vetoed the resolution, but the controversy appeared to have had no negative effect on the organisation’s turnout for the just-ended conference, which had 2,400 participants – 900 more than last year – and over 500 students participating.
Over 50 members of Congress were in attendance and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a surprise appearance to honour Kathleen Peratis, vice chair of the J Street Education Fund and the recipient of the group’s Tzedek V’Shalom award.
With pro-democracy revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya dominating the headlines over the past week, uncertainty about the shifting geopolitics in the region was a recurring theme in the remarks delivered by J Street leadership, panelists and an Obama administration senior Middle East adviser.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, told attendees, “We know in our hearts that it’s not just the status quo in the Arab world that is bound to change, it is the status quo between Israel and the Palestinian people that has to change as well,” at the conference’s kickoff on Saturday night.
“And the events of recent weeks only convince us more deeply that the time is now for a serious and sustained effort to secure an agreement that provides for a democratic homeland for the Jewish people living side by side in peace and security with a democratic homeland for the Palestinian people,” he continued.
Indeed the emphasis on taking immediate steps, with the leadership of the United States, to bring about a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian is central to J Street’s mission as Washington’s “political home for pro-Israel, pro- peace Americans”.
J Street has gained attention for its willingness to press harder than other pro-Israel organisations in Washington – particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – to pressure Israel to halt settlement construction and for its efforts to create a political space for American Jews who are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege on Gaza.
The organisation’s founding and the appearance, for the second year in a row, of a senior Obama administration official at the conference has found a mixed reception from other “pro-Israel” groups in Washington.
This year, senior White House Middle East adviser Dennis Ross was dispatched to address the conference, leading the right-wing Emergency Committee for Israel to call on Ross to take a critical tone in his remarks to the J Street audience.
“There are few moments when someone with your experience and credibility is invited into the anti-Israel echo chamber and provided an opportunity to dispel myths, combat falsehoods, deliver much-needed moral clarity – and state clearly that the United States stands with Israel,” said a Feb. 24 letter from the ECI’s Executive Director Noah Pollak.
“I trust that you will seize this moment to explain why the Jewish State is not just one of our closest allies, but a country that fully deserves the admiration and moral support of all Americans,” Pollak wrote.
Ross spoke on Sunday and delivered remarks which, while avoiding the harsh criticisms which Pollak called on him to make, fell short of the recurring call from J Street panelists for the Obama administration to take a more aggressive approach to bridging issues on which both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government have been unable to find common ground.
“We will continue to press both sides to engage seriously in negotiations – the only forum and the only mechanism that can resolve this historic conflict,” said Ross.
Ross deflected a question about the possibility for a new U.S. initiative to kickstart the peace process and repeated the administration’s position on Iran, stating, “While the door will always remain open for diplomacy, we remain determined to prevent Iran from acquiring the nuclear weapons and we won’t be deflected from this goal.”
The panel following Ross’s address was critical of the White House official’s position, leading New York Times columnist Roger Cohen to quip after Ross had left the room, “[Ross] sat in five administrations but couldn’t sit after the speech for the debate,” and, “When I hear the word process, I am dying inside, there is no process and there is no peace.”
The conference concluded with a keynote address from Naomi Chazan, president of the New Israel Fund and former deputy speaker of the Knesset, who told the audience, “The democratic wave spreading through the Middle East includes a free Palestine as an integral part of what is going on. And therefore, Israel as an occupying state cannot remain democratic while it rules over another people. It is antithetical to the winds of the time.”
Her speech repeated the calls heard throughout the three days of panels and discussions for the Obama administration to urgently assume greater leadership in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Neither Israel nor Palestine can [make peace] alone. Therefore, action requires that the U.S. and Europe and the international community take steps as well. The present administration in Washington must step forward now,” said Chazan.
(END)
]]>Some key quotes from the panel included Saban Center director Kenneth Pollack calling for the U.S. to hold Israel back from any “rush action” while the Middle East is in a state of turmoil:
This hasn’t been about Israel. And the most important thing for the Israelis to do is to not make it about Israel. There are a lot of things that the government of Israel could do right now that would be extraordinarily unhelpful. Unhelpful to the events playing out in the region and ultimately unhelpful to the future and security of the state of Israel.
It would be driven by the fear, the siege mentality. It’s one of our roles as the United States, and their great ally and friend, to help them through this period without taking rash action that will ultimately be to the detriment of Israel and the U.S. and to the benefit of Iran.
I think the Iranians would like nothing more than to see the Netanyahu government take a series of rash steps that would infuriate the Arab populations.
