News and views relevant to US foreign policy for Sept. 11
“New intelligence on Iran nuke work”: The Associated Press reports that the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has received intelligence from the United States, Israel and at least two other Western countries showing that Iran has “moved further toward the [...]]]>
News and views relevant to US foreign policy for Sept. 11
“New intelligence on Iran nuke work”: The Associated Press reports that the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has received intelligence from the United States, Israel and at least two other Western countries showing that Iran has “moved further toward the ability to build a nuclear weapon”.
“Nuclear Mullahs, Continued”: Bill Keller responds to reader questions about his column that argues against a preemptive war on Iran’s nuclear program:
Q: You say that after an attack, Iran would have strong motivation to rebuild its nuclear facilities, this time faster and deeper underground. But the Israeli attacks on nuclear reactors at Osirak, Iraq, in 1981 and Al-Kibar, Syria, in 2007 were quite successful in keeping those countries non-nuclear.
A: First, Iran’s multiple facilities, well fortified (especially the centrifuges buried deep in the rock at Fordow, near Qom) present a much tougher target than the reactors in Iraq and Syria. Second, and more important, the Osirak attack, far from stopping Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, hastened them. After Israel bombed the reactor, Saddam Hussein launched an accelerated, covert program to manufacture nuclear weapons. When the First Gulf War ended his ambitions in 1991, that program was well underway. Experts disagree how far Saddam was from having a weapon (estimates ranged from six months to three years) but the Israeli strike in Iraq accomplished what many fear a strike in Iran would accomplish: it gave the nuclear weapons program new life. Third, Israel’s attack on the (suspected) nuclear reactor in Syria was kept secret for a long time, so that Syria did not feel obliged to undertake reprisals against the superior Israeli military. It’s inconceivable that Iran and the world would not know whom to hold responsible for an attack on its facilities, and Iranian leaders would have to lash back, if only to save face. Fourth, what ended Iraq’s nuclear ambitions was a full-scale military invasion in 1991 – followed by an (unnecessary and botched) occupation in 2003. No doubt, occupying Iran would solve the problem of its nuclear program. Anybody up for that?
“Former CIA Chief: Obama’s War on Terror Same as Bush’s, But With More Killing”: Wired reports that Michael Hayden has offered words of praise for President Obama’s counterterrorism agenda after initially criticizing the POTUS’s early comments against programs Hayden helped formulate under George W. Bush, such as the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and domestic wiretapping:
“But let me repeat my hypothesis: Despite the frequent drama at the political level, America and Americans have found a comfortable center line in what it is they want their government to do and what it is they accept their government doing. It is that practical consensus that has fostered such powerful continuity between two vastly different presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, when it comes, when it comes to this conflict,” Hayden said Friday while speaking at the University of Michigan.
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But Hayden, in a nearly 80-minute lecture posted on C-Span, said Obama came to embrace Bush’s positions. Both Bush and Obama said the country was at war. The enemy was al-Qaida. The war was global in nature. And the United States would have to take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be, he said.
“The Deafness Before the Storm”: Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald delivers a bombshell report in the New York Times on the 11th anniversary of the September 11th attacks arguing that the Bush Administration had received multiple warnings prior to August 2001 from the CIA about Osama bin Laden’s intent and capabilities to attack US targets. According to Eichenwald, the White House dismissed the agency’s sources as agents “in” on a maskirovka directed by both Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden:
But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.
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“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.
“Iraqi Spokesman: Al-Hashemi Is ‘Connected Directly’ To Terrorists”: Al-Monitor interviews Iraqi Government spokesman Ali Aldabbagh on the in absentia death sentence against the country’s Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi and the ongoing oil revenues dispute between Baghdad and the Kurdish north. The wide-ranging interview also touched on Iran-Iraq relations, including an oblique reference to reports that the US is pressuring Iraq to do more to undermine Iranian assistance to the Syrian regime:
]]>Al-Monitor: The US has asked Iraq to inspect Iranian planes flying to Syria to prevent arms and material from reaching the Syrian government. Is this a reasonable request? Will the government of Iraq consider doing so?
Aldabbagh: The US never asked [us] to do so, but it is our commitment not to allow the flow of arms or fighters to both parties in Syria. We had informed the Iranians that Iraq will never [allow the] use [of] its airspace to do so. Iraq is ready to be part of international efforts to stop any arms to Syria. We protect our borders from [allowing the flow of] any equipment or fighters to or from Syria. Iraq is totally committed to these principles. The US had satisfied with Iraq measures toward Syria.
