FT Also Sees Pentagon Opposition to Iran Attack

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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.

Gates Chooses Democrat to Chair Policy Board

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In a further indication of Robert Gates’ efforts to move U.S. policy closer to the center a la Baker-Hamilton, he has appointed John Hamre, the former deputy defense secretary under Bill Clinton, to head the Defense Policy Board (DPB), the advisory body that played an important role under Richard Perle’s chairmanship immediately after 9/11 in moving U.S. policy toward war with Iraq. (At Perle’s invitation, Ahmad Chalabi took part in its supposedly highly classified deliberations just a few days after 9/11, and many of the DPB’s members at the time – including James Woolsey, Eliot Cohen, Kenneth Adelman, as well as Perle himself – became the most ubiquitous cheerleaders for war 18 months that followed.)

Hamre has served as president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here since 2000 and is known to have been both very sceptical of the case for war before the invasion and highly critical of the occupation after it. Consistent with his career as a Washington national-security insider, however, he has generally preferred to voice his views privately, rather than publicly, a practice that has, according to knowledgeable sources, caused him some considerable moral regret, which makes his selection by Gates all the more interesting. It is also notable that Gates chose as yet another new DPB member Hamre’s former boss under Clinton, William Perry.

Aside from those two choices, however, Gates played to the right in his new appointments to the Board, choosing three former administration hawks: former Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch; former State Department arms-control honcho, Robert Joseph; and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Peter Rodman; as well as the just-retired chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Peter Pace.

Despite the addition of Hamre and Perry, the Board is still dominated by Rumsfeld’s appointees and will retain a decidedly hawkish cast. Prominent neo-conservatives who remain include Devon Gaffney Cross (whom I have previously profiled), China specialist Aaron Friedberg; Ruth Wedgewood of the School of Advanced International Studies; and James Q. Wilson. Other hard-liners include former Rumsfeld spokesperson Victoria Clarke; ret. Adm. Vern Clark; Newt Gingrich; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Reagan, Fred Ikle; ret. Gen. (and Surge architect) Jack Keane; Rodman mentor, Henry Kissinger; ret. Gen. (and Rumsfeld poodle) Richard Myers; Nadia Schadlow; former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger; Smith Richardson Foundation exec (who also worked as Afghanistan Policy Coordinator in Rumsfeld’s office, Marin Strmecki; former Republican Rep. Vin Weber; and former Rumsfeld aide, Christopher Williams. (Incidentally Strmecki, Devon Cross, and Schadlow have all worked at Smith Richardson. The only other member who is identifiable as a Democrat is Jimmy’s Carter’s former Pentagon chief, Harold Brown.

Hamre’s choice has definitely raised some right-wing hackles, as the Washington Times‘ national-security reporter Bill Gertz assailed the new chairman as a “pacifist” (presumably because he defended the 1972 ABM Treaty, among other things that the Bush administration repudiated). In his weekly column, “Inside the Ring,” Gertz quoted one Pentagon “official,” as saying, “With or without his approval, President Bush’s team has apparently begun the transition to the third Clinton administration. We can see now that with the possible exception of the president himself, their hearts and minds just never were into governing as Republicans.” [I know a lot of Republicans who would agree with that, albeit not in the sense that the official meant it!] Another official quoted by Gertz questioned Hamre’s “credentials for the job, other than the deluded notion that somehow giving a Clintonite a board seat might make Hillary, should she win, more amenable to the department.”

More Neo-Cons for Giuliani

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Republican presidential candidate and current front-runner, Rudi Giuliani, has named seven more people, including four prominent neo-conservatives, to his already-neocon-dominated foreign policy team. The neo-conservatives include Ruth Wedgwood of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; “terrorism analyst” and free-lance writer often published in the Weekly Standard and the National Review Online, Thomas Joscelyn; and two “scholars” at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and protégés of Richard Perle – Michael Rubin and David Frum (with whom Perle wrote the ultra-hawkish “An End to Evil” in 2004). Combined with such incumbent team members as Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Kasten, the team increasingly resembles the cheer-leading squad for the U.S. section of the international Bibi Netanyahu fan club.

