by Derek Davison

This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Derek Davison

This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, demonstrate solidarity, and carry out a public discussion about the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for the future of Europe, Russia, and the world.” However, Wieseltier’s remarks at the conference, delivered on May 17, focused very little on “Ukrainian pluralism” and instead painted a picture of a crisis that bears little resemblance to what we actually know about the situation in Ukraine.

Wieseltier should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the neoconservative policy world. Despite being considered a liberal thinker, he has worked on behalf of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and its offshoot, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), as well as continues to be affiliated with PNAC’s successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). FPI has written many letters, all including Wieseltier’s signature, to prominent DC politicians, endorsing a litany of neocon policy goals: military intervention in Syria, increased hostility toward Iran, and belligerence toward Russia. Wieseltier himself insists that he is not a neocon, and former LobeLog contributor Ali Gharib once declared him a “liberal neocon enabler and booster” rather than a neocon in his own right. This may be a distinction without much of a difference.

During his remarks in Kiev, Wieseltier began by placing his feelings on the situation in Ukraine in the context of his “somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals, some of whom became my teachers and my heroes, against the Stalinist assault on democracy in Europe.” That desire seems to have motivated Wieseltier to concoct a new narrative of recent events that papers over the very real internal struggle going on among the Ukrainians themselves, in order to make the crisis entirely about Russian aggression. He concedes that “Putin is not Stalin,” at least, and no one could challenge his assertion that “Putin is bad enough,” but Wieseltier was still trading in half-truths through much of his speech.

For starters, Wieseltier opines that “[t]he Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West, its unintimidated preference for Europe over Russia, is not merely a strategic and economic choice; it is also a moral choice, a philosophical choice, a societal decision about ideals, a defiance of power in the name of justice, a stirring aspiration to build a society and a state that is representative of some values and not others.” This assumes facts not in evidence — specifically, of a “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” According to polling data, prior to Crimea’s secession in March, when Ukrainians were asked which economic union their country should join if it could only join one, support for joining the European Union never polled higher than a slim plurality of Ukrainian citizens. A Gallup poll taken in June-July 2013 found that more Ukrainians saw NATO as a “threat” than as “protection” (a plurality chose “neither”). Predictably, Ukrainians in the country’s east have been more likely to have a negative view of NATO and the EU than Ukrainians in the west.

Even now, after Crimea’s secession and the implied threats of a Russian invasion, only 43% of Ukrainians want stronger relations with the EU to the exclusion of stronger relations with Russia, and only 45% of Ukrainians have a positive view of the EU’s influence on Ukraine. These are both pluralities, yes, but they hardly speak to some universal “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” In fact, there is evidence to suggest that recent polling that indicates growing support for joining the EU reflects the Ukrainians’ response to what they see as Russian aggression and does not necessarily involve any abiding Ukrainian desire to join the West.

Wieseltier talks about four principles that guide the Ukrainian “revolution”: liberty, truth, pluralism, and moral accountability, but in each case his remarks obscure what is really happening in Ukraine. He talks about liberty, “the right of individuals and nations to determine their own destinies and their own way of life,” but ignores the fact that, for many Crimeans and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, the Euromaidan protests that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych took away their rights, as individuals, “to determine their own destinies.” This was not a democratic or electoral transfer of power; it was a coup against what was by all accounts a legitimately elected government. Weiseltier seems unconcerned that Ukraine’s revolution effectively disenfranchised vast numbers of Ukrainian citizens by short circuiting their electoral process. He also criticizes Russian propaganda that calls the Kiev government “fascist” without acknowledging that there are fascist or soft fascist elements involved with Euromaidan who have been given a significant role in the government.

But it is on the principle of “pluralism” where Wieseltier is most confounding. He says that “[t]he crisis in the Ukraine is testing the proposition that people who speak different languages can live together in a single polity. That proposition is one of the great accomplishments of modern liberalism. Putin repudiates it.” But Putin’s geopolitics aside, it was, in fact, the new Ukrainian parliament installed by Euromaidan that initially repudiated that proposition; its very first act was a repeal (passed but not signed into law) of a 2012 law that allowed regional languages to attain semi-official status in parts of Ukraine with sizable non-Ukrainian populations. The impact of this action in terms of stoking the fears of Ukraine’s Russian population about the intentions of the new government probably can’t be overstated.

It seems clear that, as Jim Sleeper writes, Wieseltier has “learned nothing from his moral posturing on Iraq.” As he and his colleagues in PNAC and the CLI did a decade ago, Wieseltier is still using the language of principle and moral absolutes to mask reality and support the desire for a more muscular American foreign policy.

