Discussing his outspoken opposition to diplomacy with Iran, Republican Senator Mark Kirk said in a phone briefing for his supporters: “It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the [...]]]>
Discussing his outspoken opposition to diplomacy with Iran, Republican Senator Mark Kirk said in a phone briefing for his supporters: “It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the 21st century.” This is an important statement, and one which bears intense scrutiny at a time when the Obama Administration is trying to walk the United States back from a war footing with Iran, against the wishes of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and, especially, Israel and its domestic allies.
I hurried to congratulate my colleagues, Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton, for their reporting on Kirk’s private briefing call. I tweeted the following: “Thanks to @AliGharib and @EliClifton, we have Mark Kirk on record stating that he values Israeli interests over US’.” Naturally, I was attacked for “questioning Kirk’s loyalty.” I certainly confess; Twitter is a place for shorthand and bombastic statements, and no doubt, Kirk’s position is more complicated vis a vis US vs. Israeli interests. That’s why the interaction I had with a more sober-minded individual around this, Prof. Brent Sasley of the University of Texas at Arlington, was more probative.
Sasley’s point was that Kirk was more likely echoing the very common view that Israeli and U.S. interests are virtually identical, and that this was at least as plausible an interpretation of what Kirk was quoted as saying. I have known Sasley, online, for a while now, and I know him to be a thoughtful person, and to the extent that people who have never met face to face can call each other friends, I’d like to call him one. I get his point.
But Kirk said what he said. In that sentence, there isn’t a hint of consideration as to whether backing away from war with Iran would be the better move for the United States. Nor does any appear later in the article, as Kirk apparently reiterated his belief that U.S. intelligence could not be trusted if it disagreed with the Israeli version (although both U.S. and Israeli intelligence have generally been in agreement on Iran—it is Israel’s political leadership that has disagreed with both).
One thing that is interesting to note here is the impression one gets from Kirk. He works hand in glove with AIPAC, as he makes absolutely clear in his talk. But I’m not sold that he’s an AIPAC puppet—he comes off a lot more like a true believer, not in a religious sense, but as no less a fanatical disciple of far-right Israeli policies.
MJ Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer who has dedicated his work for years now to exposing the Israel lobby’s destructive role in US Middle East policy, as well as to Israel (and, obviously, the Palestinians), said this about Kirk a few years ago: “Why do the PACs love him? It is because Kirk is a pure Israel-firster. For Kirk, Israel can do no wrong. Add to that that he sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations where he brings home the bacon for Israel big time. … I would not categorize him as pro-Israel because that would require supporting an end to the deadly status quo. Mark Kirk is just pro-AIPAC and shaking the trees for all the campaign money he can get by his hate rhetoric about Arabs. Playing like he’s ‘pro-Israel’—and not just pro-lobby—has paid off very very well for him.”
I agree, of course, with MJ’s general characterization. And Jim Lobe suggests that Kirk may be at least partly motivated by the campaign cash he has received from pro-Israel PACs as one among many possibilities to explain Kirk’s radical stance. But Kirk seems to me to be a more interesting man than that. He is perhaps the most radical hawk on the Middle East in the Senate. But he is also a Republican who has been a strong supporter of same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Unlike many neo-conservatives, he has a radically anti-immigration agenda as well, largely informed by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.
To me, this gives the impression more of a true believer than of a political opportunist. And that’s what I think Kirk is. I think, for whatever reasons, he’d hold these views on Israel if he never received a dime of AIPAC-directed campaign funds (as a reminder to readers, AIPAC does not actually engage in campaign financing directly, but most pro-Israel PACs and major donors donate based on AIPAC’s guidance). It’s a case where the Lobby comes to him, rather than him going to them.
And this is the basis of Sasley’s and my disagreement. In one (actually, it was split into two) of his tweets to me, Brent said “’Israel lobby’-types like to take a quote or two as proof of their accusations. But if you look at consistent language about US interests, values & Israeli interests, values, they’re seen as same. That’s (the) context in which Kirk’s call should be understood.”
Sasley is making an important point here, although whether that was intentional or not is unclear to me. The “Israel lobby” theme can sometimes obscure key nuances. It is often dominated by two extremes, one which tries to downplay the lobby’s role almost to nothing (this position has become far less tenable in recent years) and considers all other views to be evidence of anti-Semitism; and the other extreme which attributes all the ills of U.S. Middle East policy to the lobby’s malign influence. The debate can never end because ultimately, there’s no way to precisely measure the lobby’s actual influence.
The issue of Iran has brought the lobby’s activities into much clearer view, but not its boundaries. There is, without a doubt, a strong current of support for Israel without AIPAC. It comes largely from a small but active and well-heeled section of the U.S. Jewish community, a theology that has come to be known as “Christian Zionism,” deserved guilt over centuries of anti-Semitism (including some complicity and a lot of indifference toward the Holocaust at the time), the strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. (especially during the Cold War), and the “David vs. Goliath” mythos around Israel. One can write a book on this stuff, and a good number have. But suffice to say it is a mistake to attribute all of even the myopic support for Israeli policies to the lobby.
So, yes, I think Kirk is a true believer, and that really is the point. Because maybe Brent is right, and Kirk simply believes that U.S. interests are best served by following Israel’s lead. Maybe he believes that the U.S. has a God-given mission to support Israel in all its hawkish and self-destructive extremism.
In the end, it doesn’t matter, because it still amounts to the same thing – subordinating US policy to Israel in a crucial arena. I don’t know whether Brent thinks of me as one of the “Israel Lobby” types, but both John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have known me for years and both are aware that, while I agreed with much of their thesis, I publicly disagreed with their points regarding the war on Iraq and their conflation of neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby. I have also written dozens of articles about the destructive role of the Israel Lobby.
But I don’t really care about Mark Kirk’s patriotism. No one has ever accused me of an over-abundance of national pride. What I do think is important, however, is that people understand what their representatives are doing. Mark Kirk is fighting tooth and nail for an attack on Iran(although he insists he wants a peaceful solution amounting to Iran’s surrender, the same rhetorical trick Benjamin Netanyahu employs) because he believes it is in Israel’s best interests. Even accepting Brent’s argument that his view is that protecting Israel’s interests is vital, in and of itself, to US interests, then this logic needs to be articulated and debated.
