Category: US foreign policy

Bushites up the military ante against Iran

Dave Lindorff has just posted an article on The Nation website about the Navy’s recent issuance of “Prepare to Deploy orders” to a number of ships including the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier whose home-port is Norfolk, Virginia.
He writes:

    According to Lieut. Mike Kafka, a spokesman at the headquarters of the Second Fleet, based in Norfolk, Virginia, the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received recent orders to depart the United States in a little over a week. Other official sources in the public affairs office of the Navy Department at the Pentagon confirm that this powerful armada is scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran on or around October 21.

Lindorff quotes Col. Sam Gardiner, an air force officer who previously taught strategy at the Natinal War College, as saying, “You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It’s a very significant order, and it’s not done as a training exercise.”
Lindorff continues:

    “I think the plan’s been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran,” says Gardiner. “It’s a terrible idea, it’s against US law and it’s against international law, but I think they’ve decided to do it.” Gardiner says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, “the Iranians have many more options than we do: They can activate Hezbollah; they can organize riots all over the Islamic world, including Pakistan, which could bring down the Musharraf government, putting nuclear weapons into terrorist hands; they can encourage the Shia militias in Iraq to attack US troops; they can blow up oil pipelines and shut the Persian Gulf.” Most of the major oil-producing states in the Middle East have substantial Shiite populations, which has long been a concern of their own Sunni leaders and of Washington policy-makers, given the sometimes close connection of Shiite populations to Iran’s religious rulers.
    Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian antiship weapons, against which the Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush MO to date.

I should note that I largely disagree with the “Bush is not bluffing” thrust of that second para there. (And I would also describe the list of counter-moves that Iran could be predicted to undertake a little differently.) It is true that the increasingly deranged-seeming Dick Cheney may well favor attacking Iran; but I think that, significantly, Rumsfeld seems not to be acting in total lockstep with Cheney these days (where is he, anyway? seems to have dropped off the map?); and Condi Rice isn’t in lockstep with Cheney either. Therefore there is a good chance at this point that the counsels of wisdom will prevail inside the White House.
In addition, I honestly believe that the military brass will be much more vigilant than they proved able to be back in 2002-2003, about not getting themselves dragged into a disastrous, quite unwinnable military adventure… Perhaps some military planners may have once hoped that airpower alone could win the American war goals in Iran and that they could regain their glory that way? If so, the outcome of Dan Halutz’s stunningly counter-productive air assault against Lebanon should certainly have given them pause.
As, too, the fact that– as explored at some length over at Pat Lang’s blog– it seems clear that during that war at least some of the Israelis’ communications as well as their air force’s ability to deploy many planes in “stealth” mode had been hacked into by Hizbullah and its Iranian backers. (We can assume, here, too, that Iran’s military intelligence would have learned at least as much if not more from the course of the battles during the war as the Israelis and their US military colleagues were able to learn… )
That blog post over at Pat Lang’s place cited this recent Newsday article, which said, “Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month’s battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults.” It even quoted an unnamed Hizbullah commander boasting about that ability. However, just yesterday I heard some very reliable observers who were in Beirut during the war noting that Hizbullah seemed to have an uncanny ability to “predict” IAF strikes against targets in South Beirut, as well, since a number of buildings there that the IAF bombed had been cleared of their inhabitants just shortly beforehand.
Interesting, huh?
… All this just really confirms the judgment I made here back on August 14 (ceasefire day, as it happened) when in response to the famous Sy Hersh piece about the broader implications of the 33-day war, I wrote that, if the Olmert/Halutz Blitz against Lebanon had indeed been intended as a “field test” for a possible future US assault against Iran,

    then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds.

There still remains, of course, the distinct possibility that the Bushites might be eager to do a bit of militaristic bluff ‘n’ blustering in the lead-up to our election day, November 7… Whatever their ultinmate intentions, though, I think it would be great if Virginians could find a way to get over to Norfolk to protest this latest deployment of these machines of death.

The US in Iraq and Afghanistan: what to do?

The news from Iraq has been so bad, for so long, that I’ve been almost too depressed to even write about it. I’m not sure that any of us who opposed the ghastly US invasion and occupation of the country from the get-go– and even before then– can take any pleasure at all in reading the news these days.
Like this AP report today: “Police found 30 bodies bearing signs of torture Friday, the latest in a wave of sectarian killings sweeping the Iraqi capital despite a monthlong security operation… ”
On it goes. On and on and on. I weep for my friends in Iraq. (Yes, and I continue to go to our weekly anti-war demonstrations here at home, whenever I can. Yesterday, once again, we got great support from the drivers-by.)
One possible glimmer of good news: The recently reported failure of SCIRI’s scheme to create a Shiite super-region in the south and cdenter of the country. Such a scheme would surely have led to levels of Sunni-Shiite fear, hatred, and violence even higher than what already exist… plus an intensification of sectarian “cleansing”, endless battles over frontiers and access to resources, etc etc.
Iraqis already have the de-facto secession of much of Iraqi Kurdistan. An unfinished process, certainly, and one which portends a lot more violence along the way. (Kirkuk, anyone?) But I think it’s good that they’re not going to have a second splittist process going ahead within the ethnic-Arab community as well.
So that’s the glimmer of good news for Iraqis at this point. Not much to compensate for all the hundreds of other ghastly things that are going on in their country… And for which, of course, the US, as the occupying power, remains responsible.
… Anyway, I wanted to try to take a “big picture” look at what has been going on in Iraq over recent weeks. And one good jumping-off point for this is this piece by Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at Bradford University in the UK, which was published on Open Democracy’s website yesterday.
The article, which is titled Al-Qaida’s new terrain, looks at the current situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I think this is a good way to approach the subject these days, given the increasing numbers of political and strategic reverberations between the two (US-“liberated”) countries.
Regarding Afghanistan, Rogers writes of “rapidly increasing levels of insecurity” there, citing in particular, this report from the Independent on Sept. 13 in which Kim Sengupta cited a British soldier serving with the US-led ISAF force in the southern province of Helmand as saying:

