By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jul 7 2017 (IPS)

Iran hawks suddenly have a new mantra: the Islamic Republic is the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and the Trump administration should work to hasten the regime’s impending collapse.

It’s not clear why this comparison has surfaced so abruptly. Its proponents don’t cite any tangible or concrete evidence that the regime in Tehran is somehow on its last legs. But I’m guessing that months of internal policy debate on Iran has finally reached the top echelons in the policy-making chaos that is the White House these days. And the hawks, encouraged by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s rather offhand statement late last month that Washington favors “peaceful” regime change in Iran, appear to be trying to influence the internal debate by arguing that this is Trump’s opportunity to be Ronald Reagan. Indeed, this comparison is so ahistorical, so ungrounded in anything observable, that it can only be aimed at one person, someone notorious for a lack of curiosity and historical perspective, and a strong attraction to “fake news” that magnifies his ego and sense of destiny.

This new theme seemed to have come out of the blue Tuesday with the publication on the Wall Street Journal’s comics—I mean, op-ed—pages of a column entitled “Confront Iran the Reagan Way” by the South Africa-born, Canada-raised CEO of the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Mark Dubowitz. I wish I could publish the whole thing (which is behind a paywall), but a couple of quotes will have to suffice:

In the early 1980s, President Reagan shifted away from his predecessors’ containment strategy toward a new plan of rolling back Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and revolutionary yet internally fragile regime that had to be defeated.

Reagan’s policy was outlined in 1983 in National Security Decision Directive 75, a comprehensive strategy that called for the use of all instruments of American overt and covert power. The plan included a massive defense buildup, economic warfare, support for anti-Soviet proxy forces and dissidents, and an all-out offensive against the regime’s ideological legitimacy.

Mr. Trump should call for a new version of NSDD-75 and go on offense against the Iranian regime.

…the American pressure campaign should seek to undermine Iran’s rulers by strengthening the pro-democracy forces that erupted in Iran in 2009, nearly toppling the regime. Target the regime’s soft underbelly: its massive corruption and human-rights abuses. Conventional wisdom assumes that Iran has a stable government with a public united behind President Hassan Rouhani’s vision of incremental reform. In reality, the gap between the ruled and their Islamist rulers is expanding.

….The administration should present Iran the choice between a new [nuclear] agreement and an unrelenting American pressure campaign while signaling that it is unilaterally prepared to cancel the existing deal if Tehran doesn’t play ball.

Only six years after Ronald Reagan adopted his pressure strategy, the Soviet bloc collapsed. Washington must intensify the pressure on the mullahs as Reagan did on the communists. Otherwise, a lethal nuclear Iran is less than a decade away.

Dubowitz, who clearly has allies inside the administration, asserts that parts of this strategy are already being implemented. “CIA Director Mike Pompeo is putting the agency on an aggressive footing against [the Iranian regime’s terrorist] global networks with the development of a more muscular covert action program.” Dubowitz predictably urges “massive economic sanctions,” calls for “working closely with allied Sunni governments,” and argues—rather dubiously—that “Europeans …may support a tougher Iran policy if it means Washington finally gets serious about Syria.” As for the alleged domestic weaknesses of the regime, let alone its similarity to the USSR in its decline, he offers no evidence whatever.

Takeyh Joins In

I thought this was a crazy kind of one-off by FDD, which, of course, houses former American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Freedom Scholar Michael Ledeen, who has been predicting the imminent demise of the Islamic Republic—and Supreme Leader Khamenei—for some 20 years or so. Ledeen also co-authored former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s bizarre 2016 autobiography and no doubt tutored the NSC’s 31-year-old intelligence director, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, whose conviction that the regime can be overthrown has been widely reported.

But then a friend brought to my attention a short piece posted Wednesday on The Washington Post’s website by Ray Takeyh, a Council on Foreign Relations Iran specialist who in recent years has cavorted with Dubowitz and FDD and similarly inclined Likudist groups, notably the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Entitled “It’s Time to Prepare for Iran’s Political Collapse,” it also compared Iran today with the Soviet Union on the verge.

Today, the Islamic republic lumbers on as the Soviet Union did during its last years. It professes an ideology that convinces no one. It commands security services that proved unreliable in the 2009 rebellion, causing the regime to deploy the Basij militias because many commanders of the Revolutionary Guards refused to shoot the protesters.

…Today, the Islamic republic will not be able to manage a succession to the post of the supreme leader as its factions are too divided and its public too disaffected.…

The task of a judicious U.S. government today is to plan for the probable outbreak of another protest movement or the sudden passing of Khamenei that could destabilize the system to the point of collapse. How can we further sow discord in Iran’s vicious factional politics? How can the United States weaken the regime’s already unsteady security services? This will require not just draining the Islamic republic’s coffers but also finding ways to empower its domestic critics. The planning for all this must start today; once the crisis breaks out, it will be too late for America to be a player.

Once again, actual evidence for the regime’s fragility is not offered. Indeed, although he claims that the 2009 “Green Revolt” “forever delegitimized the system and severed the bonds between state and society,” he fails to note that May’s presidential election resulted in a landslide win for President Hassan Rouhani with 73 percent voter turnout, or that reformist candidates swept the local council polls in most major cities, or that the leader of the reformist movement, leaders of the Green Movement, and prominent political prisoners encouraged participation. Nor does he address the question of whether Washington’s intervention in Iran’s internal politics—in whatever form—will actually help or harm efforts by the regime’s “domestic critics” to promote reform, particularly in light of the recent disclosures of the extent and persistence of U.S. intervention in the events leading up to and including the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq. Or whether last month’s terrorist attack by ISIS in Tehran might have strengthened the relationship between society and state.

This is not to deny that the regime is both oppressive and highly factionalized, but why is it suddenly so vulnerable—so much like the Soviet Union of the late 1980s—compared to what it was five or ten or 20 or 25 years ago? Only because Khamenei is likely to pass from the scene sooner rather than later? That seems like a weak reed on which to base a policy as fraught as what is being proposed.

Again, I’m not sure that this Iran=USSR-at-death’s-door meme is aimed so much at the public, or even the foreign-policy elite, as it is toward the fever swamps of a White House run by the likes of Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller or Cohen-Watnick. But here’s why a little more research into the new equation really got my attention.

And Also Lieberman

Dubowitz’s article, it turns out, was not the first recent reference. The most direct recent reference was offered by none other than former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who incidentally is one of three members of FDD’s “Leadership Council,” in a speech before none other than the annual conference of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and its cult leader, Maryam Rajavi, outside Paris July 1. Seemingly anticipating Takeyh (plus the Rajavi reference), Lieberman declared:

Some things have changed inside Iran, and that’s at the level of the people. You can never suppress a people, you can never enslave a people forever. The people of Iran inside Iran have shown the courage to rise up… To just talk about that, to just talk about that, to hold Madam Rajavi’s picture up in public places, is a sign of the unrest of the people and the growing confidence of the people that change is near. The same is true of the remarkable public disagreements between the various leaders of the country…It is time for America and hopefully some of our allies in Europe to give whatever support we can to those who are fighting for freedom within Iran.

He then went on, “Long before the Berlin Wall collapsed, long before the Soviet Union fell, the United States was supporting resistance movements within the former Soviet Union”—an apparent reference, albeit not an entirely clear one — to the Reagan Doctrine and its purported role in provoking the Communist collapse.

And, in a passage that no doubt expressed what at least Dubowitz and his allies think but can’t say publicly at this point:

The Arab nations are energized under the leadership of King Salman and Crown Prince [Mohammed] bin Salman. [Saudi Prince (and former intelligence chief) Turki Al Faisal Al Saudi addressed the “Free Iran Gathering” just before Lieberman.] They’re more active diplomatically and militarily as part of a resistance against the regime in Iran than we’ve ever seen before. And of course for a long time the state of Israel, because its very existence is threatened by the regime in Iran, has wanted to help change that regime. So you have coming together now a mighty coalition of forces: America, the Arab world, and Israel joining with the Resistance, and that should give us hope that we can make that [regime] change.

Putting aside the question of just how popular or unpopular Madam Rajavi is in Iran for a second, there are a number of truly remarkable things about Lieberman’s speech. How much will it help “the resistance” in Iran to be seen as supported by the Saudis and the “Arab nations?” And how will it help to boast about Israel’s assistance when most Iranians already appear to believe that the Islamic State is a creation of the Saudis and/or Israel? Is there any “mighty coalition” more likely to permanently alienate the vast majority of Iranians? Is it possible that the MEK has become an IRGC counter-intelligence operation? It’s very clear indeed that the group is lobbying heavily—and spending lavishly—to become the administration’s chosen instrument for achieving regime change. But advertising Saudi and Israeli support for the enterprise will likely make that goal more elusive. The MEK’s reputation in Iran was bad enough, but this is really over the top.

Lieberman no doubt received ample compensation for saying what he said. Other former prominent US officials, including John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, and Gen. Jack Keane—all of whom probably have closer ties than Lieberman to the White House – also spoke at the MEK event, which, incidentally, makes me think that the White House is indeed seriously considering supporting the group as at least one part of its Iran policy. I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.

This piece was originally published in Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy Lobelog.com

Jared Kushner, senior advisor to President Donald J. Trump, speaks with Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (by Dominique A. Pineiro via Department of Defense)

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 20 2017 (IPS)

The apparent and surprisingly abrupt demise in Steve Bannon’s influence offers a major potential opening for neoconservatives, many of whom opposed Trump’s election precisely because of his association with Bannon and the “America Firsters,” to return to power after so many years of being relegated to the sidelines. Bannon’s decline suggest that he no longer wields the kind of veto power that prevented the nomination of Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state. Moreover, the administration’s ongoing failure to fill key posts at the undersecretary, assistant secretary, and deputy assistant secretary levels across the government’s foreign-policy apparatus provides a veritable cornucopia of opportunities for aspiring neocons who didn’t express their opposition to the Trump campaign too loudly.

Ninety days into the administration, the military brass—whose interests and general worldview are well represented by National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster and Pentagon chief Gen. James Mattis (ret.), not to mention the various military veterans led by National Security Council (NSC) chief of staff Gen. Kenneth Kellogg (ret.) who are taking positions on the NSC—appears to be very much in the driver’s seat on key foreign policy issues, especially regarding the Greater Middle East. Their influence is evident not only in the attention they’ve paid to mending ties with NATO and northeast Asian allies, but also in the more forceful actions in the Greater Middle East of the past two weeks. These latter demonstrations of force seem designed above all to reassure Washington’s traditional allies in the region, who had worried most loudly about both Obama’s non-interventionism and Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, that the U.S. is not shy about exerting its military muscle.

Nor could it be lost on many observers that Bannon’s expulsion from the NSC took place immediately after Jared Kushner returned from his surprise visit to Iraq hosted by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford—reportedly the culmination of a calculated strategy of seduction by the Pentagon. Kushner has emerged as the chief conduit to Trump (aside, perhaps, from Ivanka). The timing of Bannon’s fall from grace—and Kushner’s reported role in it—was particularly remarkable given that Kushner and Bannon were allied in opposing McMaster’s effort to fire Ezra Cohen-Watnick from the NSC just a week before Kushner flew to Baghdad.)

The Ascendance of the Military

The military’s emergence—at least, for now—has a number of implications, some favorable to neocons, others not so much.

On the favorable side of the ledger, there are clear areas of convergence between both the brass and the neocons (although it’s important to emphasize that neither is monolithic and that there are variations in opinion within both groups). Although both the military and the neocons give lip service to the importance of “soft power” in promoting U.S. interests abroad, they share the belief that, ultimately, hard power is the only coin of the realm that really counts.

The military tends to appreciate the importance of mobilizing multilateral and especially allied support for U.S. policies, especially the use of force. Many neocons, however, don’t accord such support so much importance. Indeed, some are openly contemptuous of multilateralism and international law in general, believing that they unduly constrain Washington’s freedom of action (to do good for the world).
With substantial experience in counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan, both McMaster and Mattis appreciate the importance of politics in military strategy in principle. But they are ultimately military men and hence naturally inclined to look in the first instance to military tools to pound in any loose nails, whether in the form of failing states or failing regional security structures. (That hammer will likely look even more compelling as the Trump administration follows through on its budgetary proposals to deplete U.S. diplomatic and development capabilities.) Like neoconservatives, they also appreciate large military budgets, and although they certainly oppose, in principle, the idea that the U.S. should play globocop for fear of overextension, they have no problem with the notion of U.S. global military primacy and the necessity of maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world to uphold it.

Moreover, the military and neoconservatives share to some extent an enduring hostility toward certain states. The Pentagon is quite comfortable with an adversarial relationship with Russia, if only because it is familiar and ensures European adherence to NATO, which the United States will dominate for the foreseeable future. This applies in particular to McMaster, who spent the last couple of years planning for conflict with Russia. For similar reasons, the military is generally comfortable with a mostly hostile relationship toward Iran. Such a stance ensures close ties with Washington’s traditional allies/autocrats in the Gulf (whose insatiable demand for U.S. weaponry helps sustain the industrial base of the U.S. military as well as the compensation for retired flag officers who serve on the boards of the arms sellers). And, as Mattis has made clear on any number of occasions, he sees Iran as the greatest long-term threat to U.S. interests in the region and welcomes an opportunity to “push back” against what he has claimed are Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions there. All of this is clearly encouraging to neocons whose antipathy toward both the Islamic Republic and Russia is deeply ingrained and of long standing.

On the more negative side, however, the military as an institution naturally harbors a distrust of neoconservatives, a distrust established by the Iraq debacle in which the military still finds itself bogged down with no clear exit. “Regime change” and “nation-building”—much touted by neocons in the post-Cold War era—are dirty words among most of the brass, for whom such phrases have become synonymous with quagmire, over-extension, and, as much as they resist coming to terms with it, failure. Of course, many active-duty and retired senior military officers, of whom McMaster may well be one, consider the 2007-08 “Surge”—a plan heavily promoted by neoconservatives—to have been a great success (despite its manifest failure to achieve the strategic goal of political and sectarian reconciliation) that was undone by Obama’s “premature” withdrawal. But even the most ardent COINistas are aware that, absent a catastrophic attack on the U.S. mainland, the American public will have very limited patience for major new investments of blood and treasure in the Middle East, especially given the general perception that Russia and China pose increasing threats to more important U.S. interests and allies in Europe and East Asia, respectively, compared to five or six years ago.

