by A. R. Norton
Until 1:04 PM on April 18, 1983, Robert Clayton Ames was little known outside U.S. foreign policy and intelligence circles. On that day he died, along with 62 other casualties in and around the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, then a familiar landmark on Beirut’s seaside corniche.
The building suffered [...]]]>
by A. R. Norton
Until 1:04 PM on April 18, 1983, Robert Clayton Ames was little known outside U.S. foreign policy and intelligence circles. On that day he died, along with 62 other casualties in and around the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, then a familiar landmark on Beirut’s seaside corniche.
The building suffered devastating damage when a pickup truck laden with 2,000 pounds of explosives was driven into the lobby. Ames, the influential Director of the Near East and South Asia division within the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, was on a visit to Lebanon, which President Ronald Reagan declared a “strategic interest” for the U.S. following Israel’s game-changing invasion the prior year.
A former National Intelligence Officer, Ames’ intelligence assessments carried weight in Washington where he enjoyed access to Secretary of State George Shultz. He had arrived in Beirut in April 1983 carrying the outline of an agreement that would be announced the following month. Mediated between Israel and Lebanon by Shultz, the May 17 agreement called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, but with the proviso that the Syrians would also withdraw their soldiers.
Hours before his death, Ames shared the details with Mustafa Zein, a longtime Lebanese confidante, a wielder of wasta (connections), which are far more important in Lebanon than institutions or laws. Zein urged irreverently that the agreement be printed on very thin paper so it might be used in the toilet. Ames enjoyed the joke, a hint of his own cynicism about the prospect that then-President Hafez al-Assad would yank his forces from Lebanon, particularly at a time when the high blown but mutually contentious hopes of Israel and the United States were deflating.
The agreement did accomplish one thing, perhaps its hidden motive: it helped repair a rupture in U.S.-Israeli relations that had been provoked by the clash of their rival agendas in Lebanon. Otherwise, Zein got it right.
Defective policy
One of the many virtues of Kai Bird’s impressive volume, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, is that he offers a fine-grained, if sometimes gruesome account, of the destruction of the embassy as well as the broader tableau for U.S. engagement in a Middle East that would become more vicious and venomous.
The U.S. intervened in Lebanon in support of a political order that was being upended, in significant measure as a result of the rise of the large Shi’a community. It was this community that bore the brunt of brutish Israeli behavior that bred enmity to Israel and to its protective uncle. Ames and his fellow intelligence officers were deeply skeptical of U.S. policy in Lebanon. They worried about growing dangers, but their political masters were slow to grasp the reality. At the time, I felt that the understanding in the White House of the evolving situation in Lebanon lagged months behind the reality on the ground.
President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, walk by the flag-draped caskets of victims of the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Credit: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
There were precedents for the deadly attack, including similar incidents in December 1981 when the Iraqi Embassy was demolished, and in November 1982 when an Israeli intelligence center near the southern city of Tyre was decimated. Yet, the scale of destruction came as a shock to U.S. policymakers. Bird reports that two vehicle barriers that might have impeded the April attack were gathering dust in a warehouse.
Credible evidence — reprised by Bird — points to Iran as the progenitor of the April attack as well as the even more massive bombings in October 1983 against the U.S. Marine Barracks and a building housing French Paratroopers that killed more than 300 soldiers. Bird offers new details about the role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials in Lebanon, including Ali Reza Asgari, who he links to both attacks.
Iran found ready partners, especially among young militants inspired by the 1979 “Islamic Revolution,” including a young man by the name of Imad Mughniyeh, born in Tayr Dibbah (Bird mangles the name of the village) in southern Lebanon.
The notorious Mughniyeh (assassinated in Damascus in 2008), while not the mastermind according to Bird, did have a key hand in the embassy bombing. He is credited with lots of deadly mischief and terrorism in the ensuing years, but details remain murky, including in Bird’s account. As one retired Agency officer wryly notes, “when in doubt, and we are always in doubt about this, blame Mughniyeh.”
A very good spy
Ames joined the CIA in late 1960. The slow-paced early chapters of the book offer glimpses of his early career as a spy and his pre-CIA service as a young draftee assigned to a secluded intelligence station in Eritrea where his fascination with Arabic and the Arab world on the opposite shore of the Red Sea emerged.
All of Ames’ Agency assignments were in challenging locales. He served in Aden, in 1968-69, in the waning days of British control and the first and violent days of the former protectorate’s independence and subsequent estrangement from the West. Even so, he proved an adept recruiter of sources, a talent for which he gained admiration around the Agency.
He subsequently served in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon — countries affected profoundly but differently by the magnetic appeal of Arab nationalism, especially from the lips of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Ames kept his emotions in his pocket, like when he witnessed a botched execution in Saudi Arabia and simply murmured to a colleague that they should leave. That was, he reasoned, how things were done in Arabia.
He was not immune to the fervor of the period though. When Nasser was felled by a heart attack in 1970, he composed a poem reading in part: “A light went out, an era ended.” And so it had. Nasser’s exit opened the way for contending Arab dreams based on state nationalism or the idealism of Islamism.
After his death, he was described by CIA Director William Casey as “the closest thing to an irreplaceable man”. In part, Casey’s tribute honored Ames for his success in penetrating the Palestinian resistance in the early 1970s, which he did largely on his own initiative, retrospectively gaining the blessing of the CIA Director. His key source was the flamboyant Ali Hassan Salameh, who Yasser Arafat trusted and entrusted with maintaining a conduit to the United States.
