by Jim Lobe
In light of the chorus of criticism and contempt by neoconservatives and other hawks (like the Washington Post’s editorial board) leveled at President Barack Obama’s West Point speech last week, I found striking the similarities in basic viewpoints between his address and the concluding pages of Robert [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
In light of the chorus of criticism and contempt by neoconservatives and other hawks (like the Washington Post’s editorial board) leveled at President Barack Obama’s West Point speech last week, I found striking the similarities in basic viewpoints between his address and the concluding pages of Robert Gates’ memoir, Duty. Gates, of course, was the one major hold-over from the Bush administration, and, despite his service under Obama, was very, very rarely criticized by the usual suspects, particularly the neocons and their right-wing allies in Congress. Here he is on pages 591-3 in his book:
My time as secretary of defense reinforced my belief that in recent decades, American presidents, confronted with a tough problem abroad, have too often been too quick to reach for a gun — to use military force, despite all the realities I have been describing. They could have done worse than to follow the example of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his presidency, the Soviet Union became a thermonuclear power, China became a nuclear power, and there were calls for preventive war against both; the Joint Chiefs unanimously recommended that he use nuclear weapons to help the French in Vietnam; there were several crises with China related to Taiwan; a war in the Middle East; a revolution in Cuba; and uprisings in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. And yet after Eisenhower agreed to the armistice in Korea in the summer of 1953, not one American soldier was killed in action during his presidency. [Bear this passage in mind if you read Bob Kagan's most recent treatise on how international peace and stability has depended and should continue to depend on U.S. military power since 1945.]
Too many ideologues call for the use of the American military as the first option rather than a last resort to address problems. On the left, we hear about the “responsibility to protect” as a justification for military intervention in Libya, Syria, the Sudan, and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to use military force in Libya, Syria, or Iran is deemed an abdication of American leadership and a symptom of a ‘soft’ foreign policy. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia was framed almost entirely in military terms as opposed to economic and political priorities. And so the rest of the world sees America, above all else, as a militaristic country too quick to launch planes, cruise missiles, and armed drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces. [Emphasis added.]
I strongly believe America must continue to fulfill its global responsibilities. We are the “indispensable nation,” and few international problems can be addressed successfully without our leadership. But we also need to better appreciate that there are limits to what the United States — still by far the strongest and greatest nation on earth — can do in an often cruel and challenging world. The power of our military’s global reach has been an indispensable contributor to peace and stability in many regions and must remain so. But not every outrage, every act of aggression, every oppression, or every crisis can or should elicit an American response.
I wrote in my first book in 1996 that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the biggest doves in Washington wear uniforms. This is because our military leaders have seen the cost of war and its unpredictability, and they have too often sent their troops in harm’s way to execute ill-defined or unrealistic presidential objectives, with thin political support that evaporated when the going got tough or the fight became prolonged. Just as it did in “the necessary war” in Afghanistan.
There is one final lesson about war that we too often forget. We are enamored of technology and what it can do because of advances in precision, sensors, information, and satellite technology. A button is pushed in Nevada, and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. A bomb destroys the targeted house on the right, leaving intact the one on the left. War has become for too many — among them defense “experts,” members of Congress, executive branch officials, and the American public as well — a kind of arcade video game or action movie, bloodless, painless, and odorless. But as I told a military audience at the National Defense University in September 2008, war is “inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain.” I warned them to be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. “Look askance,” I said, “at idealized, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war, where the enemy is killed, but our troops and innocent civilians are spared: where adversaries can be cowed, shocked, or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.” I quoted General William T. Sherman that “every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.” And I concluded with General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s warning that “no matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out — there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.”
We must always be prepared and willing to use our military forces when our security, our vital interests, or those of our allies are threatened or attacked. But I believe the use of military force should always be a last resort and our objectives clearly and realistically defined (as in the Gulf War). And presidents need to be more willing and skillful in using tools in the national security kit other than hammers. Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents. [Emphasis added.]
It seems to me that, if anything, the principles laid out by Obama in his West Point speech actually makes him more hawkish than Gates. Which makes me wonder once again why the hawks were so reluctant to attack Gates.