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U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a  by John Feffer*

U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan. The “war on terrorism” now seems so last decade. U.S. military spending has leveled off, and the Pentagon is looking at some fairly serious reductions after 2015. Last month, President Obama finally pulled the various threads of his foreign policy approach into a “doctrine” that emphasizes incremental diplomacy and leaves military intervention as a last resort.

We are, it would seem, at an epochal moment in U.S. history. The Reagan and Bush Jr. administrations attempted to deepsix the Vietnam syndrome and resurrect the U.S. military as the principle tool of U.S. foreign policy. But after the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the syndrome has returned in an industrial-strength version. Finally, it seems as if the United States is willing to take the cop out of cooperation.

But before we stick flowers into the barrels of the Special Forces’ combat assault rifles and celebrate the transformation of the CIA’s drones into Amazon delivery vehicles, let’s evaluate what will likely be a very substantial backlash to the Obama doctrine. Depending on what happens in the mid-terms and more importantly the next presidential elections in 2016, we might be looking at yet another effort to drive a stake through the heart of the Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq syndrome and reassert, once again, American military power.

In the last presidential election, we narrowly escaped a return to the foreign policy of the 1980s with Mitt Romney. Next time around, the hawks from both major parties minus the libertarians — the War Party — may well offer something considerably more retrograde: perhaps a return to the 1890s and a celebration of American empire under Teddy Roosevelt.

But it won’t be just one war — Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain! — that the War Party will want the Pentagon to prepare to fight. Nor will it be the two or two-and-a-half wars of the Cold War heyday. Instead, the next generation of U.S. militarists — the Project for the NewNew American Century — will be talking about girding our loins for three wars. Before detailing this three-front global conflict, let me explain how we’ve been at this point already twice in the recent past.

Long before Obama unveiled his doctrine, the last two Democrats in the White House also tried, in their half-hearted ways, to restrain the Pentagon and elevate the State Department. For Jimmy Carter, his first two years in office marked the high point of détente and the military drawdown from the Vietnam years. Even though he turned considerably more hawkish in the second half of his term, Carter became a symbol of everything weak about the Democratic Party and its foreign policy. The events of 1979 — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution — also conspired against President Malaise. Carter’s opponent in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan, promised to stand up to the Russians, the Iranians, and anyone else who dared challenge Old Glory.

Bill Clinton, too, presided over a reduction of the U.S. military leviathan in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Clinton was by no means a pacifist. The United States was involved in the wars in former Yugoslavia and several attacks on al-Qaeda and its ilk during the 1990s. But the great sin of the Clinton administration, to its critics on the right, was its commitment to multilateralism. The Clinton administration actually seemed to believe in the United Nations and such associated efforts as the International Criminal Court. Beginning in 1997, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) pushed a program that would eerily resemble the eventual foreign policy of the George W. Bush presidency, including a major uptick in military spending and regime change in Iraq. As in 1979, the events of September 11 helped to propel U.S. foreign policy in a different direction.

PNAC is dead and gone, and the Bush doctrine is buried in the sands of the Middle East. Obama has reached back to the earlier traditions of his Democratic predecessors for inspiration, borrowing a measure of modesty from Carter and a measure of multilateralism from Clinton. And Obama has encountered the same congressional resistance to his de factotempering of American exceptionalism. Behind the Obama doctrine lurks a certain implicit assumption: that a safety net of international norms can both cushion the relative decline of the United States and contain the rise of other powers like China. Of course, Washington would like to game the system as much as possible to prolong the U.S. unipolar moment and ensure a comfortable imperial retirement. If all goes according to plan, the only conflicts that will take place will be over the terms of America’s golden parachute and our 401(k) plan (to be negotiated at trade talks, with Chinese investors, and with European banks).

But nothing ever goes according to plan. And here are three reasons why, drawn entirely from recent headlines.

On May 1, China set up an oilrig in the South China Sea in waters that Vietnam also claims. Vietnam has used YouTube to show China ramming its ships. Both sides have fired water cannons at each other. Chinese fighter jets patrol the sky above the disputed territory. Vietnam and U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines have all pressed Washingtonto check China’s more assertive claims to territory in the East and South China Seas. They want a more vigorous Pacific pivot to Asia.

On May 11, voters in two regions in eastern Ukraine supported greater autonomy in a referendum rejected by the central government in Kiev. Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to intervene if the interests of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are threatened. Although he has promised to withdraw the 40,000 troops currently near the border, no such troop movements have been detected. Clashes between Ukrainian government forces and separatists in eastern Ukraine threaten to spiral into a civil war. New NATO members in East-Central Europe are wary of Russia’s more assertive claims to territory near their eastern borders. Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak, for instance, has called on the United States to “re-pivot” to Europe.