Salameh, who headed the organization’s intelligence apparatus, was a rival of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) chieftain Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), creator of Black September. Salameh headed Force 17 (Mughniyeh had once been a member), the Fatah Special Ops unit, and he operated on the margins of Black September. He was suspected by the Israelis of involvement in the kidnapping and deaths of Israeli Olympic athletes at Munich in 1972. Bird offers an ambivalent assessment of his role.
Ames maintained an extraordinary relationship with Salameh, with whom he brokered effective security cooperation in Lebanon, including guarantees for the safety of U.S. diplomats. Ames warned the Palestinian that the Israelis were gunning for him (they succeeded in 1979). Recall that in the 1970s, the prospect of an independent Palestinian state was well beyond the pale, and the PLO was reflexively decried as a terrorist group. Within Washington circles, the usual formula for accommodating Palestinian aspirations was to be found in an arrangement with Jordan that came well short of an independent Palestinian state.
Ames is credited with ghostwriting the peace initiative announced by Ronald Reagan on September 1, 1982, which Prime Minister Menachem Begin quickly rejected. Begin had approved the June invasion of Lebanon and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s objective of crushing Palestinian nationalist aspirations. He had no intention of accepting even an autonomy scheme with Jordan.
Ames, for his part, was oddly optimistic about the initiative, which many of his colleagues viewed as a “non-starter,” a “fool’s errand”. Given the access to power that Ames enjoyed, he was grasping what was feasible in the Washington context, but in doing so he was contradicting what his deep knowledge of the Arab world would have taught him was necessary to accommodate Palestinian aspirations.
To give Ames his due, when the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel were signed a decade later, he was credited by his colleagues with opening the door that made possible the acceptance of the PLO as a respectable diplomatic actor.
Knowledgeable readers will appreciate the author’s nuanced account. General readers will find the book accessible, lucid and rewarding. There are many more nuggets to be mined and assayed from The Good Spy, but within the confines of a concise review that will have to wait.
Robert Ames worked in a murky environment populated by people with plenty of dirt under their nails and blood on their hands; not people whose moral probity stands up well to scrutiny under bright lights. He would probably appreciate the bitter irony that Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian intelligence officer who played a key role in bringing his life to a terrible end, defected in 2009 and is now living someplace in America under an assumed identity after being drained of his many secrets. That was the milieu in which the good spy thrived and then perished.
– A. R. Norton is a professor of anthropology and of international relations at Boston University. Princeton University Press published the new edition of his book, Hezbollah: A Short History, in May 2014. This article was first published by LobeLog.
Photo: A view of the US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after the bombing that killed 63 people on April 18, 1983.
]]>by Peter Jenkins
On Dec. 2 the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, What a Final Iran Deal Must Do. The authorship is ascribed to Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, but it is hard to believe that this piece is really the work of such distinguished statesmen, so striking are the [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
On Dec. 2 the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, What a Final Iran Deal Must Do. The authorship is ascribed to Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, but it is hard to believe that this piece is really the work of such distinguished statesmen, so striking are the misleading depictions of crucial facts and the shortcomings in their reasoning.
The authors open by reminding readers of their Cold War experience of confronting “nuclear perils”, implying an analogy between a Soviet Union that by the 1970s possessed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and an Iran which at present possesses no more than an unproven, very basic and as yet unused nuclear weapons capability.
They go on to argue for the dismantling or mothballing of parts of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, omitting to mention that they never tried to persuade the USSR (or China) to dismantle any of their nuclear infrastructure (and would have been given short shrift, had they done so). Instead, they negotiated balanced arms control agreements that reduced “nuclear perils” by improving mutual understanding and providing for confidence-building verification measures.
In addition, they write as though there is a clear distinction between a nuclear weapons capability and a “plausible civil nuclear program” (to which they, rightly, raise no objection). The essential problem posed by a dual-use nuclear technology like uranium enrichment is that no such distinction exists. An enrichment plant that is producing fuel for reactors one day can be reconfigured the next to produce weapons-grade uranium.
Because that is the case, it is a mistake to fixate on technical capabilities. Far more useful is to minimise the risk that a state that possesses nuclear weapons potential will ever want to realise it. The world is full of states that possess the capacity to inflict death and destruction on other states. Mercifully, most of that capacity remains unused because most governments are smart enough to recognise that picking a fight is a pretty dumb thing to do, i.e. not in the national interest, in a post-1945 world.
So it would have been wise of the authors to focus, not on a misleading distinction between civil and military capacities, but on the desirability of developing the mutual understanding that they, in their prime, were so adept at fostering, and on confidence-building verification measures.
It would also have been reassuring if they had shown awareness of the divergence of the outlook that has been a discernible characteristic of Iran’s leading politicians since the late 1980s. President Rouhani’s outlook has little in common with his predecessor’s. He shares with former presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami a pragmatic and defensive mind-set. None of these three leaders (all are still alive) seeks to export Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Defending Iranian interests is their guiding objective.
A penchant for treating facts misleadingly transpires in the authors’ description of Iran’s nuclear program. They write as though it had been established beyond all doubt that this is a military and not a civil or safety-net dual-use program. It has not.
