Condi Rice’s “Uniquely American Realism”

On Thursday, June 7, Secretary Rice gave a a speech at the Economic Club of New York that was the most sustained expression of her view of the world that we have seen any time since she became a significant force in national policy-making, back in January 2001.

Many people who have known her in the past have described her as “a conscientious staff person” and given her other damning-with-faint-praise accolades like that. But the statement of her view of the US’s role in world politics that she produced Thursday is worthy of some close study. Especially since, with Dick Cheney’s star in the decline and the President himself daily losing his political mojo, her position in national security decisionmaking is becoming stronger and stronger. (Stronger and stronger within an administration that is becoming weaker and weaker, that is.)

So I have started annotating her speech. I’m afraid I haven’t finished doing it yet. But since I’ll be busy for the next couple of days, I thought I would get this much up onto the blog, and try to get around to the rest later. (By the way, if readers would like to suggest their own annotations for some of the paras I haven’t yet gotten around to, just put that in a comment here and note the number of the paragraph.)

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40 years ago: Attack on the Liberty

Forty years ago today, Israeli navy and air force units maintained a two-hour-long assault against a ship in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean belonging to another country’s navy. The assault included attacks with napalm, and the machine-gunning of three life rafts launched in an attempt to float the most seriously wounded sailors to some safety. (This latter being clearly a war crime.)
The assailants killed 34 of the other country’s sailors and injured 172 more. Only 30 percent of the sailors on the targeted ship escaped injury, and it was only through heroic efforts that those survivors were able to keep the ship afloat at all and thus avoid considerable further loss of life.
The nationality of the targeted ship? It was a US Navy vessel.
If the assailants had belonged to just about any other country than Israel, imagine the uproar that would have followed within the US political system!
Today, 40 years after Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, the San Diego Union-Tribune carries an anguished, very thought-provoking op-ed contribution on the affair from Ward Boston, Jr., a former naval aviator and FBI agent who served as chief counsel to the Court of Inquiry that the US Navy ordered into the attack.
Boston notes that though June 8, 1967 was a “sunny, clear day” the government of Israel claimed that this two-hour assault was “an accident.”
Well, if the attack had taken the form of the landing on the ship of a single missile, or perhaps even a small number of missiles, you could make that claim with a straight face? (As the Israelis did in 1996, when they claimed that their shelling of the UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, had been an “accident.”)
But a sustained, two-hour-long assault that was coordinated between the two very different Israeli combat arms– an accident??
Boston writes:

    I know from personal conversations with the late Adm. Isaac C. Kidd – president of the Court of Inquiry – that President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of “mistaken identity.”

Again, given the weather conditions, this seems like an inherently implausible claim.
Boston wrote that as part of their enquiry he and Adm. Kidd,

    boarded the crippled ship at sea and interviewed survivors. The evidence was clear. We both believed with certainty that this attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.
    I am certain the Israeli pilots and commanders who had ordered the attack knew the ship was American. I saw the bullet-riddled American flag that had been raised by the crew after their first flag had been shot down completely. I heard testimony that made it clear the Israelis intended there be no survivors. Not only did they attack with napalm, gunfire and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned at close range three life rafts that had been launched in an attempt to save the most seriously wounded.

He writes, “I am outraged at the efforts of Israel’s apologists to claim this attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity.'” He also gives several details about how the various levels of ther US government carried out their politically motivated cover-up of the findings of the professional, technical investigation that he had helped to lead…
He writes,

    I join the survivors in their call for an honest inquiry. Why is there no room to question Israel – even when it kills Americans – in the halls of Congress?
    Let the survivors testify. Let me testify. Let former intelligence officers testify that they received real-time Hebrew translations of Israeli commanders instructing their pilots to sink “the American ship.”
    Surely uncovering the truth about what happened to American servicemen in a bloody attack is more important than protecting Israel. And surely 40 years is long enough to wait.
    The ensuing cover-up has haunted us for 40 years. What does it imply for our national security, not to mention our ability to honestly broker peace in the Middle East, when we cannot question Israel’s actions – even when they kill Americans?

The survivors of the USS Liberty have been muzzled for a long, long time. Now let’s see if any other major media outlets will take up this story– and even more importantly, let us see if any US political figures will join the call for an honest commission of inquiry that will tell the whole truth about what happened on that sunny day 40 years ago today.
Then, those responsible for organizing and participating in this attack should be held to just as much account as any other body that knowingly and systematically carries out attacks on US forces.
The attempts by Israel’s supporters in the US to muzzle public consideration and discussion of some of the more sordid aspects of Israel’s policy over the decades have gone far too long for this to be a healthy part of the US political scene. The success of these muzzling (and self-muzzling) efforts have distorted both the US’s relationship with Israel, and the terms of the US’s general engagement with the world, in a way that has helped nobody…. certainly not the US citizenry!
I see that the survivors of the attack on the Liberty are asking for an official US investigation into the war crimes committed against US military personnel on June 8, 1967. Who in the US political system will be courageous enough to support their campaign?

