This week, Jeffrey Goldberg gave cover to Mitt Romney’s critique of public discussion about the consequences of going to war with Iran in Bloomberg News.
Goldberg wasn’t giving Romney a platform for his messaging; he agrees with the Republican nominee’s assessment:
Romney’s more potent criticism of Obama has more to [...]]]>
This week, Jeffrey Goldberg gave cover to Mitt Romney’s critique of public discussion about the consequences of going to war with Iran in Bloomberg News.
Goldberg wasn’t giving Romney a platform for his messaging; he agrees with the Republican nominee’s assessment:
Romney’s more potent criticism of Obama has more to do with statements made by Obama’s underlings. It is true, as Romney wrote, that administration officials have discussed publicly the risks of an American (or Israeli) attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. There are risks, of course — potentially catastrophic ones — of attacking. But it doesn’t help the American negotiating position to publicly telegraph to the Iranians these sorts of doubts.
Goldberg reiterated his stance in the Atlantic:
President Obama has been undermined from time to time by his own team on the Iran question — whenever a senior official of his administration analyzes publicly the dangers of a military confrontation to the U.S., we should assume the Iranian leaders breathe a sigh of relief, and make the calculations that Obama is bluffing on military action.
Not everyone agrees with Romney and Goldberg, whose flawed reporting about the alleged threat from Saddam Hussein in 2002 was referenced by US hawks to advance their case for war on Iraq. Indeed, prompted by Israel’s latest Iran-pressure campaign, the editorial board of USA Today urged for a real discussion about the military option’s consequences:
But the choice between hot and cold wars is exactly what needs to be discussed before the U.S. risks launching itself into another military morass. Look at the daunting consequences, and you see why Israelis are so divided:
But can the cons of publicly discussing an easily devastating war be more harmful than concealing the discussion from the public? Ali Gharib answers in the Daily Beast:
Were the administration not willing to publicly discuss the potential consequences with its public, then the threats better be a bluff—because to launch this war without a national dialogue would be a monumental disservice to American democracy, not to mention irresponsible. The stakes are simply too high: an eminent group of foreign policy heavyweights recently said an attack could spark an ”all-out regional war“; former top Israeli security officials say strikes could be counterproductive, spurring Iran to build the bomb, and justify it. That’s to say nothing of the incredible potential these scenarios—deemed likely by experts—hold for spilled American blood and treasure.
As does Ben Armbruster in ThinkProgress:
…having a thorough, thoughtful, honest and open discussion about the consequences of going to war with Iran only helps us and our allies. Democracies debate policy openly and freely, which actually could serve as a model for those Iranians looking for change. Openly discussing and knowing the consequences of attacking Iran doesn’t mean that President Obama won’t follow through with his policy of using all options available, including military force, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It means that he, his administration and the American people will be more informed about what the aftermath of a military attack would look like.
“If we’ve learned anything from the past decade of war in the Middle East, it’s that debates over our national security strengthen our policy and our democracy. Doing the opposite weakens it,” Rubin said.
Indeed, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” didn’t work out so well in 2003.
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In case you missed it, Robert Wright penned a sharp analysis of what can only be called Bibi Netanyahu’s Iran speech at the United Nations last week. Say what you will about the Israeli Prime Minister’s cartoon-like graphic-aid, but in the end Netanyahu publicly altered his own timeline for taking military [...]]]>
In case you missed it, Robert Wright penned a sharp analysis of what can only be called Bibi Netanyahu’s Iran speech at the United Nations last week. Say what you will about the Israeli Prime Minister’s cartoon-like graphic-aid, but in the end Netanyahu publicly altered his own timeline for taking military action against Iran:
]]>Still, none of this should obscure the upshot of Netanyahu’s talk: Without quite saying so, he has now backed off of the limb he had gotten himself out on. Whereas only weeks ago he was suggesting that Israel might bomb Iran before he finished his next sentence, the upshot of today’s speech was that Israel won’t bomb Iran before spring.
At least, that’s the only plausible interpretation of the speech that I can find. But reaching this conclusion requires disambiguating what was in some ways a confusing presentation
Robert Wright has an excellent piece at the Atlantic exploring the “hidden causes” of the protests against the United States across the Muslim world. The violence, which it’s important to emphasize is never excusable, is receiving little serious analysis in the mainstream media.
