Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the CIA of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups.
While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive and sometimes furious negotiations between the Senate Committee’s majority and both the CIA and the Obama administration, the groups said additional steps were needed to ensure that U.S. officials never again engage in the kind of torture detailed in the report.
“This should be the beginning of a process, not the end,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The report should shock President Obama and Congress into action, to make sure that torture and cruelty are never used again.”
He called, among other steps, for the appointment of a special prosecutor to hold the “architects and perpetrators” of what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) accountable and for Congress to assert its control over the CIA, “which in this report sounds more like a rogue paramilitary group than the intelligence gathering agency that it’s supposed to be.”
He was joined by London-based Amnesty International which noted that the declassified information provided in the report constituted “a reminder to the world of the utter failure of the USA to end the impunity enjoyed by those who authorised and used torture and other ill-treatment.
“This is a wake-up call to the USA; they must disclose the full truth about the human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable and ensure justice for the victims,” said Amnesty’s Latin America director, Erika Guevara.
The Senate Committee’s report, actually a 524-page, partially-redacted summary of a still-classified 6,300-page report on the treatment of at least 119 terrorist suspects detained in secret locations overseas, accused the CIA not only of engaging in torture that was “brutal and far worse” than has previously been reported, but also of regularly misleading the White House and Congress both about what it was doing and the purported value of the intelligence it derived from those practices.
Water-boarding, for example, was used against detainees more often and in more of the CIA’s “black sites” than previously known; sleep deprivation was used for up to a week at a time against some suspects; others received “rectal feeding” or “hydration’; and still others were forced to stand on broken feet or legs.
In at least one case, a detainee was frozen to death; in the case of Abu Zubayda, an alleged “high-value” Al Qaeda detainee who was subject to dozens of water-boardings, the treatment was so brutal, several CIA officers asked to be transferred if it did not stop.
While the CIA officers and former Bush administration officials, notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, have long insisted that key information – including intelligence that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — was obtained from EITs, the report concluded that these techniques were ineffective.
Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive EITs provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report, which relied on the CIA’s own cables and reports.
In some cases, detainees subjected to EITs gave misinformation about “terrorist threats” which did not actually exist, the report found. Of the 119 known detainees subject to EITs, at least 26 should never have been held, it said.
Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who fought hard for months to release the report over the CIA’s fierce objections, wrote in its Forward that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, “she could understand the CIA’s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and CIA was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”
“Nevertheless, such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security,” according to Feinstein.
For his part, CIA director John Brennan, a career CIA officer appointed by Obama whose role in the Bush administration’s detention programme remains cloudy, “acknowledge(d) that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.”
“The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the Agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.”
But he also defended the EITs, insisting that “interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” A fact sheet released by the CIA claimed, as an example, that one detainee, after undergoing EITs, identified bin Laden’s courier, which subsequently led the CIA to the Al Qaeda chief’s location.
With several notable exceptions, Republicans also defended the CIA and the Bush administration’s orders to permit EITs. Indeed, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican members released a minority report that noted that the majority of staff had not interviewed any CIA officers directly involved in the programme.
“There is no reason whatsoever for this report to ever be published,” said the Committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss. “This is purely a partisan tactic” which he said was designed to attack the Bush administration. Republicans also warned that the report’s release would endanger U.S. service personnel and citizens abroad by fuelling anti-American sentiment, especially in the Muslim world.
But Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam war, defended the report, calling it “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose …but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.”
McCain has championed efforts to pass legislation outlawing torture, particularly because Obama’s 2009 executive orders prohibiting such practices could be reversed by a future president.
Passage of such a law – whose prospects appear virtually nil in light of Republican control of both houses of Congress for the next two years – is one of the demands, along with release of the full report, of most human-rights groups here.
“The Obama administration and Congress should work together to build a durable consensus against torture by pursuing legislation that demonstrates bipartisan unity and fidelity to our ideals,” said Elisa Massimino, director of Human Rights First.
Many groups, however, want Obama to go further by prosecuting those responsible for the EIT programme, a step that his administration made clear from the outset it was loathe to do.
“We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture programme,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented a number of detainees at Guantanamo, including Abu Zubaydah, in U.S. courts. “They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and, if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under principles of universal jurisdiction.”
“The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are utter fiction,” according to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”
Noting that health professionals, including doctors and psychologists also played a role in the EITs, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also called for legal accountability. “For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been lying about its use of torture,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director.
“The report confirms that health professionals used their skills to break the minds and bodies of detainees. Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability,” she said.
This article was first published by IPS and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>by Emile Nakhleh
Much blame could go around regarding the current chaos in Iraq and the recent territorial gains of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Four contributing factors stand out:
The 2003 decision by the Bush administration to dissolve the Iraqi army and “debaathify” the country (ban the Baath [...]]]>by Emile Nakhleh
Much blame could go around regarding the current chaos in Iraq and the recent territorial gains of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Four contributing factors stand out:
- The 2003 decision by the Bush administration to dissolve the Iraqi army and “debaathify” the country (ban the Baath Party and remove all senior Baathists from the government and security forces).
- The refusal of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to establish an inclusive governing process.
- The US military’s poor knowledge of the Iraqi military’s state of readiness since the US departure.
- Inaction by US and Western powers in the past two years to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Senior US diplomat Paul Bremer’s decision in 2003 to dissolve the Iraqi army and to debaathify the country, with the approval of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, was disastrous. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of officers, many of whom were Sunni Muslims, found themselves on the streets without a job and with a debilitating loss of influence and status. Their anger fueled the first insurgency.