US and Iran: A welcome diplomatic opening

The US and Iranian ambassadors in Baghdad met for four hours earlier today, hosted by Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki in his office in the Baghdad Green Zone.
This was the highest-level bilateral (trilateral) meeting between officials of Iran and the US since Washington broke diplomatic ties with Teheran in 1980. The length of today’s meeting was a welcome indicator that some serious– if still necessarily preliminary– diplomatic business got done.
In that report linked to above, Reuters’ Ross Colvin wrote that both sides afterwards described the meeting as “positive.”
He wrote that the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, called the meeting “a first step in negotiations between these two sides” and said Tehran would seriously consider an Iraqi invitation for further discussions.
Colvin wrote that K-Q’s American counterpart, Ryan Crocker,

    said he had been less interested in arranging further meetings than laying out Washington’s case that Shi’ite Iran is arming, funding and training Shi’ite militias in Iraq, a charge Iran denies.

Colvin wrote that Kazemi-Qomi said Iran

    saw positive steps in the talks.
    “Some problems have been raised and studied and I think this was a positive step … In the political field, the two sides agreed to support and strengthen the Iraqi government, which was another positive item achieved in these talks,” he said.
    He said Iran had offered to help train and arm Iraq’s security forces, presently the job of the U.S. military
    Crocker said he would refer to Washington a proposal by the Iranians for a mechanism with Iranian, U.S. and Iraqi participation to coordinate Iraqi security matters.
    He said he had told the Iranians they must end their support for the militias, stop supplying them with explosives and ammunition and rein in the activities of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Qods Force in Iraq.
    The Iranians had rejected the allegations but did not respond in detail. In turn, they had criticized the “occupying” U.S. military’s training and equipping of the new Iraqi army, saying it was “inadequate to the challenges faced”.
    … In a brief address to the delegations before the start of the talks, Maliki said Iraq would not be a launchpad for any attacks on neighboring states, an apparent reference to Iranian fears of a U.S. attack. It would also not brook any regional interference in its affairs, he added.

Colvin noted that the talks, “come as U.S. warships hold war games in the Gulf and after Tehran said it had uncovered spy networks on its territory run by Washington and its allies.”
The talks also, of course (though Colvin didn’t mention this) come as the region-spanning tensions over both Iran’s nuclear-engineering program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are running high. For my part, I find it very hard indeed to see how the US-Iraq-Iran imbroglio can be sustainably defused unless those other components of what I have called the “perfect storm” of three concurrent and linked crises in the Middle East can also be put on the path to sustainable resolution…
But still, to have these two significant governments at last apparently talking seriously about shared concerns in Iraq, rather than engaging in an open shooting war there or anywhere else, is a huge blessing for all of humankind, and especially for the long-suffering residents of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.
Let’s just first of all, all say a big thanks for that.
I have a few more comments on today’s developments:
(1) The role of the Iraqi government in the emerging US-Iranian negotiations (I guess it is still too soon to call this a US-Iranian “relationship”?)
But the Maliki government’s role in this is intriguing. Obviously, when Pres. Bush made the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, one of his key goals was to install a reliably pro-US government there. Maliki emerged as PM as a result of an electoral process that was completely dominated by the US. But the demographic and political realities of Iraq meant that any use of anything approaching a “fair” electoral process there always meant that the product of such a process would be a leadership much more responsive to the urgings of “brotherly” and neighboring Iran than to those from distant, and very “foreign”, Washington.
How on earth could the Bushites ever have expected anything different? (Because they always systematically blocked out any input into their decisionmaking from objective scholars and analysts who actually knew something about Iraq, is how. But we don’t need to revisit that here.)
So now, we start to see some of the diplomatic results of that.
It is notable that today’s talks– and presumably, the continuing diplomatic process that we can now expect will flow from them– are being described as “hosted by” Maliki. Okay, he is still to a large degree the “captive” of the US forces, there in the Green Zone. But these days, the Americans may well need him– to provide a veneer of political legitimacy to their presence in Iraq– just as much as, if not more than, he needs them (to, among other things, protect him from the wrath of an Iraqi citizenry that is very fed-up with the fact he has been able able to deliver almost nothing of any value to them…)
It is notable too that, at a time when the political elite in the US is abuzz with discussions of Maliki’s many claimed “shortcomings” as Iraq’s PM, the Iranian negotiator was saying that the Iranian government wants to give the the Maliki government more support, including through the provision of military and security-force training– in a move that seems couched as a thinly veiled criticism of what the US has been doing in this field up until now.
(2) The exchange of accusations between the US and Iran.
Crocker trotted out the US’s very well-rehearsed litany of accusations of Iran’s unjustified “meddling” in Iraq. All of which are, of course, particularly rich, coming as they do from a power that sent troops, fighter-bombers, and cruise missiles halfway round the world to intervene extremely illegitimately in Iraq!
But the Iranians also have their own, very numerous, accusations regartding the US’s many– and generally much better documented– hostile acts and declarations against them.
These include Congress’s funding of regime-change activities; the Pentagon’s despatch of an additional large naval task force to the waters very near Iran’s coast, and their conduct of some large-scale military exercizes there; the US forces’ recent arrests of five Iranian diplomats in Erbil, northern Iraq… And most recently, the accusations that Teheran’s Intelligence Ministry made last Saturday that it had,