This theme — that hardliners in Iran, not to mention other Arab leaders facing citizen uprisings, will benefit from aggressive behavior on the part of Israel — was recurring during the panel’s discussion.
Pollack also addressed the argument that democratic revolutions in the Middle East can be hijacked, saying:
We need to be alive to the possibility that these revolutions can come off the rail, that there are spoilers out there who look to take advantage of it. Iran is one that is unquestionably trying to do just that. What we have to do is make it hard for Iran to do it and help our allies in Israel not become spoilers themselves.
Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, added her own warning: that the U.S. must be careful not to fall victim to Islamophobic fear-mongering as popular democracy movements sweep across the Middle East.
You are seeing at every level people who conflate the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Al Qaeda as if they were all one thing whose primary purpose is to blow us up in our supermarkets. That is the rhetoric we’re going to be confronting here in Washington.
The New York Times’s Roger Cohen emphasized that the constant predictions that Iran is on the precipice of producing a nuclear weapon (with many of the deadlines already having passed) has been highly inaccurate:
We’ve had a lot of predictions that [Iran would be producing nuclear weapons] and the fact is it hasn’t happened.
And
The Iranians have been messing around with this nuclear program for forty years! What are they doing?
The discussion about Iran tended to focus on what the democratic uprisings in Iran and elsewhere will mean for Israel and its fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The panelists admitted that Iran had lost its position on the front pages of newspapers and, as breaking news emerges from the Middle East on a daily basis, the Obama administration’s focus on Iran’s nuclear program will be diminished.
Pollack observed:
]]>A lot of the people who previously spent all their time working on Iran, trying to craft these sanctions, trying to bring all these other countries aboard against Iran are now spending 24 or 25 hours a day doing nothing but working on Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, etc… Iran is very much on the backburner at the moment in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.
- Tablet Magazine: Hudson Institute Visiting Fellow Lee Smith writes, “Arabs are not winning an information war against Israel, nor anything else for that matter. Rather, the stories and lies they tell to delegitimize the Jewish state are part and parcel of the war that they have been waging against themselves, and with stunning success.” In his attack on Arab culture, he groups Iran with the “Arabic speaking Middle East” and observes, “Culture is more powerful than technology, and how a society uses any given technology is determined by its culture. This is why no one wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to have a nuclear bomb, but no one has a problem with France’s weapons program.”
- The Wall Street Journal: Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, writes that, for Iran’s hard-liners, Iran’s Green Movement is still a force to be reckoned with. Berman cites the crackdown on Green Movement leaders and observers, “If the Green Movement were truly a spent force, Iranian officials would be far less preoccupied with containing and discrediting its remnants.” He concludes, “That Iran’s leaders appear to believe otherwise suggests that they understand well what many in the West do not: the Green Movement itself may be on the ropes, but the larger urge for democracy that it represents isn’t dead. It is simply hibernating.”
- Commentary: Jonathan Tobin writes on Commentary’s Contentions blog that Roger Cohen’s column, on the Jewish community in Iran that was published two years ago, was brought about because “The Times columnist’s motive for trying to soften the image of that openly anti-Semitic government was to undermine support for sanctions or the use of force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” Tobin cites reports that the Tomb of Mordechai and Esther—the central characters in the Jewish story of Purim— in the city of Hamdan has lost its official status as a religious pilgrimage site. “While we cannot know whether the Iranians will follow through on this threat and actually tear down the tomb or transform it into a center of anti-Jewish hate, it does provide yet another insight into the virulent nature of the attitudes of those in power there,” he writes. Tobin concludes, “Anyone who thinks that we can live with a nuclear Iran needs to consider the madness of allowing a government that thinks the Purim story should be reversed the power to do just that.”
Tangential to this [...]]]>
Tangential to this tiff was a discussion of the dangers of reporting in Iran. But both Milbank and O’Reilly are completely off base about what it means for Westerners to report from Iran. It’s high demonization, and the way they bandy about these falsehoods is rather reckless — considering the ramped-up campaign for war with Iran — and disrespectful to those Iranian reporters whose brave reporting puts them at risk from their own government.
While I have no problem with a little humorous sniping — especially at Bill O’Reilly’s expense — one should be aware of what they are talking about. I’ve written before about how making fun of Iran can have the effect of demonizing the country , by placing Iranians in the camp of “the other.” Or as Harvard professor and Foreign Policy blogger Stephen Walt put it, mainstreaming war.