Most Iraqis were expected to hold Baath party membership under Saddam Hussein if they desired a position in the government and in the private sector, including education, health services, and corporations. Bremer’s decision to lay off these people because of their party affiliation produced millions of unemployed Iraqis — angry, alienated, desperate, and willing to carry arms against the new Shia-dominated power structure and the US occupation.
According to media reports and published memoirs, Vice President Cheney and his top advisers, including David Addington and Scooter Libby, believed on the eve of the invasion that Iraqis would view the US military as liberators, not occupiers.
They failed to realize at the time that Iraqis’ dislike for Saddam did not automatically translate into love of foreign occupation. Debaathification and dissolving the army created a “perfect storm,” which explains what’s happening in Iraq today.
Prime Minister Maliki has pursued a narrow-minded partisan policy, which excludes anyone — Sunni and Shia — who does not belong to his Dawa Party. Visitors to his office would be hard-pressed to find any senior employee without party affiliation.
Contrary to American advice, Maliki refused to keep thousands of Sunni tribesmen, who were involved in the “Awakening,” on the government payroll. Here again, thousands of these tribesmen who received regular incomes from the American military became unemployed.
Not surprisingly, they became the backbone of the second insurgency against the Maliki government.
Maliki misjudged his countrymen thinking that they would tolerate a regime based on divisiveness, sectarianism, systemic corruption, and a budding dictatorship. He promoted sectarianism even among the senior military officer corps and promoted party allegiance over competence and experience.
He thought mistakenly that for geopolitical reasons, both the United States and Iran would continue to support him despite his poor policies. This support is now tepid at best; even mainstream Shia political leaders are calling for his removal.
Maliki has clearly reached a dead end and should be replaced. Following the US departure, he failed to lead Iraq into a more inclusive and stable country. Key regional and international actors no longer believed his accusations that his critics were “terrorists.”
ISIS’ territorial advances, as were dramatically depicted on television screens around the world, highlight the disintegration of some divisions within the Iraqi army. It’s an embarrassment not only for the Iraqi army, but also more significantly for the US military, which trained these units.
Depicting ISIS’ sudden success as another case of “intelligence failure” is tempting. In reality, the US military had inadequate knowledge of the loyalties, commitment, professionalism, and sectarianism of the Iraqi military. Abandoning their uniforms and weapons and refusing to fight for their country meant Iraqi officers did not believe in what they were fighting for or their mission. Billions of dollars spent by the US on training these units went to naught.
Washington’s failure to bring about the fall of Assad early on has also emboldened Sunni militants to fight in Syria. “Jihadists” from across the globe, including from Western countries, descended on Syria for the same cause. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and other Gulf countries have funded these groups.
Bashar al-Assad’s self-fulfilling prophecy that terrorism is the main enemy in Syria has come home to roost, not only in Syria, but also in Iraq.
The way forward
- The United States, in cooperation with Iran, the Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Sunni tribal leaders, and mainstream Shia and Sunni politicians, should work to create a new government that is ethnically and religiously inclusive. Someone other than Maliki should be the leader.
- The Iraqi government should establish transparent and accountable procedures in politics, the economy, and the judiciary, and institute territorial and economic compromises and power sharing in ethnically mixed cities in the north. Sending 300 US military advisers to Iraq is at best a Band-Aid approach; at worst, it could become another “mission creep.”
- The Obama administration should urge the Saudis, Qataris, and other Gulf countries to stop funding ISIS and other militant Sunni groups. These countries have also promoted sectarianism in Syria and Iraq.
- Western countries, under American leadership, should revisit their ineffectual policies toward the Assad regime. Recent developments have shown the longer he stays in power, the more emboldened militants and terrorists become.
A failed state in Syria and a dismembered Iraq could push the entire Middle East toward sectarian wars and instability, which could in turn unsettle oil markets and rattle the global economy. Before the 2003 invasion, former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President George W. Bush of the Pottery Barn rule. The United States pushed Iraq into this mess; it’s time Washington owns what it broke.
This article was first published by LobeLog and was reprinted here with permission. Follow LobeLog on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Photo: Demonstrators carry al-Qaeda flags in front of the provincial government headquarters in Mosul, 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq on June 16, 2014.
by Jim Lobe
While this blog is devoted to U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it should come as no surprise to regular readers that I regard climate change as likely to be the greatest challenge faced by the United States and the world over for the coming century and beyond.
[...]]]>by Jim Lobe
While this blog is devoted to U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it should come as no surprise to regular readers that I regard climate change as likely to be the greatest challenge faced by the United States and the world over for the coming century and beyond.
The most recent news, including the latest government report on how climate change is already impacting the United States, and the studies that came out three weeks ago regarding the apparently irreversible collapse of the West Antarctica ice sheet, clearly underline the rising stakes, not only from a strictly environmental point of view, but also with respect to national security. After all, as Tom Friedman and others have argued, the civil war in Syria owes much to the extended drought conditions that have prevailed in that country over the past decade and more, driving millions of mostly Sunni small farmers from the countryside into the big cities where they were unable to earn a decent living in fast-growing shanty towns that have mushroomed over that period. (Obviously, western-backed neoliberal economic policies and corruption didn’t help.) While that drought, like a similar phenomenon in central Mexico that has sent hundreds of thousands of people across international borders in search of work, may not be 100% provably attributable to global warming, there is sufficient consistency in the predictions by increasingly refined computer models developed by climatologists over decades to conclude that there is almost certainly a strong connection between the amount of carbon being pumped up into our atmosphere and these changes in weather patterns over significant swathes of our planet.
And, as the indefatigable Tom Engelhardt, in an essay about “climate change as a weapon of mass destruction“, requested of anyone in Wyoming to ask former Vice President Dick Cheney if they should happen to run into him:
How would he feel about acting preventively, if instead of a 1% chance that some country with weapons of mass destruction might use them against us, there was at least a 95% — and likely as not a 100% — chance of them being set off on our soil?
