As everyone knows, prominent neo-conservatives have been spending weeks insisting that Chuck Hagel is an anti-Semite. The most toxic of these charges have, of course, been leveled by the Council on Foreign Relations’ mendacious Senior Middle East fellow Elliott Abrams in his now-infamous NPR interview a few evenings ago (which was [...]]]> via Lobe Log

As everyone knows, prominent neo-conservatives have been spending weeks insisting that Chuck Hagel is an anti-Semite. The most toxic of these charges have, of course, been leveled by the Council on Foreign Relations’ mendacious Senior Middle East fellow Elliott Abrams in his now-infamous NPR interview a few evenings ago (which was taken apart by Lobelog alumnus Ali Gharib and which, I hear, is creating some major headaches for CFR president Richard Haass); the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens in a particularly malodorous column; the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin’s regular rants; and Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, which launched the campaign almost a month ago with a quote from “a top Republican Senate aide” that warned: “Send us Hagel and we will make sure every American knows he is an anti-Semite.” (One wonders whether the source could have been Sen. Mark Kirk’s deputy chief of staff and AIPAC favorite, Richard Goldberg.) Of course, it’s long been a strategic neo-con goal to make criticism of Israel and its policies synonymous with anti-Semitism, so it’s no surprise that Hagel, who, for example, has been critical of Israeli settlements, should incur such attacks, as utterly ridiculous as virtually everyone who has worked with Hagel on Middle East issues (including former and current senior Israeli officials) has subsequently testified.

Neo-cons have long made sniffing out (as Stephens would probably put it) anti-Semites a specialty, although that skill has been deployed in a remarkably one-dimensional way, directed, as it has been, almost exclusively at “the left.” Aside from Adolph Hitler and his Nazis and, more recently, paleo-con Pat Buchanan, their olfactory sense appears to be blocked when inhaling through the right nostril. For example, they have largely absolved the Religious Right of anti-Semitism because of its love of Israel. (As Bill’s dad, Irving Kristol, opined about the more-anti-Jewish tendencies in Christian Zionist thought in Commentary back in 1982, “It’s their theology, but it’s our Israel.” And when Pastor John Hagee said in 2008 that the Nazi Holocaust was part of God’s plan to get Jews to move to Israel, neo-cons — and Abe Foxman – accepted his explanation without question.)

Much the same applied on the international front. Indeed, while the elder Kristol was arguing for a Judeo-Christian Zionist alliance at home back in the early 1980s, he and other leading neo-cons, notably Midge Decter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and, yes, Elliott Abrams, too, were also busy defending really serious anti-Semities abroad. Even as they agitated effectively for the exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union, they conveniently averted their view from what was going on inArgentina, whose military junta — which enjoyed normal, even good relations with Israel — conducted its “dirty war” between 1976 until its fall shortly after its disastrous 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict withBritain. That war not only targeted Jews in disproportionate numbers, but was also known for treating those Jews who were “disappeared” into its clutches especially brutally — a fact that was well-documented as it happened but about which the neo-cons for several years had virtually nothing to say.

Consider the headline “Argentina Worried Over Anti-Semitism” that appeared in the July 7, 1977 edition of the New York Times. That article noted that:

[T]he complaints in the Jewish community include the leveling of anti-Semitic insults at and the physical abuse of Jews arrested by the security forces during investigations of subversive activities by left-wing guerrilla groups. In some cases, Jews have disclosed after being questioned and released that there were swastikas and pictures of Hitler in interrogation centers.

Earlier that year, two synagogues — one in central Buenos Aires– were firebombed, while pro-junta newspapers headlined lurid plots about the “Jewish-Marxist-Montonero conspiracy” against the country. In early 1980, Amnesty International published a lengthy report that included interviews of escaped detainees who testified that Jews were singled out for especially harsh treatment. Here’s a Jerusalem Post account quoting from the Amnesty report:

“From the moment they were kidnapped until they were included in a ‘transfer’ [a euphemism for being killed, usually taken by truck to helicopters, drugged, eviscerated, and thrown into the sea] they [the Jews] were systematically tortured. Some of them were made to kneel in front of pictures of Hitler and Mussolini to renounce their origins.”

A watered-down report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that came out shortly afterwards confirmed that Jewish detainees were being singled out for especially cruel treatment by their captors.

Or, read this 1981 account of one prominent Jewish family’s ordeal by the extraordinarily courageous columnist for the Buenos Aires Herald, Mario del Carril, to get some notion of what was happening in Argentina:

“Before he died in exile — stripped of his citizenship — former Peronist economy minister Jose Ber Gelbard reported that his decision to take his whole extended family — 36 persons — out of Argentina in 1976 was prompted by the fact that a distant relative, a nephew that he might encounter once a year, had been tortured for no reason at all — unless the family connection to Gelbard can be considered a reason. This young man was found alive and nude in the street of a provincial city with a sign tied from his neck that read: ‘I am a Jewish pig.’ [Imagine if any of these things were happening in Iran today.]

Jacobo Timerman

The Carter administration, with its new emphasis on human rights, reacted to the repression quite strongly by U.S.historical standards. It downgraded ties with Buenos Aires; it cut bilateral assistance and opposed loans to the country from international financial institutions like the World Bank; and, through the persistent and public hectoring of the first human rights assistant secretary, Pat Derian, it pushed relentlessly for the release of some of the more prominent detainees, notably and fatefully newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman, who was abducted by unknown assailants in April, 1977 and spent a year in a torture chamber and prison before being transferred to house arrest one year later and finally freed by a Supreme Court order in September, 1979, only to be immediately stripped of his citizenship by the junta which also expropriated his property and newspaper, and bundled him onto a plane bound for Israel. To its credit, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also spoke out strongly against the treatment of Jews by the regime during this period.

And what was the reaction of the neo-cons at the time to all this? They not only looked the other way; they actively criticized the Carter administration’s efforts, arguing, as Kirkpatrick did in her famous ”Dictatorships and Double Standards” essay in Commentary that Washington’s human-rights policy was dangerously naive, especially in the context of the global struggle between the West and the Soviet Union. In her view, one had to make a distinction between “traditional autocrats” — especially friendly ones — which, in her view, were far less threatening to human rights (they respect “habitual patterns of family and personal relations” as opposed to “totalitarian” regimes, especially of the Communist variety, which deny their subjects all rights and are incapable of internal reform). Pressing “friendly authoritarians” like Somoza in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran to respect human rights too quickly and punishing them if they failed to do so were ultimately counter-productive in her view, both politically in terms of encouraging internal reform and strategically in terms of the greater contest with Moscow. As Ronald Reagan took power in January 1981, the notion that “friendly authoritarians” — be they the military junta in Argentina, or apartheid South Africa, or genocidal Guatemala — should be dealt with through positive incentives and “quiet diplomacy” became the guiding light for the new administration for which Kirkpatrick would serve as UN ambassador and Abrams initially as assistant secretary of state for international organizations, soon thereafter as assistant secretary for human rights, and ultimately as assistant secretary for Inter-American affairs.

Meanwhile, Timerman had written a book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, which detailed his experience in exceptionally powerful terms. In addition to describing his own torture by electric shock (and the reaction of his torturers as they chanted in glee after each jolt, “Jew…Jew…Jew!…Jew”), he also addressed the fate of other victims, including entire families whose torture he personally witnessed or overheard.

“Of all the dramatic situations I witnessed in clandestine prisons, nothing can compare to those family groups who were tortured often together, sometimes separately but in view of one another. …The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father’s genitals …or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses.” [Recall Kirkpatrick’s defense of authoritarian regimes based on their respect for “habitual patterns of family and personal relations.”]

Unfortunately for Ernest Lefever, Reagan’s first pick for the human rights post and a man who fully embraced Kirkpatrick’s theories and many other highly questionable ideas, the English-language edition of Timerman’s book came out just as his confirmation hearings were about to begin. Until that moment, U.S. mainstream media had paid amazingly little attention to what had been going on in Argentina, but the book made such a splash, and Reagan’s repudiation of Carter’s human-rights policy had been so stark, that when Timerman himself showed up to witness and comment on the hearings, the military junta, its torture chambers, and its anti-Semitic —  not to say neo-Nazi — inclinations, suddenly became front-page news and the focus of long-delayed attention to the nature of the Argentine regime.