Personally, I doubt many US citizens are prepared to accept that the US should engage in another Middle East military adventure for the sake of Israel. Maybe others think differently. But Kirk makes it clear that this is all about Israel, and that is what I was putting out there, perhaps clumsily. That needs to be brought into the light and debated with vigor.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The 2013 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference wasn’t quite the same show of arrogant power that it usually is. There seems to have been a note of unusual concern among the 13,000 or so assembled activists. And those concerns echo some of [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The 2013 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference wasn’t quite the same show of arrogant power that it usually is. There seems to have been a note of unusual concern among the 13,000 or so assembled activists. And those concerns echo some of what AIPAC’s detractors have been saying for some time.
The tone was set by AIPAC’s president, Michael Kassen at the beginning of the conference. In what Ha’aretz reporter Chemi Shalev described as “… an uncharacteristic ‘adapt or die’ alarm to the American Jewish community,” Kassen warned of “the growing allure of isolationism among our new leaders”, which would include an aversion to difficult foreign policy issues…like Israel.
Kassen urged the AIPAC activists to expand the base from its overwhelmingly Jewish one, and highlighted the participation of representatives from the African-American and Latino communities in the conference. Yet, despite this outreach, The Forward’s Natan Guttman reports that “…a look at the audience made clear that AIPAC is still largely an organization made up of white Jewish activists.”
There’s more here. Orthodox Jews are disproportionately represented at AIPAC. The Orthodox community represents around 15% of all US Jews. Support among non-orthodox Jews has been dwindling in a hurry, and despite intense efforts by AIPAC to reach out to younger Jews, the crowd is heavily skewed toward grey hair. Guttman also reports that an AIPAC official he spoke to rejected the idea that AIPAC had lost many liberal Jews to the more dovish pro-Israel group J Street by saying that “…if anything, liberal activists are turning away from the issue of Israel altogether and are not seeking a different kind of political approach.”
What AIPAC seems to be facing is the fact that its base, while very active and willing to mobilize considerable wealth as well as time and energy to support the AIPAC agenda, is aging and increasingly out of touch with most Americans. This is something commentators like myself, MJ Rosenberg and groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have been contending for quite some time. And this is only the tip of the iceberg of AIPAC’s problems.
As reported by Adam Horowitz, a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed American support for Israel as opposed to the Palestinians (who got 13%) at 45%, that 55% of Americans believe the United States should treat Israel and the Palestinians as equals, and 69% do not believe Israel and the Palestinians can reach a peace agreement. This demonstrates what the authors of the famed book The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, have repeatedly stated: Americans do support Israel, but do not believe it should hold a place any more special than other US allies.
None of this is lost on AIPAC, and it was reflected, to some extent, in Kassen’s statements about Congress, where he expressed concern that many younger Congress members have a “different association” with Israel. But it doesn’t end there. The battle over Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense is also casting a shadow on AIPAC, perhaps with some permanent ramifications.
Although AIPAC wisely stayed out of the fight, that didn’t prevent the entire episode from becoming a shining example of just how strong an impact the pro-Israel lobby has on Congress. It seeped deeply into popular culture, with prominent comedian and talk show host Bill Maher openly declaring that “Based on every statement I’ve heard from every Republican in the last two years, the Israelis are controlling our government.” And Saturday Night Live may have decided not to air a skit lampooning the extent to which the Senators questioning Hagel were beholden to the Israel Lobby, but it found a bright new life on YouTube.
The more extreme groups that took on Hagel are heavily tilted toward the Republican Party, and they, in the 2012 election, tried very hard to win Jewish votes for the GOP by portraying it as the “only pro-Israel party.” They failed mostly because very few Jews actually vote based on Israel. But that polarization is undermining one of AIPAC’s major strengths, its bipartisan reach, by alienating more and more liberals and Democrats in general from Israel advocacy.
Finally, many reports from across the political spectrum have noted that AIPAC’s conference this year had a rather thin agenda. The focus was on Iran, and to a lesser extent, trying to protect aid to Israel from both the current sequester and future budget cuts. These are responsive issues — reactions to perceived threats. The conference offered scant vision of a better future for Israel, as it completely ignored the Palestinians. To some extent, one might ascribe this to Israel presently being in a state of flux without a new governing coalition. But it actually is more reflective of Israel’s own lack of interest in peace these days. And the idea of simply managing the conflict is a tough message to sell.
These aren’t new problems for AIPAC, and they’re not going away any time soon. The organization itself has taken note of them, but whether or not they will be able to deal with them is an open question. AIPAC is certainly resourceful, but the simple fact is, the playing field is changing. Americans have major economic concerns, and the entire Middle East is stirring or storming. Israel’s behavior in recent years has been more brazen and the reality of its routine violations of Palestinian human rights and its permanent denial of their civil rights has reached the awareness of more Americans — Jewish and otherwise — than ever before.
The “special relationship” has always been an AIPAC-invented fiction that comes to life because of political, not popular, pressures. It has been the shaky foundation of US policy toward Israel and much of the Middle East since the end of the Cold War and the concomitant diminishment of Israel as a strategic asset to the US. In a time where the US populace is continuing to face a level of economic stress it has not witnessed since the Great Depression, the special relationship façade will be even harder to maintain. And AIPAC is nervous, because they know it.
]]>AIPAC comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, and ‘then you’ll get 80 to 90 senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters.’
When someone would accuse him of not being pro-Israel because he didn’t sign the letter, Hagel told me he responds: “‘I didn’t sign the [...]]]>
AIPAC comes knocking with a pro-Israel letter, and ‘then you’ll get 80 to 90 senators on it. I don’t think I’ve ever signed one of the letters.’
When someone would accuse him of not being pro-Israel because he didn’t sign the letter, Hagel told me he responds: “‘I didn’t sign the letter because it was a stupid letter.” Few legislators talk this way on the Hill. Hagel is a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values. “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” but as he put it, “I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator.”
–Chuck Hagel to Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land
The kerfuffle over Chuck Hagel’s use of the term “Jewish lobby” — and the implication that some members of Congress are intimidated by it — pervades the right-wing media and its echo chamber in the blogosphere. Since Hagel was floated as a possible Secretary of Defense, some American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) representatives, among them former spokesman Josh Block and former Executive Director Morris Amitay, have denounced Hagel’s characterization. Even progressives are not immune to debating its appropriateness. M. J. Rosenberg, also a veteran of the AIPAC but now one of its fiercest critics, writes:
It is true that it is impolitic to use the term “Jewish lobby” rather than “Israel lobby” although the very same people criticizing Hagel for using the former term objected just as vehemently when Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer used the latter in their book on the subject. In any case, the term Jewish lobby is accurate when one refers to organizations like the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League, etc. They are Jewish organizations and not AIPAC, the registered Israel lobby.