    “succeeded in finding, recognizing and confronting some spy networks of infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers in west, southwest and central Iran… These spy networks were guided by the intelligence services of the occupiers and were supported by some influential Iraqi groups.”

The Iranian news agency IRNA promised that more details of this accusation would be forthcoming “in the next few days.”
No indication was given there whether these “spy networks of infiltrating elements” were connected at all with the bitterly anti-mullah Iranian dissident organization the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which has some 3,800 fighters concentrated in Camp Ashraf, which is around 60 km north of Baghdad (and 100 km west of the Iranian border.)
The US has formally designated the MEK as a terrorist organization. But in early April, CNN was reporting that, “The U.S. military… regularly escorts MEK supply runs between Baghdad and its base, Camp Ashraf.” The reporter there did not specify what these “supplies” were, though he quoted the camp’s MEK leader as saying that what was involved was “procurement of logistical needs.” As third-country nationals in a country under military occupation, the occupying power has a responsibility to ensure that the MEK members’ basic humanitarian needs are met– but certainly not their need for “logistics”, whatever that term might cover… And especially not, given that the MEK as as an organization is still designated as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
There have been various reports of other, non-MEK, Iraq-based and US- and british-backed saboteurs undertaking acts of violence and other hostile actions inside Iran in recent months, too.
The CNN reporter wrote in April that Shirwan al-Wa’eli, Iraq’s national security minister, had said,

    “We gave this organization [the MEK] a six-month deadline to leave Iraq, and we informed the Red Cross…And presumably, our friends the Americans will respect our decision and they will not stay on Iraqi land.”

I found it interesting that in today’s press briefing, Amb. Kazemi-Qomi made no mention of the MEK– or indeed, of any of the accusations that Iran has about anti-Iranian actions being undertaken or supported by the US government, whether from Iraq or from elsewhere. Rather than getting drawn into endless rounds of reciprocal accusations, K-Q seemed more intent on being “statesmanlike”, and on focusing on the forward-looking agenda regarding his government’s negotiations with the US– an agenda that Crocker and most of the rest of the Bushites are seem noticeably reluctant to think about or talk about in public.
(And regarding the MEK, the Iranians are probably more intent on trying to work bilaterally with the Maliki government to get the MEK camp or camps dismantled. So they must have been pleased to hear Maliki say that Iraq “would not be a launchpad for any attacks on neighboring states”.)
3. The further agenda for the US and Iran talks, regarding Iraq.
This is huge. But most Bushites, as noted above, are probably still very reluctant to start to address it. This is an issue that is still very problematic and divisive within the administration. Gates, the uniformed military, and Rice are all now probably more or less united in realizing that,

    (a) Washington has to find a way to negotiate a substantial US troop withdrawal from Iraq, starting at the very latest in early 2008;
    (b) To do this, including Iran as one major party in the negotiation is unavoidable; and
    (c) In this context, a military attack on Iran is out of the questions; and probably, in addition, the current level of tension in the US-Iran relationship needs to be de-escalated.