    We are flattening places we have already flattened, but the attacks have kept coming. We have killed them by the dozens, but more keep coming, either locally or from across the border. We have used B1 bombers, Harriers, F-16s and Mirage 2000s. We have dropped 500lb, 1,000lb and even 2,000lb bombs. At one point our Apaches [helicopter gunships] ran out of missiles they have fired so many. Almost any movement on the ground gets ambushed. We need an entire battlegroup to move things. Yet they will not give us the helicopters we have been asking for.

In the original, that soldier then went on to say, significantly:

    We have also got problems with the Afghan forces. The army, on the whole, is pretty good, although they are often not paid properly. But many of the police will not fight the Taliban, either because they are scared or they are sympathisers.

Sounds familiar?
And this, in what was supposed to be hearts-and-minds-y, reconstruction-focused mission down there in Helmand. Small wonder that some of the Canadians who were persuaded to serve in it feel just a little disillusioned… And of course, NATO is now scurrying around looking for more warm troop-bodies to deploy there.
Rogers writes that there have also been two other disturbing developments outside Afghanistan, that will most likely also undermine the stability of the ISAF-led order there:

    The first is the decision of the Pakistani government to negotiate an agreement with paramilitary groups [including pro-Taliban groups] in North Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan… [T]he indications being that the district will become even more of a refuge, training centre and support base for militias operating across the border…
    The second development is a report from a usually reliable source [Syed Saleem Shahzad, writing in Asia Times Online] that Osama bin Laden himself has now recovered from his serious kidney problems and is in sufficiently good health to take to the road again, possibly travelling from South Waziristan into some eastern Afghan provinces… [T]he very fact that he seems to have emerged from an obscurity that has lasted two years is likely [to] give a boost to the wider al-Qaida movement.

Regarding Iraq, Rogers writes,

    Iraq has experienced an increase in violence on an even more substantial scale…
    In response to the increased violence in Baghdad towards the end of August, United States troops were moved from other parts of Iraq to bolster security in the city. This has exacerbated a loss of control by US forces that stretches right across Anbar province, which covers a large swathe of land right up to the Syria border and includes major centres of resistance such as Fallujah and Ramadi. An unusually frank assessment by a senior US marine-corps intelligence officer, Colonel Pete Devlin, reveals the problems the US military is facing in Anbar (see Thomas E Ricks, “Situation Called Dire in West Iraq“, Washington Post, 11 September 2006).
    Devlin’s report was dated 16 August, just as the violence was escalating in Baghdad, but actually covered the province that lies to the west and north-west of the city. It describes a vacuum in which governmental institutions do not function and the writ of US forces hardly extends beyond their permanent bases. Instead, insurgent groups, including those linked with al-Qaida, have developed local power bases that effectively replace external authority.
    The key point here is that Anbar province encompasses those major centres of the insurgency that have been subject to intense military action by US forces since the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime three and a half years ago. A sustained policy of “clear and hold” has been applied, based on a process of clearing a city, town or district of insurgents and then holding it with a combination of US and Iraqi security forces.
    Fallujah, in particular, was the site of a major marine-corps action right back in April 2004, and this was repeated on a much larger scale in November of that year when a joint US army/marine corps force took over the entire city in the largest single action since April 2003; this killed around 5,000 people and destroying three-quarters of the city’s infrastructure.
    At the time, the Bush administration expressed a solid conviction that Fallujah was the most important centre of the whole Iraqi insurgency, but insurgents took control of much of the city of Mosul even as the US operation in Fallujah was still underway. Moreover, within months of the November 2004 operation, and despite a secured perimeter and well-armed roadblocks, insurgents were proving able to manufacture car-bombs within the city. Elsewhere in the province, including the city of Ramadi, attempts to control the insurgency were failing.
    The problems in Anbar province actually go well beyond insecurity in particular cities because Colonel Devlin’s report implies that the province has essentially been “lost” from US control. This throws into question the whole “clear and hold” policy that has underpinned the US military approach to winning the war in Iraq. There have been occasional reports that CIA assessments of the situation in Iraq have been negative in recent months, but US military intelligence reports have tended to be more positive. Devlin’s is clearly an exception, and appears to be much more in line with the CIA…

