by Jahandad Memarian
According to a recent special report on Iran in The Economist: “The revolution is over.” The article concludes by suggesting that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s approach to the country’s controversial nuclear program and international relations is a departure from that of his predecessors. While the piece makes several noteworthy points, it fails to mention some important nuances of Iran’s foreign policy paradigm shift, a movement three decades in the making.
Ruhi Ramazani, a veteran scholar on Iranian affairs, has long demonstrated that since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the country’s foreign policy-makers have broken away from a doggedly spiritual paradigm in varying degrees, at times acting directly in opposition to long-held religious, moral, and ideological values. Indeed, the intervening years since the Iranian Revolution have facilitated an evolution of the country’s foreign policy, which has culminated as a hybrid political construct framed by both pragmatism and spirituality, as Ramazani asserts in his book, Independence Without Freedom.
The leader of Iran’s revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, a super-idealist, led the charge toward a more aspirational foreign policy paradigm based on ideals rooted in what Ramazani describes as spiritual pragmatism. To achieve this, Khomeini, at times, allowed deviations from “his ideological line” (Khatti Imam) and adjusted his worldview in response to social and political circumstances. Whether in regard to declaratory or practical policies, no one altered Khomeini’s line more than Khomeini himself.
For example, after the 1979 American hostage crisis in in Tehran, which began the era of ever-increasing US sanctions on Iran, Khomeini declared, “We must become isolated in order to become independent.” Yet following the release of the hostages in 1981 and the liberation of the Iranian port city of Khorramshahr from Iraqi forces in 1982, Khomeini saw his power consolidated at home and turned the lens on his ardent followers. He placed the blame for Iran’s “hermit” status on the international stage squarely on their shoulders. In one markedly critical accusation of his hard-line supporters, Khomeini even went so far as to cite the prophet Muhammad as an example of someone who sent out ambassadors to establish conciliatory relations with the outside world. To demand that Iran permanently cut ties with other countries made no sense, said Khomeini, because for Iran “it would mean defeat, annihilation, and being buried right to the end.”
Perhaps the most salient example of Khomeini’s pragmatism was Iran’s decision to secretly purchase arms, for its defensive war against Iraq (1980-88), from both the United States and Israel in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair (1985-87). By striking a deal through intermediaries, American and Israeli military supplies were provided to Tehran in return for its cooperation and assistance in securing the release of Western hostages in Lebanon. In negotiating with his adversaries, Khomeini’s pragmatism proved he was focused on the bigger picture for Iran.
Many Iranian leaders have attempted following in Khomeini’s footsteps. Even president Sayyid Ali Khamenei, now the country’s Supreme Leader, adopted similar views under Iran’s “open door” foreign policy and declared, in the summer of 1986, that “Iran seeks a rational, sound, and healthy relations with all countries.”
What would these healthy relations look like for Iran? Consider the example of the high point in US-Iran relations that occurred during the two countries’ decision to cooperate in response to the war in Afghanistan. In late 2001, Iranian diplomats (and even some members of the Revolutionary Guard) domestically lobbied for working with the United States to deliver the mutual benefit of toppling the Taliban and implementing a new political order in Afghanistan. Ayatollah Khamenei conceded and as a result Iran offered airbases, search-and-rescue missions for downed American pilots, the tracking and killing of al-Qaeda leaders, and assistance in building ties with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. But this warming in relations was short-lived. Not long after taking advantage of Iran’s assistance, then-President George W. Bush declared Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil,” thereby instantly destroying the tenuous goodwill the two discordant countries had been working to build.
In another example, during his first two terms, President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani pressed for military reconstruction and economic development as a means of emphasizing the country’s practical needs following the end of the Iran-Iraq war. During his time in office, Rafsanjani invited Conoco Oil, a US company, to bid for the Sirri oil field development project (the largest in Iran’s history at that time). With Khamenei’s approval, Rafsanjani worked to close the Conoco deal, understanding that this act would significantly increase economic relations between Iran and the United States. But not long after the $1 billion deal was awarded to Conoco, the Clinton administration blocked the contract as a “threat to national security.”