Then there’s Africa, where the United States created a new Africa Command shortly before Obama took office and where the Pentagon has recently ramped up its operations to more than a mission a day. Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group that seeks to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state, kidnapped more than 200 girls from their school last month. It’s only the latest act of extremism from a group that Washington put on the foreign terrorism list last year. It’s not clear whether the Nigerian radicals have any ties to al-Qaeda. But the war on terrorism has entered a new phase in which smaller U.S. forces partner with governments on the ground in Africa to battle non-state actors. Although some in the United States have called for an “African pivot,” no one in the region has issued such an invitation. They don’t really have to. We’re already there.

So far, the Obama administration has been rather cautious in addressing all three of these challenges. The U.S. Navy maintains more than half of its fleet in the Pacific, the Army still has bases in Europe, and Special Forces are deployed throughout Africa. But the administration has not advised military intervention in any of the three cases (though the use of drones and some “boots on the ground” in Africa certainly go beyond mere non-military strategies).

It’s also not likely that a Republican president would do anything appreciably different, although the party has practically Photoshopped Neville Chamberlain into the Oval Office. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is likely to throw his hat in the ring for 2016, has called for perhaps the strongest responses to Russia and China. But even he has stopped short of calling for actual U.S. military intervention. After all, Americans are now thoroughly cynical about sending U.S. troops to fight overseas.

But remember: the United States maintained its two-war doctrine more as a yardstick for measuring how much money to allocate to the Pentagon. In the 1980s, hawks were not pushing the United States to start a war with the Soviet Union or Iran. Rather, they wanted to maintain the capabilities to fight both wars simultaneously if need be.

Here’s the nightmare scenario for 2016. The War Party will fight against any cuts in Pentagon spending and argue for upping the allocation in order to fight three wars simultaneously: against Russia, against China, and against non-state actors wherever they threaten U.S. interests. Sound unlikely? The Bush administration was able to transform a ragtag group of crazies — which, admittedly, had directly attacked the United States and killed nearly 3,000 people — into the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century.” Imagine what the War Party, if it controlled the White House and Congress, could do with the likes of Russia, China, and the heirs of the heirs of all those murderous ideologies? If we’re lucky, we’ll avoid any outright conflict. But the price will nevertheless be bankruptcy. Forget about that imperial 401(k) plan.

It’s often pointed out that the British Empire finally collapsed because of the debts incurred by England during World War II. Washington extended London a mountain of loans to fight the war, and when the loans came due, the United States effectively replaced England as the hegemon of the “free world.”

But the process was not so cut and dried. “In July 1950, on the eve of the Korean War,” writes Tony Judt in Postwar, “Britain had a full naval fleet in the Atlantic, another in the Mediterranean and a third in the Indian Ocean, as well as a permanent ‘China station.’ The country maintained 120 Royal Air Force squadrons worldwide and had armies or parts of armies permanently based in Hong Kong, Malaya, the Persian Gulf and North Africa, Trieste and Austria, West Germany and the United Kingdom itself.” Five years after the end of World War II, someone forgot to give the British the news that their term was over.

The United States that Barack Obama inherited in 2008 was similarly a “dead empire walking,” and China now serves as the bankroller that the United States was in the 1940s. A prudent president, Obama has attempted to maintain U.S. position in the world at a lower cost and with less blowback. His critics on the left, myself included, want less empire and more prudence. But we must also acknowledge the deluge that might come après Obama and make the last few years seem like halcyon days.

If the War Party wins in 2016, all bets are off. We will prepare to fight in the Eurasian heartland, the South China Sea, and the resource-rich lands of Africa — because if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here. Just when it seemed like we were about to give peace a chance, the United States will suddenly revert to a three-war doctrine. 2016 will be 1979 and 2001 all over again. And, as we all know, bad luck always comes in threes.

*John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). This article was first published by FPIF and was reprinted here with permission.

by Jim Lobe

The neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor organization of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), has just published another open letter (reproduced below) to Congressional leaders that implicitly endorses what I have called the “Kirk-Menendez Wag the Dog Act of 2013,” known officially [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

The neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor organization of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), has just published another open letter (reproduced below) to Congressional leaders that implicitly endorses what I have called the “Kirk-Menendez Wag the Dog Act of 2013,” known officially as the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013 (S. 1881). I say implicitly, because it doesn’t come right out and urge support for the specific bill, which AIPAC and the Israel lobby, for which AIPAC is the vanguard, are flogging as hard as they possibly can. But the intention is pretty clear.

This letter — like PNAC, FPI is essentially a “letterhead organization” that issues manifestos, rather than a real think tank or grassroots membership organization — was signed by 72 “former U.S. government officials and foreign policy experts,” the vast majority of whom are easily identified as neoconservatives, as opposed to “conservatives,” the highly questionable term used by the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin, who reported on the letter even before it was published on the FPI website to describe the signatories. (One wonders whether Rogin was given the letter on the condition that the authors be described as “conservatives” rather than “neoconservatives,” which really has become something of a dirty word over the past decade due to its association with the Iraq war and their enthusiasm over other ill-advised military adventures.)

