The fight over the possible nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense can be defined as a battle waged with smears from the one side, and thoughtful, evidence-backed arguments from the other.
Too simplistic to be true? Case in point. A few hours ago, Josh Block, a
The fight over the possible nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense can be defined as a battle waged with smears from the one side, and thoughtful, evidence-backed arguments from the other.
Too simplistic to be true? Case in point. A few hours ago, Josh Block, a former spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), tweeted this full-page ad from the New York Times this morning with the following message: “Found complete Log Cabin ad about #Hagel. Full page NYT today. Wow. If this now, what if later? pic.twitter.com/AqJ449zW“.
While the hottest issue over Hagel’s nomination has been his stance on Israel — which appears to be fully supportive, despite rampant claims to the contrary — so too has there been attention on his support for Gay rights. This ad, sponsored by Log Cabin Republicans, a Gay Conservative group that endorsed Romney over Obama, appears damning, but isn’t factual.
“…Chuck Hagel is pro-gay, pro-LGBT, pro-ending “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The only problem is that no one asked him his views lately — including the president of the Human Rights Campaign,” wrote Steve Clemons, the openly Gay Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, a week ago. He goes on:
…Hagel has lunch with Vice President Biden about once a week. They don’t tell others about it — but they are best friends. Hagel once donned a Joe Biden mask in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Halloween, wearing a T-shirt labeled “Vote for Me” — when Biden was getting ready (again) to run for president. When Biden opened the door on Meet the Press on gay marriage — saying that he had “absolutely no problem” with gay marriage — I’m guessing Biden and Hagel chatted about it. Biden doesn’t tolerate bigots or racists or people who are locked in anachronistic sensibilities, at least not on his own time. Hagel had evolved privately on these issues — but again, no one had asked him his views.
Perhaps the Log Cabin Republicans were unaware of Clemons article, or, maybe there’s more to that story. But other attacks against Hagel have been carefully crafted by groups and people who undoubtedly know what they’re doing. Groups like the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel, which is known for publishing patently dishonest attacks on President Obama, smear campaigns against its ideological opponents, and attempting to paint the Occupy Wall Street Protests as anti-Semitic.
Then there’s the other side. The side that has taken the time to carefully explain why the ferocious attacks on Hagel have not only been unfair, but untrue. “Hagel is a blunt-spoken, passionate internationalist who believes that it is important to talk to your enemies, and that war should be a last resort,” writes Connie Bruck of the New Yorker. A veteran investigative reporter who has broken some of the most important political stories of our time, Bruck doesn’t shy away from explaining what the fuss is really over:
From the moment Hagel’s name was leaked as a possible nominee for Secretary of Defense—in what was, apparently, a trial balloon floated by the Obama Administration—Hagel’s most vocal critics have been members of what can be called the Israel lobby. Their enmity for Hagel goes back to his two terms in the Senate. A committed supporter of Israel and, also, of a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, Hagel did not make the obeisance to the lobby that the overwhelming majority of his Congressional colleagues do. And he further violated a taboo by talking about the lobby, and its power. In his 2008 book, “The Much Too Promised Land,” Aaron Miller interviewed Hagel, whom he described as “a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values.” Miller also wrote, “Of all my conversations, the one with Hagel stands apart for its honesty and clarity.” He quoted Hagel saying that Congress “is an institution that does not inherently bring out a great deal of courage.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, Hagel continued, and “then you’ll get eighty or ninety senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters”—because, he added, they were “stupid.” Hagel also said, “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” but “I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator.”
Perhaps most interesting is the so far limited, but growing pushback from Jewish commentators who are calling out right-wing and “extremist” Jewish groups for leading the attack-Hagel wagon. According to Bernard Avishai, an Israeli-American Professor and analyst:
…I think it is time to acknowledge, bluntly, that certain major Jewish organizations, indeed, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations—also, the ADL, AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, political groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition, along with their various columnists, pundits, and list-serves—are among the most consistent purveyors of McCarthyite-style outrages in America today. Are there greater serial defamers of public officials in fake campaigns against defamation? Starting with Andrew Young and the late Charles Percy, and on to Chas Freeman and (now) Chuck Hagel, the game has been to keep Congresspeople and civil servants who might be skeptical of Israel’s occupation and apologetics in a posture that can only be called exaggerated tact.