AIPAC’s rebranding of itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby” instead of the “Jewish lobby” is also relatively recent. The critiques of AIPAC from both the right and left overlook a long paper trail of AIPAC’s self-perception and self-description, which for much of its history — from the 1950s through the 1990s — has reveled in its role as the voice of “the Jewish community.” In Israel today it still is regarded as such, as Chemi Shalev points out in Haaretz:
The most frivolous of the accusations against Hagel, from a strictly Israeli point of view, is his statement to Aaron David Miller that “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people” in Washington. First, because the term “Jewish lobby” in Hebrew is in common use and is a widely accepted Israeli synonym for AIPAC. Second, because Israelis take pride and comfort in the legendary prowess and influence of the lobby that supports them.
In November 1981, Wolf Blitzer, now a familiar face on CNN but back then the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, wrote an article titled “The AIPAC Formula” for Moment magazine, then a top quality monthly journal under the editorial aegis of Leonard Fein. In it, Blitzer traced the evolution of AIPAC from its founding in 1954 to “the sexy Jewish organization” whose rising profile could be viewed as resulting largely from the heightened increase in US government assistance to Israel:
…with the exception of South Viet Nam, Israel has received more U.S. governmental assistance than any other foreign country–including all of the Western European nations during the post-World War II Marshall plan…The need to keep up with an escalating arms race in the Middle East guarantees that Israel’s foreign aid requests from the United States are going to continue for the foreseeable future.
…one reason AIPAC has become so much of a force in the American Jewish community in recent years is the fact that the Israeli government itself has come to rely on AIPAC for advice in understanding the complicated U.S. legislative process. “The Jewish lobby” [emphasis added] come to be a well-known phenomenon in Israel since the 1973 war. As Israelis concentrate more of their foreign policy on relations with the United States, they come to understand the critical role played by AIPAC and other supporting Jewish organizations in winning friends and influencing people on behalf of closer U.S.-Israel relations.
Blitzer pointed out that an AIPAC mailing on Sept. 8, 1981 included a quote from the New York Times calling AIPAC “The most powerful, best-run and effective foreign policy interest group in Washington”, and another from the Washington Post that said AIPAC was “A power to be reckoned with at the White House, State and Defense Departments, and on Capitol Hill.” (Much of this was accomplished by the strategy of AIPAC’s new executive director at the time, Tom Dine, according to J.J. Goldberg’s 1996 book, Jewish Power: The Rise and Rise of the Israel Lobby.” “Dine openly trumpeted AIPAC’s clout, boasting about ‘Jewish political power’ to mass audiences, in the obvious belief that an outsized reputation would intimidate the opposition.” [Emphasis added])
A month later, in the December 1981 issue of Moment, Aaron Rosenbaum deconstructed AIPAC’s unsuccessful attempt to block the Reagan administration’s sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in “The AWACs Aftermath.” However, wrote Rosenbaum, who spent eight years as AIPAC’s Director of Research (1972-80), “every circumstance contains opportunities.” AIPAC had lost a battle, but it would be better prepared for the next one:
The Jewish community emerges from the fight politically cohesive, ideologically coherent, respected, unbroken, better organized than ever. After the F-15, Jewish lobbying power [emphasis added] was materially diminished. Not this time. The AWACS campaign allowed the Jews to recapture politically what had been lost three years ago to build upon it. The AWACS campaign paved the way to broader ties to labor (with the coalition for strategic stability in the Middle East) and religious groups (with Christians United for American Security and the Christian Leadership Conference for Israel) as well to national security types that now have a better appreciation of the value of Israel.
Rosenbaum also outlined what would become an important component of AIPAC’s future strategy:
…The American Jewish community has to avoid a desire for “revenge” and practice pragmatism wherever possible. Simultaneously it must start cutting definitive deals with both congressmen and candidates. Jews are increasingly sick of politicians who pledge their support for Israel yet always seem to vote the wrong way. The best way to channel good intentions is to tie them to some positive act with which the member of Congress feels comfortable. Once done, it becomes a precedent, a hook on which one can hang the encouragement that is lobbying.
One of the means AIPAC developed for “channeling good intentions” is the sign-on letter through which a member of the House or Senate reaffirms his/her support for Israel (and since the 1990′s, opposition to Iran). These letters have, as Rosenbaum foresaw, helped create a near-unanimous consensus on “support for Israel,” even today in an ideologically bifurcated Congress whose members can agree on little else. Hagel was well within his rights as a senator to abstain from signing them and considering them “stupid.”
All in all, according to Rosenbaum:
The Battle Over the AWACS was a good fight. It would have been better, to be sure, had the sale been blocked. The transaction will pose a real threat both to the United States and to Israel. But the opponents of the sale hardly come away empty handed and defeated. They defended a position consistent with the best interests and ideals of the United States.
As we now know, the sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia was nowhere nearly as damaging to Israel, nor to the interests of the US, as Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon would prove to be. But the claim that AIPAC was defending the interests, not just of Israel, but of the US itself, would catch on and become the organization’s mantra.
“In the next confrontation,” Rosenbaum concluded, “our opponents will act as if those they are attempting to persuade have no memory and historical consciousness. The Jews, a people defined by their money and sense of historical purpose, will have an opportunity and an obligation to show how wrong they are.
“Jews, a people defined by their money…” One can only imagine Josh Block’s response if Chuck Hagel had said that!
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As reported last Friday in the Huffington Post by M.J. Rosenberg, Robert Baer, a former CIA operations officer (1976-97), told radio talk show host Ian Masters on July 12:
There is almost “near certainty” that [Israeli Prime Minister Bernjamin] Netanyahu is “planning an attack [on Iran] … and it will probably be in September before the vote on a Palestinian state. And he’s also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict…”
Baer is now expressing astonishment that anyone could have construed his comments as predicting an Israeli strike against Iran. In Time Magazine today, Baer offers his version of the unfolding of events since the radio interview was picked up and publicized:
Last week, my friend Ian Masters, who hosts the Los Angeles talk-show Background Briefing, called me up to talk about the Arab spring, and especially what would happen if Israel were to attack Iran. He was struck by the comments of recently retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan, saying that an increasingly paranoid and isolated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was considering launching a reckless attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and doing that soon… I noted there have been other recently retired senior Israeli security officials who’d said much the same thing, including the well-respected chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi.