I have never been convinced that “Al-Qaeda” has been responsible for most of the anti-US armed activity in Iraq. And nor am I now. But it does seem evident to me that Qaeda-linked networks and cells have a much greater presence in Iraq today than they ever had before March 19, 2003. Well, actually, there were virtually no Qaeda cells in Iraq when Saddam was still in charge– only that little groupuscule that Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi was running up in an area of Kurdistan that was more under US control than it was under Saddam’s.
But matters have changed now. Qaeda-linked groups almost certainly have a non-trivial presence in western Iraq, though it remains as hard as ever to estimate what proportion of the anti-US “resistance” in those areas these groups actually comprise. What does seem clear is that repeated US efforts forcibly to “pacify” majority-Sunni cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, etc etc have had the– quite predictable– effect of radicalizing the population in an anti-US direction.
Paul Rogers, in his piece, adduced the two examples of Iraq and Afghanistan in order to compare the veracity of the claims about those political situations made by, respectively, Qaeda strategist Ayman al-Zawahiri, and President George W. Bush. Bush had said Sept. 11, “Today we are safer but we are not yet safe.” (He also once again used the argument that, “we have to fight the terrorists over there in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them at home”, and in general, did everything he could to associate the US mission in Iraq with the “Global War on terror”.) And Zawahiri recently declared that the US is “facing defeat” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the conclusion to his piece, Rogers writes:

    Uncomfortable though it may be to western analysts, al-Zawahiri may be closer to telling the truth about this situation than President Bush. The first phase of George W Bush’s war on terror is essentially about taking control in Afghanistan and Iraq while destroying the al-Qaida movement. The second phase will then be about regime change in Pyongyang and Tehran and the creation of a pro-American “greater middle east” that will secure Gulf oil supplies for decades. As of now, he is losing, not winning, that first phase.

I agree with this assessment. I agree, even if I don’t think that Qaeda is necessarily doing as well inside Iraq as Rogers seems to…. I just think the situation there is far more complex and fluid than being just a two-party “US vs. Qaeda” game. (That is more the case inside Afghanistan than Iraq, I think– though even there, there are many other parties and interests also involved.)
But anyway, for me this raises a huge question as to what we in the global peace movement plan to do about all this. I don’t think it’s sufficient any more just to make the argument– which I have made many times before– that if only the Bush administration had not been “distracted” by Iraq, then it could have undertaken a serious, post-war stabilization and reconstruction effort in Afghanistan.
Even though that is now revealed today as being truer than ever. There are, as Paul Rogers reminds us, 36,000 foreign triios in Afghanistan– but there are now 147,000 U.S. troops in Iraq! (Hat-tip to Juan C. for that. See you in Ann Arbor on Sunday, Juan.)
But I don’t want to be in a position where my activism contributes to a resurgence of Taliban/Qaeda rule inside Afghanistan.
We can of course also note that it has overwhelmingly been the actions and decisions that the Bush administration has made that have led– almost directly– to the present resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan, and that has led to the birth and some growth of a Qaeda presence inside Iraq.
But again, just saying that doesn’t seem to me to be enough at this point.
I think we need to go back to some first principles regarding the US presence and actions in both those countries, and say first of all that the US’s active exercise of its militaristic policies there has inflicted great suffering on the peoples of both countries. (And both those peoples were anyway very vulnerable, having already been badly traumatized by preceding events, even before the US went and imposed its militarism on them.)
Therefore, we peace-minded US citizens need to call for:

    (1) the withdrawal of US military power from both those countries, and for
    (2) the complete– or any way substantial– demilitarization of our country’s interaction with the rest of the world. (If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. Surely we can see the truth of that at this point?)

Those are our primary responsibilities. Those are things that we US citizens could and should do.
And then after that, do we have any “special” responsibilty as to what happens inside Afghanistan and Iraq once US military force has been extracted from those two situations? Yes, we do. The responsibility to do whatever we can to repair the citizens of those countries from the many traumas we have helped to inflict on them. But helping to “repair” their situation does not come with any concomitant “responsibility” (far less, any “right”) to tell those peoples how they should rule themselves in the future. That is honestly up to them… So long as they don’t do anything to threaten any other countries.
But honestly, right now, whether between the US and Iraq or between the US and Afghanistan: which country’s actions are threatening the other country the worst? To me, it seems very clear in Iraq: the US’s actions threaten Iraqis much more than the actions of any Iraqi (individual or institution) threatens the US. So we have zero “right” to tell the Iraqis, post- a US withdrawal from the country, what kind of policies they they should pursue.
And the same in Afghanistan. Though honestly, matters seem a little more ethically complex there. There, after all, the presence of the US and allied forces already has some legitimacy from the UN…
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, however, a non-catastrophic “end-game” to the present US entanglement looks possible only with much, much more active involvement from the UN. And this will require Washington to try to find a lot of goodwill from all around the world… We peace- and equality-minded US citizens certainly have a huge job to do, to try to turn round this lumbering and currently very destructive “ship of state” of ours before it crashes into the shoals of global catastrophe.

