A new letter in support of former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination signed by a familiar list of eminences was published in the form of an ad in the front section of the Washington Post. Unlike other letters, this one specifically addresses the Israel-Palestinian conflict with a strong endorsement of the principles [...]]]>
A new letter in support of former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination signed by a familiar list of eminences was published in the form of an ad in the front section of the Washington Post. Unlike other letters, this one specifically addresses the Israel-Palestinian conflict with a strong endorsement of the principles that underlie the so-called “Clinton parameters”. And, in a clear swipe at neo-conservatives, in particular, it asserts that attempts by some to claim that those who support these principles are either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic are “unacceptable.”
Signers include former Oklahoma Sen. David Boren, who is Hagel’s co-chair on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, former Republican Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum-Baker, former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills (George H. W. Bush), former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and UN Amb. Thomas Pickering, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter) and Brent Scowcroft (Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush), former CentCom Commander, Gen. William “Fox” Fallon, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci (Ronald Reagan), and former World Bank Chairman James Wolfensohn. Of course, most of these have signed other letters in support of Hagel, but Boren’s signature is particularly significant given his long history in the right-of-center Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), one of the central principles of which was solid support for Israel. Wolfensohn is also significant given his role after his departure from the Bank as the Quartet’s representative in dealing with Israel-Palestinian issue. He quit in frustration after only a year in 2006 and was succeeded by the egregiously cynical Tony Blair.
Here is the letter.
]]>Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
Michael Singh (WINEP), Washington Post: The managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (aka [...]]]>
Lobe Log publishes Hawks on Iran every Friday. Our posts highlight militaristic commentary and confrontational policy recommendations about Iran from a variety of sources including news articles, think tanks and pundits.
Michael Singh (WINEP), Washington Post: The managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (aka the Washington Institute or WINEP), a think tank that was created by the American Public Israel Affairs Committee (AIPAC), calls for imposing more pressure on Iran while bolstering the military option:
Like any good pugilist, Washington should follow the heavy blow of oil sanctions with further unrelenting pressure.
…
Finally, Washington should bolster the credibility of its military threat. Recent steps to strengthen its force posture in the Persian Gulf are a good start. They should be accompanied by more serious statements about U.S. willingness to employ force and an end to statements exaggerating the downsides of military action.
Former top CIA middle east analyst Paul Pillar responds in the National Interest:
If the oil sanctions aren’t enough, what other pressure does Singh say should be used? One is “bolder” efforts, whatever that means, to oust the Assad regime in Syria, and regardless of whatever implications that may have for escalation of that conflict. Another is an ill-defined reference to “cultivating Iranians outside the narrow circle around” the supreme leader or “providing support to dissidents” in Iran. No mention is made of how to get around the inherently counterproductive aspect of outside efforts to manipulate internal Iranian politics, or how one more indication that regime change is the ultimate Western objective is supposed to make the current regime more interested in making concessions. Finally, Singh calls for more military saber rattling—as if the threat of a military attack is supposed to make the Iranians less, rather than more, interested in a nuclear deterrent to protect themselves from such attacks. That makes as much sense as pushing yet again on the “pull” door.
We probably should not take the purveyors of such advice at their word. Surely at least some of them, including probably Singh, are smart enough to understand the basics of Sanctions 101. Their objective evidently is not success at the negotiating table but instead the indefinite perpetuation of the Iranian nuclear issue for other reasons or the checking off of a box on a pre-war checklist.
Lee Smith (FDD), Tablet Magazine: Hawks on Iran regular Lee Smith of the neoconservative-dominated Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) quotes retired Army Gen. John Keane (see biographical note below) before undermining repeated warnings from high-level defense and administration officials that a military strike would only set back Iran’s alleged nuclear aspirations by a few years:
In contrast, the Obama Administration has pulled out of Iraq and will soon pull out of Afghanistan. Yet the White House continues to repeat the trope that the program can, at best, be delayed a few years. Just as politics informed the Bush White House’s insistence on the delay-not-destroy mantra, politics of a different sort are informing this White House: This administration is conducting a public diplomacy campaign with the purpose of undermining the capability of a U.S. attack because the administration has no intention of striking.
Note: Keane has close ties with U.S. neoconservatives and was one of the main architects of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq. In 2006, Gen. George Casey and the chief of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid recommended reducing troop levels in Iraq, but Keane and his neoconservative allies started looking for someone that would support escalation instead–ultimately General David Petraeus. As documented by Bob Woodward in the War Within, Keane ignored the chain of command while heavily promoting Petraeus. He also helped persuade Bush to reject the Iraq Study Group’s findings and recommendations by aggressively pushing an alternative strategy he wrote with Frederick Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute called “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.” That report led to the military buildup that followed.