There are of course other events in the Islamic Republic’s history proving that from Ayatollah Khomeini to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, many Iranian leaders have genuinely attempted to—even in the face of powerful internal and external impediments—implement a hybrid paradigm, with each leader assigning different weights to practical and spiritual considerations. Considered with this history in mind, Rouhani’s efforts to facilitate compromises in regard to the Iran’s nuclear program are not, as The Economist suggests, a turning point in Iranian politics. They’re merely a continuation of an ongoing trend that should have been noticed by Western analysts long before now.
Jahandad Memarian is a research associate at the West Asia Council and a senior research fellow at Nonviolence International as well as a contributor to Al-Monitor and the Huffington Post. He holds an M.A. in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran and was previously an Iranian Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2010-11. Prior to that, Mr. Memarian was a researcher at the Iranian Parliament Research Center and worked as a journalist for the Iranian news daily, Hamshahri.
]]>As readers of this blog know, I’m not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which pretty much defines neo-conservative foreign-policy orthodoxy and is probably the movement’s single-most influential and effective proponent in the elite U.S. media. If you accept certain of its assumptions — sometimes explicit, sometimes [...]]]>
As readers of this blog know, I’m not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which pretty much defines neo-conservative foreign-policy orthodoxy and is probably the movement’s single-most influential and effective proponent in the elite U.S. media. If you accept certain of its assumptions — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit — the editorials, columns, and op-eds the Journal produces usually make the most coherent case for a neo-conservative position, especially as regards anything having to do with Israel and its ruling Likud Party, as any other publication, including the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and Commentary’s Contentions blog. As tendentious and bizarre as these pieces often are, they also usually offer some degree of intellectual integrity.
In that respect, the “Wonderland” column published last Thursday by the Journal‘s deputy editor of the editorial page Daniel Henninger struck me as particularly lacking. I don’t read Henninger’s column very frequently; on foreign policy, he seems to be a lightweight compared to his colleague Bret Stephens, who writes the Tuesday “Global View” column. But I read this one, entitled “Rand Paul’s Reagan,” because its title raised a favorite interest of mine — the ongoing battle between the neo-con/aggressive nationalist and the paleo-con/libertarian wings of the Republican Party.
Of course, you should read the whole thing, but the part that really jumped out at me was his juxtaposition of the “Weinberger Doctrine” and his confident depiction of Ronald Reagan as a staunch and unflinching advocate of a hawkish foreign policy:
While there was never a formal Reagan Doctrine, Ronald Reagan himself said enough and did enough to know where he stood. In his 1985 State of the Union, Reagan said, “We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that’s not innocent.”
Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” aligned his own policy toward Soviet Communism with the idea of “rollback,” stood at the Brandenburg Gate and cried, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” increased U.S. defense spending, deployed Pershing 2 ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in Europe amid world-wide protests in 1983, invaded Grenada the same year, and gave U.S. support to anticommunist movements in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola and Latin America—with many congressional Democrats in a towering rage of eight-year opposition to nearly all of it. The words Reagan used most to support all this were “freedom” and “democracy.” He ended four decades of Cold War.
Well, aside from the fact that Henninger seems to take great pride in U.S. support for such “anticommunist” and freedom-loving movements represented by the mujahadin (and future Taliban) in Afghanistan, the Khmer Rouge (de facto) in Cambodia, the witch-burning Jonas Savimbi in Angola, and the Somocista-led contras in Nicaragua (not to mention the murderous armies and security forces of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — the three main sources of all those children on the southern border now — in Central America), I find this litany of “where (Reagan) stood” in the context of any discussion of the Weinberger Doctrine quite remarkable for what it omits. More precisely, Henninger fails to devote a single word to the events that gave rise to Weinberger’s enunciation of the doctrine that bears his name: the disastrous deployment of U.S. marines at the Beirut airport and the Oct 23, 1983, bombing of their barracks in which 241 servicemen were killed.