Of the 72, I counted at least 25 who signed PNAC letters — most of them dealing with Iraq and the Middle East — dating back to its 1997 founding by Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol to its unceremonious demise in 2005. (Kagan and Kristol also co-founded the FPI with Dan Senor two years later during Bush’s second term when most of the neocons who championed the Iraq War had either left the administration or been successfully marginalized by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon chief Bob Gates.) Among them are stalwarts from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), such as Danielle Pletka, Michael Rubin, Fred Kagan, and Gary Schmitt (and now Joe Lieberman!), which acted as a kind of annex to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon in the run-up to and the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion.

Other signatories include AEI alumni Joshua Muravchik and Reuel Marc Gerecht, who also championed the Iraq debacle, but who, like Michael Ledeen, has since moved to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) — a seemingly Likudist front that has increasingly partnered events, letters and policy papers with FPI. FDD signatories include Clifford May (who also signed PNAC letters); Mark Dubowitz, the Canadian citizen who has played a key role in crafting U.S. sanctions legislation and waging what he has repeatedly called “economic warfare” against Iran; John Hannah, who served as Dick Cheney’s national security adviser during Bush’s second term after the departure of Scooter Libby; as well as Gerecht. Then there’s a group from the Hudson Institute, which also beat the drums of war in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, including its president, Ken Weinstein, Seth Cropsey, Jack David, Lee Smith, and Doug Feith himself.

As for former Bush officials, there are plenty: Elliot Abrams and his deputy on the NSC, Michael Doran; Feith and his successor as the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Eric Edelman (and an FPI director along with Kagan, Kristol, and Senor); Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) czar Jerry Bremer (and his then-spokesman, Senor); Cheney’s deputy, the aforementioned Hannah; former head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Jeffrey Gedmin; former Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim; former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph and his deputy, Stephen Rademaker (Pletka’s spouse); former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehnher; former Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky; and then a couple of people who worked in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon or with the CPA, including AEI’s Dan Blumenthal and Rubin, and Michael Makovsky, the current head of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, whose motto is “Securing America, Strengthening Israel”.

What I found particularly curious about the list of signers was the absence of some of the most visible (aside from Kristol) neoconservative champions of the Iraq war; in particular, AEI’s Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, and James Woolsey (as well as John Bolton, who is more of an aggressive nationalist than a neocon, but who also has pooh-poohed any diplomatic process with Iran from the get-go.) I don’t think this is an indication that they disagree with the contents of the letter; rather, I believe they have decided (or been advised by their friends at AIPAC) that their public involvement in the debate could prove counter-productive precisely because they were so outspoken — and so disastrously wrong — about Iraq.

But, of course, anyone even remotely acquainted with the run-up to the Iraq war knows the roles played by PNAC, AEI, FDD, the Hudson Institute, as well as by many of the individuals — as noted above, almost all of whom are neoconservatives — who have signed the letter. Which is why I think it actually proves counter-productive to their purposes, even without the endorsement of Wolfowitz, Perle, and Woolsey. And while there are a few token Democratic signatories, such as former Congresswoman Shelley Berkley (for years, the biggest beneficiary of “pro-Israel PAC” money in the House behind Kirk himself, according to the Center for Responsive Politics) and Lieberman (if he can be considered a Democrat), the overwhelming majority are identified with the Republican Party and/or the Bush administration. We’ll soon see if this letter backfires by further portraying the Iran sanctions bill as a GOP/conservative-backed issue.

Indeed, while AIPAC has just about doubled the number of co-sponsors for the “Wag the Dog” Act since it was first introduced by Kirk and Menendez on Dec. 19 from 26 senators — equally divided between Republicans and Democrats — to 53 today, all but two of the new co-sponsors are Republicans. In other words, with each day, the bill is looking increasingly partisan in nature — a very worrisome trend for AIPAC and the lobby, which have long considered bipartisanship as key to their success, especially in Congress.

The more Republican the bill appears to be, the less inclined Democrats will be to desert their president. The fact that a strong majority of Senate Democrats is still resisting pressure from AIPAC and its donors to co-sponsors is highly significant, as, I think, is the statement issued today by the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) that “We encourage Congress to support the President’s foreign policy initiative by making stronger measures available should they be required.” (Emphasis added.) A cleverly worded non-endorsement of the bill from an organization that routinely toes the AIPAC line.