And here’s James Besser, the Washington correspondent for The Jewish Week from 1987 to 2011, in the New York Times today:
Playing to the extremist fringe could produce short-term gains for pro-Israel groups by rallying the faithful and encouraging big contributions. But — as this year’s election and rising anti-gun sentiment demonstrates — it brings with it the risk of a popular backlash.
Support for the Jewish state remains strong among both parties on Capitol Hill and across the American electorate, and it won’t disappear anytime soon. But that support will wither if Aipac and other mainstream Jewish leaders don’t forcefully reject the zealots in their midst.
And, in the long run, that can only damage the interests of a vulnerable Israel.
photo credit: New America Foundation via photopin cc
]]>In terms of leaping to Islamophobic conclusions, this must rank right up there with the smug certainty with which The Investigative Project’s Steven Emerson claimed on CBS News the afternoon of the 1995 Oklahoma [...]]]>
In terms of leaping to Islamophobic conclusions, this must rank right up there with the smug certainty with which The Investigative Project’s Steven Emerson claimed on CBS News the afternoon of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that the act showed “a Middle Eastern trait” because it “was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible” — a memorable moment for me, if only because we at the IPS Washington bureau, as subsequently noted by the Washington Post and The Guardian of London, were the first news organization to publish that the bombing’s source likely would be found closer to the Midwest than the Middle East. (Sorry I don’t have a link; it’s too old.) In this case, it appears that Norway has found its Timothy McVeigh. Mondoweiss did an excellent profile on the alleged bomber/mass killer.
Of course, the Journal’s editorial writers were hardly alone as a quick scan at the blogs of the usual suspects — Commentary’s ‘Contentions’ (John Podhoretz), The Weekly Standard (Tom Joscelyn), the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, etc. — shows.
But special attention should be paid to Jennifer Rubin, whose “Right Turn” blog on the Post’s website has, in its relatively short and controversial life, become kind of one-stop shopping site for all the hard-line neo-conservative memes and rages of the day. Yesterday’s blog on the Norwegian outrage was no exception, and she hasn’t yet bothered to amend it in light of new details about the alleged perpetrator, as the Journal felt compelled to do. The Atlantic’s James Fallows and Steve Clemons have already taken her on, and I’m sure many more will follow.
Perhaps the most objectionable part of Rubin’s comments was actually voiced by American Enterprise Institute’s resident intelligence expert, Gary Schmitt, who, unlike most his AEI foreign-policy colleagues, tends to keep a low media profile. Nonetheless, she quotes him as telling her:
- “There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we’ve got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it’s become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we’re dealing with global nest of snakes.”
Now we don’t know whether Rubin had taken this quote out of context or whether the certainty with which he expressed the view that Al Qaeda was behind the Oslo killings in this excerpt had been preceded by the caveat “if” or “assuming” that Al Qaeda was responsible or similar cautions against leaping to conclusions. If so, then this statement wouldn’t be nearly as objectionable.
Nonetheless, it’s significant that Rubin turned to Schmitt, the former executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), as an expert on this question. Here are some relevant excerpts about Schmitt’s experience and expertise in intelligence from his Right Web profile, particularly with respect to the Iraq War and long-time association with Abram Shulsky of the notorious Office of Special Plans (with my emphasis):
- Like many of the proponents of the Iraq War, Schmitt has had to struggle with both faulty rationales he and other neoconservatives peddled before the war began and the spiraling problems confronted by the U.S. military in the wake of the invasion. In an article for the Weekly Standard several weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Schmitt wrote: “We know [Iraq] has stockpiled mass quantities of anthrax and has worked hard to make it as potent a weapon of terror as possible. We know that Saddam’s Iraq continues to pursue development of weapons of mass destruction-nuclear, chemical, and biological-believing that these are the ultimate keys to overcoming America’s military dominance in the region. In short, Iraq is both equipped with dangerous weapons and out to get the United States” (October 29, 2001).
