Articles by Jim Lobe

Paul Wolfowitz’s admission that he and others were "clueless on counterinsurgency" at the Hudson Institute’s symposium on Douglas Feith’s "War and Decision" last week was certainly the lede as Eli Lake reported it in the New York Sun reported last week, but overlooked were the remarks on the same panel by Dan Senor who demolished – albeit very politely – just about everything Feith and Wolfowitz had to say.

I’m never been a fan of Senor – he has been a spokesman for Freedom’s Watch – and he was, of course, spokesman and a top adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief L. Paul ("Jerry") Bremer to whom he obviously retains some sense of loyalty. But his responses to the most basic point made by Feith in his book and Wolfowitz during the symposium – that things went bad when the U.S. declared an "occupation" instead of turning over the government to and empowering an Iraqi authority dominated by "externals" like Ahmed Chalabi and other members of the so-called "London Group" – were clear and irrefutable (at least by Feith and Wolfowitz) and also served to point up once again how completely ignorant the administration’s leading hawks were both about Iraqi society and the likely impact on it of the U.S. invasion.

The symposium, which Hudson has made available in both transcript and video forms on its website, was important, if only because it marked the first time that I know of that Wolfowitz, who was Feith’s nominal superior at the Pentagon, has spoken publicly at length about the Iraq War since he left the administration in 2005 to take over the World Bank (from which he was forced to step down last June). His contribution to the panel, which also included former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter Rodman, consisted mostly of quoting passages from Feith’s book and agreeing with them.

In particular, he quoted Feith’s central argument: "The chief mistake [by the U.S. government] was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year, even though the dangers of occupation had been recognized throughout the Bush administration and even though the president’s policy had called for the early creation of an Iraqi interim authority. The central task of liberation was to bring about political transition in Iraq, but this was impeded beginning months before Saddam’s overthrow by the self-induced anxieties at State and CIA [always the bad guys for the neocons - ed's note] about the presumed lack of legitimacy of the Iraqi opposition." According to Feith and Wolfowitz (and Richard Perle, for that matter), it was this decision that at least fueled – if it didn’t create – the insurgency.

But to Senor, the decision to declare and sustain a legal occupation was "irrelevant" given the basic fact that the "occupation" was a fact of life for the vast majority of Iraqis.

"To them, occupation was the fact that virtually every interaction they had with any official providing them a government service, whether it was the dispensing of basic essential services like electricity and water and gasoline, or providing basic security in those early months, was conducted by American men and women in uniform and our coalition forces. That is the fact. To them, that was occupation. For most Iraqis, occupation existed in their daily lives when they walked out their front door and there was a Humvee sitting around the corner and they had to drive through checkpoints that were manned by American military. Anywhere they need to go, those checkpoints were clogging up Baghdad. That to them is occupation.

"…And the idea that we could be tinkering with position papers and memos about how we define occupation and that would somehow change the perception of Iraqis’ sense of occupation day to day, I think, is somewhat disconnected from reality."

Moreover, the assumption by Feith and Wolfowitz that transferring power to the "externals" favored by the Pentagon civilians would have prevented or "tamped down" – rather than intensified – the resistance, particularly within the Sunni population, was simply unfounded, according to Senor. “Indeed, …[i]f you simply look at some of the actions they did take take when …we handed authority [for] de-Ba’athification over to the Iraqi Governing Council, they took [its] implementation …in a far more extreme direction than anybody envisioned." Indeed, Senor said, transferring authority to that group would have created "a sovereign government …dominated by Shiite Islamists."

Aside from the omnipresence of American soldiers, the basic problem faced by the U.S. in Iraq from the outset was the perceived disenfranchisement of the Sunni population, Senor stressed. "You have a community that represented some 20 percent of the population that for the entire modern life of Iraq, at least its modern-state life, had been in control of the country …in very possible way. …And the notion that we were going to go into Iraq, in a society that had deep and visceral inter-communal tensions and dislocate or disenfranchise or at least take this community and have their influence represent their proportionate representation in the population. And for that not to be the problem is something [that] at best we may not have seen coming…"

Feith and Wolfowitz admit that also they did not see it coming (although they tend to see the "Sunni" problem as an all-controlling "Ba’athist" conspiracy), but then they insist that no agency in the U.S. government foresaw it. In his presentation, Wolfowitz quoted approvingly again from Feith’s book:

"What was not anticipated by any office, as far as I know, was the Iraqi regime’s ability to conduct a sustained campaign against coalition forces after it was overthrown. When the CIA in August, 2002, analyzed how Saddam might attack, surprise, or otherwise foil us in a war, its analysis dealt only with actions Saddam might take while still in power. I never saw a CIA assessment of the Ba’athist after their ouster would be able to organize, recruit for, finance, supply, command, and control an insurgency, let alone an alliance with foreign Jihadists."

Wolfowitz noted that he, too, had never seen any such study.

Yet, we now know that two such studies did exist, although they were undertaken on the initiative of the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, Paul Pillar, of the National Intelligence Council and officially commissioned by the State Department’s Policy Planning Office. And they were theoretically available to all relevant policymakers, including Wolfowitz and Feith, well before the invasion. They were declassified by the Senate Intelligence Committee in May, 2006.

Here’s how Pillar summarized their findings in a Foreign Affairs article just before their declassification:

"Before the war, on its own initiative, the intelligence community considered the principal challenges that any post-invasion authority in Iraq would be likely to face. It presented a picture of a political culture that would not provide fertile ground for democracy and foretold a long, difficult, and turbulent transition. It projected that a Marshall Plan-type effort would be required to restore the Iraqi economy, despite Iraq’s abundant oil resources. It forecast that in a deeply divided Iraqi society, with Sunnis resentful over the loss of their dominant position and Shiites seeking power commensurate with their majority status, there was a significant chance that the groups would engage in violent conflict unless an occupying power prevented it. And it anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks – including by guerrilla warfare – unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam.

"…[W]ar and occupation would boost political Islam and increase sympathy for terrorists’ objectives – and Iraq would become a magnet for extremists from elsewhere in the Middle East.[Emphasis added]

Of course, the fact that these studies originated with the CIA and the State Department no doubt reduced their credibility for hawks like Wolfowitz and Feith who were so determined to go to war that they never bothered to check out what the National Intelligence Council or the State Department’s Policy Planning Office (which Wolfowitz at one time headed!) was producing. They much preferred the reassuring predictions they were getting from the exiles in the London Group, the same ones who, at least Senor now recognizes, either led them down the garden path or who, like Wolfowitz himself, had no clue about the Iraq to which the Pentagon was about to return them.

In any event, the Hudson transcript (or video) is certainly worth reviewing for the ease with which Senor takes apart virtually every point made by Wolfowitz and Feith and the apparent inability of Wolfowitz or Feith to rebut him. While Senor never suggests that he thinks the original decision to invade Iraq was a mistake, it’s pretty clear that he thought the decision was not very well thought out by its principal advocates at the Pentagon.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Just to add a little to last month’s post, “Is the Pentagon Policy Shop Funding Likudist Fronts?”, on Devon Gaffney Cross’ London-based Policy Forum for International Security Affairs, Jeffrey Gedmin’s (?) Case for Freedom, and Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.org, all of which appear to have as a common denominator — and a common, Israel-based IP address — interlocking directorates, their participation at last June’s Prague Conference on Democracy and Security Conference (about which I’ve written twice, here and here) and OneJerusalem’s director, a New York-based attorney named Allen Roth, who, it turns out, is a long-time aide and adviser to Ronald Lauder. It was Lauder, a major supporter of former Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chief Binyamin Netanyahu, who reportedly gave $1 million to OneJerusalem to launch a campaign against President Bush’s Annapolis conference last fall, apparently because he feared that renewed, U.S.-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians could lead to a divided Jerusalem. It was also in his capacity as president of the World Jewish Congress, a post to which he was elected in 2007, that Lauder appealed in a controversial open letter to the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, not to do anything that would compromise Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.