Within the Republican Party– and indeed, within the broader US political elite, as well– the first of those three propositions now has considerable support. But its corollaries (b) and (c) still don’t, by any means, either in the GOP or in the broader political elite!
Hence, presumably, the need the Bushites see for extreme wariness in proceeding with this negotiation.
4. The US-Iranian agenda beyond Iraq.
As I mentioned above, the Bushites’ policies conflict harshly with those of Teheran in other areas, too, primarily regarding the nuclear issue and Arab-Israeli issues. It seems the “ground-rules” for today’s meeting in Baghdad had been firmly established by the US side as being that the discussions could only deal with matters directly related to Iraq.
Hey, who knows what the three of them might all have talked about inside the room there? Maybe we’ll never wholly know. But anyway, in his remarks after the meeting, K-Q stuck to the agreed script and didn’t mention any non-Iraq-related subject.
However, as I noted above, it will certainly be very hard for the US to get very much of what it wants to get from the Iranians regarding Iraq unless it is prepared to at least start dealing with some of Iran’s very sharp concerns in other fields.
Including, if Washington’s desire US really is for an orderly and substantial US troop withdrawal from Iraq– then what on earth is the Iranians’ interest in that?? Because now, the Iranians have the US troops in Iraq just exactly where they want them: dispersed, stretched out; vulnerable– 160,000-plus sitting ducks who are Teheran’s present guarantee that the US will undertake no military attack against Iran, and also, that it will rein the Israelis from trying anything similar.
Jimmy Carter only had to think about the fate of 52 US hostages to the will of the revolutionary Iranians. Now, George Bush has quite voluntarily and recklessly sent 3,000 times that number of hostages to the same fate…
No wonder that some administration insiders are now talking about a post-surge “Plan B” that would remove substantial numbers of the US troops from Iraq, and concentrate the remainder within only three or four, presumably very well-guarded perimeters.
But why should anyone believe the Iranians would be willing to let that happen so long as they continue to be subjected to all kinds of other hostile acts and declarations by the Americans?
So for the Iraq part of the US-Iran negotiation to work requires, at the very least, that the two sides reach agreement on a broader pact of ending direct hostilities between them.
How far-reaching might such an agreement be? We don’t know yet. But one thing that seems clear to me is that with every month that passes, the Iranian side of this complex balance is becoming stronger, and the US side weaker. Thus the longer the Bushites delay the conclusion of a non-agggression pact with Teheran, the broader will be the gains that Teheran ends up making.
5. Other regional and international actors.
Of course the US and Iran are not the only foreign (non-Iraqi) governments who have an intense interest in containing and ending the current state of insecurity in Iraq. In particular, I note that in the Arab world, all the Arab governments have a very strong interest in both

    (a) Seeing the restoration of political stability and public security inside Iraq, before Iraq-incubated Sunni extremism becomes an even more threatening force than it already is, for all of them; and
    (b) Not seeing the affairs of the Middle East being regulated entirely between these two non-Arab governments, in Washington and Teheran.

When I was in Egypt and Jordan in February, those were two very strong themes I heard again and again from my Arab friends and colleagues there– at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, and elsewhere.
(I note that Israel and Turkey also have certain interests regarding the the US-Iranian-Iraqi nexus. Turkey’s have mainly to do with the situation in the north, and can probably be fairly well accomodated in the context of improving US-Iran relations. Israel’s– as understood by the current government there– depend fairly strongly on there not being any improvement in US-Iran relations… Just the opposite! Tough luck for them, then, if they have to sit back and watch while US-Iran ties improve.)
Back to the Arab states, though. I guess a big question in my mind is whether goals (a) and (b) above can both be satisfactorily reached. I would say they could– provided the Iranians are prepared to do do some fairly clever and sure-footed diplomacy to set at ease the minds of Arab elites in places like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
Anyway, for any stabilization project inside Iraq to succeed will require the active involvement of, at the very least, the Saudis, Jordanians, and Syrians, all of whom have various fingers in the Iraqi pie at present.
… So, bottom line on the US-Iranian diplomacy: Yes, today’s meeting was a great breakthrough… But considerable further diplomatic work remains to be done.
Let’s all hope and pray the leaders in all the relevant capitals are prepared to do that work. As Winston Churchill once memorably said, “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” That was never truer than today. The lives of Iraqis (and American service members) will continue to be lost and devastated in quite unacceptable numbers until the diplomats– supported, I hope, by a swelling movement of citizens in all the countries concerned in favor of much more “jaw-jaw” and less “war-war”– can get their act together and definiteively defuse this very, very harmful situation.

Bacevich: “I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose”

I know I (Scott) should say something about Andrew J. Bacevich’s heartbreaking WaPo essay, “I Lost My son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.”
A brave, grieving father. Our sympathies to him and his family.
This hits close for me – as I too am an academic type, opposed from the beginning to this misadventure. My oldest son is a “gung ho” Lieutenant in the Army National Guard, when he’s not an engineer-in-training for VDOT and a first-time father-soon-to-be.
I often wonder late at night, like right now, of all the ways I failed him, of how I didn’t better inoculate him from the siren songs of the recruiters and the neocons. When he earned his ROTC scholarship, 9/11 had just happened; Iraq was still on the neocon drawing board. My son is now living the dream of his late West Pointer grandfather, not mine. At least he still talks to me — well, usually. He still desperately wants to believe that his “duly elected leaders” wouldn’t be sending him on a fool’s errand, and that his father is the one with the screw loose.
I share Bacevich’s anger, his disgust at the pathetic non-responsiveness of our democracy — of the corrupting “money,” the rabidly fanatical Christian-zionists, and certain “Middle East allies” who’ve hijacked US foreign policy.
Morgenthau was wrong; no country automatically follows its NATIONAL INTEREST. It’s not written in the gene code.
I also share Bacevich’s indignation at those who blame the father for his own son’s death, for having given “aid and comfort to the enemy” with his criticisms of “our” side. Vile indeed.
For today, we have a family reunion on the Blue Ridge Parkway, near a special family spot at “hump-back rocks.” I try not to think of where we might be next year, or if…
May all the families currently separated be brought together soon. My son won’t like this, but my (selfish) idea of supporting our troops will be to bring them home – much sooner rather than later! I must do more.
Peace to all.