Patrick Lang: “The Best Defense…”

On 9/11, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia featured a talk by Colonel Patrick Lang – who returned here by reputation as a voice of reason, experience, “independence,” and wit regarding the Middle East. He did not disappoint.
Miller Center lectures are a rather unique phenomena here. First, they are popular. For this one, I arrived five minutes “early” (e.g. very late) – to be escorted to the fourth and last overflow room. Not bad for forums that ordinarily are simulcast on the net. Yet Miller audiences are hardly filled with bright-eyed students; the Miller Center is off the main “grounds” (campus) and students rarely comprise more than a handful amid the throngs. Instead, these sessions draw from the extraordinary community of retired policy professionals who seem to be flocking here to Hoo’ville.
Colonel Lang himself is “retired” from full-time government service, having served with distinction in the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) and then at the highest levels of U.S. Military Intelligence. His training includes a Masters Degree in Middle East studies from Utah, and he served in the mid-1970’s as the first Professor of Arabic at West Point. Today, he combines ongoing consulting and training projects with frequent media appearances, ranging from PBS to CBS to BBC. For more, see his bio and publications highlights, via this link on his blog.
Colonel Lang “sticks out” in Washington for his informed willingness to take on what passes for “received wisdom” regarding the Middle East. His publications include the memorable “Drinking the Koolaid” in Middle East Policy. It’s still an important, sobering read. Quite far afield from Graham Allison’s realist “rational choice” decision-making model, Lang attributes the disastrous decision to invade Iraq to a loss of nerve among policy makers and analysts. Instead of honorably sticking to their convictions, even if it meant “falling on their swords,” career-preserving senior policy makers were more inclined to drink from a Jonestown-like vat of poisonous illusions. “Succumbing to the prevailing group-think” drawn up by the small core of neoconservative “vulcans,” Lang’s former intelligence colleagues “drank the koolaid” and said nothing, leaving them henceforth among the “walking dead” in Washington.
Speaking here on 9/11, Lang’s comments were wide-ranging and stimulating; he didn’t stick narrowly to his talk title on Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah, but he had much to suggest related to all three. I offer a few highlights here:
On Military Options against Iran:
Here Lang summarized his now widely cited National Interest article from earlier this spring. (Issue #83 – no link available). Even though Lang and co-author Larry Johnson seem to accept standard worst-case assessments of Iran’s nuclear aspirations, their article makes a compelling case that there are no “realistic” military options to attack Iran, by land or air, conventional, or exotic. Air assaults, whether by Israel or the US, are a “mirage” – unlikely to succeed for long, while incurring the risks of severe retaliations by Iranian assets.
To Lang, these dangers are obvious. Yet spelling them out serves the purpose of going on record so that neoconservatives in the future cannot claim – as they did with Iraq – that the disaster could not have been foreseen. This time, we’ve been warned.
On the greatest source of conflict within Islam:
If I understood him correctly, Lang was not as concerned about a battle between extremists and political pietists, deeming the “pietists” overwhelmingly still in the ascendant. Instead, Lang’s “bigest concern” for the Muslim world was over the “revolution” in the Shia-Sunni equation. The old order of “Sunnis rule and Shias survive” is now in question. Lang depicted Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear option as the latest extension of a long-forming Shia effort to resist domination from the Sunni realm.
Yet Lang did emphasize that Muslims of all stripes come together in resentment towards Israel — as a direct affront to the well being of the faith. To accept the existence of Israel means having to admit that the Islamic world has been truncated, that part of the “realm of God” had been given back. Hizbullah thus has become widely popular among all Muslims, not just among Shia, for its demonstrated capacity to resist both Zionists and the modern day crusaders.
Iran’s support for Hizbullah:
Lang deems Iran’s support for Lebanon’s Hizbullah as “first and foremost” useful for Iran’s pursuit of respect and leadership within the Islamic world. Yet Iranian financial assistance for Lebanon has shrewdly earned friends among Arab Christians and Sunnis too. In this light, Iran’s low-key strategy has been quite successful; hardly a rat-hole, such “success” draws more support.
On Why Hizbullah beat Israel:

Continue reading “Patrick Lang: “The Best Defense…””

GAO charts depressing picture in Iraq

The U.S. “Government Accountability Office” today released an intriguing new study titled Stabilizing Iraq: An Assessment of the Security Situation.
This report is described as a “Statement for the Record by David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States”. And it is indeed good to have this document on the record, even if none of the fairly pertinent questions that Walker asks in it gever gets satisfactorily answered. But heck, some of them might at least get asked, now that he has given the members of the US Congress some hints as to what some good questions might be.
On p.1 of the report (p.3 of the PDF file), he writes,

    The Department of Defense (DOD) has reported obligations of about $227 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq for fiscal years 2003 through June 2006. U.S. assistance appropriated for Iraqi security forces and law enforcement has grown from $3.24 billion in January 2004 to about $13.7 billion in June 2006.

So that’s around $5 billion we taxpayers are laying out each month to fund Cheney and Rumsfeld’s sick fantasies there… Almost beyond belief.
On p.3 of the report Walker lays out three of the key questions he thinks prudent members of Congress should be asking about the use of these generously obligated funds:

    • What political, economic and security conditions must be achieved before the United States can draw down and withdraw military forces from Iraq?
    • Why have security conditions continued to worsen even as Iraq has met political milestones, increased the number of trained and equipped forces, and increasingly assumed the lead for security?
    • If existing U.S. political, economic, and security measures are not reducing violence in Iraq, what additional measures, if any, will the administration propose for stemming the violence?

It strikes me that, while those might be good questions to start with, there are also a whole class of much bigger questions that could and should be asked… Including,

    “Actually, taken altogether, what have we achieved in Iraq with the outlay of all these funds?”
    “How could those funds have been more effectively used to further the real interests of the US citizenry at home and abroad (i.e. What have been the opportunity costs of the decision to do these things in Iraq)?” and most of all,
    “Who are the near-criminally incompetent nincompoops who got us all into this mess and why the heck are they still in office?”

