Zbigniew Brzezinski, political scientist and former adviser to Jimmy Carter, opposed the war on Iraq and criticized the U.S.’s handling of Afghanistan. His criticism of the U.S.’s “special relationship” with Israel resulted in him being shunned from the Obama administration after opposition from the so-called Israel lobby. But he is also demonized by progressives, [...]]]>
Zbigniew Brzezinski, political scientist and former adviser to Jimmy Carter, opposed the war on Iraq and criticized the U.S.’s handling of Afghanistan. His criticism of the U.S.’s “special relationship” with Israel resulted in him being shunned from the Obama administration after opposition from the so-called Israel lobby. But he is also demonized by progressives, who take issue with his realpolitik approach to international relations. Regardless, at the age of 83, he is one of the few voices of reason on U.S. foreign policy (and sometimes on domestic issues too).
In this clip from late October, Brzezinski discusses Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, one of the few mainstream shows who still feature him. (His daughter, Mika, is Scarborough’s co-host.) On Iran, Brzezinski repeats calls for engagement and reminds us that the Islamic Republic plays a key role in stabilizing both Afghanistan and Iraq. If it is prevented from having one, and the U.S. does not ramp up it’s diplomatic efforts, Iran will respond accordingly, especially after the U.S. has emboldened it and bolstered its influence with the two disastrous wars it has waged and is now leaving behind.
The entire segment is well worth watching in full.
]]>IPS News: Further to Jim’s post yesterday is his article about the approval of two bills calling for “sweeping sanctions” against Iran by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives. Lobe quotes the two bills’ leading [...]]]>
IPS News: Further to Jim’s post yesterday is his article about the approval of two bills calling for “sweeping sanctions” against Iran by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives. Lobe quotes the two bills’ leading sponsor and committee chairperson Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen saying that she hopes the House and the Senate enact them quickly to “hand the Iranian regime a nice holiday present”. Lobe notes that regardless of if or when the bills are passed, the “draconian legislation” will further stoke tension in the region while giving leverage to Israel lobbyists who are pushing for more militant sanctions against Iran by the U.S.
According to some observers here, the war talk in Jerusalem may be intended primarily to encourage lawmakers here to support the strongest possible sanctions legislation, which Netanyahu has repeatedly called for over the last several years.
Haaretz: Lending support to the idea that Israel’s recent military chest-banging is actually posturing intended to pressure the U.S. to pass more militant sanctions against Iran are comments by Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in an Israeli daily. The authors argue that Israel stands to benefit from the recent increase in war talk about Iran as long as the plan doesn’t backfire:
But this is a dangerous game. A few more weeks of tension and one party or another might make a fatal mistake that will drag the region into war. Barak, the brilliant planner, should know this. More than once in the past his complex plans have gone seriously awry.
Jerusalem Post: Despite considerable doubts raised about the U.S.’s controversial allegations about an “Iranian plot” to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Benjamin Weinthal of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies (also a Jerusalem Post correspondent) urges for “crippling” sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) in response. Weinthal cites a 2007 New York Times article quoting an Iranian-German exile to support his linking of the CBI to Iran’s revolutionary guards. He adds that the U.S. will need to ”strongly twist Europe’s economic arm” to get the EU to support the U.S.-led initiative against Iran. Weinthal’s odd focus on Germany in the article was likely inspired by his recent attendance at an Israel lobby conference in Frankfurt which he wrote about here. His other quote about why the CBI needs to be sanctioned comes from an “expert” at the FDD’s Brussels’s branch.
Huffington Post: Former George W. Bush advisor Frances Townsend writes an article with the president of United Against Nuclear Iran (where she serves on the advisory board), Mark D. Wallace, urging the U.S. to “isolate Iran further” through its financial sector and support anti-regime forces inside the country. They end by arguing that Iran refused the “olive branch” that the Obama administration apparently offered it and that the U.S. should respond to alleged Iranian aggressions with “swift and effective financial and military action.”
]]>Washington Post: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria bravely singles himself out as one of the last media commentators to still be talking about “engagement”.
Strategic engagement with an adversary can go hand in hand with a policy that encourages change in that [...]]]>Washington Post: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria bravely singles himself out as one of the last media commentators to still be talking about “engagement”.