Robert Wright has an excellent piece at the Atlantic exploring the “hidden causes” of the protests against the United States across the Muslim world. The violence, which it’s important to emphasize is never excusable, is receiving little serious analysis in the mainstream media.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who sympathized with Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik back in May – published a cover story in this week’s Newsweek titled, “Muslim Rage & The Last Gasp of Islamic Hate.” She wrote:
The Muslim men and women (and yes, there are plenty of women) who support — whether actively or passively — the idea that blasphemers deserve to suffer punishment are not a fringe group. On the contrary, they represent the mainstream of contemporary Islam.
That type of simplistic analysis, says Wright, fails to ask or answer the real questions about why parts of the Muslim world hold deep-seated resentment towards the US. Wright blogs:
[W]hen a single offensive remark from someone you’ve long disliked can make you go ballistic, the explanation for this explosion goes deeper than the precipitating event. What are the sources of simmering hostility toward America that helped fuel these protests? Here is where you get to answers that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney wants to talk about and that, therefore, hardly anybody else talks about.
Wright goes on to list drone strikes, the US’s unconditional support of Israel (sometimes at the expense of progress in the peace process), and American troops in Muslim countries as some of the explanations for the eruption of anger. “…[W]hen American policies have bad side effects, Americans need to talk about them,” he writes.
Indeed, reflecting on US policies in the Middle East is a verboten topic during the presidential election. Mitt Romney, in comments surreptitiously recorded at a fundraiser and released this morning, quipped:
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.” And so what you do is you say, “You move things along the best way you can.” You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem… All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don’t go to war to try and resolve it imminently.
But the media and Obama and Romney’s unwillingness to publicly acknowledge the geopolitical dangers for the US in the Middle East does come at a a very human cost. Back in March 2010, Gen. David Petraeus set off a firestorm when his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee linked the lack of progress in the peace process with security risks for the US. Petraeus said:
Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
Petraeus’ comments, later echoed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CENTCOM commander Gen. James Matthis, were met with denunciations by Israel hawks. The Anti-Defamation League event went so far as to label Petraeus’ views as “dangerous and counterproductive.”
With anger in the Muslim world towards the US erupting over the past week, observers are left with two options: Accept an Islamophobic, if not outright racist, narrative of irrational Arab and Muslim anger towards the US or start asking tough questions about US policy, as well as US strategic interests, in the Middle East.
Some of the US’s most prominent strategic thinkers have already warned about the geopolitical and security dangers facing the US as a result of failed policies in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the TV news cycle and the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney appear to have little bandwidth to openly discuss the strategic challenges facing Americans in the Middle East, even while US diplomats are finding themselves in harms way.
]]>The different language used in the latest public row between Israeli and US officials is actually quite telling. The notion of a “deadline” rejected by Hillary Clinton suggests a time frame beyond which the Iran talks are declared useless, kicking into gear a shift to the attack mode. A “red [...]]]>
The different language used in the latest public row between Israeli and US officials is actually quite telling. The notion of a “deadline” rejected by Hillary Clinton suggests a time frame beyond which the Iran talks are declared useless, kicking into gear a shift to the attack mode. A “red line”, on the other hand, requires the specification of a point in technological advances, the crossing of which would elicit an attack.
Benjamin Netanyahu and officials from his government have used the term “red line” several times. It was inspired by Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s rather vague notion of the “zone of immunity,” which presumably has to do with circumstances under which Israel would judge Iran’s key nuclear facilities so fortified as to make the country’s “capability” to build a bomb immune to attacks. In other words, a red line is when a military attack on the country would become ineffective or impossible.
But, true to form, Israeli officials have been quite vague in terms of exactly what would constitute nuclear capability. Indeed, despite all the talk regarding red lines, no one really knows what the Israeli threshold is. Meanwhile this vagueness is critical to the argument that Obama is not doing enough to assure Israel. Just take a look at this exchange between two hard line supporters of Israel:
Goldberg: Come back to red lines. What would your red line be if you were the Israeli prime minister, and what would your red line be if you were the American president?
Satloff: Thankfully, I am neither, just a humble think-tank director. The rub is that America and Israel have similar and complementary interests but not identical interests; the threshold for risk to be borne by a great power thousands of miles away and a small though potent regional power in the neighborhood are different; and therefore the red lines the Israeli prime minister and American president will lay down will necessarily be different. Especially at this hyper-politicized moment, when President Obama is allergic to the idea of deepening foreign entanglements, it is highly unlikely that he could begin to approach the sort of commitment-to-use-military-force-when-Iran-crosses-a-certain-enrichment-threshold that PM Netanyahu would like to hear.