Oh well, I suppose that’s not the kind of language a “Comptroller General” gets to use.
P.6 has a sobering graphic, showing how the number of aattacks against the US and its allies and civilians jumped in April 2004 from about 1,000/month to about 2,000/month– and how it has stayed at or much higher than that latter figure ever since then. (In July 2006, it was around 4,000.)
The report notes with an air of near-wonderment:

    The security situation has deteriorated even as Iraq has made progress in meeting key political milestones and in developing its security forces… [A]ccording to the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the December 2005 elections appeared to heighten sectarian tensions and polarize sectarian divides. According to a U.S. Institute of Peace report, the focus on ethnic and sectarian identity has sharpened as a result of Iraq’s political process, while nationalism and a sense of Iraqi identity have weakened.

So much for elections as any kind of panacea.
If you want to see the US government’s multi-color map of the sectarian/ethnic breakdown (break-up?) of Iraq, you’ll find it on p.13.
On p.15 the report notes some of the problems with the data provided to the GAO regarding the preparation of new Iraqi security forces. (So who was the nincompoop who disbanded the old Iraqi security forces, anyway?)
On pp.19-21, the report lays out its recommendations for the questions that diligent Congressional overseers ought to be asking the DOD about Iraq. In addition to the ones already listed, these include a few other good ones, as well.
But as I noted above, the questions asked are still not pitched at anything like a broad enough strategic and political level.

Bernard Lewis Watch

Bernard Lewis, where are ye when we need ye?
(Irony alert)
At a time when nattering bloggers, columnists, traditional conservatives, and even neoconservatives are openly questioning our rightly guided President’s mental and psychic faculties, we need you, oh wise and venerable Princeton high priest of neoconservative orthodoxy, to really show us the true straight path to enlightenment, to rally our troops around the “doctrine” that bears your name and directed us so brilliantly in liberating and controlling Iraq.
We cannot think of anyone who has been so astonishingly consistent in his prediction accuracy about what would happen after the US invaded Iraq. Even as you now counsel patience, we can see that your vision of secular democracy, imposed forcefully and creatively from without, is now flourishing everywhere in the Middle East. It is simply miraculous that with a track record like yours, you retain such a bipartisan following among US political leaders.
We are of course most grateful that two weeks ago, you capped off your distinguished career by giving us clarity for today – August 22nd. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, you drew from your vast experience to declare that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad – indeed all of Islamic Iran – was the real crazy threat to the world and must never be permitted to have nuclear anything. Islamic Iranians are, well, just too, too, too…. Islamic, to be permitted the luxury of a MAD nuclear capacity.
In your essay, you selectively invoked a 25 year-old quote from Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to inform us that Islamic Iranians really can only think in terms of a cataclysmic choice between annihilating the rest of the world, or joining hands in martyrdom. Never mind that this quote came in the context of perceived global support for Iraq’ invasion of Iran, and no, you never mentioned that Khomeini himself interpreted his own model for Iran’s relations with the world, “neither East nor West,” as meaning ties between respectful equals, rather than the old “lion vs. lamb” patterns.
You instead keep it brilliantly simple for us – and especially for our much challenged President. Its either us, or them. Let’s not be confused with the quarter century of subsequent smokescreen meant to conceal Iran’s true intentions. So if they’re not with us, they must be against us.
From your ascended status, you specifically prophesied for us that today, August 22nd could “possibly” be the day the end of the world will be made manifest by Iran. You were suspicious that the Iranian President had chosen today for Iran’s response to the latest round of European proposals to rein in Iran’s nuclear program. Given that some Muslims commemorate this as the day of the Prophet Mohammad’s miraculous flight to Jerusalem, you warned that, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.”
You didn’t even need to cite any evidence of such actual thinking; your steadfast WSJ editors have such faith in your genius. Yahr!
So if you have not yet taken flight yourself, we beseech you now to help us mere mortals fathom how Iran’s announcements today simply comfirm your divinations of the end of the world. As such, how should we then live? How shall we respond in unison to any suggestions to the contrary? And which stocks of companies on the plains of Armageddon do you advise for us to sell short?

Chuck Hagel: Thinking

I have long been interested in Senator Chuck Hagel, a self-styled “Eisenhower Republican” from Nebraska. Still mulling a run for the Presidency in 2008, Hagel’s latest bout of independent “free thinking” deserves greater attention and scrutiny.
Senator Hagel, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, presents a “problem” for the widespread media and academic characterizations of an unprecedented “polarization” in American politics between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy, and Iraq in particular. No less than the New York Times on July 30th ran a breathless story that began,

“No military conflict in modern times has divided Americans on partisan lines more than the war in Iraq, scholars and pollsters say — not even Vietnam. And those divisions are likely to intensify in what is expected to be a contentious fall election campaign.”