Haaretz: A professor at Purdue University who chaired Project Daniel in Israel and two retired U.S. military members with high security credentials write a hawkish editorial discussing the legal and practical issues involving a preemptive U.S. attack on Iran. Louis René Beres, Admiral (ret.) Leon “Bud” Edney and Lt. Gen. (ret. ) Thomas G. McInerney argue that if there isn’t “an American defensive strike on Iran”, the U.S. and Israel will have to deal with a “fully nuclear Iran, led by irrational Shiite clerics”. In case readers aren’t alarmed enough by such a prospect, the authors also tell us that we are at the “11th hour.”
Most interesting about this article is the considerable time the authors spend discussing how imminent a “threat” must be for the “survival” of a state before a preemptive attack can be legally launched and the quick and simplistic way they dismiss those arguments to justify their hawkish stance.
And why should the U.S. protect Israel from this alleged threat? A strange, almost paternalistic answer: Israel is “at greatest risk from Iranian nuclear weapons” and there is a “long and venerated international legal tradition that Great Powers have commensurately great responsibilities.”
Wall Street Journal: Mansour Arbabsiar, the number one witness and defendant in the U.S.’s controversial case about an “Iranian plot” to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, has plead not guilty to the charges laid against him. This is important because all the evidence made public so far is based on Arbabsiar’s confession and calls.
IPS News: Reporting from Iran, Yasaman Baji informs us that the U.S.’s allegations about an “Iranian plot” have stirred complex and nationalistic feelings in Iran.
Foreign Policy: Dalia Dassa Kaye, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, explains that a military attack on Iran is still inadvisable for a list of reasons including
Tikun Olam: Richard Silverstein has been tracking a growing wave of hawkish articles appearing in Israeli media about a pending attack on Iran. This week Silverstein pointed out that Israel’s most prominent journalist, Nahum Barnea, is also warning of an Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak led strike. Silverstein argues that Barnea’s article makes the prospect of an Israeli attack imminent, but this is debatable considering how previous Israeli threats along these lines were mere posturing which resulted in further “concessions” made to them by the U.S. The article is in Hebrew, but Silverstein has translated excerpts of it. Here’s one:
Barak does not use the same superlatives, but is urging military action: he is certain that just as Israel prevented nuclear projects in the past, it must prevent this one as well. This is both his strategy and legacy…There are those who suspect Barak of having personal motives: he has no party; he has no voters. A strike on Iran would be the big bang that would make it possible for Netanyahu to bring him into the top ten of the Likud in the next elections. This way he could continue to be defense minister.
Keane repeated his claim that Iran is “our number one strategic enemy in the world” and called the alleged plot a “stunning rebuke to the Obama administration’s policy of negotiation and isolation with the Iranians.” His recommendations included conducting “covert operations led by the CIA” and providing “money, information and encouragement to the dissident leaders inside Iran to use their population to put pressure on the regime.”
Keane stopped short of recommending military strikes, but another panelist, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the uber-hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies did.
In response to a question directed at the entire panel about what should be done to counter the “threat” posed to the U.S. by Iran, Gerecht pushed the standard neo-con argument that the Islamic Republic is led by irrational actors who “do not respond in the same rational economic ways that we do.” He also echoed the preemptive war rhetoric that the Bush administration used in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
I don’t think that you’re really going to really intimidate these people, get their attention, unless you shoot someone…I think you have to send a pretty powerful message to those who have undertaken this or I think down the road you’re asking for it.
Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, added that sanctions against Iran have been “tremendously effective,” but they have to be used in tandem with other options “aggressively enough to make Iran care.” His list of other options included “military options,” “covert actions” and “diplomatic options.”
The hearing did include a few brief moments of reason. At one point Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said that while
Iran’s leaders must be held accountable for their action…we cannot take any reckless actions which may lead to opening another front in the ‘War on Terror,’ which the American people do not want and cannot afford.