The prevailing wisdom among the brass remains pretty much as former Defense Secretary Bob Gates enunciated it before his retirement in 2011: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” The military may indeed escalate its presence and loosen its rules of engagement in Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, and even Yemen in the coming months, but not so much as to attract sustained public attention and concern, despite the wishes of neocons like Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake, Gen. Jack Keane (ret.), or the Kagans. The desirability of a “light footprint” has become conventional wisdom at the Pentagon, while some neocons still believe that the U.S. occupation of post-World War II Germany and Japan should be the model for Iraq.

Besides Iraq’s legacy, the military has other reasons to resist neocon efforts to gain influence in the Trump administration. As successive flag officers, including one of their heroes, Gen. David Petraeus (ret.), have testified, the virtually unconditional U.S. embrace of Israel has long made their efforts to enlist Arab support for U.S. military initiatives in the region more difficult. Of course, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, neocons argue that circumstances have changed over the last decade, that the reigning regional chaos and the fear of a rising Iran shared by both Israel and the Sunni-led Arab states have created a new strategic convergence that has made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict virtually irrelevant. According to this view, Washington’s perceived acquiescence in, if not support for, expanding Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and its quarantine of Gaza are no longer a big deal for Arab leaders.

But this perception runs up against the reality that the Pentagon and CENTCOM have always faced in the region. Even the most autocratic Arab leaders, including those who have intensified their covert intelligence and military cooperation with Israel in recent years, are worried about their own public opinion, and, that until Israel takes concrete steps toward the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state pursuant to the solution outlined in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), their cooperation will remain limited, as well as covert. In the meantime, the ever-present possibility of a new Palestinian uprising or another armed conflict in Gaza threatens both continuing cooperation as well as the U.S. position in the region to the extent that Washington is seen as backing Israel.

There are other differences. Despite the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, neocons have long believed that states necessarily constitute the greatest threat to U.S. national security, while the military tends to take relatively more seriously threats posed by non-state actors, such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda or, for that matter, al-Shabaab or Boko Haram to which neocons pay almost no attention. Although some neocons are clearly Islamophobic and/or Arabophobic (in major part due to their Likudist worldview), the military, as shown most recently by McMaster’s opposition to the use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” sees that attitude as counter-productive. And although neocons and the military share a strong antipathy toward Iran, the latter, unlike the former, appears to recognize that both countries share some common interests. Mattis, in particular, sees the nuclear deal as imperfect but very much worth preserving. Most neocons want to kill it, if not by simply tearing it up, then indirectly, either through new congressional sanctions or other means designed to provoke Iran into renouncing it.

The military tends to appreciate the importance of mobilizing multilateral and especially allied support for U.S. policies, especially the use of force. Many neocons, however, don’t accord such support so much importance. Indeed, some are openly contemptuous of multilateralism and international law in general, believing that they unduly constrain Washington’s freedom of action (to do good for the world). Neocons see themselves above all as moral actors in a world of good and evil; the brass is more grounded in realism, albeit of a pretty hardline nature.

Thus, to the extent that the military’s worldview emerges as dominant under Donald Trump, neoconservatives may have a hard time gaining influence. However, on some issues, such as lobbying for a larger Pentagon budget, taking a more aggressive stance against Moscow, aligning the U.S. more closely with the Sunni-led Gulf states, and promoting a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis Iran in the Middle East, neocons may gain an entrée.

Other Avenues of Influence

Just as the Pentagon deliberately courted Kushner—who appears, like his father-in-law, to be something of an empty vessel on foreign policy issues despite the rapid expansion of his international responsibilities in the first 90 days—so others will. Indeed, Abrams himself appears to have gotten the message. In his interview last week with Politico, he unsurprisingly praises Trump’s cruise-missile strikes against Syria and Kushner’s modesty. (“I don’t view him at all as an empire builder.”) At the end of the article, the author notes,

As for his own future with Trump, Abrams teased that it may still be in front of him, depending on how things shape up with Bannon and Kushner, the latter of whom he kept going out of his way to praise. [ Emphasis added.]

Although the deputy secretary of state position now appears to be taken, Abrams was also careful to laud his erstwhile promoter, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Now reportedly coordinating increasingly with Mattis and McMaster, Tillerson seems to have gained significant ground with Trump himself in recent weeks. Neocons may yet find a home at State, although I think Tillerson’s initial promotion of Abrams as his deputy was due primarily to the latter’s experience and skills as a bureaucratic infighter rather than for his ideological predispositions. Meanwhile, UN Amb. Nikki Haley, who was promoted to the NSC’s Principals Committee on the same day that Bannon was expelled, appears to have become a neocon favorite for her Kirkpatrickesque denunciations of Russia, Syria, and the UN itself. That she initially supported neocon heartthrob Sen. Marco Rubio for president and has been aligned politically with Sen. Lindsey Graham, who stressed Haley’s commitment to Israel when she was nominated as ambassador, also offers hope to neocons looking for avenues of influence and infiltration.

Yet another avenue into the administration—indeed, perhaps the most effective—lies with none other than casino king Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest donor to the Trump campaign and inaugural festivities (as well as to Haley’s political action committee). As we noted in January, Kushner himself, along with Israeli Amb. Ron Dermer, had become a critical, pro-Likud conduit between Trump and Adelson beginning shortly after Trump’s rather controversial appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) at the beginning of the presidential campaign. Although Adelson has maintained a low profile since the inauguration, he clearly enjoys unusual access to both Kushner and Trump. Indeed, the fact that Sean Spicer reportedly apologized personally to Adelson, of all people, almost immediately after his “Holocaust center” fiasco last week serves as a helpful reminder that, as much as the various factions, institutions, and individuals jockey for power in the new administration, money—especially campaign cash—still talks in Washington. This is a reality that neoconservatives absorbed long ago.

This piece was originally published in Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy Lobelog.com

E3/EU+3 nuclear talks, Vienna - July 2014. Credit: EEAS/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 25 2014 (IPS)

Buoyed by the failure of the U.S. and five other powers to reach a comprehensive agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme after a week of intensive talks, pro-Israel and Republican hawks are calling for Washington to ramp up economic pressure on Tehran even while talks continue, and to give Congress a veto on any final accord.

“We have supported the economic sanctions, passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, in addition to sanctions placed on Iran by the international community,” Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte, three of the Republican’s leading hawks, said in a statement released shortly after the announcement in Vienna that the one-year-old interim accord between the so-called P5+1 and Iran will be extended until Jul. 1 while negotiations continue.Most Iran specialists here believe that any new sanctions legislation will likely sabotage the talks, fracture the P5+1, and thus undermine the international sanctions regime against Iran.

“These sanctions have had a negative impact on the Iranian economy and are one of the chief reasons the Iranians are now at the negotiating table,” the three senators went on.

“However, we believe this latest extension of talks should be coupled with increased sanctions and a requirement that any final deal between Iran and the United States be sent to Congress for approval. Every Member of Congress should have the opportunity to review the final deal and vote on this major foreign policy decision.”

Their statement was echoed in part by at least one of the likely Republican candidates for president in 2016.

“From the outcome of this latest round, it also appears that Iran’s leadership remains unwilling to give up their nuclear ambitions,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a favourite of pro-Israel neo-conservatives.

“None of this will change in the coming months unless we return to the pressure track that originally brought Iran to the table.”

At the same time, however, senior Democrats expressed disappointment that a more comprehensive agreement had not been reached but defended the decision to extend the Nov. 24, 2013 Joint Programme of Action (JPOA) between the P5+1 — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany – and Iran – an additional seven months, until Jul. 1.

Echoing remarks made earlier by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has held eight meetings with his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, over the past week, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein noted that “Iran has lived up to its obligations under the interim agreement and its nuclear programme has not only been frozen, it has been reversed. Today, Iran is further away from acquiring a nuclear weapon than before negotiations began.

“I urge my colleagues in Washington to be patient, carefully evaluate the progress achieved thus far and provide U.S. negotiators the time and space they need to succeed. A collapse of the talks is counter to U.S. interests and would further destabilise an already-volatile region,” she said in a statement.

The back and forth in Washington came in the wake of Kerry’s statement at the conclusion of intensive talks in Vienna. Hopes for a permanent accord that would limit Iran’s nuclear activities for a period of some years in exchange for the lifting of U.S. and international sanctions against Tehran rose substantially in the course of the week only to fall sharply Sunday when Western negotiators, in particular, spoke for the first time of extending the JPOA instead of concluding a larger agreement.

Neither Kerry nor the parties, who have been exceptionally tight-lipped about the specifics of the negotiations, disclosed what had occurred to change the optimistic tenor of the talks.

Kerry insisted Monday that this latest round had made “real and substantial progress” but that “significant points of disagreement” remain unresolved.

Most analysts believe the gaps involved include the size and scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme – specifically, the number of centrifuges it will be permitted to operate — and the number of years the programme will be subject to extraordinary curbs and international inspections.

Kerry appealed to Congress to not to act in a way that could sabotage the extension of the JPOA – under which Iran agreed to partially roll back its nuclear programme in exchange for an easing of some sanctions – or prospects for a successful negotiation.

“I hope they will come to see the wisdom of leaving us the equilibrium for a few months to be able to proceed without sending messages that might be misinterpreted and cause miscalculation,” he said. “We would be fools to walk away.”

The aim, he said, was to reach a broad framework accord by March and then work out the details by the Jul. 1 deadline. The JPOA was agreed last Nov. 24 but the specific details of its implementation were not worked out until the latter half of January.

Whether his appeal for patience will work in the coming months remains to be seen. Republicans, who, with a few exceptions, favoured new sanctions against Iran even after the JPOA was signed, gained nine seats in the Senate and will control both houses in the new Congress when it convenes in January.

If Congress approves new sanctions legislation, as favoured by McCain, Rubio, and other hawks, President Barack Obama could veto it. To sustain the veto, however, he have to keep at least two thirds of the 40-some Democrats in the upper chamber in line.

That could pose a problem given the continuing influence of the Israel lobby within the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the outgoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, Robert Menendez, who reluctantly tabled a sanctions effort earlier this year, asserted Monday that the administration’s efforts “had not succeeded” and suggested that he would support a “two-track approach of diplomacy and pressure” in the coming period.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading Israel lobby group, also called Monday for “new bipartisan sanctions legislation to let Tehran know that it will face much more severe pressure if it does not clearly abandon its nuclear weapons program.”

Its message echoed that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had reportedly personally lobbied each of the P5+1’s leaders over the weekend, and who, even before the extension was officially announced, expressed relief at the failure to reach a comprehensive accord against which he has been campaigning non-stop over the past year.

“The agreement that Iran was aiming for was very bad indeed,” he told BBC, adding that “the fact that there’s no deal now gives [world powers] the opportunity to continue …to toughen [economic pressures] against Iran.”

The Iran task force of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), co-chaired by Dennis Ross, who held the Iran portfolio at the White House during part of Obama’s first term, said, in addition to increasing economic pressure, Washington should provide weaponry to Israel that would make its threats to attack Iran more credible.

The hard-line neo-conservative Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) said Congress should not only pass new sanctions legislation, but strip Obama’s authority to waive sanctions.

“There’s no point waiting seven months for either another failure or a truly terrible deal,” ECI, which helped fund several Republican Senate campaigns this fall, said.

“Congress should act now to reimpose sanctions and re-establish U.S. red lines that will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. To that end, such legislation must limit the president’s authority to waive sanctions, an authority the president has already signaled a willingness to abuse in his desperate quest for a deal with the mullahs.”

Most Iran specialists here believe that any new sanctions legislation will likely sabotage the talks, fracture the P5+1, and thus undermine the international sanctions regime against Iran, strengthen hard-liners in Tehran who oppose accommodation and favour accelerating the nuclear programme.

“The worst scenario for U.S. interests is one in which Congress overwhelmingly passes new sanctions, Iran resumes its nuclear activities, and international unity unravels,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the Wall Street Journal website Monday.

“Such an outcome would force the United States to revisit the possibility of another military conflict in the Middle East.”

Such arguments, which the administration is also expected to deploy, could not only keep most Democratic senators in line, but may also persuade some Republicans worried about any new military commitment in the Middle East.

Sen. Bob Corker, who will likely chair the Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress, issued a cautious statement Monday, suggesting that he was willing to give the administration more time. Tougher sanctions, he said, could be prepared “should negotiations fail.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Credit: Twitter/@AntDeRosa

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 22 2014 (IPS)

Despite media hype, missteps by federal health agencies, and apparent efforts by right-wing and some neo-conservatives to foment fear about the possible spread of the Ebola virus in the U.S., most of the public remain at least “fairly” confident in the authorities’ ability to deal with the virus.

Concern about the potential threat posed by the virus has clearly grown over the past two weeks, especially after two nurses at a Dallas hospital who helped treat a fatally infected Liberian man contracted the virus. But a major poll released Tuesday found that a clear majority of respondents expressed little or no concern that they or someone in their family will be exposed.“On the one hand, it is a genuine crisis in the countries where’s it’s happening, and therefore it deserves all the attention it can get. On the other hand, the nature of that attention is inappropriate, misleading, and scare-mongering." -- Andrew Tyndall

The survey, which was conducted Oct. 15-20 by the Pew Research Center, found that about six in 10 respondents (61 percent) said they have “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence in U.S. hospitals “to diagnose and isolate possible cases of Ebola,” compared to 38 percent who said they have little or no confidence.

And 54 percent – only three percent lower than in another Pew poll taken in the days that followed Thomas Eric Duncan’s much-publicised hospitalisation — said they have a “great deal” or “fair” amount of confidence that the federal government will prevent a major outbreak of the deadly disease here.

The survey, however, found major differences in perception of the threat depending on the respondents’ political affiliations. In early October, for example, a third of self-identified Republicans said they were at least somewhat worried that they or their family members would be exposed to the virus. That percentage has since increased to 49 percent.

The loss in confidence in the government’s ability to prevent a wider outbreak has grown – albeit by not as large a percentage – among Republicans who tend generally to be ideologically more distrustful of government than Democrats or independents on most issues.