In short, the only clues we have are that the Israeli red line is “necessarily” lower than the US’s red line and that it entails Iran crossing into a “certain enrichment threshold.” To boot, instead of answering the question about the Israeli red line, the onus is placed on the Obama administration since it “has not drawn a red line based on a clear definition of what preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon really means in practice”.
The bottom line: the Israelis have a red line that is lower than the US’ and this red line has something to do with nuclear capability and enrichment. But it is the Obama Administration that is faulted for not clearly defining what “acquiring a nuclear weapon” means!
It is easy to see how the framing of the game in terms of red lines has the making of a very bad marriage for the Obama Administration, which Robert Satloff condescendingly concedes is “allergic to deepening foreign entanglements” as though it is not also the mood of the country. By remaining deliberately ambiguous about the Israeli red line, the stage is set for a rather bad relationship in which one side is always the needy and nagging party while the other cannot stop the nagging no matter how much it gives, short of a military attack on Iran.
It is in this context that Clinton’s clever switch of language to deadlines becomes significant. No more rhetorical maneuvers regarding conflicting thresholds that no one is willing to define. The red line Netanyahu wants is actually a time frame for US military action and this is not what the Obama Administration, or any US administration for that matter, should be willing to give to anyone; not even to its highly insecure and demanding partner.
]]>Michael Ledeen, Foreign Affairs: The neoconservative pundit has been arguing for years that the US should foment regime change [...]]]>
Michael Ledeen, Foreign Affairs: The neoconservative pundit has been arguing for years that the US should foment regime change in Iran byway of direct or indirect US support to Iranian dissident groups. This month he reiterates that argument while evaluating the Green Movement as a potential carrier for his proposal. The following are some of Ledeen’s key points (notice how he begins by stating that sanctions have been ineffective and will likely remain so and ends by arguing that the US’s “sanction regime” should continue anyway):
- Yet history suggests, and even many sanctions advocates agree, that sanctions will not compel Iran’s leaders to scrap their nuclear program.
- And, although war might bring down the regime, it is neither necessary nor desirable. Supporting a domestic revolution is a wiser strategy.
- Given the potential for a successful democratic revolution in Iran — and the potential for a democratic government to end Iran’s war against us — the question is how the United States and its allies can best support the Green Movement.
- …the time has come for the United States and other Western nations to actively support Iran’s democratic dissidents.
- Meanwhile, the West should continue nuclear negotiations and stick to the sanctions regime, which shows the Iranian people resistance to their oppressive leaders.
- Iran’s democratic revolutionaries themselves must decide what kind of Western help they most need, and how to use it. But they will be greatly encouraged to see the United States and its allies behind them. There are many good reasons to believe that this strategy can succeed. Not least, the Iranian people have already demonstrated their willingness to confront the regime; the regime’s behavior shows its fear of the people. The missing link is a Western decision to embrace and support democratic revolution in Iran — the country that, after all, initiated the challenge to the region’s tyrants three summers ago.
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal: For months the Journal’s editorial board published hawkish articles about Iran on a weekly basis. We highlighted some of them here, here and here. Then they stopped, perhaps due to the heating up of the presidential campaign and the crisis in Syria. But in July the board returned to reminding readers about its hawkish position on Iran, first by arguing that current sanctions are not strong enough and filled with “loopholes” while advocating for more “pain”, and then by claiming that Congress should propose the “toughest” sanctions bill possible to the President, considering how he may be a “pretender on sanctioning the mullahs”. (The “Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act” was passed this week and is expected to be signed into law by Obama shortly. As noted by the Jewish Telegraph Association, “for the first time in actionable legislation, the measure defines the capability of building a nuclear weapon as posing a threat to the United States”, which of course brings the US closer to the Israeli “red line” on Iran):
The Administration will resist these stiffer penalties, as it has consistently resisted previous Congressional attempts to impose the harshest possible sanctions. But that’s all the more reason for the conferees to present the President with the toughest bill possible, and see where he really stands.
If Mr. Obama is a pretender on sanctioning the mullahs, then you can be sure he isn’t inclined to stop their nuclear program by other means. The Israelis will draw their own conclusions, if they haven’t already.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies: The neoconservative-dominated Washington think tank that has been working hard to shape the Obama administration’s Iran sanctions policy (through executive director Mark Dubowitz) congratulates Congress for passing the “compromise bill” mentioned above because it brings the US closer to implementing Dubowitz’s recipe for ”economic warfare” against the Iranian regime:
“But Iranian nuclear physics is beating Western economic pressure and diplomacy, as the centrifuges keep spinning, and the Iranian regime continues its campaign of murder abroad and at home. While this bill is an important step towards economic warfare against the Iranian regime, much more needs to be done. Iran’s leaders need to be persuaded that the U.S. is committed to using every instrument of state power to counter the Iranian threat.”