The cited distinguished experts, including Duke Professor Oli Holsti, essentially reduce Americans to mere pawns of their party affiliations, with Republicans being staunch defenders and Democrats as intense critics of the Iraq war. The subsequent defeat of “pro-war” Senator Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary ostensibly would seem to support that line of analysis.
But the New York Times writers and the scholars they quote either forget or consciously ignore Senator Hagel and what he represents — a growing, if still timid, spread of dissident “independent” thinking within Republican ranks.
In the days before the Times story about “unprecedented polarization,” Hagel was out criticizing the Bush Administration, first in a July 28th speech before the Brookings Institution and the next day in a blistering interview with his home-state paper, the Omaha World Herald.
At Brookings, Hagel’s careful remarks emphasized the need for a multilateral approach to the Middle East, for sustained intense diplomatic engagement, with both friends and adversaries, and for the US to be genuinely seen as “fair” in its Middle East dealings – “the currency of trust” and the “wellspring of building consensus.”
While Hagel asserted that “The United States will remain committed to defending Israel….

it need not and cannot be at the expense of our Arab and Muslim relationships. That is an irresponsible and dangerous false choice. Achieving a lasting resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is as much in Israel’s interest as any other country in the world.
Unending war will continually drain Israel of its human capital, resources, and energy as it fights for its survival. The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world. Neither can allow themselves to drift into an “us against the world” global optic or zero-sum game. That would marginalize America’s global leadership, trust and influence, further isolate Israel, and prove to be disastrous for both countries as well as the region.

Ironically, given events, Hagel also called for the revival of the 2002 Beirut Declaration approach to peacemaking, a Saudi/Arab League plan to recognize Israel’s right to exist – and simultaneously to establish a recognized and viable Palestinian state. (a plan then opposed by Israel)
In the follow-up interview with the Omaha World Herald, Hagel called conditions in Iraq “an absolute replay of Vietnam,” where U.S. soldiers have become “easy targets” in a country that has descended into “absolute anarchy.” Hagel was particularly disturbed by reports that the Pentagon was calling for an additional 5,000 US troops for Iraq: “That isn’t going to do any good. It’s going to have a worse effect,” Hagel said. “They’re destroying the United States Army.”
Hagel’s candor has one Nebraska blogger marveling,

My God, a Republican Senator talking about the reality of the situation in Iraq – not just wagging a purple finger in the air, not just tossing-off meaningless platitudes about staying the course.
Though it’s undeniably too simplistic to draw too close a comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, it’s comforting to know that Hagel – a man who actually lived through the horrors of war – keeps an actual eye to the lessons of history rather than just irresponsibly reading from the Bush Administration’s talking points.

At the end of July, on the floor of the Senate, Hagel repeated much of his Brookings speech, prefaced with a harsher criticism of the Bush Administration’s then 3 week old non-approach to ending the Israel-Lebanon confrontation:

“How do we realistically believe that a continuation of the systematic destruction of an American friend, the country and people of Lebanon, is going to enhance America’s image and give us the trust and credibility to lead a lasting and sustained peace effort in the Middle East?”
“The sickening slaughter on both sides must end now. President Bush must call for an immediate cease fire. This madness must stop.”

Before Fox Fire
Hagel’s criticisms at the end of July were largely ignored, until the Senator appeared yesterday, August 20th, on Fox News Sunday, with Chris Wallace. In the following section, I will be quoting from the transcript extensively, and with emphasis added on especially interesting quotes.

Continue reading “Chuck Hagel: Thinking”

Israel’s failed ‘field test’ for a possible US attack on Iran

Sy Hersh’s latest article in the New Yorker tells us that the Bush administration– and in particular, Dick Cheney and his (previously indicted) Middle East hatchet-man, Elliot Abrams– were “closely involved” in the planning of Israel’s terrifying and lethal assault against Lebanon, hoping that this could be, essentially, a “field test” for the tactics that the US might use in a future attack against Iran.
If so– and Hersh makes a good case that this was indeed the reason for the generous diplomatic and military support that the Bushites gave to the Israelis throughout the assault– then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds…
Hersh writes:

    The Bush Administration… was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks.President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

His sourcing is his oft-used mix of (nearly always un-named) “security consultants”, “former intel officials”, etc, though he does cite a number of intriguing named sources. The piece seems to me to be highly credible.
The main ways in which Cheney was hoping that the Israeli assault could help a future, still-possible US assault against Iran were– according to Hersh’s quite intelligent-sounding sources– twofold:

    (1) Israel’s assault could itself serve as, essentially, a testing ground in which tactics and weapons that the US might use against Iran in the future could be field-tested and evaluated– that’s the “prelude” business Hersh refers to– and
    (2) By “taking down” Hizbullah’s capacity to launch blistering rocket attacks against Israel, the Israeli military would remove one of the main factors that might otherwise act as a strong deterrent against any US attack against Iran, maing such an attack more conceivable.