With the approach of mid-term Congressional elections in just two weeks, however, some Republican politicians and right-wing and neo-conservative publications and commentators appear to be deliberately fanning fears of Ebola’s spread and the government’s purported inability to deal with it, even conflating the virus’s prominence with the threat of terrorism and, specifically, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Indeed, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard’s lead editorial this week was entitled “Six Reasons to Panic”, while the Washington Post featured an op-ed by Marc Thiessen, a right-wing Republican commentator and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), depicting a “nightmare scenario” in which “suicide bombers infected with Ebola could blow themselves up in a crowded place – say, shopping malls in Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Atlanta – spreading infected tissue and bodily fluids.”

Commentators on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News have conjured similar scenarios.

As noted by The New Republic this week, “a growing body of literature in psychology suggests that feelings of fear make people’s political outlook more conservative.”

The Ebola pandemic, which, according to official figures – unofficially, the estimates run much higher – has caused the deaths of well over 4,500 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea since its outbreak last spring, was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media here until the end of July when two U.S. missionaries were infected and flown to the U.S. for treatment.

But it shot to the top of the news agenda with confirmation that Duncan, a Liberian who had flown to the U.S. for his son’s high school graduation, was admitted to a Dallas hospital Sep. 30 and tested positive for the virus. He died Oct. 8. Within a week, two nurses who had treated him also tested positive and are currently being treated in specially equipped and trained hospitals.

Since Duncan’s hospitalisation, Ebola has received more attention on three network nightly television news programmes – the single biggest source of information about international and national events for the U.S. public — than any other story, accounting for almost one third of total broadcast time over the past three weeks, according to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the authoritative Tyndall Report which has tracked network news for 25 years.

He told IPS he had “very mixed feelings” about the networks’ coverage. “On the one hand, it is a genuine crisis in the countries where’s it’s happening, and therefore it deserves all the attention it can get,” he said.

“On the other hand, the nature of that attention is inappropriate, misleading, and scare-mongering in that it is so disproportionately focuses on the very low level domestic threat (Ebola poses), as opposed as to the actual crisis in the three West African nations.”

What applied to the three networks – CBS, ABC, and NBC – applied much more to the main cable news stations – Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC – whose coverage was, if anything, more sensational despite efforts by its resident health experts or guest epidemiologists to rein in the rampant speculation.

One CNN anchor, for example, offered up a similar scenario as the one described by AEI’s Thiessen, noting that “All ISIS would need to do is send a few of its suicide killers into an Ebola affected zone and then get them onto mass transit.”

Such panic-provoking commentary has naturally bolstered Republican efforts to generate a sense that the world was spinning increasingly out of control due to the “weakness” and incompetence of President Barack Obama and his administration, a theme that was made somewhat more credible by over-confident statements before the two nurses’ infection by administration officials, notably the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about their ability to “stop [Ebola] in its tracks in the U.S.”

Backed by right-wing media, Republican lawmakers and candidates have demanded that the administration impose a ban on civilian air travel to the U.S. from the three West African countries – a position favoured by nearly three out of four respondents, according to recent polls, despite strong opposition by epidemiologists and other public-health experts who have warned that such a step would make it more difficult to track Ebola’s victims and those with whom they come in contact.

Obama sought initially to appease those demands by ordering temperature checks at five of the most important U.S. international airports for incoming passengers whose travel originated in the three West African countries. Faced with the growing political pressure, he expanded that order Tuesday by requiring passengers flying from those nations to enter the U.S. through one of those five airports.

Republican lawmakers, however, insisted that that was insufficient and are reportedly preparing legislation that would suspend U.S. visas for citizens of the Ebola-affected countries.

Despite the public’s concern about exposure to Ebola, large majorities of respondents, including 85 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans, said they supported the administration’s efforts to fight the virus in West Africa.

Those efforts include sending an estimated 3,000 U.S. servicemen and women to build treatment units and training facilities for health workers, and provide logistical support and transport for needed equipment and personnel, as well as more than 100 health specialists from the CDC and other agencies.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Credit: DoD/public domain

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 17 2014 (IPS)

U.S. combat troops may be deployed against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) if the strategy announced by President Barack Obama last week fails to make substantial progress against the radical Sunni group, Washington’s top military officer warned here Tuesday.

The statement by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, delivered during testimony before a key Congressional committee, suggested for the first time that the administration may substantially broaden military operations in Iraq beyond air strikes and advising Iraqi and Kurdish forces far from the front lines.As long as Saudi Arabia and Iran do not make common cause, any coalition to combat Islamist fanatics will be half-hearted at best and unrooted in the region at worst." -- Amb. Chas Freeman (ret.)

“If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific targets, I will recommend that to the president,” Dempsey told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“At this point, his [Obama’s] stated policy is we will not have U.S. ground forces in direct combat,” he said. “But he has told me as well to come back to him on a case-by-case basis.”

Dempsey’s remarks, which came as Congress appeared poised to approve a pending 500-million-dollar request to train and equip Syrian rebels committed to fighting ISIS, as well as the government of President Bashar al-Assad, appeared certain to fuel doubts about Obama’s plans, particularly given his promise last week that U.S. forces “will not have a combat mission.”

“We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq,” he declared in last week’s nationally televised speech in which he also pledged to build an international coalition, including NATO and key regional and Sunni-led Arab states, to fight ISIS forces in both Iraq and Syria.

While Secretary of State John Kerry has since gathered public endorsements for the administration’s strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, notably at a meeting of Arab states in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last week and from a larger group of nations in Paris Sunday, scepticism over the strength and effectiveness of such a coalition appears to have deepened.

Although Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France appear committed to provide some air support to anti-ISIS operations, several key allies, including Britain, have remained non-committal about their willingness to help with military operations.

Turkey, whose army is the largest and most potent in the region and whose porous borders with ISIS-controlled regions in eastern Syria have been fully exploited by the group, has been particularly disappointing to officials here.

Despite repeated appeals, for example, Ankara has reportedly refused to permit U.S. military aircraft to use its strategically located Incirlik air base for carrying out anything but humanitarian missions in or over Iraq, insisting that any direct involvement in the campaign against ISIS would jeopardise the lives of dozens of Turkish diplomats seized by the group at Ankara’s consulate in Aleppo earlier this year.

Critics of Washington’s strategy are also concerned that Kerry may have reduced the chances for co-operation with another potentially key anti-ISIS ally – Iran – which he explicitly excluded from participation in any international coalition due to its support for Assad and its alleged status as a “state sponsor of terror”.

While Kerry Monday said Washington remained open to “communicating” with Tehran — which, along among the regional powers, has provided arms and advisers to both Kurdish and Iraqi forces — about its efforts against ISIS, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who earlier this month reportedly authorised limited co-operation over ISIS, ridiculed the notion, insisting that it was Iran who had rebuffed Washington.

But Kerry’s exclusion of Iran from the anti-ISIS coalition, according to experts here, was motivated primarily by threats by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to drop out if Tehran were included – a reflection not only of the ongoing Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the region, especially in the Syrian civil war, but also of the difficulty Washington faces in persuading governments with widely differing interests to unite behind a common cause.

“Leaving Iran out of the collective effort to contain and eventually destroy ISIS, especially after what happened in Amerli [a town whose siege by ISIS was eventually broken by a combination of U.S. airpower and Iranian-backed militias and Iraqi troops], defies logic and sanity and cannot be explained away by anyone in Iran,” noted Farideh Farhi, an Iran specialist at the University of Hawaii.

“It suggests to many [in Iran] that the fear of legitimising Iran’s role in regional security continues to be a driving force in U.S. foreign policy,” she told IPS in an email exchange.

Indeed, the success of Obama’s strategy may well depend less on U.S. military power than on his ability to reconcile and reassure key regional actors, including Iran.

“To have any hope of success, America’s do-it-yourself approach needs to be replaced with an effort to facilitate co-operation between the region’s great Muslim powers,” according to Amb. Chas Freeman (ret.), who served as Washington’s chief envoy to Riyadh during the first Gulf War.

“… As long as Saudi Arabia and Iran do not make common cause, any coalition to combat Islamist fanatics will be half-hearted at best and unrooted in the region at worst,” he told IPS.

Despite these difficult diplomatic challenges faced by Obama, most of the scepticism here revolves around his military strategy, particularly its reliance on air power and the absence of effective ground forces that can take and hold territory, especially in predominantly Sunni areas of both western and north-central Iraq and eastern Syria.

While U.S. officials believe that Kurdish peshmerga forces and the Iraqi army – with Iranian-backed Shi’a militias – can, with U.S. and allied air support, roll back most of ISIS’s more-recent gains in Iraq, it will take far more time to wrest control of areas, including cities like Fallujah and Ramadi, which the group has effectively governed for months.

Obama announced last week that he was sending nearly 500 more military personnel to Iraq, bringing the total U.S. presence there to around 1,600 troops, most of whom are to serve as trainers and advisers both for the peshmerga and the Iraqi army.

According to Dempsey, however, these troops have not yet been authorised to accompany local forces into combat or even to act as spotters for U.S. aircraft.

As for Syria, Washington plans to train and equip some 5,000 members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a fractious coalition of “moderate” fighters who have been increasingly squeezed and marginalised by both pro-government forces and ISIS and who have often allied themselves with other Islamist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

It will take at least eight months, however, before that force can take the field, according to Dempsey and Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel. Even then, they said, such a force will be unable “to turn the tide” of battle. Dempsey’s said he hoped that Sunni-led Arab countries would provide special operations forces to support the FSA, although none has yet indicated a willingness to do so.

Hawks, such as Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have argued that these plans are insufficient to destroy ISIS in either country.

Some neo-conservative defence analysts, such as Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, have called for as many as 25,000 U.S. ground troops, including thousands of Special Forces units to work with “moderate” Sunni forces, to be deployed to both countries in order to prevail. They have also warned against any co-operation with either Iran or Assad in the fight against ISIS.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with members of the National Security Council in the Situation Room of the White House, Sept. 10, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 2014 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s new strategy to “degrade, and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is being met with widespread scepticism among both hawks and doves, as well as regional specialists.

While Congress is expected to acquiesce, if not formally authorise, the plans he outlined in his nationally televised prime-time speech Wednesday night, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have not been shy about expressing reservations.“The proverbial 64,000-dollar question is whether the seemingly mediocre Abadi government can peel enough of [the Sunni Arab tribes and veteran Awakening cadres] away from active and passive support for ISIS or from the sidelines.” -- Wayne White

“While the president presented a compelling case for action, many questions remain about the way in which [he] intends to act,” said Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

Indeed, while he adopted a determined and confident tone that won plaudits even from Republicans like Boehner, it is no secret here that Obama, who has made Washington’s extraction from Middle East wars a legacy issue for his presidency, has consistently resisted pressure to escalate U.S. military involvement in the region.

Speaking on the eve of the 13th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Obama announced that he will increase U.S. support for Iraq’s army and the Kurdish Peshmerga with more training, intelligence, and equipment and will dispatch 475 U.S. military personnel to join the 1,000-plus who have deployed there since ISIS swept across much of the northern and central part of Iraq in June.

At the same time, he pledged that the campaign “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”

In addition, he said the U.S. will carry out airstrikes against ISIS targets “wherever they exist,” not only in Iraq, but, most significantly, in Syria, as well.

Washington, he said, is also assembling “a broad coalition of partners”, including NATO, and, more importantly, the Sunni-led Gulf states, Jordan, and Lebanon whose governments pledged support for the anti-ISIS campaign and the new government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, during a meeting Thursday with Secretary of State John Kerry in Jiddah.

And Obama asked Congress to swiftly approve a pending request for 500 million dollars to train and equip anti-government and anti-ISIS Syrian rebels.

Saudi Arabia, a major backer of various factions in the three-year insurgency against President Bashar Al-Assad, has agreed to host training camps for these “moderate” rebels, according to administration officials.

This “comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy” – which he compared to Washington’s long-standing operations in Yemen and Somalia — will “take time to eradicate a cancer like ISIL (Islamic State of Syria and the Levant),” Obama said, using the administration’s preferred acronym.

While the plan gained guarded approval from most lawmakers – who, facing mid-term elections in November, are particularly sensitive to a sudden hawkish shift in public opinion – many said it raised as many questions as it answered, including whether Obama has the legal authority to order strikes against ISIS, especially in Syria, without getting explicit Congressional authorisation.

At the same time, hawks questioned whether the strategy – notably Obama’s pledge not to introduce combat troops – was sufficient to achieve its goals.

“Obama’s ‘strategy’ has no chance of success,” wrote Frederick and Kimberly Kagan of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for the Study of War, respectively, on the Weekly Standard’s website.

The two Kagans, who helped devise the Bush administration’s “Surge” to curb Iraq’s Sunni-Shi’a conflict in 2007, argued that a counter-terrorism (CT) strategy would not work against a full-fledged insurgency, which they said ISIS has become. “It’s awfully hard to develop a sound strategy when you start by misdiagnosing the problem so profoundly,” they wrote. Frederick Kagan has argued that 10-15,000 U.S. troops are necessary for Iraq alone.

Others disagreed. “Getting more U.S. troops on the ground is precisely what … [ISIS chief Abu Bakr] Al-Baghdadi wants,” Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told IPS. “A target-rich environment is what they want, and in their area.

“If the Iraqis and others are not up to defeating [ISIS] forces, then U.S. and allied airpower, some advice on the ground, and intelligence assistance should be sufficient to do so. …[ISIS] is not 10 feet tall, not even four – despite all the media hype to the contrary,” he said.

In Iraq, defeating ISIS will depend largely on whether Abadi follows through on his pledge to share power with Sunni Arabs and fully integrate them into a new security structure, according to regional experts.

“One hundred years of war …has demonstrated that air power can only succeed if a robust ground force is ready to take advantage of air strikes to physically take and occupy territory,” according to Wayne White, a former top State Department Middle East intelligence officer now with the Middle East Institute (MEI).

“The president is not ignorant of this dictum: hence, his part in ousting the loathsome [former Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki and the need for a credibly inclusive new government in Baghdad that can revive the Iraqi Army,” he wrote in an email exchange.

“…The proverbial 64,000-dollar question is whether the seemingly mediocre Abadi government can peel enough of [the Sunni Arab tribes and veteran Awakening cadres] away from active and passive support for ISIS or from the sidelines,” White added. “Only a sizeable Sunni Arab force from within could make considerable headway along with airstrikes in unhinging ISIS from key holdings like cities and large towns.”

