While Chuck Hagel is twisting in the wind, being savaged by the Emergency Committee for Israel and other “pro-Israel” organizations, Israels’ Prime Minister is contemplating making a neoconservative American-born GOP operative Israel’s next ambassador to the United States.
Ariel Kahan, the diplomatic correspondent of the conservative and religiously orthodox [...]]]>
While Chuck Hagel is twisting in the wind, being savaged by the Emergency Committee for Israel and other “pro-Israel” organizations, Israels’ Prime Minister is contemplating making a neoconservative American-born GOP operative Israel’s next ambassador to the United States.
Ariel Kahan, the diplomatic correspondent of the conservative and religiously orthodox Israeli daily, Makor Rishon, reports that Benjamin Netanyahu is nominating his American-born advisor for the past four years, Ron Dermer, to replace Israel’s current Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, when Oren’s four-year term is up.
Barak Ravid of Haaretz, whose close ties to government sources makes him a more credible source than the conspiratorially inclined Makor Rishon, asked the Prime Minister’s office for confirmation of the report and received “an expected and routine answer: ‘No comment.’” Another Israeli official queried by Ravid said Dermer’s nomination was a possibility Netanyahu might want to reconsider because Dermer “is thought of as hostile to the Obama administration” and “his views are seen as further to the right than Netanyahu’s.”
Ravid says that European and American officials have frequently told him during the past four years that they were “shocked by Dermer’s positions on the settlement issue, on peace talks with the Palestinians, and on the principle of an independent Palestinian state.” He recalls an incident when Dermer told reporters on the Prime Minister’s plane returning from the US that “the principle of two states for two peoples is a childish solution to a complicated problem.” Ravid cites a US State Department diplomatic cable leaked to Wikileaks that reveals Dermer’s skepticism about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a partner for peace. (Click here for the original document).
According to Ravid, “Netanyahu thinks Dermer is as an oracle on everything related to American politics and society. Despite his serious error over the U.S. elections, and his lack of understanding of changes in American society, Dermer’s biggest problem, in my opinion, is his level of knowledge and understanding of Israeli society.”
Son of the late two-term Mayor of Miami Beach, Jay Dermer, Ron’s first job when he graduated from college was as an assistant to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, designer of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” congressional campaign, according to a profile by Allison Hoffman. In 1997, at the age of 26, Dermer emigrated to Israel. Ravid somewhat disapprovingly points out that Dermer neither served in the Israel Defense Forces, nor did national service, later claiming that the IDF turned him down when he wanted to enlist. If true, it had nothing to do with his physical fitness, since Hoffman’s article points out that Dermer “is a ferocious competitor who quarterbacked Israel’s flag-football team in the sport’s World Cup three times.”
Instead, Dermer, thanks to his neoconservative connections, immediately became involved in Israeli politics as a pollster for Natan (Antoly) Sharansky, a former Soviet “refusenik” turned right-wing politician after his release from a Soviet prison and receiving a hero’s welcome in Israel. Hoffman credits the hookup between Dermer and Sharansky to the neoconservative “Prince of Darkness”, Richard Perle. Subsequently, Dermer became an adviser to Netanyahu. In 2004, Dermer gave up his US citizenship so that he could become Minister for Economic Affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC, a post he held for four years before returning to Israel to become Netanyahu’s chief strategist and speechwriter.
Despite the present protestations that Netanyahu and his government remained neutral during the US presidential election, Dermer was actively involved, along with Romney’s foreign policy adviser Dan Senor, in planning Romney’s visit to Israel last July, according to Hoffman, helping to keep it secret in order to pre-empt the possibility of a last-minute visit by President Obama. Ravid points out that “Dermer is also the person who tried to convince Netanyahu by any means possible that Romney was set to win the elections. We saw what happened in the end. With the Obama starting his second term in the White House, it will be hard for Dermer to develop a network of trusted and intimate contacts among the president’s most senior advisors.”