They also imply that the program is on a vast scale, whereas in fact it is modest. Nearly eight years after the re-opening of the Natanz plant (following a negotiated two year suspension of activity there) Iran only possesses enough low-enriched uranium for four nuclear weapons (which it has not attempted to make). Its stock of LEU would barely supply one quarter of the fuel needed to re-load its 930MW power reactor at Bushehr. The 40MW reactor at Arak is still incomplete.
Here are a few more egregious statements:
…progress on a heavy water reactor and plutonium reprocessing facility at Arak
There is no trace of a reprocessing facility at Arak or anywhere else in Iran. Since 2003 Iranian negotiators have steadily disclaimed any intention of reprocessing spent fuel from any of their reactors.
IAEA directives have demanded…unconditional compliance with an IAEA inspection regime
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s board resolutions (which only have political, not legal force) have urged Iran to grant exceptional access to IAEA inspectors. Iran has complied with the regular Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) inspection regime.
…we must avoid an outcome in which Iran…emerges as a de facto nuclear power leading an Islamist camp.
Do the authors really envisage Turkey, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan hailing Iran as their leader? They ought to know better.
…[Iran has] proceeded with a major nuclear effort…in violation of its NPT obligations
None of the nuclear facilities built by Iran is outlawed by the NPT. Since 2003 the IAEA has reported regularly that all nuclear material known to be in Iran’s possession is in peaceful use, as required by the NPT, and has not reported any evidence of undeclared nuclear material.
The flaws in this article matter because the ostensible authors are so distinguished that they are likely to be seen as authoritative sources of wisdom on the subject at issue. This impertinent critique of their analysis stands little chance of correcting the perceptions of those who have been influenced by this Dec. 2 piece. Nonetheless, here’s hoping.
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In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, former Secretary of State George Shultz suggested applying tips from former President Ronald Reagan for negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program.
In considering Reagan’s signal arms control achievement, the INF Treaty of 1987, which eliminated an entire category of nuclear weapons, there are some parallels worth considering. The principal Soviet incentive for reaching agreement then was to avoid the stationing of 572 U.S. nuclear missiles in Europe. A negotiated settlement was only achieved after the missiles began to be deployed into five NATO countries within range of the Soviet Union. Similarly, serious negotiations with Iran have begun only after the imposition of crippling sanctions on Iran by the United States, the European Union and the UN Security Council.
It is also the case with the Soviet Union then and Iran now that the beginning of serious negotiations coincided with the coming to power of new reform-minded leadership in Moscow and Tehran. Creative diplomatic initiatives to achieve win-win solutions – like the 1982 “Walk-in-the-Woods” agreement of lead INF negotiators Paul Nitze and Yuliy Kvitzinskiy and the October 2009 nuclear fuel swap agreement proposed to Iran by the United States – were rejected in capitals (Moscow and Washington in 1982; Tehran in 2009).
It is an open question, however, whether substantial progress could have been made earlier in both cases. President Reagan’s initial reluctance to negotiate with the Soviet Union, which he described as the “empire of evil” and President George W. Bush’s hostility toward Iran, which he characterized as part of an “axis of evil” in January 2002, critically delayed diplomatic progress on nuclear issues.
Rather than providing the “useful guide to negotiating” recently summarized by George Shultz, the Reagan administration record actually offers far more cautionary examples of what the United States should avoid doing with Iran.
Often overriding the counsel of Alexander Haig, George Shultz, “Bud” McFarland, and Paul Nitze, Reagan’s circle of hardline advisors obviated any chance of exploiting realistic opportunities for arms control progress. It was the Pentagon of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Assistant Secretary Richard Perle and the CIA of Director William Casey, which influenced White House security policy during Reagan’s first term far more than did Secretaries of State Haig and Shultz.
Likewise, the more objective assessments of intelligence community professionals were disregarded. History has found the “Team B” assessments that drove Reagan security policies to have been consistently wrong. The ideological blinders worn by the policy principals help explain why Reagan and his advisors were so slow to recognize the opportunities presented by the new Soviet leadership team of President Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze that took over in the spring of 1985. The U.S. President even had to be persuaded by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that Gorbachev was someone with whom he could do business!
Even when he finally became convinced that a US-Soviet arms control agreement on INF could serve U.S. interests, Reagan sacrificed the chance to also secure a historic strategic arms reduction agreement under the influence of the SDI chimera. The 50 percent reductions in strategic arms proposed by Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986 would have to wait several years for Reagan’s successor to deliver.
Fortunately, President Obama appears to be following a different playbook than the Gipper’s.
This time, the president is more heavily influenced by his Secretary of State than Reagan was by Shultz. And unlike during the Reagan years, the heads of Obama’s Defense Department and State Department have usually been traveling on the same trajectory.
This time, the president is basing his policies on more objective and realistic threat assessments regarding Iran than did Reagan with the Soviet Union. And this time, the president has a better grasp of critical details of the Iran nuclear challenge than did Reagan in understanding the Soviet military.
Let us hope therefore that, this time, the U.S. will be able to seize a time-limited opportunity to enhance U.S. security through an Iranian nuclear agreement rather than squandering a chance to reduce strategic arms as Reagan did in the 1980s. Mr. President, please leave the Gipper’s negotiating playbook on the shelf where it belongs.