Then “as these things go on radio, fact quickly turned to speculation,” Baer explains:
Warming to the subject, I chattered on about how I’d heard there was a “warning order” at the Pentagon to prepare for a conflict with Iran. I was about to add that that this was not unusual; there are warning orders all the time, and it could have nothing to do with Israeli or anything it was or wasn’t planning for Iran. (Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, after all, is accusing Iran of being behind the sharp uptick in deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.) But time was short, and the host needed to finish up for the next guest.
According to Baer, the easygoing banter had no reliable basis in fact, and was purely speculative:
This was a wide-ranging speculative conversation on a local radio station, two like minds kibitzing, as media pundits so often do, with no inside information to back our interpretations of the significance of the flood of former senior Israeli security officials warning that Netanyahu is crazy and likely to do something rash. “If I was forced to bet,” I ventured, “I’d say we’re going to have some sort of conflict in the next couple of months, unless this is all just a masterful bluff — which I can’t believe the Iranians would succumb to — I think the chances of it being a bluff are remote.” Not exactly claiming to know any more than any other tea-leaf reader.
And when Masters asked me when I thought this hypothetical attack might hypothetically occur, I blithely suggested September. I was only adding two plus two: a September attack would allow Netanyahu to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and wreck plans for a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood, which is slated for September. I would have added that in the Middle East, two plus two rarely adds up to four. But I was definitely out of time.
Baer insists his offhand remarks not only were taken out of context, they were disseminated as though he were “some sort of unimpeachable authority, talking with the certainly of an insider looped into the plans and intentions of the key decision-makers.”
…what I’d said was a tedious rehash of various media reports. I would have forgotten it altogether were it not for the blogosphere’s version of a Pacific hurricane. I don’t know where it started, but soon the choice bits of our conversation were being rebroadcast as a danger signal flashing bright red: “Former CIA Official: Israel Will Bomb Iran in September,” read the headline in the Huffington Post.
This was followed by hate mail, accusations that he had “gone rogue” and become “a loose cannon,” and a tweet by former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley that Baer didn’t know what he was talking about:
Crowley is right about me speculating about things I don’t know a lot about. (Isn’t that what commentators do more often than not?) … I wondered why Crowley and everyone else didn’t notice I hadn’t drawn a government check in more than 12 years, and therefore wasn’t bringing any inside knowledge to the subject. And I’d certainly never claimed a back-door access to Netanyahu’s inner circle that would give me any privileged knowledge about a planned attack.
But Baer has apparently staked his entire post-CIA career on being taken for an expert on matters about which, he now confesses, he doesn’t know very much. Baer’s claim that he doesn’t promote himself as an expert with inside knowledge or privileged access, however, rings hollow.
After leaving the CIA in 1997 after two decades as an operative in India, North Africa, Central Asia, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Iraq, Baer’s first literary venture was his memoir See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, published in January 2002. The book was generally well received. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Baer proffered a plausible explanation, based on personal experience, of how and why the U.S. government could have allowed such a catastrophic attack to take place on U.S. soil. The book won praise from New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote its Foreword and gave See No Evil his endorsement with the review quote, “Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.”
Saudi Arabia was the subject of Baer’s second book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, published in July 2003. Baer then tried his hand at writing a novel, Blow the House Down (2006), a supposedly fictional “alternative account” of how the events of 9/11 had transpired, with Iranian involvement as its major premise.
“The scenario that he sets forth reads in these pages like an alarming hodgepodge of the plausible, the speculative and the absurd,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in an acerbic New York Times book review. “…(I)f Mr. Baer’s intention in his new novel is to goad readers into a serious consideration of Iran’s possible terrorist connections (a timely subject, given current worries about Iran’s nuclear program), he fails in this mission by cavalierly mixing fact and fiction, the credible and the preposterous.”
While promoting the novel, Baer hinted that his “alarming hodgepodge” of speculations about Iran ought to be taken more seriously than those of a thriller novelist. Baer told Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, April 17, 2006) that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”
Baer apparently concluded that mixing the plausible and the speculative with the absurd would be more easily tolerated in pseudo-punditry than in fiction. In September 2008, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, Baer’s fifth book, was published. Baer outlined three policy options the U.S. has for dealing with Iran” 1) permanently stationing U.S. troops in Iraq; 2) instigating a Shia-Sunni civil war; or 3) negotiating with Iran: “(T)reat it like the power it has become, and see what it has to offer.” Baer himself recommended the third strategy. While not an unreasonable approach, it contrasted sharply with other assessments Baer was offering about Iran.
An op ed piece for the New York Daily News, “Bet on Israel Bombing Iran” (Sept. 27), 2008, offers an interesting parallel to the current kerfuffle. Baer wrote, “What many Americans miss is that Iran is a threat to Israel’s very existence, not an imagined danger used by politicians for political advantage. Every Israeli city is within range of Iranian/Hezbollah rockets. To make matters worse, since the July 2006 34-day war, Hezbollah may have as much as trebled the number of rockets it has targeted on Israel.”
Three weeks later, a promotional blurb for lecture by Baer with the title “Iran’s Grip on America’s Future,” for the Commonwealth Club of California on Nov. 5, 2008, breathlessly hyped the event:
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from and meet the man who was the basis of George Clooney’s character in “Syriana” — and find out why reality is even more riveting than film. Considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Middle East, Baer will explore the gap of information between what is going on in Iran and what Americans know. Bear [sic] visited Iran to interview suicide bombers [sic], a grand ayatollah, the hard-line chief of staff of Iran’s military forces and the terrorist chief of Hezbollah. Baer will discuss how and why Iran will control the most vital oil and gas trade routes, how it became a hero to the Palestinian Sunnis, and how it plans to seize oil from the Persian Gulf.
Yet in an Inter Press Service interview in Jan. 2009, Baer told Omid Memarian that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was “totally out of the question.” Commenting on a New York Times report that US President George W. Bush had vetoed such an attack despite the urging of Israeli leaders to launch one, Baer emphasized the futility of a military approach to resolving the clashes of interest between the U.S. and Iran:
We could bomb Tehran, but what does that get you? Nothing…You can bomb all military bases in Iran over a period of two weeks, but Iran is still there – it still has the ability to project power, project its will and maybe even come out of that type of conflict even stronger.