To make a long story short, Timerman’s book and the critical acclaim it received posed a major challenge to neo-con worldview both with respect to their cherished authoritarian/totalitarian dichotomy and their conviction that the greatest threat to Jews came from the left, rather than the right. (Indeed, Lefever’s nomination was quickly derailed, permitting the more diplomatic Abrams to take his place.) In more concrete terms, the neo-cons (and the Reagan administration in which they were ascendant) saw Argentina as a critical ally in the fight against the Soviet menace, especially in Central America where they had sent some of their torturers to help train and equip what, with the Reagan administration’s help, would become the anti-Sandinista contra army. Not only that, but the junta enjoyed very good relations with Israel, which, in the words of the Reagan State Department at the time, was “an important supplier of arms and military equipment toArgentina.” (This was cited in a memo to Congress as evidence that the junta could not be considered anti-Semitic and that “those outside Argentina who state that Argentine Jews and Soviet Jews are in the same situation do a grave disservice to Argentine Jews.”) In other words, the military junta was on our side, and here they were being exposed by Timerman as a bunch of sadistic neo-Nazi murderers, who decorated their torture chambers with banners of swastikas and giant photos of the Fuehrer himself.

So how did the neo-cons react, now that the junta’s anti-Semitism — real, Nazi-like anti-Semitism, not rhetorical denunciations about Jewish control of the media and the banks and the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, but serious, sadistic and murderous anti-Semitism that resulted in the most horrific treatment and killings of hundreds of Jewish people — had finally hit the headlines and captured the public attention in a way that it had escaped for the previous five years?

They attacked Timerman, of course. They didn’t accuse him of entirely fabricating his story, at least not publicly. (Chris Hitchens told me a few years ago that Irving Kristol had told him at a dinner party at the time that he really didn’t believe that Timerman had suffered anything like what he had described in the book.) But they — and by they, I’m referring specifically to the elder Kristol (“The Timerman Affair”, WSJ, May 29, 1981); Decter (“The Uses of Jacobo Timerman”, Contentions, August, 1981); another Journal columnist, Seth Lipsky (“A Conversation with Publisher Jacobo Timerman”, WSJ, June 4, 1981); and numerous NYT columns by William Safire — very much echoed what the Argentine regime itself had been saying: Timerman wasn’t abducted and tortured because he was a Jew, but because he had a business relationship with David Graiver, a shadowy financier suspected of funding the Montoneros (a notion thoroughly debunked by del Carril who noted in a 5 July 1981 Washington Post op-ed — “Reflections on Timerman” — that Graiver had a number of other business associates, including an archbishop and the secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS) who were not Jewish and never questioned, let alone kidnapped and tortured). Or that the military consisted of different “factions”, the more moderate of which — supposedly consisting of successive presidents of the junta (both of whom were later convicted of and imprisoned for crimes committed under their command, including the theft of babies of detained mothers who were murdered after giving birth) — had worked tirelessly to secure Timerman’s release and free other Jewish prisoners. Or that it was a chaotic period in which difficult decisions and extreme measures had to be taken. Or that anti-Semitism was never an official policy of the government.  Or that Timerman was a leftist, not just an innocent victim (thus echoing Kirkpatrick’s remarks about the four U.S. churchwomen who were raped and killed close to San Salvador’s airport in December, 1980 — “The nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were political activists.”) Here’s how Kristol, the most influential of Timerman’s assailants, wound up his op-ed in the Journal:

The military regime inArgentina, for all its ugly aspects, is authoritarian, not totalitarian

Now that the Montonero terrorists have been crushed, theUnited Statesis using its influence to try to move the regime gradually toward greater liberalization. …[W]e are doing what we can to strengthen the more moderate and sensible elements in the army. The outlook of far from hopeless.

It would become utterly hopeless, however, were we to “write off”Argentina– excommunicate it, so to speak, from the community of nations. Then the more extreme right-wing elements in the armed forces — the ones who illegally arrested and tortured Mr. Timerman — would surely take total power. One strongly suspects that there are many on the American left who would like to see this happen. The politics of polarization, in which the left crusades against the right under the banner of “human rights,” while the threat from the totalitarian left is altogether ignored, appeals to their ideological bias as well as to their self-righteous passions. One might almost say it is their secret agenda.” [You see: it's all the left's fault. Or, in Kirkpatrick-speak, "Blame the Left First."]

Ronald Reagan

So how did it work out? Well, the Reagan administration, presumably with the agreement of its new human rights czar, Abrams, soon lifted almost all the sanctions that the Carter administration had imposed against Argentina; worked with Buenos Aires to ease scrutiny of its record by the UN and Inter-American Human Rights Commission; cooperated and encouraged the junta to help build up the contra forces that were gathering in Honduras; expressed regret for all the liberal abuse the junta had taken under Carter, reassured Buenos Aires that more goodies would be forthcoming; even talked up the possibility of its inclusion in a South Atlantic Treaty Organization with South Africa,  etc. — all in the service of strengthening the “more moderate and sensible elements” in the army.

And what did those “moderate and sensible elements” do in response? They invaded the Falklands/Malvinas, thus precipitating a war and a major split within the Reagan administration between Secretary of State Al Haig, who argued the U.S. had to provide some support – even if limited to intelligence — to its closest NATO ally, Britain, and the neo-cons led by Kirkpatrick who argued that Washington should remain neutral, presumably to ensure the survival of a “friendly authoritarian” regime whose help in Central America was considered important to the administration’s ambitions there. Indeed, as the Argentines were routed, the administration tried to broker a negotiated settlement that would save the junta’s face, but, as recently declassified British documents have revealed, Maggie Thatcher would have none of it. As for Kirkpatrick’s role in this, the British ambassador at the time, Nicholas Henderson, described the administration’s highest-ranking neo-con as “more fool than fascist” for her support of the junta. Utterly disgraced in the eyes of its public, the junta under which anti-Semitism had flourished, and hundreds of Jews had been tortured and killed, was out of power within months.

Did this experience change perceptions by the neo-cons about anti-Semitism on the right? There is certainly no evidence to suggest that it did, despite the enormous amount of documentation that has subsequently been adduced by Argentina’s 1984 Truth Commission (whose report was entitled, significantly, “Nunca Mas”) and the many subsequent trials against junta officials that followed over the following years – all of which vindicated what the early reports, Amnesty, and Timerman had written about.

Indeed, Abrams and the head of Reagan’s controversial “Office of Public Diplomacy”, Otto Reich (later George W. Bush’s first assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs) worked tirelessly in the mid- to late-1980’s with the help of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary magazine to tar the Sandinista government with the anti-Semitism brush (relying primarily on wealthy Jewish exiles who had strong financial ties to ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza and left the country when or soon after he did), despite the fact that the U.S. embassy in Managua “found no verifiable ground on which to accuse the GRN [the Sandinista government] of anti-Semitism,” according to a July 28, 1983, cable. Their goal was to rally support in the Jewish community, the great majority of which was strongly opposed to the Reagan administration’s policies inCentral America, behind arming the Nicaraguan contras.

Yet the strongest anti-Semitic statement issued by any prominent Nicaraguan figure during Sandinistas’ 11-year rule was unquestionably that of the anti-Sandinista and U.S.-backed Archbishop (later made Cardinal, in part at Washington’s urging, by Pope John Paul II) Miguel Obando y Bravo. In an October 1984 homily that was reprinted in the anti-Sandinista (and U.S.government-supported) La Prensa newspaper, he stated:

[T]he leaders ofIsrael…mistreated [the prophets], beat them, killed them. Finally as supreme proof of love, God sent his divine Son, but they …also killed him, crucifying him… The Jews killed the prophets and finally the Son of God. …Such idolatry calls forth the sky’s vengeance.”

The ADL protested the homily; the neo-cons, including Abrams and Reich, ignored it.

So, if you want to identify an anti-Semite, the last person to consult would be a neo-conservative.