Note on Keane: Keane has close ties with U.S. neoconservatives and was one of the main architects of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. In 2006, Gen. George Casey and the chief of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid recommended reducing troop levels in Iraq, but Keane and his neoconservative allies started looking for someone that would support escalation instead–ultimately General David Petraeus. As documented by Bob Woodward in the War Within (though not in the fashion I write here), Keane ignored the chain of command while heavily promoting Petraeus. He also helped persuade Bush to reject the Iraq Study Group’s findings and recommendations by aggressively pushing an alternative strategy he wrote with Frederick Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute called “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.” That report led to the military buildup that followed. He’s also criticizing Obama’s announcement last week that the U.S. will withdraw all its troops from Iraq by Christmas. “I think it’s an absolute disaster,” he told the Washington Times last weekend. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
]]>EA WorldView: Scott Lucas points out that the only named source that we have to back up David Ignatius’s advancing of the claim that Gholam Shakuri “helped organize militant Shiite protesters in Bahrain” is Bahrain’s Foreign [...]]]>
EA WorldView: Scott Lucas points out that the only named source that we have to back up David Ignatius’s advancing of the claim that Gholam Shakuri “helped organize militant Shiite protesters in Bahrain” is Bahrain’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa. The following is a press release from Bahraini state news:
“This man is not new to us. Months before the indictment was issued, Bahraini and Saudi intelligence had identified him as an important “Iranian interlocutor” with several members masterminding the coup attempt in Bahrain”, Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa told Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius.
He wondered about the action which would be taken by the US against Iran to show its seriousness after President Obama denounced the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and warned that Iran “will pay a price”. “We’re asking the U.S. to stand up for its interests and draw the red lines,” Sheikh Khalid said, referring to Iran-sponsored attacks on American forces in Lebanon and Iraq and asked: “How many times have you lost lives, been subject to terrorist activities and yet we haven’t seen any proper response. This is really serious. It’s coming to your shores now.”
Washington Post: Experts are arguing that sanctions and other measures are “exerting a mounting toll” on Iran’s nuclear program:
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Iran’s clerical leaders are seeking to rapidly acquire the technical capability to make nuclear weapons, though there are indications that top officials have not yet firmly committed to building the bomb. Iran maintains that its nuclear intentions are peaceful.
The Weekly Standard: Lee Smith, the senior editor of the Weekly Standard who also works with the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and frequently accuses critics of the U.S.’s “special relationship” with Israel of being anti-Semites uses the killings of Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein as a pretext for the U.S. implementing regime change in Iran right now:
National Review Online: In “Breaking Tehran” anti-Islam extremist Andrew C. McCarthy of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who considers President Obama a “radical leftist” declares that regime change by way of military force should be the driving motivation behind U.S. foreign policy toward Iran after incorrectly stating that all other options have been exhausted. McCarthy also says that Iran’s alleged nuclear weapon ambitions aren’t the real problem:
Most significant, gone would be today’s worst threat to American national security — a threat that will become only more dire if these rabid, desperate men are permitted to become a nuclear power. That is an eventuality that will come about in short order if we fail to act. It is an eventuality that we should find unacceptable, as this week once again demonstrated. And it can be stopped only by military force; other options have been exhausted, and they only vex the mullahs — they don’t stop them.
Pillar also points out the absurd method Cohen uses to tie the alleged Iranian nuclear “threat” with the curious “Iranian plot”:
Read more.
]]>Leading the charge is the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the ideological successor to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which played a critical role in mobilising support for “regime change” in Iraq in the late 1990s and subsequently spearheaded the public campaign to invade the country after the 9/11 attacks. The group sent reporters appeals by two of its leaders for military action on its letterhead Monday.
In a column headlined “Speak Softly …And Fight Back” in this week’s Weekly Standard, chief editor William Kristol, co-founder of both PNAC and FPI, said the alleged plot amounted to “an engraved invitation” by Tehran to use force against it.
“We can strike at the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back,” he wrote, adding that Congress should approve a resolution authorising the use of force against Iranian entities deemed responsible for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, acts of terrorism, or “the regime’s nuclear weapons program”.
Kristol’s advice was seconded by Jamie Fly, FPI’s executive director, who called for President Barack Obama to emulate former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton when they ordered targeted strikes against Libya in 1986 and Iraq in 1993, respectively, in retaliation for alleged terrorist plots against U.S. targets.
Read more.
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