Antiwar.com Blog

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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.

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_11_porter.mp3]

Independent historian and journalist Gareth Porter describes the history of the Bush administration’s various claims about a threat from Iran’s nuclear program, how at times it’s a “secret” or “parallel” program, while at other times their IAEA-Safeguarded low-level enrichment is itself deemed to be the threat, the year-long internal battle over the Iran NIE, the Israeli government and lobby’s position against the conclusions in the NIE, U.S. use of the MEK/NCRI terrorists and their “intelligence” and the hope that the policy of regime change will now have to be dropped.

MP3 here. (17:06)

Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Dr. Porter was both a Vietnam specialist and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and was Co-Director of Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Dr. Porter taught international studies at City College of New York and American University. He was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/charles/2007-12-10dilliphiro.mp3]

Dilip Hiro, author of Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After: A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?, discusses the history of U.S. relations with Iraq, why they didn’t topple Saddam in 1991, the Iran-Iraq war and his belief that the Annapolis summit was held mostly for the purpose of holding together the Arab coalition against Iran.

MP3 here. (15:06)

Born in the Indian sub-continent, Dilip Hiro was educated in India, Britain and America, where he received a master’s degree at Virginia Polytechnic & State University. He then settled in London in the mid-1960s, and became a full-time writer, journalist and commentator. He has published 28 books.

I read this article and failed to find a satisfactory explanation of the statement in the synopsis that “the U.S. troop buildup has brought down violence.” I see where Sunni groups have decided that al-Qaeda was — for now — a worse foe than the US occupation. I see how Sadr has ordered his men to stand down — for now. I see that Iraqi cities and provinces are almost completely ethnically cleansed into sectarian districts — the violence of the past few years has achieved its objective and is now mostly unnecessary. I do not see what any of this has to do with the “surge,” and the LA Times doesn’t even seem to be able to invent something to help me see that. Even if we do assume the “surge” is responsible for all this calm, the calm has not brought about its intended result — that the government would suddenly assert itself over the land, as if by magic commanding the respect of all Iraqis.

As William Lind might tell you, they are not making states anymore: if you destroy one, the nature of Fourth Generation warfare (and the ubiquity of ever-cheaper military technology for guerrilla types) makes it so that it will be nearly impossible to resurrect a new one in its place.

The state ruled by Baghdad is finished. A new era of city states will erupt over the next decade, and it’s probably the best possible outcome on the road to peace in the region of statelets and kingdoms and ungoverned wilds formerly called Iraq.

The “surge” had no positive effect in Iraq. The fact that the media parrots over and over that its first step has gotten results does not make it so. In fact, in this media-as-Pentagon mouthpiece paradigm, it almost guarantees it’s not.

Quite tragic.

CNN was ready to help lead the march to attack Iran with its special “We Were Warned – Iran Goes Nuclear.” The two-hour show was to air December 12.

Rather than deal with facts, the show was set in a future where Iran has become a nuclear threat. That special was “based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,” said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report “changed everything.” In its place, CNN will this weekend air two Campbell Brown-hosted specials on the Iran situation and its history. Portions of “We Were Warned” correspondent Frank Sesno’s original reporting will be incorporated into those hours, which air Saturday and Sunday.

I am sure CNN will recover and find some other way to help start a war.

A recent short piece in The Nation, “Ron Paul’s Roots,” by Christopher Hayes, has this eye-popping denunciation of Rep. Paul by the unbearably pompous Brink Lindsey, a Cato Institute “scholar” and recently appointed vice president for research,

“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that’s tapping into those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a sustainable move in the libertarian direction.”

Here’s a new logical fallacy: the argument from snobbery. He isn’t our “kind of person.” What kind of person might that be? Well, it’s not at all clear. What is clear, however, is who isn’t “our kind of person.” As Senor Lindsey puts it:

“You have this weird group of people. You’ve got libertarians, you’ve got antiwar types and you’ve got nationalists and xenophobes. I’m not sure that is leading anywhere. I think he’s a sui generis type of guy who’s cobbling together some irreconcilable constituencies, many of which are backward-looking rather than forward-looking.”