In a subsequent article published in the Los Angeles Times after the invasion, Schmitt wrote: “Why can’t the coalition teams find stocks of weapons today? Probably because Hussein destroyed them either before the UN inspectors returned to Iraq last December or just before the war began. The credibility of both President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair will remain in question until coalition investigators have not only gotten to the bottom of the missing weapons but also, and more important, the weapons programs themselves. Here, patience is required. Intelligence products are not gospel, and they should not be treated as such. Failure to find [WMDs] would complicate a president’s ability to rally support for taking action in similar situations in the future” (June 28, 2003).
Schmitt is the author of a number of works, including with Shulsky Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (2002), in which the authors argue that “truth is not the goal” of intelligence operations, but “victory” (p. 176). He also co-authored with Shulsky The Future of U.S. Intelligence, a report published by the hardline National Strategy Information Center that seemed to foreshadow the work of the Office of Special Plans. The report concluded that intelligence should not be centralized in the CIA, and that the intelligence community should adopt new methodology aimed at “obtaining information others try to keep secret and penetrating below the ‘surface’ impression created by publicly available information to determine whether an adversary is deceiving us or denying us key information.” It recommended creating “competing analytic centers” with “different points of view” that could “provide policymakers better protection against new ‘Pearl Harbors,’ i.e., against being surprised.
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.”
]]>Only 4% of American films are made by women. In Iran it’s 25%.
Pollak tweeted the picture, adding that the ad was “truly outrageous.”
The [...]]]>
Only 4% of American films are made by women. In Iran it’s 25%.
Pollak tweeted the picture, adding that the ad was “truly outrageous.”
The ad was quickly picked up by a writer at the neoconservative flagship Commentary and then by Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. Since then, Rubin has been on a crusade against HSBC. But her rhetoric against the bank has been over-heated, occasionally veering off towards misrepresentation of facts.
Rubin has come to be known for her dishonesty. When she called blogger and think tanker Steve Clemons an “Israel-basher” recently, he said it was an “insidious character attack,” a “sliming” that insinuated anti-Semitism. She’s left critical context out of stories, and has been caught publishing misleading distortions of answers from an interview with an Obama administration official.
In the case of HSBC, she has relied on an admittedly long list of circumstantial evidence to support her arguments. The problem is not that she raises this evidence to ask questions, but rather that she offers definitive assessments without backing them up.
Take, for example, Rubin’s admission that she had no specific knowledge about HSBC’s operations inside Iran. “It is not clear precisely what business activity HSBC continues to conduct in Iran,” she wrote. “What we do know from SEC filings is that the bank maintains an office in Iran.”
By the end of her article, however, Rubin addressed HSBC’s business in Iran with searing certainty, writing that the bank “continu[es] to do business with a murderous regime.” Nonetheless, the story, built on her own conjecture, was shortened and published in the print edition of the Washington Post. Worst of all: in the shorter version, Rubin’s conjecture was presented as fact.
Rubin did make a case, using many hints of malfeasance — though none provided concrete evidence of either HSBC misconduct or of the bank doing business with the Iranian regime.
The first examples Rubin points to are that the Justice Department initiated an investigation into HSBC and that the bank had hired Deloitte to look into transactions. She went on, in the web version of the article, to mention actions taken by regulators against HSBC:
And the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a “cease and desist” order to HSBC’s North American unit in October, ordering the bank to enhance its risk management procedures.
Rubin didn’t acknowledge that the hiring of Deloitte, according to the Financial Times article she links to, was exactly the result of the very regulatory moves she’s referring to.
The two “cease and desist” orders (contra Rubin, there were two, issued concurrently and in coordination) didn’t actually state a case or present any definitive evidence. Rubin quotes the order (PDF) from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) like this:
Regulators found that the bank’s compliance program was ineffective and created “significant potential” for money laundering and terrorist financing. This opened HSBC to the possibility that it was conducting transactions on behalf of sanctioned entities.
The first sentence here is close: The order says that the bank’s lax risk assessments created “significant potential for unreported money laundering or terrorist financing.” But the second sentence seems to be pure extrapolation on Rubin’s part, though it becomes the crux of her evidence for making the “business with a murderous regime” accusation.