US-Iran Talks — and a partnership?

US-Iran watchers are holding their collective breath in hopes that the talks between America and Iran bear fruit.
I’m guardedly impressed that the talks are happening. President Bush has belatedly adopted what he had previously rejected – a core recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton commission to talk to Iraq’s neighbors.
Is the switch borne of “realism” or “desperation?” And on whose part? Does it matter? It at least seems the insubordinate Cheney-Abrams-neocon wing of the Administration has been leashed – for now. Condi Rice also seems to have abandoned her previous nonsense about not wanting to talk to Iran, lest “diplomacy” might “legitimize” the Iranian system.
Similar observation for the Iranian side: It’s perhaps as difficult, if not more, for Iran to talk to the US, given that so much of the Revolution’s fury and subsequent dynamics have been driven by suspicions of American intentions and actions. The ghosts of 1953 still loom large. Repeatedly, for the past 20 years, Iranian figures who floated ideas to talk to America had their ears pinned back, beginning (it is long forgotten) when Iran’s current Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Khamenehi) once advocated such talks when he was President.
That Iran’s political “weather had changed” dramatically was confirmed when former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati gave a long and extraordinarily candid interview ten days ago on Iran’s state TV channel. Now the foreign policy advisor to Leader Khamenehi, Velayati addressed concerns that America was both accusing Iran of causing trouble in Iraq and yet asking for Iran’s help in resolving Iraq’s troubles. Velayati also warned his compatriots of the “mirage” of seeing in the talks the solution to all of Iran’s problems, even as he also chided those Iranian “neocons” who saw dark conspiracies afoot — it’s not that “complicated.”
Bottom line: Velayati confirmed that Iran would participate in talks with America, provided they take “place between two counties in equal positions, without any preconditions, claims, rudeness or negative propaganda.”
US-Iran tensions of course have been running high from multiple sources, including nuclear questions, accusations of Iran supporting all manner of contagion in Iraq, the continued mysterious detentions of five Iranian “diplomats” by the US in Iraq (over Iraqi objections) and horrendous arrests of Iranian-American scholars in Iran.
Even more ominously, we have two US aircraft carrier battle groups again circling their rudders in the cramped Persian Gulf, Iran’s front door, a hair-trigger situation that even a curious editorial in the Kabul Times (friendly to America) characterized as “greatly alarming.”
Last Tuesday, ABC News ran a story claiming that President Bush had signed off on a CIA “black ops” order to destabilize Iran. I now wonder if this report was leaked by those wishing to sabotage the talks.
Unfazed, Iran is still coming to the table.
On Saturday, by contrast, the Boston Globe ran a scoop reporting that the US State Department had disbanded , a special unit that had been set up to orchestrate aggressive action against Iran and Syria – e.g. “regime change.” (Hat tip to Christiane in a thread below for catching this intriguing story for us.)
Yet despite these and other tensions, I share in the restrained optimism about the prospects for these talks. Both sides are well represented by multi-lingual diplomats, with rare experience with low-key contacts with the other side. America’s Ryan Crocker has already received considerable praise. Iran’s team includes its current Ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, and two key Iran observers of Iraqi developments, Reza Amiri Moghaddam and Hossein Amir Abdolhayan.
So what’s to talk about?
I’ve already touched on a long list of tensions and problems needing discussion, even if confined just to Iraq. Yet I offer now an original essay by R.K. Ramazani that focuses on one one area where there should indeed be profound US-Iran common interest and cooperation: al-Qaeda.
I had a hand in pulling the quotes together for this essay, including several that to our knowledge have not appeared elsewhere in the Western media. America’s concerns about al-Qaeda should be obvious, even as many critics scorn Bush’s recent Coast Guard speech wherein he focused on al-Qaeda in Iraq as a key reason for us to stay in Iraq.
Lesser known in the west are the many reasons why Iran too has great reasons for bitterly opposing al-Qaeda.

“Abu Musab Zarqawi, the late al-Qaida operative responsible for the decapitation of Americans and other captives in Iraq, launched a merciless crusade against the Shia. Branding them as a “lurking snake,” a “malicious scorpion,” Zarqawi considered the Shia as an “insurmountable obstacle” to al-Qaeda’s global plans….
Zarqawi declared “total war” on the Shia and Iranians on Sept. 14, 2005. His minions catalyzed open sectarian Shia-Sunni warfare by destroying the Shia shrine at Samarra on Feb. 22, 2006. Since then, millions of Iraqis – of all sects – have been killed, exiled or driven from their homes….

