by Jim Lobe
Just as this week marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as noted Wednesday by Amb. Hunter, it also marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the “Great War” that, among other things, began the long (and often bloody) process of dismantling the imperial [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Just as this week marks the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as noted Wednesday by Amb. Hunter, it also marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the “Great War” that, among other things, began the long (and often bloody) process of dismantling the imperial system that had dominated the pre-war international system. The war had many causes, but historians have generally ranked excessive nationalism — and the militarism that went along with it — pretty high on the list. While reactionary and conservative forces in each country were clearly bullish on the war from the outset, the speed and enthusiasm with which liberals and socialists throughout Europe rallied to the cause, in spite of the universalist principles that they had long espoused, offered testimony to the extraordinary magnetism of the nationalist impulse.
As I have argued previously, most neoconservatives, despite their mainly opportunistic avowals of democracy and universal rights, are exceedingly nationalistic, not to say downright chauvinist, with regard both to the United States — whose moral “exceptionalism” they believe should exempt it from the constraints of international institutions (like the UN) and international law — and to Israel, which they routinely depict as a lonely island of “democracy” and “civilization” surrounded by a raging sea of barbarism and extremism, struggling against all odds simply to survive. Virtually any means the latter’s leaders deem necessary, including violations of the laws of war as documented by independent human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (as we have seen over the past several weeks in the third Israeli war in Gaza in six years), to defeat its enemies are not only defensible, but, in the words of neocon princeling Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel, “just,” as well.
Coinciding with the Great War’s centenary, the expression of this kind of militaristic nationalism — and the mantras about “civilization” versus the ”barbarism” or “terror” of the enemy — vividly recalls the rhetoric used by both the western imperialist powers whenever they encountered violent resistance by the “natives” as they conquered most of what is now referred to as the “Global South” from the “Age of Discovery” onwards, as well as the propaganda offices of the main combatants during the war itself (just check out the war posters) would seem potentially embarrassing to the core neocon messages about the exceptional nature of the United States and Israel.
And thus it was particularly notable when, in the very first issue of the Weekly Standard of 2014, Kristol carried out what might be called a pre-emptive strike against what he thought might prove to be a major theme — the futility and stupidity of nationalism and war — in this year’s commemoration of the Great War. In the lead editorial entitled “Pro Patria,” he rued the impact of the war on the West’s morale, blaming it for what he called “civilizational decline” and quoting with approval the ode by Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”), which had been bitterly denounced in a famous poem by Wilfred Owen, a British soldier-poet, as an “old lie.” Kristol warned:
This year, a century later, the commemorations of 1914 will tend to take that [Owen’s] rejection of piety and patriotism for granted. Or could this year mark a moment of questioning, even of reversal?
Today, after all, we see the full consequences of that rejection in a way Owen and his contemporaries could not. Can’t we acknowledge the meaning, recognize the power, and learn the lessons of 1914 without succumbing to an apparently inexorable gravitational pull toward a posture of ironic passivity or fatalistic regret in the face of civilizational decline. No sensitive person can fail to be moved by Owen’s powerful lament, and no intelligent person can ignore his chastening rebuke. But perhaps a century of increasingly unthinking bitter disgust with our heritage is enough.
Kristol goes on to contrast Owen’s denunciation of war and nationalism to the concluding stanza of the “Star-Spangled Banner” penned 200 years ago by Francis Scott Key in celebration of the Battle of Fort McHenry — “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just/ And this be our motto: “In God is our trust” — and asks:
A century after World War I, two centuries after Fort McHenry, do we dare take our bearings not from Owen’s bitter despair but from Francis Scott Key’s bold hope?
The essay, of course, raises not a few questions about what exactly Kristol — the quintessential chicken hawk – has in mind. No doubt he sees the “full consequences” of Owen’s attitude as including the reigning anti-war sentiment that facilitated the rise of Fascism and German Nazism in Europe in the 1930s, which, in turn, eventually resulted in an even greater war. But the “full consequences” also included the beginning of the end of European imperialism — a very oppressive system for the vast majority of the world’s population. Of course, true to his neoconservative worldview — and the fact that the State of Israel was made possible by that same system (the Balfour Declaration and all that) — Kristol clearly sees the decline of western imperialism (“civilizational decline”) as a great tragedy.
Similarly, Kristol’s celebration of the theo-nationalist spirit expressed in what became the US national anthem as an unreservedly healthy tonic for today’s popular disillusionment with wars, especially those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and over Libya, all of which he so ardently championed, is subject to different understandings. While he no doubt sees Key’s exhortation to “conquer” as applying solely today to the US, Israel, and “the West” more generally, there is no reason to think that the sentiment expressed therein is not shared by Palestinians, including Hamas militants, Arab nationalists, or, frankly, any jihadis who claim that God, or Allah, and justice are on their side. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria [and deus] mori” was not only a Roman proverb frequently invoked by denizens of the British Empire many centuries later; it’s been an inspiration to ardent nationalists and believers of all nations, creeds and religious persuasions, especially those, one might observe, who face tremendous odds in overcoming a far more powerful foreign oppressor. Indeed, is Horace’s (and Kristol’s) affirmation, conceptually at least, so very different from that line in the Islamic Resistance Movement’s (a/k/a Hamas) charter that asserts: “Death for the sake of Allah is its most coveted desire,” as was noted most disapprovingly just this week by Kristol’s fellow-Likudist, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, in one of a flood of neocon and Israeli efforts to justify Israel’s hugely destructive campaign in Gaza?
For those who are more interested in Kristol’s notions of nationalism and its importance, it’s worth noting that he will be offering an intensive course entitled “The Case for Nationalism” on the subject from Dec. 8-12 for just $3,000 for non-Israelis. The course, which is co-sponsored by the Hertog Foundation — Roger Hertog is a board member of both the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Commentary magazine, among other neoconservative associations — and the Tikvah Fund, whose faculty and speakers constitute a veritable who’s who of the Jewish neoconservative world, will take place at (and given his nostalgia for the British Empire, Kristol will love this) King George Street 44 in (West) Jerusalem.
Here’s the rather bewildering, not to mention historically and intellectually dubious (but rhetorically very Straussian), course description, which I necessarily quote at length:
Led by Dr. William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the leading public intellectuals in America, this institute will examine the political and moral questions surrounding nationalism and nation-states. The course will begin by examining the case for and against nationalism, drawing upon some of the major works of modern political theory. It will then look in detail at three “regimes”—Europe, America, and modern Israel—drawing upon a mix of classic texts, speeches, and case studies.
In Europe, we see the dominant moral and political idea of our age—“human rights”—in its most advanced form. All persons everywhere are entitled to equal dignity and equal protections. The most dangerous threats to human rights—terror and empire, religious extremism, natural catastrophe, market dysfunction—all transcend national borders. Human rights cannot be secured by nations, and excessive national pride is a threat to the new ideal of the free, sovereign, cosmopolitan individual. The nation must be overcome and replaced by a centralized governing body that is large enough to protect global citizens from global threats.
In America, we see the ideals of universal liberty and natural rights combined with a belief in the exceptional character and special responsibilities of the American nation. Does American power serve the interests of world order? Do Americans believe in their own exceptionalism, or do they seek to become a nation among the nations?
The question of nationalism takes on special significance for citizens of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Zionism is a form of nationalism, and the founding of Israel represents the culmination of ancient longings for the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. But it was also founded in partial response to World War II and the Shoah it perpetrated on European Jewry. If the intellectual architects of the European Union believe that the national form causes violence and stands in the way of a more harmonious world, the intellectual architects of the State of Israel believed the opposite—that only a state dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people will ensure their welfare and prosperity.
Taken together, these urgent questions invite us to think about the deepest meaning and true character of political life, returning us yet again to the great texts and thinkers who illuminated the problems of politics with greatest clarity and force.
Of course, the belief by the architects of the European Union that nationalism can contribute to violence and “stands in the way of a more harmonious world” is based in large part on the lessons drawn from both the Great War and its successor. And doesn’t a state “dedicated to the protection” of one people foster violence and stand in the way of a more harmonious world if that “protection” translates into actively defeating the legitimate national aspirations of another people, denying their own self-determination, and occupying them militarily and colonizing their territory in violation of international law? Isn’t that the kind of question we should be pondering in this centenary year?
If you can’t get to the seminar, Kristol’s latest editorial offers what I suppose is his much-abbreviated lesson in the form of an extended quotation by Douglas Murray, the associate director of the London-based Henry Jackson Society of which Kristol, among many other prominent US neoconservatives, is an “International Patron:”
Israel is surrounded by enemies, as we have been for much of our history. But today we like to think that enemies are a thing of the past. There are no enemies, just phobias we haven’t been cured of yet.
A gap may well be emerging. But not because Israel has drifted away from the West. Rather because today in much of the West, as we bask in the afterglow of our achievements—eager to enjoy our rights, but unwilling to defend them—it is the West that is, slowly but surely, drifting away from itself.
Today Israel is also distinguished by a deep sense of its values and ethics as well as a profound awareness of their source—things we also used to have. Deep questions of survival, the tragedy and triumph of the past, present and future remain the stuff of every Israeli house I have ever been to. . . .
[I]t is Israel that remains the truly western country. It is Israel which takes its history seriously, thinks deeply about where it is going and what it exists for. It is Israel which takes western values seriously and fights for the survival of those values. . . . [I]t is Israel that is still truly a western country. Far more than many parts of western Europe now are.