But first the background: On his show, O’Reilly joked about beheading Milbank. After getting a viewer complaint about the crassness of such a joke, O’Reilly responded by saying:
Well, let me break this to you gently, Heidi [the complainer]. If Dana Milbank did in Iran what he does in Washington, he’d be hummus.
Milbank rightfully responded to O’Reilly in a column on Wednesday, putting the latter’s crassness and hypocrisy on hilarious display. But he backed up O’Reilly’s baseless charge about Iran:
O’Reilly is partly right about that. As an American and a Jew, I probably wouldn’t last long in Iran. And criticizing the government there, as I do here, wouldn’t add to my life expectancy. But what was he trying to say? That America would be better if it were more like Iran?
This is hogwash. “As an American,” Milbank would be fine reporting in Iran. Even as a Jew. Even if he criticized the government. Just as another American Jew did: Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist who broke the rules for foreign reporters, went out on the streets in the middle of the post election turmoil, braved the regime’s brutal crackdown, and reported back for everyone in the West to see what was happening. No one mashed up this particular chic pea. Hummus isn’t even an Iranian dish (far be it for Bill O’Reilly to make distinctions — gastronomical or otherwise — between Muslims in Arab countries and Muslims in Iran).
Cohen, of course, was deported from Iran. But he showed a partisan flair in his reporting and, as I said, violated the terms of his press visa. Other Western journalists who operate within the government’s regulations seem to stay in Iran without much trouble or harassment.
But Cohen’s fate pales in comparison to that of Iranian nationals who blog and report on Iran. Take a look at the Committee to Protect Journalists page for Iran and review the fate of these reporters. It belittles their sacrifice for their country, and for journalism ,when O’Reilly and Milbank make flippant remarks.
]]>In regards to Iran, toward the start of the discussion Sheen brought up the non-violent strategy of targeted boycotts to oppose, among other things, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory. Foxman, exposing his hypocrisies, replies (with my emphasis):
I’m opposed to boycotts, period. I think boycotts hurt the wrong people, do not achieve their aims. They’re counterproductive. I’m not aware of any boycott — except for the boycott against South Africa — that has worked. And even there, it hurt innocent people…
So I’m opposed to boycotts, and I’m certainly opposed to boycotts whether against the whole state of Israel or segments of the state of Israel. We basically have a policy of being opposed to boycotts.
[Question from Sheen about whether Foxman's opposition is moral deficiencies or tactical inefficacy of the strategy.]
Well, the moral reason is boycotts basically hurt the wrong people, and there are innocent victims of the boycotts. There’s the same question about sanctions, whether sanctions work. … On a principled stance, we are opposed to boycotts.
Watch the video, starting from 16:40:
While Foxman says he doesn’t support visiting the morally reprehensible collective punishment of boycotts on Israelis, he has no qualms about using them to attack ordinary Iranians in an effort to force the country’s leadership to change its mind. This is exactly what Foxman did when the ADL whole-heartedly backed various sanctions packages — which he admits are plagued by the same moral quandaries as boycotts — against the Islamic Republic.
Here’s an ADL statement, co-issued by Foxman on June 9, welcoming UN sanctions against Iran (my bold again):
The world can live without Iranian oil exports, but the regime can’t. Empty oil tankers bypassing Iran on their way to fill up at Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirati ports will concentrate the minds of Iran’s leaders unlike any action we can take short of war.
Foxman again, on June 17, celebrating EU sanctions against Iran that targeted that nation’s oil and natural gas sectors as well as finance and trade. His statement — a de facto endorsement of collective punishment of Iranians in order affect change in the Iran’s leadership — was issued despite the well-known fact that the leadership is notoriously obstinate:
While the impact on Iran’s finances will be in the future, these sanctions should impact the regime’s decision-making today.
The leadership of the Iranian opposition is unequivocally opposed to broad-based U.S. sanctions against Iran — both Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi have said as much, as have some exiles close to the Green movement like Hooman Majd. Even New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, whose writing shows that he is certainly no fan of the Islamic Republic’s leadership, is opposed to sanctions.
Foxman is always accusing critics of Israel of singling out the Jewish state. In this case, it turns out Foxman is the Israeli exceptionalist, period.