Featured Photo: Pictures of some of the estimated 30,000 people who were “disappeared” during Argentina’s “Dirty War”. By “miss buenos ares” Flickr. 

It’s June 15, 1992. A news nugget on page A-12 of the Washington Post reports that the chief of Israel’s Air Force believes military action might be necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons:

Maj. Gen. Herzl Budinger told Israeli television that if Iran’s intensive effort to develop [...]]]> via Lobe Log

It’s June 15, 1992. A news nugget on page A-12 of the Washington Post reports that the chief of Israel’s Air Force believes military action might be necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons:

Maj. Gen. Herzl Budinger told Israeli television that if Iran’s intensive effort to develop atomic weapons is not “disrupted,” the fundamentalist Islamic nation will become a nuclear power by the end of the decade. Earlier, the air force commander told reporters that “the greatest disruption possible, whether military or political,” is necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of the Middle East and prevent a world war. By “disruption,” Budinger said he meant “international political action, and aggressive action, if needed.”

This was the birth of what we can now look back on as two decades of threats by Israel to “bomb Iran” — with or without the consent, assistance and/or leadership of the United States — to prevent Iran’s impending development of nuclear capability.

Iran was struggling to recover economically from the ravages of its eight year war with Iraq (1980-1988). Its firebrand revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had died three years earlier. A US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE 34-91, Oct. 1991) viewed Iran’s president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as a pragmatic nationalist who “is likely to move slowly and prudently to repair relations” with the US but conceded that “Iran’s major foreign policy goal is to foster a more stable regional environment conducive to Iranian security and economic development.” Although it would be a “nuisance,” Iran’s becoming “more dangerous” was viewed by the NIE as a “less likely scenario.” The Israeli defense establishment thought otherwise.

Fast forward a decade. Weeks after Iran had quietly assisted the US in achieving its initial victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush branded Iran as part of an “axis of evil” during his 2002 State of the Union speech. In an interview with the London Times, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on the international community “to target Iran as soon as the imminent conflict with Iraq is complete.” Sharon insisted that the day after the Iraq war (which had not yet begun) ended, the war against Iran must begin.

Fast forward another decade…

During 2012, not a month passed when the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran didn’t generate hyperventilated headlines. To mark the end of the 20th anniversary of “the Iranian threat,” here’s a look back at some of the articles that kept the about-to-happen war against Iran’s nuclear program in the headlines last year.

January 2012: The year started with a bang…at least in the press. Foreign Affairs features an essay “Time to Attack Iran” by Matt Kroenig, reinforced by “The Case for Regime Change in Iran”, a commentary by Jamie M. Fly and Gary Schmitt, alongside of which are two pieces critical of Koenig’s arguments: “Not the Time to Attack Iran” by Colin H.Kahl” and “The Flawed Logic of Striking Iran” by Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro. Also weighing in with a totally contrarian view was neorealist Kenneth Waltz, who contributes “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” to the debate. An astute critique of Fly and Schmitt, which remains timely, is Simon Tisdall’s piece in the Guardian, “An Iran War is Brewing From Mutual Ignorance.”

A noteworthy pro-war attention grabber that reaches a much wider and more diverse audience outside policy wonk circles is Ronen Bergman’s cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Will Israel Attack Iran?”, which concludes, ”After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”  Ira Chernus provides a takedown of Bergman’s arguments a few days later in the Huffington Post. Also contradicting Bergman is a draft of an Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) report, arguing that Iran would not be capable of building a nuclear weapon in 2012 and that a a military attack wouldn’t effectively prevent Iran from building one if it made the decision to do so.

February: David Ignatius reveals in a Washington Post op-ed, “Is Israel Preparing to Attack Iran?”, that US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s biggest worry is that Israel may be preparing to attack Iran in the spring. Ignatius’ scoop goes viral, eliciting commentary from all directions within the mainstream media and blogosphere. Charles Krauthammer immediately infers that such a leak would not have occurred unless an Israeli attack was “certain” and concludes it’s a done deal. Gareth Porter argues that the leak brings into sharper focus “a contradiction in the Barack Obama administration’s Iran policy between its effort to reduce the likelihood of being drawn into a war with Iran and its desire to exploit the Israeli threat of war to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran”. In the New York Times, former Israeli military defense chief Amos Yadlin demands ”an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity — and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest — Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so.” Jonathan Marcus at BBC News provides a step-by-step blueprint of “How Israel Might Strike at Iran.”

March: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Israeli media that he had assured President Obama during their talks in Washington that Israel had not yet decided whether or not to strike Iran in the next few weeks. Within days, a front page piece in the Sheldon Adelson-owned Israeli daily Israel Hayom by headlined “Difficult, Daring, Doable”, propounds the feasibility and desirability of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Mark Perry exposes what his sources believe to be a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran from Azerbaijan; the neoconservative and right-wing media are divided as to whether the story is a hoax or another deliberate leak by the Obama administration intended to thwart Israeli plans.

April: It’s spring and there are no signs of an Israeli attack. Slate’s Fred Kaplan suggests that Israel might launch an “October surprise” just before the US elections:

If they started an attack and needed U.S. firepower to help them complete the task, Barack Obama might open himself up to perilous political attacks—for being indecisive, weak, appeasing, anti-Israel, you name it—if he didn’t follow through. It could cost him the votes of crucial constituencies.

May: In the May/June issue of World Affairs Journal, Elliott Abrams and Robert Wexler debate whether the time for an Israeli attack on Iran has finally arrived. Abrams calls for immediate action and Robert Wexler argues “not yet.” After numerous reports in the right-wing blogosphere cite Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz in arguing that Israel is about to attack Iran, Gantz slams the “public chatter” about the Iranian nuclear issue by people who used to know things about Iran’s nuclear program but no longer do,” while assuring the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel is “super ready” for military action. A temporary lull in war rhetoric from Israel fuels mid-month speculation that the top echelons of the Israeli government are in “lockdown” in preparation for a military strike. The surprise formation of a national unity government, Reuters infers, is reflective of Netanyahu’s desire for “a strong government to lead a military campaign,” particularly one that includes Iranian-born Shaul Mofaz, a former Israeli Chief of Staff and a veteran soldier in the coalition:

‘I think they have made a decision to attack,’ said one senior Israeli figure with close ties to the leadership. ‘It is going to happen. The window of opportunity is before the U.S. presidential election in November. This way they will bounce the Americans into supporting them.’

June: In another op-ed, David Ignatius rings alarm bells:

It’s clear that Israel’s military option is still very much on the table, despite the success of economic sanctions in forcing Iran into negotiations. ‘It’s not a bluff, they’re serious about it,” says Efraim Halevy, a former head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. A half-dozen other experts and officials made the same point in interviews last week: The world shouldn’t relax and assume that a showdown with Iran has been postponed until next year. Here, the alarm light is still flashing red.

July: Chief of Staff Benny Gantz refutes rumours that he is opposed to war with Iran. “The IDF will carry out orders to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if it receives them from the government,” he declares. Mofaz leaves Netanyahu’s coalition, revivifying the need for Israeli elections. Charles Krauthammer opines to Fox News that Israel will attack Iran if it appears that President Obama will win re-election.

August: During Panetta’s visit to Israel, Netanyahu informs him during closed talks that Israel is prepared to defend itself from Iran with or without the help of the US and that he is prepared to accept the consequences. Barak Ravid of Haaretz reports that others at the meeting believed that Netanyahu’s comments were part of a “psychological warfare” campaign waged by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak “in order to pressure the U.S. into attacking Iran itself.” Two weeks later, Panetta tells the press that the Israelis have not yet “made a decision as to whether or not they will go in and attack Iran at this time,” while Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey incurs the wrath of Israeli political leaders when he asserts that an Israeli attack “could delay but not destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

September: Among the questions that Lesley Stahl asks “The Spymaster” — the former head of Israel’s Mossad, Meir Dagan — in a Sixty Minutes interview is whether an Israeli attack on Iran could succeed. Although she opens the interview with a Dagan quote asserting that “Israel attacking Iran was the stupidest idea [he] had ever heard,” she insistently argues that he ought to believe otherwise, sometimes even putting words in Dagan’s mouth despite his clear resistance.