Lee also uses Keane’s words to repeat his call for a ramped up military option:
…long before the United States decides to attack Iran, we need to communicate our seriousness to the regime. “There is only one guy you need to convince here to voluntarily give up the nuclear program and that is the Supreme Leader Khameini,” Jack Keane argues. “He must know we are dead serious about a military strike, as a last resort, and this is not just about the nuclear facilities—their military will be decapitated. This is the U.S. military. Believe me, we will destroy you.”
United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI): The neoconservative-aligned Iran sanctions-enforcement organization ramps up its pressure campaign against the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the financial messaging system used to arrange international money transfers, aimed at further crippling Iran’s economy:
Said UANI CEO, Ambassador Mark D. Wallace:
Now is the time for a full banking blockade against the Iranian regime, and SWIFT needs to play its part. SWIFT made the right decision in February to deny access to Iran’s Central Bank and some other institutions, but it has thus far failed to cut off all Iranian banks and entities. SWIFT should immediately sever its ties with all Iranian banks, particularly the ten that have been sanctioned by the U.S. government but still maintain SWIFT access.
Every day that SWIFT permits these illegitimate banks to have continued access to its network is a day the Iranian regime will continue to circumvent international sanctions. As the world weans itself off of Iranian crude, there is not a need to maintain conduits for energy related payments, but a need for an international banking embargo against Iran.
Clifford D. May (FDD), Scripps Howard: The president of the FDD repeats colleague Mark Dubowitz’s recommendation of blacklisting the entire Iranian energy sector as a “zone of primary proliferation concern” and reiterates his own call for U.S.-assisted/backed regime change:
[President Obama] should announce his support for legislation introduced by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) that would blacklist the entire Iranian energy sector as a “zone of primary proliferation concern.”
…
Such a speech should be followed by other measures in support of Iranians willing to take the risks necessary to replace a regime that has failed domestically, a regime that has been at war with the U.S. since it seized our embassy in 1979; a regime that four years later instructed Hezbollah to suicide-bomb the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut; a regime that has facilitated the killings of hundreds of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan; a regime that plotted to blow up a restaurant in Washington, D.C., just last year.
Alan Dershowitz, Times of Israel: The pro-Israel Harvard Law Professor who “met for 45 minutes one-on-one with US President Barack Obama to discuss Iran” criticizes the J-Street lobbying group for “undercutting American policy toward Iran” by not pushing the military option on Iran:
]]>Dershowitz said that by “explicitly undercutting Obama on Iran,” it actually “makes it more likely that Israel will have to go alone. As George Washington said a long time ago, the best way to preserve peace is to be ready for war, and that’s been the Obama policy.” For J Street to undercut it and misrepresent prominent Israelis’ positions on it, he said, “takes it out of the pro-Israel camp. I don’t think it’s debatable that J Street is pro-Israel. It is not.”
The problem for the ADL is that there simply isn’t much anti-Semitism [...]]]>
The problem for the ADL is that there simply isn’t much anti-Semitism of consequence in the United States these days. While anti-Semitism continues to thrive elsewhere in the world and to molder on the fringes of American society, Jews have by now been fully assimilated into the American ruling class and into the mainstream of American life. A mundane event like the recent wedding of Protestant Chelsea Clinton and Jewish Marc Mezvinsky drove this point home. What was notable was not the question “will she convert?” but how little importance anyone attached to the answer; the former first daughter’s choice between Judaism and Christianity seemed as inconsequential as the choice between Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism would have a few decades ago.
At the same time, many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious conspiracy breeding within Western society, pledging allegiance to an alien power, conspiring with allies at the highest levels of government to overturn the existing order. Because the propagators of these conspiracy theories are not anti-Semitic but militantly pro-Israel, and because their targets are not Jews but Muslims, the ADL and other Jewish groups have had little to say about them. But since the election of President Barack Obama, this Islamophobic discourse has rapidly intensified.
Read the whole thing here.
]]>The real question is why the piece was published in the first place. I’ve written for Tablet before, and found the editors to be smart, thorough, and open-minded (as evidenced by their willingness to publish my piece in the first place). Reading Smith’s screed, I have to wonder how it made it through the publication process without anyone forcing him to provide some evidence for his claims.
More generally, it’s an interesting question why Smith has his gig at Tablet in the first place. I have no objection to the magazine airing neoconservative voices–they are a small minority in the American Jewish community, but an important one–but it is strange that the magazine would give its only weekly politics column to a neoconservative political operative who uses it exclusively as an echo chamber for talking points from Commentary and the Weekly Standard (where Smith also writes). I’ve gone through just about all of Smith’s Tablet columns, and virtually without fail they fall into one of two genres: there are hit pieces against whoever the neocons’ enemy of the week is (e.g. Trita Parsi, the Leveretts, and this latest article), and there are sycophantic puff pieces touting the wisdom of various Likudnik policymakers (e.g. Elliott Abrams, Michael Oren). Last week, he attempted a deeper think piece on Israel, Intellectuals, And The Fate Of Western Civilization, and it didn’t go too well–the kind of turgid pop philosophy that would be more at home in a college newspaper.