The first thing worth noting is that both the Policy Forum and Case for Freedom websites appear to be moribund. Despite the $79,000 Pentagon grant it received last September and its new mandate to reach out beyond the elite media “to the active, curious, and engaged public” in Great Britain and Europe, the Policy Forum site — which is entitled Policy Forum for International Affairs but which refers to itself internally as Policy Forum for International Security Affairs — apparently hasn’t been updated since last June when it ran some opinion pieces on the U.S. presidential campaign.

The Case for Freedom site, which describes itself as a “dynamic community for dissidents and freedom’s advocates across the globe,” appears nearly as dead as Policy Forum’s. Its last news entry is a link to a February 26 article from the Daily Telegraph entitled “China Mounts Dissident Assault before Games.” Aside from its dynamic self-description, the inactivity on the Case for Freedom site is particularly remarkable given the fact that it was launched at Sharansky’s Prague Conference (at which Bush himself gave a high-profile address over the objections of the State Department) and the peculiar role played by Gedmin, the president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), in the launch. Indeed, ten months after the group’s founding, Gedmin’s interview of Gary Kasparov remains the featured item on the group’s home page.

Gedmin, of course, is the former director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (which sent a five-person delegation led by Richard Perle and Michael Novak to the Prague Conference). Shortly after 9/11, in November, 2001, Gedmin became head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin where his job, according to right-wing Philanthropy Roundtable’s “National Terror Guidebook,” was to “explain key Bush administration policies (and) …challenge the more common assumptions held by Europeans about the United States.” In other words, his role was somewhat similar to that of Devon Gaffney Cross’, who began operating her Policy Forum in London in 2002. As I noted in last month’s post, Cross and Gedmin have been close colleagues for quite some time. In addition, however, I’ve been told by two sources acquainted with the Berlin office’s activities that, on taking over the office, Gedmin boasted to his new colleagues that he was bringing to his new job a $1 million grant — from Lauder’s foundation. (It’s worth noting that the Berlin office in FY 2005 was also awarded a $1.7 million grant to “bring together key policy makers, opinion leaders, NGO representatives, media, and human rights activists from the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. to discuss practical steps toward the promotion of civil society and democracy in the region” from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, then overseen by Liz Cheney). Among the main activities of the office under Gedmin was to bring prominent neo-conservatives and other hawks to Berlin to meet with prominent Germans.

Once again, one has to ask how much sense it makes for a prominent neo-conservative, Iraq war advocate and staunch defender, and beneficiary of Lauder’s largesse to be placed in charge of U.S. government broadcasting to Arab and Iranian audiences on issues such as U.S. policy in the Middle East and the Gulf. (Of course, another AEI alumnus, James Glassman, is chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the RFE/RL’s oversight body, and has been nominated to serve as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.) Surveys of regional opinion have consistently shown overwhelming frustration and anger with Washington’s steadfast support for Israel in its conflict with Palestinians. So why place someone in such a high-profile government post who is so clearly part of a network of individuals who are so as closely associated with Likudists like Netanyahu, Sharansky, and Lauder? Why, indeed, place someone in such a high-profile post who is so clearly part of a network that even opposes negotiations of the kind promoted by Bush himself?

Meanwhile, you’ll remember that the IP address that is home to One Jerusalem, Case for Freedom, and Policy Forum also hosts the personal blog of Caroline Glick, the hard-line deputy managing editor and columnist of the Jerusalem Post and one-time Netanyahu foreign-policy adviser. As a correspondent pointed out, Glick is also senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Frank Gaffney’s ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, where, according to her blog, she “travels several times a year to Washington (to) … brief senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.” Gaffney, of course, is Devon Cross’ brother and a beneficiary of casino king Irving Moskowitz, although it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Lauder and Roth were also CSP contributors.

Finally, another correspondent pointed out that the mysterious Zacharias Gertler, who served with Roth as a director of Cross’s Policy Forum until last May, was credited by yet another close Netanyahu and One Jerusalem associate, former Israel Amb. Dore Gold, with being “the real force who inspired” his 2003 book, “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.” In Gold’s acknowledgments section, Gertler’s help and encouragement are noted directly before those of Yigal Carmon, the president and co-founder (with Meyrav Wurmser) of MEMRI, and of Allen Roth and Steven Schneier, a major Netanyahu fund-raiser who also attended the Prague conference as a representative of the Policy Forum. Gold’s writings are a frequent feature on onejerusalem.org’s website.

Marking the impending fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sunday’s influential ‘Outlook’ section of the New York Times asked “nine experts on military and foreign affairs to reflect on their attitudes in the spring of 2003 and to comment on the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wished they had considered in the prewar debate.” Of the nine, two were serving in the military at the time, two others were war sceptics (Anthony Cordesman — who memorably called the notion that the Iraq war would democratize the Middle East “neo-crazy” — and Anne-Marie Slaughter), and the rest were public boosters of the war, including L. Paul Bremer III, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, and — not one, not two, but — three fellows from the hard-line neo-con American Enterprise Institute (AEI): Frederick Kagan (who became formally affiliated with AEI well after the occupation had begun); Danielle Pletka; and Richard Perle who, in addition to his AEI responsibilities in the run-up to the war, served as chairman of Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board (DPB) until he resigned his chairmanship (while maintaining his membership) just before the war. Of the latter three, only Pletka admits she may have been mistaken in a key assumption — that “all who year for freedom, once free, would use it well” — an assumption, incidentally, that I don’t think was in any event central to her support for the war. But confirming Jacob Heilbrunn’s thesis that neo-conservatives always know “they were right,” Perle’s contribution is, predictably, pure chutzpah, a rewriting of history that defies virtually everything that is known about the decisions and the way they were taken in the early days of the occupation.

For those who aren’t fully acquainted with both the meaning of chutzpah (it’s about a man who kills his father and mother and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan) and Perle’s penchant for using it, I am reprinting below (the link to the original appears to have gone bad) a story entitled “Chutzpah, Thy Name is Perle” that I wrote for tompaine.com three years ago after Perle blamed the CIA for faulty intelligence regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD). I also published several items, which you can find here, here, and here, on my blog last spring about Perle’s efforts to rewrite his own role in championing the Iraq war and occupation.

What’s so remarkable about Perle’s latest version of events is that he lays the primary blame for the failure of the occupation neither on Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, nor on anyone (God forbid) in the Pentagon — not on Donald Rumsfeld, not on Paul Wolfowitz, and definitely not on his protege, Douglas Feith, who owed his job as Undersecretary for Policy to Perle’s personal intervention with Rumsfeld. Rather, the occupation failed, according to Perle, as a result of the decisions of all those senior officials whose advice, according to virtually every other account (with the dubious exception of Feith’s, of course), was most consistently ignored or marginalized both in the run-up to the war and in the occupation’s early days.

“Rather than turn Iraq over to Iraqis to begin the daunting process of nation building, a group including Secretary of State Colin Powell; the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice; and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet — with President Bush’s approval — reversed a plan to do that,” according to Perle’s account. What is even more remarkable is that he goes on to partially excuse Bremer himself, insisting that he “did his best to make a foolish policy work.”

Bremer himself has written and testified several times that his orders for policy shifts came directly through the Pentagon command — from Rumsfeld down through Feith. And, of course, one of the occupation’s most controversial and destructive policies — de-Ba’athification — was virtually hatched at AEI where it was championed most strongly by Perle’s own AEI associates, including Pletka, Michael Rubin and Reuel Marc Gerecht.