Here’s the full text of the FPI/PNAC letter:

January 9, 2014

Dear Speaker Boehner, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and Representative Pelosi:

We write in support of efforts to enforce Iranian compliance with the Joint Plan of Action that Iran agreed to on November 24, 2013, and in support of the ultimate goal of denying Iran nuclear weapons-making capability. Congress has a chance to play an important role in making clear the consequences of Iranian violations of the interim nuclear deal, in clarifying expectations with respect to future nuclear talks with Tehran, and in creating incentives for Iran to conclude a comprehensive nuclear agreement that protects the national security interests of the United States and its allies.

We support the use of diplomacy and non-military pressure, backed up by the military option, to persuade Iran to comply with numerous U.N. Security Council Resolutions and verifiably abandon its efforts to attain nuclear weapons-making capability.  Congressional leadership has been indispensable in creating the framework of U.S.-led international sanctions that brought Iran back to the negotiating table.  However, given Tehran’s long history of violating its international nuclear obligations—and the lack of any explicit enforcement mechanisms in the Joint Plan of Action’s text—congressional leadership is once again required to set clear standards for enforcing Iranian compliance with the interim nuclear deal.

As talks go forward, it is critical that Iran not use diplomatic talks as subterfuge for continued development of various aspects of its nuclear program.  It is worth recalling Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s claim that, when he served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator a decade ago, he used diplomatic talks to buy time for Iran to advance its nuclear program.  Congressional leadership can help prevent Iran from using future negotiations as cover to further the growth of its nuclear weapons-making capability.

Congress should also use this opportunity to describe its expectations for a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.  Such an agreement would irreversibly close off Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon through uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing, bring Iran into compliance with its international obligations for full transparency and cooperation regarding its nuclear program, and permit extraordinary inspection measures to safeguard against any undeclared Iranian nuclear activities.

Commenting on the likelihood of getting Iran to agree to a comprehensive nuclear agreement, President Obama recently commented, “I wouldn’t say that it’s more than 50/50.”  We can do better than a coin-toss.  Congress now has the opportunity to make clear the consequences for Iran if it violates the interim nuclear deal or fails to conclude a comprehensive nuclear agreement. Congressional action can thus substantially improve the prospect that Iran’s growing nuclear threat will be verifiably and irreversibly halted without the use of force.  We urge Congress to seize this opportunity.

Sincerely,

by Jim Lobe

A short item just to note that Bill Kristol, in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous”, crystallized (shall we say) the internal split among neoconservatives over how to react to the military coup and subsequent repression against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

A short item just to note that Bill Kristol, in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous”, crystallized (shall we say) the internal split among neoconservatives over how to react to the military coup and subsequent repression against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Breaking with his fellow-neoconservative princeling, Robert Kagan (with whom he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and its successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Kristol came out against cutting military aid to Egypt. Here’s the relevant exchange:

Stephanopoulos: Bill Kristol: one country that has not said [this was a coup and aid should be cut] is Israel. Israel, ironically, actually wants to keep the aid flowing.

Kristol: Well, I think they prefer the military to rule to the Muslim Brotherhood ruling. And I think an awful lot of people in the region prefer that. You know, an awful lot of the Arab governments prefer it. And it’s not clear to me that we shouldn’t prefer it.

So I’m a little — I’m — most of my friends in the foreign policy world are for cutting off aid. I’m much more uncertain about it at this point. I mean, this is a trigger we can only pull once. You can only cut off the aid once. And what’s the point of — what would happen concretely? What better thing is going to happen in Egypt or in the region if, tomorrow morning, the president got on TV and said we’re cutting off the aid?

I’m very doubtful about that, and I think there’s a lot we can do with our relationship with the Egyptian military that will be harder to do once we cut off the aid.

Of course, in referring to his friends, Kristol no doubt had Kagan in mind. For his part, Kagan, who has been by far the most outspoken neoconservative calling for an aid cut-off — even to the extent of accusing Washington of being “complicit” in the massacres that have taken place over the last two weeks — had just signed off on a statement last Friday by the “Working Group on Egypt” (which he co-chairs with Michele Dunne of the Atlantic Council) calling on Obama to immediately suspend military aid to Egypt and stating that a failure to do so would be a “strategic error.” The same statement called for Washington to use its influence to block funding by international financial agencies until the interim government reverses course. In addition to a number of liberal internationalists, other neocons who signed the statement included Elliott Abrams, Ellen Bork, and Reuel Marc Gerecht.

It’s a remarkable moment when the two arguably most influential neocons of their generation disagree so clearly about something as fundamental to US Middle East policy, Israel and democracy promotion. They not only co-founded PNAC and the FPI; in 1996, they also co-authored “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in Foreign Affairs, which among other things, advocated “benevolent global hegemony” as the role that Washington should play in the post-Cold War era. But they now appear to have a fundamental disagreement about how that benevolence should be exercised in a strategically significant nation which is also important to Israel’s security.