Wow. Today’s Israel apparently would have felt right at home in August 1914.
Photo: Willy Werner’s depiction of “Flanders Fields.” Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Canadian Press
]]>by Jim Lobe
As some readers may recall, I wrote a long essay shortly after last July’s military coup d’etat against Egypt’s democratically elected Morsi government on differing attitudes within the neoconservative movement toward the coup and democracy itself. Given the complete lack of consensus among leading neocons as to how [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
As some readers may recall, I wrote a long essay shortly after last July’s military coup d’etat against Egypt’s democratically elected Morsi government on differing attitudes within the neoconservative movement toward the coup and democracy itself. Given the complete lack of consensus among leading neocons as to how the U.S. should react to the coup — indeed, the fact that most neocons favored the coup and urged Washington to maintain its military assistance to the coupists — I concluded, contrary to conventional wisdom and the way that neocons have often sought to depict themselves, that “democracy promotion can’t possibly be considered a core principle of neoconservatism.” I followed that up a month later with a short post noting how the two “princelings” of the neoconservative movement and co-founders of both the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and its successor organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol, had themselves split on the issue, with Kristol (citing Israel’s position) expressing doubt about the wisdom of cutting military aid, and Kagan demanding that it be cut.
Kristol hasn’t had much to say about Egypt recently, but Kagan came out in yesterday’s Washington Post with a stunning denunciation (also featured on FPI’s website) not only of continuing U.S. military aid for Egypt, but also of lobbying by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Congress for continuing that assistance AND of Israel’s support for the regime. The op-ed, entitled “A Partnership That Damages the U.S.”, is particularly critical of Israel’s attitude toward both Egypt and democracy in the region, something that the ironically named (and Likudist) Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) may wish to consider. Here are the relevant paragraphs:
Many members of Congress also believe that by backing the Egyptian military they are helping Israel, which, through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has actively lobbied Congress for full restoration of military aid. Even though the Morsi government did not pull out of the Camp David Accords or take actions hostile to Israel, the mere presence of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt frightened the Israeli government.
To Israel, which has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel, the presence of a brutal military dictatorship bent on the extermination of Islamism is not only tolerable but desirable. Perhaps from the standpoint of a besieged state like Israel, this may be understandable. A friendly observer might point out that in the end Israel may get the worst of both worlds: a new Egyptian jihadist movement brought into existence by the military’s crackdown and a military government in Cairo that, playing to public opinion, winds up turning against Israel anyway.
Israel has to be the judge of its own best interests. But so does the United States. In Egypt, U.S. interests and Israel’s perceptions of its own interests sharply diverge. If one believes that any hope for moderation in the Arab world requires finding moderate voices not only among secularists but also among Islamists, America’s current strategy in Egypt is producing the opposite result. If one believes, as President Obama once claimed to, that it is important to seek better understanding between the United States and the Muslim world and to avoid or at least temper any clash of civilizations, then again this policy is producing the opposite result. [Emphasis added.]
It’s really a remarkable column that deserves to be read in full because of its very trenchant critique of Obama’s policy as well. If only it represented a preponderance of neoconservative opinion, which it unfortunately doesn’t.
Kagan is writing in the context of a whole lot of bad human-rights news coming out of Egypt in recent weeks in spite of which the Obama administration approved the delivery of 10 Apache helicopters, the transfer of which was held up by a partial suspension of military aid to the regime last fall. Since then, Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs the key Senate subcommittee that oversees foreign aid appropriations, has called for halting all military aid, including those items, like the helicopters, that are supposedly earmarked for “counter-terrorism.” As noted by Kagan, AIPAC is lobbying on behalf of the Netanyahu government against such a cut-off.
Indeed, for AIPAC’s (and Israel’s) talking points, you need look no further than a policy analysis entitled, “Resuming Military Aid to Egypt: A Strategic Imperative”, published this week by Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank spun off by AIPAC in the 1980s but still very much in the lobby group’s orbit. While Trager predictably deplores the abuses that have taken place, he argues, dubiously, that somehow the military is not accountable for them because of the “severely fractured …competing power centers” that supposedly characterize the Egyptian state at the moment. He goes on:
]]>…[W]ithholding aid could still jeopardize Washington’s ability to ensure Egypt’s longer-term cooperation. For one thing, Russia is trying to expand its influence in the Middle East by selling weapons to Cairo, and various Persian Gulf states — which have sent billions in aid to keep the current Egyptian government afloat — are strongly supporting Moscow’s efforts. Moreover, after years of refusing to do so, the Egyptian military has been actively fighting Sinai-based jihadists since September, so withholding aid now would send a very confusing message about Washington’s strategic priorities. The United States also stands to lose other strategic benefits if the aid is withheld, including overflight rights and preferred access to the Suez Canal.
by Jim Lobe
In a remarkable demonstration of the the increasingly vulnerable state into which AIPAC appears to have thrown itself, the Israel lobby’s premier group released a new statement this afternoon clarifying that it still supports the Kirk-Menendez “Wag the Dog” Act less than 24 hours after announcing [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
In a remarkable demonstration of the the increasingly vulnerable state into which AIPAC appears to have thrown itself, the Israel lobby’s premier group released a new statement this afternoon clarifying that it still supports the Kirk-Menendez “Wag the Dog” Act less than 24 hours after announcing that it no longer supported an immediate vote on the legislation.
The statement came as two hard-line neoconservative (and Republican) groups — Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the Republican Jewish Coalition — implicitly denounced AIPAC for its retreat. The latest AIPAC statement, issued in the name of its president, Michael Kassen, suggests that it is being whipsawed between its Republican neoconservative supporters, who are used to getting their way in the organization, and its desire to remain in the good graces of key Democrats who have been increasingly alienated and angered by the degree to which Republicans are aggressively seeking to make Iran (and Israel) a partisan issue.
One very interesting question raised by the latest developments is whether AIPAC sought Bibi Netanyahu’s blessing before its statement yesterday opposing immediate action on the Kirk-Menendez bill. That AIPAC should feel compelled to make such a public statement just three weeks before its annual policy conference here will likely add to the impression among its members — 14,000 of whom are supposed to attend — that the group was not only defeated — at least for now — in its biggest legislative fight against a president of the past two decades, but that it also suffers from an indecisive and uncertain leadership typical of large organizations that have grown overconfident in their power when suddenly confronted with a major setback.
Here’s AIPAC’s latest:
I am writing today to correct some mischaracterizations in the press regarding our position on the Senate Iran bill. Some have suggested that by not calling for an immediate vote on the legislation, we have abandoned our support for the bill. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, we remain strongly committed to the passage of the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act. This legislation is one important part of a broad strategy that we have pursued over many years to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. As negotiations for a final agreement with Iran begin, we must—and will—continue our efforts on every front to ensure that any deal with Iran guarantees the dismantlement of its nuclear infrastructure and blocks its path to a bomb.
Yesterday, Senator Menendez—who along with Senator Kirk is the lead sponsor of the legislation—delivered a forceful speech on the Senate floor, in which he outlined what such a deal must include. In response, we issued a statement applauding Chairman Menendez’s leadership. We strongly support his assessment of the threat, his commitment to the critical role Congress must play, and his path to passage of the legislation, which includes building broad bipartisan support.
I want to thank you for your hard work thus far in earning the support of 59 senators for the Menendez-Kirk bill. We still have much work to do over the coming months. It will be a long struggle, but one that we are committed to fighting.
We will continue to work closely with friends on both sides of the aisle, in both the House and Senate, to ensure that everything is done to prevent a nuclear weapons-capable Iran.
Sincerely,
Michael Kassen
AIPAC President
Now, I personally didn’t see any press reports that asserted that AIPAC was withdrawing its support for the bill; only that it had withdrawn its support for an immediate vote on it. So what provoked this “correct[ion]?” I assume it was the remarkably hasty way in which AIPAC beat its retreat — less than two hours after Sen. Menendez delivered his floor speech in which he rued the attempt by his Republican colleagues to use the bill as a bludgeon against Democrats even as he himself stood it. While I had assumed that Menendez and AIPAC had choreographed the sequence of statements in advance — after all, Menendez was the Senate’s biggest beneficiary of pro-Israel PACS associated with AIPAC in 2012 — AIPAC’s announcement appeared to leave a number of its critical allies, such as The Israel Project (TIP), United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), and not least the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — all of which have lobbied for immediate passage of the bill, hanging out there with a position that it had abandoned — hanging out to dry. (Remarkably, TIP’s “Daily Tip” — its news digest — completely ignored Menendez’s speech and AIPAC’s statement.)
But while those groups maintained silence Friday, ECI and RJC came out swinging, suggesting that AIPAC’s concerns about maintaining its bipartisan appeal were foolish. Here’s ECI’s statement “on the withdrawal of Democratic support for a vote on the Senate Iran sanctions bill,” issued in the name of Kristol himself:
We commend 42 [Republican] Senators for their strong letter demanding a vote on S. 1881, the bipartisan Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, which has been cosponsored by more than half of the Senate. The bill is simple and reasonable. It would reimpose existing sanctions suspended under the interim agreement if Iran cheats; it would ensure that a final agreement requires Iran to dismantle its illicit nuclear infrastructure; and it promises to impose additional economic sanctions in the future should Iran fail to agree to a final deal that dismantles its nuclear infrastructure.