Greg Thielmann is a senior fellow of the Arms Control Association, and former office director for strategic, proliferation, and military affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He also served as State Department adviser to the U.S. delegation at the opening of the INF negotiations in 1981.
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Neo-Cons Hit Post-Cold War Low
Nearly six weeks after launching their campaign to derail the prospective nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Obama’s second-term secretary of defense, hard-line neo-conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, and Washington Post blogger
Neo-Cons Hit Post-Cold War Low
Nearly six weeks after launching their campaign to derail the prospective nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as Obama’s second-term secretary of defense, hard-line neo-conservatives, led by Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin find themselves more isolated – and, in their words, further “outside the mainstream” of U.S. foreign policy thinkers than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and possibly longer. I say that not only because they have failed to enlist the main organizations in the Israel lobby (of which they consider themselves the rightful vanguard) in their cause, but also because Hagel is supported by virtually everyone who is anyone in what could be called the foreign policy establishment of both parties.
This was made abundantly clear by the publication by ABC News Thursday of a new letter — a copy of which is reproduced below — of endorsements by 13 former top Republican and Democratic national-security officials. While almost all of the signatories have previously come out in support of Hagel, the list includes two who have not spoken out before and who, while not neo-cons themselves, have cooperated closely with them in the past – former Secretary of State George Shultz and former National Security Adviser Robert “Bud” McFarlane. Both, of course, served under Ronald Reagan.
Of the two, Shultz is particularly significant because, in many ways, he has been a hero and mentor to key neo-cons, notably Abrams, who prospered under Shultz’s stewardship – first as assistant secretary for human rights and then for Inter-American Affairs – at least until he was indicted for lying to Congress, and Bob Kagan, who served as Shultz’s speechwriter. Initially distrusted by the neo-cons and the Israel lobby when he succeeded Al Haig because of his service on the board of Bechtel (which was close to the Saudi royal family), he became much-admired by them as a result of his strong stand against terrorism, his battles with then-Pentagon chief Casper Weinberger over the use of military force, his deep hostility toward Syria, and his enduring support for Israel (despite the fact that he laid the groundwork for U.S. recognition of the PLO). More than anyone else in the Reagan administration, Shultz espoused the kind of “moral clarity” in foreign policy that neo-cons love to extol when they talk about the Reagan administration.
After 9/11, he also worked closely with them, agreeing to serve as one of six co-chairs of the Committee for the Present Danger (CPD) – which was big on the concept of “World War IV” against “Islamofascism” – and as honorary co-chair of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a Bush administration front group to mobilize support for the invasion. Some idea of the appreciation felt by neo-cons for Shultz at the time is suggested by the fact that, in an editorial published by Kristol’s Weekly Standard in May, 2002, both Kristol and Kagan called for him to co-chair (with Sam Nunn) a “blue-ribbon commission” to investigate the government’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. That Shultz should now come out in favor of Hagel’s nomination – particularly given accusations by the Standard and his former protégé Abrams that the nominee is an anti-Semite – has to be considered a body blow to the neo-conservative cause.
McFarlane, who was forced to resign as NSA as a result of his extremely ill-considered trip to Tehran (facilitated by Michael Ledeen) as part of the Iran component of the Iran-Contra scandal, is naturally less significant given the relatively short time (two years) he served in that position. But his ties to the neo-cons are even more extensive: he serves on the advisory boards of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Foreign Policy Council and also served as a member of the board of directors of the Committee for the Present Danger and the Set America Free Foundation of which Frank Gaffney is one of the principals. He was also associated with Kristol’s and Kagan’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That he, too, should now turn his back on the neo-cons is particularly surprising.
Look at the names on the letter below and try to think of a still-sentient cabinet-level foreign-policy Republican, apart from Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who has not endorsed Hagel’s nomination. So what does that mean for the neo-conservatives’ place in the mainstream foreign-policy community?
Here’s the letter:
January 24, 2013
To Members of the United States Senate:
We, as former Secretaries of State, Defense, and National Security Advisors, are writing to express our strong endorsement of Chuck Hagel to be the next Secretary of Defense.
Chuck Hagel has an impeccable record of public service that reflects leadership, integrity, and a keen reading of global dynamics. From his time as Deputy Veterans Administrator managing a quarter of a million employees during the Reagan presidency, to turning around the financially troubled World USO, to shepherding the post-9/11 GI Bill into law as a United States Senator, and most recently through his service on the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon and as co-Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, Chuck Hagel is uniquely qualified to meet the challenges facing the Department of Defense and our men and women in uniform. As President Obama noted in announcing the nomination, this twice-wounded combat veteran “is a champion of our troops and our veterans and our military families” and would have the distinction of being the first person of enlisted rank and the first Vietnam veteran to serve as Secretary of Defense.
His approach to national security and debates about the use of American power is marked by a disciplined habit of thoughtfulness that is sorely needed and these qualities will serve him well as Secretary of Defense at a time when the United States must address a range of international issues that are unprecedented in scope. Our extensive experience working with Senator Hagel over the years has left us confident that he has the necessary background to succeed in the job of leading the largest federal agency.
Hagel has declared that we “knew we needed the world’s best military not because we wanted war but because we wanted to prevent war.” For those of us honored to have served as members of a president’s national security team, Senator Hagel clearly understands the essence and the burdens of leadership required of this high office. We hope this Committee and the U.S. Senate will promptly and favorably act on his nomination.