So while pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans alike are wringing their hands at the thought that an executive branch appointment in the US administration might give offense to Israel’s supporters, Israel’s Prime Minister may be plotting to stick his thumb in the eye of President Barack Obama, who has promised “no daylight” between the US and Israel. What better way to cross swords with the US president than by appointing an Ambassador who has spent his entire career in the employment of the Republican party and actively rooted for, and worked for, the victory of Obama’s rival?
]]>In a wide-ranging interview, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell discussed Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech with neoconservative Romney-adviser Dan Senor, challenging him over his intimation that the Obama administration lacked the will to increase sanctions on Iran two years ago:
SENOR: They talk about all these tough sanctions that they [...]]]>
In a wide-ranging interview, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell discussed Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech with neoconservative Romney-adviser Dan Senor, challenging him over his intimation that the Obama administration lacked the will to increase sanctions on Iran two years ago:
SENOR: They talk about all these tough sanctions that they put in place. The question is, why did they wait until 2011 and 2012 to put those sanctions in place in Iran? When Congress was pushing for tough sanctions on Iran in 2009 and 2010 –
MITCHELL: Dan, on that — on that, you know very well that –
SENOR: — the administration was fighting them every step of the way.
MITCHELL: Sir, you know very well –
SENOR: I’m sorry?
MITCHELL: That those were the unilateral — you know those were the unilateral sanctions on the central bank and the reason given by the [T]reasury officials, right or wrong; was that to do that level of sanctions would create an energy crisis at that time because there wasn`t enough other oil –
SENOR: So why — no, Andrea, come on.
MITCHELL: Let me finish the question.
SENOR: Andrea.
MITCHELL: Because I was reporting this in real time.
SENOR: OK. Fair enough.
MITCHELL: What about the multilateral sanctions that this administration achieved with the help of finally getting Russia and China on board from the United Nations which the Bush administration was never able to achieve because there was no understanding or no agreement from the U.N. that diplomacy was being given some time to work.
SENOR: It’s great that we got multilateral sanctions through the U.N. Security Council. Unfortunately the price we paid for getting those sanctions, for getting China and Russia to buy into those sanctions was that the central bank sanctions would not be included. Everyone agrees across the political divide in the United States who follow this issue closely that the central bank sanctions are the ones that have had the real bite.
The administration resisted efforts in Congress repeatedly to get those sanctions in place. Now you can cite, as they often do, the economic implications. It’s not clear to me why there were economic implications in 2009-2010 but there weren’t in 2011-2012, but they also said that it would undermine their diplomatic strategy. Their diplomatic strategy was reaching out to the ayatollahs in Iran with an outstretched hand, unconditional — unconditionally trying to get unconditional talks.
They were silent when there was a genuine protest movement in Iran that would have given political pressure on the regime. All these moments where those economic pressure or political pressure in 2009 and 2010 the administration did nothing because they believed there was this direct deal that they could get done with the — with the regime. It failed. It did not happen.
So it is important that today we have some sanctions in place that are having an impact. We’re simply saying imagine if those sanctions and the kind of political pressure that could be waged had been put in place earlier on, and to say that things are going fine just because the Iranian economy is in bad shape is just a sad statement of the state of affairs.
The goal is not to weaken the Iranian economy. The goal is to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Weakening its economy and weakening the regime politically are means.
MITCHELL: Dan –
SENOR: They are not results. There`s only one measurement that matters. And whether or not Iran is closer to the nuclear weapons program and today they are.
Presently, Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), whose policies are closely associated with the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is in fact now seeking a “broader ban [Congressional] for Iran central bank deals and “to blacklist entire energy sector of Iran,” Reuters reports.
]]>Michael Ledeen, Foreign Affairs: The neoconservative pundit has been arguing for years that the US should foment regime change [...]]]>
Michael Ledeen, Foreign Affairs: The neoconservative pundit has been arguing for years that the US should foment regime change in Iran byway of direct or indirect US support to Iranian dissident groups. This month he reiterates that argument while evaluating the Green Movement as a potential carrier for his proposal. The following are some of Ledeen’s key points (notice how he begins by stating that sanctions have been ineffective and will likely remain so and ends by arguing that the US’s “sanction regime” should continue anyway):
- Yet history suggests, and even many sanctions advocates agree, that sanctions will not compel Iran’s leaders to scrap their nuclear program.