Ayman al-Zawahiri, #2 in al-Qaeda and reputed chief strategist, has similarly taken aim at Shias and Iran:

Al-Zawahiri’s May 5th (2007) tape included an intensified al-Qaeda’s verbal attack on the Shia, Bush and Iran, in anticipation of U.S.-Iran talks. Apart from incendiary insults aimed at Shia belief and practice, al-Zawahiri chided Iran for having given up its slogan “America, the Great Satan” [for] the slogan “”America, the Closest Partner.

Talk about an insult (!) — yet one with more than a grain of truth in it, from al-Qaeda’s perspective.
Unreported in the west, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad replied with a full-bore blast aimed at al-Zawahiri:

“Why do you, who want to kill Americans, kill innocent people and place bombs in the [Iraqi] market place?… On behalf of all the women and children in Asia, Europe and America, who have been victims of al-Qaida terrorists, I wish for you and your terrorist group hellfire, and would gladly sacrifice my life to annihilate you.”

Strange thing for an alleged closet ally of Al-Qaeda to say, eh?
Anyway, if I say so myself, do read the whole essay here.
And indeed, let’s hope, as the essay concludes, that “cooler heads will prevail.”
Fitting that today is Memorial Day in America. May that be a sobering reminder of the stakes.

Judith Miller sighting – @ the Guardian?

There ought to be a dictionary entry for Judith Miller — as in 1.) “journalist” of dubious reputation, 2.) front-page fiction writer; 3.) war fodder. Related google “search terms” could be: aluminum tubes, cakewalk, “un-named sources,” al-Qaeda linked, Chalabi, and “Michael R. Gordon.” Unkind thesaurus entries might be: shill, Benador, troll, and embed.
Yet never mind the recent timid documentaries on how the war to invade Iraq was “sold” to the American public, there’s been no shortage of Judith Miller clones in the media, doing their part to “sell a war” on Iran.
The latest sighting of Judy Miller wannabees appears, shockingly, in today’s Guardian – a paper alleged to be far to “the left” of the US mainstream media. The recent Guardian story hyping Iran’s alleged role in “taking over” Basra was bad enough. (as flagged here on the jwn sidebar) Simply being Shia doesn’t mean taking orders from Iran.
Ask Ayatollah Khomeini. When Iran pursued withdrawing invaders back into Iraq in 1982, Khomeini implored Iraqi Shia to rise up and unite with their would-be liberators. Didn’t happen then; not happening now..
In today’s Guardian, chaos theory reigns in a breathless front-page article entitled, Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq.”
Written by no less than one of the Guardian editors, Simon Tisdall, this isn’t another shallow and dubious story of Iranian components alleged to be in roadside mines (e.g., “IED’s”) or about Iran supporting this or that Shia militia in Iraq.
Nope, it’s Miller Time.

Continue reading “Judith Miller sighting – @ the Guardian?”

When all else fails, blame Iran (Part II)

Matters must be really deteriorating in Afghanistan. Why else would the Pentagon brass now be darkly suggesting that Iranian arms have been “captured,” supposedly on their way to the Taliban? It sounds suspiciously like the tired old formula; when matters go really bad somewhere in the Middle East, change the subject and blame Iran.
Michael R. Gordon today is competing yet again to be chief salesman for such ominous news. Media bloggers have taken to deeming him the resident “ghost of Judith Miller” at the New York Times, the journalist most willing to “take out Cheney’s trash.”
Lately, Gordon has been quite active in reviving support for getting tougher on Iran.
Last week, I commented here on the Pentagon’s odd claim that Iran was now not only supporting Iraqi Shia insurgents, but Sunni fighters as well. On February 10th, it was Michael R. Gordon who started the latest round of Iran-as-the-source-of-trouble-in-Iraq” with a front-page “scoop” that breathlessly cited un-named US sources contending that Iran was providing deadly munitions that were killing Americans. Gordon’s follow-up report generously allowed his sources to defend their claims amid the “controversy,” which even a NYTimes editorial criticized. (Amazingly, that editorial neglected to mention that it was their own reporter – Gordon – who catalyzed the controversy).
Like Judy Miller, Gordon has long specialized in providing red meat for neoconservative circles.
Last November, it was Michael R. Gordon reporting that “Iran-backed” Hizbullah was training Iraqi Shia fighters. And throughout the fall, Gordon filed multiple “reports” citing “experts” and “analysts” cautioning against quick withdrawal from Iraq, then condemning the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group (particularly the idea to talk to Iraq’s neighbors), and then advocating a “surge” of more troops into Iraq.
Back in 2002, it was Michael R. Gordon who wrote regularly with Judith Miller about Iraqi WMD capabilities, most infamously about the aluminum tubes presumed for Iraq’s nuclear program. The obvious intent of such articles was to drum up support for invading Iraq sooner rather than later.
The New York Times flagellated itself last year for such bad reporting, and specifically cited the Miller-Gordon “tubes” story as one of the worst examples. Yet Michael R. Gordon remains the Times’ lead “military” correspondent.
In a contentious interview last year with Amy Goodman, Gordon claimed that he was merely a recorder of the best intelligence and analysis available (pre-Iraq invasion) and that later “dissenters” had not contacted him.
That’s a curious defense. Shouldn’t the reporters be the ones casting about for different views?
Gordon may have thought himself funny when he told Goodman: “I’m actually not Judy Miller.” !
Really?
Today, the NYTimes designates none other than Michael R. Gordon to tell us that Iran is supporting the Taliban (sic) in Afghanistan. That’s right, Iran is now accused of sending arms to the Taliban, Iran’s mortal arch-enemy.