Baer is currently promoting his sixth book, The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story, published earlier this year, and co-authored with his wife Dayna. The couple met in Sarajevo, while both working for the CIA and married to other spouses. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross on NPR back in March, Baer described writing the book as a “purgative.” (Apparently the first five books hadn’t done the job.)
After Baer said that he and the U.S. intelligence community had been taken by surprise by the “Arab spring,” Gross asked him, “So, do you expect you’re going to be surprised by Iran?” Baer responded, “I think now the street rising in Tehran is a neocon fantasy. I talked to people com[ng out] of Tehran, it’s not quite as bad as the exiles say. Yes, the regime has repressed the street and this Green Revolution, but I think what we’re going to see in Iran is a much more stable state…”
Exactly what that might mean for Iran’s future wasn’t at all clear, but then again, as we’ve just found out in Time today, Baer really doesn’t know what he’s talking about anyway. He is, however, selling his books.
]]>House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who [...]]]>
House Foreign Affairs chief Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) was wondering about the “nefarious ends” of some “elements” there, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who, with shifting views, expressed apprehension about the Muslim Brotherhood (giving space to FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, who seems open to Islamism, apparently, and Eli Lake, who doesn’t think Egypt’s peace deal with Israel will collapse).
Goldberg, to his credit, is asking big questions. And one of the biggest right now is about Islamism, and it’s role in the future of the Middle East. It’s playing out most acutely today in Tunisia and Egypt, but has been simmering all over the region, from Gaza to Qom.
Opinion makers in the U.S. seem to be divided along the lines that define what M.J. Rosenberg has called the “status quo lobby” (SQL), those whose actions — or key inactions — have thwarted a robust role for the U.S. in Middle East peacemaking. Goldberg and Ros-Lehtinen fit the paradigm: Both unflinching SQLers, they wear their hesitance for the long-awaited Arab democratic uprising on their sleeves.
The tepid support for Egyptians is about fear of Islamists, and no totalitarian strain, but one that has transitioned to seeking democratic legitimacy and inclusion. Yet events unfold in Egypt that drown out that narrative of what Phil Weiss, in an eloquent, must-read essay, called the “false choice of secular dictator-or-crazy Islamists.”
A bearded, angry young Arab shouted into a camera that “whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights.” Police held their fire, and protesters their stones, to break for prayers. On Twitter, Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, wrote that a key day of demonstrations went forward even without the internet because people already knew where to meet up: “[O]n Friday everybody knew mosques would be focal points, didn’t need to coordinate.”
But the “false choice” clings to life among adherents of the SQL, where it is considered infallible wisdom.
The New York Times gave us a pretty even handed account a few weeks back about Tunisia’s relatively moderate Islamist party, then hauled out WINEP‘s Martin Kramer to unthinkingly denounce Islamism. (The Times also carried a pro-inclusion analyst.) Kramer, you see, hasn’t honestly answered or asked this question for decades.
Even Ben Birnbaum, a young reporter with the right-wing Washington Times, where he works with Lake, was asking himself some serious questions, too, on Twitter:
Do my mixed feelings about democracy in #Egypt make me a bad person? #Jan25
You get the feeling that Steve Coll had just the SQL in mind when he wrote, in the New Yorker, that the Tunisian Islamist party — the one that’s cool with “tourists sipping French wine in their bikinis” – is “raising anxieties in some quarters.”
In other quarters, however, questions are being asked. Take Coll himself:
[T]he corrosive effects of political and economic exclusion in the region cannot be sustained—among them the legions of pent-up, angry young men, Islamist and otherwise.
Yes, he calls for Obama to “thwart” Islamists in Tunisia. But the New Yorker‘s Comment is a column that important people read, and they’re reading about important questions.
]]>Others have [...]]]>
Others have also described Ross as more skeptical [than Mitchell] about the chances of peace, based on his decades-long experience with trying to bring together the parties.
I don’t want to get all new-agey, but if you think something is difficult or impossible to do, the chances of being able to do it are greatly diminished from the get-go.
So why does this Ross guy keep getting jobs that he doesn’t think are possible? I picked up Ross’ book off of my shelf here in D.C., and it amazed me how many times he says you cannot make any kind of deal with the Iranians. Then, Obama put him in charge of making a deal with the Iranians. Ross, we now learn, doubts that a peace deal can be reached in Israel-Palestine, and Obama gives him a job making peace in Israel-Palestine.
On the Middle Eastern conflict, Ross’s credentials for the job are impeccable. After all, he’s been involved in decades — decades! — of failed peace processes. Ross has worked at the Washington Institute (WINEP), an AIPAC-formed think tank, and also chaired the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), an Israeli organization dedicated to “ensur(ing) the thriving of the Jewish People and the Jewish civilization.” (The organization seems to oppose intermarriage with racist-sounding statements like “cultural collectivity cannot survive in the long term without primary biological foundations of family and children.”)
Ross was thought responsible for crafting Obama’s presidential campaign AIPAC speech — yes, the one with the line about an “undivided” Jerusalem that would spike a peace deal if implemented. Ross later reiterated the notion of an undivided Jerusalem as a “fact” in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Ross was recently in the news following a secret but not-so-secret visit to the Middle East, which was fleshed out on Politico by Laura Rozen. Rozen was the reporter who carried a rather shocking anonymous allegation about Ross:
“[Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this administration.”
In an update, Rozen carried NSC CoS Denis McDonough’s defense of Ross:
“The assertion is as false as it is offensive,” McDonough said Sunday by e-mail. ”Whoever said it has no idea what they are talking about. Dennis Ross’s many decades of service speak volumes about his commitment to this country and to our vital interests, and he is a critical part of the president’s team.”
But the new Forward article, as MJ Rosenberg points out, backs up the notion that Ross was extremely concerned with “advocat[ing]” for Israel. The source is none other than Israel-advocate extraordinaire Abe Foxman (who doesn’t negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government):
“Dennis is the closest thing you’ll find to a melitz yosher, as far as Israel is concerned,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, who used the ancient Hebrew term for ‘advocate.’”
Do you get the feeling that Ross advocated for Iran? Or, as the Forward article put it (with my strikethrough), has “strong ties to Israel” Iran? Guttman writes that Ross is considered to have a “reputation of being pro-Israeli.” As for Iran? Not quite: Ross’s Iran experience seems to boil down to heading United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a group that pushes for harsher, broad-based sanctions against Iran (despite a stated goal to not hurt ordinary Iranians) and that has criticized Obama’s policy of engagement. Ross left the gig, as with JPPI, when he took the job with the administration.