Photo: President Barack Obama talks with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, left, and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outside the Oval Office in the White House, June 16, 2009. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>The New York Times reports that despite US reluctance to arm Islamist actors in Syria, that’s happening as the US does little to vet the actions of its partners Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Though the amount of aid flowing to the badly-equipped rebels is still relatively small as other on-the-ground [...]]]>
The New York Times reports that despite US reluctance to arm Islamist actors in Syria, that’s happening as the US does little to vet the actions of its partners Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Though the amount of aid flowing to the badly-equipped rebels is still relatively small as other on-the-ground reports have reiterated, the Times suggests that unless the US takes a more direct route, the situation will come to favor the Islamists:
“The opposition groups that are receiving the most of the lethal aid are exactly the ones we don’t want to have it,” said one American official familiar with the outlines of those findings, commenting on an operation that in American eyes has increasingly gone awry.
The United States is not sending arms directly to the Syrian opposition. Instead, it is providing intelligence and other support for shipments of secondhand light weapons like rifles and grenades into Syria, mainly orchestrated from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The reports indicate that the shipments organized from Qatar, in particular, are largely going to hard-line Islamists.
Jackson Diehl, the Washington Post‘s editorial pages hawkish deputy editor, expanded on the argument that Obama’s skittishness is leading the US to disaster in Syria. Diehl has been a forceful advocate of non-engagement with Assad since before the Syrian uprising began, and has called for more assertive US policy to help remove Assad from power:
…. Obama rejected suggestions by several senators that he lead an intervention. Instead he committed a second major error, by adopting a policy of seeking to broker a Syrian solution through the United Nations. “The best thing we can do,” he said last March, “is to unify the international community.”
As countless observers correctly predicted, the subsequent U.N. mission of Kofi Annan was doomed from the beginning. When the White House could no longer deny that reality, it turned to an equally fantastical gambit: Vladimir Putin, it argued, could be persuaded to abandon his support of Assad and force him to step down. The nadir of this diplomacy may have been reached on June 30, when Clinton cheerfully predicted that the Kremlin had “decided to get on one horse, and it’s the horse that would back a transition plan” removing Assad.
Needless to say, Putin did no such thing. The war went on; thousands more died. For the past three months, Obama’s policy has become a negative: He is simply opposed to any use of U.S. power. Fixed on his campaign slogan that “the tide of war is receding” in the Middle East, Obama claims that intervention would only make the conflict worse — and then watches as it spreads to NATO ally Turkey and draws in hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters.
Al Qaeda’s presence in Syria has often been cited both for and against the case for direct Western intervention. But the number of foreign fighters in Syria is not known. According to Max Rodenbeck, “by no current estimate does the number of foreign fighters in Syria — young men who mostly see themselves as part of a Spanish Civil War–style international brigade rather than as terrorist ninjas — surpass a thousand, out of at least 50,000 armed men on the rebel side.” The Times itself adds that some militias appear to be falsely burnishing “Salafist” credentials in order to woo donors.
Though non-governmental rebel advocates like the Syrian Support Group have downplayed the question of where the militias fall ideologically, the Wall Street Journal, TIME and Real Clear Politics report that rivalries among Islamist factions for arms procurement are undermining their nominal joint effort against the Syrian Army. The Times has reported before that even the rebels’ Gulf backers are starting to consider the possibility of ”blowback.”
The Times adds that even though Obama’s course is being criticized by interventionists, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has not offered the sort of direct military aid some in the Beltway would prefer:
But Mr. Romney stopped short of saying that he would have the United States provide those arms directly, and his aides said he would instead rely on Arab allies to do it. That would leave him, like Mr. Obama, with little direct control over the distribution of the arms.
Diehl also blames Obama for “reversing Bush’s policy of distancing the United States from strongmen like Assad and Hosni Mubarak.”
]]>Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
William Kristol & Jamie Fly, Weekly Standard: Neoconservative pundit William Kristol who cofounded such jewels as the [...]]]>
Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
William Kristol & Jamie Fly, Weekly Standard: Neoconservative pundit William Kristol who cofounded such jewels as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) and who serves on the board of the hyperbolic Israel advocacy group, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) tries to pressure the President into bringing the U.S. closer to war with Iran with ideologue in arms, Jamie Fly: (Jim Lobe has the story.)