Netanyahu’s speech before the UN General Assembly on Sept. 27 becomes an iconic moment when the Israeli leader literally draws a line with a red marker on a crude graphic of an incendiary device. “Ladies and gentlemen, the relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb,” he said. Netanyahu’s use of the “Wile E. Coyote” rendition of an Iranian nuclear weapon evokes disapproving frowns as well as irreverent mockery: “I’m hearing ridicule of that stunt from people in the United States government who are a) militant on the subject of Iran, and b) needed by Israel to carry-out effective anti-proliferation efforts,” Jeffrey Goldberg fumes in The Atlantic. Goldberg, normally a staunch defender of Netanyahu, also complains:

Netanyahu’s constant threats, and warnings, about Iran’s nuclear program have undermined Israel’s deterrent capability. Netanyahu spent much of this year arguing, privately and publicly, that soon it would be too late to stop the Iranians from moving their centrifuges fully underground. He knows full well that the Iranians could soon enter the so-called zone of immunity, by moving the bulk of their centrifuges into the Fordow facility, where Israeli bombs can’t reach. But he’s now kicked the can down the road until next spring.

October: Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak tells Britain’s The Daily Telegraph that Iran has used up to a third of its enriched uranium to make fuel rods for a medical research reactor, thereby delaying progress towards a weapon for 8-10 months. Barak speculated that Iran’s “ruling ayatollahs” may be trying to reduce tension over the nuclear issue until after the US presidential election, or convince the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iran’s willingness to cooperate. Barak said this did not change Israel’s view that Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

The threat of an October surprise immediately before the US election subsides. The alliance of Netanyahu’s Likud party with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s even more hardline Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”) party leads to concerns that the PM is forming a war cabinet that would make a military confrontation inevitable. According to Aluf Benn of Haaretz:

…he announced that the top priority of his next government will be preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The merger with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party will dissolve any domestic opposition to the war, since after the election, Netanyahu will be able to argue that he received a mandate from the people to act as he sees fit. Ministers and top defense officials will have a hard time arguing with him. From now on, only American opposition is liable to delay, or even prevent, a command to the Israel Air Force to take off for Iran.

November: Netanyahu vows to stop Iran’s nuclear progress, even if it means defying the US. In a joint press conference at the Pentagon, after Panetta implied that retiring Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak agreed that “there is time and space for an effort to try to achieve a diplomatic solution” with Iran — which Panetta said “remains, I believe, the preferred outcome for both the United States and for Israel” — Barak undercuts his host, stating that Iranian leaders would have to be “coerced” into ending their nuclear program. Barak predicts this will happen in 2013.

December:  On Dec. 31, in a Haaretz article headlined “Bibi’s Strange Silence on Iran,” Uzi Benziman wonders what has become of the Iranian threat, which suddenly vanished from Israel’s national conversation, with the exception of a single unremarkable mention as part of a list of challenges in a political party speech by Netanyahu last week:

Since his [Netanyahu's] In a joint press conference at the beginning of the month with Panetta, retiring Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak anyahu’s] resounding appearance at the United Nations, where he pointed to the Iranian threat by means of a ludicrous drawing, this fateful issue (from his perspective ) has somehow dropped from the public eye. It’s a strange turn of events considering the fact that the Iranian nuclear program topped Netanyahu’s agenda during his entire current term in office, and that the manner in which he handled it cast a pall of palpable existential threat over Israel.

But according to former Obama national security adviser Dennis Ross, 2013 will be “the decisive year” in the showdown with Iran’s nuclear program. “If by the end of 2013 diplomacy hasn’t worked, the prospects for use of force become quite high,” he said.

A new year, with new possibilities, which will probably include more talk of an impending war with Iran (that Lobe Log will continue to track and report on). Elections are coming up in both Israel and Iran, opening the door to a range of events that can seriously impact the US and Israel’s Iran policy, as well as Iranian foreign policy. And while total peace may be unlikely, one can at least hope that past predictions of war with Iran will be as accurate in 2013 as they have been in the past.

Chuck Hagel hasn’t even been nominated for Secretary of Defense and yet rumors abound that he is a frontrunner for the job. The volume of the squawking from hard-line hawks opposing his nomination reveals much about the way the neoconservative echo chamber operates.

Morris Amitay, a former executive director of [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Chuck Hagel hasn’t even been nominated for Secretary of Defense and yet rumors abound that he is a frontrunner for the job. The volume of the squawking from hard-line hawks opposing his nomination reveals much about the way the neoconservative echo chamber operates.

Morris Amitay, a former executive director of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founder of Washington PAC, and author of the 2008 ultimatum, Why Jews Must Vote for John McCain“, opined to Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon that Hagel becoming Secretary of Defense “would be a very unwise and disastrous choice for U.S. policies and activities regarding the Middle East.” Asked to rate Hagel’s views on Israel, Amitay responded, “He’s probably the worst.”

“He is one of the most hostile critics of Israel that has ever been in the Senate,” harrumphed Morton Klein, President of the Zionist Organization of America to The Algemeiner, a right-wing (and virulently anti-Obama) Jewish news site.

Noah Silverman of  the Republican Jewish Coalition wrote that Hagel’s nomination would be a “gut check” for pro-Obama Israel supporters, gleefully pointing to a litany of complaints about Hagel refusing to sign letters of support on a variety of Israel-related topics compiled by the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). Silverman also referenced the rantings of Jennifer Rubin, Right Turn blogger at the Washington Post, who dusted off and recycled some anti-Hagel canards from her files, in particular an anti-Hagel screed she wrote for Commentary in 2010.

What do Rubin and the hyper-pro-Israel, franti-Iran-spinmeisters find so distressing and dangerous about Hagel? And how justified are their accusations? Rubin notes that “In 2009, Hagel signed a letter urging Obama to open direct negotiations with Hamas, a position so extreme that Obama hasn’t (yet) embraced it.”

In fact, the said letter was the brainchild of Henry Siegman, the Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress for nearly three decades, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, a US army chaplain awarded a bronze star during the Korean War and currently President of the US/Middle East Project (USMEP). He also authored a 2006 article for the New York Review of Books stating that negotiating with Hamas was Israel’s last chance for peace. Hagel’s nine “extreme” bi-partisan co-signatories were two veteran presidential national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski; economic adviser Paul Volcker; JFK’s special counsel Ted Sorensen; former House International Relations Committee chairman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat; former Bush #41 UN ambassador Thomas Pickering, co-chair of USMEP; World Bank president James Wolfensohn; Carla Hills, a former US trade representative during the Ford administration; and another former Republican senator, Nancy Kassebaum Baker.

Hagel’s anti-Israel stance is epitomized by a (rather fuzzily cited) Hagel quote dug up by Rubin, which she apparently considers damning: “Let me clear something up here if there’s any doubt in your mind. I’m a United States Senator. I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States Senator. I support Israel. But my first interest is, I take an oath of office to the constitution of the United States. Not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel.”

On Iran, Rubin wrote in 2010: “Hagel was one of two senators in 2004 to vote against renewal of the Libya-Iran sanctions act. (“Messrs. Hagel and [Richard] Lugar … want a weaker stance than most other senators against the terrorists in Iran and Syria and the West Bank and Gaza and against those who help the terrorists. They are more concerned than most other senators about upsetting our erstwhile allies in Europe — the French and Germans — who do business with the terrorists.”)

The unidentified parenthetical quote she used in both her Washington Post and Commentary attacks on Hagel was lifted from a 2004 New York Sun editorial disparaging Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry for his adherence to “Lugar-Hagelism”– a foreign policy stance that regards direct negotiations with antagonists as being far more productive and efficacious than sanctions:

  …what is Lugar-Hagelism?

One indicator came on July 24, 2001, when the Senate voted 96 to 2 to renew the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. The act helps deny Iran and Libya money that they would spend on supporting terror or acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The two senators who opposed the measure? Messrs. Lugar and Hagel.