Continue reading “When all else fails, blame Iran (Part II)”

When all else fails in Iraq,…

blame Iran.
It’s a tried, tired, and (not) true neocon formula, dating to the very first signs of trouble in Iraq after Saddam, four years ago. It’s the same ole’Allan Jackson country music tune “they” trot out, figuring Americans mostly still “love Jesus and talk to God,” but they just don’t know “the difference ‘n Iraq and Iran.”
According to the Voice of America, top US spinmeister General William B. Caldwell (the IVth) told a Baghdad press conference yesterday of familiar “charges” about Iranian weapons and training for Iraqi insurgents :

“We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them… We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month, from detainees debriefs.”

Caldwell clarified that the mentioned “training” of Iraqi insurgents was done by intelligence “surrogates” for Iran.
I wonder what “methods” were used on the “detainees” to get such desired evidence.
The material “evidence” trotted out this time was apparently different from previous briefings. Most media reports focused on weapons claimed to have been captured on Monday, after a “citizen tip” in a Sunni section of Baghdad named “Jihad” (sic). According to the NYTimes,

“The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked “made in 2006….”
The weapons that the military officials said were of Iranian origin were labeled in English, which Major Weber said was typical of arms manufactured for international sale.”

How convenient!
Why didn’t the New York Times apply the laugh test to that one? Does this mean the Iranians “sold” them or “donated” them? By the way, I don’t recall those alleged Iranian arms in 2002 on the Karine-A headed for Palestine being labeled in English? eh? It is especially thoughtful of those “Iranians” to now mark weapons from Iran in English. It will save American “disinformation” specialists from having to stencil them in Persian or Arabic. (which of course they just wouldn’t do anyway, as my son the Lieutenant would insist…)
The real “headline” grabber though, the change off the broken record, came when US Major General Caldwell remarked,

“We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support.”

He apparently didn’t elaborate. But “the quote” gave CNN’s perma-embed @ the Pentagon, Barbara “yes-sir” Starr, a breathless top-billing on CNN for the next eight hours (last I checked). All she could say was, “this is new…, really new.”
Yes, new – and bizarre.

Continue reading “When all else fails in Iraq,…”

Pelosi and Damascus, part 2

When we left Nancy Pelosi earlier this week she was still in Damascus. Yesterday, she was in Saudi Arabia. (She said she raised with her Saudi governmental hosts the Kingdom’s lack of any female political figures.)
But the controversy continued to swirl around her visit to Damascus. When she was there she announced she had delivered a message to Pres. Bashar al-Asad from Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, whom she’d met with the day before, to the effect that Israel “was ready to engage in peace talks” with Syria. She also announced that she had found Asad ready to resume the peace talks, as well.
Olmert immediately undercut her, arranging for a message to be posted on his website saying that there was no way Israel could talk with Syria until Syria had met several preconditions including ending its support for what Israel calls terrorism, etc etc.
Was this a big humiliation for Pelosi? The WaPo editorial writers evidently thought it was (or, that it should be seen in that way.) They tried to rub in this humiliation by penning an editorial viciously critical of her, under the headline Pratfall in Damascus.
It declared,

    any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

One big problem: The editorial writers there seemed to have taken completely at face value Olmert’s claim that Pelosi had fabricated the content of the message he wanted to send to Damascus, and to have completely discounted her claim that she did not.
Why on earth would the editorial writers of the Washington Post choose to take the word of a foreign politician over that of the duly elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives?. (Also, why should they criticize her for seeking to lead the House of Representatives in exercising its completely constitutional power of the purse?)
There are many possible explanations of what happened re the “Pelosi message”. One is that she is a careful politician and proven good listener who conveyed exactly the message she had been asked to convey. The other is the WaPo/Olmert story that she dangerously bungled this small piece of discreet international communication… Then, of course, there is also the hand of the Bushites, who as we saw earlier were apoplectic that Pelosi should even dare to visit Syria at all.
Here are some possibilities worth considering:

