I’m not a big fan of The New Republic, but there are two articles in the July 30 edition that are well worth a read.

The first essay is by the always-insightful John Judis, who two years ago wrote the best account to date of McCain’s evolution from realist to neo-conservative in the late 1990s. Now Judis revisits the issue to determine McCain’s likely trajectory, focusing in particular on the candidate’s Manicheanism, especially with regard to Russia. Money lines are found right up front:

“Two years ago, I wrote a profile arguing that there were reasons to believe that McCain was more pragmatic than his support for the Iraq debacle suggested (”Neo-McCain,” October 16, 2006). In the interviews I conducted with him in 2006, he repeatedly distanced himself from neoconservatism, reminding me that he talked regularly to realists like Brent Scowcroft. I thought there was a good chance that there was a peacemaker lurking beneath McCain’s warrior exterior–that a President McCain might be able use his hawkish reputation to, say, bring Iraq’s warring parties together or to lure Iran to the bargaining table. Read the rest of this entry »

On the eve of next week’s Third Annual Washington Israel Summit of Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the folks at the excellent JewsonFirst.org have released their new must-see video, entitled “Pastor John Hagee’s Preoccupation With the Jews”. It’s the best documentation of Hagee’s views on the subject that I’ve seen to date and should thoroughly embarrass the Summit’s keynote speaker, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, not to mention the many neo-conservatives — Bill Kristol, Clifford May, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Charles Jacobs, and Dennis Prager, among others — who will be featured at the Summit as “some of the most influential leaders and thinkers in Washington.” Their message will then be carried to lawmakers all over Capitol Hill by the thousands of attendees from all around the country. Kristol’s best buddy, Gary Bauer, as well as Iran hawk, Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), former Sen. Rick Santorum, and Reps. Elliot Engel and Mike Pence, will also be on the agenda which you can find here. Notably absent, of course, will be Sen. John McCain. Read the rest of this entry »

Gary Sick, an acute observer of U.S.-Iranian relations for more than three decades who served on the National Security Council staff under president Ford, Carter and Reagan and now teaches at Columbia University, wrote a brief comment today on the latest developments in U.S. Iran policy and what it says about the balance of power between hawks and realists within the Bush administration. His essay, which refers to John Bolton’s op-ed, “Israel, Iran and the Bomb, published Monday on the opinion pages of the ever-hawkish ‘Wall Street Journal,’ is reproduced with the author’s permission. (Incidentally, I had the opportunity to talk briefly with former Amb. James Dobbins, who dealt extensively with Iranian diplomats over Afghanistan during and after the ouster of the Taliban and who has been one of the most outspoken and influential voices in the foreign-policy community here to urge direct engagement with Tehran on a whole range of issues. He called the decision to send Undersecretary of State for Policy William Burns to Geneva to join his counterparts from the EU-3, Russia, and China in talks with Iran Saturday a “remarkable” and a “dramatic departure” from previous U.S. policy.)

As usual, John Bolton is absolutely right. His policy prescriptions may be reckless to the point of foolishness (”When in doubt, bomb!”), but his understanding of what is happening in Washington policy (as outlined in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday) is unerringly accurate. Read the rest of this entry »

Further to my post last week about Adm. Mullen’s press conference, Anthony Cordesman, the Middle East military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), has told an Israeli audience that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told his Israeli counterpart during his visit to Israel two weeks ago that the U.S. would not support an Israeli strike on Iran, according to an article that appeared in Tuesday’s Haaretz newspaper. (Scroll down to see the relevant part.) Moreover, according to Cordesman, Mullen was speaking on behalf of the president when he communicated that message. Cordesman, a heavyweight who once served as McCain’s national security advisor (back in the candidate’s realist days), is known as a very cautious, taciturn analyst whose words are chosen with great care, although, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he described the notion that it would result in the democratic transformation of the region as something that “crosses the line between neo-conservative and neo-crazy.”

After posting Mohammed Omer’s account of his treatment at the hands of Israel’s Shin Beth ten days ago, I was reminded of a passage I had just read in the New Yorker’s excellent profile by Connie Bruck of Freedom’s Watch’s co-founder and biggest financier, multi-billionaire and staunch Likudist, Sheldon Adelson:

“Adelson, whose countenance often suggests that he is spoiling for a fight, takes pride in being an outsider, who has suffered rejection and ridicule but has avenged every slight, many times over. Vindication is sweet, if never quite sufficient…”

“Adelson’s father, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a cabdriver in Boston, and his mother ran a knitting shop from home, in a tenement in Dorchester. Sheldon, his three siblings, and their parents all slept in one room. He and other Jewish boys in the neighborhood were beaten up by Irish youths.”

The last point immediately brought to mind the similar childhood experience of another staunch Likudist, Norman Podhoretz. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t be surprised if Sen. John McCain “refines” his own Iraq plans very soon, just as his campaign has accused Barack Obama of doing.

In an article in Monday’s USA Today, ret. Army Gen. Jack Keane, a key architect and supporter of the “Surge”, who is close to both Gen. David Petraeus and the neo-conservatives who are advising McCain, predicted “significant reductions (in U.S. troops in Iraq) in 2009 whoever becomes president.” Even more remarkably — and in contrast to the repeated cautions by senior military officials in Iraq, including Petraeus, that the progress made by the Surge over the past year remains “fragile” and “reversible” — Keane told the newspaper, “I think the momentum we have (in Iraq) is not reversible.”

With Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard already declaring victory, Keane’s assessment opens the door for McCain, who revised his previous opposition to setting any timetable for withdrawal when he declared in mid-May that most U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by 2013, to suggest an accelerated pace that may yet approach Obama’s timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat troops 16 months after taking office, or by June, 2010. Despite the ridicule that such a revision might invite, the fact is that the Iraq war remains a loser for McCain, especially among independent voters.

Interestingly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who is desperate to get more troops into Afghanistan, revived the possibility Monday that Washington will continue withdrawing troops from Iraq after only a brief pause in August after the formal end of the Surge. That possibility seemed to have been put on the shelf a couple of months ago when Bush indicated that troop levels were unlikely to be reduced below the 140,000 to be reached at the end of this month through the rest of the administration. Whether Mullen’s remarks were provoked by a new assessment that improvements in Iraq are indeed irreversible, as Keane apparently believes, or whether they reflect a new Pentagon effort to persuade Bush to revise his own timetable isn’t clear yet.

It was dispelled Wednesday by Adm. Mike Mullen, who repeatedly made clear that he opposes an attack on Iran — whether by Israel or his own forces — and, moreover, favors dialogue with Tehran. While various media have printed or run excerpts of his press conference, I think it might be useful to post virtually all of his remarks regarding Iran just to illustrate how clear he was: Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, the IPS correspondent in Gaza, Mohammed Omer, was detained last Thursday by Israeli authorities on his return from Europe where he received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism and went on a brief speaking tour. He is currently in a hospital back in Gaza recovering from the physical wounds incurred during his interrogation. His experience resulted in an official protest by the Dutch government and some attention in the British press, especially The Guardian and The Independent, as well as in the IPS cast itself. The Israeli government’s explanation Mohammed’s wounds, as recounted by IPS correspondent Mel Frykberg, seems somehow unconvincing, although hopefully a thorough investigation, as promised by Israeli’s ambassador to The Hague, will shed some additional light on the matter.

Earlier this week, colleagues sent me a lengthy — but quite eloquent — statement by Mohammed about his experience that, with his permission, I am posting on the blog. I found his thoughts about Shylock’s appeals in the “Merchant of Venice” to his Christian persecutors as Mohammed himself was undergoing what must have been a very traumatic and deeply disillusioning experience at the hands of his fellow human beings to be particularly compelling. You can judge for yourself.

“SUMMARY OF EVENTS IN THE DETENTION, INTEROGATION & TORTURE
OF PRIZE WINNING INTERNATIONAL JOURNALIST, AGE 24, GAZA NATIVE MOHAMMED OMER BY ISRAELI AUTHORITIES, JUNE 26-27, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Or maybe even 674 pages, the length of Douglas Feith’s recent opus, War and Decision.

As you can imagine, Israel does not figure prominently in Feith’s book, and you would never guess from reading it that, as early as 1996, Feith — along with David Wurmser and their common mentor, Richard Perle — was already thinking that the ouster of Saddam Hussein was the key to transforming the regional balance of power decisively in favor of Israel, thus permitting a Likud-led Israel to make a “clean break” from the Oslo peace process and “secure the realm” of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, as well as its pre-1967 borders.

I don’t intend to review of the book, at least now. But the map that appears next to Feith’s “Introduction” depicting Iraq and its neighbors as of 2003 offers some insight into his worldview and Israel’s rightful place — or, more precisely, its size — within it:

Not much space for a Palestinian state, is there? Good strategic depth around Jerusalem. Looks like the Golan isn’t supposed to revert to Syria, either. No suggestion of occupation. It’s all Israeli.

Incidentally, In his book, Feith claims that it was Fred Ikle that got him the undersecretary for policy job, but I have it on excellent authority that it was Perle, the only man who Rumsfeld (who himself referred to the West Bank and Gaza as “so-called occupied territories”) believes is his intellectual equal, whose recommendation was decisive. And it’s good to know that the Washington Post still considers Perle credible enough to give him space on its op-ed page to warn against the perils of multilateralism in dealing with Iran, as it did today.

When Don Rumsfeld ruled over the Department of Defense, articles from the Daily Telegraph (and the Jerusalem Post) would often be featured in the Pentagon’s daily “Early Bird” compilation of important news stories that was then distributed throughout the national-security bureaucracy. Since Rumsfeld’s departure, however, the frequency with which Telegraph articles have appeared has diminished sharply, a measure, I believe, of the degree to which Robert Gates and his principal aides consider the publication credible, as opposed, say, to yet another media megaphone through which neo-conservatives and other hawks could shout their views and wage their “war of ideas” against liberals and other assorted enemies.

Now, the Telegraph has offered a soapbox to John Bolton who, consistent with his views of the past four or five months, still believes that George W. Bush will not order an attack on Iran before he leaves office, but also now argues that Israel will do so between the November elections and the inaugural of the new president, particularly if that president is Sen. Obama. “With McCain they might still be looking at a delay” beyond the inauguration, Bolton told the newspaper. “But, [g]iven that time is on Iran’s side, I think the argument for military action is sooner rather than later absent some other development.” Read the rest of this entry »