The group also launched an error-filled fear-mongering video (while Ross was still there; he appears in the video) and a campaign to get New York hotels to refuse to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he comes to town each year for the U.N. General Assembly, which hardly lays the groundwork for good diplomacy.
Oh, and about the Iran engagement designed by Ross: The administration’s approach has been questioned by several leading Iran experts. “It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed. In December, Ross publicly defended the administration against charges that engagement was less than sincere from the U.S. side. But it is Ross himself who has apparently long held a pessimistic outlook on engagement.
Ross’s 2007 book, “Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World“, is fascinating in light of where Ross has come from, and where he’s taken Iran policy. I was struck at a five-page section of the first chapter called “Neoconservatism vs. Neoliberalism,” in which Ross writes, “[Neoconservatism's] current standard-bearers — such as Richard Perle, David Frum, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan — are serious thinkers with a clear worldview,” (with my links).
Later, in several long sections about the run-up to George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Ross notes that Paul Wolfowitz was highly focused on Iraq before and after 9/11. He also mentions “political difficulties” in the push for war: “Once [Bush] realized there might be a domestic problem in acting against Iraq, his administration focused a great deal of energy and effort on mobilizing domestic support for military action.”
But Ross never acknowledges that some of his neoconservative “serious thinkers” — such as Kristol and his Weekly Standard magazine — were involved in the concerted campaign to mislead Americans in an effort to push the war… just as the same figures are pushing for an attack on Iran. Frum, who does seem capable of serious thinking, was the author of the “axis of evil” phrasing of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. The moniker included both Iraq and Iran, despite the fact that the latter was, until the speech, considered a potential ally in the fight against Al Qaeda. (Marsha Cohen chronicled an Israeli effort to squash the alliance, culminating in Frum’s contribution to the Bush speech.)
Ross never mentions that neocon Douglas Feith, a political appointee in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), was responsible for cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq within the administration, and whose office was feeding cooked information to the public via Scooter Libby in Vice President Dick Cheney‘s office. Through Libby, the distorted information made its way into the hands of the Standard and sympathetic journalists like ideologue Judith Miller at the New York Times. In August of 2003, Jim Lobe wrote (with my links):
[K]ey personnel who worked in both NESA [the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau] and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. …
Other appointees who worked with… both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud ‘Jerusalem Post’; and Chris Lehman, the brother of the John Lehman, a prominent neo-conservative who served as secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, according to Kwiatkowski.
Ross has personal experience with many OSP veterans, working with them at WINEP and signing hawkish reports on Iran authored by them.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ross was a member of a task force that delivered a hawkish report apparently co-authored by two veterans of OSP, Rubin and Michael Makovsky. (Ross reportedly recused himself as the presidential campaign came into full swing.) Lobe, noting Ross’s curious involvement, called the report a “roadmap to war with Iran,” and added, a year later, that the group that put out the report was accelerating the plan, calling for a military build-up and a naval blockade against Iran.
After taking his position within the Obama administration, Ross released a book, co-authored with David Makovsky, that was skeptical of the notion that engagement could work. Nathan Guttman, in a review of the book for the Forward, wrote:
The success of diplomatic engagement, according to Ross, is not guaranteed and could be unlikely. Still, he and Makovsky believe that negotiations will serve a purpose even if results are not satisfying. “By not trying, the U.S. and its refusal to talk become the issue,” said Makovsky in a June 1 interview with the Forward. “What we are saying is that if the U.S. chooses engagement, even if it fails, every other option will be more legitimate.”
The attitude of Ross and Makovsky seems closer to that of the Israeli government then to that of the Obama administration.
OSP, Feith, the Makovsky brothers, and Rubin are not listed in the index of “Statecraft,” nor have they appeared in the many sections that I’ve read in full.
In his book, Ross does have many revealing passages about concepts that have been worked into the Obama administration’s Iran policy. One such ploy, which has not been acknowledged or revealed publicly, is using Israel as the crazy ‘bad cop’ — a potentially dangerous game. Ross also writes that international pressure (through sanctions) must be made in order to cause Iran “pain.” Only then, thinks Ross, can concessions such as “economic, technological and security benefits” from the U.S. be offered:
Orchestrating this combination of sticks and carrots requires at this point some obviously adverse consequences for the Iranians first.
This view does not comport with the Obama plan for a simultaneous dual-track policy toward Iran — which holds that engagement and pressure should occur simultaneously — and serves to bolster critics who say that engagement has not been serious because meaningful concessions have not been offered. But it does hint at another tactic that Ross references at least twice in the book: the difference between “style” and “substance.” With regard to Iran, he presents this dichotomy in relation to public professions about the “military option” — a euphemism for launching a war. But publicly suppressing rhetoric is only used as a way to build international support for pressure — not also, as one might expect, a way to assuage the security fears of Iran.
But those aren’t the only ideas from the 2007 book that seem to have made their way into U.S. policy toward Iran. In “Statecraft,” Ross endorses the use of “more overt and inherently deniable alternatives to the use of force” for slowing Iran’s nuclear progress. In particular, he mentions the “fragility of centrifuges,” which is exactly what is being targeted by the Stuxnet virus, a powerful computer worm thought to be created by a state, likely Israel, and perhaps with help from the U.S., according to the latest revelations.
Some critics of this website complain that the level of attention given to neoconservatives is too great, but they should consider this: Look at Dennis Ross. He works extensively with this clique, and no doubt has the occasional drink or meeting with them. And, most importantly, he writes approvingly about neoconservatives, noting that their viewpoint affects political considerations of “any political leader.” Because of these neocon “considerations,” he writes, this is how we should view the Islamic Republic: “With Iran, there is a profound mistrust of the mullahs, and of their perceived deceit, their support for terror, and their enduring hostility to America and its friends in the Middle East. … No one will be keen to be portrayed as soft on the Iranian mullahs.”
This from the man that formulated a policy that has offered “adverse consequences” but so far no “carrots.” Ross’s predictions are a self-fulfilling prophecy — and since he gets the big appointments, he gets to fulfill them. Taking reviews of his book with Makovsky, the Bipartisan Policy Committee report, and “Statecraft” as a whole, I’m not at all surprised that little progress has been made with Iran.