Hersh’s piece reveals a number of significant things about strategic decision-making inside both Israel and the Bush administration.
First, and most evident, is that the Israeli “plan” for taking down Hizbullah was one that relied almost totally on the use of airpower and other forms of stand-off weaponry (ship-launched missiles, drones, etc). This would clearly be the most plannable way in which the Bushites might be planning to attack Ira, since the US, like Israel, harbors an intense wariness to getting bogged down in a ground war.
But of course the “airpower plan” developed and used by IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz failed miserably at taking down Hizbullah’s military capacity– even while it had the entirely predictable political effect of uniting the Lebanese population more firmly around Hizbullah than it had been for the past three or four years.
Interesting results for the “field-test” of tactics that might be used against Iran, huh?
I note that the many Iranian commentators whose work I read, who include many democrats and reformers, are nearly all united in saying that any US military attack against Iran will cause the Iranian population– including them themselves and other dissidents and reformers inside and outside the country– to rally much more strongly around their existing national government than they have for many years, too.
Honestly, though, I don’t think anyone needed a “field test” of the use of widespread anti-infrastructure bombing tactics to be able to reach the conclusion that they would be (a) politically extremely counter-productive, as well as (b) of limited operational value against a well-prepared opponent. My parents stayed in London for much of the Blitz: Bush and Cheney had only to talk to members of the older generation of Londoners (or indeed, of Dresdeners) to find out that air bombardment by foreigners causes a population to rally ever closer round the national flag, not to seek that particular moment in history to rally for deepseated political change.
Worth noting, too: While many Israelis were apparently stunned to discover over the past month that– notably unlike the western powers during their 1999 air assault against Serbia– their own population at home was vulnerable to a hail of rockets launched by Hizbullah in return for the Israeli air assault against Lebanon, the US’s military planners presumably understand quite well that (1) Iran has quite substantial missile and other forces arrayed along its lengthy coast on the northeast of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and (2) that the supply lines and logistics bases for the US military presence in Iraq and in other Gulf countries are all concentrated either within or on the southwest coast of that same body of water.
… Oh, and did I mention that, number (3), a significant portion of the world’s internationally traded oil supplies also pass through the Gulf, on ships that load at vast terminals arrayed along its southwest coast and then pass through the extremely narrow Straits of Hormuz, which are bordered on one side by Iran?
(Re #2 in that list, Hersh notes that within the Bush administration D. Rumsfeld has acted with uncharacteristic self-restraint throughout the Israeli assault on Lebanon so far. Hersh quotes an un-named “U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel” as saying, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and [Rumsfeld] tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.” Well, if Rumsfeld felt that Israel’s war on Lebanon put the US forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy, imagine what effect a US assault on Iran would have on them… )
So altogether, I don’t think Israel’s field test of an airpower-focused assault has gone very well for Cheyney and the other mad-eyed militarists within the Bush administration, do you? Israel’s spectacular failure in achieving either the dismantlement-by-force of Hizbullah’s military capacity or its dismantlement-by-politics (i.e., by turning the Lebanese population against Hizbullah) means that Iran’s leaders must be feeling very relieved indeed today. Indeed, just today, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament announced that the Islamic Republic of Iran would not accept the suspension of uranium enrichment.that had been called for in a recent Security Council resolution. That Islamic Republic News Agency report linked to there tells us that the Speaker, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel

    said the recent resolution passed last week by the United Nations Security Council on Iran’s nuclear case has no legal and logical justification.
    …[H]e reiterated that the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have witnessed no deviation from civil and peaceful activities in Iran’s nuclear program.
    “We believe that the balance between rights and duties should be observed in international organizations,” he said, stressing that the international bodies should not dictate anything to countries while refusing to recognize their rights.
    “If Iran is to be deprived of its inalienable rights, there will be no reason for the country to remain a member of the international bodies and the IAEA,” he added.

Well, I for one am very concerned about both the possibility of nuclear proliferation and the current presence of actual nuclear weapons within the Middle East. Let us all of us work to make the whole region into a zone quite verifiably free of all weapons of mass destruction.
That would include requiring the extremely belligerent government of Israel to give up its nuclear weapons, and the extremely belligerent US to take all its nuclear weapons-bearing ships completely out of the Gulf and the Middle East area as a whole. And yes, of course it would also require Iran and all other states of the region to submit completely to IAEA or even IAEA-plus inspections; and would require all these actors to comply in full with the conventions against chemical and biological weapons.
Colonial-style militarism and double standards really have no place in the kind of 21st century I seek to build. All of these conflict and concerns– every single one of them!– can certainly be resolved through negotiation and other nonviolent means, if only (1) we all make every effort to discover, develop, and actually use such forms of conflict resolution, and (2) we base all these efforts on a simple and strong commitment to the equality of all human beings. There are no states or peoples that have any legitimate claim to be given any “special” treatment. All the peoples of the Middle East have long histories of suffering. The challenge now is to help them– and the rest of us!– to get out of the well-turned cycles of increasingly lethal violence.

Condi takes ownership of the assault on Lebanon

Clearsighted WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson was quite right to note in this piece yesterday the significance of the arrogant, belligerant rhetoric that US Secretary of State Condi Rice has been using regarding Israel’s thunderous, extremely lethal assault against Lebanon.
“We will prevail” – indeed!
Do political pronouncements get get any more belligerent, partisan, and childishly chest-thumping than that? (As a US citizen, I wholeheartedly dissociate myself from that “we.”)
Robinson, who is African-American, writes of Rice:

