Category: Hawkwatch

There have been lots of reports that the “shock and awe” component of the Rumsfeld-Cheney invasion of Iraq last year was directed primarily not at the Iraqi people–who were merely to be pawns in this nasty game–but towards China.
Was it in “Plan of Attack” that I read some evidence of that? Or was it someplace else?
Well, it could make sense as an explanatory theory… Perhaps… Except that if the idea of launching that particular war, in that particular way (using lean, mobile forces… the kind that can be fairly easily deployed over large distances… Ooops! But they ain’t much good at running an occupation!) … If it was indeed Bombs-Away Don’s brilliant idea that doing that would scare the Chinese shitless, then… he scored one heck of a large-scale own goal, didn’t he?
How shocked and awed do YOU think the Chinese are by his little display of power (and its less than glorious outcome)?
In the International Herald Tribune today, Jane Perlez writes:

it is hard not to notice the legacy of America’s shrinking influence in Asia over the last four years.
A profound rearrangement is under way, with China and its expanding economy leading the charge, and in some instances, it’s to the exclusion of the United States…
At the same time, the central banks of China and Japan are holding $1.3 trillion of U.S. government debt, a position that gives Asia quite a bit of leverage, economists say.

She then asks, quite sensibly,

Is anybody in terror-obsessed Washington paying attention?

She quotes one senior Asian diplomat as saying that since the mid-1990s, China’s diplomacy has been “consistent, subtle and creative.” During the same period, he said, the “U.S. has been out to lunch.”
She adds:

Continue reading “Rumsfeld’s massive “own goal””

Brent Scowcroft, who was the first Pres. Bush’s National Security advisor (and therefore Condi Rice’s boss that time around) has weighed in again with publicly expressed views that directly challenge key aspects of W’s foreign policy.
In an Oct. 14 article in the Financial Times that I had missed, FT reporter Daniel Dombey reports that Scowcroft told him that W,

is “mesmerised” by Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, and that the Bush administration’s recent co-operation with the United Nations and Nato in Afghanistan and Iraq is a desperate move to “rescue a failing venture”.
Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and close collaborator of former president George H. W. Bush, told the Financial Times that the US administration’s “unilateralist” stance had contributed to the decline of the transatlantic relationship…
“Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger,” Mr Scowcroft said. “I think the president is mesmerised.”
“When there is a suicide attack [followed by a reprisal] Sharon calls the president and says, ‘I’m on the front line of terrorism’, and the president says, ‘Yes, you are. . . ‘ He [Mr Sharon] has been nothing but trouble.”
Mr Scowcroft also cast doubt on Mr Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, which last week Dov Weisglass, a leading Israeli adviser, said was intended to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
“When I first heard Sharon was getting out of Gaza I was having dinner with Condi [Rice] and she said: ‘At least that’s good news.’ And I said: ‘That’s terrible news . . . Sharon will say: ‘I want to get out of Gaza, finish the wall [the Israelis’ security fence] and say I’m done’.”

(You can find a very similar analysis of the Gaza withdrawal plan in the piece I had in Boston Review about Palestine, last spring.)
That Scowcroft is speaking out in this way now, and to a leading European publication, has to be significant. His last major speakout was in mid-August 2002, when he ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the simple heading “Don’t attack Saddam“.
On that occasion, according to Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack”, Scowcroft received two important phone calls shortly afterward…

Continue reading “Scowcroft on W and Sharon”

The WaPo’s Dana Milbank presents the proof regarding the amazing feat of political/rhetorical cloning by which Iyad Allawi became Bush’s very own ‘Mini-me’.
By the way, Juan Cole links to a Time mag piece about Allawi’s longtime sponsors in the CIA having had and then later shelved a plan to “help” the former Baathist thug win the January election.
The piece seems to be referring mainly to plans to shovel money into Allawi’s campaign. However, even if that particular plan has been shelved, you have to know that there are 1,001 other ways that an occupying power can stack the deck to rig an election, including by determining the security situation, stacking the election rules, etc etc. So the “integrity” of the electoral process is certainly still not assured.