- And, although war might bring down the regime, it is neither necessary nor desirable. Supporting a domestic revolution is a wiser strategy.
- Given the potential for a successful democratic revolution in Iran — and the potential for a democratic government to end Iran’s war against us — the question is how the United States and its allies can best support the Green Movement.
- …the time has come for the United States and other Western nations to actively support Iran’s democratic dissidents.
- Meanwhile, the West should continue nuclear negotiations and stick to the sanctions regime, which shows the Iranian people resistance to their oppressive leaders.
- Iran’s democratic revolutionaries themselves must decide what kind of Western help they most need, and how to use it. But they will be greatly encouraged to see the United States and its allies behind them. There are many good reasons to believe that this strategy can succeed. Not least, the Iranian people have already demonstrated their willingness to confront the regime; the regime’s behavior shows its fear of the people. The missing link is a Western decision to embrace and support democratic revolution in Iran — the country that, after all, initiated the challenge to the region’s tyrants three summers ago.
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal: For months the Journal’s editorial board published hawkish articles about Iran on a weekly basis. We highlighted some of them here, here and here. Then they stopped, perhaps due to the heating up of the presidential campaign and the crisis in Syria. But in July the board returned to reminding readers about its hawkish position on Iran, first by arguing that current sanctions are not strong enough and filled with “loopholes” while advocating for more “pain”, and then by claiming that Congress should propose the “toughest” sanctions bill possible to the President, considering how he may be a “pretender on sanctioning the mullahs”. (The “Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act” was passed this week and is expected to be signed into law by Obama shortly. As noted by the Jewish Telegraph Association, “for the first time in actionable legislation, the measure defines the capability of building a nuclear weapon as posing a threat to the United States”, which of course brings the US closer to the Israeli “red line” on Iran):
The Administration will resist these stiffer penalties, as it has consistently resisted previous Congressional attempts to impose the harshest possible sanctions. But that’s all the more reason for the conferees to present the President with the toughest bill possible, and see where he really stands.
If Mr. Obama is a pretender on sanctioning the mullahs, then you can be sure he isn’t inclined to stop their nuclear program by other means. The Israelis will draw their own conclusions, if they haven’t already.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies: The neoconservative-dominated Washington think tank that has been working hard to shape the Obama administration’s Iran sanctions policy (through executive director Mark Dubowitz) congratulates Congress for passing the “compromise bill” mentioned above because it brings the US closer to implementing Dubowitz’s recipe for ”economic warfare” against the Iranian regime:
“But Iranian nuclear physics is beating Western economic pressure and diplomacy, as the centrifuges keep spinning, and the Iranian regime continues its campaign of murder abroad and at home. While this bill is an important step towards economic warfare against the Iranian regime, much more needs to be done. Iran’s leaders need to be persuaded that the U.S. is committed to using every instrument of state power to counter the Iranian threat.”
Dan Senor, New York Times: The former Iraq war hawk turned Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser (see two recent profiles here and here) drew media attention last week for alleging that Romney respected Israel’s right to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to the NYT’s politics blog:
“If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision,” Mr. Senor said.
Previewing Mr. Romney’s remarks, Mr. Senor explained: “It is not enough just to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program. The capability, even if that capability is short of weaponization, is a pathway to weaponization, and the capability gives Iran the power it needs to wreak havoc in the region and around the world.”
As the Times notes, the Romney campaign tried to walk back those comments somewhat, but Robert Wright at the Atlantic didn’t buy the damage control effort.