As the Senators put it in their letter to the Majority Leader, ‘Now we have come to a crossroads. Will the Senate allow Iran to keep its illicit nuclear infrastructure in place, rebuild its teetering economy and ultimately develop nuclear weapons at some point in the future?’
The answer to this question must be no. The Senate should act now to deliver that answer. It would be nice if there were universal bipartisan support for acting now to stop a nuclear Iran. But there apparently is not. And it would be terrible if history’s judgment on the pro-Israel community was that it made a fetish of bipartisanship — and got a nuclear Iran. [Emphasis added.]
And here’s what the RJC, speaking through the voice of its Congressional Affairs Director, Noah Silverman, put out:
As you know, the RJC has been the most consistent voice urging Congress to enact strong new legislation that will maximize pressure on Iran’s rogue regime to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons capability.
When Senator Kirk and Senator Menendez introduced their bipartisan bill to lock in new, crippling sanctions on Iran if the regime failed to follow through on its obligations under the Geneva accord, we launched an all-out effort to win support from Republican Senators.
Within days – thanks in large part to our efforts – 95 percent of the Senate Republicans had signed on as cosponsors of the Kirk/Menendez bill. Considering that the bill (S. 1881) has numerous Democrat cosponsors, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had pledged to permit Senate action soon when he delayed a vote on sanctions last year, success seemed within reach.
What happened next should trouble every pro-Israel American deeply. The Obama administration unleashed an unprecedented campaign to portray Kirk, Menendez and their backers as ‘warmongers.’
And they enlisted Democratic members of non-partisan pro-Israel organizations to work from within to undermine the push for Kirk-Menendez.
The Obama White House’s tactics have been disgraceful. But they’ve clearly had an effect. Democratic Kirk-Menendez cosponsors endorsed delaying a vote on the legislation they ostensibly support. Liberal news outlets attacked Republicans as ‘partisan’ for demanding a vote on bipartisan legislation.
And now the most prominent organization in the coalition of activist groups supporting Kirk-Menendez – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – has reversed itself and is calling for Senate action on Kirk-Menendez to be delayed.
We still believe this legislation is urgently needed if there is to be any hope of convincing the Iranians to alter their course. And the good news is that Senate Republicans overwhelmingly understand this. Earlier this week, 42 GOP Senators sent Harry Reid a letter making it clear that Republicans who support Kirk-Menendez are determined to get a vote.
Now more than ever, Republican leaders in Congress will need our help. We want to thank you for everything you’ve already done – and to assure you that, no matter what others do, we are not going to give up on this effort. The stakes for our national security and for the survival of Israel are just too high.[Emphasis in the original.]
So now we have two hardline neoconservative Republican groups attacking AIPAC, albeit not by name, for mak(ing) a “fetish of bipartisanship,” as Kristol put it. And we no doubt have Democrats, like Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who can’t be happy with the organization due to the kinds of pressure it exerted on them to oppose their own president and the fact that AIPAC had effectively aligned itself with the Congressional Republican leadership for so long. Nor can groups like TIP or UANI or the AJC be happy with AIPAC’s probable failure to consult with them before staking out its latest position. And then there’s the fact that AIPAC, which, as this blog has noted before, prefers to act behind the scenes, had not only been forced into the limelight as a result of its advocacy for the Kirk-Menendez bill, but has, through its back-to-back public statements, moved itself to center stage, even as it finds itself buffeted by both right and left. This can’t be a comfortable place for it to find itself. Indeed, it suggests not only weakness on the part of its leadership, but also the possibility of serious internal conflict.
There’s still the question of what motivated it to change its position so publicly and so ineptly? Was it the fact that the Clintons came out for delaying a vote? After all, it’s one thing to alienate Obama, who will only be around for another three years and may face a Republican majority in both houses of Congress less than a year from now; it’s another to embarrass Hillary who, it may think, has a virtual lock on the nomination with no Republican in sight who can beat her. Or was it that letter signed by the 42 Republicans, thus transforming the bill into a more clearly partisan issue, provoking Menendez, a generally very loyal Democrat (except on Cuba), to change his position, that persuaded AIPAC’s leadership that they had to move if they were going to retain any claim to bipartisanship (in which case Kirk, who appears to have organized the letter, made a very, very serious mistake)? Or did Netanyahu, whose national security establishment appears increasingly reconciled to and comfortable with the possibility of a limited Iranian nuclear program, come to a similar realization? Or did the White House say it wasn’t going to send any Cabinet-level official to the AIPAC conference March 2-4 unless it backed off the bill, as Peter Beinart suggested in Haaretz last week? Or all of the above?
]]>by Jim Lobe & Daniel Luban
For much of the past few years, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has described the ruling regime in Iran as “messianic” and “apocalyptic”, a talking point he repeated over and over again last week during his latest trip to the United States.
“You don’t [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe & Daniel Luban
For much of the past few years, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has described the ruling regime in Iran as “messianic” and “apocalyptic”, a talking point he repeated over and over again last week during his latest trip to the United States.
“You don’t want to be in a position where this messianic, apocalyptic, radical regime that has these wild ambitions but a nice spokesman gets away with building the weapons of mass death,” he told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Oct 2. The following day, he was at it again, insisting to Stephen Inskeep of NPR that “Iran’s doctrinaire, messianic, apocalyptic regime” was also a “terrorist regime bent on world domination.”
Of course, it was much easier to make such claims when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the public face of the Islamic regime — particularly during his annual appearances at the UN General Assembly, where he craved the spotlight and often made deeply provocative statements in order to gain it. As Netanyahu himself has argued, it’s much more difficult to make that case now that Ahmadinejad has been replaced by Hassan Rouhani, who has explicitly rejected much of the style and substance of his predecessor. So far, Rouhani has been an unqualified hit — Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey suggested that he came across as a kind of “Santa Clause in a turban” during his maiden visit to the UN — and his much-publicized phone call with President Obama at the end of his visit has raised hopes of a rapprochement over the Iranian nuclear issue.
Hopes for some, at least. Politically speaking, such a rapprochement would be Netanyahu’s worst nightmare — both in terms of potentially legitimizing some Iranian nuclear enrichment and, perhaps more importantly, in returning attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Netanyahu has effectively relegated to the back burner with his repeated threats of war against Iran. It’s therefore hardly surprising that Netanyahu, who has called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” since the beginning of the President’s new term, feels compelled to repeat ad nauseam the “messianic, apocalyptic” nature of the “cult” for which Rouhani serves as a mere “clerk.” (As LobeLog noted several years ago, this is a familiar dance for Iran hawks: when the Iranian president is a radical like Ahmadinejad, they play up his power; when it’s a moderate like Rouhani, they deride him as a mere figurehead.)
We do not doubt that there may be “messianic” and “apocalyptic” currents within the Iranian regime. But even a cursory examination of Netanyahu’s rhetoric indicates that there may be more than a little projection at work here.
A quick look at definitions helps demonstrate what we mean. “Messianic,” according to Merriam-Webster, means “supporting a social, political, or religious cause or set of beliefs with great enthusiasm and energy” — a description that certainly applies to Netanyahu’s Likudist faith. “Messianism,” according to the Free Dictionary, may include a “belief that a particular cause or movement is destined to…save the world.”
Consider in that connection what Netanyahu himself told the UN General Assembly in his speech last week:
I want there to be no confusion on this point. Israel will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone. Yet, in standing alone, Israel will know that we will be defending many, many others.
In the Weekly Standard’s lead editorial this week, Bill Kristol and Michael Makovsky argued that Netanyahu was referencing Winston Churchill’s remarks in July 1940 during the Battle of Britain: “And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach…We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone” as London “enshrines the title deeds of human progress.” Thus we are made to understand that Netanyahu sees himself as Churchill (indeed, the authors tell us that he has a photo of the great man on his office wall behind his desk) standing alone and defiant against the barbarity of Nazism — whose modern-day equivalent, of course, is the Islamic Republic of Iran (or the Biblical Amalek). Who knows if Netanyahu, in his heart of hearts, really sees his conflict with Iran in the same light as Churchill’s conflict with Nazi Germany. In any case, “messianic” would certainly be one way of describing both his rhetoric and its historical allusions.
As for “apocalyptic,” Netanyahu’s descriptions of Iran, particularly an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon, would seem apt. Merriam-Webster defines the word as “of, relating to, or involving terrible violence and destruction” and “of or relating to the end of the world.”
“A nuclear Iran is an existential threat on the State of Israel and also on the rest of the world,” he said at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, last year, arguing that those who dismiss the Iranian threat “have learned nothing from the Holocaust.” He posed a similar question just last week in his UN speech, leaving little doubt that he was paralleling Iran with Nazi Germany:
Now, I know that some in the international community think I’m exaggerating this threat. Sure, they know that Iran’s regime leads these chants, “death to America, death to Israel,” that it pledges to wipe Israel off the map. But they think that this wild rhetoric is just bluster for domestic consumption. Have these people learned nothing from history? The last century has taught us that when a radical regime with global ambitions gets awesome power, sooner or later its appetite for aggression knows no bounds.
That’s the central lesson of the 20th century. And we cannot forget it. The world may have forgotten this lesson. The Jewish people have not.
Elsewhere, Netanyahu has dropped the insinuations and veiled parallels, however obvious they might be, and stated his position baldly: “It is 1938,” he told the Jewish Federations of North America back in 2006 when he was chairman of Likud. “Iran is Germany, and it is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons.” One really can’t get more apocalyptic than that.