Another indicator came on November 11, 2003, when the Senate, by a vote of 89 to 4, passed the Syria Accountability Act authorizing sanctions on Syria for its support of terrorism and its occupation of Lebanon. Mr. Hagel – along with Mr. Kerry – didn’t vote. Mr. Hagel met in Damascus in 1998 with the terror-sponsoring dictator, Hafez Al-Assad, and returned to tell a reporter about the meeting, “Peace comes through dealing with people. Peace doesn’t come at the end of a bayonet or the end of a gun.”

Kerry and Hagel weren’t alone in abstaining on the Syria Accountability Act vote. Sen. Joe Lieberman didn’t cast a vote either. More to the point, Hagel’s stance on Syria, expressed to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2005, has proven itself astute, even prescient:

The United States should be very cautious about supporting the collapse of the Assad regime. That would be a dangerous event, with the potential to trigger wider regional instability at a time when our capacity to help shape a desired regional outcome is very limited. Our objective should be a strategic shift in Syria’s perspective and actions that would open the way to greater common interests for the countries of the region.

Furthermore, it would appear that attacks from the right on Hagel might also apply to Kerry: “Mr. Kerry has a lot in common with Mr. Hagel; Mr.Hagel is also a decorated Vietnam veteran who is now a multimillionaire. Mr. Kerry has a lot in common with Mr. Lugar, too; they are both former Navy officers. Mr. Lugar has been in the Senate for 27 years, while Mr. Kerry has been there, and serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Mr. Lugar now chairs, for 19 years.”

Ironically, during the 2012 election cycle, Lugar — who the New York Sun dubbed “Ayatollah Lugar” for his skepticism about the wisdom of Iran sanctions — received $20,000 from NORPAC, a leading pro-Israel political action committee in New Jersey, more than any other candidate in the 2012 election cycle. The Jewish Week explains why pro-Israel groups lamented Lugar’s defeat in the Indiana GOP primary and his absence from the Senate:

Lugar, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, consistently backed defense assistance for Israel and in the 1980s championed freedom for Soviet Jews. But he was also known for pushing a more active U.S. approach to brokering Middle East peace than that favored by much of the pro-Israel lobby, and he preferred to move ahead cautiously on Iran sanctions….

Israel advocates and GOP insiders explained that Lugar represented a breed of lawmaker who pro-Israel groups see as valuable to their cause and disappearing: One who reaches across the aisle.

“Lugar wasn’t actively pro-Israel, but he wasn’t anti either,” said Mike Kraft, a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1970s and 1980s who now is a consultant on counterterrorism and writes for a number of pro-Israel websites and think tanks. “But generally losing a good, balanced, thoughtful guy on foreign policy is a real tragedy. It weakens the American political system.”

Try telling that to Jennifer Rubin.

- Dr. Marsha B. Cohen is an independent scholar, news analyst, writer and lecturer in Miami, FL specializing in Israeli-Iranian relations. An Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Florida International University for over a decade, she now writes and lectures in a variety of venues on the role of religion in politics and world affairs. 

The world economy would bear substantial costs if the United States took steps to significantly escalate the conflict with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, according to the findings of a Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) special report released here Friday.

Based on consulations with a group of nine bipartisan [...]]]> via IPS News

The world economy would bear substantial costs if the United States took steps to significantly escalate the conflict with Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, according to the findings of a Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) special report released here Friday.

Based on consulations with a group of nine bipartisan economic and national security experts, the findings showed the effects of U.S. escalatory action against Iran could range from 64 billion to 1.7 trillion dollars in losses for the world economy over the initial three-month term.

The least likely scenario of de-escalation, which would require U.S. unilateral steps showing it was willing to make concessions to resolve the standoff, would result in an estimated global economic benefit of 60 billion dollars.

“The study’s findings suggest that there are potential costs to any number of U.S.-led actions and, in general, the more severe the action, the greater the possible costs,” Mark Jansson, FAS’s special projects director, told IPS.

“That being said, even among experts, there is tremendous uncertainty about what might happen at the higher end of the escalation ladder,” added Jansson, the second author of the report after Charles P. Blair, an FAS senior fellow on state and non-state threats.

The six plausible scenarios of U.S.-led actions against Iran included isolation and a Gulf blockade, which would include U.S. moves to “curtail any exports of refined oil products, natural gas, energy equipment and services”, the banning of the Iranian energy sector worldwide (incurring an estimated global economic cost of 325 billion dollars), and a comprehensive bombing campaign that would also target Iran’s ability to retaliate (incurring an estimated global economic cost of 1.082 trillion dollars).

The report is explicit in not endorsing any particular policy recommendation, although others are not so reticent.

United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) are leading hardline Washington-based advocacy groups arguing for sweeping economic measures against Iran.

“The White House must build on this momentum, intensifying economic warfare in an effort to shake the Islamic Republic to its core,” wrote FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz in June.

Paul Sullivan, an economics professor specialising in Middle East security at Georgetown University, told IPS that, “The fact that the hardest core of the neoconservative ‘strategists’ have not thought through the costs of escalating conflict with Iran is proof of their group intellectual inadequacy.

“The main effects to the U.S. if there is escalation is through the price of oil and increased military and other national security costs,” said Sullivan, who evaluated the scenarios as an expert but could not comment on the specific figures due to Chatham House Rules.

“If there is an attack on Iran, with the expected counterattacks the price of oil could quite easily go to 250 dollars or higher. This could push the U.S. right back into a recession,” he said.

As tensions rise over the decades-long dispute over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, analysts are increasingly examining a range of costs associated with escalating the so-far cold conflict between the U.S. and Iran.

The Iran Project Report released in September showed that the cost of Iranian retaliation would be “felt over the longer term” by the U.S. and could result in a regional war.

“In addition to the financial costs of conducting military attacks against Iran, which would be significant…there would likely be near-term costs associated with Iranian retaliation, through both direct and surrogate asymmetrical attacks,” according to the report, which was endorsed by a long list of high-level, bipartisan national security advisers.

The Iran Project report’s findings support the notion that greater escalatory action will result in greater costs – shown in financial terms by the FAS findings: “A dynamic of escalation, action, and counteraction could produce serious unintended consequences that would significantly increase all of these costs and lead, potentially, to all-out regional war,” notes the report.

An Oct. 19 event on the economic and military considerations of war with Iran at the Center for the National Interest (CNI) offered similar assessments.

“You could lose eight million barrels a day of production, and it would not come back quickly,” said J. Robinson West, who has also held senior positions in the White House, the Energy Department, and the Pentagon under various Republican administrations. “We believe the price of oil will go above 200 dollars a barrel.”

On Oct. 20, the New York Times reported that the U.S. and Iran had “agreed in principle for the first time” to direct negotiations.

But Tehran and Washington did have “limited bilateral talks” in 2009 “when the Iranian leadership saw a potential in the newly elected Obama administration to address some of Iran’s bottom lines regarding the country’s right to enrichment,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar and affiliate graduate faculty at the University of Hawai’i, told IPS.

On Wednesday, President Obama denied the Times report but did not dismiss the notion of one-on-one talks. In fact, he strongly suggested that the U.S. would seriously engage if the Iranians proved their sincerity.

“If Iran is serious about wanting to resolve this, they’ll be in a position to resolve it,” he said during his first press conference following his successful presidential re-election campaign.

“The situation is different now insofar as the Iranian leadership is much more sceptical of Obama’s words regarding his desire to resolve the nuclear issue instead of going for the Islamic regime’s jugular after a show of desire for talks,” said Farhi.

“To be sure, there will always be hardline naysayers in Tehran no matter what. A similar situation exists in the U.S.. But if the past is any guide, Tehran will come around and abandon its current resistance to bilateral talks if it sees a potential for breakthrough,” she said.