In fairness to Perle, he has long maintained that the occupation would have gone perfectly well had Washington first created a government-in-exile under the leadership of his friend, Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which would then have taken over the country after U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. And, indeed, it was Wolfowitz, apparently with Cheney’s okay (thus circumventing Powell, Rice, Tenet, and Bush himself), that Chalabi and some 700 of his “Free Iraqi Forces” were flown into the country in the early days of the invasion, presumably to take on precisely that role. “I was astonished (and dismayed) that we did not turn to well-established and broadly representative opponents of Saddam Hussein’s regime to assume the responsibilities of an interim government while preparing for elections,” writes Perle in an apparent reference to the INC and Chalabi. (As documented by reporters on the ground, Chalabi’s “Free Iraqi Forces,” which he promised would restore order to a chaotic Baghdad in mid-April, quickly lost whatever discipline it had after grabbing and securing various prime parcels of real estate that could be of use to Chalabi’s political and financial ambitions.)

Perhaps Perle’s preferred scenario would indeed have worked out just as he had predicted, although the notion that Chalabi, whose party famously failed to win a single seat in Iraq’s last elections, was either “well-established” or “broadly representative” appears utterly ludicrous in retrospect. And the fact that Perle’s friend may have been more than inclined to help Iran asserts its post-war interests in Iraq — or may even have been an agent of the mullahs — seems still never to have penetrated his otherwise vivid imagination. Yet, according to Aram Rosten, Chalabi’s biographer (via Laura Rozen’s warandpiece.com blog), Chalabi’s main Iranian interlocutor just before and after the invasion was a top Quds Force general who in January was named by the Treasury Department as one of four individuals subject to U.S. financial sanctions for his role in “threatening peace and stability in Iraq”.

In any event, one has to ask why the Times, which, after admitting that its pre-war coverage of Iraqi WMD was highly misleading and journalistically irresponsible, then added a pro-war propagandist like William Kristol to its stable of regular columnists, would not only offer a disproportionate amount of space to people whose judgment with respect to Iraq and Iraqis has proved so disastrously wrong, but also, in Perle’s specific case, offer it to someone with such a long-standing and proven record of contempt for the historical record. I guess it shows that chutzpah has its rewards.

UPDATE: The Times has an important and relevant story Monday on the other major disastrous decision enforced by the occupation (and the Pentagon) in addition to the sweeping de-Baathification order that was so vigorously advocated by Rubin, Pletka, Gerecht, and Perle’s other proteges at AEI and at the Pentagon; namely, the decision to disband the Iraqi Army. While major responsibility for this decision clearly belongs to Bremer and his liberal hawk deputy, Walter Slocombe, it seems clear that from the various accounts included in the article that Rumsfeld and his neo-con advisers, including Feith, willingly went along with the idea, if not helped to ensure that it was adopted. (AEI fellows had been arguing for a massive purge of the officer corps and a drastic down-sizing of the army before the invasion, let alone before Bremer arrived on the scene.) The article makes clear that the State Department and other relevant agencies, including the Joint Chiefs, were left completely out of the decision by Bremer and the Pentagon.

As Bremer states, “I had clear instruction from the president to report through Rumsfeld. I was following the chain of command established by the president.” And here’s a revelatory sentence: “A memo from Mr. Feith’s office to Mr. Slocombe notes that the joint staff, which serves as a secretariat for the Joint Chiefs, provided comments on a draft of the decree to abolish the Iraqi Army. But the disbanding of the army came as a surprise to the officers working on Iraqi reconstruction issues.” The articles goes on to quote the Joint Chiefs chairman at the time, Gen. Richard Myers, as saying that the issue had never been debated by the chiefs. In other words, even as of May 23, 2003, when the decree formally disbanding the Iraq army was issued by the CPA, all of the individuals blamed by Perle for screwing up the occupation — Powell, Rice, Tenet — were unable to exert influence on policy, and the Pentagon — with Perle’s friends there firmly in charge — was making the decisions.

In any event, here’s the 2004 story:

Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Perle
Feb 03 2004

Chutzpah—a Yiddish word that the dictionary defines as “unmitigated effrontery or impertinence, gall”—is best illustrated by a much-cited anecdote.

“Chutzpah is when a man kills his mother and his father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he is an orphan.”

In the last few days in Washington, however, prominent neoconservatives, particularly arch-hawk Richard Perle, are giving new meaning to the word.

It wasn’t enough that Perle, author of a new book titled An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism, gave the keynote speech last week at a rally at the Washington Convention Center in solidarity for an Iranian rebel group officially listed by the State Department as a “foreign terrorist organization.” (A self-described terrorism expert, Perle later pleaded ignorance about the rally’s purpose, despite the fact that the Red Cross and the La Leche League had figured out the connection and withdrawn their own association with the event.)

No, now Perle and his fellow neoconservatives are hailing chief U.S. weapons-of-mass-destruction hunter, David Kay. On resigning from his post last week, Kay charged that the intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, clearly exaggerated the size and scope of Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD programs. “I don’t think they existed,” he said, insisting that he himself, as well as the intelligence community, “were almost all wrong” about Iraq’s alleged WMD stockpiles and reconstitution of Iraq’s nuclear-arms program.

“I have always thought our intelligence in the Gulf has been woefully inadequate,” Perle, former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB), confided to The New York Times after Kay disclosed his findings.

You would think from that remark that Perle had spent the run-up to the Iraq invasion warning Congress and the public that the intelligence community had hyped the WMD threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

But, if you thought that, of course, you would be dead wrong. No, Perle and his close associates—such as Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney and former CIA director James Woolsey—said quite the opposite: their single-minded message, repeated endlessly in op-ed columns, television interviews and Congressional testimony, was that the intelligence community was consistently underestimating the Iraqi threat in a deliberate effort to undermine the drive to war.

Their campaign now—and there is an orchestrated campaign underway, make no mistake—is to blame the CIA for exaggerating the Iraqi threat must rank right up there with parenticidal orphans.

It was Gaffney, a long-time Perle protégè who worked under him in Sen. “Scoop” Jackson’s office and later at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, for example, who was raising alarms over Hussein’s non-existent “atomic and perhaps even thermonuclear weapons” even before 9/11.

Hawking The War

“He (Hussein) has weapons of mass destruction,” Perle stated unequivocally as early as November 2001—even as his friends in the Pentagon were setting up their Office of Special Plans (OSP), an informal intelligence unit whose job it was to mine raw intelligence to find and disseminate the most threatening possible evidence of Iraq’s WMD programs and alleged ties to Al Qaeda that the neoconservatives thought the CIA or even the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency had not given adequate credence.

Perle even used his good offices as DPB chairman to ensure that “defectors” handled by his good friend Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC)—such as Khidir Hamza, a former nuclear scientist who stoked totally unfounded fears that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear-weapons program—were given the widest possible exposure to policy-makers. Senior intelligence officials have since identified the INC’s defectors as the source of a great deal of the mis-, if not dis-information, that skewed its assessments.

For Perle, Hussein’s WMD program was simply a given. “If (Hussein) eludes us and continues to refine, perfect and expand his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons,” he testified to Congress in the fall of 2002, “the danger to us, already great, will only grow.” The problem, of course, was that the arsenal whose existence was never subject to the slightest doubt by Perle and his friends didn’t exist.

Indeed, just two weeks before his friend Kay acknowledged there were simply no weapons to be found, Perle insisted to an audience at his home base, the American Enterprise Institute, “I don’t think that you can draw any conclusion from the fact that stockpiles were not found.”