    her boss remains convinced that grand gestures change everything — witness how the Iraq invasion and occupation have persuaded Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to bring out their guitars and join in chorus after chorus of “Kumbaya.” [Irony alert for him there, I am sure]
    Does Rice envision that in her “new” Middle East, Palestinians will somehow develop amnesia and forget their aspirations for a viable independent state? Does she believe the autocrats in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere will allow free and fair elections — and that voters will reject the militant faith-based factions that for years have been providing needed services that corrupt governments can’t be bothered with? Does she think anyone is going to see the uncontrollable Frankenstein’s monster we created in Iraq as a model to emulate?
    … Other stalwarts of the Bush administration’s grandiose schemes seem exhausted — Rumsfeld is more philosopher than conqueror when he talks about Iraq these days, while Cheney bizarrely sticks with the story that everything’s just fine. But Rice’s life story — little black girl from Birmingham rises to become secretary of state, somehow becoming a hawkish Republican along the way — and her obvious potential in politics still make her an intriguing figure. I personally know three people who are writing books about her.
    Now, in her first real test as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice will be judged on more than her impressive résumé, her obvious intelligence, her poise on the world stage and her fashion sense. Now she has her own war to sort out, and all she’s done so far is scare people with her talk of somehow making the world’s tinderbox into something “new.”
    She should remember the famous dictum from philosopher Rumsfeld, which I paraphrase: You go to war with the Middle East you have, not the Middle East you might want.

There is also a huge further issue to be explored here, of course. And that is: After the extreme partisanship, belligerency, and just plain callousness toward humane and humanitarian concerns that have been displayed in all of the pronouncements from Condi and her boss, to what degree can the US government hope to gain the world’s support for the idea that it should have any kind of “special” role at all– let alone the “monopoly” role that it has long enjoyed, or even any kind of a “leading” role– in the in Arab-Israeli-peace diplomacy that very evidently must follow this crisis?
I would say, very little. The longer the fighting continues, and the longer Bush and Rice continue with their partisanship in it, the more the US’s position in the world will erode. Much, much faster than it would have done otherwise. What sad, blind, and deeply uninformed, unthinking “leaders” they are.

Quotes for the record:

All too much rhetorical nonsense relating to the Lebanon crisis is afoot. Where to start? Many of the themes I raised here weeks ago are finally being taken up meekly by reporters and commentators. No comfort in that.
I do not think I have ever been more embarrassed and worried for my country – and I say that as one whom my former colleagues at Houghton would have accused of being quite the conservative, patriotic type. Maybe I got converted somewhere. Or maybe I’ve been quite free of ideological straight-jackets all along. Ah never mind, let the facts – and the quotes below – speak.
So as I craft essays on, among other things, Iran and Hizbullah, here’s a selection of particularly memorable quotes re. Lebanon related matters from the past week or so, with my own brief comments inserted:
Retired Israeli army Col. Gal Luft, first quoted in Washington Post essay by Wright & Ricks on 19 July:

“Israel is attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is: If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land.”

Or in the “open ended” words of Israeli chief of Staff, Brigadier General Dan Halutz, “Nothing is safe (in Lebanon), as simple as that.”
Dr. Martin Accad, academic dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary of Lebanon, writing on 25 July in Christianity Today (an influential “evangelical” weekly)

“Seven hundred thousand out of a total Lebanese population of 3.5 million, 20 percent of the population, mostly Shiites, are now being cared for and given refuge by mostly Christian schools, churches, and
other humanitarian organizations. This is the story of the Good Samaritan at a mega scale! And to think that this is the outcome of a strategy that meant to rouse anti-Hezbollah feelings among the Lebanese population and government. Talk about a failed strategy! Of course, this has happened so many times before that any thoughtful
tactician would have learned the lesson by now, but military muscle is always too hedonistic and narcissistic to listen to the voice of reason and history.”

Fascinating – considering the source that published this quote. Lately, it seems that one wi’ll find more “balance” in some “evangelical” Christian sources – home of “dispensationalism” – than you will on CNN domestic, especially “Blitzer-world”…. (CNN International is more like BBC – but very few Americans can get it.)
Zbigniew Brzezinski, from a speech on 20 July 2006

“I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect–maybe not in intent–the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages. Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, youÕre killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You are simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.”

And from the same session’s Q&A:

Secretary of State Rice’s trip to the Middle East will be like “sitting in front of a mirror, talking to herself” if she does not deal diplomatically with the major players.

Continue reading “Quotes for the record:”

Kucinich leads again (in U.S. Congress)

This, from Jewish Voice for Peace:

    Finally, we have a bill in the House of Representatives that we need to support. Brought by Dennis Kucinich and with 23 co-sponsors, H. Con. Res. 450 calls for an immediate cease-fire, multi-party negotiations and an international peacekeeping force. Click here to read the text of the bill.
    The US Campaign to End the Occupation has designated Tuesday, July 25 a national call-in day. JVP, along with the US Campaign, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Council for the National Interest, Partners for Peace, Progressive Democrats of America, United for Peace and Justice, Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee—Chicago, and Interfaith Peace- Builders are coming together to call for this national day of action.
    Please take a moment to locate your representative’s phone number by going to our home page at www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org. Scroll down near the bottom of the page and enter your zip code under “Who’s Your Rep?” Call your representative on July 25 and urge them to vote Yes on H. Con. Res. 450.
    Now that we have a bill that we can support. It is crucial that we send a clear message to our representatives to urge them to support this bill. Click here to send an e-mail to let your representative know that you support H. Con. Res. 450. But phone calls are much more effective, especially if we all do it on the same day. So call today, July 25 and tell Congress we want the killing to stop now!

Huge congratulations to our friends from JVP for their moral clarity and leadership on this issue and their great organizational skills.
(Confession: I have not had the chance to read the legislation in question. But given the identity of the organizations listed as co-sponsoring this campaign I feel confident of joining it.)