Over at the National Interest Jacob Helibrunn wonders whether neoconservative pundit William Kristol’s advising of Mitt Romney and influence over Republican party foreign policy thinking has contributed to their respective decline:

What about the GOP? It’s soul-searching time. A good case could be made that the author, [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Over at the National Interest Jacob Helibrunn wonders whether neoconservative pundit William Kristol’s advising of Mitt Romney and influence over Republican party foreign policy thinking has contributed to their respective decline:

What about the GOP? It’s soul-searching time. A good case could be made that the author, in many ways, of the GOP’s problems is William Kristol. Kristol saddled John McCain with Sarah Palin. He’s the biggest backer of Paul Ryan, a Washington creature, who is being talked up as a potential presidential candidate in 2016–when was the last time a Congressman won the presidency? And Kristol, of course, has dominated foreign policy debate in the GOP by ceaselessly purveying neocon malarkey about American militarism abroad, but Romney’s bluster about a new American century went nowhere. Had Romney shunned the neocon bluster and campaigned as a Massachusetts moderate, he would have posed a much greater threat to Obama than he did.

The temptation, of course, will be to blame Romney, and Romney alone, for the defeat. This is nonsense. Yes, Romney was always an unpromising candidate, but of the Republican primary candidates Romney was the most formidable. The campaign he waged was far superior to John McCain’s in 2008. But ultimately the positions that Romney was forced to adopt undid his campaign. He never really recovered from pandering to a base that never fully accepted him. From calling himself “severely conservative” to the Todd Akin disaster, Romney was crippled by the radicalism of the GOP…

With President Barack Obama winning re-election, foreign policy analysts here are pondering whether his victory will translate into major changes from the rather cautious approach he followed overseas in his first term.

For now, speculation is focused primarily on the Middle East, the region that has dominated the international agenda [...]]]> via IPS News

With President Barack Obama winning re-election, foreign policy analysts here are pondering whether his victory will translate into major changes from the rather cautious approach he followed overseas in his first term.

For now, speculation is focused primarily on the Middle East, the region that has dominated the international agenda since 9/11, much to the frustration of those in the Obama administration who are hoping to accelerate Washington’s “pivot” to the Asia/Pacific, especially in light of growing tensions between China and Japan and the ongoing political transition in Beijing.

Others are hoping that Obama will be willing to invest a fair amount of whatever additional political capital he gained from his victory on reviving international efforts to curb global warming, a challenge that thrust itself back into public consciousness here with hurricane-force winds as “Super-Storm Sandy” tore up much of the northeastern coast, including lower Manhattan.

Indeed, long-frustrated environmental groups seized on Obama’s allusion to the “destructive power of a warming planet” in his Chicago victory speech early Wednesday’s morning as a hopeful sign that the president, who hardly mentioned the problem during the campaign for fear of key coal-producing swing states, notably Ohio, may make climate change one of his “legacy” issues.

“President Obama’s legacy will be shaped by his ability to take on big challenges, including climate change, clean energy, environmental protection, and sustainability,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI).

As with climate change and other issues with major domestic implications, however, Obama will be constrained by certain political realities, most notably the fact Republicans will still hold a solid majority in the House of Representatives and 45 seats in the Senate, enabling them to effectively block any legislation to which they are strongly opposed.

“You’ve had an election that more or less preserves the status quo in the House,” noted Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At a time when Obama’s top priority is getting the economy going, I’m not sure we’ll see a major initiative on climate change.”

And, while Obama won a sturdy majority of the electoral vote, his margin in the national vote is unlikely to exceed three percent when all the votes are counted. As a result, the institutional and partisan balance of power remains much the same as before the election.

Moreover, the fact that foreign policy did not play much of a role in a campaign dominated by the economy – only five percent of voters told pollsters as they left the voting booth that foreign affairs was the most important issue facing the country – suggests that Obama cannot claim a clear mandate for major policy changes.

Still, the fact that his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, dropped his earlier hawkish, neo-conservative rhetoric as the election approached and essentially embraced Obama’s general policy approach, including even in the Middle East, in the closing weeks of the campaign was taken by some as a green light, if not a mandate, to pursue the president’s instincts.

“The election campaign, and not only the outcome, should be seen as the rout of the neo-conservatism of the disastrous 2001-2006 period of the Bush administration and the consolidation of a broad, bipartisan foreign policy consensus,” wrote Middle East analyst and occasional White House adviser Marc Lynch on his foreignpolicy.com blog Wednesday.

He predicted that what he called Obama’s “caution and pragmatism” in the region, particularly with respect to generally supporting democratic transitions, seeking ways to convene Israelis and Palestinians, engaging moderate Islamists, and pursuing Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, is unlikely to change, although he suggested that bolder approaches in some areas were called for.

In particular, the administration should begin “serious efforts at real talks with Iran” on its nuclear programme and “be prepared to take yes for an answer,” he wrote, echoing a consensus among realists in the foreign policy establishment that Obama will have greater flexibility to strike a deal with Tehran now than at any time in the last two years.

Reports of back-channel talks between the U.S. and Iran in preparation for a new round of negotiations between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 powers after the election have been circulating for two weeks.

Lynch also called for Washington to get behind a major push to unify the two main Palestinian factions and “encourage the renewal of a peace camp in the upcoming Israeli election” in hopes reviving serious efforts to achieve a two-state solution – a recommendation that also been urged by many analysts disappointed by Obama’s failure over the last two years to apply real pressure on Israel to halt the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since 2010, Obama and his fellow Democrats have avoided confronting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who made little secret of his support for Romney – on either issue in major part because they felt their re-election chances depended heavily on the neutrality, if not the goodwill of the powerful Israel lobby.

Remarkably, however, those fears appear to have proved largely unfounded. Despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars in swing states on ads by the hard-line neo-conservative Republican Jewish Coalition and the Emergency Committee for Israel, as well as repeated charges by Romney that Obama had “thrown Israel under the bus,” 70 percent of Jewish voters opted for the president – a result that suggested that at least those hard-line neo-conservative elements of the lobby most closely tied to Netanyahu and the settler movement were not nearly as powerful as generally believed.

If so, Obama may have more room for manoeuvre on both Israel-Palestine and Iran, if he chooses to exercise it, than he himself previously thought.

Indeed, the election results were greeted with some considerable anxiety by Netanyahu’s supporters both here and in Israel.

“(R)emember that Obama is deeply committed to three things: global nuclear disarmament, rapprochement with the Islamic world, and Palestinian statehood,” wrote David Weinberg Wednesday in Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper funded by U.S. casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a major Netanyahu backer who also funded the election ads against Obama.

“I believe that he will forcefully act to progress on all three fronts, and this could bring him into conflict with Israel,” he added. “So start filling your sandbags. We’re in for a rough ride.”

Moreover, surveys of Jewish voters nationwide and in the swing states of Ohio and Florida commissioned by J Street, a “pro-peace” Zionist group, found that Obama’s tally among Jewish voters was only four percent less than in 2008 – roughly the same proportionate loss he suffered among virtually all demographic groups, except Latinos, who increased their support for the president significantly compared to four years ago.

The surveys also found overwhelming (79 percent) support for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, 76 percent support for an active U.S. role in negotiating a settlement, as well as a significant plurality for continuing diplomacy with Iran.

Still Kupchan believes Obama is unlikely to aggressively challenge Netanyahu, especially on the Israel-Palestinian issue.

“I think the chances of a major push on the peace process are slim,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That would happen only if there is an opening of sorts in the region or if it comes primarily from within Israel and a shift in the electoral landscape there that gives it Netanyahu an incentive to do something bold.”

But he, too, predicted that Obama will try harder to reach some agreement with Iran in the coming months while continuing to resist intervention – especially military intervention – amid the continuing turmoil in the Arab world.

“The one place you’ll see a growing footprint and presence and growing activism,” he said, will be in Asia, especially if “things heat up more over territorial disputes between China and its neighbours. And the new Chinese leadership may pursue a more confrontational stance which could in turn invite an American response in kind.”

With the widely touted shift in the public opinion polls after the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney is no longer an underdog. That being the case, his pronouncements are attracting some well-deserved scrutiny from mainstream media sources. Romney’s major foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Oct. 8 [...]]]> via Lobe Log

With the widely touted shift in the public opinion polls after the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney is no longer an underdog. That being the case, his pronouncements are attracting some well-deserved scrutiny from mainstream media sources. Romney’s major foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Oct. 8 is being  fact-checked — and castigated —  by the Associated Press, CNN, and even by Fox News.