While Perle clearly assumed the existence of a massive WMD threat as described by his INC sources, he was even more expansive in the run-up to the war about Hussein’s alleged operational ties to Al Qaeda, a notion for which only the political appointees at OSP could ever find even the slightest, but almost always uncorroborated, evidence.

Perle, for example, has always insisted that 9/11’s operational mastermind, Mohammed Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence official, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, at a Prague cafe five months before the suicide hijackings, despite the fact that the CIA and the FBI have both concluded that Atta was in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting. When al-Ani was captured by U.S. forces last July, Perle declared that his version of events would soon be confirmed, but then, in a suggestion that the CIA could not be trusted, added, “a lot depends on who is doing the interrogating.” By all accounts, al-Ani has steadfastly denied ever meeting Atta, a problem Perle has not addressed lately.

An Axe To Grind Against The CIA

Perle and his fellow-neocons’ contempt for the CIA dates to the 1970s when he and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the agency of being naive about Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions. That set the pattern. To Perle, the CIA, like the State Department, has long been a haven for naive and foolish “liberals” incapable of understanding just how dangerous and threatening the enemy—any enemy—really is.

“Over time, it has become an agency with very strong, mostly liberal policy views, and these views have again and again distorted its analysis and presentation of its own information,” Perle wrote in An End to Evil, which was co-authored by former White House speechwriter, David Frum.

“The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures,” he continued, arguing that this is especially true of the Arab world. “The CIA’s reports on the Middle East today are colored by similar ideological biases—exacerbated by poor understanding of the region’s culture and a politically correct disinclination to acknowledge unflattering facts about non-Western peoples.”

“(D)ata yields useful information only if it is analyzed without ideological prejudices or institutional biases,” according to Perle’s book. “A good intelligence analyst must constantly question his own ideas about the phenomena he studies.”

Good advice. Now, if only Perle and his fellow-neocons had applied it to themselves, their own assessments might not have been so much worse than the CIA’s.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

In the most recent edition of its annual “Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism” released Thursday, the State Department — and hence the U.S. government — moves ever more closely to a long-standing neo-conservative tenet: that criticism of Israel or Israeli policies often, if not always, equals anti-Semitism. The report also suggests that comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to South African apartheid — as former President Jimmy Carter did in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid — also amounts to anti-Semitism. And it focuses on the United Nations as a breeding ground for anti-Semitism as expressed through criticism of Israel, another major neo-conservative theme that has intensified sharply over the past five years, notably through the efforts of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the National Review Online and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

Here’s the argument as laid out in the introductory section of the report entitled Contemporary Forms of Anti-Semitism”:

“Anti-Semitism has proven to be an adaptive phenomenon. New forms of anti-Semitism have evolved. They often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that — whether intentionally or unintentionally — has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.

“The new anti-Semitism is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations. For example, various United Nations bodies are asked each year on multiple occasions to commission investigations of what often are sensationalized reports of alleged atrocities and other violations of human rights by Israel. Various bodies have been set up within the UN system with the sole purpose of reporting on what is assumed to be ongoing, abusive Israeli behavior. The motive for such actions may be to defuse an immediate crisis, to show others in the Middle East that there are credible means of addressing their concerns other than resorting to violence, or to pursue other legitimate ends. But the collective effect of unremitting criticism of Israel, coupled with a failure to pay attention to regimes that are demonstrably guilty of grave violations, has the effect of reinforcing the notion that the Jewish state is one of the sources, if not the greatest source, of abuse of the rights of others, and thus intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism.

“Comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis is increasingly commonplace. Anti-Semitism couched as criticism of Zionism or Israel often escapes condemnation since it can be more subtle than traditional forms of anti-Semitism, and promoting anti-Semitic attitudes may not be the conscious intent of the purveyor. Israel’s policies and practices must be subject to responsible criticism and scrutiny to the same degree as those of any other country. At the same time, those criticizing Israel have a responsibility to consider the effect their actions may have in prompting hatred of Jews. At times hostility toward Israel has translated into physical violence directed at Jews in general. There was, for example, a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide during the conflict between Hizballah and Israel in the summer of 2006.” [Italics added.]

Of course, it would be interesting to apply this analysis to the rhetoric used by senior political figures, neo-conservative groups (such as FDD or the American Enterprise Institute), and media in the U.S. and Europe about Islam, Muslims or about various kinds of Islamic political movements in the Arab and Islamic worlds, particularly with respect to the notion that these actors may have a “responsibility to consider the effects their actions may have in prompting” Islamophobia. [I suspect the report’s author meant “promoting” rather than prompting.]

The report purports to apply a definition of anti-Semitism established by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) to its own analysis. But it actually goes beyond that by suggesting at various points, particularly in relation to UN conferences, resolutions, and the reports by UN Special Rapporteurs, that any comparison of the treatment by Israel of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories with apartheid amounts to anti-Semitism. Carter, however, goes unmentioned, perhaps because the report’s scope does not cover the anti-Semitism in the United States. If it did, I suppose it would have to also address the anti-Semitism — as opposed to the philo-Zionism — of the Christian Right, and that wouldn’t be good for a Republican administration. That anti-Semites like Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell can be the most zealous supporters of Israel, particularly a Greater Israel, for theological reasons certainly poses some delicate challenges for those disposed to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. So far as the neo-conservatives are concerned, however, that conundrum was settled 25 years ago when Irving Kristol noted that Jews should not be concerned about an alliance with the Christian Right despite its anti-Semitic beliefs. “Why would it be a problem for us?” he wrote back in the early 1980s. ”It is their theology; but it is our Israel.”

The report is being issued in advance of next Wednesday’s a meeting at AEI next week on the subject of “Anti-Semitism and the War on Terror” featuring Germany historian Matthias Kuentzel, the author of the ‘Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11.’ As pointed out in the AEI blurb, the author’s “central thesis is that a great deal of contemporary Islamist anti-Semitism comes directly from the Third Reich, that it was institutionalized in the Middle East during the Second World War, and that is has grown ever since, thanks to organizations and individuals who — in many cases — received direct ideological, political, and financial support from teh Nazis and who are still very active.” AEI fellows Michael Ledeen and Michael Novak (who personally assured me at another AEI seminar back in 1981 that the Argentine military junta could not possibly be considered a neo-Nazi regime as alleged by one its most famous victims, Jacobo Timerman, after his release — as a result of pressure from Jimmy Carter, no less — from one of its secret torture prisons) will comment after the presentation.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

The independent National Security Archive has just published recently declassified documents regarding the birth and evolution of the infamous Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) that was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post in early 1992 and that later became the inspiration for the Project for the New American Century in 1997 and eventually codified in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America in September 2002 — the codification of the so-called “Bush Doctrine.” The document, which Sen. Joseph Biden, among others, denounced as a “Pax Americana” at the time, called, among other things, for a global strategy based on U.S. military pre-eminence, pre-emption of rogue states and possible rivals, and coalitions of the willing (which it called “ad hoc assemblies”). The 15 documents featured by the Archive was drafted between June 5, 1991 — just after the first Gulf War — and January 1993 when then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney released an official, if euphemistic, version of the controversial document. Most of the documents, however, are heavily redacted.