Sincerely,
Hon. Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State
Hon. Samuel Berger, former National Security Advisor
Hon. Harold Brown, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor
Hon. William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. James Jones, former National Security Advisor
Hon. Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Robert McFarlane, former National Security Advisor
Hon. William Perry, former Secretary of Defense
Hon. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
Hon. George Shultz, former Secretary of State
Hon. Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor
]]>“It is unfortunate that the entire Democratic Party has embraced President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” declared Mitt Romney on September 4.
The deletion of a single sentence about Jerusalem in the Democratic platform, which reportedly had been vetted by officials from the American Israel Public [...]]]>
“It is unfortunate that the entire Democratic Party has embraced President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” declared Mitt Romney on September 4.
The deletion of a single sentence about Jerusalem in the Democratic platform, which reportedly had been vetted by officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), generated hysterical headlines that went viral and ricocheted throughout cyberspace, arousing panic among Democrats and glee among Republicans.
Ironically, affirming Jerusalem’s status as the capital of Israel and the importance of relocating the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been a largely Democratic strategy for nearly four decades, particularly when there has been an incumbent Republican president in the White House. Republicans latch on to it whenever a Democratic president is running for re-election.
Now for some historical perspective.
The Democratic party’s 1976 platform was the first to stipulate:
We recognize and support the established status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, with free access to all its holy places provided to all faiths. As a symbol of this stand, the U.S. Embassy should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
This stance was reiterated in the 1980 and 1984 platforms. In 1983, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called for relocating of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, in a bill co-sponsored by fifty senators. When State Department officials in the Reagan administration objected that moving the Embassy would strain diplomatic ties with Arab countries, Moynihan did not press for a vote. No mention of Jerusalem whatsoever was made in the Democratic platform in 1988, in the wake of Secretary of State George Shultz’s sharp criticism of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis for suggesting that, if elected President, he would consider transferring the Embassy to Jerusalem. “It’s shocking that anybody would make such a proposal,” the Reagan administration’s chief spokesman on foreign policy told NBC’s Today show. Since Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights “are regarded as occupied territory” and are “subject to negotiations” according to Shultz, who deemed any notion of moving the Embassy a “mistake.”
But Jerusalem was back in the 1992 Democratic platform, a seeming non sequitur tacked on to the Middle East Peace plank, minus the call for moving the US Embassy:
The United States must act effectively as an honest broker in the peace process. It must not, as has been the case with this Administration, encourage one side to believe that it will deliver unilateral concessions from the other. Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel and should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.
Republicans were the latecomers to the Jerusalem capital-ism game. The GOP’s 1976 platform made no mention of Jerusalem. The 1980, 1984 and 1988 Republican platforms all declared that “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city with continued free and unimpeded access to all holy places by people of all faiths.” The same assertion appeared in the 1992 platform, followed by the coy sentence, “No genuine peace would deny Jews the right to live anywhere in the special city of Jerusalem.”
With a popular Democratic president in the White House, it was the Republicans’ turn to play the Jerusalem capital card. On October 24, 1995, the Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Implementation Act, introduced by Republican Sen. Bob Dole (who just happened to be running for president), passed the Senate (S. 1323) in a 93-5 and the House (H.R. 1595) 374-37. President Clinton signed the bill two weeks later. The overwhelming bi-partisan support for the measure did not prevent Republicans from taking full credit, gloating in the 1996 GOP platform:
We applaud the Republican Congress for enacting legislation to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. A Republican administration will ensure that the U.S. Embassy is moved to Jerusalem by May 1999.
Clinton won the 1996 election. The US Embassy stayed in Tel Aviv. Then the 2000 Republican platform became even more strident:
The United States has a moral and legal obligation to maintain its Embassy and Ambassador in Jerusalem. Immediately upon taking office, the next Republican president will begin the process of moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.”
Nevertheless the Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, who had publicly pledged to thousands of attendees at AIPAC’s 2000 Annual Policy Conference that on his first day in office he would move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, did not do so after winning the election. Not on his first day, not on his last day, and at no point in between. The Republican platform in 2004 stayed low key, noting, “Republicans continue to support moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.”
Democrats stuck with their tried-and-true 1992 formulation in 1996, in 2000, in 2004, and in 2008, reiterating the city’s status as Israel’s capital and the right of people of all faiths to access it. Ironically, Republicans framed their mega-affirmation of Jerusalem being Israel’s capital in 2008 with an endorsement of the creation of a Palestinian state, which went largely unnoticed by the media:
“We support the vision of two democratic states living in peace and security: Israel, with Jerusalem as its capital, and Palestine…We support Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and moving the American embassy to that undivided capital of Israel.”
Two democratic states living side by side! Uri Friedman points out that such language “provoked a raft of amendments arguing that, in endorsing the two-state solution, the Republicans were dictating the terms of a peace agreement to the Israeli government.”