    — Perhaps Olmert deliberately set Pelosi up from the get-go, as a presumed favor to his equally embattled buddy George Bush, or
    –Perhaps Olmert didn’t set her up beforehand; but after sher had made her (interesting but quite evidently non-operational) comments in Damascus about her various diplomatic contacts until then, the outraged Bushites called Olmert and asked him to issue the retraction? (This, remember, after several seemingly credible reports emerged late last summer that the White House intervened during the 33-day war in Lebanon to prevent Olmert from sending out peace feelers to Damascus…)

Anyway, whatever the truth of the back-story there, one thing seems fairly clear: Olmert has certainly not enhanced the way that this very experienced and politically significant Speaker we now have in Washington will view him in the future. And nor, for what it is worth, has the WaPo editorial board.

GAO’s Pogo Report on Unsecured Munitions In Iraq

GAO, meet POGO.
Yesterday, the US Government Accounting Organization released an unclassified 35 page version of a study submitted to the Pentagon in December, with a long-winded title: “Operation Iraqi Freedom: DOD Should Apply Lessons Learned Concerning the Need for Security over Conventional Munitions Storage Sites to Future Operations Planning.”
A better title, in Pogo’s immortal “Swamp Speak,” might be, “In Iraqi IED’s, We have Met the Enemy and He is Us.”
The gist of the report is that “hundreds of thousands of tons” of Iraqi munitions were left unsecured after Iraq was “liberated” in April of 2003. Such munitions and components are being used by insurgents in making the roadside mines (IED’s), the devises deemed responsible for half of American casualties.
As Secretary of Defense Gates admitted yesterday, unsecured weapons caches have been a “huge, huge problem.” Characterizing Iraq now as “one huge ammo dump,” the munitions on the loose literally provide the raw materials for much of the carnage in Iraq today.
So how did this happen dear Pogo?
Elementary. We did it to ourselves.
First, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF) assumed that after Saddam’s regime was overthrown,

“the regular Iraqi army units would ‘capitulate and provide internal security.’ Knowledgeable senior-level DOD officials stated that these Iraqi army units would have been used to secure conventional munitions storage sites….” (over 400 of them… p.8)

“As stated in the OIF war plan, the U.S. Commander, CENTCOM, intended to preserve, as much as possible, the Iraqi military to maintain internal security and protect Iraq’s borders during and after major combat operations.”

The US military planners also assumed that,

“Iraqi resistance was unlikely…. the plan did not consider the possibility of protracted, organized Iraqi resistance to U.S. and coalition forces after the conclusion of major combat operations. As a result, DOD officials stated that the regime’s conventional munitions storage sites were not considered a significant risk.”

Why should they have feared such resistance? After all, then Assistant Defense Secretary Wolfowitz was channeling the koolaid being mixed by Chalabi, Lewis, Ajami and their neocon pals. Remember the welcome to Iraq predictions?
In short, and as incredible as this may now sound, OIF planners assumed that, “Postwar Iraq would not be a U.S. military responsibility.”
As a result, “U.S. forces did not have sufficient troop levels to provide adequate security for conventional munitions storage sites in Iraq because of OIF planning priorities and certain assumptions that proved to be invalid.”
“Heck of a Job there Tommy.”
Worst of all (and to be more candid than the GAO report), the OIF military’s planners did not anticipate the actions of their own government:

“On May 23, 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved the Iraqi Army, which the CENTCOM commander assumed would provide internal security.”

As a direct consequence, Iraq’s weapons caches and manufacturing facilities went essentially unguarded for months. The US Military did not have a coordinated effort to manage and monitor Iraq’s munitions depots until after August of 2003. Even now, the GAO contends that monitoring and control of such “vulnerable” Iraqi munitions sites remains poor.
The consequences of leaving Iraqi munitions so vulnerable to theft have been… grave:

“As reported by DOD and key government agencies, the human, strategic, and financial costs of not securing conventional munitions storage sites have been high. Estimates indicate that the weapons and explosives looted from unsecured conventional munitions storage sites will likely continue to support terrorist attacks throughout the region. Government agencies also assessed that looted munitions are being used in the construction of IEDs.”

In turn, ongoing high levels of violence impede reconstruction and stabilization efforts.
Remember this report next time you learn of a breathless claim that Iranian origin components are somehow the root of the road mines that are “killing Americans.” The neocons wanted to use such claims to buttress their “regime change” and bomb Iran campaigns. One wonders how the neocons will respond to the more plausible explanation that such American casualties are the fruit of American incompetence at the highest levels.
Pogo would frown at blame-somebody-else tactics.