Of course, it’s Cheney and his neoconservative and right-wing friends (too often aided by liberal hawks like the Washington Post’s editorial board), who have consistently derided President Obama’s alleged timidity and failure to “lead” in foreign policy (by which they ordinarily mean using or threatening to use military force in dealing with any crisis). Indeed, just last week, in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Cheney, who, next to George W. Bush, bears the greatest responsibility for the worst U.S. foreign policy debacle at least since the Vietnam War, remarked:
He’s a very, very weak president, maybe the weakest certainly in my lifetime. And I know from my own experience on a recent trip to the Middle East, spending several days talking with folks I’ve dealt with all the way back to Desert Storm, they all are absolutely convinced that the American capacity to lead and to influence events in that part of the world has been dramatically reduced by this president.
We’ve got a problem of weakness. It’s centered right in the White House.
This “weakness” is sometimes attributed by critics to Obama’s supposed left-wing worldview and/or naiveté. Arguing that Obama’s motivations are more cynical and political, others have noted its consistency with the general public’s allegedly “isolationist” tendencies and its disenchantment with the military “hammer”(that was used so promiscuously by Bush and Cheney), as expressed in countless surveys and polls.
In any event, this charge of Obama’s weakness, timidity, retreat, and lack of leadership has now become a neoconservative and Republican mantra repeated and recycled endlessly in the mass media as each new foreign policy challenge moves into the spotlight — from Benghazi to Beijing to Bergdahl. It has become the meta-narrative for analyzing Obama’s foreign policy, from which even many Democrats (watch Hillary Clinton carefully; it’s already out there that she opposed a deal to free Bergdahl) are now trying hard to distance themselves.
Of course, it is in this context that it’s important to ask how such a weak, timid, and “lead-from behind” president could also address climate change as he did earlier this week by taking executive action to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants — a move that appears to offer him no particular political advantage and may indeed prove counter-productive to his hopes of retaining Democratic control of the Senate. In his blog post at the National Interest, Paul Pillar, who, as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia, commissioned the pre-invasion study that predicted much of the fiasco that followed the Iraq invasion — only to be ignored by Cheney, Bush & Co. — was similarly struck by this apparent anomaly and wrote a blog post entitled “Leading from the Front on Carbon Dioxide.” It deserves more attention.
A constantly recurring theme in criticism of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is that he allegedly is a weak leader, or when he leads does so only from behind. An action such as his recent move on power plant emissions highlights how such accusations, insofar as they are not just opposition for the sake of opposition, really aren’t about leadership at all but instead about disagreement on the substance of whatever issue is at hand.
Much criticism of the president has combined an image of him as a weak, stay-in-the-rear leader on foreign policy with a picture of an over-reaching, rule-flouting chief on domestic policy. Opponents will catalog the new rules on power plants in the latter category. Efforts to curb destructive emissions are ultimately a foreign policy problem, however, because Earth is a single planet with a single atmosphere. Pollution problems vary with the locale, and it may be sensible practical politics for the president to talk about respiratory problems among American children, but climate change is global. The heaviest lifting will involve getting China and other heavy polluters to do their part. It is a task as troubling and challenging as any that involve China using dashed lines on maps to make territorial claims.
The task is hard enough given the belief of developing countries that the United States and other Western nations already had their opportunity to develop and to become prosperous and to pollute with impunity as they did so. It would be discriminatory, according to this belief, for late developers to be subject for environmental reasons to more economic restraints than early ones. The least the United States can do, to keep this task from being any harder than it has to be, is to exercise leadership by setting an example and cleaning up its own act.
President Obama also gets criticized for playing small ball in foreign policy, a criticism he partly brings on himself by talking about hitting singles and doubles rather than home runs. Stopping climate change is not small ball. Saving the planet would be a home run. Small ball is played by those, Democrats as well as Republicans, who would rather talk about the health of the coal industry in Kentucky than about the health of the planet. And small ball is played by those who cannot or will not see beyond the powering of most of the world’s economy through any means other than burning what alternative energy guru Amory Lovins has called “the rotten remains of primeval swamp goo.”
Photo: The melting of Mexico’s Orizaba glacier is another consequence of global warming. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS
]]>by Jim Lobe
I’ve been slowly reading Robert Gates’ Duty over the last week or so and some of it is quite pertinent in light of the recent recommendation by JINSA’s Michael Makovsky and Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.) in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration provide Israel with Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
I’ve been slowly reading Robert Gates’ Duty over the last week or so and some of it is quite pertinent in light of the recent recommendation by JINSA’s Michael Makovsky and Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.) in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama administration provide Israel with Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) bombs and B-52 bombers to deliver them against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Here’s what they wrote in their article entitled, “Sending a Bunker-Buster Message to Iran”:
By transferring to Israel MOPs and B-52Hs the administration would send a signal that its ally, which already has the will, now has the ability to prevent a nuclear Iran [a very dubious assertion, according to most experts]. Once they are delivered — ideally as the current six-month interim deal is set to expire in July — Iran will be put on notice that its nuclear program will come to an end, one way or another.
While Gates in his book (pp. 190-191] doesn’t say whether Israel requested the same weaponry in 2007, his description of the arguments presented, both pro and con, would certainly apply to Makovksy’s and Deptula’s arguments today. The passage is worth quoting in full, although the main point is summarized at the end when Gates quotes directly from what he told Bush in private. Here’s the passage as a whole:
Debate [about Iran's nuclear program] heated up considerably in May [2007], prompted by several Israeli military requests that, if satisfied, would greatly enhance their ability to strike the Iranian nuclear sites. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and me in the Tank on May 10, in the middle of a conversation on Afghanistan, the president suddenly asked if anybody was thinking about military action against Iran. He quickly added that the goal was of course to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons and that he “just wanted you to be thinking about it — not a call to arms.”