Even if the strategy in Iraq succeeds, however, attacking ISIS in Syria will be far more difficult, in major part because Western-backed rebel factions are “much weaker than two years ago,” according to former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell whose assessment echoed that of most regional experts, some of whom, such as former the former U.S. Amb. to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, have argued for working with Assad as the lesser evil – a step that the administration appears so far to reject.

“The speech left major questions about Syria unanswered,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst. “If ISIS is to be set back, who fills that vacuum? If it is the Assad regime, how does that square with the continued U.S. opposition to that regime? If it is supposed to be someone else, how does that square with the persistent lack of unity, strength, and credibility of the so-called moderate opposition?”

Along with Wilkerson, regional experts worried that Obama’s strategy is susceptible to “mission creep”.

“If the air strikes do not ‘defeat’ ISIS, what policy will the president pursue considering that he ruled out putting boots on the ground?” asked Emile Nakhleh, a former director of the CIA’s political Islam strategic analysis programme.

He also questioned the commitment of the Sunni Arab states that signed on to the strategy in Jiddah “considering that domestic radical Islamists are already posing a serious challenge to such countries as Saudi Arabia and Jordan.”

Thomas Lippman, a Gulf specialist at MEI, agreed that the coalition that Obama was putting together could prove problematic, noting that its members “…are united about what they DON’T want — namely more ISIS — but are not united about what they DO want. And many of them are suspicious about some of the others,” he said in an email exchange.

He noted that Turkey, with the most potent military force in the region and whose Incirlik air base has been used in the past for U.S. operations over Iraq, had participated in the Jiddah meeting Thursday but failed to sign the summit statement.

Like Wilkerson, Nakhleh also suggested that Obama’s hand been forced as a result of the “media frenzy about the hyped-up ISIS threat” which some commentators have blamed on the sensational coverage of the recent beheadings by ISIS of two U.S. journalists and overheated rhetoric by some of Obama’s top officials, including Kerry and Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel.

A poll conducted last week by ABC News and the Washington Post found 71 percent support for air strikes against “Sunni insurgents in Iraq” – up from 54 percent in mid-August and 45 percent in mid-June as ISIS swept across Iraq.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

National Security Adviser Susan Rice was interrupted by a protester who shouted “End the siege on Gaza." Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2014 (IPS)

Pro-Israel activists assembled a huge crowd and a long list of congressional leaders and diplomats to declare their unconditional support for Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip on Monday, largely downplaying  tensions between Jerusalem and Washington.

Key congressional figures from both the Republican and Democratic Parties echoed similar views: that Israel was exercising its inherent right of self-defence, that the entire blame for the hostilities lies with Hamas, and reminding the audience, in a thinly veiled message to U.S. President Barack Obama, that Hamas is backed by Iran.Many of the speakers brought up Iranian sponsorship of Hamas, despite the fact that the relationship between them splintered after Hamas declared its support for the rebels in Syria.

Obama was represented at the event here, dubbed the National Leadership Assembly for Israel, by his national security adviser, Susan Rice.

Her address was interrupted by a protester, Tighe Berry, who shouted “End the siege on Gaza,” and held up a sign with the same words. Berry was joined by a handful of protesters outside the building from the pro-peace activist group, Code Pink.

After the protester was removed by force, Rice delivered the White House view that a ceasefire was of the utmost urgency in Gaza and Israel.

“The United States supports an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire,” Rice said. “That humanitarian ceasefire should lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities based on the agreement of November 2012.”

That statement was distinct from the Israeli stance and that of almost all of the speakers at this event. Although Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire several weeks ago along similar lines, it is now insisting on first eliminating any tunnels in Gaza which lead into Israel and taking steps to disarm Hamas before halting its operations.

Robert Sugarman, the chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which spearheaded this gathering, set the tone with his opening remarks to the overflow crowd.

“We must continue to support the decisions of the government [of Israel], whatever our personal views may be,” Sugarman said. “And we must continue to urge our government to support [the decisions of the Israeli government] as well.”

While most of the speakers did not state any direct opposition to the Obama administration’s policy, virtually all of them stressed the view that Hamas must be disarmed and that the Netanyahu government must have unqualified U.S. support.

John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and one of President Obama’s leading political opponents, came closest to squarely criticising the president, by tying the crisis in Gaza to Iran.

“We will continue to push this administration to address root cause of conflict in the Middle East,” Boehner said. “What we’re seeing in Gaza is a direct result of Iran sponsored terrorism in the region. This is part of Iran’s long history of providing weapons to Gaza-based terror organizations, which must come to an end. Israel’s enemies are our enemies. As long as I’m Speaker, this will be our cause.”

Many of the speakers brought up Iranian sponsorship of Hamas, despite the fact that the relationship between them splintered after Hamas declared its support for the rebels in Syria, fighting against Iran’s key ally in the region, Bashar al-Assad.

Nonetheless, for many of the speakers, the connection provided a bridge to connect the fighting in Gaza to Congress’ scepticism about diplomacy with Iran over the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme.

But ongoing tensions between the Obama administration and the government of Israel inevitably made their way into the room.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Dermer tried to balance a conciliatory tone with Israel’s determination to continue its operations in Gaza despite calls from the United States and most of the international community for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

“Israel has uncovered dozens of tunnels whose sole purpose is to facilitate attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel will continue to destroy these tunnels and I’m sure the Obama administration understands this,” Dermer said.

“Everyone understands that leaving these tunnels is like seizing 10,000 missiles and handing them back to Hamas. That is not going to happen. We will not stop until that job is done. Israel believes that a sustainable solution is one where Gaza is demilitarized, rockets are removed, and the tunnels destroyed so Hamas cannot rearm in another year or two. We appreciate that all U.S. leaders have supported us.”

But Dermer also delivered a message of moderate conciliation in the wake of very harsh criticism in Israel of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry after the alleged text of a ceasefire proposal from Kerry was leaked to the Israeli media.

“I am speaking now for my prime minister,” Dermer said. “The criticism of Secretary Kerry for his good faith efforts to advance a ceasefire is unwarranted. We look forward to working with the United States to advance goal of a ceasefire that is durable.”

Rice also addressed the criticism of Kerry. “We’ve been dismayed by some press reports in Israel mischaracterising [Secretary Kerry’s] efforts. We know these misleading reports have raised concerns here at home as well.

“The reality is that John Kerry, on behalf of the United States, has been working with Israel every step of the way to support our shared interests. Both in public and private, we have strongly supported Israel’s right to defend itself. We will continue to do so and continue to set the record straight when anyone distorts facts.”

Rice’s defence of Kerry did not seem to ruffle many feathers in the audience. But the next day, a new controversy arose in Israel when several Israeli radio stations reported on a leaked transcript of a phone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. Israel’s Channel 1 reported that Obama “behaved in a rude, condescending and hostile manner” toward Netanyahu in the call.

Both the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office flatly denied the reports.

“[It is] shocking and disappointing [that] someone would sink to misrepresenting a private conversation between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister in fabrications to the Israeli press,” said an official statement from the Prime Minister’s Twitter account.

Identical language was employed by the United States National Security Council over their own Twitter account. “The…report is totally false,” added White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

Editing by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at plitnickm@gmail.com

Amidst a roiling and mostly partisan debate over Washington’s global role, a survey released here Thursday suggests that President Barack Obama’s preference for relative restraint and multilateral – over unilateral – action very much reflects the mood of the voting public.

The survey, which was conducted by prominent pollsters for both major political parties, confirmed a decade-long trend in favour of reducing active U.S. involvement in global affairs and focusing more on domestic issues.“It’s not that ‘leadership’ is seen as a negative term, but what people object to is putting the U.S. out front while others are hanging back.” -- Steven Kull

At the same time, however, it found strong support for working cooperatively with other countries to address international issues, including and especially through the United Nations about which, remarkably, twice as many respondents (59 percent) said they felt favourably than they felt about the U.S. Congress (29 percent).

Indeed, a whopping 86 percent of the 800 voters contacted randomly by the poll said that it was either “very” (61 percent) or “somewhat” (25 percent) important “for the United States to maintain an active role within the United Nations.”

“This not about apathy to foreign policy or assistance – to the contrary, the poll shows voters feel a strong, vested interest in global affairs,” said Peter Yeo, executive director of the Better World Campaign, which commissioned the survey.

The survey, which was conducted in mid-April as the crisis over Crimea and Ukraine dominated the news, comes amidst strong criticism of Obama by neo-conservatives and other hawks over what they allege is his passivity in reacting to Russian aggression, as well as China’s assertion of territorial claims in the East and South China seas and advances by government forces against western- and Gulf Arab-backed rebels in Syria, among other presumed setbacks.

In their view, Obama’s restraint, or what they increasingly call “retreat”, has fed “isolationist” tendencies that have grown steadily stronger as a result of the continuing effects of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure to achieve “victories” – attributed largely to Obama’s lack of political will – in Bush-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the administration has angrily rejected these charges, noting, for example, that it has upheld all of Washington’s treaty commitments; that it is deeply engaged in rallying regional and international opposition to moves by Russia and China; and that it is Republican hawks who, for example, have slashed foreign aid, attacked the U.N. and other multilateral forums, and promoted unilateral military measures that proved ineffective, if not counter-productive, especially during the Bush years.

The hawks have tried to conflate “military restraint with isolationism, but that’s really a ploy to tar people who have a more critical stance because of the experience of the past 13 years,” Carl Conetta, director the Project for Defense Alternatives (PDA), told IPS.

Indeed, recent polls have shown a clear public desire to reduce Washington’s international commitments. Most famously perhaps, a major Pew survey published last December found that 52 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

It was the first time in the nearly 50-year history of the question that a majority agreed with its proposition.

But, according to Conetta and other analysts, that result has much more to do with Washington’s unilateral military adventures – and the disappointments that resulted from those in Iraq and Afghanistan – than other forms of international engagement support for which has been remarkably steady for many years.

“All the polls show that there’s reduced enthusiasm for international engagement, but they also show that that doesn’t apply to all forms of engagement,” Conetta said. “We see that people are quite supportive of cooperative engagement.”

Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), agreed. “Overall, this poll and others show that during a period of economic downturn, there’s a strengthening of a feeling that we need to deal with problems at home. But that doesn’t mean that people want to disengage from the world, but rather that there’s a stronger interest in collaborative approaches where the United States isn’t out front so much.

“As we can see from this (Better World) poll, support for multilateral forms of engagement are just as strong as ever,” he told IPS.

Indeed, asked to choose up to two out of ten different international policy approaches the U.S. should pursue, the single most popular choice (40 percent) was “America working with global partners around the world and letting our partners take more of the lead.”

And while the second-most popular choice (34 percent) was “letting other countries solve their own problems without American involvement,” it was virtually tied with “international cooperation” (33 percent).

Significantly, the least popular choices were “America going it alone in resolving international issues” (2 percent) and “Isolationism” (4 percent), and “America taking the lead in preventing and resolving deadly conflict around the world” (12 percent).

“All of these answers show a cooperative orientation on the part of the public,” noted Kull. “It’s not that ‘leadership’ is seen as a negative term, but what people object to is putting the U.S. out front while others are hanging back.”

As to the U.N. itself, while respondents were split on the actual effectiveness of the world body, 85 percent said it should be made “more effective”; only 13 percent disagreed.

More than 70 percent agreed with the statements that “working through [the U.N.] improves America’s image around the world” and that the “U.S. needs needs the U.N. now more than ever because we cannot bear all the burden and cannot afford to pay to go it alone around the world.”

Two-thirds of respondents – including majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents – said Washington should pay its peacekeeping dues to the U.N. on time and in full, while 31 percent opposed payment.

Due to Congressional cuts to requests by the administration, Washington currently owes the U.N. peacekeeping account for 2014 more than 350 million dollars.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The observation that the Chinese characters for the word “crisis” combine the characters for “danger” and “opportunity” has become a staple of Washington foreign policy discourse for years.

So it’s no surprise that the ongoing crisis in Ukraine – and Russia’s de facto absorption of Crimea – provides lots of “opportunities” for various interests to push their favourite causes.The notion of a new Cold War appeared to offer all kinds of opportunities for those interests nostalgic for the financial and bureaucratic benefits which it wrought.

Of course, that begins with Republicans who have used the crisis – and President Barack Obama’s failure to anticipate, prevent or reverse it – as an opportunity to pound away at his alleged naivete, weakness and spinelessness, a theme which the party’s still-dominant neo-conservative faction has been hyping since even before his 2009 inauguration.

“(T)his is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” declared Sen. John McCain, Obama’s Republican rival back in 2008, before an audience of some 14,000 activists of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) earlier this month.

At the same time, the neo-conservative editorial board at the Wall Street Journal has kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism, comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter, rendered seemingly helpless in 1979 by the hostage seizure in Iran, the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, suggested that Obama slap tough sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and business elite (steps the White House began taking last week) to force the Russian leader to back down.

“Only a president as inept as Barack Obama could fail to seize the opportunity to win, or even wage, the new Cold War all over again,” according to Stephens.

Indeed, the notion of a new Cold War appeared to offer all kinds of opportunities for those interests nostalgic for the financial and bureaucratic benefits which it wrought.

While arms manufacturers have opted to remain in the background – lest their enthusiasm for a return to the golden age of sky-high defence budgets appear too obvious, even vulgar – their representatives in Congress and sympathetic think tanks have not been so constrained.

Thus, Amb. Eric Edelman (ret.), who served as Pentagon undersecretary for policy under George W. Bush, called last week for “a large increase in the defence budget, much like the one Jimmy Carter obtained after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“A jolt to the budget …would signal an end to the relative decline in U.S. military power over the post four years that, in [Defence] Secretary [Chuck] Hagel’s words, has meant that ‘we are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in the skies, and in space can no longer be taken for granted,’” he wrote in The Weekly Standard last week.

Edelman is currently a director of the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the successor organisation to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a letterhead organisation that championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“That would send a powerful and unwelcome message to those in both Moscow and Beijing who are betting on the end of the unipolar world,” he added.