Again, it’s difficult to tell whether Netanyahu actually believes any of this or is just trying to rally support for Israel’s hard-line positions and deflect international attention from the Palestinian question. While we are inclined to view his rhetoric as mostly cynical, his recently-espoused claim that Iranians are not permitted to wear jeans or listen to western music suggests that we can’t completely discount sheer ignorance or a Manichaean worldview that can’t reconcile blue jeans with his image of the Islamic Republic. In either case, we can probably expect his rhetoric to become increasingly messianic and apocalyptic if and when the possibility of peace between the US and Iran increases.
]]>by Jim Lobe
It’s not clear whether Bill Kristol went to the dentist Thursday and had a prolonged reaction to the Sodium Pentothal he was administered or whether he’s become desperate over the prospect that neoconservatives are losing their hold over the GOP (even his Keep America Safe co-founder,
by Jim Lobe
It’s not clear whether Bill Kristol went to the dentist Thursday and had a prolonged reaction to the Sodium Pentothal he was administered or whether he’s become desperate over the prospect that neoconservatives are losing their hold over the GOP (even his Keep America Safe co-founder, Liz Cheney opposes attacking Syria), but his lead editorial in this week’s Weekly Standard makes public the kind of argument one suspects he usually reserves for the back rooms and private dinner parties with impressionable “princes” of the Republican Party for whom he can serve as their private Machiavelli. The cynicism shown here is truly remarkable. After summarily dispensing with the “statesmanship” argument as to why Republicans should vote yes on President Obama’s AUMF — and statesmanship has nothing to do with the plight of the Syrian people or the use of chemical weapons; it’s all about U.S. power and credibility — he moves on to the “crass political reasons” why they should do so. Those reasons deserve to be quoted at length:
A Yes vote is in fact the easy vote. It’s actually close to risk-free. After all, it’s President Obama who is seeking the authorization to use force and who will order and preside over the use of force. It’s fundamentally his policy. Lots of Democrats voted in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war. When that war ran into trouble, it was President Bush and Republicans who paid the price. [Editor's note: don't tell that to Hillary Clinton.] If the Syria effort goes badly, the public will blame President Obama, who dithered for two years, and who seems inclined to a halfhearted execution of any military campaign. If it goes well, Republicans can take credit for pushing him to act decisively, and for casting a tough vote supporting him when he asked for authorization to act.
A No vote is the risky vote. In fact, the risk is all on the side of voting No. The only thing that can get Obama off the hook now is for Republicans to deny him authorization for the use of force against the Assad regime. Then the GOP can be blamed for whatever goes wrong in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, over the next months and years. And plenty will go wrong. It’s a Yes vote that gets Republicans in Congress off the hook.
A Yes vote seems to be statesmanlike. …In fact, many voters do like to think they’re voting for someone who has at least a touch of statesmanship, and so casting what appears superficially to be a politically perilous vote could well help the stature of Republicans with many of their constituents back home.
It’s true that a Yes vote will be temporarily unpopular with the base. To support Obama now may seem to invite primary opposition from challengers who would be more in tune with popular sentiment to stay out of the Syrian civil war. For a few weeks after the vote, Republicans will hear such rumblings. But at the end of the day, Republican primary voters are a pretty hawkish bunch. It’s hard to believe they’re going to end up removing otherwise conservative representatives or senators in favor of challengers who run on a platform whose key plank is that Republicans should have voted to let an Iran-supported, terror-backing dictator with American blood on his hands off the hook after he’s used chemical weapons. What’s more, primary elections are more than half a year away. Republican senators and congressmen will have plenty of time to reestablish their anti-Obama credentials by fighting Obama on Obama-care, immigration, the debt ceiling, and a host of other issues.
A Yes vote can also be explained as a vote to stop the Iranian nuclear program. Syria is an Iranian proxy. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons is a proxy for Iran’s ability to move ahead unimpeded in its acquisition of nuclear weapons. To bring this point home, soon after voting to authorize the use of force against the Assad regime, Republicans might consider moving an authorization for the use of force against the Iranian nuclear weapons program. They can explain that Obama’s dithering in the case of Syria shows the utility of unequivocally giving him the authority to act early with respect to Iran. An Iran debate would pretty much unite Republicans and conservatives and would help mitigate political problems arising from a Yes vote on Syria. The issue of Iran will most likely come to a head before Election Day 2014, probably even before primary elections earlier next year. An Iran resolution means the Syria vote won’t be the most important vote Republicans cast in this session of Congress—it won’t even be the most important foreign policy vote.
Of course, these arguments are also being made with Republicans by AIPAC and other institutions of the Israel lobby, but not nearly so publicly. Which, in my view, makes this such a remarkable document.
This week’s Weekly Standard appears devoted almost entirely to the Syria vote, with featured contributions by Fred Barnes, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Gary Schmitt, Fred Kagan, and Stephen “Case Closed” (a reference to his book purportedly proving Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda) Hayes (who just came out with a paywalled op-ed actually opposing Obama’s AUMF unless it’s amended to authorize a much bigger commitment). Schmitt directs his comments at the 2016 Republican presidential aspirants — the three senators currently considered most likely to run (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz) have voted against or indicated opposition to the AUMF — in ways similar to Kristol’s:
No doubt, there are conservatives who, like the president, want simply to pivot away from the Middle East altogether and believe that’s what the public wants as well. But what the public wants today and what it sees as important down the road will almost certainly not be the same. In 1999, John McCain went against the majority of his congressional GOP colleagues, supported a military intervention in Kosovo, and stole a march on his nomination opponents in appearing more presidential. He was joined by then-governor George W. Bush in support of the intervention, and soon enough the polls showed a majority of Americans in agreement.
On the other side of the coin, another senator with presidential aspirations, the relatively hawkish Democrat Sam Nunn, voted in 1991 against the congressional authorization for the first Gulf war and now admits it was the greatest mistake of his career.
In short, conservatives, especially those thinking that they could be sitting in the Oval Office one day, ought to think long and hard before they reject a sensible, if not perfect, authorization for the use of force.
So, it’s clear that Kristol and the Weekly Standard see the upcoming vote as a critical test of their enduring influence over the Republican Party.
]]>by Jim Lobe
If one thing has become clear in the wake of last week’s military coup d’etat against Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, it’s that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. Unlike protecting Israeli security and preserving its military superiority over any and all possible regional challenges (which is [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
If one thing has become clear in the wake of last week’s military coup d’etat against Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, it’s that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. Unlike protecting Israeli security and preserving its military superiority over any and all possible regional challenges (which is a core neoconservative tenet), democracy promotion is something that neoconservatives disagree among themselves about — a conclusion that is quite inescapable after reviewing the reactions of prominent neoconservatives to last week’s coup in Cairo. Some, most notably Robert Kagan, are clearly committed to democratic governance and see it pretty much as a universal aspiration, just as many liberal internationalists do. An apparent preponderance of neocons, such as Daniel Pipes, the contributors to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and Commentary’s ’Contentions’ blog, on the other hand, are much clearer in their view that democracy may be a universal aspiration, but it can be a disaster in practice, especially when the wrong people get elected, in which case authoritarian rulers and military coups are much to be preferred.
The latter group harkens back to the tradition established by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams, among others, in the late 1970’s when anti-communist “friendly authoritarians” — no matter their human rights records — were much preferred to left-wingers who claimed to be democrats but whose anti-imperialist, anti-American or pro-Palestinian sympathies were deemed too risky to indulge. These leftists have now been replaced by Islamists as the group we need “friendly authoritarians” (or “friendly militaries”) to keep under control, if not crush altogether.
Many neoconservatives have claimed that they’ve been big democracy advocates since the mid-1980’s when they allegedly persuaded Ronald Reagan to shift his support from Ferdinand Marcos to the “people power” movement in the Philippines (even as they tacitly, if not actively, supported apartheid South Africa and considered Nelson Mandela’s ANC a terrorist group). They were also behind the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental organization headed by one of Kirkpatrick’s deputies, Carl Gershman, and designed to provide the kind of political and technical support to sympathetic groups abroad that the CIA used to supply covertly. (Indeed, the NED has not been wholly transparent, and some of its beneficiaries have been involved in highly undemocratic practices, such as agitating for military coups against democratically elected leftist governments, most recently in Haiti and Venezuela. I was at a dinner a few years ago when, in answer to my question about how he perceived neoconservative support for democracies, Zbigniew Brzezinski quipped that when neoconservatives talk about democratization, they really mean destabilization.) In a 2004 op-ed published in Beirut’s Daily Star, I wrote about how neoconservatives have used democracy promotion over the past quarter century as a means to rally public and Congressional support behind specific (often pro-Israel, in their minds at least) policies and strategic objectives, such as the invasion of Iraq.
The notion that neoconservatives really do promote democracy has now, however, become conventional wisdom, even among some foreign-policy realists and paleoconservatives who should know better. In his 2010 book, NeoConservatism: The Biography of a Movement, Justin Vaisse, then at the Brookings Institution and now head of policy planning at the French foreign ministry, included democracy promotion among five principles — along with international engagement, military supremacy, “benevolent empire” and unilateralism — that are found at the core of what he called “third-age neoconservatism,” which he dates from 1995 to the present. (In a rather shocking omission, he didn’t put Israel in the same core category, although he noted, among other things, that neoconservatives’ “uncompromising defense of Israel” has been consistent throughout the movement’s history. In a review of the book in the Washington Post, National Review editor Rich Lowry included “the staunch defense of Israel” as among the “main themes” of neoconservatism from the outset.)