Of course, what is relevant here was Reagan’s reaction. You would think from Henninger’s depiction of “The Gipper” that he not only would have shrugged off what was the worst one-day loss of life of U.S. servicemen since World War II. He would also have spared no effort to hunt down the perpetrators*, bombed the hell out of their suspected sponsors wherever they were to be found, and then quadrupled the number of troops deployed to Lebanon in order to demonstrate to all the world his determination to “stand” his ground in the face of terrorist threats and outrages, and defeat them.
In fact, however, Reagan did nothing of the kind. Two days after the disaster, his administration launched the invasion of tiny Grenada partly, no doubt, to divert the public’s attention from Beirut. Meanwhile, most of the surviving marines were immediately deployed offshore, and by February, they had been withdrawn entirely from Lebanon, albeit not before the USS New Jersey fired off dozens of VW Bug-sized shells at Druze and Syrian positions east of Beirut. (Neither is believed to have had anything to do with the bombing.) Weinberger, who had opposed the original deployment and had wanted to lay out the principal lessons that he thought should be learned from the debacle shortly after the withdrawal, waited until November 1984 to devote a speech to the subject. One year later, that same tough-guy Reagan, who, as Henninger recalls, warned against playing “innocents abroad,” authorized the arms-for-hostages deal that formed the basis of the Iran-Contra scandal …and then claimed that he had no idea that he was indeed trading arms for hostages. This is Henninger’s Reagan.
I should stress right away that, unlike both Paul and Henninger, I’m definitely not a defender of Ronald Reagan whose presidency, I believe, was an unmitigated disaster for the country (exceeded only by George W. Bush’s, of course), not to mention the many tens of thousands of innocent people who died or were killed by the application of the “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, southern Africa (remember, Reagan’s support for apartheid South Africa), and Indochina. And, while I agree with Henninger that “Ron Paul’s Reagan” is not an entirely accurate rendition of the 40th president’s foreign policy, Henninger’s depiction is no less flawed. In fact, I believe it is fundamentally dishonest. After all, if you’re going to attack Paul’s central point about Reagan’s alleged adoption of the Weinberger Doctrine, the very least you can do is mention the events that gave rise to it: the ill-thought-out commitment of U.S. troops into a civil-war situation and their subsequent ignominious withdrawal. As noted by none other than Reagan’s own Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman (also a member of the 9/11 Commission), ”There’s no question it [Reagan's withdrawal] was a major cause of 9/11. We told the world that terrorism succeeds.” Of course, that particular Reagan obviously doesn’t exactly fit Henninger’s idealized and highly misleading version.
* One of the great ironies is that an alleged key planner of the 1983 barracks bombing, as well as other attacks against U.S. officials in that period, was an Iranian intelligence officer, Ali Reza Asgari, who, according to Kai Bird’s recent biography of Robert Ames (the CIA officer who was killed in the suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut six months before), was granted asylum in the U.S. during the George W. Bush administration in 2007 in exchange for sharing his knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program. According to Bird, Asgari has been living here under the CIA’s protection since his defection. You can find Augustus Richard Norton’s review of Bird’s book for LobeLog here.
Photo: Caspar Weinberger meeting in 1982 with then-Israeli Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon Credit: public domain
]]>
by Jim Lobe
As Republican lawmakers and Fox News have been claiming that the Benghazi “cover-up” scandal will prove even bigger than the Iran-Contra and Watergate scandals combined, Elliott Abrams – who, faced with a slew of felony charges by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor while serving as Assistant Secretary [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
As Republican lawmakers and Fox News have been claiming that the Benghazi “cover-up” scandal will prove even bigger than the Iran-Contra and Watergate scandals combined, Elliott Abrams – who, faced with a slew of felony charges by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor while serving as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs (1985-89), quickly pled guilty to two counts of misleading Congress — seemed to be a particularly poor choice by the Wall Street Journal to comment on this week’s hearings by the House Oversight Committee and decry the partisanship and viciousness of “Washington politics.”