Writing for the same publication, Thomas Donnelly, a PNAC alumnus based at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that defence increases must include a reversal of the Obama administration’s decision to cut the active-duty from the current 522,000 troops to around 445,000, the smallest number since the eve of Washington’s entry into World War II.

He even decried other hawks, including McCain and neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who have ruled out putting “boots on the ground” to counter Russian moves, or for that matter advances by the Syrian army against rebel forces as well.

“Ukraine is still, for the present, a no-man’s-land, neither West nor East. But Ukraine is hardly the only no-man’s-land. The entire Middle East is fast become an especially gruesome. The South China Sea is likewise up for grabs. …Preserving the peace on the Eurasian landmass demands land forces,” he wrote.

In addition to restoring cuts to the army, another long-time and highly lucrative favourite of the military-industrial complex – missile defence – is being promoted as the answer to Russian moves.

“Beyond sanctions and aid to Ukraine, the most important thing we could be doing right now, with respect to Russia, is installing anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a likely 2016 presidential aspirant, told the Washington Post last week shortly after Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney made much the same pitch, deploring Obama’s decision in 2009 to scrap a plan to install missile defences in Poland the Czech Republic as part of a “reset” in relations with Moscow.

Echoing FPI, which, much like its PNAC predecessor used to do, published an entire agenda Friday of actions to counter Moscow signed by dozens of mainly neo-conservative foreign policy analysts, Cheney called for a “joint military exercises with our NATO friends close to the Russian border,” as well as a step-up in military equipment training for Ukraine’s armed forces.

But the military-industrial complex is not the only interest that is jumping on the Crimea crisis to push for major new initiatives from which it stands to benefit financially.

Bemoaning the degree to which Ukraine, other Central European countries, as well as much of western Europe depends on Russian oil and gas, U.S. energy companies and their advocates in Congress and on the op-ed pages are pressing the administration hard to permit them to more freely export their products, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG), for which the U.S. has very few export terminals, around the world.

“Even if, in the short term, most of our LNG exports go to Asia rather than to Europe, expediting and expanding those exports would increase global supply, push down global prices, and signal to Putin that Washington is determined to squeeze his gas revenues and break his energy stranglehold on Eastern Europe,” wrote Texas Sen. John Cornyn Monday in the National Review Online.

That argument was echoed by the Washington Post, which in the past has expressed concerns about the impact on climate change of encouraging fossil fuel consumption.

But, faced with Russian actions, the Post said ramping up U.S. exports now would send an important message. “The more suppliers there are…,” it wrote Sunday, “the less control predatory regimes such as Mr. Putin’s will have over the market.”

While the administration declined to comment on Monday’s announcement by the Department of Energy that it had authorised LNG exports from a terminal in Oregon, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s lobby group, welcomed the move.

“The economic and strategic benefits of natural gas exports have sparked a bipartisan chorus for action,” said API’s president, Jack Gerard. “Today’s approval is a welcome step toward greater energy security, and our industry stands ready to help the administration strengthen America’s position in the global energy market and provide greater security to our allies around the world,” he said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

As the fate of Ukraine hangs in the balance, U.S. politicians from both parties have been scrambling to take advantage of the crisis.

Republicans in Congress have slammed President Barack Obama for his “trembling inaction.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has revived the hawkish approach of her pre-secretary of state years by comparing Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s actions to Hitler’s.The partisan divisions in the United States are dwarfed by the depth of animosity between those in Ukraine who favour the policies of Moscow and those who side with the new government in Kiev.

With the mid-term elections coming up this fall and the presidential elections beckoning two years hence, the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine has become the latest issue to roil partisan politics in the United States. In this case, however, the divergent rhetoric conceals a broad consensus on how Washington should deal with the crisis.

The situation on the ground in Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to be largely non-violent. But tensions remain at a high pitch.

After protesters in Kiev sent President Viktor Yanukovych in exile to Russia and took power in late February, a pro-Russian backlash gathered force in areas of the country with a large Russian-speaking minority.

The resistance has been most acute on the Crimean peninsula, a semi-autonomous region that is the only part of Ukraine where Russian speakers are in the majority. The region also hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet, in a leasing arrangement good until 2042.

Russian troops have spread throughout Crimea, effectively neutralizing Ukrainian forces. After armed men stormed the Crimean parliament last weekend, lawmakers hastily chose a new Crimean prime minister, Sergei Aksynov, who leans toward Moscow.

He has called for a referendum on Crimea’s fate on Mar. 16 when voters will choose between Russia and Ukraine. The result is not a foregone conclusion, given the sizable number of Ukrainians and Tatars who live in Crimea.

Secretary of State John Kerry has attempted to negotiate a way out of the impasse, but his meetings this week in Paris and Rome with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have not yielded a compromise.

Both the United States and the European Union are working quickly to assemble aid packages for the new leadership in Kiev, which presides over a rapidly tanking economy.

These diplomatic efforts have not prevented critics of the Obama administration from seizing the opportunity to repeat complaints that the president is not sufficiently strong.

Congressional opponents urged a military response to the crisis in Libya in 2011, which helped to force the president’s hand and initiate intervention.

Similar criticisms of administration weakness in the face of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war last August led the administration to ask Congress for authorisation to use military force, a plan made moot by a Russian-brokered plan for the Assad government to give up its arsenal.

The same critics have been quick to recycle their earlier judgments. Obama’s opponent in the 2008 presidential elections, John McCain (R-AZ), echoed comments he made during the Libya and Syria crises when he appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual meeting in Washington on Monday.

The situation in Ukraine, he said “is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.”

His colleague in the House, freshman Congressman Cotton, accused the Obama administration of “trembling inaction.” The Republicans are eager to pick up seats in the mid-term elections and possibly retake control of the Senate.

For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking further ahead to the 2016 elections. During her 2008 presidential bid, she derided Obama for his lack of experience in foreign policy and called his willingness to talk with America’s adversaries “naïve.”

Obama went on to win the election and appointed Clinton his secretary of state. In her new position, she implemented the foreign policy she had previously criticised, particularly in her negotiations with the leadership in Myanmar.

Despite her misgivings about Vladimir Putin – during the 2008 elections she famously said that he lacked a soul – she led the team responsible for pushing the “reset” button on U.S.-Russian relations.

Although her reservations about Putin are not new, her comments comparing Russian actions in Crimea to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 certainly establish distance between her and the administration she once served.

Clinton has not come out and said that President Obama is weak, but her invocation of the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland suggests that appeasement might be just around the corner.

Yet the administration and its critics do not offer substantially different recommendations for dealing with Ukraine.

The Obama administration has sent fighter jets to the region, but only to monitor the air space. No one is talking military options. The only different of opinion is over the relative mix of economic sanctions and diplomatic sticks.

The partisan divisions in the United States are, of course, dwarfed by the depth of animosity between those in Ukraine who favour the policies of Moscow and those who side with the new government in Kiev.

But despite demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, stand-offs between Russian and Ukrainian troops in Crimea, and the seizure and re-seizure of public buildings by competing factions in eastern Ukraine, so far there’s been no more violence than what might occur in an average European soccer match.

Even though politicians in the United States are failing to model bipartisan behaviour, there is still a chance that the different sides in Ukraine can find a compromise that keeps the country together and also protects the rights of minorities.

Much depends on Russian intentions and Ukrainian reactions, but also on the ability of policymakers in Washington to keep their own political ambitions in check.

A familiar clutch of hawks have taken wing over the rapidly developing crisis in Ukraine, as neo-conservatives and other interventionists claim that President Barack Obama’s preference for diplomacy over military action  invited Russian aggression.

At stake in the current crisis, according to these right-wing critics, are not only Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also Washington’s “credibility” as a global superpower and the perpetuation by the U.S. and its western allies of the post-Cold War international order."[It] makes about as much sense as saying that a proper response to a terrorist act by an Afghanistan-based group is to launch a war against Iraq.” -- Paul Pillar

Some right-wing commentators, such as Michael Auslin of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, have even compared Russian President Vladimir Putin’s moves to occupy the Crimean peninsula to Adolf Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland as a result of the notorious Munich agreement in 1938.

“The toxic brew of negative perceptions of Western/liberal military capability and political will is rapidly undermining the post-1945 order around the world,” he wrote on the Forbes magazine website Monday.

“One can only assume that China, Iran, and North Korea are watching Crimea just as closely as Putin watched Washington’s reactions to East and South China Sea territorial disputes, Pyongyang’s nuclear provocations, and Syria’s civil war,” according to Auslin, echoing a line of attack against Obama that has become a leitmotiv among his fellow interventionists.

“(T)here is more than (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin to think about,” according to Elliott Abrams, a leading neo-conservative who served as George W. Bush’s top Middle East aide, wrote Monday on the National Review website.

“Tyrants in places from Tehran to Beijing will also be wondering about the cost of violating international law and threatening the peace and stability of neighbors. What will China do in neighboring seas, or Iran do in its tiny neighbor Bahrain, if actions like Putin’s go without a response?” he asked.

As yet there have been few voices in favour of taking any military action, although  both the lead editorial in Monday’s Wall Street Journal and Freedom House President David Kramer called for Obama to deploy ships from the U.S. Sixth Fleet into the Black Sea, and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called for reviving Bush-era plans to erect new missile defence systems along Russia’s European periphery.

But the president, who spent 90 minutes on the phone with Putin Saturday in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the Russian leaders to send Russian troops in Crimea back to their barracks, is being pressed hard to take a series of tough actions against Moscow.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who is scheduled to travel to Kiev Tuesday in a show of support for its new government that may include one billion dollars in U.S. aid as part of a much larger Western economic package to be led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), listed a number of moves Sunday that Washington has already taken or is actively considering adopting.

In addition to coordinating international – particularly European – condemnation of Putin’s moves against Ukraine, Kerry also said Washington had cancelled upcoming bilateral trade talks and is considering boycotting the G8 summit that Putin is scheduled to host in Sochi in June, if not suspending or formally expelling Russia from that body.

If Russia doesn’t “step back” from its effective takeover of Crimea, he said Sunday, “there could even be, ultimately, asset freezes (and) visa bans” against specific individuals and economic enterprises associated with the current crisis. He called Russia’s move “an incredible act of aggression.”

“We are examining a whole series of steps — economic, diplomatic — that will isolate Russia and will have a negative impact on Russia’s economy and its status in the world.,” Obama himself warned Monday during a joint press appearance with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the same time, however, he stressed that he was still looking for a diplomatic way out of the crisis – possibly with the help of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that reportedly began sending monitors to the Ukraine Monday evening — which could reassure Moscow regarding the protection and welfare of Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine and Crimea in whose interests Moscow has justified its actions to date.

The administration and most analysts here agreed that Washington’s freedom of action in reacting to the current crisis must necessarily be coordinated with its European allies, some of which, including the continent’s economic powerhouse, Germany, are strongly disinclined to escalate matters. Germany gets about one-third of its gas supplies from Russia and has long considered a cooperative relationship with Moscow to be critical to maintaining stability in central Europe.

Such constraints clearly frustrate the hawks here, even as some of them, such as Sen. John McCain, acknowledged Monday that Washington had no ready military option and would, in any event, have to coordinate closely with Brussels as the crisis unfolds.

But, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), McCain also blamed Obama’s alleged timidity – particularly his failure to carry out his threat to take military action against Syria last September – for the situation. “(T)his is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” McCain said to thunderous applause from the hawkish audience whom Netanyahu will address Tuesday.

Indeed, Israel-centred neo-conservatives, for whom Obama’s “weakness” and “appeasement” in dealing with perceived adversaries have become a mantra over the past five years, have been quick to use the Ukraine crisis to argue for toughening Washington’s position in the Middle East, in particular.

“In the brutal world of global power politics, Ukraine is in particular a casualty of Mr. Obama’s failure to enforce his ‘red line’ on Syria,” according to the Journal’s editorial writers, who stressed that “(a)dversaries and allies in Asia and the Middle East will be watching President Obama’s response now. …Iran is counting on U.S. weakness in nuclear talks.”

“Like Putin, the ayatollahs likely see our failure to act in Syria … as a sign that they can drive a hard bargain indeed with us over their nuclear weapons program, giving up nearly nothing and getting sanctions relief,” wrote Abrams on his Council on Foreign Relations blog over the weekend.

“And now they see us reacting (so far) to Russian aggression in Ukraine, sending troops across the border into the Crimea, with tut-tutting,” he added in a call for Congress – likely to be echoed by Netanyahu here this week — to pass stalled legislation imposing new sanctions against Tehran.

“That makes about as much sense …as saying that a proper response to a terrorist act by an Afghanistan-based group is to launch a war against Iraq,” replied Paul Pillar, the intelligence community’s top analyst for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, on his nationalinterest.com blog Monday.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

P5+1 foreign ministers after negotiations about Iran's nuclear capabilities concluded on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: U.S. Dept of State/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2014 (IPS)

Eight years ago, Stephen Rosen, then a top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and well-known around Washington for his aggressiveness, hawkish views, and political smarts, was asked by Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker magazine whether some recent negative publicity had harmed the lobby group’s legendary clout in Washington.

“A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table,” wrote Goldberg about the interview. “’You see this napkin?’ [the official] said. In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”"The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience." -- Stephen Walt

Eight years later, the same official, Stephen Rosen, who was forced to resign from AIPAC after his indictment – later dismissed — for allegedly spying for Israel, told a Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that AIPAC needed to retreat from its confrontation with President Barack Obama after getting only 59 senators – all but 16 of them Republicans – to co-sponsor a new sanctions bill aimed at derailing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany).

“They don’t want to be seen as backing down… I don’t believe this is sustainable, the confrontational posture,” he said.

If AIPAC had succeeded in getting 70 signatures on the bill, which the administration argued would have violated a Nov. 24 interim agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that essentially freezes Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for easing some existing sanctions for a renewable six-month period, that would have been three more than needed to overcome a promised Obama veto.

But, after quickly gathering the 59 co-sponsors over the Christmas recess, AIPAC and the bill’s major sponsors, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, appeared to hit a solid wall of resistance led by 10 Democratic Committee chairs and backed by an uncharacteristically determined White House with an uncharacteristically stern message.

“If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “Otherwise, it’s not clear why any member of Congress would support a bill that possibly closes the door on diplomacy and makes it more likely that the United States will have to choose between military options or allowing Iran’s nuclear program to proceed.”