In the print edition of the paper, the accusation went from being extrapolation to fact — that the OCC was making accusations specifically about “sanctioned entities.” The story, on page A15 of the December 27 Post, read, with my emphasis:
And the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a “cease and desist” order to HSBC’s North American unit in October, having found that there was “significant potential” the bank was conducting transactions on behalf of sanctioned entities.
In reality, neither order mentions Iran or sanctions, let alone lays out any evidence about business with “sanctioned entities.” The OCC order does, however, mention inadequate monitoring of associates of “politically-exposed persons (PEPs),” which usually indicates foreign officials but has been expanded in the OCC order to include “former senior foreign political figures, their families, and their close associates.” But, once again, inadequately monitoring is not the same as “continuing to do business” with someone.
I asked a spokesperson at the OCC if the order implied that HSBC had conducted such business with the Iranian regime. “Under the law, we’re required to make public enforcement orders,” the spokesperson, Kevin Mukri, told me. “But we can’t comment on anything further than that, which puts us in a bind. The order has to be self-explanatory.”
Mukri referred me to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Treasury Department’s liaison to law enforcement, which declined to offer comment for this story.
I asked Mukri if he or, to his knowledge, anyone from OCC had spoken to Rubin on background, or deep background, which would have allowed her to make such accusations without referring to sources. At first, Mukri said that, even if he had spoken to Rubin, he wouldn’t tell me, but then quickly denied having done so or knowing of anyone who had. He explained that speaking about the orders, beyond their content, would be a violation of laws governing the office’s conduct. “It’s something we don’t do as an agency,” he told me. “I’ve been here for 14 years and don’t know anyone who’s done that, ever.”
Rubin also mentions that two members of Congress recently sent letters about regulations relating to sanctions on Iran:
Moreover, Rep. Frank Pallone (D.-N.J.) recently wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calling for increased enforcement of prohibitions on banks and other financial institutions doing business with Iran, and citing HSBC as an example of part of the problem. Rep. Joe Baca (D.-Calif.) sent a similar letter.
I was curious about the mention of HSBC in the letter by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, but his office did not supply the text of the letter following repeated inquiries. Pallone does mention HSBC in the press release for the letter.
The link Rubin supplies for the Pallone letter, however, is from Grendel Report, a blog dedicated to “cutting-edge open source information on terrorism and the Islamic threat” (note the absence of the word ‘radical’ there). The Grendel story, in turn, is attributed to Geostrategy-Direct, a newsletter operated by the World Tribune, a website that says it “tend[s] to reinforce the Judeo-Christian values” and brags about a mention from right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh for definitively connecting Iraq and al Qaeda and proving the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. (One must excuse me for being skeptical of these sources.)
The office of Rep. Joe Baca, the other member of Congress mentioned by Rubin, similarly declined to supply me with a copy of his letter, and no press release exists. So Rubin’s word that it was a “similar letter” will have to stand on its own. The reader is unable to know if the letter mentioned HSBC.
In the print edition, however, the two examples are conflated. Baca’s letter is no longer “similar,” but now also definitively cites HSBC:
Two members of Congress have written to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urging stronger controls on back activities citing HSBC as an example.
The online version of the piece by Rubin contained one more distortion. This one came to Rubin via e-mail from former AIPAC spokesperson Josh Block. Block wrote to her that “the regime in Tehran is the leading human rights violator and state sponsor of terror in the world.” The second bit, on terror, is the same pro-forma language that the State Department uses. But the first part — that Iran “is the leading human rights violator… in the world” — is a tough assertion to back up. I e-mailed and called Block several times for comment, suggesting that he soften the statement by saying Iran is ‘one of the leading…’. Block never responded.
The charge, nonetheless, was a particularly troubling one coming from advocates of Israel who constantly say that the Jewish state is being singled out. And even more troubling coming from Block, whose business partner Lanny Davis was, at the time Block made his comment, working for the Ivorian dictator responsible for the killing of more people in post-election violence than Iran’s leaders were during its own election aftermath (according to the UN).
But Rubin’s eagerness to paint all involved with Iran as a force for evil is not surprising. A U.S. attack on Iran has long been a priority for Rubin, who wrote from her former home at Commentary last September that such a move was the “best of disagreeable options.”