Among other things, the document illustrates the important role played by Scooter Libby, as well as Paul Wolfowitz (who is generally given credit or blame for the document) in coordinating the project, an additional piece of evidence that Libby, rather than Wolfowitz or Elliott Abrams, was probably the most important and influential neo-conservative in the current administration. It’s increasingly clear that Libby’s demise in October 2005 marked a heavy blow to neo-conservative hopes of retaining decisive influence in the administration. Unmentioned, however, is the informal role played by Albert Wohlstetter and Richard Perle, among others, in helping to shape the outcome through Abram Shulsky, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, and Libby.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly, I think I was among the first — if not the first (according to Nexis) — to write about the relationship between the leaked DPG and the strategy pursued by the Bush administration after 9/11 — for IPS in ‘Pax Americana’ All Over Again, December 27, 2001; and for Alternet in Bush’s Foreign Policy Blueprint: A Grand Global Plan, March 26, 2002.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to study the documents in any detail, but this primary source material will obviously be extremely important for those who wish to piece together the evolution of the Bush Doctrine and the antecedents of the radical trajectory on which U.S. foreign policy embarked after 9/11.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

For an update on the exodus of Democrats from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, see Wednesday’s article by Spencer Ackerman on the new Washington Independent website and a later piece by Isikoff and Hosenball at the Newsweek website. It seems that three other Democrats, including Rep. Eliot Engel and Sen. Chuck Schumer (whom I didn’t mention in Tuesday’s post), have resigned from the group, which last week hastily reorganized its corporate structure — and gave birth to a new organization, Defense of Democracies — to preserve its 501(c)3 status.

Of course, these Democrats are leaving primarily because FDD has become increasingly partisan in its attacks on specific Democratic lawmakers and leadership, not because of its steady drumbeat of Arabo- and Islamo-phobia that has dominated its work since its inception more than six years ago. I still wonder whether the remaining self-described Democrats, such as former Amb. Marc Ginsberg and, most particularly, James Woolsey and Sen. Lieberman (that will be an interesting test), will also desert the FDD. And what about the Democrats associated with the Committee on the Present Danger, an FDD “project?” They include former Reps. Dave McCurdy and Stephen Solarz, and former Amb. Peter Rosenblatt.

May denied to Newsweek that the funding for the controversial ads came from telecom companies, insisted they came from individual donors. I would imagine that the likely suspects include the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) donors to Freedom’s Watch, which has set a goal of raising and spending $250 million this year in support of its agenda. The current ad campaign in support of Bush’s version of the Protect America Act costs $2 million, according to Newsweek.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

It took more than six years, but at least one Democrat enlisted after 9/11 by the hard-line neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) seems finally to have caught on to the fact that its agenda is something other than what its name suggests. In a statement released by her office Monday, Democratic consultant and frequent television political commentator Donna Brazile “strongly condemn[ed]” what she called a “misleading and reckless ad campaign” undertaken against 17 Democratic lawmakers by the FDD for their opposition to the Protect America Act and resigned from its Board of Advisers.

“The organization is using fear mongering for political purposes and worse, their scare tactics have the effect of emboldening terrorists and our enemies abroad by asserting our intelligence agencies are failing to do their job. I am deeply disappointed they would use my name since no one has consulted me about the activities of the group in years.”

Of course, fear-mongering is exactly FDD’s stock in trade, as it has been from the very beginning, something of which Brazile unfortunately appears to unaware, claiming, as she does, that, “due to the influence of their funders, in the last few years, FDD has morphed into a radical right wing organization that is doing the dirty work for the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans.” If she had been paying attention, she would have seen from the moment she signed on that FDD’s messages — particularly concerning virtually anything from the Arab or Islamic worlds — were designed to create fear, starting with the TV ad that ran in 2002 which clearly sought to confuse the viewer into believing that somehow Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden were all part of the same threat. Indeed, FDD, the best profile for which is found on Right Web, has acted primarily as a front for the Likudist founders of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), the same group that is also behind the Freedom’s Watch about which I have posted here and here. Cliff May, FDD’s president since its founding Sep 13, 2001, served previously as RJC’s vice chair.

Might Brazile’s resignation prompt other self-identified Democrats, such as certified Friend of Bill (FOB) former Amb. Marc Ginsberg or Amb. Max Kampelman or Rep. Eliot Engel, to reconsider their own association with FDD (which, incidentally, also sponsors the Committee on the Present Danger)? (I won’t even mention the possibility that “Distinguished Advisors” Sen. Joseph Lieberman or James Woolsey might want to disassociate themselves, let alone Zell Miller.) How about Republicans who might be somewhat less partisan or less Likudnik in their policy preferences, like Jack Kemp, one of the two surviving members of FDD’s board of directors? (The other two are Steve Forbes and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick.) Or former Secretary of State George Shultz, who co-chairs the CPD along with Woolsey)? The full roster of FDD’s many boards, staff members and associates — already heavily weighted to the extreme right — can be found here.

What I found particularly intriguing about Brazile’s statement — other than her naivete about what FDD has been all along — was her assertion that FDD “would use my name since no one has consulted me about the activities of the group in years.” One would think that an organization dedicated to “defending democracies” would try to keep its associates, let alone its leadership, informed of its activities. But apparently that has not been the case. Also intriguing is the fact that she blames the group’s evolution on its the “influence of (its) funders” whose identities, however, she fails to disclose. In the interests of transparency — which all can agree are essential for democracy — perhaps the group will see fit to identify them.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Barack Obama reportedly said something very important and long overdue to a group of some 100 Cleveland Jewish leaders on Sunday — that being pro-Likud and being “pro-Israel” are two different things.

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”

He said even more about the confined nature of the debate over Israel and its security in this country, according to the dispatch in the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA). Apparently in defense of his consultations with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has been harshly critical of neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, Obama said:

“Frankly some of the commentary that I’ve seen which suggests guilt by association or the notion that unless we are never ever going to ask any difficult questions about how we move peace forward or secure Israel that is non military or non belligerent or doesn’t talk about just crushing the opposition that that somehow is being soft or anti-Israel, I think we’re going to have problems moving forward.”

And he contrasted those constraints on the debate here with the breadth and vigor of the discussion of those same issues in Israel itself.

“There was a very honest, thoughtful debate taking place inside Israel. All of you, I’m sure, have experienced this when you travel there. Understandably, because of the pressure that Israel is under, I think the U.S. pro-Israel community is sometimes a little more protective or concerned about opening up that conversation. But all I’m saying though is that actually ultimately should be our goal, to have that same clear-eyed view about how we approach these issues.”

The staunchly pro-Likud New York Sun is carrying a partial transcript of the meeting it obtained from the Obama campaign.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht now believes that Washington should offer to engage in unconditional, high-level talks and even normalize diplomatic relations with Iran…apparently in order to rally support for war.

In a New York Times op-ed misleadingly entitled “Attack Iran, With Words,” Gerecht, who is certain there’s no way that the mullahs will agree to such offer, argues that their predictable refusal will rally the public and perhaps even Washington’s European allies to support a pre-emptive attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

“If the mullahs don’t want to negotiate, fine: making the offer is something that must be checked off before the next president could unleash the Air Force and the Navy. To make the threat of force against clerical Iran again credible, there needs to be a consensus among far more Democrats and Republicans that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable. If the White House tried more energetically to find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear threat, if it demonstrated that it had reached out to Iranian “pragmatists” and “moderates,” and that again no one responded, then the military option would likely become convincing to more Americans.

“…If the Bush administration were to use this sort of diplomatic jujitsu on the ruling clerics, it could convulse their world. No, this is absolutely no guarantee that Tehran will stop, or even suspend, uranium enrichment. But a new approach would certainly put the United States on offense and Iran on defense. We would, at least, have the unquestioned moral and political high ground. And from there, it would be a lot easier for the next administration, if it must, to stop militarily the mullahs’ quest for the bomb.”