]]>- Foreign Policy: David Rothkopf charges that Roger Cohen’s recent New York Times op-ed totally disregards the threat posed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Instead, Rothkopf endorses Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s New York Times op-ed demanding Palestinian recognition of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. “As unproductive as the Israeli stance on settlements has been, the Palestinian stance on the nature of the Israeli state, and its ability to continue operations as conceived and sanctioned by the United Nations nearly six and a half decades into its modern existence is just as unconstructive and indefensible,” writes Rothkopf. He concludes with a variation of the debunked reverse-linkage argument, arguing that “[Ahmadinejad’s] grandstanding and inflaming crowds on Israel’s borders with the language of obliteration is not just rhetoric. It is part of a systematic and thus far effective effort to exacerbate dangers and, not secondarily, to prolong the misery of the Palestinian people whose right to a free, independent state created in their own image is, of course, every bit as great as that of the Israelis.”
- The Washington Times: Eli Lake writes that Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon adds pressure to Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to withdraw his support of a UN investigation to determine who killed his father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. “I think it’s clear that Ahmadinejad’s visit is intended to show support for Hezbollah at a time when it’s facing the prospect of indictments in the murder of Hariri and is engaged in a campaign to undermine and derail the tribunal,” said Ash Jain, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Lake’s article went to print before it was known whether Ahmadinejad would travel to the Israeli border—he did not—but he writes that such a visit “would signal Iran’s proxies were on Israel’s border.”
- FrumForum: Brad Schaeffer, an energy derivatives broker writing for the blog of neoconservative pundit David Frum, lines up three scenarios (best, mid,and worst case) on what could happen to oil prices should Israel attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Best-case results in only a small, temporary spike in prices and the Iranian leadership uses the strike to turn the “military lemon into PR lemonade” by playing “victim” without retaliation. A mid-level escalation would result in small to medium spikes, for a more sustained period, and attacks against Western forces. Worst case would mean an all out war (and closing the Strait of Hormuz) and the doubling of oil prices from their current levels.
- Time: Tony Karon describes Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to Lebanon as emblematic of a U.S. policy failure in the region. The visit makes clear three difficult realities the U.S. is facing: “First, Iran is not nearly as isolated as Washington would like; secondly, the Bush Administration efforts to vanquish Tehran and its allies have failed; and, finally, the balance of forces in the region today prompts even U.S.-allied Arab regimes to engage pragmatically with a greatly expanded Iranian regional role.” Ahmadinejad met with Lebanon’s Christian president and Saudi-backed Sunni prime minister, notes Karon, and “he also appears to be placing a heavy stress on Lebanese unity and the need to avoid division” — rather than focus solely on Iran’s Hezbollah beneficiaries.
- The Washington Post: In an editorial, WaPo’s Jackson Diehl writes the Obama administration’s foreign policy strategy is marked by public and highly choreographed “process” and timelines. On Iran, Diehl points to the administration’s statement last spring that Iran was two to five years away from producing a bomb. Whether the sanctions approach will be successful is still unclear, says Diehl, but it has set a clock ticking. The scheduled drawdown of troops in Afghanistan by July 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ goal of creating a “framework agreement” by next September, and the scheduled withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, all are on timelines and will be put to a test before the 2012 presidential election. He concludes, “Process is always important to good policy — and yes, the Bush administration sometimes demonstrated what can go wrong when there are no deadlines. Yet in the Obama administration, the timetable is becoming an end in itself. It reflects a president who is fixed on disposing of foreign policy problems — and not so much on solving them.”
- The New York Times: In his oped, Roger Cohen reflects on his breakfast with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and concludes that he is ultimately, “odious” but not dangerous. Cohen points out that hyping the threat of Ahmadinejad has become a U.S. and Israeli pastime, with estimates for when Iran will acquire an atomic bomb ranging from 1999 to 2014. “There is a dangerous pattern here of Israeli and U.S. alarmism,” he writes. Iran is a “paper tiger,” says Cohen. “One of the things there’s time for, if you’re not playing games with the Iran specter, is a serious push for an Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough that would further undermine the Iranian president.”
- The Daily Beast: Reza Aslan writes that Farsi1, a Farsi-language satellite station broadcasting in Iran, is among the most popular in the banned-but-tolerated Iranian satellite TV market. But Farsi1 is partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewCorp, which operates a slew of right wing American outlets like the New York Post and Fox News Network. Several officials in the Islamic Republic have denounced it as a tool of the West’s war with Iran, as they have done with BBC Persian and Voice Of America (which are operated by the British and U.S. governments, respectively). “Part of why the government is so wary about these satellite programs is that they are usually filled with overt political propaganda against the Iranian regime (this includes BBC and Voice of America),” writes Aslan. “But what controversy exists about Farsi1 is focused on the main man behind the project, Rupert Murdoch,”whose Fox News has fed “anti-Islam hysteria.”