What is surprising, though, is that the Washington Post allows reports to go to print with serious allegations that seem to be based on little more than the combination of circumstantial evidence and conjecture.
]]>But perhaps Rubin’s most egregious language, which would seem to fall well outside of the accepted tone of The Washington Post, has been saved for those individuals and groups that she deems to be enemies of Israel for daring to suggest that Israel should cease settlement construction in the Occupied Territories.
The Washington Note’s Steve Clemons has issued a public call to the Post’s editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, and Post Chairman Donald Graham, to address Rubin’s recent post in which she wrote:
The usual crowd of Israel bashers has sent the president a letter urging him to go along with a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its settlements.
Clemons, along with a host of prominent foreign policy analysts, issued a letter urging the the Obama administration to support a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the Occupied Territory.
He responded to her smear:
I believe that she and I have a serious disagreement about what Israel’s interests are — and I believe that the Netanyahu wing of the Israeli political establishment regularly places short term interests over long to mid-term interests. But I don’t call those who support Netanyahu Israel-bashers even though I believe that as patriotic as they may be as Israelis or as pro-Israel as they may be as Americans they are harming Israel’s interests. That could be a constructive debate — something where both sides could learn something, perhaps.
Calling someone as Israel-basher is akin to calling them an anti-Semite or a bigot, and that can’t go without response. I’m a strong believer in Israel and want a healthy and constructive relationship between Israel and the United States. I have traveled to Israel, have met people from nearly every political party in the Knesset, and love the place and people.
But Rubin, it would appear, took Clemons’ post as a personal challenge and used the exact same term in a post this morning in which she characterized a group of congressmen who endorsed General David Petraeus’s concept of “linkage” as “Israel-bashing.”
Rubin, who repeatedly tries to challenge conventional wisdom that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict damages U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East, wrote:
…[A] group of the worst of the Israel-bashing congressmen sent a letter last May to Obama parroting back the general’s gaffe.
Back in May, these congressmen wrote to Obama, urging him to “continue [his] strong efforts to bring U.S. leadership to bear in moving the parties toward a negotiated two-state solution.”
They began their letter:
As steadfast advocates of the unbreakable U.S. commitment to the security of Israel, we write in support of your strong commitment to a Middle East peace process that results in Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security.
Hardly the language of “Israel-bashing” except, perhaps, in the peculiar world of Jennifer Rubin’s Right Turn blog at The Washington Post.
Rubin’s proclivity towards smearing her opponents as Israel-bashing belies the fundamental weakness of the hawkish, Israeli right-wing — a position she consistently advocates from her perch at The Washington Post. While she can’t be blamed for continuing the abrasive tone that she perfected on Commentary’s Contentions blog, Clemons is right in pointing out that Rubin’s character attacks are beneath The Washington Post and should be called to the attention of the Post’s editors and chairman.
]]>Reed, in his blog post on Steve Clemons’ The Washington Note, concludes that: the Iranian [...]]]>
Reed, in his blog post on Steve Clemons’ The Washington Note, concludes that: the Iranian government would do more damage to their own source of revenue than to western importers if they limited output to punish Western economies; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have little ability to project power beyond their border; Tehran possesses no “on-off” switch for Hezbollah (despite what Lee Smith might argue); Tehran could harass commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf but this would impact Iranian oil revenues; and the Islamic Republic will not develop a sizable nuclear arsenal anytime soon and will be susceptible to anti-missile systems.
Reed writes:
]]>Every tool at Iran’s disposal comes with serious limitations: the “oil weapon” is self-defeating; Iran’s conventional military is too modest; any asymmetric attacks would be small-scale or prompt massive retaliation; and nuclear intimidation is evaporating with the deployment of new anti-missile systems. Iran’s leaders might still make rhetorical threats, but their tools are too weak if they wish to convert verbal attacks into physical ones.
This week, we have another striking example of the restating of the argument that, as we’ve discussed before, ‘the road to Middle East peace runs through… anywhere but Jerusalem.’ Writing on “Hudson New York,” a blog and aggregator operated by the neoconservative Hudson Institute, Aymenn Jawad (sometimes Aymenn Jawad al-Timmi) declares that the U.S. should focus on Yemen, not Israeli-Palestinian peace.