Combined with a grassroots lobbying campaign carried out by nearly 70 grassroots religious, anti-war, and civic-action groups that flooded the offices of nervous Democratic senators with thousands of emails, petitions, and phone calls, as well as endorsements of the administration’s position by major national and regional newspapers and virtually all but the neo-conservative faction of the U.S. foreign policy elite, the White House won a clear victory over AIPAC and thus raised anew the question of just how powerful the group really is.

AIPAC’s inability to muster more support among Democrats, in particular, came on top of two other setbacks to its fearsome reputation over the past year.

Although they never took a public position on his nomination a year ago, the group’s leaders were known to have quietly lobbied against former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel for Defence Secretary due his generally critical attitude toward Israel’s influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Several groups and individuals closely aligned with AIPAC, notably the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) – both of which have joined AIPAC in lobbying for the new Iran sanctions bill – questioned or opposed Hagel. Ultimately, however, he won confirmation by a 58-41 margin in which the great majority of Democrats voted for him.

Eight months later, AIPAC and other right-wing Jewish groups lobbied Congress in favour of a resolution to authorise the use of force against Syria – this time, however, at Obama’s request, although clearly also with the approval of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

But the popular groundswell against Washington’s military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern conflict – as well as the reflexive aversion by far-right Republicans to virtually any Obama initiative – doomed the effort.

Neither Hagel nor Syria, however, has approached the importance AIPAC has accorded to Iran and its nuclear programme which have dominated the group’s foreign-policy agenda for more than a decade. During that time, it has become used to marshalling overwhelming  majorities of lawmakers from both parties behind sanctions and other legislation designed to increase tensions – and preclude any rapprochement — between Tehran and Washington.

Last July, for example, the House of Representatives voted by a 400-20 margin in favour of sanctions legislation designed to halt all Iranian oil exports from Iran. The measure was approved just four days before Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration.

Throughout the fall, AIPAC worked hard – but ultimately unsuccessfully – to get the same bill through the Senate.

Now, two months later and unable to muster even a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, AIPAC appears to have shelved the Kirk-Menendez bill, which, among other provisions, would have imposed sanctions if Tehran violated the Nov. 24 agreement or failed to reach a comprehensive accord with the P5+1 on its nuclear programme within a year.

“Clearly, the ground has shifted, dealing a huge defeat to AIPAC and other groups who have been aggressively lobbying for [the new sanctions bill],” wrote Lara Friedman, a lobbyist for Americans for Peace Now in her widely-read weekly Legislative Round-up, while other commentators, including Rosen, warned that overwhelming Republican support for the bill put AIPAC’s carefully cultivated bipartisan image at risk with Democratic lawmakers and key Democratic donors.

“They definitely lost this round and that has cost them a huge amount of political capital with the administration and with a lot of Democrats,” said one veteran Capitol Hill observer who also noted AIPAC faced “an almost perfect storm” of an administration willing to fight for a policy that also enjoyed strong support from the foreign-policy elite and an engaged activist community that could exert grassroots pressure on their elected representatives. “Senate offices were getting a couple of calls in favour [of the bill] and hundreds against. That certainly has to make a difference.”

“AIPAC and other hard-line groups remain a potent force in guaranteeing generous U.S. aid to Israel and hamstringing U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution, but their clout declines when they advocate a course of action that could lead to another Middle East war,” Stephen Walt, co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told IPS in an email exchange.

“The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience,” according to the influential Harvard international relations scholar.

No one, however, believes that AIPAC and its allies have given up. If the P5+1 negotiations should falter, the Kirk-Menendez bill is likely to be quickly re-introduced; indeed, one influential Republican senator said it should be put on the calendar for July, six months from Jan. 20 the date that Nov. 24 interim accord formally went into effect.

“It seems likely that advocates [of the bill] are getting ready to shift to some form of ‘Plan B’ [which], …one can guess, will look a lot like Plan A, but, instead of focusing on derailing negotiations with new sanctions, [it] will likely focus on imposing conditions on any final agreement – conditions that are impossible to meet and will thus kill any possibility of a deal,” according to Friedman.

That could include conditioning the lifting of sanctions on an agreement that includes a ban on any uranium enrichment on Iranian soil – a condition favoured by Netanyahu that Tehran has repeatedly rejected and that most experts believe would be a deal-breaker.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The threat of Congressional action has receded amidst the consolidation of a consensus that the deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry is a good one. Credit: US Mission/Eric Bridiers

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 5 2013 (IPS)

Ten days after the signing in Geneva of a groundbreaking deal on Iran’s nuclear programme, the agreement appears safe from any serious attack by the strongly pro-Israel U.S. Congress, at least for the balance of 2013.

Despite continuing grumblings about the first-phase agreement between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, and Britain) by Republicans and a couple of key Democrats, the chances that lawmakers will enact new sanctions against Iran before the year’s end – as had been strongly urged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters here – seem to have evaporated.

Tehran has made clear that any new sanctions legislation – even if its implementation would take effect only after the expiration of the six-month deal — would not only violate the terms of the agreement, but almost certainly derail the most promising diplomatic efforts in a decade to ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme does not result in its acquisition of a weapon.

“If we pass sanctions now, even with a deferred trigger which has been discussed, the Iranians, and likely our international partners, will see us as having negotiated in bad faith,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Tuesday.

The threat of Congressional action has receded amidst the consolidation of a virtual consensus among the foreign policy elite that the deal negotiated by, among others, Secretary of State John Kerry, is a good one, as well as its endorsement by several key Democrats, notably the chairs of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, Carl Levin and Dianne Feinstein, respectively.

In addition, a series of polls conducted both just before and after the Nov. 24 deal was concluded has shown strong public support for the diplomatic route, particularly if the most likely alternative was military action.

In the run-up to the last negotiation, majorities of 64 and 56 percent of respondents told CNN and Washington Post polls, respectively, that they would support an agreement in which some economic sanctions against Iran would be lifted in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s nuclear programme that would make it harder to build a bomb. Just after the accord was reached, a Reuters/IPSOS poll found that respondents favoured the deal by a two-to-one margin (44-22 percent).

A far more detailed survey released here Tuesday by Americans United for Change and conducted by a highly regarded political polling firm, Hart Research Associates, also found strong backing (57 percent) among likely voters who had heard at least a little about the deal.

When respondents were informed about the accord’s basic terms – including the neutralisation of Iran’s stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium, curbs on its 3.5 percent stockpile, and enhanced international inspections in exchange for the easing of some sanctions — support rose to 63 percent overall.

Moreover, that support crossed partisan and ideological lines: pluralities approaching 50 percent of self-described Republicans, “conservatives”, and “very strong supporters of Israel” (who constituted nearly a third of the sample), said they favoured the terms as depicted in the survey.

More than two-thirds (68 percent) agreed with the proposition that Congress should not take any action that would block the accord or jeopardise negotiations for a permanent settlement, while only 21 percent favoured additional sanctions legislation now even if it would break the agreement or jeopardise the negotiations.

“Underlying much of this is Americans’ desire to avoid getting involved in another war in the Middle East,” noted Geoffrey Garin, Hart’s president and a top Democratic pollster. “There’s great scepticism about using military force against Iran.”

Despite Netanyahu’s continuing denunciations of the Nov. 24 accord as a “bad agreement” and “historic mistake”, results such as these appear to have persuaded mainstream institutions of the Israel lobby, which have been avidly courted by the White House, not to go all-out for the immediate enactment of new sanctions legislation.

As noted by ‘The Forward’, the nation’s largest-circulation Jewish newspaper that endorsed the deal “as a risk well worth taking,” even the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appears more focused now on the terms of a final agreement, even as its echoes Netanyahu’s critique and urges Congress to enact “prospective sanctions” as soon as possible..

“AIPAC is now defining its red line as insisting that the United States ‘deny Tehran a nuclear weapons capability’ – a vague term that falls short of Israel’s demand for ‘zero enrichment’ of uranium by Iran for its nuclear production,” according to the newspaper’s well-connected diplomatic correspondent, Nathan Guttman.

Indeed, even as Netanyahu continued to assail the agreement, he quietly sent a delegation headed by his national security adviser here last week for meetings with the Obama administration focused on what specific limits can be placed on Iran’s nuclear programme in upcoming negotiations. Officially, Israel has insisted that virtually the entire programme, including and especially Iran’s uranium enrichment, be completely dismantled – a goal which Washington believes cannot be achieved.

Meanwhile, the elite consensus in favour of the current deal and the negotiation process appears to be consolidating.

An informal poll of more than 100 “National Security Insiders” published by the influential ‘National Journal’ found that more than 75 percent considered it a “good deal”, although only 58 percent expressed confidence that the negotiations would end with a favourable settlement.

On Tuesday, nine former top-ranking foreign-service officers, including six ambassadors to Israel, released a letter sent to members of key national-security committees in Congress praising the Geneva accord.

“More than any other option, a diplomatic breakthrough on this issue will help ensure Israel’s security and remove the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to the region generally and Israel specifically,” the group, which included four former undersecretaries who served in Republican administrations, wrote.

The letter followed another signed by former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski and subsequently endorsed by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright on the eve of the Geneva talks opposing additional sanctions.

Two Republican heavyweights, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, also published an op-ed in the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal this week which, while negative and sceptical in tone, did not urge new sanctions or an end to negotiations. It called instead for the administration to insisting as part of any final accord on “Iran dismantling or mothballing a strategically significant portion of its nuclear infrastructure.”

“We should be open to the possibility of purs(u)ing an agenda of long-term cooperation” with Tehran, it also noted.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Despite strenuous objections by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and mostly Republican lawmakers here, the new accord between the Iran and the U.S. and five other major powers on Tehran’s nuclear programme appears to be gaining support here and abroad.

Most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including prominent non-proliferation hawks who previously voiced scepticism over prospects for any accord, have rallied behind the six-month deal announced in the wee hours Sunday morning in Geneva after more than three days of intensive talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany).

“The interim accord between Iran and the six world powers is a significant accomplishment,” according to Richard Haass, the president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who also headed the State Department’s policy planning office during most of former President George W. Bush’s first term.

“Those who are opposing the interim accord for what it does not do are asking too much,” he wrote in the Financial Times in an implicit criticism of Netanyahu and his backers here who have argued that any agreement should, among other things, require Iran to halt all enrichment of uranium, dismantle most of its 19,000 centrifuges, and begin to stop all work on – if not abandon — its yet-to-be-completed Arak heavy-water facility at the very least.

Similarly, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), who, in association with the neo-conservative Foundation for Defensc of Democracies (FDD), has favoured increased sanctions against Iran, praised the accord in a Washington Post op-ed as having “accomplish(ed) a great deal,” particularly in lengthening the time by at least one month that Iran would need to achieve “nuclear breakout” and significantly increasing the frequency and scope of inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Like virtually all other commentators, including those who have long urged the Obama administration to use more carrots and fewer sticks in its diplomacy with Tehran, Albright stressed that the U.S. and its P5+1 partners still face major challenges in negotiating a comprehensive agreement that would effectively prevent Tehran from building a bomb if it chose to do so.

On the international front, meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional arch-rival whose strong opposition to Tehran’s nuclear programme has been frequently cited in recent months by Netanyahu, cautiously welcomed the deal, asserting that it “could be a first step towards a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear programme, if there are good intentions.”

Several other Gulf states, notably the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that have generally followed Riyadh’s lead, also offered statements of support.

Their endorsement – however tentative – marked a major setback for Netanyahu who had spent much of the past several weeks denouncing any interim accord that did not meet his minimum requirements as a “very bad deal.”

In addition to his other complaints, the Israeli premier and his top officials have argued that even the relatively modest relief from tough U.S. and international economic sanctions provided by the deal – valued by the Obama administration at less than 10 billion dollars over the next six months — will inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire international sanctions regime, thus removing the main source of pressure on Tehran to dismantle its programme.

The Obama administration, on the other hand, has strongly rejected this, insisting that it will continue to vigorously enforce the financial and oil sanctions that it says have forced Iran to agree to the constraints contained in the deal, including, among other things, the elimination of its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium, a freeze on its five-percent stockpile and on the installation of new centrifuges, and an agreement not to fuel the Arak reactor, as well as the enhanced inspection regime.

Nonetheless, just hours after the agreement was signed in Geneva, Netanyahu came out swinging, calling it a “historic mistake” and suggesting, as he has frequently in the past, that Israel was prepared to launch a unilateral attack against Iran if it felt its security was threatened.

His defiant tone, which has been criticised by former senior Israeli national security officials as counter-productive and potentially damaging to Israel’s strategic ties to Washington, was echoed here by hard-line neoconservatives and other hawks who had championed the Iraq invasion 10 years ago, as well as by a number of mostly Republican lawmakers.

Bush’s former U.N. ambassador, John Bolton of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), denounced the accord as “abject surrender by the United States” in the neoconservative Weekly Standard in which he called for Netanyahu to follow through on his threats to take military action.

Insisting that Tehran, despite the much stricter international inspection regime to which it agreed to submit under the accord, would “go to extraordinary lengths” to follow North Korea’s path in building secret bomb-making facilities, Bolton warned that “the more time that passes, the harder it will be for Israel to deliver a blow that substantially retards the Iranian program.”

“This agreement shows other rogue states that wish to go nuclear that you can obfuscate, cheat, and lie for a decade, and eventually the United States will tire and drop key demands,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who echoed Netanyahu and many of his colleagues in calling for Congressional approval of new sanctions despite the deal. “Iran will likely use this agreement – and any that follows that does not require any real concessions – to obtain a nuclear weapons capability.”

Some Democrats close to the Israel lobby, notably New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, said Sunday they would also support swift enactment of new sanctions with the caveat that they would take effect if Iran failed to comply with the deal or in six months’ time, unless a comprehensive agreement was reached.

The administration has warned that any new sanctions legislation before the six-month period would violate the Geneva accord so long as Iran was in compliance.

Nonetheless, the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) came out Monday in support of new sanctions. In addition to urging Congress to press for a comprehensive accord that would “prevent Iran from ever building nuclear weapons,” it said “Congress must also legislate additional sanctions, so that Iran will face immediate consequences should it renege on its commitments or refuse to negotiate an acceptable final agreement.”