In his own recent summary of the basics of neoconservatism (and its zombie-like — his word — persistence), Abrams himself praised Vaisse’s analysis, insisting that, in addition to “patriotism, American exceptionalism, (and) a belief in the goodness of America and in the benefits of American power and of its use,”…a conviction that democracy is the best system of government and should be spread whenever that is practical” was indeed a core element of neoconservatism. (True to form, he omits any mention of Israel.)
It seems to me that the coup in Egypt is a good test of whether or not Vaisse’s and Abrams’ thesis that democracy is indeed a core element of neoconservatism because no one (except Pipes) seriously contests the fact that Morsi was the first democratically elected president of Egypt in that country’s history. I will stipulate that elections by themselves do not a democracy make and that liberal values embedded in key institutions are critical elements of democratic governance. And I’ll concede that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were not as inclusive and liberal as we in the West may have wished them to be.
But it’s also worth pointing out that their opposition — be it among Mubarak holdovers in the judiciary and the security forces or among the liberals and secularists who played catalytic roles in the 2011 uprising against Mubarak and now again against Morsi — did not exactly extend much in the way of cooperation with Morsi’s government either. (Indeed, Thursday’s New York Times article on the degree to which Mubarak’s cronies and his so-called “deep state” set out to deliberately sabotage Morsi’s rule recalls nothing more than what happened prior to the 1973 coup in Chile.) And we shouldn’t forget that Morsi not only won popular elections outright, but that that Islamists, led by the Brotherhood, gained a majority in elections for parliament (that was subsequently dissolved by the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court). Morsi and his allies were also able to muster 64 percent of the vote in a referendum to ratify a constitution, however flawed we may consider that (now-suspended) document to have been. In any event, the democratic election of a president is not a minor matter in any democratic transition, and ousting him in a military coup, especially in a country where the military has effectively ruled without interruption for more than half a century, does not exactly make a democratic transition any easier.
Now, if Vaisse and Abrams are right that democracy is a core principle of neoconservativism, one would expect neoconservatives to be unanimous in condemning the coup and possibly also in calling for the Obama administration to cut off aid, as required under U.S. law whenever a military coup ousts an elected leader. (After all, the “rule of law” is an essential element of a healthy democracy, and ignoring a law or deliberately failing to enforce it does not offer a good example of democratic governance — a point Abrams himself makes below. Indeed, the fact that the administration appears to have ruled out cutting aid for the time being will no doubt persuade the Egyptian military and other authoritarian institutions in the region that, when push comes to shove, Washington will opt for stability over democracy every time.)
So how have neoconservatives — particularly those individuals, organizations, and publications that Vaisse listed as “third-age” neoconservatives in the appendix of his book — come down on recent events in Egypt? (Vaisse listed four publications — “The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The New Republic (to some extent) [and] Wall Street Journal (editorial pages) — as the most important in third-age neoconservatism. Almost all of the following citations are from three of those four, as The New Republic, which was still under the control of Martin Peretz when Vaisse published his book, has moved away from neoconservative views since.)
Well, contrary to the Vaisse-Abrams thesis, it seems third-age neoconservatives are deeply divided on the question of democracy in Egypt, suggesting that democracy promotion is, in fact, not a core principle or pillar of neoconservative ideology. If anything, it’s a pretty low priority, just as it was back in the Kirkpatrick days.
Let’s take the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page as a starter.
Here’s Bret Stephens, the Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Global View” columnist even before the coup:
[T]he lesson from Egypt is that democracy may be a blessing for people capable of self-government, but it’s a curse for those who are not. There is a reason that Egypt has been governed by pharaohs, caliphs, pashas and strongmen for 6,000 years.
The best outcome for Egypt would be early elections, leading to the Brotherhood’s defeat at the hands of a reformist, technocratic government with military support. The second-best outcome would be a bloodless military coup, followed by the installment of a reformist government.
And here’s the Journal’s editorial board the day after the coup:
Mr. Obama also requested a review of U.S. aid to Egypt, but cutting that off now would be a mistake. Unpopular as America is in Egypt, $1.3 billion in annual military aid buys access with the generals. U.S. support for Cairo is written into the Camp David peace accords with Israel. Washington can also do more to help Egypt gain access to markets, international loans and investment capital. The U.S. now has a second chance to use its leverage to shape a better outcome.
Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.
Now, consider the New York Times’ David Brooks (included by Vaisse as a third-age neocon in his Appendix) writing a column entitled “Defending the Coup”, just two days after the it took place:
It has become clear – in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere – that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death.
…Promoting elections is generally a good thing even when they produce victories for democratic forces we disagree with. But elections are not a good thing when they lead to the elevation of people whose substantive beliefs fall outside the democratic orbit.
…It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
And Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute writing on July 7:
Now is not the time to punish Egypt… If democracy is the goal, then the United States should celebrate Egypt’s coup.
…Rather than punish the perpetrators, Obama should offer two cheers for Egypt’s generals and help Egyptians write a more democratic constitution to provide a sounder foundation for true democracy.
And Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy (in Vaisse’s Appendix), July 4:
On the eve of our nation’s founding, Egypt’s military has given their countrymen a chance for what Abraham Lincoln once called ‘a new birth of freedom.’
…Whether anything approaching real freedom can ever take hold in a place like Egypt, however, will depend on its people’s rejection (sic) the liberty-crushing Islamic doctrine of shariah. Unfortunately, many Egyptians believe shariah is divinely mandated and may wage a civil war to impose it.
…If so, we should stand with those who oppose our common enemy – the Islamists who seek to destroy freedom worldwide. And that will require rooting out the Muslim Brothers in our government and civil institutions, as well.
Or the AEI’s Thomas Donnelly (also in Vaisse’s Appendex) writing in The Weekly Standard blog on July 3:
In some quarters, the prospects for progress and liberalization are renewed; the Egyptian army may not be a champion of democracy, but its intervention probably prevented a darker future there. Egyptians at least have another chance.
Commentary magazine, of course, has really been the bible of neoconservatism since its inception in the late 1960’s and has since served as its literary guardian, along with, more recently, Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, ever since. So what have its ‘Contentions’ bloggers said about the coup and democracy?
Here’s Jonathan Tobin on July 7:
The massive demonstrations protesting Morsi’s misrule that led to a military coup have given the president a chance to reboot American policy toward Egypt in a manner that could make it clear the U.S. priority is ensuring stability and stopping the Islamists. The question is, will he take advantage of this chance or will he, by pressuring the military and demonstrating ambivalence toward the possibility of a Brotherhood comeback, squander another opportunity to help nudge Egypt in the right direction?
…The problem with so much of what has been said in the past few days about Egypt is the misperception that what was going on in Cairo before the coup was somehow more democratic than what happened after it. It cannot be repeated too often that there is more to democracy than merely holding an election that enabled the most organized faction to seize power even if it is fundamentally opposed to democracy. That was exactly what occurred in Egypt in the last year as the Brotherhood won a series of votes that put it in a position to start a process by which it could ensure that its power would never be challenged again. Understood in that context, the coup wasn’t so much a putsch as it was a last ditch effort to save the country from drifting into a Brotherhood dictatorship that could not be undone by democratic means.
And here’s Tobin again, a day later and just after the apparent massacre by the military of some 51 or more peaceful Brotherhood demonstrators:
But it would be a terrible mistake if Washington policymakers allowed today’s event to endorse the idea that what is at stake in Egypt now is democracy or that the Brotherhood is a collection of innocent victims. Even if we concede that the killings are a crime that should be investigated and punished, the conflict there is not about the right of peaceful dissent or even the rule of law, as the Brotherhood’s apologists continue to insist. While our Max Boot is right to worry that the army’s behavior may signal an incapacity to run the country that could lead to a collapse that would benefit extremists, I think the more imminent danger is that American pressure on the new government could undermine its ability to assert control over the situation and lead the Brotherhood and other Islamists to think they can return to power. But however deplorable today’s violence might be, that should not serve as an excuse for media coverage or policies that are rooted in the idea that the Brotherhood is a peaceful movement or that it’s [sic] goal is democracy. The whole point of the massive protests that shook Egypt last week and forced the military to intervene to prevent civil war was that the Brotherhood government was well on its way to establishing itself as an unchallengeable authoritarian regime that could impose Islamist law on the country with impunity. The Brotherhood may have used the tactics of democracy in winning elections in which they used their superior organizational structure to trounce opponents, but, as with other dictatorial movements, these were merely tactics employed to promote an anti-democratic aim. But such a cutoff or threats to that effect would be a terrible mistake.
Despite the idealistic posture that America should push at all costs for a swift return to democratic rule in Egypt, it needs to be remembered that genuine democracy is not an option there right now. The only way for democracy to thrive is to create a consensus in favor of that form of government. So long as the Islamists of the Brotherhood and other groups that are even more extreme are major players in Egypt, that can’t happen. The Brotherhood remains the main threat to freedom in Egypt, not a victim. While we should encourage the military to eventually put a civilian government in place, America’s priority should be that of the Egyptian people: stopping the Brotherhood. Anything that undermines that struggle won’t help Egypt or the United States. [My emphasis]
So far, the picture is pretty clear: I’m not hearing a lot of denunciations of a coup d’etat (let alone a massacre of unarmed civilians) by the military against a democratically elected president from these “third-generation” neocons and their publications. Au contraire. By their own admission, they’re pretty pleased that this democratically elected president was just overthrown.