What is really remarkable about the new choices is their announcement during the same week that the latest edition of Newsweek featured a three-page rundown of Giuliani’s foreign-policy team, entitled “Would you Buy a Used Hawk From this Man?” “Neocons can’t help but slink around Washington, D.C.,” it began. (In an amazing screw-up, the magazine mismatched the captions with the photos of four of the members.) “The Iraq War has given the neoconservatives …something of a bad name, and several of the Republican candidates seem less than eager to hire them as advisers. But Rudi Giuliani apparently never got the memo.”

In any event, Wedgwood, who worked with Perle on Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board and more recently published an impassioned defense of Paul Wolfowitz’s promotion of his girlfriend at the World Bank, is listed as an international law and organizations adviser, while Joscelyn, who is associated with ultra-Straussian Claremont Institute and holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago, will act as Giuliani’s “senior terrorism advisor,” (presumably in place of the mayor’s old sidekick, the scandal-ridden former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik). Despite a total lack of foreign-policy-making experience, Frum, who also writes regularly for the National Review Online, will be a “senior foreign policy adviser,” while Rubin, who worked on the Iran and Iraq desks at the Pentagon under Douglas Feith before being sent to Baghdad after the invasion, will act as both the “senior Iran and Turkey Advisor,” as well as a member of the “Middle East Advisory Board.” (Like Rubin, a fifth new member of Giuliani’s team, John Agresto, also worked for Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) where he was assigned to rebuild the Iraqi higher education system, a job at which he reportedly failed utterly, as indicated by the name of his recent book, ‘Mugged by Reality.’ It’s comforting to note that he has been made a member of Giuliani’s “Iraqi (sic) Advisory Board.”)

It’s probably good that Rubin will not serve on the “Iraqi” board if only because he was an outspoken critic of the counter-insurgency tactics of neo-con hero Gen. David Petraeus during the latter’s service in Iraq immediately after the invasion. Along with AEI fellows Reuel Marc Gerecht, Perle, and Danielle Pletka, Rubin has long been among the most vehement U.S. advocates of “de-Baathification” in Iraq (which another AEI fellow, Joshua Muravchik, now insists neo-cons had absolutely nothing to do with). In several articles entitled, respectively, “Failed Model,”“Betrayal”, and “The Price of Compromise” published in 2004 and 2005, Rubin singled out Petraeus’ efforts to “appease” Baathists in his efforts to pacify Mosul and al-Anbar. Indeed, as recently as a year ago, when neo-cons began their clamor for the “Surge”, Rubin was still complaining – in the Financial Times no less – about Petraeus’ efforts to rehabilitate former Baathists. With Giuliani squarely lined up behind the general, Rubin’s deployment to the Iraq board would naturally raise uncomfortable questions about what the mayor really thinks of the Surge and Petraeus’ efforts to co-opt the Sunni population.

The addition of Frum and Rubin to Giuliani’s team suggests that the foreign-policy staff at AEI, particularly those closest to Perle, has decided that Fred Thompson, who has long-standing links to the think tank, isn’t going anywhere and now see Giuliani as their return ticket to power, especially now that Newt has ruled out a run. It will be interesting to see if other AEI colleagues enlist in the mayor’s campaign.

Max Boot and the Colonialist Mentality

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I’ve been occupied with organizational issues for the past week, but I didn’t want to let it pass without highlighting a passage in column by Max Boot that appeared last Wednesday in the Los Angeles Times. It’s just a passage, mind you, and very short at that, but, to me, it offers a useful and frankly damning insight into the colonialist and frankly racist assumptions that underlie neo-conservative thinking. Of course, Boot, a former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and near-constant presence on Commentary’s “Contentions” blog, is a dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative hawk, somewhat incongruously perched at the influential Council on Foreign Relations where he is mostly surrounded by the kind of realists and liberal internationalists who dominated U.S. foreign policy until 9/11.