]]>- ROMNEY’S VISION: FOREIGN AFFAIRS:
- Romney supports Obama’s plan to withdraw US troops by the end of 2014
- Romney: Afghanistan position could change with changing commanders
- Romney says he opposed negotiations with the Taliban to end fighting
- Romney plans to order a review on Afghanistan’once elected
- Romney using the Arab Spring as an issue in the presidential race
- Romney: Concerns over Islamist fighters in Arab Spring countries
- He said the Arab Spring was a result of Obama abandoning Bush’s “Freedom Agenda”
- Romney said halting a nuclear Iran is the top national security priority
- Romney wants to push for a greater diplomatic isolation of Iran
- Romney staff: US should sanction Iran’s petroleum industry
- Romney said US needs to increase pressure on Iran through sanctions
- Romney staff said he would back Israel’s decision to attack Iran
Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, a top foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney said the GOP presidential nominee would support an Israeli decision to attack Iran’s nuclear program. The right-wing adviser Dan Senor said Iran should not be able to attain a nuclear “capability” — a significant break in language from state U.S. policy.
Senor told reporters:
If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing the capability, the governor would respect that decision.
In a follow-up statement, Senor said, “We should employ any and all measures to dissuade the Iranian regime from its nuclear course, and it is his fervent hope that diplomatic and economic measures will do so,” but that an American attack should remain an option.
While Obama has said an Iranian nuclear weapon is “unacceptable,” declaring a nuclear “capability” an American “red line” that would trigger war sets a lower threshold for U.S. military involvement. The CIA has laid out a specific definition, but the “nuclear capability” language is a complex issue. The word “capability” has a special meaning in the non-proliferation context, but it’s not always clear exactly what. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), one of the Senate’s most vociferous Iran hawks, said this year, “I guess everybody will determine for themselves what that means.” Hawks in Congress pushed a bill this year to shift the official U.S. “red line” to a nuclear “capability.”
During an appearance with Romney in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netnayahu said he agreed with Romney’s approach, falsely claiming that “all the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota.” U.N. sanctions have delayed Iran’s nuclear progress. A U.N. ban on selling Iran weapons technologies appears to have set back their ballistic missile programs as well.
President Obama considers a potential Iranian nuclear weapon a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, as well as the nuclear non-proliferation regime. And he’s vowed again and again to keep all options on the table to deal wtih it. U.S., U.N. and Israeli intelligence estimates give the West time to pursue a dual-track approach of building international pressureand using diplomacy to resolve the crisis. Questions about the efficacy and potential consequences of a strike have led U.S. officials to declare that diplomacy is the “best and most permanent way” to resolve the crisis. Obama has also reaffirmed Israel’s “sovereign right to make its own decisions about what is required to meet its security needs.”
Romney has long supported military involvement in the Middle East and still defends President Bush’s preventative invasion in Iraq. In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Romney said, “President Bush took action which he believed, based upon the information that was available to him, both from British intelligence and intelligence in our country and around the world, that Saddam Hussein presented a very serious threat to the world, including the potential of weapons of mass destruction.”
UPDATE
The New York Times has a more full transcript of Senor’s comments, emphasizing the shift to “capability” as a U.S. “red line”:
It is not enough just to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program. The capability, even if that capability is short of weaponization, is a pathway to weaponization, and the capability gives Iran the power it needs to wreak havoc in the region and around the world.
WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.
The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Warning that Libya stood “on the threshold of a moral and humanitarian catastrophe”, the letter, which was addressed to President Barack Obama, called for specific immediate steps involving military action, in addition to the imposition of a number of diplomatic and economic sanctions to bring “an end to the murderous Libyan regime”.
In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to “develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters” to “aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;” as well as “(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians.”
Among the letter’s signers were former Bush deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush’s top global democracy and Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney‘s former deputy national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI’s four directors: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman.
It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush’s term in 2005.
The letter comes amid growing pressure on Obama, including from liberal hawks, to take stronger action against Gaddafi.
Two prominent senators whose foreign policy views often reflect neo-conservative thinking, Republican John McCain and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, called Friday in Tel Aviv for Washington to supply Libyan rebels with arms, among other steps, including establishing a no-fly zone over the country.