An intern at Daniel Pipes‘ Middle East Forum, where his Yemen article is reprinted and has been promoted on the front page for several days, Jawad, an apparent friend of anti-Jihadist Islamophobe Robert Spencer, cites two Al-Arabiya polls and goes on to conclude:
These data should put to rest the notion of “linkage,” the idea that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to dealing with the problem of Iran’s goal of becoming the dominant power in the region.
Proponents of “linkage” argue that Iran is increasing its influence because it is playing on resentment about the ongoing conflict, but how can this be so when surveys from Al-Arabiya consistently illustrate a lack of interest amongst Arabs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the peace process?
This line of attack on linkage raises two big problems.
First, hawks have long proclaimed that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a magic bullet that will wipe away the U.S.’s problems. At Commentary, Jennifer Rubin characterized linkage as “the unsupportable claim that Iran can be disarmed only in the aftermath of a successful peace process.” When linkage came up in Gen. David Petreus’s Congressional testimony last Spring, as well as reports of Vice President Joe Biden’s private conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor told the Forward that he isn’t on board with “the notion that if somehow we address the concerns of the Arab world regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then all our problems will be solved.”
But this is a straw man — a deliberate mischaracterization of what proponents of linkage are saying. In a post picking apart the anti-linkage arguments of top Obama Mid East adviser Dennis Ross and WINEP fellow David Makovsky, blogger and foreign policy realist Steve Clemons wrote:
The ongoing and repeated failures to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict are increasingly consequential to American security and US interests. [...]
Solving the Israel-Palestine conflict will not solve all the political and identity tensions which will continue to boil in Arab and Muslim-dominant states — but the echo effect of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will knock down many walls in these societies that have been resisting change.
Indeed, Clemons hints at the Arab Peace Initiative and other agreements to assert: “The quid pro quo of moving Palestine and Israel toward a credible two state track is normalization of relations between Israel and 57 other now hostile countries.”
This is the sort of broad and nuanced tack that opponents of linkage avoid addressing. More disturbing than failing to address the question at hand, however, is Jawad’s invocation of a “survey” by Al-Arabiya, a partially Saudi-owned and U.A.E. based Arabic-language television channel. Jawad offers a link to a page in Arabic displaying the survey results, and then trumpets the results as definitive: “71% of respondents had no interest in the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.” Indeed, that is the result listed, but this is no scientific poll: It’s merely an online reader survey from the front page of Al-Arabiya‘s website. The “survey,” in other words, is statistically meaningless. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute harped on the same point when Efraim Karsh wrote his New York Times op-ed attacking linkage based on the same “survey.”
Furthermore, no interest in the peace process and no interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not the same thing. A friend fluent in Arabic relates to me that the question referenced by Jawad indeed deals only with the peace process. It asks about “amaliyat as-salam fii ash-sharq al-awsat,” or “the peace process in the Middle East.” Zogby hit this point, too: Arabs “no longer ‘passionate about Palestine’?” he wrote on Huffington Post, “Don’t bet on it.”
As for the 2005 poll cited by Jawad, I can’t find it online (perhaps because of my limited Arabic). Taking Jawad’s numbers at face value (despite the credulity gap on the other Al-Arabiya online viewer survey), however, does not prove his argument. Just as caring about the “peace process” is not the same as caring about the conflict, failing to link the conflict’s resolution to “Arab development” is, again, not capturing the full spectrum of the potential benefits — both for countries in the Middle East and the U.S. — heralded by supporters of linkage like Clemons.
Though Jawad calls for an end to drone strikes in Yemen, where U.S. “overt military intervention undermines its allies,” it should be noted that many of his fellow travelers in the neoconservative movement are not so level-headed. Late last year, Joe Lieberman called on the U.S. to prevent allowing Yemen to be “tomorrow’s war” by making it today’s war — ie, the famous “preemptive” aggression preferred by neocons in Iraq and, today, in Iran. All this, of course, for only a few-hundred members of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
All this blustering supports the hawkish talking point that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a distraction to U.S. policymakers, and that Obama should instead pursue a road to Middle East peace that winds through nearly every Arab and Muslim capital. Look for peace anywhere but Jerusalem, they seem to say. Nothing to see here. Move along.