Al-Monitor: How do you assess Iraq-Iran relations? Does your relationship with Iran complicate your ties with the United States, as in the case of Syria?
Aldabbagh: Never, on the contrary. The US understands that Iraq should maintain good relations with Iran, as we [have] been mediating between them. Even with the Syrians, we differ on some issues with US, while we agree and have the same ideas on some Syrian aspects. Such differences never affect our relations — the US respects Iraq sovergnity [sic] in building relations with others.
Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics [...]]]>
Both of his parents were teachers and union loyalists, inculcating their son with left-leaning liberal politics but not much in the way of a religious education. Instead, Goldberg forged his Jewish identity in response to some schoolyard anti-Semitism whose traumas left him longing for the so-called muscle Judaism represented by Zionism.
Jim has written an excellent blog post on the role of humiliation in forming the neocon psyche which, when read in the context of the description of Goldberg’s “Jewish identity,” offers some insights into how Goldberg may have gained his hawkish instincts.
But the points from Berrin’s article which deserve special attention regard Goldberg’s role in the hyping of an Iraq-al-Qaeda link in a 2002 New Yorker article and accusations that he is “peddling Israeli propaganda.”
Berrin writes of the response to Goldberg’s September Atlantic cover story (I blogged about it here) on the likelihood of an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear program (my emphasis):
The story has been both widely praised and reviled. Critics accused Goldberg of warmongering, framing the piece as a question of who would invade Iran — Israel or the U.S.? — rather than challenging the sense of another Middle East incursion. Charges that he was, yet again, prepping America for war stem back to a 2002 piece he wrote for The New Yorker, in which he claimed to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. The piece was widely interpreted as an endorsement for the Iraq war, which, on some level, Goldberg regrets. He now admits having been wrong about Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction “like everybody else” but maintains the dignity of the story. “I will never regret taking a stand against a genocidal fascist,” he said. “Do I regret the atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war, and its aftermath? Of course.” Citing a report conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, he defends his claim connecting Hussein to al-Qaeda.
While I haven’t seen many critics attack Goldberg for “taking a stand against a genocidal fascist,” I have seen a fair number of criticisms of Goldberg’s reporting. His critics assign him considerable responsibility for having given mainstream acceptance to the false narrative that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was forming ties with al-Qaeda.
Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein wrote in 2006:
In urging war on Iraq, Goldberg took highly dubious assertions — for example, that Saddam was an irrational madman in control of vast quantities of WMDs and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were deeply in bed together — and essentially asserted them as fact. From these unproven allegations, he demonstrated that an invasion of Iraq was the only rational policy.
While Goldberg had plenty of company in being mistaken about the WMD’s and al-Qaeda ties, “everybody else” was not wrong — just the power players in DC As Michael Massing chronicles in his excellent 2004 New York Review of Books article “Now They Tell Us,” dissent was all around. Knight Ridder reporters questioned the premise for the war, but their newspapers were not read in DC. Rereading Massing’s take, Goldberg’s response is a lot like that of disgraced journalist Judith Miller.
Goldberg’s half apology, in which he defers blame to the “atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war,” closely mirrors the avoidance of responsibility displayed by neoconservatives like Richard Perle, David Frum, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Michael Rubin, James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen and Danielle Pletka when they publicly decried the Bush administration’s execution of the war to Vanity Fair‘s David Rose in late 2006. The fact that the war was, in large part, engineered by these very neoconservatives (or colleagues who, quite-literally, worked down the hall) was conveniently overlooked.
Goldberg still stands by his 2002 New Yorker article in which he depended on Mohammed Mansour Shahab, a prisoner in a Kurdish town in northern Iraq, as his source to confirm the Saddam Hussein-al-Qada link. But, as reported by The Guardian‘s Jason Burke, Shahab is a liar and very little of his story which established the al-Qaeda link for Goldberg holds up to closer scrutiny.
In contrast, liberal interventionists (and Goldberg likes to portray himself as one) have offered more thoughtful apologies for their involvement in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. The editors of the The New Republic issued an apology in which they said “The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war” and in may 2004, The editors of The New York Times issued an apology in which the editors took responsibility for, among several failures, depending on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq,” as trusted sources. The information provided by these sources was often misleading and, at times, completely wrong, and the Times admirably took responsibility for not fulfilling basic reportorial duties of double checking their stories.