Two days later the national security team met with the president in his private dining room adjacent to the Oval Office. The participants included Cheney, Rice, Mullen, Bolten, Hadley, Hadley’s deputy Jim Jeffrey, and me. We addressed two questions: How do we answer the Israelis and what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program? In many respects, it was a reprise of the debate over the Syrian nuclear reactor the year before. Hadley asked me to lead off. When making my case to the president on a significant issue like this one, I always wrote out in advance the points I wanted to make, because I did not want to omit something important. Given Bush 43′s green light to Olmert on the Syrian reactor, I was very apprehensive as the meeting began.
I recommended saying no to all the Israelis’ requests. Giving them any of the items on their new list would signal U.S. support for them to attack Iran unilaterally: “At that point, we lose our ability to control our fate in the entire region.” I said we would be handing over the initiative regarding U.S. vital national interests to a foreign power, a government that, when we asked them not to attack Syria, did so anyway. We should offer to collaborate more closely with Israel, I continued, doing more on missile defense and other capabilities, “but Olmert should be told in the strongest possible terms not to act unilaterally.” The United States was not reconciled to Iran having nuclear weapons, but we needed a long-term solution, not just a one-to-three-year delay. I went on to say that a strike by the United States or Israel would end divisions in the Iranian government, strengthen the most radical elements, unify the country behind the government in their hatred of us, and demonstrate to all Iranians the need to develop nuclear weapons. I warned that Iran was not Syria — it would retaliate, putting at risk Iraq, Lebanon, oil supplies from the Gulf (which would lead to skyrocketing oil prices), and the end of the peace process, as well as increasing the likelihood of a Hizballah war against Israel. Addressing what I knew to be Cheney’s desire to deal with the Iranian nuclear program before Bush left office, I observed that our current efforts to isolate Iran, significantly increase their economic problems, and delay their nuclear program might not be successful in bringing about a change of policy in Tehran during the Bush presidency, but they would leave his successor a robust array of tools with which to apply pressure. Finally, I pointed out that the president’s own conditions for preemptive war had not been met, our own intelligence estimate would be used against us, and we would be the ones isolated, not Iran.
Cheney spoke next, and I knew what was coming. Matter-of-factly, he said he disagreed with everything I had said. The United States should give Israel everything it wanted. We could not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If we weren’t going to act, he said, then we should enable the Israelis. Twenty years on, he argued, if there was a nuclear-armed Iran, people would say the Bush administration could have stopped it. I interjected that twenty years on, people might also say that we not only didn’t stop them from getting nuclear weapons but made it inevitable. I was pretty sure Condi did not favor accommodating Israeli’s requests, but the way she expressed her concerns about not leaving our ally in the lurch or feeling isolated led Mullen and me after the meeting to worry that she might be changing her mind. Mullen talked about the difficulty of carrying out a successful attack. Hadley remained silent. At the end, the president was non-commital, clearly frustrated by the lack of good options for dealing with Iran. He had a lot of company in the room on that score.
That afternoon I flew to Colorado Springs to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Aboard the plane, I became increasingly worried that the president might be persuaded by Cheney and Olmert to act or to enable the Israelis to act, especially if Condi’s position was softening. I decided to communicate once again with Bush privately. I said,
“We must not make our vital interests in the entire Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Southwest Asia hostage to another nation’s decisions — no matter how close an ally. Above all, we ought not risk what we have gained in Iraq or the lives of our soldiers there on an Israeli military gamble in Iran. Olmert has his own agenda, and he will pursue it irrespective of our interests. …We will be bystanders to actions that affect us directly and dramatically. …Most evidence suggests we have some time. …The military option probably remains available for several years. …A military attack by either Israel or the United States will, I believe — having watched these guys since 1979 — guarantee that the Iranians will develop nuclear weapons, and seek revenge. …A surprise attack on Iran risks a further conflict in the Gulf and all its potential consequences, with no consultation with the Congress or foreknowledge on the part of the American people. That strikes me as very dangerous, and not just for sustaining our efforts in the Gulf.”
Most of that should act as a rebuttal to Makovsky’s and Deptula’s dangerous recommendations.
]]>by Marsha B. Cohen
In a break with diplomatic tradition Ron Dermer, an American-born former Republican activist, is scheduled to attend the Republican Jewish Coalition’s (RJC) Spring Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas next week and share the speaking platform with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former UN Ambassador John Bolton, Ohio Governor Jon [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
In a break with diplomatic tradition Ron Dermer, an American-born former Republican activist, is scheduled to attend the Republican Jewish Coalition’s (RJC) Spring Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas next week and share the speaking platform with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former UN Ambassador John Bolton, Ohio Governor Jon Kasich and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
The keynote speaker at the Meeting’s Gala Dinner will be former Vice President Dick Cheney and the meeting will be held at the Sheldon Adelson-owned Venetian Resort and Hotel March 28-30. Adelson is a long time supporter of the RJC and has been one of its major sources of funding.
The audience will be limited to members of the RJC’s National Leadership, an elite status requiring a minimum contribution of $1000 to the organization. Also attending will be college students “who have shown strong support for both Republican and Jewish causes on and off campus” and were awarded grants covering the conference fee and meals for their commitment to serving the RJC’s “active student ambassadors” on their campuses.
It is highly unusual for foreign ambassadors to directly involve themselves in the politics of the country in which they are serving, particularly by actively aligning themselves with an opposition party.