Of course, this disagreement highlights once again the fact that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. It also suggests that the movement itself is becoming increasingly incoherent from an ideological point of view. Granted, Kagan considers himself a strategic thinker on the order of a Kissinger or Brzezinski, while Kristol is much more caught up in day-to-day Republican politics and consistently appears to align his views on the Middle East with those of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Likud-led Israeli Government. But what is especially interesting at this moment is the fact that Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham — both leaders of what could be called the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party — are moving into Kagan’s camp.

With Sen. Chuck Hagel’s possible nomination still up in the air, several developments over the last couple of days should be noted, including this unqualified endorsement of Hagel in the Wall Street Journal, of all venues, by Ryan Crocker (ret.), the former U.S. ambassador in both Baghdad and Kabul and something [...]]]> via Lobe Log

With Sen. Chuck Hagel’s possible nomination still up in the air, several developments over the last couple of days should be noted, including this unqualified endorsement of Hagel in the Wall Street Journal, of all venues, by Ryan Crocker (ret.), the former U.S. ambassador in both Baghdad and Kabul and something of a neocon heartthrob almost at the level of Gen. David Petraeus. I explained a little about how significant Crocker’s endorsement is in this post I wrote when Crocker was one of nine former top-ranked foreign service officers who signed a letter supporting him back when the controversy over Hagel first broke out two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, outgoing Democratic Rep. Barney Frank denounced Hagel in categorical terms based on the comments he made about Amb. Hormel’s nomination back in 1998. As noted by other commentators, Frank had spoken out in favor of Hagel as a prospective Pentagon chief when his name first surfaced, and frankly, his opposition now seems somewhat bizarre, particularly given Hormel’s acceptance of Hagel’s apology. Andrew Sullivan is particularly good on this. But what also seems bizarre about Frank’s denunciation is his nearly three-year-old campaign, along with Ron Paul, to make serious cuts — the degree contemplated by the sequester — to the defense budget over the next ten years. I would imagine that few people would be better placed to sell such cuts politically than Hagel, a former Republican Senator and two-time Purple Heart recipient? Certainly, neither of the two candidates tipped as alternatives to Hagel — Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter or former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy — would have the political credibility to do the job, especially with a Republican-dominated House. The facts that neither one has actually served in the military and that both have long worked and, to some extent, depended for their professional advancement on the “military-industrial complex”, make it far less likely that they would be willing to seriously challenge that complex’s interests. Hagel, on the other hand, has precisely the independence and political stature to do so. So the question is whether Frank considers an obnoxious 15-year-old statement for which Hagel has tendered an (accepted) apology more important than reducing the defense budget by a meaningful amount? It’s very difficult to figure out unless 1) the Massachusetts congressman considers the apology insincere, or, as M.J. Rosenberg suggested to Phil Weiss, that he is doing the bidding of the Israel lobby which had tried (for the most part unsuccessfully) to mobilize LGBT groups against Hagel’s nomination.

Weiss’s post actually somewhat anticipated what I wanted to write today regarding both Flournoy and Carter, Hagel’s putative rivals for SecDef who have now been profiled by Right Web. The point that Phil makes very well here is that both individuals, however smart, competent, level-headed and even right-minded on key issues (like the scepticism about a military solution to Iran’s nuclear program) they are, appear to see neocons as entirely respectable national-security “intellectuals” deserving of at least a “seat at the table” in the higher councils of policy-advising and -making. Personally, I, like a number of much more serious policy analysts such as Paul Pillar, feel that neocons have completely discredited themselves, especially with regard to the Middle East, and, by leading the charge to war in Iraq, have essentially forfeited their “right” to be taken seriously on these issues. Of course, the mainstream media continues to give them access and attention, not only because of their own ideological predilections (American “exceptionalism” and all that), but also because of their polemical skills, notably their ability to break down any dimly understood overseas conflict into a moral struggle between good and “evil” or a question of U.S credibility. (Rupert Murdoch also helps.)

Thus, we have Carter participating in the 2008 Bipartisan Policy Center task force whose conclusions and recommendations I, as Phil correctly notes, described as a “roadmap to war.” Those conclusions and recommendations, which were drafted by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, were adopted by consensus, although not every member of the task force, which was staffed by Rubin and Michael Makovsky (who has never denied reports that he once served in the IDF or lived on a Jewish settlement on the West Bank) necessarily agreed with every conclusion and recommendation. We don’t know what Carter may or may not have agreed with. But his voluntary association with such a group — look at the members and you’ll see what I mean — shows, in my view, a certain lack of judgment at best.