On Wednesday, Obama said his staff was preparing a “full range of options” for action. He also announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet fly to Geneva Monday for a foreign ministers’ meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council to discuss possible multilateral actions.
“They want to keep open the idea that there’s a mix of capabilities they can deploy – whether it’s a no-fly zone, freezing foreign assets of Gaddafi’s family, doing something to prevent the transport of mercenaries (hired by Gaddafi) to Libya, targeting sanctions against some of his supporters to persuade them to abandon him,” said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who took part in a meeting of independent foreign policy analysts, including Abrams, with senior National Security Council staff at the White House Thursday.
During the 1990s, neo-conservatives consistently lobbied for military pressure to be deployed against so-called “rogue states”, especially in the Middle East.
After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, many “neo-cons” expressed bitter disappointment that U.S. troops stopped at the Kuwaiti border instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.
When the Iraqi president then unleashed his forces against Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia insurgents in the south, they – along with many liberal interventionist allies – pressed President George H.W. Bush to impose “no-fly zones” over both regions and take additional actions – much as they are now proposing for Libya – designed to weaken the regime’s military repressive capacity.
Those actions set the pattern for the 1990s. To the end of the decade, neo-conservatives, often operating under the auspices of a so-called “letterhead organisation”, such as PNAC, worked – often with the help of some liberal internationalists eager to establish a right of humanitarian intervention – to press President Bill Clinton to take military action against adversaries in the Balkans (in Bosnia and then Kosovo) as well as Iraq.
Within days of 9/11, for example, PNAC issued a letter signed by 41 prominent individuals – almost all neo-conservatives, including 10 of the Libya letter’s signers – that called for military action to “remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”, as well as retaliation against Iran and Syria if they did not immediately end their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
PNAC and its associates subsequently worked closely with neo-conservatives inside the Bush administration, including Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Edelman, to achieve those aims.
While neo-conservatives were among the first to call for military action against Gaddafi in the past week, some prominent liberals and rights activists have rallied to the call, including three of the letter’s signatories: Neil Hicks of Human Rights First; Bill Clinton’s human rights chief, John Shattuck; and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, who also signed the PNAC Iraq letter 10 years ago.
In addition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, until last month the influential director of the State Department’s Policy Planning office, cited the U.S.-NATO Kosovo campaign as a possible precedent. “The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters,” she wrote on Twitter. “In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted.”
Such comments evoked strong reactions from some military experts, however.
“I’m horrified to read liberal interventionists continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional conflicts can be solved by the application of military power,” wrote Andrew Exum, a counter-insurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, about Wieseltier. “To speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of contemporary military operations.”
Other commentators noted that a renewed coalition of neo- conservatives and liberal interventionists would be much harder to put together now than during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
“We now have Iraq and Afghanistan as warning signs, as well as our fiscal crisis, so I don’t think there’s an enormous appetite on Capitol Hill or among the public for yet another military engagement,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
“I support diplomatic and economic sanctions, but I would stop well short of advocating military action, including the imposition of a no-fly zone,” he added, noting, in any event, that most of the killing in Libya this week has been carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries on foot or from vehicles.
“There may be some things we can do – such as airlifting humanitarian supplies to border regions where there are growing number of refugees, but I would do so only with the full support of the Arab League and African Union, if not the U.N.,” said Clemons.
“(The neo-conservatives) are essentially pro-intervention, pro-war, without regard to the costs to the country,” he told IPS. “They don’t recognise that we’re incredibly over- extended and that the kinds of things they want us to do actually further weaken our already-eroded stock of American power.”
]]>Now, Paul is not a foaming-at-the-mouth neocon. But neither do his views on the Middle East seem likely fulfill the hopes that the Leveretts have for the Tea Party — namely, providing “the most outspoken congressional opponents of potential moves by the Obama Administration toward military confrontation with Iran.”