It’s worth noting that Gerecht, like other neo-cons including several of his AEI colleagues, appears to have given up hope of an attack before the end of Bush’s term and now believes that it will up to his successor to decide what to do about Tehran’s nuclear program. His argument echoes that of the generally more pragmatic Robert Kagan who came out in favor of negotiations after the NIE’s release in early December in a Washington Post column entitled “Time to Talk to Iran.” Two differences: Kagan was less certain than Gerecht that Tehran wouldn’t take up a negotiations offer. He also did not stress the importance of offering high-level talks, although that the fact that he suggested putting all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Iran on the table implied it. The basic line was much the same. Here’s Kagan nearly three months ago:

“Beginning talks today does not limit American options in the future. If the Iranians stonewall or refuse to talk — a distinct possibility — they will establish a record of intransigence that can be used against them now and in the critical years to come. It’s possible the American offer itself could open fissures in Iran. In any case, it is hard to see what other policy options are available. This is the hand that has been dealt. The Bush administration needs to be smart and creative enough to play it well.”

It will be very interesting to see if Gerecht’s and Kagan’s advice, as cynical as it may be, is being considered by the hawks within the administration, and particularly in Cheney’s office.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

As Michael Lind pointed out in a brilliant essay published by The Nation almost exactly four years ago, Winston Churchill has been an icon of neo-conservatism for as long as it has existed. Thus, when the neo-conservatives had more confidence in George W. Bush — particularly on the eve of the Iraq invasion and immediately after — they had no hesitation in comparing him to their hero, particularly because they knew that that’s how Bush himself has conceived his own historical role vis-a-vis “Islamo-fascism” in it many forms and that flattery can be very helpful in influencing the president.

So, it’s no surprise that, in their rush to ingratiate themselves with John McCain — with whom, as I’ve noted in a recent post, they already have strong ties anyway — they are now comparing him to the Great Man. In an article entitled “The Model for McCain?” that appeared on the Weekly Standard’s website last week, Michael Makovsky, a Churchill biographer who previously worked in Douglas Feith’s intelligence manipulation office and is now — bizarrely enough — the foreign policy director of the “Bipartisan Policy Center” — points out the many fascinating similarities between Churchill and McCain, concluding that, while “McCain certainly has not reached Churchill’s heights, …he can legitimately claim to be the most Churchillian among the Republicans of his day.” The courtship is well underway.

Michael is the younger brother of David Makovsky, the director of the Washington Institute for Near Policy (WINEP). He also played a key role in re-”organizing” Iraq’s oil sector during the initial phases of the occupation.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

As I noted in my last post, the withdrawal of both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson would spur neo-conservatives and their closest aggressive nationalist friends, like John Bolton, to rally behind John McCain as their preferred candidate. Of course, now that Romney himself has withdrawn, there hasn’t really much of an alternative, notwithstanding Mike Huckabee’s ardent Christian Zionism. In any event, Jennifer Rubin, a political correspondent at Commentary’s Contentions blog (which has become much more active, if predictable, under John Podhoretz’s editorship), has a good rundown with useful links of the latest endorsements and commentary:

“On Friday at CPAC, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton sung McCain’s praises and then heartily endorsed him on Saturday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Fred Thompson got on the McCain bandwagon too. The Wall Street Journal’s editors disparaged the notion that social conservatives should sit home or vote for Hillary Clinton ( “What they can’t do with any credibility is claim that helping to elect a liberal President will further the causes that these conservatives claim to believe most deeply in”) while President Reagan’s National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane doesn’t think much of the talk show critics’ suggestion that we hand management of the war over to one of the Democrats. Newt Gingrich recognizes the obvious ( “He’s had a lifetime voting record that’s dramatically more conservative than Clinton and Obama”) and Larry Kudlow voices support as well.

Bill Kristol thinks the anti-McCain sentiment among conservatives is exaggerated, and a simple account from the campaign trail reveals a obvious truth: lots of conservatives have supported McCain all along.”

Of course, McCain’s main foreign-policy spokesman (and NRA lobbyist who, I had a heard a few years ago, got in trouble with the Capitol Police for carrying some kind of firearm where he shouldn’t have), Randy Scheunemann, tends more to the Bolton camp. A former member of the board of directors of the Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and a main founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), Scheunemann worked for McCain in 2000. (When at one point just before the Iraq war, I clicked on the CLI website and got the website of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress [INC] instead, it was Scheunemann who told me that the two organizations used the same web server, thus tending to confirm the notion that the CLI — whose honorary co-chairs were John McCain and Joe Lieberman — was a Chalabi front organization.) And, as pointed out in a previous post and in a Friday article by McClatchy’s excellent Warren Strobel, former CIA director James Woolsey has signed on to the campaign as an adviser, too. Scheunemann set up the CLI with Bruce Jackson, a long-time friend and protege of Richard Perle’s.

Does this mean John McCain is a neo-con or would necessarily pursue neo-conservative/aggressive nationalist positions if he became president? No. Unlike Bush, he has his own strong views on U.S. foreign policy, not to mention far more foreign-policy experience — and hence confidence — in those views. He also has advisers who tend to the realist category. But it does mean that, like Bush, there would almost certainly be a major power struggle between the two tendencies if he got to the White House. The best relatively recent article on McCain’s foreign-policy evolution, however, suggests that the hawks would definitely enjoy the upper hand. Read John Judis’ October 2006 article in The New Republic entitled “Neo-McCain.”

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

It will be interesting to see what Rupert Murdoch does to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, particularly if long-standing rumors that he intends to distance itself at least a little from its thinly veiled Likudist line. This week’s op-ed by Shalem Center senior fellow Michael Oren entitled “Israel’s Lebanon Disaster” was particularly – extravagantly, embarrassingly – transparent in its implied championship of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is predictably calling for the resignation of the Olmert government and new elections. An unsparing indictment of Olmert’s performance during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, the op-ed apparently anticipated a much more damning verdict in the long-awaited Winograd Commission report than what the Commission actually produced, one day after Oren’s screed. Oren, whose bizarre comparison last September (also published in the Journal) of George W. Bush to the Old Testament prophet Jonah as part of the neo-conservative campaign to rally support for the Surge I noted in a September post, even blames the fact that his rifle fell apart during Israel’s eleventh-hour ground offensive in Lebanon on Olmert.

An Israeli nationalist historian who was born and raised in the U.S., is a protege of Natan Sharansky, the director of the Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute, named for its founder-funder, casino multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who reportedly is also the biggest financial backer of Freedom’s Watch, which launched its own campaign to save the Surge at the same time that the Journal published Oren’s Jonah article. It’s really all part of the same Netanyahu network: the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the Shalem Center, Freedom’s Watch, and you can add the Middle East specialists at the American Enterprise Institute, Sharansky’s One Jerusalem, etc. etc. Aside from the fact that Oren clearly failed to anticipate the Commission’s exculpatory findings, what’s remarkable about this most recent column is the Journal’s willingness to be so openly partisan in Israel’s internal politics. Is Bret Stephens, who, before becoming the Journal’s “Global View” columnist, served as editor of the Conrad Black-owned Jerusalem Post, responsible? Will Murdoch retain him when he assumes full control?

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

If President George W. Bush’s main purpose in visiting the Gulf last week — as indicated by his call in Abu Dhabi last Sunday to confront Iran “before it is too late” — was to rally Washington’s Sunni-led regional allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, behind a containment-and-isolation strategy against Iran, especially in the wake of last month’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), it appears that he fell far short of his goal. Indeed, it now appears to have been counter-productive.