“The issue can be tricky,” explained one former US career diplomat to LobeLog. “As a sitting ambassador I often met with opposition figures to show that my country values pluralism and to hear different points of view.”
“I would not be a speaker at a political rally of any side, however,” said the former diplomat. “Doing so is an inappropriate level of involvement in a sovereign country’s domestic politics by a foreign representative.”
A retired senior officer in the US Foreign Service agreed that an embassy’s responsibility includes finding out what opposition leaders in their host country are saying. “In my day it was always an embassy’s job to have contacts across the political spectrum, except where a group was repugnant (terrorists) or put off-limits by an autocratic regime.”
However, the former senior officer emphasized that “Exchanging views with a government’s opponents would normally be carried out by ‘working level’ officers.”
The former senior officer suggested that the best solution for an embassy to glean information about opposition viewpoints was by lower-level embassy officials attending meetings at which they do not speak. “At first blush, the Israeli ambassador’s being a speaker at such an event would seem to cross the line.”
Dermer apparently committed himself to speaking at the exclusively partisan event within days of his taking up the post of Israel’s top diplomat in the US early last February, when he replaced another American expatriate, Michael Oren.
The same RJC e-newsletter sent out on Feb. 6 that welcomed Dermer as Israel’s new ambassador also announced that Cheney, Bolton and Walker were confirmed as guest speakers at the RJC Leadership Meeting. An announcement adding Kasich was e-mailed on Feb. 10, and another highlighting Christie’s participation and quietly adding Dermer’s name to the lineup was sent out on Feb. 14.
Asked to comment on the possible consequences of Dermer sharing a partisan platform with exclusively Republican speakers, the retired American foreign service officer explained, “For a foreign ambassador to appear publicly before a Republican group opposed to a Democratic administration could easily be seen as grounds for having him recalled by his government.”
“At a minimum, his utility in Washington would be affected as senior Democrats might decline to meet with him. His sending government could then decide to reassign him in favor of a neutral official,” said the former officer.
Known as “Bibi’s brain,” Dermer won’t likely face repercussions from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any time soon.
Leading US Jewish Democrats also appear unconcered about the upcoming event. Both the National Jewish Democratic Council and the office of the head of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D-FL) declined to comment on Dermer’s apparent upcoming breach of diplomatic protocol.
But Dermer has another problem now: the diplomats of the Israeli Foreign Ministry are on strike. Netanyahu has accordingly canceled his historic upcoming visit to South America, and Pope Francis may have to postpone his visit to the Holy Land as well.
According to Barak Ravid of Haaretz, Foreign Ministry officials, including diplomats abroad, are refusing to process passports and visas for Israelis abroad, arrange travel for government officials, transmit diplomatic cables to intelligence and defense agencies, promote economic and trade agreements, or engage in public diplomacy.
Among the consequences of the strike thus far is that “Israeli missions abroad refused to disseminate any of the government’s talking points about the Iranian arms ship that Israel captured earlier this month, or to brief politicians and journalists in their host countries about it.” Israeli diplomats are also refusing to attend meetings of UN institutions in New York, Vienna and Geneva.
Nevertheless, according to the RJC’s office in Washington, DC, Dermer is still planning to attend their Leadership Meeting. “He’ll be there,” responded a surprised staff member. “He’s here in Washington, and we haven’t heard anything about him not coming.”
There are two possibilities. Dermer may have not yet advised the RJC that he won’t be able to make it to Las Vegas if the Israeli diplomats’ strike hasn’t ended by next week because he’s hoping it will be over by then.
The other possibility is that Dermer plans to attend the RJC Leadership Meeting strike or no strike. He could justify his attendance with the claim that he is attending as a private person, rather than in his official capacity as a diplomat. Nonetheless, it’s almost certain that he will continue to be identified in RJC publicity and on the meeting’s program as “Ambassador Ron Dermer,” and will be introduced as Israel’s ambassador to the US.
Stay tuned.
Photo: Speaker John Boehner meets with Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, in his office at the US Capitol January 28, 2014. Credit: Heather Reed
]]>by Jim Lobe
Anyone who has followed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) knows it’s a neoconservative organization whose central purpose since its founding in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has less to do with democracy than with promoting the views of Israel as defined, in particular, by [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Anyone who has followed the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) knows it’s a neoconservative organization whose central purpose since its founding in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has less to do with democracy than with promoting the views of Israel as defined, in particular, by Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. It is no wonder that Sheldon Adelson, who casually called this week for the nuking of Tehran if Iran doesn’t abandon its nuclear program, provided the group with more than $1.5 million in donations between 2008 and 2011, as we reported yesterday.
Now, it just so happened that was in the news this week on another front: Jofi Joseph, the White House staffer who worked on the proliferation file on the National Security Council and who was outed as the tweeter known as @NatSecWonk, served as a fellow at FDD in 2011. Here’s how the New York Times first reported his association and characterized FDD:
According to Mr. Joseph’s biography on the Web site of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative group where he was a fellow for 2011, “between his stints on Capitol Hill, Jofi was a senior consultant with a professional services firm, facilitating strategic planning and policy analysis for the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts on critical infrastructure protection.” (Emphasis added.)
The succeeding paragraph named FDD associates, including John Hannah, former national security adviser to Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (whose SuperPac, incidentally, received at least $5 million from Adelson in the last election cycle), Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Gary Bauer, the Christian Zionist leader who serves on the boards of the Christians United for Israel and the Emergency Committee for Israel — all neoconservatives.