President Obama says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. The real and credible threat of force is probably the last hope of persuading the Iranian regime to back down. So: Isn’t it time for the president to ask Congress for an Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iran’s nuclear program?
Instead of running away from it, administration officials could be putting the military option front and center and ensuring it is seen as viable. And if the administration flinches, Congress could consider passing such an authorization anyway.
And here is Mitt Romney’s response to the article from CBS’s “Face the Nation“:
…I can assure you if I’m President, the Iranians will have no question but that I would be willing to take military action, if necessary, to prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world. I don’t believe at this stage, therefore, if I’m President, that we need to have war powers approval or a special authorization for military force. The President has that capacity now.
Former Senator Charles Robb (D-Va): Testifying at this week’s Armed Services Committee hearing titled “Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge: Understanding the Military Options” was former Senator Charles Robb who now co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Task Force on Iran. Robb mainly reiterated recommendations from a BPC report released in February. According to BPC staffers, “only the credible threat of force, combined with sanctions” affords “any realistic hope of an acceptable diplomatic resolution.” Unsuprisingly, “force” is the key to successful diplomacy:
There are three primary components of a credible military threat: an effective information and messaging strategy, economic preparations and credible military readiness activities. Undertaking these steps would boost the credibility of the military option, thereby strengthening the chance for sanctions and diplomacy to succeed in bringing about a peaceful resolution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
What exactly is the BPC? Jim Lobe has the scoop:
We’ve been covering BPC’s work on Iran pretty intensively both on IPS and Lobelog since the fall of 2008 when it issued its first Iran report whose primary author, as I understand it, was Michael Rubin (and Dennis Ross was on the task force that produced it).
The staff director for their Iran reports is Michael Makovsky whose RightWeb profile was updated just two months ago.
Makovsky, brother of David at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), not only served at one time in the IDF, but also was a West Bank settler, according to reports. When I asked him directly about a month ago whether those reports were accurate, he abruptly terminated an otherwise relatively cordial conversation about his service in the Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. If those reports are indeed true, and, to my knowledge, he’s never denied them, one has to ask how someone who presumably supports Israeli settlements in occupied territory could become Foreign Policy Director of something called the “Bipartisan Policy Center”.
When they unveiled their last report in February you can read my synopsis here, Robb and Sen. Coates presided. I wrote about their first report in 2008.
Interestingly, several of the key players on the Iran task force at BPC were invited to a Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) retreat in the Bahamas back in May 2007, entitled “Confronting the Iranian Threat: The Way Forward”. In addition to Makovsky, Rademaker was invited, as were Michael Rubin and Air Force Lt. Gen. Chuck Wald (ret.), who has been a major contributor to the Iran task force and co-written op-eds about its work with Robb and Coates. Precisely who turned up there, I don’t know, but Wald told me at the time that he wasn’t able to attend. I wrote about the invitation on Lobelog at the time. You can find it here. It was kind of a who’s who among the neo-con hawks: Bret Stephens, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Michael Ledeen, etc. etc.
Congress, Foreign Policy: Josh Rogin reports on a bipartisan letter spearheaded by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) that was sent out last Friday by 44 senators calling on the President to cease diplomatic efforts if the Iranians don’t submit to 3 U.S. demands, as well as continue the relentless sanctions regime and ramp up the military option:
“On the other hand, if the sessions in Moscow produce no substantive agreement, we urge you to reevaluate the utility of further talks at this time and instead focus on significantly increasing the pressure on the Iranian government through sanctions and making clear that a credible military option exists,” they wrote. ”As you have rightly noted, ‘the window for diplomacy is closing.’ Iran’s leaders must realize that you mean precisely that.”
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald responds:
This implication is clear: a military attack by the U.S. on Iran is at least justified, if not compelled, if a satisfactory agreement is not quickly reached regarding Iran’s nuclear program. At the same time, the letter itself virtually ensures no such agreement is possible because the conditions it imposes as the “absolute minimum” are ones everyone knows Iran will never agree to (closing the Fordow facility and giving up its right to enrich uranium above 5 percent). It also declares that it is not only Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon that is “unacceptable” — diplomatic code for “we’ll go to war to stop it” — but its mere “capability” to build one.