It’s not just that Abrams has a rather dubious reputation for truth-telling dating back to even before Iran-Contra, to his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights (1981-5), when his efforts to downplay or cover up serious human rights atrocities (some of which certainly match or even exceed the worst attributed to Assad’s forces in Syria) committed by “friendly authoritarians” in South and Central America were routinely denounced by human-rights activists and their supporters in Congress. As for his lying about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, it’s quite something when a lawmaker as gentle and bipartisan as former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell threatens to eject you from a hearing room if you even try to testify because of your performance at previous hearings. (During one exchange in Dec 1986, after Iran-Contra hit the headlines after it had become clear that Abrams had lied to Congress about his role in fund-raising for the Contras, Sen. Tom Eagleton ended an exchange with Abrams by saying “I’ve heard [your testimony], and I want to puke.”)
It’s also that if you’re going to complain about the “vicious political culture of Washington,” your own contribution to that culture and its conventions should somehow be acknowledged. It was Abrams, after all, who repeatedly argued recently that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was an anti-Semite (or, more precisely, has “a thing about ‘the Jews’”). During the Reagan administration, he, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, was not shy about accusing human-rights activists, pro-poor clerics, and sympathetic Democratic lawmakers with whom he clashed on Central America of being fellow-travelers or dupes. As noted by Jefferson Morley back in 1987, he also adopted a more-sophisticated PR strategy designed to
dominate the conventions of Washington debate — epitomized on talk shows with speakers pro and con. Knowing these shows need federal officials, Abrams regularly refused to appear with selected opponents of Administration policy. He usually got his way. In declining to appear, Abrams labeled his critics, including respected diplomats, as ‘vipers’ beyond ‘the borders of responsible criticism.’
“Vipers” was also a word he reportedly used to describe foreign service officers who he felt were insufficiently loyal to the Reagan administration’s policies. Which brings me to the passage that really stuck out in Abram’s op-ed in the Journal, entitled “Benghazi Truths vs. Washington Politics.” The article concluded:
This hearing did not ascertain where the buck should stop, but it was a step forward in getting the facts. And it was a reminder that in Washington we should not permit people with political motives to blight the careers of civil servants and blame them for failures of management and policy at the top.
Of course, I personally couldn’t agree more with this appeal. But I find Abram’s invocation of it particularly ironic (not only because of the fact that neo-conservatives, including Abrams, and other hawks who marched the U.S. to war in Iraq are now finding it ever-so-convenient to blame the intelligence agencies for what was the worst debacle in U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War). It was also ironic because, during the Reagan administration, Abrams did not hesitate to retaliate against career officers who, in his opinion, failed to align their views with his own political interests. Consider these excerpts from a March 7, 1987, New York Times article, entitled “Abrams Under Fire at Senate Hearing.”
Just before [Abrams] was questioned, the subcommittee heard testimony from Francis J. McNeil, a former Ambassador to Costa Rica and 31-year-veteran of the State Department, who acknowledged under questioning that he quit his job because he was ”fed up” with being undermined by Mr. Abrams.
Mr. McNeil said that when as Deputy Director of Intelligence he gave discouraging assessments of the ability of the Nicaraguan rebels, Mr. Abrams translated that into ”not being on the team.” He said Mr. Abrams then made clear his belief that ”I was untrustworthy and a leaker.”
He said that Department investigators cleared him of the charge that he leaked a document to The Washington Post and that on resigning he wrote Mr. Abrams saying he had conducted an ”exercise in McCarthyism.”
When Mr. Abrams replaced Mr. McNeil at the witness chair, he appeared to try to face him as if to nod in recognition. But Mr. McNeil sought to avoid that by walking away with his head averted.
Under questioning from Senator Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, Mr. Abrams acknowledged that the investigators were unable to show that Mr. McNeil had leaked any documents. ”Well, they never discovered any leaker,” Mr. Abrams said.
Mr. Abrams characterized Mr. McNeil’s letter of resignation as ”character assassination” and said he did not respond because ‘I consider it to be a nasty note of a personal nature.”
He acknowledged interceding to prevent Mr. McNeil from being named Ambassador to Peru. He said that when assistant secretaries take such actions, Foreign Service officers object. ”They hate our guts,” he said.