Robert Kaplan is an Atlantic Monthly writer who’s been fairly influential over the years. His books about the Balkans and West Africa both painted a picture of a world “out there”, far from the U.S., that was governed by ancient hatreds, dangerous to Americans, and irredeemable. He wrote a hate-filled book about those earnest US diplomats of an earlier era who actually cared enough to learn something serious about the Arab world: he made them out to be some heinous force for evil in the world, and thus contributed hugely to strengthening their demise and the rise of the wilfull “know-nothing-ism” regarding the Middle East in the US policy elite…
Now, he has gone even further in showing us his real colors. Taking the idea of a globalized “manifest destiny” role for the US to its logical extreme, he has now started calling openly for the US military to act in the rest of the world as though it were in “Indian country”.
What does this mean? As he tells us in this Sept. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it means this:

Continue reading “Robert Kaplan goes beserk”

So for Rumsfeld, Iraq today became “that place”. As in:

“Any implication that that place needs to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and U.S. forces would be unwise… ”

I guess that’s the kind of self-distancing locution one uses when one hates being pestered with questions about the subject at hand? Perhaps, because one has some flickerings of shame or uncertainty about one’s past decisions with regard to it?
As in this January 1998 statement:

“I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

Well, as they say: Clinton lied, and no-one died. But as for Rumsfeld and his buddies?????
Maybe “that place” will continue to haunt Rumsfeld for some time to come…
Do you think his conscience is starting to get to him?

Regarding the development Sunday when US helicopters opened fire on (mainly or wholly civilian?) Iraqis in Baghdad, killing or injuring many of them, today Reuters’ Ed Cropley from Baghdad filed this:

The U.S. military defended on Wednesday two helicopter pilots who fired seven rockets into a crowd of Iraqis in Baghdad this week, saying they had come under “well-aimed ground fire” and responded in self-defence.
Initially, the military had said they opened fire on Sunday to destroy a crippled U.S. armoured vehicle to prevent looting.
At least five people including a television journalist were killed in the incident… in central Baghdad’s Haifa Street, a bastion for anti-American insurgents.
Colonel Jim McConville, head of the U.S. First Cavalry Division’s aviation brigade, said two helicopters armed with heavy machineguns and a total of 21 rockets had swooped over the burning vehicle and the crowd of Iraqis.
“While he (the lead pilot) was overflying the target he received well-aimed ground fire so close that he could hear it over his intercom system,” McConville told a news conference…

One of those killed was Al-Arabiyya producer Mazen Tomeizi, who was filiming the scene around the crippled vehicle when the first of the seven rockets struck behind him.
Cropley writes:

Reuters cameraman Seif Fouad was wounded in one of the subsequent rocket strikes.
Witnesses in Haifa Street dispute the U.S. military’s version of events, saying they saw no one firing at the helicopters before the aerial attack.
Fouad’s footage of the crowd around the Bradley in the moments before the helicopter strike also showed no evidence any one in the crowd around the vehicle was armed or firing.
The footage shows a crowd of men and teenage boys milling around the vehicle, as Tomeizi speaks in the foreground. The journalist is then cut down and his blood spatters on the lens…

Continue reading “Escalations and excuses in Iraq”

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it…
So okay, if I were Karl Rove, what would I need to have happen in Iraq before November 2?
I think, if I were him, the thing I’d most like to see is some palpable progress toward stability and elections in Iraq. (As in Afghanistan, where the holding of the elections has been rushed forward to October, specially to fit Mr. R’s election priorities in the US.)
But if actual progress toward stability in Iraq doesn’t look probable–and faking it for the whole electorate might be a LOT harder than faking it for the GOP faithful who flocked to new York last week– then, well, how would a bit of determined bang-bang play for Bush’s election campaign instead?
My fears about this are certainly related to my experience of seeing half a dozen successive Prime Ministers in Israel launch escalations in Lebanon as part of their re-election strategies… Oh, the Lebanese have a very intimate view of the dark chauvinistic under-belly of Israel’s “democracy”. And then, remember the strong influence that Israeli politicians have on many in Bush’s close circle.
Actually, if I were Karl Rove, I wouldn’t think that a big, showy escalation in Iraq would necessarily–in the US context–be such a great vote-getter. But still, I might be tempted… Wag the dog, and all that…
So my fears in this regard [Helena speaking now, not Mr. R.] were piqued when I read a big piece of US Army swagger coming from the lips of Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the number 2 in the military command in Iraq, as reported by AP’s Jim Krane today.
Krane wrote:

Continue reading “Thinking like Karl Rove”

So it seems that Richard Perle, the éminence noire of the current neo-con cabal is, at the heart of it all, just a mundane old kleptocrat after all, not a courageous, idealistic “true believer” in anything?
Okay, maybe he’s both.
But as this report in today’s WaPo makes clear, there are plenty of his former colleagues on the board of the media conglomerate Hollinger International who now say he was just in it for the money. $5.4 million in bonuses and compensation, to be precise.
Hollinger– which owns the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and until recently London’s right-kookie Daily Telegraph— was put together and run the originally Canadian (now also British) Likudnik Conrad Black.
Some of the shareholder reps on the Hollinger board commissioned the report after the company nearly went totally belly-up last November.
Perle, also a director of the company, got that $5.4 million in a series of sweetheart deals with Black. WaPo’s Frank Ahrens writes that the latest report said, “Perle should return the money.”