But, at least, that was his first try. He’s a three-time-loser on Israeli-Palestinian peace-making. With Iran, I had to put the pieces together, whereas with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, his record is right there for all to see. Putting Ross in charge of peace-making between the two seems to perfectly fit Einstein’s definition of insanity.
]]>Neoconservatives [...]]]>
Neoconservatives and Iran hawks have been quick to push for any and all sanctions imaginable that may pressure Iran to give up its alleged nuclear program. Back in April, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Michael Rubin wrote about how the sanctions should impact the lives of ordinary Iranians.
In a footnote to his Commentary article titled “Iran: The Case for Regime Change,” Rubin wrote:
While Iranian groups lobby on humanitarian grounds for the Obama administration to waive sanctions on airplane parts, citing the frequent domestic Iranian air crashes, the White House should refuse, especially since the Iranian government cannibalizes civilian planes to outfit military aircraft. Tehran is eight hours by bus from both Tabriz and Isfahan, but just an hour’s flight. Iranians, not surprisingly, prefer to take the heavily subsidized one-hour flight. But flying is not a right; it is a luxury.
Perhaps flying is not a right but, given Iran’s horrible air safety record, it also seems somewhat crass to describe aircraft reliability and safety as “a luxury.”
The New York Times wrote yesterday:
Iran’s air industry has been plagued by safety concerns for years, at least in part because international sanctions have prevented the country from purchasing new American and European aircraft and spare parts for the ones it has.
Iran’s American-built aircraft were purchased before Iran’s 1979 revolution, when the two countries cut off relations. Airlines, including Iran’s flagship carrier, Iran Air, have struggled to keep those planes, as well as aging and often unreliable aircraft bought from Russia and other former Soviet states, in service.
Indeed, it’s important to wait before drawing conclusions about the cause of this plane crash–but the accident, and large civilian death toll, should make proponents of sanctions that target civilians aware of the potential costs of such policies. Perhaps more importantly, hawks, like Michael Rubin, should be forced to explain how endangering Iranian travelers will help bring about regime change in Tehran.
Back in February, Senior Media Matters Fellow MJ Rosenberg wrote of the sanctions that target civilians, including those that ban the export of airplane parts to Iran, that:
]]>Smart sanctions would help bring down the Iranian regime or, at the very least, make it more open to negotiations over its nuclear plans. To be “smart,” however, they must target the regime and not the Iranian people. The House and Senate passed sanctions are not only dumb, they are the very kind of sanctions Ahmadinejad would devise if it was up to him.
Perhaps that’s why, just in time for the holidays, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) launched a scathing attack on some of the most prominent — and pro-Israel– [...]]]>
Perhaps that’s why, just in time for the holidays, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) launched a scathing attack on some of the most prominent — and pro-Israel– Jewish Senators and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Noah Silverman, RJC’s Congressional Affairs Director since 2006, may have been moved by the sight of boiling oil when he made his debut as an official RJC blogger. No sooner writ than said, Silverman’s pontifications splattered over to RJC’s e-mail list on Thursday night.
Silverman attacks Jews and Jewish organizations who have come out in support of the immediate ratification of the New START Treaty. Picking up where the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and JINSA left off, Silverman’s rails against “an unprecedented effort to ‘make START a Jewish issue‘ by pressuring Jewish communal organizations to advocate for the treaty’s ratification.”
He’s irate with the ADL and the American Council of World Jewry, both of whom objected when Senate Republicans made it known that they would use member prerogative to block ratification: “We are deeply concerned that failure to ratify the new START treaty will have national security consequences far beyond the subject of the treaty itself,” a Nov. 19 letter from the ADL to all members of the Senate asserted. ”The U.S. diplomatic strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons requires a U.S.-Russia relationship of trust and cooperation.”
Granted that the ADL was speaking from the perspective of its anti-Iran agenda. Nonetheless — and perhaps especially so — it’s bizarre to hear the RJC’s Silverman challenging the right of Jewish organizations to weigh in on issues other than Israel. And Silverman is livid that Senate Democrats would dare to use an argument about Israel’s security to enlist AIPAC in the effort to get START ratified.
MJ Rosenberg — citing Nathan Guttman in the Forward and Ron Kampeas at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — suggests that
AIPAC is in agony. It desperately wants to support the US-Russia START treaty aimed at limiting nuclear warheads because the treaty would greatly advance Israel’s security.
But it is afraid of defying right-wing Republicans in the Senate. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), in particular, is telling AIPAC “don’t you dare.” His reason is simple: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has ordered Republicans to block anything the President submits to the Senate except, of course, tax cuts for millionaires. That includes START.
Tight-with-the-right Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is Silverman’s source that the involvement of AIPAC in a non-Israel issue is shocking. Rubin writes, “An experienced Israel hand tells me, ‘Well, they of course claim there is a direct link to Israeli security. But, no, this must be very rare.’ A Capitol Hill adviser from another office says ‘I’ve never seen this done with AIPAC on a non-Israel issue.’”
But it’s not all that rare, according to Rosenberg:
AIPAC argues that it does not get involved in congressional battles that do not directly involve Israel. Of course, they do. They always have. Even when I worked at AIPAC decades ago, they put their full lobbying weight behind a then-controversial plan to establish a military base on the Pacific island of Diego Garcia.
Why? Because the Republican President at the time asked them to. More recently, AIPAC made sure that its friends in Congress knew that the “right vote” for Israel was supporting both Iraq wars. (Had AIPAC not indicated its support for war, far fewer Democrats would have voted for the second Iraq war.)
Silverman frames the effort to pass START as evidence of “a panicked White House is scrambling to salvage what it can of its legislative agenda before its influence in Congress is diminished next year.” But the letter to AIPAC which so outrages Silverman was written by two longtime senators who supported arms control long before Barack Obama was elected president.
Michigan Democrat Carl Levin was first elected to the Senate in 1978, where he’s Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He’s been consistently supportive of conventional forces and basic, reliable weapons systems to protect national security. His support for START is anything but last minute. In a column in the Niles Daily Star on July 9, Levin wrote:
As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described it, New START will “make our country more secure and advance our core national security interests.” This treaty is in keeping with a long tradition of bilateral, verifiable arms control agreements with Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, and it strengthens the U.S. commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
Silverman not only ignores Mullen’s endorsement of START, he seems completely oblivious to the support expressed by Republicans for “resetting” the Treaty. They include what Jim Lobe calls are the “big guns in what remains of the Republican foreign policy Establishment, including five former secretaries of state whose service spanned the last five Republican administrations.” They include Colin Powell, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Lawrence Eagleburger, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that there are “compelling reasons” for Republicans to approve ratification of START.