I don’t know if Abrams’ views of foreign service officers and other career civil servants have changed since then, although the neo-conservative disregard for — not to say hatred of — “Arabists” in the State Department and the intelligence community was certainly evident during the Bush administration in which Abrams served as the senior Near East staffer on the National Security Council. Who can forget Pat Lang’s retelling of his interview with Doug Feith, an Abrams protege, to head up the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations?
So, it’s especially ironic to read Abrams’ denunciation of the “chasm between the culture of career civil servants ready to risk their lives and the vicious political culture of Washington” to which he has contributed so much over the past several decades.
But for more on what Abrams’ really thinks about the relationship between politics and the career civil service (and their feeding and care), you should read his recent essay, “The Prince of the White House.“
]]>via IPS News
NEW YORK, Nov 26 2012 (IPS) - I have never read a book quite like this. “Becoming Enemies” is the latest product of the indispensable National Security Archive, the Washington non-profit that has given new meaning to the Freedom of Information Act.
They not only use their [...]]]>
via IPS News
NEW YORK, Nov 26 2012 (IPS) - I have never read a book quite like this. “Becoming Enemies” is the latest product of the indispensable National Security Archive, the Washington non-profit that has given new meaning to the Freedom of Information Act.
They not only use their skills to get major U.S. policy documents declassified, but they take those documents and find innovative ways to illuminate important historical episodes. This book is a living example.
It covers the period of the Iran-Iraq war, during which U.S.-Iran relations hardened into the seemingly permanent enmity that has characterised their relations ever since. NSA assembled a group of individuals who were deeply involved in the making of U.S. policy during that time, backed up by a small group of scholars who had studied the period.
They provided them with a briefing book of major documents from the period, mostly declassified memos, to refresh their memories, and then launched into several days of intense and structured conversation. The transcript of those sessions, which the organisers refer to as “critical oral history”, is the core of this book.
No one can emerge from this book without a sense of revelation. No matter how much you may know about these tumultuous years, even if you were personally involved or have delved into the existing academic literature, you will discover new facts, new interpretations, and new dimensions on virtually every page.
I say this as someone who was part of the U.S. decision-making apparatus for part of this time and who has since studied it, written about it, and taught it to a generation of graduate students. I found little to suggest that my own interpretations were false, but I found a great deal that expanded what I knew and illuminated areas that previously had puzzled me. I intend to use it in my classes from now on.
Iranians tend to forget or to underestimate the impact of the hostage crisis on how they are perceived in the world. Many Iranians are prepared to acknowledge that it was an extreme action and one that they would not choose to repeat, but their inclination is to shove it to the back of their minds and move on.
This book makes it blindingly clear that the decision by the Iranian government to endorse the attack on the U.S. embassy in November 1979 and the subsequent captivity of U.S. diplomats for 444 days was an “original sin” in the words of this book for which they have paid – and continue to pay – a devastating price.
Similarly, U.S. citizens tend to forget their casual response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, our tacit acquiescence to massive use of chemical weapons by Iraq, and the shootdown of an Iranian passenger plane by a U.S. warship, among other things.
The authors of “Becoming Enemies” remind us that, just as Americans have not forgotten the hostage crisis, Iranians have neither forgotten or forgiven America’s own behaviour – often timid, clumsy, incompetent, or unthinking; but always deadly from Iran’s perspective.
It is impossible in a brief review to catalogue the many new insights that appear in this book for the first time. However, one of the most impressive sections deals with the so-called Iran-contra affair – the attempt by the Reagan administration to secretly sell arms to Iran in the midst of a war when we were supporting their Iraqi foes.
This, of course, exploded into a major scandal that revealed criminal actions by many of the administration’s top aides and officials and nearly resulted in the impeachment of the president. The official position of the administration in defending its actions was that this represented a “strategic opening” to Iran.
Participants in this discussion, some of whom had never before publicly described their own roles, dismissed that rationale as self-serving political spin. President Reagan, they agreed, was “obsessed” (the word came up repeatedly) with the U.S. hostages in Lebanon and was willing to do whatever was required to get them out, even if it cost him his job.
Moreover, the illegal diversion of profits from Iran arms to support the contra rebels in Central America was, it seems, only one of many such operations. The public focus on Iran permitted the other cases to go unexamined.