While in the run-up to Bush’s visit to Saudi Arabia, its foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, was quoted in some of the mainstream press as warning against U.S. efforts to pit the Gulf states against Iran in this way, a remarkably blunt editorial, entitled “Peace Now,” that appeared in the Jeddah-based English-language Arab News on the second day of the president’s sojourn in Saudi Arabia — two days after his Abu Dhabi speech — received virtually no notice. It should have, because it is probably unprecedented in its bluntness about the kingdom’s honored guest, constituting what the former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, Chas Freeman, today called “a notable …breach of standard Arab etiquette” and one that was presumably condoned, if not approved, by senior members of the royal family. No one from the News has since been publicly admonished or dismissed, let alone arrested; indeed, no official has distanced the government from the sentiments expressed in it. The entire text, which is reproduced below, warrants attention, but the last paragraph — in which U.S. policy is described as “madness” — is not a little breathtaking, considering that the presidential party probably received complimentary copies with their morning coffee.

“Our region is not short of bloodshed and instability. Iraq, Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan are all scenes of past and present conflicts where largely innocent blood has flowed in plenty. We do not need yet another dangerous conflict.

That is why it was so sad, even depressing, to hear US President George W. Bush use his visit to the Gulf to continue his saber-rattling against the Iranians - and over a nuclear weapons program which his own intelligence chiefs say Tehran abandoned five years ago. To any dispassionate observer, US military action against Iran is unthinkable. Unfortunately the Bush administration’s record since 9/11 has not only embraced the unthinkable but, more dangerously, it has embraced it in an unthinking fashion.

To continue such dire warnings was inconsiderate given that Bush was the guest of Gulf states which are on Iran’s doorstep. Such warnings were not what we wanted to hear. As Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told his Canadian counterpart Maxime Bernier this week in a message that he then repeated to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, confrontational behavior by Washington toward Iran was not the answer. If Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states had a problem with Iran concerning its nuclear program, then they would talk to Tehran as neighbors should.

Before Bush’s Middle East visit, White House briefers were telling correspondents that the president would be pushing the Israelis for a Palestinian settlement in return for Arab backing of a tough stance with Iran. It was suggested that Israel might be more tractable if the “Iranian nuclear threat” were removed. But the linkage simply is not there. It is because of the enduring injustices visited upon the Palestinians, with US connivance, that the Arab world, not least Saudi Arabia, which has long been a US ally, has been so disappointed by the failure to reward loyalty and friendship by Washington’s driving through a Palestinian settlement.

And further, it is because Israel - again with US connivance - has acquired a nuclear arsenal that Iran and, before it, Saddam’s Iraq even thought of acquiring their own nuclear deterrents.

Purblind US policies and Washington’s desperate failure time and again to listen to the advice and guidance of its Arab friends in the region have brought us to this new moment of tension with Iran. We do not need more threats of war. Warmongering has already created the greatest level of regional instability in 60 years. Bush’s inflammatory threats against Iran ride roughshod over the counsels of peace that he has heard from every Arab government on his Middle East visit.

Whatever threat Iran may constitute, now or in the future, must be addressed peaceably and through negotiations. The consequences of further war in the region are hideous, not least because they are incalculable.

Even Bush, with the ruin of Iraq before him, must surely see that. Yet in his confrontational remarks about Iran, he offers no carrot, no inducement, no compromise - only the big US stick. This is not diplomacy in search of peace. It is madness in search of war.”

Freeman, who was moderating a panel on “Iran’s Strategic Concerns and U.S. Interests,” said it was very doubtful such sentiments were expressed directly to Bush during his stay in Saudi Arabia, particularly given the efforts expended by King Abdullah to establish a warm personal relationship with the president. Other participants, who included Gary Sick, Trita Parsi, Barbara Slavin, and Ray Takeyh, appeared to agree that the administration’s efforts to rally the Sunni Gulf leaders behind a confrontational stance against Iran were unlikely to succeed, with Takeyh asserting that, “You’ve begun to see Arab governments moving to integrate Iran as a means of …disarming” the threat that it poses. The Gulf states’ stance, he went on remains contradictory. “(They) don’t want American-Iranian confrontation, and they don’t want American-Iranian normalization,” he said. Along similar lines, readers might profitably read an interesting analysis published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London by Neil Partrick, a Gulf specialist with the International Crisis Group, written on the even of Bush’s trip.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

If you need an example of just how sophomoric both Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard and AEI’s Michael Rubin can be, don’t miss Rubin’s latest article in the Standard, entitled “Living in a Dream World: The Political Fantasies of Foreign Service Officers”. Rubin’s target is the contents of a regular column in the State Department’s in-house monthly magazine, State, in which diplomats overseas offer brief descriptions of life in their host countries. It’s very difficult to figure out why Rubin, a talented polemicist and Rudi Giuliani’s “Senior Iran and Turkey advisor”, would spend much time going over old issues of the magazine to prove what he calls the “sheer inanity of Foreign Service thinking.” Perhaps he had an intern with a lot of time on his or her hands, and the Standard needed some filler. On the other hand, most neo-conservatives, especially proteges of Richard Perle, believe there’s never a bad time to bash the “realists” in the State Department. (Indeed, in his new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn quotes Douglas Feith, Rubin’s boss during Bush’s first term, as saying that his family’s history as Holocaust victims made him understand the true nature of foreign policy, “unlike the ‘WASPs in the State Department.’” With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder the Feith and the Pentagon civilians tried so hard to keep the State Department out of the loop.)

Of course, it was Rubin more than any other neo-con who repeatedly assailed Gen. David Petraeus for trying to “appease” Ba’athists in his efforts in 2004 and 2005 to pacify Mosul and al-Anbar provinces, as I pointed out in a post last October on the Likudist cast to Giuliani’s foreign-policy team. As late as 14 months ago, Rubin, a de-Ba’athification hawk and Chalabi acolyte from the get-go, was still complaining bitterly about Petraeus’ early efforts to co-opt the Sunni insurgency. That those efforts are now given credit — even by Rubin’s fellow-neo-cons and most especially Kristol, who named Petraeus the Standard’s “Man of the Year” just last month — for what progress has been made in reducing the violence in Iraq over the past year is ironic to say the least. Indeed, the relative success of Petraeus’ tactics also suggests that it’s not just foreign service officers who inhabit dream worlds.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

While hard-line neo-conservatives associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page (See Bret Stephens column, “The NIE Fantasy”) continue to rage against last week’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, two key — if more pragmatic — movement leaders appear to now be resigned to the fact that, barring a particularly provocative move by Tehran, the Bush administration is highly unlikely to carry out an attack against Iran before its term expires.

I hope to write an article about this development for IPS in the coming days, but Robert Kagan’s column, “Time to talk to Iran,” which appeared in the Washington Post last Wednesday (but which I read only over the weekend as I was catching up with a two-week accumulation of newspapers), marks a major turning point in the debate over Iran policy. Not only does he state flatly, “[t]he Bush administration cannot take military action against Iran during its remaining time in office, or credibly threaten to do so, unless it is in response to an extremely provocative Iranian action,’’ but he goes on to argue that there is now ‘’a good case for negotiations” on a range of issues, including those which Iran offered to talk about in April-May, 2003 (to which, however, he does not allude). In other words, Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, believes it’s worth testing the notion that a “grand bargain” is possible. He’s not happy about it, but that’s his conclusion.

While his PNAC co-founder, Bill Kristol, doesn’t go nearly as far in embracing the notion of negotiations with Tehran, his lead editorial in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard, “What Happened in 2003?”, offers a mixture both of indignation against the NIE and resignation that it marks the end of the chances for a U.S. attack on Iran before Bush’s term expires. Bush’s task over the next year, he argues, is to try to restore U.S. credibility — including military credibility — by achieving “victory” in Iraq. Here’s the last paragraph:

“The complete and unequivocal defeat of al Qaeda and of Iranian-backed proxies in Iraq is the best way to show Iran that the United States is a serious power to be reckoned with in the region. Resisting the temptation to throw away success in Iraq by drawing down too fast or too deep is the greatest service this president can render his successor. Only if Bush wins in Iraq will the next president have a reasonable chance to defeat the threat of a nuclear-weapons-seeking Islamic Republic of Iran.”