But the Senate’s Majority Leader, Harry Reid, who last week said that he, too, would support additional sanctions as early as Dec. 9 when Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess, indicated Monday that any sanctions measure should first be considered in relevant committees rather than going directly to the Senate floor. That could push new Congressional action, if any, until after the new year.

“I don’t think Congress is going to overturn this agreement,” said Gary Samore, a Harvard professor who served as a top proliferation official in Obama’s first term and now heads the hawkish United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI). “I just don’t think they’re going to shoot the country in the foot,” he told a teleconference sponsored by the Wilson Centre Monday, calling the accord “good enough to get started on the process which is going to be very challenging.”

He said Israel’s insistence on zero enrichment as an end-state in negotiations was “not an achievable objective” and that the U.S. and its allies should instead focus on finding agreement on three specific issues: the permissible level of enrichment; the fate of the Arak reactor; and the terms of the final monitoring regime, particularly regarding its ability to detect any covert facilities.

He expressed doubt that a comprehensive agreement can be reached in six months. Instead, “I could imagine another interim deal” that would include more limitations on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for more sanctions relief, he said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, in Geneva with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs. Credit: Courtesy of the European Commission

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 23 2013 (IPS)

As Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers of at least four other major powers prepared to join talks with Iran in Geneva Saturday, the stakes over the eventual success or failure of the negotiations seem very much on the rise here.

While nervous Democrats in the Senate held off a last-minute push by Republicans to approve legislation preventing President Barack Obama from easing sanctions against Iran as part of a possible interim deal to curb its nuclear programme, they also warned that, absent an accord in Geneva, new punitive measures are likely to be enacted shortly after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess Dec. 9.

Most analysts, including administration officials involved in the negotiation, believe that any new sanctions – or curbs on Obama’s authority to waive existing ones – are likely to drive Iran from the table by bolstering hard-liners in Tehran who have long argued that Obama is either unwilling or unable to deliver what they regard as a minimally acceptable deal.

Such a breakdown in the talks would return the two countries to a path of confrontation, significantly enhancing the chances of war, according to both the White House and most independent analysts.

While diplomats from the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) and Iran have been remarkably tight-lipped about the past three days of talks, foes of a likely accord – almost all of whom are associated with the Israel lobby here – have escalated their attacks here.

Even if an interim accord is reached within the coming days, the lobby’s leaders and their backers in Congress have made clear they will not give up on their efforts to derail its implementation. Republican lawmakers, in particular, warned this week that, in addition to seeking new sanctions, they will introduce legislation aimed at reducing Obama’s room for manoeuvre.

A number of prominent neo-conservatives, who have tried to lie relatively low on the Iran issue due to their high-profile championship 10 years ago of the now-highly unpopular Iraq war, have come to the fore in recent days, apparently unable to restrain themselves at such a critical moment.

One leading Iraq hawk and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and the Emergency Committee for Israel, Bill Kristol, who has been immersed in “Obamacare” and intra-Republican politics for weeks, titled the lead editorial in his Weekly Standard magazine “No Deal”.

“[S]erious people, in Congress and outside, will do their utmost to expose and scuttle Obama’s bad Iran deal. They can expect to be smeared by the Obama administration as reckless warmongers and slandered by Obama’s media epigones as tools of the Israel lobby,” he wrote, calling on lawmakers to resist such intimidation.

Similarly, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, a leading neo-conservative who has largely neglected Iran in recent months, published a column Friday entitled “A ‘Sucker’s Deal'” – the phrase used by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who reportedly blew up the last round of Geneva talks at the 11^th hour earlier this month – in which he echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that any easing of sanctions against Iran as part of an interim accord would be irreversible.

Netanyahu and his supporters here have demanded that Iran be denied any sanctions relief pending verifiable steps leading to the virtually complete dismantlement of its nuclear programme, including any enrichment of uranium which Iran has long claimed is its “right” under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

According to multiple reports, the current offer by the P5+1 governments for an interim accord – which would eventually be superceded by a comprehensive agreement to be finalised within six months to a year – would permit Tehran to continue enrichment to 3.5 percent, although it would not explicitly recognise a “right to enrich”.

Such an agreement would also require Iran to freeze its 20-percent enrichment programme, as well as the number of centrifuges it is operating; place its current stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium – which is closer to bomb grade – under international supervision pending its transformation into oxide or less-dangerous forms; and an effective suspension of work on its Arak heavy-water facility, which, when operational, would produce plutonium fuel for its nuclear reactors.

In addition the offer calls for an enhanced inspection regime overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor compliance.

In return, the P5+1 would permit Iran access to as much as 10 billion dollars of its foreign exchange reserves that are currently frozen in Western banks and ease sanctions on its trade in gold, other precious metals, petrochemicals, and airplane spare parts, according to the latest reports.

Obama has insisted that such concessions keep core financial and oil sanctions intact.

Netanyahu and his backers, however, disagree, arguing any easing of sanctions will trigger the collapse of the entire international sanctions regime, and thus make it possible for Iran to retain its basic nuclear infrastructure and, with it, the capability to build a bomb.

They thus oppose any interim agreement that does not require Iran to dismantle – rather than simply freeze — Arak and most of the rest of its nuclear facilities and capabilities.

But administration officials consider Israel’s demands as a deal-breaker. Indeed, a senior White House official told a confidential briefing Wednesday of think tank analysts and advocacy groups that favour an accord that Israel’s terms would “close the door on diplomacy” and “essentially lead to war,” according to an account published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

That kind of warning has infuriated neo-conservatives and Israel lobby leaders, as did an op-ed published this week by the influential New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that blasted both the lobby and lawmakers who oppose an interim accord.

“If Israel kills this U.S.-led deal, then the only option is military,” he wrote. “How many Americans or NATO allies will go for bombing Iran after Netanyahu has blocked the best effort to explore a credible diplomatic alternative?”

“Not many,” he noted.

Indeed, that conclusion was echoed in two polls published this week. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC poll said they would support an agreement in which “the U.S. and other countries would lift some sanctions against Iran, in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear programme in a way that makes it harder for it to produce nuclear weapons.”

Fifty-six percent of respondents in a subsequent CNN poll also approved a similarly phrased deal. The latter survey, however, stressed that such a deal would “not end [Iran’s nuclear programme] completely.”

The administration’s strategy gained other influential backers besides Friedman this week. Former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft, who served under President Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served under Jimmy Carter, sent a letter to the Congressional leadership endorsing an interim deal. They were joined by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served under Bill Clinton.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft were key dissenters in the Iraq war, while Albright initially supported it.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber flies by ships participating in an exercise in the Arabian Gulf, August 2013. Riyadh views the U.S. as willing to risk sacrificing key strategic assets – in this case, the Bahrain headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet -- as part of a broader retreat from the region. Credit: U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. Fifth Fleet/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 7 2013 (IPS)

While Monday’s meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Saudi King Abdullah may have helped calm the waters, the latest anxieties and anger expressed by Riyadh toward the United States has reignited debate here about the value of the two countries’ long-standing alliance.

In fact, a parting of the ways is already underway, according to Chas Freeman, a highly decorated former Foreign Service officer who served as U.S. ambassador in Riyadh during the first Gulf war.

“The Saudis were not convinced by Kerry,” Freeman, who retains high-level ties in Riyadh, told IPS. “Of course, both sides have their own good reasons for wishing to downplay that [fact] because the prestige of each in the region depends in part on the appearance of a cooperative relationship with the other.

“But in the past, we’ve been able to rely on them at a minimum not to oppose U.S. policy, and most often to support it. Now we no longer have that assurance, and in some cases, they’re moving to oppose it,” he said.

Built during World War II as a strategic bargain that would ensure the plentiful flow of Saudi oil to the U.S. and its allies in exchange for Washington’s military protection, the relationship has come increasingly under question both here and in Riyadh.

Here it was crystallised most dramatically by an op-ed by Fareed Zakaria, a prominent fixture of the foreign-policy establishment, published by Time magazine entitled “The Saudis Are Mad? Tough!”

“If there were a prize for Most Irresponsible Foreign Policy it would surely be awarded to Saudi Arabia,” noted Zakaria, a former editor of the influential Foreign Affairs journal who hosts a weekly foreign policy programme on CNN.

“It is the nation most responsible for the rise of Islamic radicalism and militancy around the world,” he noted, concluding that “Yes, Saudi Arabia is angry with the U.S. But are we sure that’s a sign Washington is doing something wrong?”

Zakaria’s assault, while the most spectacular, has not been the only one. Several influential commentators have suggested in the New York Times and elsewhere in recent weeks that the Riyadh-backed counter-revolution against the Arab Spring — which achieved its greatest advance with the military coup last summer Egypt’s first democratically elected president – will ultimately prove counter-productive and destabilising to the region and possibly even to the kingdom itself, most of whose top leadership is very old or in poor health.

For some of the same reasons, they have also criticised the strongly sectarian, Sunni-vs-Shia narrative that Riyadh, or at least its Wahhabi religious establishment, has propagated in its regional rivalry with Iran, particularly at a time when the West and Washington – and, most recently, Sunni-led Turkey — are seeking détente with Tehran, a prospect of considerable concern to the kingdom.

Serious strains between the two countries are not new. Riyadh participated in the 1973 Arab oil embargo to punish Washington for backing Israel during that October War. More recently, the 9/11 attacks, the perpetrators of which were almost all Saudi, spurred a major round of Riyadh-bashing, notably by pro-Israel neo-conservative forces that were then riding high in the George W. Bush administration.

The kingdom has harboured its own grievances, beginning with Washington’s refusal to seriously pressure Israel to accept a series of Saudi-initiated peace plans, most recently the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

And, in its competition with Iran, the effective handover by the George W. Bush administration of control of the Iraqi government to the Shiite majority after the 2003 U.S. invasion constituted for Riyadh perhaps its biggest strategic setback of the past several decades – and one to which the kingdom is still not reconciled, as evidenced by its refusal, despite Washington’s repeated entreaties, to send an ambassador to Baghdad.

Under Obama, however, ties have become even more strained, as Saudi doubts about Washington’s commitment to protect Riyadh’s interests have grown steadily.

Not only did Obama fail to follow through on demands that Israel cease settlement activity during his early showdown with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but his insistence, after some initial hesitation, that long-ruling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resign shook Riyadh’s faith that Washington would stand by its long-loyal, if autocratic, regional clients.

Washington’s disapproval — however mildly stated — of the tough, Saudi-backed crackdown by Bahrain’s royal family against its majority Shia population in early 2011 compounded Riyadh’s impression that Washington not only failed to understand the vital interests of the kingdom itself, what with its own restive Shia community concentrated in its Eastern Province just across the causeway.

It also appeared to Riyadh that Obama was willing to risk sacrificing key strategic assets – in this case, the Bahrain headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet — as part of a broader retreat from the region. That perception only increased last summer as Obama reacted with similar ambivalence – some cuts in military and security assistance — to the coup in Egypt which was strongly supported by the kingdom.

The brutal civil war in Syria and Obama’s clear reluctance to intervene on behalf of the Sunni-led opposition — most dramatically expressed by his failure to attack key military targets after concluding that the Iranian-backed Assad regime had indeed crossed his “red line” by killing hundreds of people with chemical weapons – clearly compounded these concerns.

Heralded already by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal’s decision not to address this year’s U.N. General Assembly, Riyadh’s unhappiness hit the headlines with last month’s announcement that it would not take its seat on the U.N. Security Council that it had spent two years of intensive lobbying trying to obtain.

Three days later, the kingdom’s intelligence chief and former ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan al-Saud was reported by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal as telling European diplomats that Riyadh was considering a “major shift” in ties with Washington, particularly regarding its efforts to bolster the armed Syrian opposition. The decision to forgo the Security Council seat, he was reported as saying, “was a message for the U.S., not the U.N.”

This, in turn, was followed by a series of appearances and interviews here by Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, also a former ambassador here, in which he repeatedly complained about Washington’s failure to bomb Syria after the chemical attack and provide substantially more military aid to the Syrian rebels, and expressed alarm over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

In this unprecedented diplomatic campaign, Riyadh clearly has powerful supporters here, including the Pentagon, which has steadfastly resisted suggestions from human rights groups and others to move the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain and to cut all security assistance to Egypt as is required by law after a military coup against an elected government.

With a long history of partnership with the kingdom, the oil industry also remains a not-insignificant supporter of maintaining the closest possible ties with Riyadh, as do major arms contractors who depend heavily on sales to Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies.

Finally, the Israel lobby appears to be discreetly rallying behind Riyadh due primarily to its status as Iran’s main regional rival, even as Saudi denunciations have also been praised by neo-conservatives.

While all of these forces are calling on the administration to take Saudi complaints seriously lest there be a “major shift”, as Bandar described it, the general reaction here, as Henderson put it, has been “an almost audible yawn,” although Kerry’s trip clearly signals a recognition of a need for greater consultation at the least.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Hopeful statements emerging from this week’s talks between Iran and the great powers have clearly set back foes of any détente between Washington and Tehran, but they are far from giving up the fight.

Arizona Rep. Trent Franks and more than a dozen of his colleagues in the House introduced a resolution calling not only for more sanctions, but also an Authorisation of Military Force (AUMF) against Iran. Credit: Gage Skidmore/cc by 3.0

Iran hawks here are pushing hard for Congress, where they enjoy the greatest influence, to approve a new set of extra-territorial sanctions – albeit with some tactical adjustments to take account of the newly hopeful mood coming out of Geneva – before the next round of talks between Tehran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) scheduled for Nov. 7-8 in the Swiss city.

Much will depend on how hard the administration of President Barack Obama presses sceptical Democrats – particularly those most closely associated with the powerful Israel lobby here – on putting off pending legislation at least until after the next round, and the persuasiveness of the chief U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State for Policy Wendy Sherman, in briefing lawmakers about the past week’s talks during which she also held a rare one-hour bilateral meeting with her Iranian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

Diplomats involved in the talks have so far been remarkably tight-lipped about the details of the proposals put forward by Araqchi and his boss, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif – a fact which is seen as a sign of the seriousness with which the proposals are being considered in western capitals. Sherman’s briefings will be held behind closed doors.