Another striking contribution is the decisive role played by the U.N. secretary-general and his assistant secretary, Gianni Picco (a participant), in bringing an end to the Iran-Iraq war. This is a gripping episode in which the U.N. mobilised Saddam’s Arab financiers to persuade him to stop the war, while ignoring the unhelpful interventions of the United States. They deserved the Nobel Peace Prize they received for their efforts.
There are, however, some lapses in this otherwise exceptional piece of research. One of the “original sins” of U.S. policy that are discussed is the U.S. failure to denounce the Iraqi invasion of Iran on Sep. 22, 1980, thereby confirming in Iranian eyes U.S. complicity in what they call the “imposed war”. I am particularly sensitive to the fact that the discussion of the actions of the Carter administration in 1980 is conducted in the absence of anyone who was actually involved.
Those of us in the White House at the time would never have failed to recall that direct talks with the Iranians about the release of the hostages had begun only days earlier. So there was for the first time in nearly a year a high-level authentic negotiating channel with Iran.
My own contribution to the missed opportunities that are enumerated at the end of the book would, in retrospect, have been our lack of courage or imagination to use our influence with the United Nations Security Council to bargain with Iran for immediate action on the hostages. If we had taken a principled position calling for an immediate cease-fire and Iraqi withdrawal, the entire nature of the war could have been transformed.
To my surprise, Zbigniew Brzezkinski, my boss at the time, sent a personal memo to President Carter (which I had never seen until now) that argued for “Iran’s survival” and held out the possibility of secret negotiations with Tehran. This was a total revelation to me, and it was so contrary to the unfortunate conventional wisdom that Brzezkinski promoted the Iraqi invasion that even the authors of this book seemed at a loss to know what to make of it.
The other huge disappointment with this initiative, which is not the fault of the organisers, was the absence of any Iranian policymakers. Iranian leaders and scholars should read this book. Perhaps one day their domestic politics will permit them to enter into such a dialogue. That day is long overdue.
*Gary Sick is a former captain in the U.S. Navy, who served as an Iran specialist on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He currently teaches at Columbia University. He blogs at http://garysick.tumblr.com.
]]>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.”
]]>Incredibly, he’s become even more strident in his calls since he was purged by Danielle Pletka from the American Enterprise Institute along with a handful of other hard liners (who then reacted badly). Imagine having your scholarship questioned by the likes of Pletka!
And so how refreshing it is to have a funny take down of a recent Ledeen post (it was covered in our Daily Talking Points) from the Poor Man Institute, a blog that I was heretofore unfamiliar with, but intend to check back on quite often. Even the title of the post was pitch perfect: “Funnier, Please!” — a send up of Ledeen’s Pajamas blog.
I’m going to quote a section of the piece at length, but I first want to highlight this important link — a blog post by Eric Martin – discovered therein: a catalogue of Michael Ledeen’s unfailingly belligerent comments about Iran. In short, these are actual calls for war, conta Ledeen’s common statements that “of course, he’s not calling for war on Iran.”‘ Don’t be fooled.
From the Poor Man post:
]]>In a recent offering, Ledeen again hams it up for the crowd by feigning ignorance as to how Secretary Gates could possibly claim that the Iranian people might rally around the flag in the face of a series of massive US or Israeli airstrikes targeting all manner of Iranian military and nuclear facilities (many of which are embedded in civilian areas and would, thus, lead to many dead civilians – although even their scientists and soldiers are Iranians and might be missed).
Imagine that. How crazy. And does Gates have any actual evidence for this conspiracy theory (history be damned)?
In order to perpetrate this thinly veiled ruse, Ledeen pretends that every regime opponent either has a family member locked in prison, or has multiple deceased family members courtesy of the regime (considering that he pegs the opposition in the tens of millions, one wonders at the size of the Iranian prison population - and size of the mass graves).
In reality, of course, the opposition is probably smaller, and there is a large spectrum of viewpoints represented in that opposition, with many opponents of the current ruling clique not urging on revolution as much as supporting their own candidates within the system (or for more human rights protections regardless).
But nevermind reality, we’re discussing a Ledeen column.