Israelis have for the most part been amused by, even cynical about, the overblown rhetoric about Jerusalem in US elections. As Douglas Bloomfield explained four years ago, when GOP presidential candidate John McCain told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that if elected president he would move the US Embassy “right away,” not only wasn’t it going to happen — regardless of who was elected — but Israelis wouldn’t care either way:
Moving the embassy has never been a high priority for any Israeli leader in meetings with American presidents. They see it as a political football in an American game they prefer staying out of. All recent prime ministers have understood that an agreement on Jerusalem is critical to any peace settlement with the Palestinians – and that symbolic action like American politicians trying to force the embassy move can only make an agreement more elusive. But the game continues even though seasoned political observers understand it’s a sham. This year is no exception. Any politician who tells you he’s going to move the embassy before the Israelis and Palestinians come to an agreement on the city’s final status and borders thinks you’re wearing a name tag that says “chump.”
No prominent Democrat seems to know why the reference to Jerusalem was deleted in 2012 (it was reinserted on September 5). What is certain, however, is the fact that for the past 35 years the role of Jerusalem in both party platforms has had no practical effect in Israel, except perhaps to distract from — and thus implicitly condone — the unilateral Israeli tripling in size of the area within the municipal boundaries of “united Jerusalem” between 1967 and today. Politicizing the holy city has been one way that both American parties have tried to score points against the opposition, a distraction from more complex and urgent issues in US domestic and foreign policy. This year is no exception.
Meanwhile, Republicans seem to have soured on their “Embassy Sweets” commitment to moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. That the 2012 GOP platform has dropped the call for the Embassy’s relocation has gone almost totally unnoticed by the ever-distractible media, except, oddly, by the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently Romney didn’t get the memo.
]]>Classifying political leaders as either “hawks” or “doves” obscures an uncomfortable truth: that the real debate between political rivals is rarely whether to go to war but rather with whom.
Case in point: a man interred in Israel on Monday, former Prime Minister and terrorist/resistance fighter Yitzhak [...]]]>
Classifying political leaders as either “hawks” or “doves” obscures an uncomfortable truth: that the real debate between political rivals is rarely whether to go to war but rather with whom.
Case in point: a man interred in Israel on Monday, former Prime Minister and terrorist/resistance fighter Yitzhak Shamir.
Writing in the Sheldon Adelson-owned free daily Israel Today, Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe (“Boogie”) Yaalon praised Shamir for his unswerving commitment to the “iron wall” concept of Israeli security, first laid out by Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky: “He acted on his principles, not according to polls or trends.” That resoluteness is viewed from a very different angle in the Financial Times: “The kind of unflinching resolution behind Shamir’s campaign of bombings and assassinations, first as leader of the Stern Gang and later as a Mossad agent, often appeared to have defined his core character.”
One of the code names Shamir chose in the Stern Gang (a militant group also known as Lehi) was “Michael,” in tribute to Michael Collins of the Irish Republican Army, who Shamir esteemed as a role model in resisting British occupation. Shamir had no qualms about being labeled a terrorist. On the contrary. “First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one,” Shamir wrote in an article titled “Terror” in the Lehi journal Hazit in August 1943. “It demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier.”
Shamir’s career as Foreign Minister (1979-1983) and his first term at helm of the Israeli government in (1983-84) encompassed the unfolding of the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon as a response to the Israeli invasion and occupation in 1982. The revelation of Israeli weapon sales to Iran that were exposed during the Iran-Contra hearings and the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 occurred during his second term as Prime Minister (1986-92). Yet neither the accolades nor the accusations published in the days since his death mention any of these events.
Nonetheless, Iran was very much at the forefront and part of the backstory of Israeli foreign policy at the time. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz cautioned President Reagan’s National Security adviser Robert McFarlane that “Israel’s agenda regarding Iran ‘is not the same as ours’ and that relying on Israeli intelligence concerning Iran ‘could seriously skew our own perception.’”
Elected to Israel’s parliament on the right-wing Herut party ticket in 1973, Shamir became Speaker of the Knesset in 1977 when Menachem Begin became Prime Minister, after elections toppled the governing Labor-led coalition that had ruled the country since 1948. Shamir was designated Israel’s Foreign Minister in 1979 when Moshe Dayan resigned from the post, eight months after the revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran.
According to investigative journalist Robert Parry, who covered Iran for the Associated Press during the 1980s, Shamir confirmed in a 1993 interview that there was indeed a “Saturday Night Surprise”–as detailed by Gary Sick in a New York Times op ed and in his book by that title–that delayed the release of the 54 American hostages held at the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days (Nov. 4, 1979-Jan. 21, 1981) because of a deal struck by the Iranian government with the Reagan presidential campaign. Furthermore, Shamir candidly hinted–before retreating–that the Israeli government had approached Republican operatives and offered to help engineer President Jimmy Carter’s defeat:
To prevent a Palestinian state and buy time for Israel to further “change the facts on the ground” by moving more Jewish settlers onto the West Bank, Begin felt Carter’s reelection had to be prevented. The Likud also believed that Reagan would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon. The Likud-Republican collaboration reportedly led to Israel becoming a go-between for the Reagan campaign’s secret contacts with Iran, helping to prevent Carter from resolving the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis and dooming his reelection hopes.
[nb: Parry's use of the party name Likud is anachronistic here, since Begin and Shamir's Herut party did not become part of the Likud bloc until 1988. mbc]
Like the Revisionist’s mentor Jabotinsky, Shamir did not believe that Arab states would ever willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 may have changed Iran’s ruling regime, but it did not alter Israel’s needed non-Arab allies in the region–especially Iran–according to Israel’s long held “doctrine of the periphery.” Foremost among the Arab leaders worrying Israel was Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who invaded Iran in Sept. 1980, launching a war that would last for eight years.