One day later, the Times published a follow-up article on Joseph, but this time, the characterization of FDD changed rather remarkably. Here’s the new paragraph:
In 2011, Mr. Joseph also held a national security fellowship with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, which has a generally conservative bent. “Clearly, he had risen up through the Democratic ranks,” said Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the foundation, where fellowships are designed for “young and upcoming national security people in D.C.” of all views, Mr. Dubowitz said.
Well, all one can say is that the Times nailed it on the first go-round, but really blew it the second time. What does “a generally conservative bent” mean when attached to an organization whose principal purpose is the advocacy of the Likud Party’s foreign-policy views in the U.S.? I understand “generally conservative” as meaning someone like Brent Scowcroft or Robert Gates. Moreover, “neoconservative” as a description of FDD is not only accurate, it’s also very concise in contrast to “has a generally conservative bent,” which is quite vague and verbose in a way that newspapers try to avoid.
We can, of course, speculate as to why the change occurred. It could have been the decision of a copy editor who may have felt uncomfortable with “neoconservative” and thought that “generally conservative” sounded better. Or it could’ve been that Dubowitz strongly objected to the word “neoconservative” attached to his organization because it has taken on a rather pejorative meaning in popular parlance due to the critical role the neoconservatives played in promoting the Iraq war (which FDD actively promoted from the “get-go” after 9/11, running a TV ad produced by a former Israeli Embassy press official, for example, that suggested that Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were all part of the same threat.)
Indeed, I suspect that’s one very good reason why some readily identifiable neoconservatives who featured so prominently in promoting the Iraq war — people like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and Doug Feith — have been keeping such a low profile on Iran over the past year. They’re the ones who gave neocons a bad name, while Dubowitz wasn’t even on the scene back then.
]]>by Jim Lobe
I stopped reading neo-con and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson, “the Sage of Fresno”, after the Bush administration, largely because almost everything he wrote sounded exactly the same (cranky), and he offered no insight into what influential people were thinking. Instead, he simply repeated — in [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
I stopped reading neo-con and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson, “the Sage of Fresno”, after the Bush administration, largely because almost everything he wrote sounded exactly the same (cranky), and he offered no insight into what influential people were thinking. Instead, he simply repeated — in his own kind of world-weary, father-knows-best way — whatever the neo-con echo chamber was expounding on.
This week, however, I made an exception because his latest piece in The National Review, “Iran’s North Korean Future”, addressed an emerging neo-con meme designed to take full advantage of the ongoing crisis over North Korea. To wit, if you think a nuclear Pyongyang is bad, wait until Tehran goes nuclear. (Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is trying to become for Iran what the American Enterprise Institute was for Iraq, wrote on the same topic in the Review on the same day.)
Hanson’s Review piece was subsequently published in the Washington Times and the Chicago Tribune and, to my despair, reprinted in the Early Bird edition of the Pentagon’s Current News. The central argument of the article is that a nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous than “other nuclear rogue states” such as Pakistan and North Korea. Why? Pakistan is deterred by a far larger and more powerful India, according to Hansen, while “North Korea can be “muzzled once its barking becomes too obnoxious” to China on whose patronage and support Pyongyang so clear depends. (Hansen also somewhat dubiously claims that Beijing “enjoys the angst that its subordinate causes its rivals.”)
Unlike Pakistan and North Korea, however, Iran has “no commensurate regional deterrent” that would constrain its behavior, according to Hanson. “If North Korea has been a danger, then a bigger, richer and undeterred nuclear Iran would be a nightmare,” he concludes.
Except that earlier in the same op-ed, Hansen notes that Iran would be most unlikely to attack Israel precisely because Israel’s nuclear arsenal is indeed a deterrent. Here’s the relevant passage:
Iran could copy Mr. Kim’s model endlessly — one week threatening to wipe Israel off the face of the map, the next backing down and complaining that problems in translation distorted the actual, less-bellicose communique. The point would not necessarily be to actually nuke Israel (which would translate into the end of Persian culture for a century), but to create such an atmosphere of worry and gloom over the Jewish state as to weaken the economy, encourage emigration and erode its geostrategic reputation.” [Emphasis added.]
So, even while insisting that Iran would not be deterable (because it doesn’t have a powerful next-door enemy like nuclear Pakistan has in India or a powerful patron like nuclear North Korea has in China) Hanson says in virtually the same breath that it is deterable. And this kind of analysis is rewarded by publication in the Current News!
Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz somewhat belatedly added his Iraq War retrospective, entitled (predictably) “Iraq: It’s Too Soon to Tell,” to the flurry of op-eds that came out at the end of March to mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion he fought so hard to realize.
Thankfully, it was not published in a U.S. medium beyond the AEI website but rather in the London-based Saudi daily, Asharq Al-Awsat. It appears primarily to be an (extremely lame) exercise in self-exculpation but is nonetheless well worth reading if for no other reason than he is probably the most high-ranking and influential policy-maker to offer an assessment on this occasion.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go into specific details, but you will see some rather obvious problems in the recitation of the facts and logic.
One example: Saddam “also posed a more immediate danger [than his presumed plans to rebuild his WMD capabilities after sanctions were lifted] because terrorists, including Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, had already begun operating from Iraqi territory to plan terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East [at the time of the invasion].” If that is the definition of the kind of imminent threat that justifies a U.S. invasion, what other country in the region, leave aside Pakistan, would not qualify?
(Wolfowitz also seems to put a lot of the blame on former Secretary of State James Baker for allegedly failing to heed Saudi appeals for the U.S. to intervene on behalf of the Shi’a uprising against Saddam in southern Iraq after the first Gulf war.)
The closest he gets to expressing regret is the following passage.