Here’s the passage. It appears in a column entitled “Accept the Blackwater Mercenaries” that both defended Blackwater and (entirely reasonably) called for greater oversight of security contractors operating in Iraq and elsewhere.

“Take the Sept. 16 incident, in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed and which was the impetus for a House hearing Tuesday. Blackwater says its employees fired in self-defense after being attacked. Iraqis claim that the Blackwaterites fired indiscriminately and without provocation. There is no reason to assume — as so many critics do — that the more damning version is true, especially because the harshest condemnations have come from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a notorious hotbed of sectarianism.” [Emphasis added]

The problem I have with this passage is simply this: there were reasons to assume that the more damning version of the Nihoor Square incident (or massacre?) were true at the time Boot wrote his column. All of the Iraqi witnesses and victims — and there were many — interviewed by U.S. mainstream journalists after the incident described the Blackwater shootings as unprovoked and indiscriminate, at least so far as they could determine. Moreover, the Iraqi assessments were confirmed by subsequent U.S. military reports, according to a detailed Washington Post account that appeared October 5, admittedly after Boot had published his column. Indeed, the only accounts — so far as I am aware — that backed Blackwater’s version of events have been provided by Blackwater staff.

So how is it that Boot can so easily dismiss the credibility of the accounts of the Iraqis who were caught up in or witnessed the mayhem? I’m not arguing that their accounts — and the conclusions of the U.S. military reports — are necessarily totally accurate. But why assert that “there is no reason to assume” that the Iraqi accounts are untrue when the evidence adduced by generally reliable U.S. reporters up to the moment that Boot wrote his column pointed strongly in favor of the Iraqis’ version? The phrasing suggests that Boot does not consider Iraqis credible, at least when they are describing alleged bad behavior by American troops or contractors. Or am I reading too much into this?

Now, Boot goes on to suggest that their lack of credibility may be due to the fact that the “Iraqi Interior Ministry, a notorious hotbed of sectarianism,” issued the harshest criticism. But I don’t understand the relevance of this point. First, the testimonies came from civilian eyewitnesses, as well Iraqi police, who are presumably under the ministry’s jurisdiction, and soldiers, who are not. And it seems that the fear and contempt provoked in Iraq by Blackwater and other foreign-led security contractors runs across sectarian lines. They appear to be broadly hated and resented by Sunni, Shia, and Kurd alike. Now, if Boot had written “anti-American” in place of “sectarian,” the relevance of his subordinate clause would have been a bit stronger, even if the totality of the evidence known at that time still pointed toward the same conclusion. But let’s assume for a second that the the Interior Ministry was the only source. It’s still part of a government supported by Washington that came to power in a democratic process which, according to Boot’s previous writings, is one of the important reasons we went to war and remain in Iraq. What would be its motives for lying about what had taken place, particularly in view of its continued deep dependence on U.S. support.

I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but, as a writer myself, I try to pay close attention to words in order to gain clues about motivation, prejudice, and worldview. As the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), Boot, like most neo-cons, sees the aggressive masculinity of Theodore Roosevelt and the early American Imperialists, as a model for the “new American Century.” And, like other imperialists through history, he makes assumptions both about the benevolence of U.S. intentions and hegemony and the ingratitude and untrustworthiness of those who have the good fortune to be brought under U.S. rule.

Again, it’s just one passage, but I believe that it — like the repeated assertions by neo-cons, such as Charles Krauthammer, Reuel Marc Gerecht, etc. that power is the only language that Arabs (and Iran) understands — offers a helpful insight into the very undemocratic and colonialist mentality that underlies much of the movement’s thought.

Is Steve Clemons Right? — Will Bush Bomb Iran?

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Steve Clemons’ article this week in Salon, “Why Bush won’t attack Iran,” offers, I think, a helpful corrective to what has been the growing conviction that has gripped anti-war critics and others that the administration is consciously moving toward war with Iran, possibly imminently. I think Steve’s analysis, which should be read carefully and in full, is very sound, although I’m not quite as persuaded as he appears to be that Bush fully understands or absorbs some of the potential costs of a military attack.