Notwithstanding Ayatollah Khomeini’s vitriol against “the Zionist entity,” Shamir never wavered in his conviction that it was Iraq, not Iran, that endangered Israel. As Trita Parsi points out in his book Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.:
From Tel Aviv’s perspective, Iraq was the single greatest threat to Israel’s security, while Iran–in spite of its ideology, its harsh rhetoric, and its vocal support of the Palestinian issue–was seen as a nonthreat. For all practical purposes, Iran continued to be a partner in balancing the Iraqi threat.
“Operation Opera,” Israel’s attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility on June 7, 1981, took place while Shamir was Foreign Minister. Shamir wrote a three page letter to world leaders justifying Israel’s preemptive strike before nuclear fuel had been loaded into it. Ari Ben Menashe, who claims to have spent two years as Shamir’s “roving troubleshooter” with the title of “special intelligence consultant,” told Parsi that representatives of the Khomeini regime met with Israeli officials about a month before the Osirak strike. The Iranians gave the Israelis details of an unsuccessful Iranian attack on the site on Sept. 30, 1980, according to Ben Menashe, as well as permission for Israeli planes to land at an Iranian airfield in Tabriz in an emergency.
Shamir was also Foreign Minister during the Israeli invasion that launched the “First Lebanon War” According to several sources, Shamir was neither particularly surprised nor troubled by the Phalangist massacre that took place in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps outside Beirut. Author and journalist Ze’ev Schiff, co-author of Israel’s Lebanon War, attributed the catastrophic consequences of the Lebanon war not so much to the incursion itself but rather to Israel’s decision to remain in Lebanon as its occupier, recalling that in southern Lebanon at the outset of the war: “I was talking to an old man, a Shiite, who was very happy about what Israel had done. He grabbed my arm and said, ‘Don’t forget to leave.’ But we did. There is just no such thing as an enlightened occupation.”
The creation of Hezbollah as a Shiite paramilitary group to resist the Israeli occupation was one of the consequences of the Israeli decision not to leave. “Hezbollah’s original cadres were organized and trained by a 1,500-member contingent of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who arrived in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in the summer of 1982, with the permission of the Syrian government,” according to Adam Shatz . “For Iran, whose efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to the Arab world had been stymied by its war with Iraq, Hezbollah provided a means of gaining a foothold in Middle East politics.”
Shamir believed that Israel ought to prepare for the possibility that more moderate elements in the Iranian regime might gain control of the Islamic Republic once the aging and ailing Khomeini was gone from the scene. The late David Kimche, a retired founder deputy head of the Mossad who Shamir appointed as Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 1979, told Parsi in an interview:
There were the ultraextremists and there were, let’s say, the moderate extremists…They were all fanatics, but there were the ones who were absolutely dangerous, and there was another group…who would be willing to come to terms with the West…They were still against Israel, but there were much less extremist than that first group.
Kimche would emerge as a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair which exposed Israel’s sale of US weapons to Iran during the Iraq-Iran war (albeit with weapons that Israel would claim were outdated, defective and overpriced). The weapons sales, about which Shamir denied having any knowledge (he alternated serving as Prime Minister with now-President Shimon Peres in a power-sharing arrangement during the mid-late 1980s) were motivated in part by Israel’s hope that if Iraq and Iran were fighting one another, neither would attack Israel. But it was also based on the expectation that Khomeini would eventually be replaced by more pragmatic Iranian leadership.
Shamir was a tough-minded pragmatist who did not let the label “terrorist” inhibit him. He knew from personal experience that the line between a terrorist and a resistance fighter against occupation and terrorist was very much in the eye of the beholder. In August 1987, when Iranian Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani suggested in an NBC news interview that Western hostages held by extremist groups in Lebanon might be freed in a trade involving Shia Muslim prisoners held in Israel and Kuwait, the U.S. State Department immediately rejected the Iranian suggestion. “No deals,” State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley responded. “The United States will not make concessions to terrorists nor will we ask others to do so. Making concessions only encourages additional acts of terrorism.” Shamir, however, was willing to consider the proposal. “I must study the statement of Mr. Rafsanjani,” Shamir said. “I don’t know what was his intention and about which Shia prisoners he is talking. So after we will see what is the issue, we’ll decide what could be, and if will be, any reaction from us.”
In 1992, Shamir was replaced as Prime Minister by the Labor Party’s Yitzhak Rabin. Despite his apotheosis after his assassination by a Jewish extremist and Israeli peace movement, Rabin was no dove. After the defeat of Saddam’s Iraq during the First Gulf War (during which Israel was attacked with Scud missiles), Rabin agreed to pursue the Oslo peace accords because he believed that resolution of the Palestinian issue would free him to take on Iran. As a self-described member of the “pro-Israel left” wrote recently:
Twenty years ago, Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who concluded peace agreements with an Arab country and the Palestinian people, linked countering the Iranian threat with resolving the Palestinian issue. Today, some of his ideological heirs and admirers outside of Israel fail to see the persisting connection between dovishness on Palestine with hawkishness on Iran. For Rabin, defending against threat from Iran meant diminishing the threat from Palestine. Today, advancing toward peace with the Palestinians means preparing for the potential of a horrific war of necessity with Iran.