So Kristol appears to have given up — however reluctantly (Remember, it was his publication which featured Kimberley Kagan’s piece late last summer that lay the groundwork for a military attack on Iran based on its alleged interference in Iraq) — on the idea of a military attack on Iran in the next year.

Kristol and Kagan have obviously been the leading lights of the — for lack of a better word — “moderate” wing of the neo-conservative movement since the mid-1990s when they co-authored their influential article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” in Foreign Affairs and went on to found PNAC the following year. Unlike neo-con hardliners like Norman Podhoretz or Richard Perle and his numerous proteges — some of whom, like Danielle Pletka and Frank Gaffney and Podhoretz himself, have all but accused the NIE’s authors of deliberate deception — scattered around Washington, the two have generally been less wedded to the views of former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For example, while the hardliners opposed former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza, Kristol and Kagan lined up behind Sharon, even when he deserted Likud to form Kadima.

Of the two columns, Kagan’s is, of course, the more notable, simply because he believes Washington has no choice at this point but to engage with Iran in a way that the administration until now has never considered. That Kagan has been close to Elliott Abrams since they worked together in the State Department back in the 1980s makes his latest position — which now approaches that of Americans for Peace Now (which called this week for unconditional U.S. engagement with Iran) — all the more remarkable.

Kagan’s advice has also been echoed in recent days by two other influential voices identified with or previously embraced by the neo-conservative movement. In a column in the Washington Times today. Roll Call columnist Morton Kondracke called for Bush to “drop his objections to direct talks with the Iranians,” even while he insisted that Washington should continue to push for more sanctions against Tehran. He still sounds very hawkish on Iran but appears to have given up on the idea that Bush will take military action against Iran, arguing, ‘’the question of whether to go to war …is gone.” Over the weekend, British historian Niall Ferguson, whose neo-imperial views have long been embraced by the neo-conservatives, explicitly agreed in his Financial Times column with Kagan’s analysis — that “the time may well have arrived to rethink US policy towards Iran,” although he thinks “it just is not in this president’s nature to beat his sword into a plowshare” and that, in any event, “it seems doubtful the Iranians would take such a volte-face seriously.” He goes on to call for Bush’s successor to offer Tehran “a grand bargain” — economic assistance and diplomatic rapprochement for a renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism.” He thinks John McCain is the candidate who could best pull that off.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

It’s unquestionably premature to conclude that Pakistan may displace Iran as the most urgent foreign-policy challenge likely to be faced by the Bush administration next year, but it’s beginning to look like a distinct possibility. For evidence, see his column in the Sunday New York Times by Tom Friedman in which he somewhat offhandedly asserts, “After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issues that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran,” and, more strikingly, a second Times column co-authored by neo-conservative Fred Kagan and liberal interventionist Michael O’Hanlon, entitled “Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem” — the latest example of the growing partnership between the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institution. “We do not intend to be fear mongers,” according to the two authors who then proceed to argue that Washington needs to focus right now on how best to intervene militarily in the Muslim world’s second-most-populous nation to secure its nuclear stockpile if and when things get out of hand there. Their optimal goal is to get those weapons to New Mexico, but, if that proves impossible [for, say, political reasons], then the U.S. should “settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops.”

The article itself is mind-blowing in the various scenarios it depicts; sending in, for example, “a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations” — in support of “the core of the Pakistan armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership”. But the fact that Kagan is widely viewed as an architect of the “Surge” in Iraq (and hence close to the White House); and that O’Hanlon, a former Clinton national-security aide, is regarded as representative of an important sector within the Democratic Party means that the article and its various scenarios are likely to be taken quite seriously in the Muslim world, most especially in Pakistan itself. And, please note, there’s no talk of the importance of democracy here; it’s all about making sure those nukes are placed in reliable (preferably our) hands. The assumption is that the “moderate” core of the Pakistani military will be the key to success and, despite any nationalist feelings it may harbor, is prepared to fully cooperate with a major foreign military intervention to ensure foreign control of its most important weapons.

I’m no Pakistan specialist; nor do I have any reason to believe that Kagan (whose expertise is German military history) and O’Hanlon are particularly learned on the subject; their operating assumptions appear highly questionable to me. But I have no doubt that their musings are indeed an indication of what is speeding to the top of the administration’s national-security agenda. Moreover, compared to the concerns they express about the fate of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile and the lengths to which Washington should be prepared to go to secure it, the threats posed by Iran over the next year or so seem awfully tame. Now, with Musharraf appearing to have rejected the appeals of both Bush last week and Negroponte over the weekend, and the political impasse between the civilian opposition and the military under Musharraf having hardened considerably in just the past few days, a serious crisis of the kind envisaged by Mssrs. Kagan and O’Hanlon is looming ever larger. Under such circumstances, the notion that the U.S. would attack Iran seems considerably less credible, at least from Tehran’s point of view.

Incidentally, for an interesting analysis of the relationship between U.S. military intervention, the regional rise in “Islamic nationalism,” and how it plays out in Pakistan, particularly from the point of view of the Pakistani military, I strongly recommend an article by the former vice chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council and an expert on the region, Graham Fuller published November 8 by New Perspectives Quarterly. Fuller currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in beautiful Vancouver, B.C.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

In my last post, I argued that the release by the U.S. military of nine Iranians, including two of the five officials seized in Irbil last January, suggested that Pentagon chief Robert Gates and the administration’s “realist” wing was making progress in wresting control of Iran policy from resurgent hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney. In addition to the release, I cited as evidence the public assessments by Gates and senior military officers that the alleged flow of EFP’s (explosively formed projectiles) and other weapons from Iran to Shi’ite militias in Iraq had declined in recent months. Now comes the estimable Financial Times with a front-page article and a thorough back-page analysis that strengthens the case, quoting, among others, Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon at length as to why war with Iran is not an attractive option. It even quotes Patrick Clawson of the hawkish Washington Institute on Near East Policy (WINEP) — the same group that last month provided the forum for Cheney’s strongest war hoop against Iran — who is close to Cheney’s national security adviser, John Hannah, as saying: “The national intelligence director is saying we have time before the Iranians get the bomb, the secretary of state is saying diplomacy still has a chance, the secretary of defence is saying the military is at breaking point and the [White House] political advisers are saying another war would probably not be a good idea.”

I would add that the last week’s events in Pakistan — not to mention the continuing rise in oil prices and rapid decline in the U.S. dollar — have also probably set back the hawks’ hopes of confrontation with Iran. Not only is the crisis necessarily displacing Iran in the media spotlight, but it is also diverting the time and energy of key policymakers within the administration, including the vice president’s staff and deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, who is also in charge of the White House’s badly tattered “Global Democracy Strategy.” And it gives Iran another card to play in the high-stakes regional poker game that is being played out. I personally don’t know whether long-standing reports of covert U.S. support for Iranian Baluch nationalists in Iran are true or not, but impoverished Pakistani Baluchistan (whose capital, Quetta, serves as the headquarters of the Afghanistan’s Taliban under the protection of Pakistan’s military) has long been restive. Indeed, riots broke out 15 months ago after the death of an important Baluch leader, Nawab Mohammed Akbar Khan Bugti, in a battle with federal forces. If Tehran wishes to add to Washington’s regional headaches in Afghanistan and Iraq, Baluchistan offers it a new opportunity (although one that could easily blow back across the border, too). In any event, nuclear-armed Pakistan’s suddenly apparent fragility once again underlines the importance of Iran as both a relatively tranquil island in an expanding sea of turbulence and as a potentially critical player in determining whether the region stabilizes or explodes further.