I would add to his analysis some of my own recent observations and concerns.

First, I was very struck by a Brookings briefing paper by Peter Rodman released in June, “Countering Iran’s Revolutionary Challenge,” in which he took the hawks’ standard position on Iran – viewing it as an ideological, revolutionary regime that should be changed and whose acquisition of nuclear weapons is “not acceptable” – but concluded that a future administration will have to deal with it.

“Organizing a counter-strategy will be one of the most important tasks on the next Administration’s agenda. It will be able to build on the policies of its predecessors. Iran’s nuclear challenge may prove to be the forcing event; if Iran continues its defiance, then the international community will need to find ways to increase pressures. The time may soon come for us to play offense, not only defense, pressing harder against the regime’s internal vulnerabilities.”

Rodman, of course, was Rumsfeld’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, and, while not a hard-line neo-conservative by any means (indeed, he began his career as a protégé of Henry Kissinger), his ties to the neo-cons, – and other hawks within the administration, including the vice president’s office – have been close. (He was one of the charter signatories of the Project for the New American Century of its letter urging the ouster of Saddam Hussein back in 1998.)

It appears then that, at least as of last May-June – that is, just about the time that David Wurmser was shopping his “end run” scenario for forcing Bush into an attack on Iran (and voicing his boss’ conclusion that Bush opposed war), as described by Steve – Rodman had also concluded that an attack was unlikely before the end of Bush’s term.

2) Like Steve, I also believe that Gates, the Joint Chiefs (particularly the incoming chairman), and the CentCom commander, Adm. William Fallon, are quite strongly opposed to getting into a war with Iran, that, unlike some of their predecessors, they will not be shy about voicing that opposition to Bush himself, and that, ultimately, they will be more influential with respect to any such decision than Rice or other “engagers.” Much of that assessment is based not only on Gates’ past support for engaging Iran and his participation in the Iraq Study Group, as well as published reports and his efforts to tone down provocative charges against Iran by military officers in Iraq, but also on anecdotes about some of the key people from their friends and acquaintances one picks up here and there in Washington. Of course, Gates still suffers in the White House from being perceived as “Daddy’s boy” by Bush and certainly by Cheney, but, if he’s backed up by men with lots of ribbons on their chests, he becomes much harder to dismiss. At this point, I think the Pentagon brass poses the biggest challenge to those in the administration who want to attack Iran, and I think David Ignatius’ disclosure in an important column, “Cooling the Clash with Iran,” last weekend that U.S. military commanders in the Gulf are pushing for an “incidents at sea” agreement with Iran speaks volumes.

Even Gen. Petraeus, of whose integrity Adm. Fallon apparently does not think too highly, as my colleague, Gareth Porter, recently discovered, has had some interesting things to say about what Iran is doing or not doing in Iraq. While much media attention was focused on his charges that Tehran is conducting a “proxy war” there against the U.S., he also volunteered during his testimony the surprising observation that “the Quds Force itself – we believe, by (and) large, those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity.” Those remarks, if an accurate assessment, may, of course, reflect more the possibility that Iran itself is becoming more cautious in Iraq in hopes of easing tensions, but the fact that they he volunteered them – in answer to a question by Rep. Duncan Hunter, no less – struck me as significant and deserving of more attention and exploration. (I note that a suspected Quds officer was reportedly arrested by U.S. military forces today in Kurdistan, although two of his companions were immediately released and there is some question as to whether it was another case of mistaken identity.)

3) None of the above is meant to convey confidence that Bush will still not decide to go to war before the end of his term, particularly given the possibility, as Steve points out, of an “accidental war” or even an “end run” a la Wurmser (who, I heard earlier this month, is still working in Cheney’s office). I agree very much with Pat Lang’s analysis of Steve’s article in which acknowledges that Steve’s “discussion of the ongoing argument within policy circles …is reasonably accurate,” but that ‘’it is also irrelevant (because) (o)nly the decider will decide. He will decide with the help and advice of his pal, ‘just plain Dick,’ and after the ‘Italian letter’ crowd have done their worst.”