But, in fairness, that’s not the whole picture.
On the pro-democracy side, Kagan really stands out. In a Sunday Washington Post op-ed where he attacked Obama for not exerting serious pressure on Morsi to govern more inclusively, he took on Stephens’ and Brooks’ racism, albeit without mentioning their names:
It has …become fashionable once again to argue that Muslim Arabs are incapable of democracy – this after so many millions of them came out to vote in Egypt, only to see Western democracies do little or nothing when the product of their votes was overthrown. Had the United States showed similar indifference in the Philippines and South Korea, I suppose wise heads would still be telling us that Asians, too, have no vocation for democracy.
As to what Washington should do, Kagan was unequivocal:
Egypt is not starting over. It has taken a large step backward.
…Any answer must begin with a complete suspension of all aid to Egypt, especially military aid, until there is a new democratic government freely elected with the full participation of all parties and groups in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood.
Kagan clearly played a leadership role in gathering support for his position from several other neoconservatives who comprise, along with a few liberal internationalists and human rights activists, part of the informal, three-year-old “Working Group on Egypt.” Thus, in a statement released by the Group Monday, Abrams, Ellen Bork from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (successor to the Project for the New American Century), and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies joined Kagan in complaining that “the reliance on military intervention rather than a political process to resolve crises severely threatens Egypt’s progression to a stable democracy.”
As to the aid question, the group argued that:
The Obama administration should apply the law that requires suspending $1.5 billion in military and economic aid to Egypt following the removal of a democratically-elected leader by coup or military decree. Not only is this clearly required under U.S. law, but is the best way to make clear immediately to Egypt’s military that an expedient return to a legitimate, elected civilian government—avoiding the repression, widespread rights abuses, and political exclusion that characterized the 18 months of military rule after Mubarak’s fall—is Egypt’s only hope. It is the only way to achieve the stability and economic progress that Egyptians desperately want.Performing semantic or bureaucratic tricks to avoid applying the law would harm U. S. credibility to promote peaceful democratic change not only in Egypt but around the world, and would give a green light to other U.S.-backed militaries contemplating such interventions.
The Egyptian military has already shown its eagerness to secure U.S. and international acceptance of its action; Washington should not provide this cost-free. The military helped sow the seeds of the current crisis by failing to foster consensus on the political transition, and its promise to midwife a democratic transition now is just as uncertain. Suspending aid offers an incentive for the army to return to democratic governance as soon as possible, and a means to hold it accountable. Cajoling on democracy while keeping aid flowing did not work when the military ruled Egypt in the 18 months after Mubarak’s fall, and it did not work to move President Morsi either.
Remarkably, in an apparent break with its past practice regarding the Group’s statements, this one was not posted by the Weekly Standard. That may have been a simple oversight, but it may also indicate a disagreement between the two deans of third-age neoconservatives — Kagan and Bill Kristol — who also co-founded both PNAC and FPI. The Standard has pretty consistently taken a significantly harder line against U.S. engagement with political Islam than Kagan. Curiously, FDD, whose political orientation has bordered at times on Islamophobia, also did not post the statement on its website despite Gerecht’s endorsement. (Indeed, FDD’s president, Clifford May, wrote in the National Review Thursday that he agreed with both Brooks’ conclusion that “radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government [and] …have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets…” and with the Journal’s recommendation that Washington should continue providing aid to the generals unless and until it becomes clear that they aren’t engaged in economic reform or guaranteeing “human rights for Christians and other minorities…”)
Abrams’ position has also been remarkable (particularly in light of his efforts to isolate and punish Hamas after it swept Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and his backing of the aborted putsch against the Hamas-led government in Gaza the following year). On Wednesday this week, he argued in the Standard that U.S. aid must be cut precisely for the reasons I cited at the beginning of this post.
Look back at all those things we want for Egypt, and the answer should be obvious: We will do our friends in Egypt no good by teaching the lesson that for us as for them law is meaningless. To use lexicographical stunts to say this was not really a coup, or to change the law because it seems inconvenient this week, would tell the Egyptians that our view and practice when it comes to law is the same as theirs: enforce the law when you like, ignore the law when you don’t. But this is precisely the wrong model to give Egypt; the converse is what we should be showing them as an ideal to which to aspire.
When the coup took place last week, Abrams took the same position, noting that “coups are a bad thing and in principle we should oppose them.” He then noted, however, that
…[M]ost of our aid to Egypt is already obligated, so the real damage to the Egyptian economy and to military ties should be slight – if the army really does move forward to new elections. …An interruption of aid for several months is no tragedy, so long as during those months we give good advice, stay close to the generals, continue counter-terrorism cooperation, and avoid further actions that create the impression we were on Morsi’s side.
In other words, follow the law because we, the U.S., are a nation of laws, but, at the same time, reassure the coupists and their supporters that we’re basically on their side. This is a somewhat more ambiguous message than that conveyed by Kagan, to say the least.
Indeed, despite the fact that coups are a “bad thing,” Abrams went on, “[t]he failure of the MB in Egypt is a very good thing” [in part, he continues, because it will weaken and further isolate Hamas]. Washington, he wrote, should draw lessons from the Egyptian experience, the most important of which is:
[W]e should always remember who our friends are and should support them: those who truly believe in liberty as we conceive it, minorities such as the Copts who are truly threatened and who look to us, allies such as the Israelis who are with us through thick and thin. No more resets, no more desperate efforts at engagement with places like Russia and Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. A policy based on the simple principle of supporting our friends and opposing our enemies will do far more to advance the principles and interests of the United States.
Despite his call for Washington to stand faithfully by Israel, Abrams and the call to suspend aid were harshly criticized by Evelyn Gordon, writing in Commentary’s Contentions blog Wednesday, in which she argued that Israel’s security could be adversely affected by any such move:
The Republican foreign policy establishment, headed by luminaries such as Senator John McCain and former White House official Elliott Abrams, is urging an immediate cutoff of U.S. military aid to Egypt in response to the country’s revolution-cum-coup. The Obama administration has demurred, saying “it would not be wise to abruptly change our assistance program,” and vowed to take its time in deciding whether what happened legally mandates an aid cutoff, given the “significant consequences that go along with this determination.”
For once, official Israel is wholeheartedly on Obama’s side. Senior Israeli officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down spent hours on the phone with their American counterparts this weekend to argue against an aid cutoff, and Israeli diplomats in Washington have been ordered to make this case to Congress as well. Israel’s reasoning is simple: An aid cutoff will make the volatile situation on its southern border even worse–and that is bad not only for Israel, but for one of America’s major interests in the region: upholding the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
Indeed,the implications of the coup on Israel and its security have been an explicit preoccupation for some neoconservatives. In her first jottings in the coup’s immediate aftermath, Jennifer Rubin, the neoconservative blogger at the Washington Post, praised the coup, called for massive economic assistance to stabilize the situation, and worried about Israel.
…Egypt may have escaped complete ruin by a skillfully timed military intervention, and there is no use denying that.
The primary and immediate crisis there is an economic one. As one Middle East observer put it: “They are broke. They can’t buy diesel. Without diesel they can’t feed their people.” This is precisely why the army was hesitant to again take over. Directly ruling the country would mean the economic meltdown becomes the army’s problem.
The United States and our Gulf allies should consider some emergency relief and beyond that provide considerable assistance in rebuilding an Egyptian economy, devastated by constant unrest and the evaporation of tourism.
Beyond that immediate concern, it will be critical to see whether the army-backed judge will adhere to the peace treaty with Israel and undertake its security operations in the Sinai. Things are looking more hopeful in that department if only because the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent, is now gone and disgraced. Egypt’s military has had good relations with both the United States and Israel so the issue may be more one of limited capability to police the Sinai (the army has to be fed, too) than lack of will.
Now, in fairness, none of this means that many — maybe even most — neoconservatives wouldn’t prefer a democratic Egypt as a general principle. Indeed, much of the advice offered by them over the past week has urged the administration and Congress to use aid and the threat of its withdrawal to coax the military into returning to the barracks, respect human rights, transfer power to civilians and eventually hold new elections in which Islamists should be permitted to participate in some fashion — if, for no other reason, than a failure to maintain some sense of a “democratic transition” (however cosmetic) could indeed force a cut-off in military aid. Such a move could present serious challenges to general U.S. security interests in the region and, as Gordon stressed, raise major questions about the durability of Camp David. But a democratic Egypt in which Islamists win presidential and parliamentary elections, draft a constitution ratified by a clear majority of the electorate and exercise real control over the army and the security forces? Judging from the past week’s commentary, most neoconservatives would much prefer Mubarak or a younger version of the same.
So, what can we conclude from this review about the importance of democracy promotion among the most prominent “third-era” neoconservative commentators, publications, and institutions? At best, there’s no consensus on the issue. And if there’s no consensus on the issue, democracy promotion can’t possibly be considered a core principle of neoconservatism, no matter how much Abrams and Vaisse would like, or appear to like it to be.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Rashad
]]>via IPS News
Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.
While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the [...]]]>
via IPS News
Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.
While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.
“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”
The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.
Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel.
War-weariness and public disillusionment with U.S. interventions they championed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as President Barack Obama’s oft-expressed reservations about the wisdom of engaging in yet another war in a predominantly Muslim country, had kept the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks at bay.