Dan Senor, New York Times: The former Iraq war hawk turned Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser (see two recent profiles here and here) drew media attention last week for alleging that Romney respected Israel’s right to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to the NYT’s politics blog:
“If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision,” Mr. Senor said.
Previewing Mr. Romney’s remarks, Mr. Senor explained: “It is not enough just to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program. The capability, even if that capability is short of weaponization, is a pathway to weaponization, and the capability gives Iran the power it needs to wreak havoc in the region and around the world.”
As the Times notes, the Romney campaign tried to walk back those comments somewhat, but Robert Wright at the Atlantic didn’t buy the damage control effort.
]]>In the interview, Meir Dagan said that, contrary the contention made by of [...]]]>
The former head of Israel’s vaunted Mossad spy agency told the Atlantic magazine that an attack on Iran would not spur the Iranian people to rise up against the regime and could cause the international sanctions regime imposed against Iran to crumble.
In the interview, Meir Dagan said that, contrary the contention made by of many Iran hawks, should Israel attack Iran, the population may well rally behind the regime. He went on to say, in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, that the U.S.-led international sanctions regimen imposed on Iran would crumble in the face of an attack, making pursuit of a nuclear weapon easier for the Islamic Republic. Goldberg writes:
Some senior Israeli officials have argued to me that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities might actually trigger the eventual downfall of the regime. Dagan predicts the opposite: “Judging by the war Iran fought against Iraq, even people who supported the Shah, even the Communists, joined hands with (Ayatollah) Khomeini to fight Saddam,” he said, adding, “In case of an attack, political pressure on the regime will disappear. If Israel will attack, there is no doubt in my mind that this will also provide them with the justification to go ahead and move quickly to nuclear weapons.” He also predicted that the sanctions program engineered principally by President Obama may collapse as a result of an Israeli strike, which would make it easier for Iran to obtain the material necessary for it to cross the nuclear threshold.
Dagan’s previously said that an attack could “ignite… a regional war” and “could accelerate the procurement of the bomb” by Iran because it would “provide them with the legitimacy to achieve nuclear capabilities for military purposes.” That puts him in line with the former head of Israel’s internal security service, and the former head of Israel’s military intelligence service. Perhaps taking their cues from predecessors, a majority of Israel’s current security chiefs reportedly oppose an attack on Iran.
A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of pressure and diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis.
]]>- This means, among other things, that the tapes do not include an account of how the plot was first initiated and how it evolved from the kidnapping plot, which Arbabsiar said in his confession that he was he first instructed to set up, to an assassination. Who first raised the idea of using explosives in the assassination? Arbabsiar is charged with intent to use weapons of mass destruction — in this case, the bombing. But with these key conversations never recorded, it’s difficult or impossible to prove who first suggested the most damning details that legally turned a kidnapping plot into a terrorism plot.
Wheeler also wonders why Arbabsiar cooperated so quickly and willingly with the authorities. The evidence might be in the original complaint in the case, writes Wheeler, but it remains sealed.
- But we don’t yet understand why a man arrested — purportedly for an assassination attempt — waived his right to a lawyer and within hours started to give the government all the evidence it needed to fill in any gaps in their case. His cooperation is all the more curious given that four of the five charges against him (the fifth is using interstate commerce to arrange a murder for hire) are conspiracy charges that probably couldn’t have been charged before Arbabsiar implicated Shakuri. The government surely could have charged him with other things, such as wire fraud, without the conspiracy charges. So why would Arbabsiar provide the evidence for four new charges against him that could put himself in prison for life?
One document that might explain Arbabsiar’s motives for cooperating is the original complaint in this case. The document that’s been publicly released is actually an amended complaint written 12 days after his arrest, presumably written to incorporate Shakuri in the charges based on Arbabsiar’s cooperation. But in a rather unusual move, the first complaint against Arbabsiar remains sealed — meaning we don’t know when the government first charged him or for what — with the approval of the Chief Judge in Manhattan, possibly in an entirely different docket (the amended complaint is entry number 1 in this docket). Thus, it is possible that Arbabsiar was originally charged for a completely unrelated crime — perhaps the opium deal. And it is possible Arbabsiar was charged much earlier than his arrest on September 29. As a result, we don’t know what kind of incentives the government might have offered Arbabsiar for his testimony.