As does the Washington Post’s hawk-in-chief Jennifer Rubin who applauds the increasingly militaristic trend in Congress and the fact that it’s “unlikely the Iranians will agree to any of those conditions” in the letter while yet again agitating for the U.S. to wage war on Iran (emphasis mine):
But those crippling sanctions have come very late as Iran compiles a sufficient stockpile of enriched uranium to make multiple bombs. We are drawing close to the point when Obama will face the choice he has tried to avoid: Act militarily, support the Israelis’ military action or accept the “unacceptable,” a nuclear-armed revolutionary state sponsor of terror? And as we arrive at that point it becomes clear that the only reason for Israel (with fewer military capabilities than the United States) to act militarily rather than the United States would be that the president, even on the most critical national security threat of our time, won’t lead.
Yet despite all the huffing and puffing that Rubin does on a weekly basis about the “threat” the U.S. faces from Iran, just this February Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified that “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.” Add to that the top U.S. intelligence official James Clapper’s reiteration that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear bomb and that diplomacy and sanctions–as opposed to the militaristic measures that Rubin advocates–remain the most effective means of dissuading the Iranians from going nuclear.
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: What sanctions good for according to Rubin (forget that diplomacy mumbo jumbo):
We should, of course, move forward on sanctions insofar as they may undermine the current regime and push segments of the population in the country to align themselves with the Green Movement.
And here is her lament for what has so far been U.S. refusal to militarily strike Iran:
Given Obama’s refusal to act forcefully against Iran’s weaker, non-nuclear armed ally Syria, I strongly suspect it will be up to Israel. That would be a pitiful result of a lackadaisical American approach to our primary security threat and the ignominious end to “leading from behind.” Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but at this point that certainly seems like the most likely outcome.
Washington Post: The Post’s hawkish editorial board calls for U.S. rejection of Iran’s right to peacefully enrich uranium (putting them in line with the Israeli position) and increasing pressure on Iran:
The Obama administration must nevertheless be prepared to take an Iranian “no” for an answer. It should resist any effort by Russia or other members of the international coalition to weaken the steps that Iran must take, or to grant Tehran major sanctions relief for partial concessions. It should continue to reject recognition of an Iranian “right” to enrich uranium.
The United States and its allies also should have a strategy for quickly and significantly increasing the pressure on the Khamenei regime if the negotiations break down. Israel may press for military action; if that option is to be resisted, there must be a credible and robust alternative.
Mark Kirk (R-Ill.): Following the Moscow talks Senate hawk Mark Kirk calls for a “final” (what happens after?) round of more sanctions on Iran:
After three rounds of meetings, Iran remains in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions ordering it to halt all its uranium enrichment activities. The House and Senate should immediately negotiate a final Iran sanctions bill that can be sent to the President’s desk in July. This legislation should include new and tougher sanctions proposals put forward by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including sanctions targeting Iran’s energy and financial sectors, shipping and insurance.
Jed Babbin, American Spectator: The Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush who stated in 2006 that he was “willing to kill as many people as it requires to take out Hezbollah” declares that “[d]iplomacy won’t work” with Iran so for now covert operations, particularly in the cyber realm, should be vigorously deployed through all available means including the U.S.’s vast arsenal:
]]>Expanding our cyberwar operations against Iran is one of the best options. Offensive cyberwar is far cheaper, and easier, than the defensive. We can, and should, disrupt Iranian government and military functions as often as we can. Iran is reportedly developing a new computer language to make such attacks more difficult. Our cyber warriors should be tasked to infiltrate that project and plant malicious software — “malware” in cyber jargon — to gather information from and at our command disrupt or destroy the computer networks the new system runs on.
A future president — let’s hope one will take office next year — should consider the “bad luck” option. Covert operations need not be conducted only by special operations forces, CIA agents, or computer warriors. We have a significant variety of stealthy weapons and weapon platforms. That president would have the option of making an equally large variety of Presidential Determinations authorizing the use of those weapons against Iran’s nuclear facilities and its intelligence and military centers.