Antiwar.com Blog

Citing most of the same evidence that I have written about over the past few weeks, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, whose access to key policymakers (outside of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office) is second to no other Washington daily journalist argues in his Sunday column that the Bush administration is unlikely to bomb Iran before it leaves office. It’s an important column, not only because he is more specific about the messages conveyed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, (and DNI chief Adm. Michael McConnell before him) to top officials in Israel this summer — that the U.S. would “oppose overflights of Iraqi airspace to attack Iran” — but also because he has been told by a “senior official” that the administration will announce what has been rumored for the past month — that Washington will indeed open an interest section in Tehran. Given the trauma of the 1979-81 hostage crisis, I personally believe that the presence of U.S. diplomats in Tehran virtually guarantees that the U.S. will not attack Iran so long as they remain there. If the prediction of Ignatius’ senior official comes true, it’s a very, very big deal in my view.

Ignatius is particularly close to both the Pentagon brass and the intelligence community (and he’s writing a book to be published in September with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft). His mention of the study by the Washington Institute for Near Policy (WINEP) — which clearly tries to downplay the international consequences of a U.S. and/or Israeli preventive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — is particularly interesting in that respect. The study, which its authors have strenuously denied is aimed at making such an attack much more “thinkable,” is nonetheless quite concerning, even more so because Tony Lake and Susan Rice (among Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers) effectively endorsed it. It’s clearly on the minds of some people who count.

After reading the column, you should also look at Col. Pat Lang’s caution about it on his always-incisive blog. He generally agrees with Ignatius’ analysis, expands on it in important ways, but notes that the current commander-in-chief could prove disturbingly unpredictable in the wake of the November elections. If, on the other hand, U.S. diplomats are in place by then, I think his options will have narrowed considerably.

A brief update on Devon Gaffney Cross’ Policy Forum on International Security (www.policyforumuk.com) whose cozy, off-the-record briefings by senior Pentagon officials, fellow-neo-cons and fellow members of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) for select British and European reporters in exclusive clubs and cafes in London and Paris, we discovered earlier this year, were the beneficiary of a no-bid contract by Defense Undersecretary Eric Edelman’s Policy office last September. We just learned that the Policy Forum was also the beneficiary of the Smith Richardson Foundation, for which Cross has in the past served as director of research and a program office, according to the Foundation’s 2006 annual report which was published late last year. Cross’ group, the report said, was to have received a grant for $25,000 during 2006 to “organize a series of events that bring current and former U.S. policy makers and strategic thinkers together with leading European journalists and opinion makers to discuss key foreign and security policy issues.”

Smith Richardson, whose considerable endowment is based on the Vick’s VapoRub fortune, has been a big funder of neo-con organizations and individuals since the 1970’s, as well as more-mainstream organizations and universities.

Despite the Pentagon’s and Smith Richardson’s largess, the Policy Forum’s website remains as dormant as ever. For more on the Forum’s and Cross’ activities, just type in her name on this site. I’ve posted about half a dozen times on them over the past year or so. Cross, of course, is the sister of Frank Gaffney, the ultra-hawkish president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP) who last week wrote a remarkable column in the Washington Times in which he associated Sen. Obama’s use of the phrase “citizen of the world” in Berlin with the Terror in Revolutionary France, “Citizen Kane,” the Organization of Islamic States (”a Muslim mafia organization”), “Communist China,” Russia, the non-aligned movement, the specter of gun control, and Rodney King. As you will see from the other posts, the Policy Forum appears to be closely associated with the people at Anatol Sharansky’s OneJerusalem.

If you don’t already know about it, the ongoing battle between Time magazine’s Joe Klein and the hard-line neo-conservatives at Commentary’s Contentions blog, as well as the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Abe Foxman (whose recent silence on the issue suggests he thinks this can’t turn out well for his side), over the question of divided or dual loyalties and what is in the respective interests of the U.S. and Israel appears to be heating up. One hopes that it will soon move from the blogosphere (including Time’s “Swampland”) to the mainstream U.S. media. Perhaps Klein himself will get the go-ahead from his editors to devote one of his magazine columns to it so it actually gets in print.

Daniel Luban and I wrote about the controversy today for IPS in which we tried to put it in the context of a series of events that have made it possible for a mainstream, centrist journalist — Jewish and proudly “pro-Israel” no less — like Klein to go after the neo-cons for their war-mongering, their “very, very dangerous form of extremism” and, a propos my last post, their “really dangerous anachronistic neocolonial sensibility,” as Klein described it in a very compelling interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on the Atlantic Monthly’s blog Tuesday. (I praised Goldberg’s own extraordinary attack on AIPAC and other right-wing Jewish groups in the New York Times two months ago as a major advance in the ongoing battle over the media’s reflexive use of the “pro-Israel” moniker to describe such groups.) Klein followed up the interview with a very concise restatement of his position and his determination to continue denouncing the neo-cons in a post, entitled “When Extremists Attack,” on the Swampland blog.

Led by John Podhoretz and Christian Right activist and Bill Kristol protege Peter Wehner, now with the misnamed Ethics and Public Policy Center (where Elliott Abrams spent most of his time after his pardon by President George H.W. Bush), and provoked by Goldberg’s interview, the neo-cons have returned to the attack, once again accusing Klein of anti-Semitism (which was Foxman’s concern) and adding charges of both intellectual and emotional instability for good measure.

But, as he argued in his interview with Goldberg, Klein argued that he is not anti-Semitic; he’s anti-neo-conservative — a very useful distinction that underlines the difference between religion or ethnicity, on the one hand, and political ideology on the other. Now, if all Jews were neo-conservatives, then Klein’s critics, including Foxman, might have a point, but, as Klein notes, Jewish neo-conservatives, to their great frustration, have always been and remain a rather small minority within the larger U.S. Jewish community.

In any event, both Klein’s interview and latest post are well worth reading, and the controversy he has provoked will hopefully soon move into the mainstream press. Oh, and don’t miss M.J. Rosenberg’s review of the latest developments at talkingpointsmemo.com.

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

Spurred by Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s calls for impeachment, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings today on the “Imperial Presidency.”

This hearing was broadcast on CSPAN and is archived here:

Part 1
Part 2

Witnesses includes former representatives Bob Barr and Elizabeth Holtzman, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, former Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and Elliot Adams of Veterans for Peace.

If, as I do, you believe that the writings of the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes reflect the views of Dick Cheney, particularly on matters having to do with the “Axis of Evil,” then you would have to conclude from the lead editorial in this week’s edition that the vice president is really, truly angry about the drift of U.S. policy toward the Axis’ two surviving charter members, especially Iran. “Stunningly Shameful” is the name of the piece written by Hayes on behalf of the editors, which also, of course, includes Bill Kristol.

The title is taken from a quote attributed to “former adviser to Condoleezza Rice,” the principal villain of the piece about whom, you’ll remember, Hayes did a real hatchet job in a lengthy feature article in the magazine’s June 2 edition. One can speculate who that “former adviser” is — it could be someone from her National Security Council days like Elliott Abrams or J.D. Crouch or from the State Department, such as Robert Joseph or, of course, John Bolton whose complaints about the ”intellectual collapse” of the administration, if not Bush himself, has become a staple of New York Times coverage since Rice sent William Burns to the Geneva talks last weekend. In any event, I can’t imagine Hayes writing about anything of special interest to the subject of his fawning biography without the latter’s presumed or even actual approval. (The 2007 book, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, is available used and new for as little as $2.79 on amazon.com.)

“It has been a dispiriting few weeks,” Hayes sighs. “Several conservative political appointees have said that they are embarrassed to be working the Bush administration.” Would that include the vice president?