Read more.
]]>Goldberg is indignant that Aslan suggests, based on revelations about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in WikiLeaks cables, that the boisterous president may not be as evil as many commentators in the West — particularly pundits, [...]]]>
Jeffrey Goldberg, a prominent hawkish Israeli-American journalist, has written a post responding to a Reza Aslan piece on The Atlantic website.
Goldberg is indignant that Aslan suggests, based on revelations about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in WikiLeaks cables, that the boisterous president may not be as evil as many commentators in the West — particularly pundits, like Goldberg, close to the Israel lobby — make him out to be. Aslan contends that, according to this new evidence, Ahmadinejad may be more amiable to a nuclear deal and some increased freedoms for Iranians than previously thought.
Goldberg, of course, seizes on Alsan’s passage about Ahmadinejad’s oft-cited quote about ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ Aslan notes that, in the Farsi context, this phrase is not quite as incendiary as it is portrayed in the West — though Aslan admits that a more proper translation would bring little comfort to Westerners.
Ignoring Aslan’s important qualification, Goldberg lashes out. He exaggerates and gives evidence to support his view that Ahmadinejad is a “Holocaust-denying, eliminationist anti-Semitic Iranian president.” There should be ample citable examples to support such a view, but Goldberg doesn’t employ them. Instead, he gives a series of unsourced, unlinked quotes from Ahmadinejad. Some of the quotes seem to be of dubious origin.
First, Goldberg starts out with a hyperbolic interpretation of what Aslan is saying, and pillories it (Goldberg loves his straw-men). He hauls out a laundry list of Ahmadinejad’s statements that call for an end to the “Zionist regime.” But he has pulled out this exact same list twice before–with one new quote added this time around. That strikes me as a bit lazy (it’s the internet, dude, you can link back to your old posts) and a bit dishonest (you could at least acknowledge that you’ve essentially written the same column twice before).
I don’t want to defend these comments from Ahmadinejad, but there’s something here that needs to be unpacked: Calling for the end of the “Zionist regime” is calling for an end to a state that is driven by a particular ideology. This is called ‘regime change’ and people like Goldberg and his allies in the hawkish pro-Israel camp support this concept all the time.
Of course, Goldberg says this that list of pronouncements by Ahmadinejad are things that the president has “said about Israel and Jews in the last several years.” But that’s not exactly true: In the 20 examples, the word “Jew(s)” is never used; “Israel,” or some derivative, is used four times, with three of the four in either parenthesis or brackets (Goldberg, or whoever compiled this list for him some years ago, was not consistent). Instead, the quotes from Ahmadinejad that Goldberg uses refer mostly to the “Zionist regime.”
Goldberg is widely considered a liberal Zionst (as well as “one of the most influential Jewish journalists working in mainstream media”), and Zionism is, of course, an ideology. Goldberg’s fervent Zionism seems to intellectually confine him. It’s not actually so unusual for one state to call for an end to the ideological underpinnings of a hostile state– this is exactly what Goldberg and others of his ilk do from their own perspective. Those pundits, of course, want an end to the Islamic Republic. A reformed Islamic Republic, even one that might be less likely to pursue nuclear weapons or hostility towards Israel, is not good enough — they demand a secular state bereft of an official Islamic religion. That is what ‘regime change’ in the case of Iran is all about.
Back to Goldberg’s list: I am also afraid that I have to question the veracity of his quotes. In none of the three blog posts does Goldberg provide any sources. Each quote is accompanied by just a month and year. So I punched a bunch of the quotes into Google using Goldberg’s wordings. Take this item from Goldberg’s list:
July 2006: “Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won’t take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map… The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region’s nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide.”
If you stick this into Google, without the date intro, you’ll get about 200 hits (not that many, relatively speaking). You might expect the top one to be a well trafficked or reputable news site — well, you’d be sort of right. The first hit is a website for Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), and the Google cache points you to a version of the site with a reprinted Daily Caller column from August (which could easily be citing Goldberg). The second hit is Goldberg himself. Then comes the blogspots, hokey right-wing websites like EMPACT America (dedicated to the overhyped EMP threat), and the Christian Zionist pages like “The Bible Teaching Ministry of David Hocking“, “Bible Searchers”, and even some Christian Zionist blogspots!
I don’t have time to run through all the quotes, so I’ll just let that one stand, and challenge my esteemed colleague (much more esteemed than I) to give some sources for his oft-used list of quotes (even if they’re from MEMRI). If he’d like to draft a new list, I’d point him to the website for the right-leaning pro-Israel advocacy website The Israel Project. At least when they compile Ahmadinejad quotes, they’re not so lazy, and provide sources and links.