For a more fleshed out account of the direction of the Tea Party’s foreign policy, check out Scott McConnell’s piece at Right Web. McConnell, a founding editor of the American Conservative, described the different approaches of neoconseravtives and Tea Partiers who tend toward fiscally-conservative restraint and writes:
Thus far, the neoconservatives appear to be parrying the challenge effectively. The question is, can the neocons, as they have with other political factions in the past, successfully co-opt this new political force in such a way as to make it amenable to their goals?
McConnell notes that Palin was discovered by neoconservative don Bill Kristol. Those Tea Partiers who have actually been successful (winning or garnering great followings and attention) have been courted by — and often seemed to please — Israel lobby forces and some neoconservative influences.
Take Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, who will represent Florida in the Senate as of early January. The day after winning his seat, Rubio announced a visit to Israel. During the campaign, Rubio, much to the excitement of neoconservatives, said that the U.S. should attack Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. Likewise, Utah’s Senator-elect Mike Lee, another Tea Partier, met with Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu and ran on a platform that “military action [against Iran] would be justified.” Both Senators-elect said the U.S. should allow Israel to strike Iran.
The picture with Rand Paul is significantly more complicated than what the Leveretts present. Comments Paul made during the campaign in May sparked a minor blog squabble between various elements of the “old right” — the American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison and Antiwar.com‘s Justin Raimondo. (Both could claim the “old right” mantle before the Tea Party was even a glimmer in the eye of Rick Santelli or the Koch brothers.)
Just a week after the mid-term elections that elevated Rubio, Lee and Paul to the Senate, McConnell gave an updated breakdown of Paul’s views in his Right Web piece:
On the other hand, Rand Paul, the son of the isolationist icon and early Tea Party favorite Ron Paul, has studiously avoided discussion of foreign policy issues in his campaign. In October, a GQ article reported that after Paul’s primary win he met with prominent neoconservatives Bill Kristol, Tom Donnelly of AEI, and Dan Senor (cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative) in Washington to talk foreign policy. While he once criticized the Republicans’ “military adventurism,” opposed the war in Iraq, and “scoffed at the threat of Iranian nukes,” he may have begun changing his positions. Senor categorized Paul as “in absorption mode” and not “cemented in his views.” Paul later met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he reportedly “told them what they wanted to hear” and distanced himself from his father, who has been critical of the extent of U.S. support for Israel.
McConnell concludes by noting that the Tea Party has a strong “religious” right element as well as a “libertarian” one.
The “religious” element is likely aligned with Christian Zionists such as John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose views on the Middle East profess a Greater Israel Zionism even more fervent and violent than one finds in most public neoconservative quarters (the two groups are already strong allies). As with the neocons, Christian Zionists tend to take a moralistic worldview that finds any and all enemies of Israel (particularly Muslims) to be “evil” — unredeemable to the point of requiring extermination by force (otherwise known as Armageddon, or the final battle between good and evil, a central piece of Christian Zionist eschatology.)
Furthermore, the “libertarian” elements of the Tea Party might indeed include those who, confronted by the wider consequences of an attack on Iran, would recoil at the idea of a broad and unpredictable Middle East war. But neoconservatives — in attempting to build a diverse coalition for their aggressive policies — will constantly downplay these negative wider consequences of an assault. (As they did during much of the panel on the “kinetic option” at the big Foundation for Defense of Democracies Iran confab earlier this month.)
And as for fiscally minded small-government ideologues from either branch of the Tea Party, they will come to learn that the cost of a bombing run will only be the price of a warehouse full of ordinance, smart bombs, drones with Hellfire missiles, and the fuel to get it all into Iranian territory. That just ain’t that much dough.
If the Leveretts so choose, they can take heart that there might indeed be some Tea Partiers who, as they put it, “are stalwart in their criticism of the Iraq war and their determination that the United States not launch another ‘war of choice’ in the Middle East that will end up doing even greater damage to America’s interests and international standing.” But I’m not going to hold out hope on this score.
