Antiwar.com Blog

Just coming across the wire: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi spent $16,000 on flowers this year. Of course, not one was strewn on the grave of a soldier who fell in the senseless war in Iraq she and her party have continued to fund. According to her office, all those posies went to various “heads of state” who visited Washington, such as Ehud Olmert.

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.

[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.