But maybe that’s why Goldberg keeps doing the same post over and over again: If you repeat something often enough, especially on the internet, people will start to think that it’s true.
]]>Because I got hung up in New York Wednesday morning, I hit rush hour traffic on the Beltway coming into DC, and arrived late for the opening session of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘s Washington Forum on “Countering the Iranian Threat.”
Nothing out of the ordinary during last night’s cocktail outing at the Ritz-Carlton, where in an adjacent conference area, two Barhraini gentlemen stood in white robes and head-dresses greeting people for an event sponsored by that government. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) event is your run-of-the-mill blue chip neoconservative conference at the high-endest of high-end Washington hotels.
As I looked closely at the final schedule, I was rather struck by the speakers’ list.
The New York Times‘s David Sanger — who just co-wrote a controversial story about Iran – will moderate a panel. Jeffry Goldberg, another mainstream journalist and no stranger to controversial stories on Iran, will be on a panel with perhaps the most strident advocate of immediate attacks on Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht.
From officialdom, U.S. WMD czar and the former vice president of United Against a Nuclear Iran, Gary Samore, will address the crowd on Friday morning.
Naturally, the right wing of the foreign policy establishment is represented as well. Iran Policy Committee head Raymond Tanter, a tireless advocate of the Mojehedeen-e Khalq (MEK), was at the cocktail. And the Hudson Institute‘s I. Lewis Scooter Libby — formerly then-Vice President Dick Cheney‘s chief of staff who was convicted of lying to investigators in the PlameGate scandal — was in attendance for Thursday morning’s panels, as was Patrick Clawson of the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Of course there is the FDD roster itself: Gerecht (who was seen chatting in the lobby on Thursday morning with neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake), Cliff May, Michael Ledeen, and all the others.
But what really piqued my interest was an FDD fundraiser scheduled for Thursday night at the home of an unnamed ambassador to the United States.
Here’s what the schedule has to say:
7:00 pm
Dinner at the residence of one
of Washington’s noteworthy Ambassadors
(Closed to Media)
(Minimum $5,000 gift required. Contribute here, or for more information on becoming a donor, please contact XXXXXXX)
FDD’s communications director, Judy Mayka, told me on Wednesday night that just which ambassador is hosting the $5,000 a plate fund-raiser is such a closely guarded secret that even she didn’t know. I’ll update as I find out more.
However, Thursday morning’s session featured Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who made the case for more robust U.S. assistance to Israel on missile defense. He received spontaneous mid-presentation applause — a rarity at these Washington panels.
Given the focus on Israel for FDD and many of its scholars — and the neoconservative movement from which they emerge — it’s not a stretch to put the early odds that Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren will play host to tonight’s big money FDD donors.
Otherwise, what I caught of the opening panel was rather unremarkable. Former Regean administration national security advisor Bud McFarlane spoke about impending threats and FDD’s unique ability to confront them:
We’re going, in the next two years, to face a threat from Iran, North Korea… We’re probably going to face a disruption of the oil supply…
Nobody else in Washington has the reach and the depth and the solutions that will get us out of this.
Mark Dubowitz, FDD’s executive director, ran down the group’s roster and sang their praises. He joked, as anti-anti-Semitism activist Irwin Cotler did on Thursday morning, about being a Canadian. Threats against Iran were not totally absent, but Dubowitz delivered them with a metaphor:
There’s no silver bullet for solving this problem, but there might be silver shrapnel.
Knowing some of the views of FDD staff and experts, some of the panel titles read like rhetorical questions:
- Sanctions: What’s Next?
Is enforcement enough?- Increasing Threats, Diminishing Options: Should the Military Option be Employed against Iran?
When does this become the only option?
Dubowitz confirmed the militarist bent of FDD when he closed out Wednesday night’s opening cocktail reception: “We’re not just a think tank. We like to think of ourselves as a ‘battle tank’.”
]]>Fisher specifically refers to a recent pronouncement by U.S. born and Yemen-based AQAP leader Anwar al-Awlaki, the inspiration behind several attacks against the U.S. in the past year.
Fisher writes:
In a video posted to jihadi forums on Monday, Anwar al-Awlaki, an ideological leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and influential figure to allied jihadist groups worldwide, denounced Iran. He urged his followers to place the Iranian regime in the same category as traditional al-Qaeda target, “the American occupation.”
Bu- bu- but they’re all “jihadists”!
]]>