But a combination of an ever-climbing death toll, Hezbollah’s increased involvement, the rise of radical Islamist groups within the insurgency, and the initial –albeit yet to be confirmed — estimates by U.S., Israeli, and Western European intelligence agencies that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, as well as Obama’s apparently offhand public warnings during last year’s election campaign that such use would cross a “red line”, have propelled some prominent liberals – most recently, New York Times columnist Bill Keller and former senior Obama policy official Anne Marie Slaughter — into their camp.
Led by the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives remain the most aggressive among the hawks in their advice, just as they were in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Thus, providing weapons to selected rebel groups – an option which the administration is considered most likely to exercise if the evidence of chemical weapons use by government forces is confirmed – is no longer considered sufficient.
“At this stage, (a better outcome of the conflict), this would require more than arming some rebels,” according to the Journal editorial. “It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces.
“We would not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons,” the editorial writer added in a notable deviation from assurances offered by the hawks’ two most prominent Congressional champions – Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham – who, in deference to public opinion, have said repeatedly that putting U.S. “boots on the ground” should be off the table.
This echoed Kristol’s own editorial in the Standard published on the weekend. Arming the rebels, he wrote, “could well be too little, too late. …It’s hard to see what a serious response would be short of direct American engagement – perhaps a combination of enforcement of a no-fly zone and aerial attacks. And no serious president would rule out a few boots on the ground…”
The Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-policy columnist, Bret Stephens, weighed in with even more specific advice Tuesday.
He called for Obama to “disable the runways of Syrian air bases, including the international airport in Damascus; …[u]se naval assets to impose a no-fly zone over western Syria; …[s]upply the Free Syrian Army with heavy military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and light tanks; [and b]e prepared to seize and remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, even if it means putting boots (temporarily) on the ground.”
Liberal hawks have been less precise about what needs to be done, but their sense of urgency in favour of escalating U.S. military intervention – beginning with supplying the rebels with weapons – appears no less intense.
Slaughter, who served for two years as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning chief and, as an influential Princeton University international-relations professor, urged U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Libya, publishedan op-ed in the Washington Post that warned that Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria brought forth the spectre of the Rwandan genocide.
“For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act,” she wrote, without prescribing precisely what he should do.
Keller, who described himself as a “reluctant hawk” in an influential 1,500-word op-ed on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, provided somewhat more detailed advice in 1,300-word, very prominently placed op-ed entitled “Syria is Not Iraq” Wednesday in which he quoted Slaughter, among other liberal hawks.
“The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels – funnelling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiation an orderly transition to a non-sectarian Syria,” he wrote.
“We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”
Keller, who several years after the Iraq invasion offered a somewhat muted apology for supporting that war, stressed that he did not “mean to make this sound easy,” but stressed that a disastrous outcome “is virtually inevitable if we stay out [of the conflict]. …Why wait for the next atrocity?” he asked.
“Iraq should not keep us from doing the right thing in Syria…,’’ according to the op-ed’s subhead.
]]>by Eli Clifton & Jim Lobe
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) is having a rough six months. Last year, ECI and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, did all it could to portray Barack Obama as insufficiently supportive of Israel. The group’s efforts and considerable spending on television ad-buys did little [...]]]>
by Eli Clifton & Jim Lobe
The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) is having a rough six months. Last year, ECI and its chairman, Republican operative Bill Kristol, did all it could to portray Barack Obama as insufficiently supportive of Israel. The group’s efforts and considerable spending on television ad-buys did little to sway Jewish voters, 69% of whom voted for Obama.
Hot off their election losses, the group then sunk several hundred thousand dollars into a campaign to derail Obama’s nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) to head up the Pentagon. The campaign failed, and Hagel, despite being labeled “not a responsible option” in full-page newspaper ads bought by ECI, was sworn in as Secretary of Defense at the end of February.
Having thus shown themselves to be at best in the mainstream of an increasingly extremist and partisan Republican Party and lacking a scintilla of evidence that they represent the views of a majority of Jewish Americans, the group today took issue with a letter from the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), signed by 100 prominent Jewish Americans, calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “work closely with Secretary of State John Kerry to devise pragmatic initiatives, consistent with Israel’s security needs, which would represent Israel’s readiness to make painful territorial sacrifices for the sake of peace.”
Signatories included well-known donors to Jewish and Israeli charities and foundations, such as Charles Bronfman, Danny Abraham, Lester Crown, and Stanley Gold; former U.S. Defense Undersecretary Dov Zakheim; former Rep. Mel Levine, former AIPAC executive director Tom Dine; Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt; the current and immediate past presidents of United Reform Judaism; Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson; the former chairman of of the United Jewish Appeal, Marvin Lender; former chairman of the Jewish Agency, Richard Pearlstone; and the director of the influential Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Rabbi David Saperstein, among others.
The ECI blasted the IPF in its own letter to Netanyahu, which was signed by its three board members — Kristol, Gary Bauer, and ”Bad Rachel” Abrams – its executive director, Noah Pollak, and “adviser” Michael Goldfarb. The five signatories assured the Israeli leader that the IPF signatories — whom they call “oracles of bad advice” — “don’t speak for us or for a majority of Americans.”
We not only question the wisdom of their advice, we question their standing to issue such an admonition to a democratically-elected (sic) prime minister whose job is not to assuage the political longings of 100 American Jews, but to represent — and ensure the security of — the Israeli people.
The ECI letter goes on to assure Netanyahu that its five signers “affirm the words of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, who recently asked an American Jewish audience to ‘respect the decisions made by the world’s most resilient democracy.’”
“We, too, have strong opinions on the peace process — but one thing we never presume to do is instruct our friends in Israel on the level of danger to which they should expose themselves.”
The letter concludes:
We trust, of course, that you are under no misapprehensions about any of this. But we felt it important that you heard from a mainstream voice in addition to the predictable calls from a certain cast of American activists for more Israeli concessions.
Indeed, there is little to reason to doubt that ECI’s board members, one of whom called on Palestinians to be thrown into the sea “to float there, food for sharks, stargazers and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose,” have “strong opinions about the peace process” or that they are strong supporters of Netanyahu (although, as individuals, they have offered no end of advice to other Israeli Prime Ministers, such as Ehud Olmert.)
But, as their short list of signatures suggests, US Jews, in any event, don’t agree with ECI’s extremist views.
The American Jewish Committee’s 2012 poll of Jewish public opinion found only 4.5% of Jewish voters listed US-Israel relations as their most important issue in November’s 2012 presidential election. A November 6, 2012 J Street poll found that 73% of Jewish voters agreed with Obama’s President’s policies in the Arab-Israeli conflict, while 76% supported the US playing an active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict “if it meant the United States putting forth a peace plan that proposes borders and security arrangements between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Such an agreement may well run afoul of Oren’s directive that Jewish Americans “respect” Israel’s decisions or ECI’s suggestion that it is inappropriate for American Jews “to demand ‘painful territorial sacrifices’ of Israelis.”
Thus, it seems safe to conclude that the views of IPF’s signatories are much closer to those of most US Jews than to ECI’s and its five signatories.
As for ECI’s claim that it speaks for “a majority of Americans,” that, too, seems in question. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) in the latest of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’s quadrennial series of surveys, released last September, said they believed that Washington should not side with either party in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. That finding was broadly consistent with previous polling on the same or similar questions over many years.
]]>The Military-Industrial Complex Strikes Back
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
Barely a week after the 53rd anniversary of President Dwight [...]]]>
The Military-Industrial Complex Strikes Back
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961
Barely a week after the 53rd anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address he prepared to leave office, warning the nation of the perils to peace emanating not just from America’s enemies, but from the increasingly rapacious appetite for power and profit of its defense industries. This week, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) offered what should have been a sobering reminder of Eisenhower’s worst fears.
On the surface, Barrasso’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on January 23, headlined Chuck Hagel’s Unsettling History, seems to be just another regurgitation of (Bill) Kristol-lite complaints and (Jennifer) Rubinesque rants about Chuck Hagel — stale smears about “the Jewish lobby,” his voting record in the Senate, and a straw-man claim that Hagel believes that “Iran would act responsibly.” Indeed, Barrasso’s arguments appear to be part of the organized attempt to deride Hagel’s character and capabilities through the casually meretricious “let’s just throw stuff at him and see what sticks” mode employed against President Obama that has become the norm in neoconservative bluster.
But Barrasso’s career also deserves scrutiny and one of his paragraphs revealed — intentionally or unintentionally — the next line of attack against the Secretary of Defense nominee: Hagel’s stance on U.S. nuclear policy.
On the issue of nuclear weapons, the candidate for U.S. secretary of defense actually seems more focused on eliminating American nuclear arms than eliminating the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Mr. Hagel was the co-author of a 2012 report for the group Global Zero, “Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture,” that included a recommendation to eliminate the “Minuteman land-based ICBM.” That could leave America dangerously vulnerable. Even Mr. Obama has promised to modernize our ICBMs, not scrap them.
Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who had run as a moderate for the Senate in 1996 and lost, replaced the late Craig Thomas in the Senate in 2007 and won a special election in 2008 that gave him a hold on the seat for another two years. He spent $2.5 million on his campaign, ten times the amount of his Democratic opponent, and easily won re-election to his first six-year term in the Senate this past November, raising over $7 million dollars and spending $4.5 million.