Praising Shamir at his funeral, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approvingly cited Shamir’s telling the U.S. during the Gulf War that if Washington did not act against Saddam Hussein, who was pointing Scud missiles at Israel, Israel would take matters into its own hands. Barak Ravid of Haaretz hints that Netanyahu ought to use Shamir’s June 9, 1981 letter to world leaders justifying Israel’s preemptive strike on Osirak–with “some minor changes”–to justify an attack on Iran. Ironically, Yitzhak Shamir was the last of Israel’s political leaders–right or left–who was not obsessed with going to war with Iran.
So it is with Elliott Abrams‘ latest [...]]]>
So it is with Elliott Abrams‘ latest op-ed on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, entitled “Dictators, Democracies and Wikileaks” in which, among other things, he informs us that “dictators and authoritarians don’t tell their people the truths they tell us” and that “their public speeches are meant to manipulate, not to inform.”
“Their approach is striking: Tell the truth to foreigners but not to your own population,” [he goes on].
“So in Yemen, for example, we see President Ali Abdullah Saleh discussing action against al Qaeda and insisting, ‘We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours and not yours.”
This quotation, of course, is taken from the cable describing a meeting between Saleh and Gen. David Petraeus during which one of Saleh’s aides jokes that he had just lied to parliament about U.S. airstrikes against alleged al Qaeda targets in Yemeni territory. Abrams, now Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, goes on to contrast this kind of mendacity on the part of “dictators and authoritarians” with the honesty of democratic governments:
“Cables reporting on U.S.-German, U.S.-French, or U.S.-Canadian consultations are different — those governments say to their parliaments what they say to us.”
So, then, how would Abrams himself judge the Reagan administration — and, specifically, his own performance in it — when he applies this standard to the Iran-Contra affair?
Abrams, of course, was indicted by the special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving [i.e. lying to] Congress about the Reagan administration’s and his personal role in supporting the Nicaraguan Contras in violation of U.S. law. He eventually pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including withholding information from Congress) in order to avoid a trial and a possible prison term. As the prosecutor’s report makes clear, Abrams, who was assistant secretary of Inter-American Affairs at the time, lied throughout the hearings, insisting that he had no knowledge of the NSC and CIA programs to support the Contras when, in fact, he was one of the three principal members (with Oliver North and Alan Fiers) of the so-called Restricted Inter-Agency Group (RIG) that oversaw Central America policy during the Contra war and had been explicitly ordered by his boss, Secretary of State George Shultz, to closely monitor North’s activities. In his guilty plea, he also admitted that he withheld from Congress the fact that he had personally solicited $10 million in aid for the Contras from the Sultan of Brunei. In other words, like President Saleh and his jovial aide, Abrams told the Sultan — who would undoubtedly fall into the dictator/authoritarian category that he now pontificates about — what he refused to tell the United States Congress or his “own population.”
Of course, one could go on and on about Abrams’ mendacity during his service under Reagan; first as assistant secretary for international organizations (1981), then as assistant secretary of human rights and humanitarian affairs (1981-85), and finally as assistant secretary for Inter-American Affairs (1985-89). So low was his credibility with senators — on both sides of the aisle — that his biggest fans on the George W. Bush administration (notably Dick Cheney) knew from the outset that he could never be confirmed to any post. So they sent him to the National Security Council — first as Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations (2001-2002); then as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs (2002-2009) and Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy (2005-2009) — where he would never be required to testify before Congress.
One other anomaly struck me about Abrams’ most recent op-ed, aside from his highly questionable assertion — presumably from his old friends in Battalion 316 whose atrocities he helped to cover up in the 1980′s — about the “Honduran people’s unified desire to throw out” ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. I refer to his praise for former U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey’s analysis of Turkey’s new foreign policy as “sharp and well-written.” That seems very strange, indeed, given what Abrams himself has written about the direction Turkey is taking under the AKP government and President Erdogan. Here’s Abrams in the Weekly Standard last June immediately after the flotilla incident:
“[I]t’s obvious that our formerly reliable NATO ally has become a staunch supporter of the radical camp [in the Middle East]. …Turkey’s U.N. Security Council vote against the newest round of sanctions this past week put it in Iran’s camp against Europe, the United States, Russia, and China. That’s quite a realignment for a NATO ally.
“…Turks may tire of Erdogan’s speeches and return a government that seeks a true balance between East and West rather than a headlong dive into alliances with Iran and Syria.”
Now here’s what Jeffrey wrote in his summary of Erdogan’s foreign policy a few months before:
“Does all this mean that [Turkey] is becoming more focused on the Islamist world and its Muslim tradition in its foreign policy? Absolutely. Does it mean that it is ‘abandoning’ or wants to abandon its traditional Western orientation and willingness to cooperate with us? Absolutely not.”
There seems to be a yawning gap between Abrams’ conviction that Turkey has joined the “radical camp” led by Iran and Jeffrey’s “sharp” analysis that such a charge is absolute nonsense.
That’s the thing with many neo-conservatives like Abrams: it’s hard to know when they are deliberately deceptive (call it takiya), when they are engaged in agitprop, or when they are doing serious analysis (of which many of them, including Abrams, are quite capable). It’s kind of like figuring out what “dictators and authoritarians” really mean when they talk to “us.”
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