So it’s Flournoy, who, like Carter, appears to be an entirely sensible person that has, for example, repeatedly stressed the folly of U.S. unilateralism when it comes to military force, and who rejects the idea of “coalitions of the willing,” that appears to be the neo-conservative favorite for the job. (The Journal just republished the piece Paul Wolfowitz wrote on Flournoy last week.) The Right Web profile cites her contribution to the Progressive Policy Institute’s study in 2003 on Democratic Internationalism and how it paralleled in some worrisome respects what associates of the Project for the New American Century were putting out at the same time.

What it doesn’t cite is the fact that Flournoy was herself a signatory of a PNAC letter back in 2005, just before the group went dormant …eventually to be re-incarnated as the Foreign Policy Initiative. The subject was the necessity for increasing the number of U.S. ground forces, and, while the signers consisted mostly (as usual) of neo-conservatives, they also included a smattering of retired generals and “liberal hawks”, such as the (still-unreformed) Peter Beinart, Michael O’Hanlon, Ivo Daalder, James Steinberg, and Walter Slocombe. You should read the whole letter to get the idea, but the heart of it asserts:

[A]fter almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice’s term, a “generational commitment.” The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality. We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops. But the defense of the United States is the first priority of the government. This nation can afford a robust defense posture along with a strong fiscal posture. And we can afford both the necessary number of ground troops and what is needed for transformation of the military.

In sum: We can afford the military we need. As a nation, we are spending a smaller percentage of our GDP on the military than at any time during the Cold War. We do not propose returning to a Cold War-size or shape force structure. We do insist that we act responsibly to create the military we need to fight the war on terror and fulfill our other responsibilities around the world.

Now, to me, this doesn’t sound very good. In fact, it sounds like a recipe for imperial over-extension of precisely the kind that Paul Kennedy (another liberal signatory) warned against before 9/11. To be precise, it sounds very neo-con. The question is why Flournoy signed on? Especially when most of the signatories are neocons. And not just the more “moderate” neocons like Bob Kagan, but the really Islamophobic neocons like Frank Gaffney and James Woolsey, who were babbling about Islamo-fascism and “World War IV” at the time. Again, there appears to be a lack of judgment here, a willingness to give credibility to individuals and organizations that don’t deserve it.

Photo: Senator Chuck Hagel shakes hands with Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta shortly before Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey deliver remarks as the keynote speakers at the Forum on the Law of the Sea Convention held at the Willard Intercontinental Washington Hotel, Washington D.C, May 9, 2012. (DoD Photo By Glenn Fawcett)(Released)  

Today former Massachusetts governor and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced his campaign’s foreign policy team. Many of the names are drawn from the foreign policy establishment and prominent Republican-associated security circles. “Their remarkable experience, wisdom, and depth of knowledge will be critical to ensuring [...]]]> Reposted by arrangement with Think Progress

Today former Massachusetts governor and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced his campaign’s foreign policy team. Many of the names are drawn from the foreign policy establishment and prominent Republican-associated security circles. “Their remarkable experience, wisdom, and depth of knowledge will be critical to ensuring that the 21st century is another American Century,” Romney said in a statement. Notably, several of Romney’s advisers were among the most forceful proponents a “new American Century” already, one that involved primarily pushing for war in Iraq.

ELIOT COHEN

Cohen, who was a member of the short-lived Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that agitated for an invasion in 2002 and early 2003 and now directs the Johns Hopkins international affairs school, stuck to the theme that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction right up until the eve of the U.S. invasion. Though he eventually walked-back his support for the war, in February 2003, Cohn told NBC Nightly News:

I would suspect that if there’re going to be heavy civilian casualties, they’ll mainly be caused by the Iraqis and would flow from the use of chemical weapons or biological weapons.

ROBERT KAGAN

Kagan, a founder of the Project For A New American Century (PNAC) and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), argued for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein beginning in the mid 1990s. In late 1998, after President Bill Clinton launched airstrikes against Iraq, Kagan complained on NPR that the attack didn’t go far enough and that Hussein needed to be overthrown:

I would agree that firing even several hundred cruise missiles into Iraq cannot be the end of the story. You really do have to go to the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is Saddam Hussein himself, and any strategy the administration undertakes has to have a practical goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

PNAC, one of the groups Kagan founded (along with neoconservative don Bill Kristol), made statements and wrote a series of open letters to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush from 1998 to 2003 that referred to Iraq, often calling for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein and accusing him both of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to Al Qaeda. Among the signatories to the letters were a bevy of those listed today as Romney advisers, including Kagan himself, Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Vin Weber, John Lehman (a National Security Advisory Council member of the Islamophobic Center for Security Policy), now-super-lobbyist Vin Weber.