Bloomberg News reports that several Republican senators — among them Richard Lugar, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, Bob Bennett, John McCain, and Kyl himself, are hinting they could support the reset of START in the lame-duck Senate session if (and perhaps only if) the Senate voted to extend the expiring Bush-era tax cuts to cover Americans in all income groups. So it’s domestic politics, not national security, that may determine the fate of START, JINSA notwithstanding. MJ Rosenberg also thinks that “Kyl may come around and then AIPAC can too.”
Silverman, who worked for seven years as a legislative aide in Kyl’s office, also uses his first blogpost to defend Kyl against what he deems to be assaults on his former boss’s reputation. He is no doubt bristling at the thought that his former boss will give in on START out of political expediency. Although the RJC launched some of the most vicious ad hominem attack ads against Obama before the 2008 election, Silverman huffs that “Pro-Obama commentators attacked Kyl in the most demeaning and personal terms — including calling him unpatriotic.”
The “demeaning” attack on Kyl to which Silverman links is a Huffington Post rhymed rant by self-described Ranting Political Poet Jim Parry. The personal attack: a single Tweet by Washington Monthly contributor and blogger Steve Benen. And the accusation of Kyl’s being “unpatriotic”? A tweet by actress Elizabeth Banks, co-star of the frat-boy comedy film Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Does Silverman really consider two tweets and a rant “pro-Obama news commentary”? If so, it explains alot.
Like why, after 25 years of Republican Jewish Coalition activism, there is only one single Jewish Republican to be found in the U.S. Congress — in either the upper or lower chamber.
]]>Rosenberg, a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters, writes:
That makes sense, except for one thing. Israeli hawks (including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu) believe, or pretend to believe, that the Iranian leadership is self-destructive. They say that they need to hit Iran because, unlike any other country in the history of mankind, Iran would happily commit suicide in exchange for the sheer joy of taking out its enemy.
Rosenberg says Israeli leadership doesn’t believe Iran is suicidal, but the fear of losing regional hegemony, as opposed to an Iranian regime bent on nuclear destruction, is the real issue at play.
He concludes:
]]>The only way to address the issues raised by an Iranian nuclear arsenal is through negotiations. I’m not talking about the kind of baby step talks both sides are inclined to propose, but real negotiations that put everything on the table: Iran’s nuclear development, Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT and allow inspection, Iran’s threats against Israel and its unremitting hostility, Iranian support for terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas, US attempts to overthrow the Iranian regime from the outside, and Iran’s roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For those who lament the utter lack of any compelling television discussion about foreign policy, particularly about U.S.-Iran relations, there was actually a very engaging conversation yesterday on MSNBC.
On the Dylan Ratigan Show, a midday program on the cable news channel MSNBC, neocon Cliff May of the [...]]]>
For those who lament the utter lack of any compelling television discussion about foreign policy, particularly about U.S.-Iran relations, there was actually a very engaging conversation yesterday on MSNBC.
On the Dylan Ratigan Show, a midday program on the cable news channel MSNBC, neocon Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies debated Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald. The discussion was heated throughout, but picks up at about five and half minutes in, when May accused Ratigan of being anti-American. Then the discussion really dug into the actual threat posed by Iran to the U.S. — “Uncooperative, for sure, but just how dangerous are they?” asked Ratigan to kick off the discussion.
Check it out here (or here on Greenwald’s site), or watch the clip:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Ratigan asserted that Iran is not a threat and May, for the second time, said that Iranians chant “Death to America.” Greenwald made two great points here: 1) That Iran sees the U.S. and Israel’s bellicose rhetoric against the Islamic Republic, and sees occupying U.S. armies to its East and West; and that 2) one need only glance at newspapers to see that America and Israel have launched numerous wars of aggression in recent decades, whereas to find an unprovoked Iranian attack on another country, one must go back centuries.
May, upon being accused of being a “warmonger,” asks: “How am I war mongering when I support President Obama and the sanctions, which is a way to peacefully…”
Greenwald interrupted: “What if the sanctions fail? Do you think the U.S. should attack Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program?”
May: “I think we have a big problem if the sanctions fail…”
Greenwald cut him off, and they went back and forth. “Why can’t you answer that?”
May responded: “I think we should…”
Then Greenwald came back: “You think we should. Exactly. That’s what makes you a war monger. You want to attack Iran even though they’re not attacking us, just like you wanted to attack Iraq even though they didn’t attack us. That’s what a war monger is: someone who wants to launch aggressive wars.”
May came back again with the Iranian slogan, “Death to America.”
“That’s all you got?” Ratigan asked, exacerbated, saying its “stick and stones.”
“You sound like a six-year-old,” Greenwald piled on.
May again restated the threat of slogans, citing the U.S. and Israel. “That may not concern you, you may think that’s not a problem. But happily most Americans watching Ahmadinejad on TV understand that.”
Actually, “most Americans” don’t. As I wrote last week on the big, new Chicago Council poll on American opinions about foreign policy:
[O]nly 18 percent of respondents think the U.S. should launch a military strike on Iranian nuclear targets now. Even if diplomacy and sanctions fail to stop Iranian advancement toward a bomb, a slim plurality still think the U.S. should not bomb Iran (49 percent oppose it, 47 would support it).
The conversation overall was the sort of frank discussion we don’t see enough of on television: two impassioned figures on each side of a debate — a real progressive and a neoconservative, no less — and a host who takes sides with reason instead of with a misplaced notion of “balance” or “equal time.”
Update: MJ Rosenberg, a long-time insider and observer of Middle East affairs in D.C., gives his take on the Greenwald vs. May debate. In his Friday newsletter, which has been running more than a decade, Rosenberg places May’s hawkish position in the context of an uptick in chatter about bombing Iran. From the Political Corrections website, a project of Media Matters Action Network, where Rosenberg is a senior foreign policy fellow:
]]>Greenwald opposes confrontation with Iran and believes the case for war is utterly phony. May is a war hawk on Iran, as he was on Iraq. (He also supports any and all Israeli military actions.)
May is kicking off the fall campaign to get America to support an Israeli attack on Iran. Of course, an Israeli attack would be viewed by the entire Muslim world as a US attack and would, as our military warns, endanger US forces throughout the region.
The “Bomb Iran” campaign is just beginning. If President Obama does not stand firm, May and his friends may win the day as they did in 2003.