There are many things that one could wish had been done differently in Iraq. Even supporters of the war can make a long list. My own list stars with the US decision to establish an occupation government instead of handing to sovereignty to Iraqis at the outset, and with the four-year delay in implementing a counter-insurgency strategy. It was already clear, soon after we got to Baghdad, that the enemy was pursuing an urban guerilla strategy — in order to prevent a new Iraqi government from succeeding and so that the US would give up and leave — and an appropriate counter-insurgency strategy should have been developed much sooner.
Notice the absence of self in this passage. It wasn’t Wolfowitz who was involved in these decisions; the implication is that he opposed them. It wasn’t even the administration of President George W. Bush in which he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an architect of the invasion. It was “the US” that made these decisions.
In fact, it was Wolfowitz who championed de-Baathification within the administration, a policy that, combined with the reigning insecurity and de facto dissolution of the Iraqi army, made an occupation necessary. Indeed, Wolfowitz’s whole argument about the occupation was demolished by none other than Dan Senor, the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), at a Hudson Institute Forum five years ago, as I noted in a blog post at the time.
As for Wolfowitz’s complaint about failure to implement a counter-insurgency strategy, he, of course, has no one to blame but himself. It was he who publicly ridiculed Gen. Eric Shinseki’s warnings about the size of the force that would be needed after the invasion, and it was he who failed to read the intelligence studies that predicted the emergence of an insurgency. That he tries now to somehow separate himself from these failures by referring to the “US” rather than to the specific decision-makers (including himself) responsible for these disasters reflects, in my opinion, a certain lack of moral integrity.
Now, to be fair, a pretty big chunk of the op-ed consists of an appeal for the Sunni-led Gulf Cooperational Council (GCC) countries to do more to support Iraq, whose government is dominated by Shi’a parties. And the fact that he is making that appeal in a Saudi newspaper strongly suggests that the op-ed was consciously written with that purpose foremost in mind. “…(T)he way to keep Iraq out of Iran’s embrace is by supporting Iraq’s new government, not by distancing oneself from it,” he wrote. “This isolation, not a love of Persians, is what has pushed Iraq too close to Iran.”
Still, given Wolfowitz’s heavy responsibility for what took place a decade ago and the series of disasters that befell Iraq while he was still in a key policy-making position — he didn’t leave until 2005 — his efforts at justifying the invasion without acknowledging his personal failures and offering advice appear unseemly at best.
Photo: Former President George W. Bush (right), former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (center) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (left). DoD photo March 25, 2003 by R.D. Ward.
]]>by Daniel Luban
This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the [...]]]>
by Daniel Luban
This week, as you’ve probably heard, marks the ten year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Most people who have commented on the milestone have agreed that the war was a catastrophic mistake. But why, exactly, did the Bush administration decide to go into Iraq in the first place? Even a decade later, there’s still not much of a consensus — although Jim’s piece from 2003, reposted yesterday, provides as good a contemporaneous account as you’ll find. Is there anything more we can say with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight?
I tried to sort through possible war motives in a piece I wrote several years ago. (Space constraints meant that the final version was cut rather heavily, and I’d be happy to provide the original version, which included more evidence and fuller argumentation.) I argued there against the somewhat conspiratorial notion that there was a single “real motive,” concealed from the public and shared by all administration backers. The Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) argument was clearly far from the whole story, as Paul Wolfowitz himself conceded. But individual actors and factions within the administration had their own reasons for wanting war.
More to the point, the motives tended to overlap: most war-backers would not have said that invading Iraq was desirable to stabilize oil supplies but not to spread democracy, or to improve Israel’s security but not to deter nuclear terrorism. Rather, they tended to hold a rather utopian belief that invading Iraq would further all of these goals simultaneously. For that reason, assessing motives is more a matter of teasing out emphasis and priority than of reaching categorical judgments about which motives were or were not in play.
With all that said, however, I think we can identify at least four relatively distinct motives that played a role. I provide more in-depth evidence in my RightWeb piece, so I’ll just sketch out some of the conclusions here.
Oil. The allegation that Iraq was a “war for oil” was one of the most frequently leveled charges against it, and one that clearly has some legs. (Just yesterday, for instance, Glenn Greenwald touched on the theme.) However, the notion of a “war for oil” is an imprecise one. It can mean two different things, one less plausible and one more so.
The first (and seemingly most widespread) meaning is that the Iraq war was primarily intended to allow the US (or US oil companies) to get their hands on oil reserves located on Iraqi soil. This is largely unpersuasive. There’s evidence (some of which Greenwald cites) that US policymakers such as Dick Cheney hoped that a post-reconstruction Iraq would greatly step up oil production and provide an alternative to Saudi oil, but there’s little evidence that this was regarded as a primary reason for invasion rather than simply a welcome collateral benefit. US oil companies themselves were lukewarm about the invasion, fearing that it might destabilize the region — and indeed, they haven’t been the primary beneficiaries of oil development in postwar Iraq.
The second (and more plausible) meaning is that the Iraq war was centrally concerned with preserving the stability of US oil supplies in the broader Gulf region as a whole. Here, the evidence is stronger: such “wars for oil” have been semi-official US policy since the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, and this was certainly a primary motive for the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam Hussein was regarded with more alarm than similarly brutal dictators elsewhere in the world largely because the risks of aggression in a geopolitically vital region like the Gulf were viewed as so much higher. Whether or not protecting the Gulf oil supply from Saddam was the primary reason for war, it was certainly an important one.
Israel. For many neoconservatives in the Bush administration, a major (perhaps the major) reason for ousting Saddam was to improve Israel’s security. Since the 1990s, when several future Bush administration figures prepared the notorious “Clean Break” report for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, neoconservatives had been preoccupied with the notion that regime change in Iraq would touch off a broader regional transformation that would disempower Israel’s opponents in the Middle East.