Among the more egregious calumnies in the speech is Romney’s mischaracterization of Obama’s response to the 2009 election in Iran.

… when millions of Iranians took to the streets in June of 2009, when they demanded freedom from a cruel regime that threatens the world, when they cried out, “Are you with us, or are you with them?”—the American  President was silent.

CNN has done a remarkably good job of laying out and scrutinizing Romney’s accusations, and the harsh Republican and neoconservative criticism of President Obama’s response to the Iranian election in mid-June 2009. Are Romney’s accusations factual? No, according to CNN: “During the first couple of days of the protests and violence, Obama did not weigh in publicly, but by a few days in, he was not “silent”– and a week later, took a tougher stance.”

As Glenn Kessler pointed out in a Washington Post article from June 19, 2009, “President Obama and his advisers have struggled to strike the right tone, carefully calibrating positive messages about the protests in an effort to avoid giving the government in Tehran an excuse to portray the demonstrators as pro-American.” Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi told Kessler in a telephone interview that she had no complaints about Obama’s response. “What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard,” she said.

This past January, former GOP-nomination contender Rick Santorum also assailed Obama’s response to the post-election protests in Iran, as 2008 presidential rival John McCain had. Santorum’s Jan. 1, 2012 exchange with David Gregory on Meet the Press provides the blueprint for the charges Romney hurled at Obama at VMI. Whoever is prepping the President for the upcoming foreign policy debate might find Gregory’s tough, pointed and well-informed questions a useful model for dealing with Romney’s dissembling:

MR. GREGORY: Before you go, I want to ask you about foreign policy. You’ve been very critical of the president, particularly on the issue of Iran, which has been a big issue of debate here in Iowa. Let me play a portion of that.

(Videotape, December 7, 2011)

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: And this president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he has had nothing but appeasement. We saw that during the lead up to World War II. Appeasement.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY: How can that possibly be accurate, if you’ve taken an objective look at the foreign policy of this administration? What on Iran specifically separates the approach that President Obama has taken and that of President Bush?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Number one, he didn’t support the pro-democracy movement in Iran in 2009 during the Green Revolution. Almost immediately after the election, I mean, excuse me, like with hours after the, the polls closed, Ahmadinejad announced that he won with 62 percent of the vote. Within a few days, President Obama basically said that that was–election was a legitimate one.

MR. GREGORY: But what would that have done specifically to disarm Iran?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: Well, well, I understand why the president would, would understand that, you know, someone announcing the minute after the polls closed that he won, I mean, he comes from Chicago, so I get it. But the problem is that this was an illegitimate election. The people in the streets were rioting saying, please support us, President Obama. We are the prodemocracy movement. We want to turn this theocracy that has been at war with the United States, that’s developing a nuclear weapon, that’s, that’s killing our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq with IEDS. And the president of the United States turned his back on them. At the same time, a few years–a year later, we have the same situation where Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists are in the streets of, of Egypt opposing an ally of ours, not a sworn enemy like Iran, but an ally of ours in Mubarak…

 MR. GREGORY: I’m sorry. The question I asked you…

MR. SEN. SANTORUM: …and he joins the radicals instead of…

MR. GREGORY: Wait a second.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: …standing with our friends.

MR. GREGORY: The–first of all, that’s patently contradictory. If you say you support democracy, there was a democratic movement in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood got elected. So how could you be for democracy in some countries and not others?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: I don’t, because, because…

MR. GREGORY: Which is inconsistent.

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: No. The Muslim Brotherhood is not–is not about democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood are Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood are going to impose Sharia law.

MR. GREGORY: They were popularly elected, I think. Isn’t that what democracy is about?

FMR. SEN. SANTORUM: No. No.

The day after Santorum’s appearance on Meet the Press, FactCheck critiqued his claims:

Iran’s presidential election was June 12, 2009, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory — triggering protests in Tehran. On June 15, Obama said at a press conference: “We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can’t state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election. But what I can say is that there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.”

Obama issued a statement five days later again condemning Iran’s post-election “violent and unjust actions against its own people” and asserting that the U.S. “stands with all who … exercise” the “universal rights to assembly and free speech.” It was one of many such statements.

FactCheck also noted that the Washington Times had reported on June 27, 2009 that Obama was being cautious in what he said about the election results because he didn’t want to be accused of interfering and providing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a propaganda “tool.”

While other leaders have been more out front in their criticism, Mr. Obama has taken pains not to appear to meddle in the debate on the actual election results, arguing he doesn’t want his words to become propaganda for the Iranian regime. “Only I’m the president of the United States, and I’ve got responsibilities in making certain that we are continually advancing our national security interests and that we are not used as a tool to be exploited by other countries,” he said at a press conference Tuesday.

Fact checkers Brooks Jackson and Eugene Kiely concluded that, in comparing Obama’s handling of the elections in Iran and Egypt, “Obama treated both cases similarly: condemning the governments’ use of violence against their own citizens and supporting the protesters right to protest.”

Progressives and conservatives can find many faults with the Obama’s administration’s handling of foreign policy in general and dealings with Iran in particular. The question in the upcoming election is whether Mitt Romney could or would do any better. Daniel Larison, a staunch conservative, doesn’t seem to think so. In “Mitt Romney’s Vapid, Misleading Foreign Policy Speech” Larison writes:

The failings of Romney’s foreign policy arguments are not entirely his. Boxed in by his party’s hawks and most Republicans’ unwillingness to acknowledge Bush administration blunders, Romney’s script was to some extent written for him before he became a candidate. Not being in a position to lead his party in a new direction on this or any other issue, he had already embraced the worldview that he found among Republican hawks in an effort to become acceptable to them. Unfortunately for the country, Americans could have used a credible opposition party and presidential candidate to hold the administration accountable for its real mistakes.

Amen.

Dispensing with some of the neo-conservative rhetoric he has used in the past, [...]]]> In what was billed as a major foreign policy address, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Monday assailed Barack Obama for “passivity” in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, arguing that it was “time to change course” in the Middle East, in particular.

Dispensing with some of the neo-conservative rhetoric he has used in the past, he nonetheless argued that the “risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when (Obama) took office” and that Washington should tie itself ever more closely to Israel.

“I will re-affirm our historic ties to Israel and our abiding commitment to its security – the world must never see any daylight between our two nations,” he told cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, adding that Washington must “also make clear to Iran through actions – not just words – that their (sic) nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated.”

As he has in the past, he also called for building up the U.S. Navy, pressing Washington’s NATO allies to increase their military budgets in the face of a Vladimir Putin-led Russia, and ensuring that Syrian rebels “who share our values …obtain the arms they need to defeat (President Bashar Al-) Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets.”

Independent analysts described the speech as an effort to move to the centre on foreign-policy issues, much as he did on economic issues during his debate with Obama last week. As a result, they said, his specific policy prescriptions did not differ much, if at all, from those pursued by the current administration.

“In a speech where he attempted to be more centrist, he ended up articulating positions that sound like those of Obama,” noted Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who teaches at Georgetown University.

Indeed, in both tone and policy, the speech marked a compromise between his neo-conservative and aggressive nationalist advisers on the one hand, and his more-realist aides on the other.

Absent from the speech altogether, for example, was any reference to making the 21st century “an American Century”, a neo-conservative mantra since the mid-1990s that Romney used repeatedly in his one major foreign-policy address during the Republican primary campaign almost exactly one year ago.

The latest speech comes at a critical moment in the presidential campaign. While Romney was lagging badly in the polls in late September, his strong performance in last week’s debate against a surprisingly listless Obama last week has revived his prospects.

While Obama had been leading by about four percentage points nationwide before the debate, the margin has since fallen to only two percentage points, while on-line bettors at the intrade website have lowered the chances of an Obama’s victory from nearly 80 percent to 64 percent.

Obama’s seeming passivity during the debate may have played a role in the Romney campaign’s decision to deliver a foreign-policy address if for no other reason than that it highlighted the argument that many Republican foreign-policy critics, especially the neo-conservatives, have been building over the past year: that the president’s policies in the Middle East, in particular, have been too passive, and that “leading from behind” – a phrase used by an anonymous White House official quoted in “The New Yorker” magazine 18 months ago to describe Obama’s low-profile but critical support for the rebellion against Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi – was unacceptable amid what Romney described Monday as the world’s “longing for American leadership”.