Continue reading “Perle, the kleptocrat”

Kudos to Laura Rozen of “War and Piece” for the interview she got in which wellknown international arms-and-snakeoil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar spoke (=bragged) about the number of meetings he’s had about the Iran situation with Michael LeSleaze; the Italian Defense Minister and the head of Italian Military Intelligence; and Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin from Doug Feith’s office.
It surprises me not one whit that Ghorby and LeSleaze (a.k.a. Ledeen), who have been co-conspirators from the the days of the Iran-contra affair of the mid-1980s, if not before, would have had numerous meetings in recent years. Heck, they’re probably godfathers for each other’s children, or whatever the relevant cultural indicator of familial intimacy is.
There is nothing I find “shocking” in that– not even knowing that LeSleaze was hired to be a consultant to Wolfie at the DOD at some point. LeSleaze also has a long, nasty history of dirty business with the Italian military “intel” folks.
And it seems kinda unexceptional that LeSleaze would have taken his good friends Rhode and Franklin to meet with Ghorby and the Italians, either… Except that, according to the Washington Monthly story by Rozen, Josh Marshall, and Peter Glastris, the US Ambassador in Italy–where most or all of the meetings were held–didn’t know about them. And when the ambassador, Mel Sembler, found out about one of the meetings, in December 2001, he “ratted” on the conspirators to the local CIA station chief and to his own boss, Colin Powell.
Powell and CIA head George Tenet then went screaming to the NSC leadership. Obviously!! They knew that Ghorbanifar had been bad news ever since the days of the Iran-Contra affair, and must have asked what the heck Feith’s people thought they were doing meeting with him!?!??? According to the WaMo article, the Italian mil-intel chief had also checked in with Tenet…
Anyway, the upshot was that Condi Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley put the word out: No more meetings with Ghorbanifar. But soon enough, the meetings resumed…
Thus far, the whole story seems unexceptional. It is quite possible that Feith and his people– who don’t really know that much about Iran (see Juan Cole’s take on this)–could be fairly easily seduced by the promises of that practiced snake-oil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar… Especially if he came with the warm recommendation of Wolfowitz consultant Michael LeSleaze…
So I can see Franklin and Rhode going along to the meetings throughout 2002, flush with excitement, thinking, “Hey, for Iraq we’ve got ‘our man’ Chalabi– and now, for Iran, we’ve got all this hot info from ‘our man’ Ghorbanifar!!! And we’re his main handlers! Yay for us!!!”
I’ve written much on JWN before about just how eager the neo-cons were to buy all the snake-oil that Chalabi was selling them up to March 2003. (Like here and here.) It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that similar kinds of people hearing the practiced blandishments of old Ghorby could be similarly seduced…
And it seems that, from another end of the story, the reason the FBI made its hurried public announcement on Friday about the investigations and possible arrests at the Franklin end of the case was because CBS’s Lesley Stahl was about to break that part of the story on “60 Minutes”.
However, a number of intriguing questions and loose ends remain to be clarified:

Continue reading “Larry Franklin Affair, contd.”

I have just started reading the Schlesinger report on US detainee operations. Its main thrust, in my reading is to skewer Lt.-Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, until recently the commander of all the forces in Iraq.
Douglas Jehl, in this piece in Wednesday’s NYT, makes the judgment that the report “drew a line that extended to the defense secretary’s office.” I think that mis-characterizes the report a bit. In the part I’ve read, there are only a few references to any responsibility Rumsfeld or any other Pentagon suits might have had. But there are plenty to Sanchez and quite a few to Gen Myers, the head of Centcom.
The report seems to be a fairly serious piece of work, in the circumstances. (And yes, I write that in the full knowledge that their lenses and worldview are significantly different than mine.) The Commission members laid out a case that responsibility for the abuses should go high up both the military and Penatgon-civilian chains of command. In the Recommendations, however, they pulled their punches, notably not issuing there any explicit call for resignations or further prosecutions.
Elsewhere in the report, though, they do say the existing programs of prosecution should be pursued aggressively and perhaps augmented.
Here are some key passages from the Exec Summary:

Continue reading “Schlesinger skewers mainly Sanchez”