There are some caveats that should be made. First, although neoconservatives were the leading proponents of war, the broader “Israel lobby” as conventionally conceived did not play a particularly strong role (a clear point of contrast with the current campaign for war against Iran). Second, the fact that many in the US pushed for war out of Israel-related concerns did not mean that Israelis themselves were necessarily strong proponents — although figures on the Israeli right with strong ties to neoconservatives, such as Netanyahu himself, certainly were.
Even if neoconservatives inside and outside the administration were motivated in large part by concerns about Israeli security, this still doesn’t answer the question of how influential they were. After all, we should be wary of turning the top leadership (especially Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) into mere vessels for neoconservative designs. As suggested below, I don’t think the Israel motive was paramount in the minds of this top leadership, although it was undoubtedly present. On the other hand, we shouldn’t downplay the instrumental role that neoconservatives played in setting the terms of debate over Iraq both before and after 9/11.
Payback. “We have been hit very hard,” a Cheney adviser told journalist Barton Gellman, “and we needed to make clear the costs to those who might have been supporting or harboring those who were contemplating those acts.” Or, as Jonah Goldberg (channeling Michael Ledeen) put it more bluntly, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” On this line of thought, 9/11 required the US to make an example out of someone to demonstrate its continued strength. The Taliban was too small and weak to serve this purpose, but Saddam — who had already been in the crosshairs for unrelated reasons — fit the bill nicely.
Many people seem hesitant to attribute the invasion to such a seemingly subjective and psychologized motive; it sounds more hardheaded to attribute it to a material interest like oil. But I think we underestimate the strength of this motive at our own peril, and that — particular for Cheney and Rumsfeld, who to my mind were the two critical decision-makers — it may even have been the primary one.
Democracy. The democracy promotion motive has become somewhat overemphasized in recent years, for several reasons. In the run-up to war, it was the motive that appealed most to pro-war liberal opinion-makers in the media, and thus received a disproportionate amount of discussion. Once the WMDs failed to materialize, the Bush administration fell back on democracy promotion as its main justification for the war, a trend that reached its height in Bush’s 2005 second inaugural address. And once the war went south, it became the easiest line of attack for critics who were eager to cast themselves as hardheaded skeptics and the Bush administration as wide-eyed utopians.
The fact of the matter is that democracy promotion was probably not the central motive for most of the war’s architects. This isn’t to say that it was always or totally insincere, however. Most notably, Bush himself seems genuinely to have bought into his own rhetoric. And although many (myself included) expected the administration simply to set up a friendly dictator to rule over postwar Iraq, this isn’t the course they followed or even really attempted. Whatever the many flaws of Nouri al-Maliki’s government, it is by no means a US puppet, and it did come to power through something resembling a democratic process (backed, to be sure, by a good bit of force).
To what extent were these four motives mutually exclusive? We should note, first of all, that the latter two flow in some sense out of the first two. The US had for decades regarded the Middle East as a geopolitically vital region, due both to its reliance on Gulf oil and its interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This intense focus on the Middle East helps explain why, in the significantly transformed post-9/11 landscape, the US seized on Saddam Hussein (rather than a figure with more significant ties to terrorism) as the proper test case for its efforts both at restoring deterrence and at democratic transformation. The hope was that success in Iraq would reverberate throughout the region.
At the same time, however, the tension between the final two motives (between payback and democracy) helps indicate some of the contradictions of the project. Thomas Friedman got at some of this tension when he suggested the “right reason” for war was “to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification,” but the “real reason” was “to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society.” In typical fashion, Friedman did not bother to question whether these two goals were complementary or contradictory, and whether “shock and awe” was reconcilable with “dehumiliation and redignification.” But we’ve witnessed the various contradictions between these motives play out for ten years now.
Photo: President George W. Bush signs H.J. Resolution 114 authorizing the use of force against Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell, center, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, right, also attended the signing. White House photo by Paul Morse.
]]>On Monday he criticized the Obama [...]]]>
An unnamed figure serving in the White House once chided journalist Ron Suskind for living in the “reality-based world”, a state of mind inconsistent with the U.S.’s new status as an empire. It appears that former Vice President Dick Cheney is maintaining a scrupulous distance from that cursed land.
On Monday he criticized the Obama administration for failing to initiate a “quick airstrike” against Iran to retrieve its lost spy drone. When CBS’s Rebecca Jarvis asked him about a resulting potential war (CNN’s Erin Burnett somehow missed that one), Cheney made an eye for an eye argument and once again failed to think through the human, financial and political costs. He also said it would be a “simple operation.”
It should be unsurprising then, that while earlier discussing what he considers the successes of a war he backed and continues to defend, Cheney failed to mention that the real winner in Iraq was actually Iran. Not only did the U.S. eliminate one of Iran’s long-time enemies, it also opened the way for a friendly, Shia-led government to take power. What more could the Islamic Republic ask for?
Cheney must be familiar with Winston Churchill, the illustrious British statesman much admired by the U.S. right who said:
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
If only leading U.S. political figures–be they GOP presidential candidates or lawmakers–would take heed.
]]>- A decade after its spectacular Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City’s twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in its hopes of accelerating the decline of U.S. global power, if not bringing it to the brink of collapse.
That appears to be the strong consensus of the foreign-policy elite which, with only a few exceptions, believes that the administration of President George W. Bush badly “over-reacted” to the attacks and that that over-reaction continues to this day.
That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush’s foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington’s dominance of the Greater Middle East and “shock and awe” any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a “unipolar” world.
Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organisation was co-founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War “hegemony as far into the future as possible.”
In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and “regime change” for rogue states, beginning with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
Read more here.
]]>