Tea Partiers who make it into the halls of power will likely have their principles watered down by that power. The opinions of Tea Party activists in the field won’t concern neoconservatives, who are known for focusing their efforts on elites — what journalist Sidney Blumenthal called the “Counter Establishment” in his 1986 book. Irving Kristol once said that with a magazine that has “a circulation of a few hundred, you could change the world.” (Some recent populist outreach on YouTube and other mediums notwithstanding.)
The Tea Party — or even a significant portion of it — seems to me to be an unlikely part of any coalition in Washington that will work to stop the United States from starting a war with Iran.
]]>So here’s an easy way for them to avoid any appearance of hypocrisy: simply propose legislation that would ban any commercial or otherwise non-commemorative establishment in the three blocks surrounding the World Trade Center. No strips clubs, no bars, no delis, no brokerage houses, no Starbucks. This appears to be the only way to make the Ground Zero site “hallowed” in the way that Krauthammer and his allies claim to believe that it already is.
Do I expect any of the mosque opponents to support such a proposal? Of course not. But if they don’t, it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that their opposition to the project has less to do with the idea that the blocks around Ground Zero are “sacred ground” and more to do with the fact that they simply don’t like Muslims very much.
]]>Now look, nobody in America would object to the construction of an Islamic center — however the question is: Why here? Why in this spot? This is a spot that was for hours bathed in the ashes of the Twin Towers and the thousands of innocents who died in it.
[...]]]>Now look, nobody in America would object to the construction of an Islamic center — however the question is: Why here? Why in this spot? This is a spot that was for hours bathed in the ashes of the Twin Towers and the thousands of innocents who died in it.
It’s not just any other spot. It’s sacred ground.
As it happens, I was staying with a friend right around the corner from the site of the “Ground Zero Mosque” this past weekend, and I can second Krauthammer on the “sacred” feel of the area. From the Starbucks where young office workers grabbed their morning decaf venti mocha frappucinos to the dive bar where aging frat boys downed Jagerbombs, the whole neighborhood reflected Dan Senor’s injunction that the area “should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims.”
But as I was walking around the neighborhood, resting easy that its residents had resolved Never To Forget That We Were Attacked On 9/11, I suddenly saw something that stopped me short. In their zeal to halt the inexorable march of Islamofascism in Lower Manhattan, I realized that Krauthammer, Senor, and their comrades may have missed the real and more insidious threat that has been lurking in front of our very eyes.
This is the view from Park Place and Church Street, a few steps away from the planned mosque:
Nothing here but 9/11 memorials, right? But not so fast — let’s take a closer look at the block:
I couldn’t help but notice the Indian restaurant on the block. At first, I saw nothing openly alarming, naively believing that the Bengalis were Friendly Brown People rather than Islamofascists. But let’s take a closer look at this supposedly peaceful commercial establishment:
Look carefully at the signs at the upper right of the restaurant’s awning. A vigilant observer will immediately notice that this supposedly innocuous commercial establishment proclaims, not once, but twice, that it serves “halal” food — that is, food in compliance with Islamic Sharia Law. As scholars of Islam such as Andy McCarthy have described, radical Muslims have joined forces with radical leftists such as Barack Obama to spawn “America-hating Islamic enclaves in our very midst, gradually foisting Islam’s repressive law, sharia, on American life.” It would be no exaggeration to regard this restaurant as a beachhead for the creeping Shariafication of America, mere steps from where We Were Attacked On 9/11 (which We Must Never Forget).
We should also note that the Google Maps photos above record only the stationary Sharia outposts in the neighborhood. They cannot tell us precisely how many Mobile Semi-Armored Jihad Wagons — of the kind pictured below — are operative in the area:
Yet the lack of media attention paid to these terror-promoting Islamist outposts raises troubling questions about the entire Ground Zero Mosque debate. Lovers of the American way have naturally focused their energies on stopping the mosque — but what if the mosque itself is merely a red herring? What if the wily Islamists’ real intention is to distract America’s defenders with the high-profile mosque, while in reality working to foist Sharia on America through subtler — and tastier — means?
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