Matt Duss, at Think Progress, has one such example with regard to David Frum‘s [...]]]>
Matt Duss, at Think Progress, has one such example with regard to David Frum‘s reading of the WikiLeaks cables: That Arab leaders care only about attacking Iran and not about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Duss replies that “this is simply false. As I wrote last week, the cables contain abundant evidence that governments in the region do in fact care about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.”
One could say the same thing about almost any hawk (including Frum), trumpeting the hawkish comments of a few Arab leaders about Iran revealed by WikiLeaks. The actual information in the cables was damning enough, but exaggeration nonetheless runs rampant throughout the neoconservative commentary on the subject.
You’d be hard pressed to find a neoconservative commenter who writes that there are some Arab capitals that do not support an attack on Iran, let alone acknowledge those who do advocate for military action may be speaking more from emotion rather than with candor. Marc Lynch has written about how hawks have completely ignored that some of the Arab leaders they fawn over have made contradictory statements about an attack on Iran.
Take the example of Foundation for Defense of Democracies “scholar” Michael Ledeen. In a video for Pajamas Media, Leeden lists countries with Arab leaders that have made hawkish statements on Iran: “Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai — the Arab countries.” He claims they are imploring the United States to answer: “Why haven’t you bombed them?”
Ledeen bats 500 with his list. I’d challenge Ledeen to find a cable with hawkish comments from a Qatari or Omani official. The latter has even expressed concern about the hawkishness of its neighbors. Likewise, the official from Abu Dhabi who called Ahmadinejad “Hitler,” also complained that his “neighboring capitals” were too close to Iran. He’s probably referencing to Dubai, which along with Abu Dhabi, is one of the sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But unlike its fellow sheikdoms, Dubai has especially strong trade ties to Iran. That Leeden can’t get this right is simple sloppiness — yet another indication that hawks select and contextualize bits of information to fit their ideological objectives.
This should come as no surprise. In the campaign for war with Iraq, many of these same ideologues were cherry-picking pieces of intelligence to fit their purposes, omitting dissent and critical context.
By the way, note the careful attention Leeden pays to facts in this piece. He calls the founder of WikiLeaks — Julian Assange — “Julius.”
]]>Assange’s illegal disclosures are helping the Taliban to undermine Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy before it has a chance to work….This is a devastating blow to the surge in Afghanistan….It may be impossible to fully recover from this leak.
Needless to say, Thiessen’s chronology and his account of the war are both a bit faulty. There has been no new “surge” or new strategy under Petraeus; as far as anyone can tell, he is largely continuing the strategy of his predecessor, Stanley McChrystal — a strategy that has already been in place for nine months and has thus far yielded disappointing returns.
The point of Thiessen’s misleading spin, however, is clear: by pretending that Petraeus has embarked on a bold change of strategy that has been sabotaged by WikiLeaks “before it has a chance to work,” he lays the groundwork for blaming any eventual failure of the Afghan war effort on home front critics like WikiLeaks rather than the strategy or war aims themselves. It is simply the latest incarnation of the Dolchstosslegende, the “myth of the stab-in-the-back,” which is always the favored method of hawks to explain away the failures of their wars.
It’s hard to see anyone being convinced by Thiessen’s latest attempt, though. Regardless of what one thinks of the WikiLeaks disclosures, it requires a great deal of credulity to see them as the primary force making or breaking the war effort.
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