Oh, those backwoods anti-IRS hicks, with necks redder than the reddest state, hopeless Neanderthals who would never read Lindsey’s book, The Age of Abundance, wherein he describes the supposedly “libertarian” utopia being ushered in by “the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a ‘creative class’ of ‘knowledge workers.'”

Lindsey and his fellow creative geniuses are too good for the poor untutored hoi polloi who don’t go to the gym four days a week and are neither feminists nor gay. In Lindsey’s lexicon, “Forward-looking” means “people like me,” and “backward-looking” stands for non-feminist non-gay non-gym-going proles, who don’t count anyway.

In any case, sneers Lindsey, Paul “comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do.” Yes, it’s all about him and his exotic prejudices.

I had to laugh when I read how Hayes demarcates the pro-Paul “populist” libertarians from the anti-Paul crowd — the latter are deemed the “cosmopolitan” faction! Yeah, as in Cosmopolitan magazine.

Lindsey’s haughtiness is really a joke, especially when it’s married to his clueless political analysis: who are these “xenophobes” he talks about — the overwhelming majority of Americans who don’t support his own “open the borders” position? And as for these alleged “nationalists” flocking to the Paulian cause: I guess this means they’re attracted to Ron’s questioning of why we’re going to war on account of UN resolutions and entangling alliances. Otherwise, I can’t imagine a less nationalistic candidate, in the modern sense of aggressive expansionism — which surely is better suited to Lindsey’s own position in favor of the Iraq war and the “liberation” of the Middle East.

What the Nation doesn’t tell us, however, is what might really interest Nation readers: that Lindsey’s critique of Paul is really rooted in Lindsey’s pro-war position. He argued in favor of the Iraq war in a piece for Reason magazine, basically making the neocon “weapons of mass destruction-they’ll-greet-us-as-liberators” argument, while Paul, of course, was against the war from the beginning. Having abandoned the core libertarian stance — opposition to mass murder by the State — Lindsey and his ilk are on their way out of libertarianism, as I’ve explained elsewhere, while Paul and his “backward-looking” brethren represent the future of the movement.

The hostility of the Beltway faux-libertarians to the Paul campaign is no surprise, as I explained here, but I’m glad to see the Reason folks are coming around. As the Hayes piece puts it: “Nothing breeds harmony like success, and the Paul bandwagon is now getting big enough for both the Hatfields and the McCoys to get on board. ‘Our readership is very enthusiastic,’ says Nick Gillespie, editor of the DC-based magazine Reason. A few months ago Reason published an article titled ‘Is He Good for the Libertarians?’ That no longer seems an open question.”

Hayes has got that right. Unfortunately, he gets other matters quite wrong: for example, I haven’t seen a single “Confederate nostalgist” at a Ron Paul event, and I’ve been to a few. I don’t imagine there are very many of these in New Hampshire, at any rate, where Ron is up to 8 percent. Hayes also brings out the “white supremacist” canard, based on the unsolicited “support” of someone who served with Dubya’s shock troops in Florida during the recount — a coincidence that seems just a bit dicey, if you think about it for a moment.

Hayes doesn’t want us to know that the key issue between the tiny Lindsey faction and the really existing libertarian movement is the war, and the issue of our foreign policy of global aggression. Just like he doesn’t want us to know the difference between Paul and all the Democratic presidential aspirants but Kucinich — which is the former’s unequivocal opposition to the war and his call for the immediate withdrawal of all US troops. If Paul runs as a third party antiwar candidate, and Hillary gets the Democratic nod, good luck to The Nation in walling off its leftist audience from Ron’s appeal. That some alleged “libertarians,” who are furthermore associated with the leading libertarian think tank, are helping to smear Ron and allowing themselves to be used in his way, is beneath contempt.