Indeed, in the wake of last month’s siege of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other embassy staffers in Benghazi, Romney’s vice presidential running-mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, and other surrogates have tried to link recent displays of anti-U.S. sentiment and Islamic militancy in the region to disasters, notably the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, that plagued – and perhaps ultimately doomed – former President Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980.

While Romney did not refer to that period, he argued that last month’s violence in the Middle East demonstrated “how the threats we face have grown so much worse” as the “struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair” in the region has intensified. “And the fault lines of this struggle can be seen clearly in Benghazi itself.”

Recalling the U.S. response to a similar struggle in Europe after World War II and invoking then-Secretary of State George Marshall (without, however, referring to the Marshall Plan that poured U.S. aid and investment into Western Europe), Romney argued that Washington should lead now as it did then.

“Unfortunately, this president’s policies have not been equal to our best examples of world leadership,” he said, adding, “…it is the responsibility of our president to use America’s great power to shape history – not to lead from behind, leaving our destiny at the mercy of events.

“Unfortunately, that is exactly where we find ourselves in the Middle East under President Obama,” he said. “…We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, …and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.

“It is clear that the risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when the President took office,” he claimed, citing the killings in Benghazi, the Syrian civil war, “violent extremists on the march,” and tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme.

On specific policy recommendations, however, Romney failed to substantially distinguish his own from Obama’s. Indeed, in contrast to recently disclosed off-the-record remarks to funders in which he indicated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was likely unresolvable, he said he would “recommit” the U.S. to the creation of a “democratic, prosperous Palestinian state”, arguing that “only a new president” can make that possible.

On Egypt, he promised to condition aid to the government on democratic reform and maintaining the peace treaty with Israel; on Libya, he said he would pursue those responsible for the murders of U.S. diplomats.

On Iran, he promised to impose new sanctions and tighten existing ones, as well as build up U.S. military forces in the Gulf; on Afghanistan, he said he would weigh the advice of his military commanders on the pace of withdrawal before the end of 2014.

On Syria, he promised to work with Washington’s partners to “identify and organise” opposition elements that “share our values” and ensure they get the weapons needed to defeat Assad. In each case, he suggested that Obama’s policies were less forceful but did not explain how.

“On matters from Syria to Afghanistan to sanctions on Iran, the speech is essentially a description of current U.S. policies,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst now at Georgetown University. “One struggles to discern how a Romney policy would work differently.”

The US and EU are touting Iran’s currency woes as proof that sanctions are working, though it’s not clear to what end. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Western powers “are working on new coordinated measures intended to accelerate the recent plunge of Iran’s currency and drain its foreign-exchange reserves”:

The first [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The US and EU are touting Iran’s currency woes as proof that sanctions are working, though it’s not clear to what end. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Western powers “are working on new coordinated measures intended to accelerate the recent plunge of Iran’s currency and drain its foreign-exchange reserves”:

The first salvos in this stepped-up sanctions campaign are expected at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Oct. 15, including a ban on Iranian natural-gas exports and tighter restrictions on transactions with Tehran’s central bank, European officials said.

The U.S. and EU are also considering imposing a de facto trade embargo early next year by moving to block all export and import transactions through Iran’s banking system ….

To that end, U.S. lawmakers are drafting legislation that would require the White House to block all international dealings with Iran’s central bank, while also seeking to enforce a ban on all outside insuring of Iranian companies.

David Cohen, who coordinates the US’s Iran sanctions policy from within the Treasury, outlined the US’s stance in a speech before a British think tank. Reuters reports:

[David] Cohen, undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, added in remarks on a visit to Britain’s Chatham House think-tank that Iran had the ability to “relieve the pressure its people are feeling” by resolving concerns over its nuclear work.

“What in particular has sparked the most recent precipitous decline in the rial, I’m not in a position to say on a granular basis,” he said, adding however that over the past year it had fallen substantially.

The Washington Post also reported that EU officials are “even more blunt” over the intentions behind the sanctions:

One senior European official said the goal of the tightened sanctions was to “bring the Iranian economy to its knees,” and to “make it in a way that really hurts the regime more than the population. That is very difficult.”

But US officials are also attempting to downplay the negative effects of the sanctions by blaming the regime. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said yesterday that “[t]he Iranian state has horribly mismanaged all aspects of their internal situation.” Cohen told the Chatham House audience that the unrest in Iran “is undoubtedly in significant part due to the Iranian government’s own mismanagement of its economy and it is in part due to the effect of sanctions. The Iranian leadership has within its capacity the ability to relieve the pressure its people are feeling.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered the following qualifier:

“They have made their own government decisions– having nothing to do with the sanctions– that have had an impact on the economic conditions inside of the country,”" Mrs. Clinton said. “Of course, the sanctions have had an impact as well, but those could be remedied in short order if the Iranian government were willing to work with. . .the international community in a sincere manner.”

Politico has the scoop on an expensive advertisement funded by a mideast-focused hawkish advocacy group featuring an aggressive speech that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made on Sept. 11. The ad is scheduled to air in several cities in Florida tomorrow, where the Jewish vote [...]]]>
via Lobe Log

Politico has the scoop on an expensive advertisement funded by a mideast-focused hawkish advocacy group featuring an aggressive speech that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made on Sept. 11. The ad is scheduled to air in several cities in Florida tomorrow, where the Jewish vote could determine who wins the key state if it’s a close presidential election. Chilling music plays in the background as the Israeli leader proclaims: ”The fact is that every day that passes, Iran gets closer and closer to nuclear bombs. The world tells Israel wait, there’s still time. And I say wait, for what? Wait until when?”

The $1 million slot was paid for by Secure America Now (SAN), which conceals the identity of its donors with its 501(c)4 status. SAN claims it operates in a “non-partisan” manner but doesn’t publish a list of its board or members. Nevertheless, one high-profile member is Frank Gaffney’s sister and fellow neoconservative activist, Devon Cross, who said in a SAN press release (now removed) about a 2011 poll showing American views of Iran as a top national security threat that:

Though both the Bush and Obama administrations have been reticent to consider military options to address the threat posed by Iranian nukes, the American people are prepared to support such action should sanctions fail. Americans across the political spectrum are focused on security, even though these issues get far less attention from politicians than these polling numbers indicate they should.

SAN has been accused of using flawed techniques for its polling. The Washington Post’s Adam Serwer described one such poll showing that Obama had lost Jewish support for the Democrat party because of his dealings with Israel “laughably bogus” because

Not only does their sample skew conservative, (only 64 percent of respondents voted for Obama, as opposed to the 77 percent of Jewish votes he actually got) but many questions in the poll are phrased in as leading a manner as possible. Indeed, given the wording of the questions, it’s actually surprising that 63 percent of respondents overall approved of Obama.

SAN’s media productions also repeat neoconservative talking points about the Obama administration’s mideast foreign policy, including a 2012 SAN ad claiming that in his first interview as president, “Obama chose Arab TV for an apology.” The ad goes on to show Obama saying that it is “important for us to be willing to talk to Iran,” with a voiceover in the ad claiming that “Iran answered with terror, attacks on our troops and nuclear weapons development. … Tell President Obama: no apologies, no weakness. It’s time to stop Iran.”

In its assessment of this ad Politifact.com concluded:

Obama’s first television interview after taking office was with the Al Arabiya network at the White House. But the ad gets nothing right beyond that. By saying ‘all too often the United States starts by dictating,’ Obama was not apologizing but being diplomatic about past strategies that failed to yield results. What’s more, the ad criticizes Obama’s approach to Iran, but his quote actually referred to the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Another ad features a suburban mother complaining that Obama has made the US less secure in many ways, including by ceasing the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, “all but abandoning Israel,” “apologizing for America,” failing to stop Iran from allegedly trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and “making clear the era of American exceptionalism is over.”

As Politico’s Maggie Haberman notes, “Bibi Netanyahu is not running a campaign in the US – it just looks that way in this new ad.”