]]>- The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg, in his long awaited cover story, claims that an Israeli unilateral attack on alleged Iranian nuclear facilities is inevitable if the United States and its allies fail to strike first. “I have come to believe that the administration knows it is a near-certainty that Israel will act against Iran soon if nothing or no one else stops the nuclear program; and Obama knows—as his aides, and others in the State and Defense departments made clear to me—that a nuclear-armed Iran is a serious threat to the interests of the United States, which include his dream of a world without nuclear weapons,” writes Goldberg. (I responded to Goldberg’s article yesterday.)
- The Washington Note: Steve Clemons offers his thoughts on Jeffrey Goldberg’s prediction that, “the likelihood of Israel unilaterally bombing Iran to curtail a potential nuclear weapon breakout capacity is north of 50-50.” Clemons writes that, “…doubts about the sanity and rationality of Iran’s leadership may be driving Israel’s leaders to abandon pragmatic rationality and serious scrutiny of costs and benefits as well. Is this all real? Or are both sides puffing up, acting like ‘crazy Ivans’, as part of a military strategy that could be bluff, or could be devastatingly severe?”
- Foreign Policy: Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett argue that Goldberg’s case for a U.S. attack on Iran is, “even flimsier than the case Goldberg helped make for invading Iraq in 2002.” Normalizing U.S.-Iran and Israel-Iran relations would profoundly benefit Israel and the United States, say the Leveretts.
- The Los Angeles Times: Paul Richter and Alexandra Sandels report that Iran told Lebanese officials that it will make up for the potential cutoff of U.S. aid to the Lebanese military. Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-NY) decided to freeze military aid over concerns that such aid might be used against Israel.
- The Washington Note: Steve Clemons says that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a conflict that matters, “…far beyond the Israeli and Palestinian populations and is a screaming, right now challenge.” As the United States remains committed to remaking Afghanistan and Iraq the urgency of resolving one of the region’s biggest historical grievances has never been higher. Clemons suggest that President Barack Obama, “sees the vital and obvious linkage between resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine and any sensible strategy rolling back and/or containing Iran’s nuclear and regional hegemonic pretensions.”
- The Wall Street Journal: The WSJ editorial board says that the sanctions against Iran are beginning to work but additional sanctions are needed and the United States and Europe should offer more assistance to Iran’s democracy movement. The op-ed also suggests that Obama should invite dissident Iranian exiles to the Oval Office. Now, argues the authors, is not the time to drop sanctions in exchange for negotiations with Tehran. “The risk now is that the modest success of the sanctions will lure the Administration into dropping some of them in exchange for another round of temporizing and inevitably useless negotiations with Tehran,” they argue.
- The Weekly Standard: Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn call attention to documents in the Wikileaks dump which claim that Iran is supporting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The authors say that reports of Iranian activity in Afghanistan show Obama’s August 2nd statement the United States and Iran have a “mutual interest” in fighting the Taliban to be a dangerous fantasy. Hayes and Joscelyn seem to willfully ignore previous passed-up opportunities for rapprochement with Iran.
- The New York Times: David Sanger reports that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made comments indicating that sanctions against Iran have had a greater economic impact than anticipated by Iran’s government. The administration’s statements appeared aimed at bringing Tehran back to the negotiating table but, Sanger points out, “Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton defined with any precision what steps Iran’s leaders would need to take to build confidence that they were willing to negotiate.”
- The Huffington Post: David Bromwich makes the case that the post 9/11 United States has developed a dangerous trend of always being at war. Obama, says Bromwich, is both withdrawing from Afghanistan more slowly than many would like and moving towards a military strike on Iran more slowly than many would prefer. “Will Iran become our third war of the moment? Sanctions which, Benjamin Netanyahu has said, should soon become ‘crippling sanctions,’ already have us in lockstep on that path,” says Bromwich. He warns that after the November midterm elections, “The Likud, in both Israel and America, may prove itself ready for action sooner than President Obama would like, just as the Tea Party picked up energy faster and harder than he looked for in the spring of 2009.” (Ali blogged on Bromwich’s article earlier today.)