The vehemence of Barrasso’s opposition to the Senate’s ratification of the START nuclear weapons reduction treaty with Russia in 2010 surprised even his Wyoming constituents. Only 11 Republican senators voted with Democrats in favor of START; Mike Enzi, Wyoming’s senior senator, wasn’t among them either. Wyoming was once one of the largest suppliers of uranium to the the nuclear weapons industry, but production has been on the decline since the 1980s. It hopes to revitalize the yellowcake industry, capitalizing on rising prices. Barrasso and Enzi both have been forthright about their state’s vested interest in perpetuating US reliance on nuclear weaponry and upgrading the US nuclear weapons arsenal.
Bill McCarthy of WyoFile points out that Wyoming’s Warren Air Force Base contributes $364 million to the Cheyenne area economy, including $221 million in payroll from the base, about $81 million in construction projects and the rest from jobs created in and around the base. The cutback or loss of any of these revenue sources and the commerce generated by them would also damage the rest of the state’s economy. But cutbacks at Warren appear inevitable. Former Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright and General Robert Kehler, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, stated in 2011 that they don’t believe funding will match past spending. Warren is at a disadvantage relative to other nuclear weapons delivery systems and facilities:
Along with the potential that silo-based missiles in Wyoming might be considered a Cold War relic compared to submarine- and aircraft-based weapons, for example, Warren is an Air Force base without a “flight line.” There are no facilities on base to land and maintain military aircraft.
So, although Barrasso opposed New START on strategic grounds, he had plenty of parochial reasons to try to stop the treaty or protect the weapons overseen from Cheyenne.
While hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent over the next decade on nuclear weapons, there will be fierce competition for fewer dollars.
Barrasso also requested an appropriation of $4.5 million in 2010 for the Wyoming Army National Guard Joint Training and Experimentation Center:
The project will focus on four areas to support war fighter experimentation: operational experiment instrumentation, expansion of ground robotics experimentation facilities including reconfigurable MOUT facilities, expansion of surrogate robotics pool, and conducting user defined robotics experiments focusing of the Joint Capability Areas (JCAs) of Joint Protection, Joint Homeland Defense, and Military Support of Civil Authorities user defined robotics experiments.
A Casper Star Tribune editorial at the time considered the speed and severity of Barrasso’s lurch to the hard right, and his uncompromising stances immediately after his election to the Senate, puzzling:
The fact that Barrasso has joined the extreme right-wing faction of his party and is leading opposition to the treaty confounds us. He is in one of the safest Senate seats in the country, and in no way needs to pander to ultraconservatives whose main goal is to see (President Barack) Obama lose.”
The op-ed noted that Wyoming’s senior senator Mike Enzi also opposed the New START, “but Barrasso has been out front in the right-wing Republican charge against what President Barack Obama has called his top foreign policy objective.”
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) led the floor fight for the START treaty in 2010. About to become Secretary of State in what is expected to be a swift and relatively bloodless confirmation process, Kerry hailed the ratification of START 3 years ago as moving the world away from the risk of nuclear disaster. “The winners are not defined by party or ideology,” he said. “The winners are the American people, who are safer with fewer Russian missiles aimed at them.”
Nuclear policy should be a matter of serious concern in confirming the next Secretary of Defense, whoever s/he may be. The 2013 nuclear agenda is going to be full, as Kevin Baron of Foreign Policy’s E-Ring points out.
The Pentagon has yet to release its plan to implement the Nuclear Posture Review, and amid continuing resolutions funding the fiscal year and the sequester-delayed budget request for 2014, the new defense secretary must decide the pace of building new nuclear submarines and strategic bombers. Additionally, the Obama administration is poised to start pushing below the caps established by the New START treaty, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 warheads each. With that agenda already penciled in, Hagel’s nomination has both thrilled nuclear disarmament advocates and concerned nuclear hawks in Congress.
It’s incumbent upon the media to point out that it is not just national security concerns, or conservative ideology, but behind-the-scenes economic considerations that will be playing a role in the political grandstanding surrounding Chuck Hagel’s confirmation. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
Case in point: John Barrasso.
Neo-Cons Hit Post-Cold War Low
Nearly six weeks after launching their campaign to derail the prospective nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Obama’s second-term secretary of defense, hard-line neo-conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, and Washington Post blogger
Neo-Cons Hit Post-Cold War Low
Nearly six weeks after launching their campaign to derail the prospective nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Obama’s second-term secretary of defense, hard-line neo-conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin find themselves more isolated – and, in their words, further “outside the mainstream” of U.S. foreign policy thinkers than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and possibly longer. I say that not only because they have failed to enlist the main organizations in the Israel lobby (of which they consider themselves the rightful vanguard) in their cause, but also because Hagel is supported by virtually everyone who is anyone in what could be called the foreign policy establishment of both parties.
This was made abundantly clear by the publication by ABC News Thursday of a new letter — a copy of which is reproduced below — of endorsements by 13 former top Republican and Democratic national-security officials. While almost all of the signatories have previously come out in support of Hagel, the list includes two who have not spoken out before and who, while not neo-cons themselves, have cooperated closely with them in the past – former Secretary of State George Shultz and former National Security Adviser Robert “Bud” McFarlane. Both, of course, served under Ronald Reagan.
Of the two, Shultz is particularly significant because, in many ways, he has been a hero and mentor to key neo-cons, notably Abrams, who prospered under Shultz’s stewardship – first as assistant secretary for human rights and then for Inter-American Affairs – at least until he was indicted for lying to Congress, and Bob Kagan, who served as Shultz’s speechwriter. Initially distrusted by the neo-cons and the Israel lobby when he succeeded Al Haig because of his service on the board of Bechtel (which was close to the Saudi royal family), he became much-admired by them as a result of his strong stand against terrorism, his battles with then-Pentagon chief Casper Weinberger over the use of military force, his deep hostility toward Syria, and his enduring support for Israel (despite the fact that he laid the groundwork for U.S. recognition of the PLO). More than anyone else in the Reagan administration, Shultz espoused the kind of “moral clarity” in foreign policy that neo-cons love to extol when they talk about the Reagan administration.
After 9/11, he also worked closely with them, agreeing to serve as one of six co-chairs of the Committee for the Present Danger (CPD) – which was big on the concept of “World War IV” against “Islamofascism” – and as honorary co-chair of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a Bush administration front group to mobilize support for the invasion. Some idea of the appreciation felt by neo-cons for Shultz at the time is suggested by the fact that, in an editorial published by Kristol’s Weekly Standard in May, 2002, both Kristol and Kagan called for him to co-chair (with Sam Nunn) a “blue-ribbon commission” to investigate the government’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. That Shultz should now come out in favor of Hagel’s nomination – particularly given accusations by the Standard and his former protégé Abrams that the nominee is an anti-Semite – has to be considered a body blow to the neo-conservative cause.
McFarlane, who was forced to resign as NSA as a result of his extremely ill-considered trip to Tehran (facilitated by Michael Ledeen) as part of the Iran component of the Iran-Contra scandal, is naturally less significant given the relatively short time (two years) he served in that position. But his ties to the neo-cons are even more extensive: he serves on the advisory boards of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Foreign Policy Council and also served as a member of the board of directors of the Committee for the Present Danger and the Set America Free Foundation of which Frank Gaffney is one of the principals. He was also associated with Kristol’s and Kagan’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That he, too, should now turn his back on the neo-cons is particularly surprising.
Look at the names on the letter below and try to think of a still-sentient cabinet-level foreign-policy Republican, apart from Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who has not endorsed Hagel’s nomination. So what does that mean for the neo-conservatives’ place in the mainstream foreign-policy community?
Here’s the letter:
January 24, 2013
To Members of the United States Senate:
We, as former Secretaries of State, Defense, and National Security Advisors, are writing to express our strong endorsement of Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense.
Chuck Hagel has an impeccable record of public service that reflects leadership, integrity, and a keen reading of global dynamics. From his time as Deputy Veterans Administrator managing a quarter of a million employees during the Reagan presidency, to turning around the financially troubled World USO, to shepherding the post-9/11 GI Bill into law as a United States Senator, and most recently through his service on the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon and as co-Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, Chuck Hagel is uniquely qualified to meet the challenges facing the Department of Defense and our men and women in uniform. As President Obama noted in announcing the nomination, this twice-wounded combat veteran “is a champion of our troops and our veterans and our military families” and would have the distinction of being the first person of enlisted rank and the first Vietnam veteran to serve as Secretary of Defense.
His approach to national security and debates about the use of American power is marked by a disciplined habit of thoughtfulness that is sorely needed and these qualities will serve him well as Secretary of Defense at a time when the United States must address a range of international issues that are unprecedented in scope. Our extensive experience working with Senator Hagel over the years has left us confident that he has the necessary background to succeed in the job of leading the largest federal agency.
Hagel has declared that we “knew we needed the world’s best military not because we wanted war but because we wanted to prevent war.” For those of us honored to have served as members of a president’s national security team, Senator Hagel clearly understands the essence and the burdens of leadership required of this high office. We hope this Committee and the U.S. Senate will promptly and favorably act on his nomination.
Sincerely,
Hon. Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State
Hon. Samuel Berger, former National Security Advisor
Hon. Harold Brown, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor
Hon. William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. James Jones, former National Security Advisor
Hon. Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Robert McFarlane, former National Security Advisor
Hon. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
Hon. George Shultz, former Secretary of State
Hon. Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor
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