4) Indeed, while Cheney’s voice – much amplified by John Bolton in recent days – seems to have been resolutely ignored by Bush over North Korea where the State Department remains very much in control, the vice president clearly considers the Middle East a higher priority for whatever influence he still wields. Moreover, his neo-conservative backers, who have been pre-occupied for the past three months with ensuring that the Surge not be compromised by Congress, have yet to launch the kind of orchestrated campaign that led up to the Iraq war. With the Surge seemingly assured as a result of this week’s defeat of the Webb amendment and the White House’s success in keeping Republicans in line, the “war party” may feel that they can now focus to a much greater extent on building the case for attacking Iran. Obviously, some seeds have already been planted – although not yet systematically cultivated – over the last two months: notably, Iran’s alleged role in EFG and other attacks against U.S. forces in Iran and NATO in Afghanistan (I just received today an update from the somewhat lethargic Committee on the Present Danger entitled “Iran’s Other Proxy War Against the West: Tehran’s Troublemaking in Afghanistan”), not to mention its ongoing nuclear program. With the Surge debate out of the way, I expect that those seeds to be vigorously watered and fertilized. Note, for example, the conclusion of the lead editorial in this week’s Weekly Standard about the Surge debate, “Men At Work, Children At Play,” by Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol: “We cannot allow Iraq’s neighbors a free hand at strengthening the forces of terror even as we work to subdue them. …Given the drawdown, and given the emphasis General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker put on the damage done by these outside actors, especially Iran, in fanning the violence in Iraq, we expect that the Bush administration will now turn its attention more directly to this critical problem.”

5) Finally, like the balance of power between hawks and realists here, much depends on the balance between similar forces in Tehran. Debate among Iran specialists continues to rage over the meaning of the recent shake-ups in the Revolutionary Guard and the election of former President Hashemi-Rafsanjani to the chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts and how they affect that balance. Partially in that connection, last week’s article by Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii on Juan Cole’s new Informed Comment Global Affairs is definitely worth a read.

Still Alive but PNG’d at AEI

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This is just to assure readers of the site that I am still alive (having been first on a family vacation and then down with the flu), although I learned this week that I am once again persona non grata (PNG) at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The first time I was declared unwelcome there resulted from my appearance on BBC’s weekly public-affairs “Panorama” television program, “The War Party,” that aired in May 2003 and covered the neo-conservatives’ role in promoting the invasion of Iraq. (AEI’s Joshua Muravchik later assailed the program in an article in the September 2003 Commentary, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” in which, among other things, he noted, curiously, that “[Lobe] look(ed) as Jewish as his name sounds.” I am indeed Jewish.) I have since attended several AEI events without incident, but last week, when my colleague, Eli Clifton, was registering for the “No Middle Way: Two Reports on Iraq” event September 6, he was taken aside by AEI’s communications director and told that AEI knew that he worked with me and that, while he was welcome to attend the forum that day, I was still PNG. In a subsequent phone call with Eli, she re-affirmed that I was unwelcome at Washington’s most prominent and influential neo-conservative think tank because I had allegedly made false accusations about and mounted ad hominem attacks against its scholars. Although requested, no specifics were forthcoming, and I remain in the dark about what she — or those who informed her — have in mind.

Of course, my writings about AEI and its associates are on the record, and readers can reach their own conclusions as to the merits of its allegations and the appropriateness of its remedy. But it is remarkable that an institution that prides itself on promoting freedom around the world and on defending “open debate” and “the competition of ideas,” as its mission statement asserts, would seek to restrict access to its policy forums in this way.

Eli, incidentally, is leaving the Washington bureau for a master’s program in international relations at Elliott Abrams’ alma mater, the London School of Economics, as is another valued colleague, Ellen Massey. (Ah, youth!) I have no doubt they will perform brilliantly in their studies and perhaps find some time to continue to contribute to IPS as well.

I hope to catch up quickly on recent events in the coming days and resume posting more frequently next week.