Goldberg played an important role in convincing the U.S. public that invading Iraq was necessary and well-grounded in factual data about what turned out to be Saddam’s nonexistent ties to Al Qaeda and pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. That Goldberg “maintains the dignity of the story” — a story which served to disseminate falsehoods and brought the U.S. into a preemptive war which resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 Americans and, according to the Iraq Body Count project, 98,585 to 107,594 confirmed civilian casualties — raises questions about Goldberg’s own (to borrow the term) integrity as a journalist. It certainly should make readers of his recent cover story on Iran ask themselves if Goldberg is reporting based on facts or finding facts to conform to his ideologically driven narrative. (Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli blogger, has written about how Goldberg, instead of cherry-picking intelligence, seems to have cherry-picked interview subjects.)
Berrin also touches upon that very question but then lets Goldberg off the hook.
She writes:
But the more insidious critique came when others denounced him for peddling Israeli propaganda, charging him with a deep, subconscious bias. As if somehow his Jewishness makes him unfit to write fairly about Israel.
In fact, Goldberg’s most salient critics don’t attack “his Jewishness” as a bias, but rather his seeming ideological bent in support of aggressive military actions against the enemies of Israel. Connected to this, but not the sole source of the charge, is Goldberg’s service in the Israel Defense Force, where he was a corporal and guarded Palestinian prisoners during the first intifada. A more apt example of criticisms, however, might be Goldberg’s apologia for the Israeli right-wing at every turn, such as his whitewashing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric against Iran, or how he masks Bibi’s intransigence on an issue — settlements — which Goldberg himself claims to take a liberal stand against.
More importantly, Goldberg’s history of pushing for preemptive wars in the Middle East should give readers pause when he makes the case for an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. When viewed in that context, the title of Berrin’s piece could be downright sinister–”Journalist Goldberg changing the world one story at a time.”
]]>CBS News conducted a phone survey of 906 randomly selected participants in September, asking for the first [...]]]>
CBS News conducted a phone survey of 906 randomly selected participants in September, asking for the first question, “What would cause you to support a war with Iran?”
Laura Rozen at Politico sums up the answers:
25% of respondents said “only if Iran attacks U.S. soil;” 25% said “If Iran attacks the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf;” 11% said “If Iran tests a nuclear bomb;” and 10% said “If Iran attacks Israel.” 24% of respondents said they would never support a war with Iran.
While half of respondents said that they would support a war if Iran directly attacked United States ships or soil, only one in ten said they’d be willing to jump into a war if Iran attacked Israel.
Only 11 percent of respondents said they would support war if Iran tested a nuclear bomb. One might interpret this to mean most Americans would support a containment policy against Iran rather than attack as a “last resort” to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state. Top military officials themselves acknowledge such “military option” is fraught with potentially devastating consequences.
And Matt Duss at Think Progress has an interesting observation about the phrasing of the question and how the hawks are surely paying attention:
It’s an oddly phrased question, but one which nevertheless indicates pretty strongly that Americans are not in favor of a U.S. war with Iran. I suspect that those who are in favor of a war with Iran understand this, which is why they like to talk exclusively about “air strikes,” “military strikes,” or my favorite, “surgical strikes.”
These results track with a Chicago Council poll last month, which we covered here at LobeLog:
Most striking (no pun intended) was that only 18 percent of respondents think the U.S. should launch a military strike on Iranian nuclear targets now. Even if diplomacy and sanctions fail to stop Iranian advancement toward a bomb, a slim plurality still think the U.S. should not bomb Iran (49 percent oppose it, 47 would support it). More than half of respondents say if Israel starts a war with Iran, the U.S. should not leap to Israel’s defense.
Vanity Fair‘s website also had a chart breaking down the poll by political affiliation. Here’s a screen grab:
With poll results such as these, it appears the efforts of Iran war hawks to rile up the U.S. populace for another Mid East war may not fly. Or, they may just choose to ignore the statistics and continue to falsely portray American public opinion as being on their side: Cliff May, when he appeared on MSNBC, said that “happily most Americans watching Ahmadinejad on TV understand” the threat posed by a nuclear Iran. Turns out what they might understand - and what they may want the United States to do – may be two very different things.
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