After the invasion, Iraq fell under the control of L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. viceroy in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority that is widely blamed for botching the early days of the occupation. Two of Bremer’s top advisers — Meghan O’Sullivan, who later served as a Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush administration and is now a Harvard professor, and CPA spokesperson Dan Senor, now with the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (think PNAC 2.0, formed in 2009 by Senor, Kagan and Kristol) — are now with Romney’s team.

WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader [...]]]> From the wire:

WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Warning that Libya stood “on the threshold of a moral and humanitarian catastrophe”, the letter, which was addressed to President Barack Obama, called for specific immediate steps involving military action, in addition to the imposition of a number of diplomatic and economic sanctions to bring “an end to the murderous Libyan regime”.

In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to “develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters” to “aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;” as well as “(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians.”

Among the letter’s signers were former Bush deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush’s top global democracy and Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney‘s former deputy national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI’s four directors: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman.

It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush’s term in 2005.

The letter comes amid growing pressure on Obama, including from liberal hawks, to take stronger action against Gaddafi.

Two prominent senators whose foreign policy views often reflect neo-conservative thinking, Republican John McCain and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, called Friday in Tel Aviv for Washington to supply Libyan rebels with arms, among other steps, including establishing a no-fly zone over the country.

On Wednesday, Obama said his staff was preparing a “full range of options” for action. He also announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet fly to Geneva Monday for a foreign ministers’ meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council to discuss possible multilateral actions.

“They want to keep open the idea that there’s a mix of capabilities they can deploy – whether it’s a no-fly zone, freezing foreign assets of Gaddafi’s family, doing something to prevent the transport of mercenaries (hired by Gaddafi) to Libya, targeting sanctions against some of his supporters to persuade them to abandon him,” said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who took part in a meeting of independent foreign policy analysts, including Abrams, with senior National Security Council staff at the White House Thursday.

During the 1990s, neo-conservatives consistently lobbied for military pressure to be deployed against so-called “rogue states”, especially in the Middle East.

After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, many “neo-cons” expressed bitter disappointment that U.S. troops stopped at the Kuwaiti border instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.

When the Iraqi president then unleashed his forces against Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia insurgents in the south, they – along with many liberal interventionist allies – pressed President George H.W. Bush to impose “no-fly zones” over both regions and take additional actions – much as they are now proposing for Libya – designed to weaken the regime’s military repressive capacity.

Those actions set the pattern for the 1990s. To the end of the decade, neo-conservatives, often operating under the auspices of a so-called “letterhead organisation”, such as PNAC, worked – often with the help of some liberal internationalists eager to establish a right of humanitarian intervention – to press President Bill Clinton to take military action against adversaries in the Balkans (in Bosnia and then Kosovo) as well as Iraq.

Within days of 9/11, for example, PNAC issued a letter signed by 41 prominent individuals – almost all neo-conservatives, including 10 of the Libya letter’s signers – that called for military action to “remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”, as well as retaliation against Iran and Syria if they did not immediately end their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

PNAC and its associates subsequently worked closely with neo-conservatives inside the Bush administration, including Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Edelman, to achieve those aims.

While neo-conservatives were among the first to call for military action against Gaddafi in the past week, some prominent liberals and rights activists have rallied to the call, including three of the letter’s signatories: Neil Hicks of Human Rights First; Bill Clinton’s human rights chief, John Shattuck; and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, who also signed the PNAC Iraq letter 10 years ago.

In addition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, until last month the influential director of the State Department’s Policy Planning office, cited the U.S.-NATO Kosovo campaign as a possible precedent. “The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters,” she wrote on Twitter. “In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted.”

Such comments evoked strong reactions from some military experts, however.

“I’m horrified to read liberal interventionists continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional conflicts can be solved by the application of military power,” wrote Andrew Exum, a counter-insurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, about Wieseltier. “To speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of contemporary military operations.”

Other commentators noted that a renewed coalition of neo- conservatives and liberal interventionists would be much harder to put together now than during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

“We now have Iraq and Afghanistan as warning signs, as well as our fiscal crisis, so I don’t think there’s an enormous appetite on Capitol Hill or among the public for yet another military engagement,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

“I support diplomatic and economic sanctions, but I would stop well short of advocating military action, including the imposition of a no-fly zone,” he added, noting, in any event, that most of the killing in Libya this week has been carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries on foot or from vehicles.

“There may be some things we can do – such as airlifting humanitarian supplies to border regions where there are growing number of refugees, but I would do so only with the full support of the Arab League and African Union, if not the U.N.,” said Clemons.

“(The neo-conservatives) are essentially pro-intervention, pro-war, without regard to the costs to the country,” he told IPS. “They don’t recognise that we’re incredibly over- extended and that the kinds of things they want us to do actually further weaken our already-eroded stock of American power.”