So why are we treated to Smith’s insights every week? Is it his good looks? His winning personality? A condition imposed by a funder? Regardless, his columns are jarringly out of place with the tenor of the rest of the magazine–and if his last couple are any indication, they’re only getting worse.
]]>Since leaving the Bush administration last year, Abrams has cast himself as the world’s foremost defender of “democracy” and “human rights” and excoriated the Obama administration’s alleged neglect of them. The scare quotes are necessary because, as anyone familiar with Abrams’s record will be aware, the notion of Elliott Abrams as champion of either democracy or human rights is utterly laughable. (Abrams’s Right Web profile provides a good rundown of his career.) Abrams got his start in the Reagan administration, running interference in Washington for the various right-wing death squads that were snuffing out left-leaning movements throughout Central America. He became most notorious for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, eventually pleading guilty to two criminal charges that seemed to end his political career.
An eleventh-hour pardon from George H.W. Bush freed him to rejoin government, and he joined the George W. Bush administration in 2000, becoming the chief architect of a Middle East policy that was, by nearly all accounts, a catastrophic failure. If the Bush administration’s philosophy on Israel-Palestine was summed up by the notion that the U.S. should passively follow whatever course of action Israel decided upon, Abrams was perhaps the figure most responsible for this. Many of the Obama administration’s difficulties in enforcing a settlement freeze upon the Netanyahu government stemmed directly from Abrams’s blundering or outright acquiescence to the Israeli government; he claimed, for instance, to have brokered under-the-table agreements with the Sharon government recognizing Israeli sovereignty over most of the major West Bank settlement blocs, thereby giving away the farm prior to any final status negotiations.
All this is to say that I am not inclined to give too much credence to Elliott Abrams’s advice on Middle East peacemaking. More interesting, however, are the ways that Abrams contradicts himself even in the span of a single article. As noted, Abrams has sought to portray himself as a spokesman for the causes of democracy and human rights, champion of the Freedom Agenda, and Smith happily goes along with this conceit. (“Elliott mainstreamed the concern for human rights in the U.S. government,” gushes an unnamed former Reagan and Bush official.)
At the same time, however, Abrams lays into the Obama administration for being insufficiently cozy with the undemocratic elites of countries like Egypt and Jordan. “If we distance ourselves from Israel,” he suggests, “the Jordanians, Egyptians and the rest of our allies in the Middle East will think, ‘if they can do it to the Israelis, why not us?’” He boasts that despite having been “extremely pro-Israel,” and actually having invaded an Arab country, the Bush administration still “had extremely close relations with the Arabs.” By Arabs, of course, he does not mean Arab populations, but rather the ruling elites. Smith reiterates Abrams’s criticism, suggesting that Obama’s principal sin is that he ignores the wishes of foreign ruling elites in favor of the wishes of the people under their control:
Obama appears not to see the world outside of America’s borders as a series of places run by local and regional elites. Rather, [Obama feels that] ruling elites are the source of our problems—and he is most comfortable speaking over their heads to a global public that really does seem to like him.
Thus Abrams and Smith have nothing but contempt for Obama’s (allegedly) favoring the people of Egypt, Jordan, and so on at the expense of their autocratic ruling elites. (I would personally welcome this shift, although I have seen little evidence of it from the administration.) On the other hand, they are the same people who excoriate him in his dealings with regimes like Iran and Syria for allegedly neglecting the wishes of the people in favor of their rulers.
The contradiction is highly revealing of the basic hypocrisy of the neoconservative “democracy promotion” project. Despite casting themselves as champions of democracy worldwide, neoconservatives like Abrams have no interest whatsoever in democratizing authoritarian allies like Egypt or Jordan; democracy promotion for them refers solely to the democratization of rival countries. The Bush administration’s much-vaunted Freedom Agenda did not prevent it from backing a dictator like Mubarak in order to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, or urging a strongman like Mohammed Dahlan to overturn the results of a free and fair democratic election in Gaza. (The Hamas takeover in Gaza, by the way, was in large part the result of yet another disastrous blunder by Elliott Abrams.) Similarly, Abrams’s professed love for human rights did not prevent him from serving as the Washington patron of the Central American death squads in the 1980s.
Both neoconservatives and their critics have increasingly come to identify neoconservatism with democracy promotion–the neocons because it lets them cast themselves as heroes fighting the good fight for freedom, the critics because it lets them cast the neocons as naive idealists unfamiliar with the world as it really is. In reality, neoconservatism has little to do with democracy promotion as such. Like other aggressive nationalists the world over, neocons like democracy when it will overturn hostile regimes and bring allies to power. When democracy does not bring the desired results, however, neocons have shown little compunction in endorsing the most brutal repressions of democratic movements by friendly autocrats.
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