Before this week’s talks, the hawks, who have generally taken their cues from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were hoping for swift passage by the Senate of new sanctions legislation that was approved last by the House of Representatives by a 400-20 margin last July, shortly after the election of the most moderate of Iran’s presidential candidates, Hassan Rouhani.

Among other provisions, it aims to effectively embargo Iran’s oil exports by penalising foreign companies or countries that buy them. It would also freeze the cash reserves Iran is holding in foreign escrow accounts by sanctioning banks that allow Tehran access to them and target other foreign companies that do business with Iran’s shipping and automotive sectors.

The legislation’s main designers include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has been heavily funded by wealthy U.S. businessmen close to Netanyahu’s Likud Party, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, and Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus.

They have made little secret of their desire to wage what its Canadian executive director, Mark Dubowitz, has called “economic warfare” against Tehran that will either force it to completely abandon its nuclear programme, including giving up any uranium enrichment on its territory, or face “regime change” through the total collapse of its economy.

Even as the P5+1 convened their meeting with Zarif on the banks of Lake Geneva, Republican hawks in Congress pressed the case. Florida senator (and likely presidential hopeful) Marco Rubio introduced a resolution that not only endorsed additional sanctions, but also demanded that the president not provide any sanctions relief sought by Iran until it had verifiably dismantled its entire nuclear programme.

At the same time, Sen. Mark Kirk, a top beneficiary of campaign cash from political action committees associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), warned British Prime Minister David Cameron that any compromise that would leave Iran with the ability to enrich uranium, even at very low levels, would be comparable to Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” policy toward Adolf Hitler in 1938.

Some Republican zealots went even further, with Arizona Rep. Trent Franks and more than a dozen of his colleagues introducing a resolution calling not only for more sanctions, but also an Authorisation of Military Force (AUMF) against Iran which he said would “strengthen the president’s hand” in the talks, a position which Sen. Lindsay Graham, a leading hawk, has also pushed in recent months.

To most Iran experts, however, these legislative initiatives appear designed more to scuttle the negotiations than to further the prospects for success, which is broadly defined here as an accord that includes verifiable guarantees that Tehran will not be able to reach “breakout capability” to quickly build a nuclear weapon in exchange for dismantling the bilateral and multilateral sanctions regimes that have been erected against it.

“The imposition of still more sanctions, and the rattling of more sabers through legislation that refers to military force, are the sorts of Congressional actions that would be a slap in the face of a new Iranian administration that has just placed a constructive proposal on the negotiating table, would feed already understandable Iranian suspicions that the United States is interested only in regime change and not in an agreement, and thereby would weaken the Iranian incentive to make still more concessions,” wrote Paul Pillar, a retired CIA veteran who headed the U.S. intelligence community’s Middle East and South Asia analysis from 2000 to 2005, on his blog on nationalinterest.com Thursday.

That proposa is believed to have featured Iran’s willingness to place verifiable limits on all aspects and facilities that make up its nuclear programme, including its enrichment of uranium, within one year. It was apparently sufficiently serious and comprehensive to prompt an unprecedented joint statement by Zarif and the P5+1 top negotiating official, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, that described the talks as “substantive and forward looking” and will now be the subject of talks between P5+1 and Iranian technical experts in the run-up to the Nov. 7-8 meeting.

It also appears to have put the hawks, who are particularly worried that Obama could soon begin easing existing sanctions in exchange for Iranian concessions as part of a confidence-building process, on the back foot.

On Friday, for example, the normally hawkish Washington Post editorial board, while noting that a final deal “would require far greater concessions than the regime appears to be contemplating,” nonetheless wrote that “it is worth exploring a settlement that permits a token amount of enrichment while locking down the program to minimise the chance of an undetected breakout.”

More surprising perhaps were remarks by Gary Samore, the Obama administration’s top proliferation hawk during his first term who now heads United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a pro-sanctions group closely allied with FDD and AIPAC, to the Financial Times.

Adding new sanctions now, he warned “would look to much of the rest of the world as if the U.S. was blowing up the negotiations. It would play into Iran’s hands, giving them an excuse to accelerate their programme,” he said, noting that Obama’s position vis-à-vis key Democrats in Congress has strengthened as a result of his clear victory this week over Republicans on the government shutdown.

Finally, one key Democratic hawk who had strongly favoured quickly adding new sanctions before this week’s talks, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez, also appears to be having second thoughts, telling Congressional Quarterly Thursday that he had not made a decision as to when sanctions should move forward.

In light of these events, sanctions proponents appear to be modifying their approach. While Samore appears to agree with the administration that the present moment to seek new legislation is not the most opportune, Dubowitz is actively promoting quick Senate passage on the pending bill subject to an amendment that would allow Obama to unfreeze Tehran’s cash reserves in foreign escrow accounts in exchange for Iranian concessions on the nuclear programme without weakening or risk unravelling the existing sanctions regime.

Such a scheme, however, would also give Congress the power to put a “hold” on Obama’s decision to permit Iran’s access to its funds, a provision that may well appeal to lawmakers sceptical of all the optimism coming out of Geneva, but that is unlikely to be viewed favourably by the White House, which resents legislative interference in its diplomacy.

And Tehran would no doubt see any new sanctions legislation – no matter how it is billed — as the latest attempt by the Israel lobby to derail negotiations before they can get up a real head of steam.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations during a four-day diplomatic blitz in September. Credit: U.N. Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 8 2013 (IPS)

A week that began with a blistering denunciation by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Iranian duplicity ended with diminished prospects for Israel to take direct action to address Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“The Israelis find themselves in a far worse position now than they have been for several years,” concluded Elliott Abrams, a leading neo-conservative who served as George W. Bush’s main Middle East adviser, in Foreign Affairs.

While Israel could still attack Iran’s nuclear sites on its own, “[i]ts ability to do so is already being narrowed considerably by the diplomatic thaw” between Iran and the United States, Abrams wrote. “It is one thing to bomb Iran when it appears hopelessly recalcitrant and isolated and quite another to bomb it when much of the world – especially the United States – is optimistic about the prospects of talks.”

Abrams’ assessment was widely shared among his ideological comrades who believe Israel will be the big loser if hopes for détente between Washington and Tehran gather steam after next week’s meeting in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany).

The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative publication, described Israel’s position as “Standing Alone,” the title of its lead editorial at week’s end, although its authors, editor-in-chief William Kristol and the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Michael Makovsky, took a far more defiant tone than Abrams. They urged Netanyahu to follow through on his latest threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities with or without U.S. approval."The United States will be stronger if it can create a new framework for security in the Middle East that involves Iran..."
-- David Ignatius

“No one likes the truth-telling skunk at the appeasement party,” they wrote, asserting that President Barack Obama’s “soft-headed, even desperate, desire for some sort of [nuclear] deal, any deal” with Iran comprised the kind of Western “failure of nerve and a collapse of will” that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decried with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal‘s chief foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, complained bitterly about the situation confronting Israel in the wake of Rouhani’s U.N. tour de force the previous week.

“Israel is now in the disastrous position of having to hope that Iranian hard-liners sabotage Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to negotiate a deal,” he wrote just before Netanyahu took the podium to denounce Tehran’s perfidy.

The Israeli leader, he complained, had already deferred far too much to Obama’s diplomatic efforts by not attacking Iran last year. Given Washington’s “retreat from the world” – most recently demonstrated by its failure to deliver on threats to attack Syria – the Israelis should “downgrad[e] relations with Washington,” he demanded, and now “must proceed without regard to Mr. Obama’s diplomatic timetable.”

Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, told IPS that neoconservatives’ recent outpouring of defiance and despair constituted “the most convincing evidence I have seen to date that the die-hard supporters of sabotaging an agreement between the U.S. and Iran are in full defensive mode.”

Diplomatic milestones

A week before Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is expected to sit down with his P5+1 interlocutors in Geneva, Netanyahu and supporters in Washington face a diplomatic and political environment distinctly different from that of just five weeks ago.

That environment is defined above all by a pervasive war-weariness among the U.S. electorate, clearly indicated by strong public support for Obama’s choice of diplomacy over missile strikes to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

The fact that the disarmament process has so far gone much more smoothly than anyone had anticipated has further discredited neo-conservatives, who were most fervently opposed to the U.S.-Russian deal that made it possible and most enthusiastic about unilaterally attacking Syria and supporting rebel forces who appear increasingly dominated by radical Islamists.

The remarkably positive impression left by Rouhani during his four-day diplomatic blitz in New York in September, capped by an unprecedented phone call with Obama, has created expectations not only for a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme but also for the possibility of a rapprochement between the two nations after 34 years of mutual demonisation.

In his essay, Abrams conceded that Netanyahu’s demand that any nuclear deal require Iran to abandon its entire nuclear programme was no longer realistic and would almost certainly have to be compromised, barring sabotage by hard-liners in Iran.

“Netanyahu is setting forth standards for a nuclear agreement that are far tougher than the Obama administration believes can be negotiated and, as a result, are not even being sought,” he wrote.

The Israeli leader should prepare to accept a limited enrichment programme of up to 3.5 percent and strict limits on the number of centrifuges Iran can run and the stockpile it can hold. Sanctions would be eased in the coming months, he stressed, only to the extent that Iran actually implements the deal.

Meanwhile, Abrams argued, echoing the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Congress, where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence, should ensure that sanctions remain in place.

Yet such a compromise is not so far from what much of the foreign policy elite already considers the most viable deal.

As put forward in an op-ed published Sunday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, its basic elements call for Iran to “cap its level of uranium enrichment (at, say, 5 percent) and its stockpile of enriched material” to levels small enough that Israel and the U.S. would have months of “strategic warning” if Tehran made a “dash for a bomb”.

In exchange, the West would lift sanctions and accept “Iran’s rights, in principle, to enrich,” according to Ignatius, whose views often reflect those of the policy establishment.

According to Ignatius, Washington’s engagement with Russia over Syria and Iran over its nuclear programme presents a “great strategic opportunity” which critics are wrong to see as “signs of American weakness or even capitulation.”

“The United States will be stronger if it can create a new framework for security in the Middle East that involves Iran and defuses the Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict threatening the region,” and that “accommodates the security needs of Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Russians and Americans.”

But such accommodation is anathema to Netanyahu and his neo-conservative supporters, who insist on Israeli primacy in the Middle East and depict its competition with Iran as a zero-sum proposition that cannot be compromised.

President Barack Obama talks with Amb. Samantha Power, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Sept. 12, 2013. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

On the eve of a possible – if seemingly accidental – encounter between U.S. President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the corridors of the U.N. Secretariat building Tuesday, speculation over the possibility of détente between Washington and Tehran has become rampant.

A series of conciliatory statements and steps taken by both sides in recent weeks has fuelled the imaginations of foreign policy mavens here, with some warning against possible U.S. “appeasement” of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called, in a reference to Rouhani, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, and others giddy with the possibilities of ending 34 years of mutual hostility.

So far, the former group, which has clearly been spooked by the remarkably successful public relations offensive conducted by Rouhani and his less-than-two-month-old government, is more vocal, particularly in the Congress where the Israel lobby enjoys its greatest influence.

But among the traditional foreign policy elite and Iran specialists, the optimists appear dominant, encouraged and very pleasantly surprised by developments on the Iranian side of the past few weeks.

Not the least of these was last week’s clear alignment, at least for now, by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – regarded as the ultimate “decider” when it comes to matters of foreign and strategic policy – behind Rouhani in an appearance before the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Not only did Khamenei call for “heroic flexibility” in negotiating a resolution to the long-running stand-off with the U.S.-led West over Tehran’s nuclear programme in a joint appearance with Rouhani. He also backed up the new president in reminding the IRGC, long regarded as a potential spoiler in any détente strategy, that the Islamic Republic’s founder, the revered Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had warned against its involvement in politics.

“To the best of my knowledge, the Supreme Leader has never made a statement like that; nor has anybody at a senior level made a public reference to Khomeini’s injunction. I don’t think you’ll ever get a clearer statement,” according to Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.

“To me, that sounded like an endorsement of what Rouhani was doing and warning …that, ‘if you’re thinking about a spoiling operation, think again’,” he told IPS.

The current speculation goes beyond a possible resolution of Iran’s nuclear programme to include possible cooperation on regional security issues, including Syria and Afghanistan.

It comes as both Obama and Rouhani prepare to address the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, a coincidence that has already sparked debate over the pros and cons of the two men “accidentally” meeting and exchanging greetings or more as they pass through the building’s hallways.

Republican leaders generally opposed the idea, while Democrats offered wary support Monday. At the same time, half a dozen activist groups, including MoveOn.org and Win Without War, submitted on-line petitions with nearly 111,000 signatures calling on Obama to meet with Rouhani, while the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal warned that such a move would confer on Iran’s “dictatorship new international prestige at zero cost”.

While such a rendezvous would undoubtedly carry considerable symbolic importance, of more practical significance may have been the announcement after a bilateral meeting Monday between Rouhani’s foreign minister, Javad Mohammad Zarif, and his European Union counterpart, Catherine Ashton, that Zarif, a U.S.-educated former U.N. ambassador, will take part in a meeting of the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week.

Secretary of State John Kerry is also expected to attend the meeting, a prelude to a long-awaited negotiating session to take place in Geneva next month and the highest-level meeting of the two countries since the 1979 U.N. General Assembly when then Secretary Cyrus Vance met with Provisional Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi seven months after the Islamic Revolution, according to Sick.

Meanwhile, however, speculation about the possibility of détente continues apace. Of central importance, according to experts here, will be whether the two sides can agree relatively quickly on interim confidence-building measures (CBMs) surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme, at the very least – something that is likely to be touched on in the P5+1 meeting later this week and explored more fully next month.

At issue here is whether and to what extent the U.S. and its partners should offer sanctions relief – or pile on more pressure – in exchange for Iran’s implementation of CBMs. Most Iran experts here believe that there should be a reciprocal process and that Washington should be prepared to offer more relief than it has tabled in the past.

But Netanyahu, who will address the General Assembly later this week and meet with Obama next week, argues that the West should actually tighten existing sanctions and add new ones until Iran effectively abandons its nuclear programme altogether. In the meantime, he is demanding that Obama take steps to make more credible his pledge to take military action, if necessary, to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Lawmakers close to the Israel lobby from both parties are urging much the same line. One letter to Obama from Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer released Monday said there should be “absolutely no relaxing of pressure on the Iranians until the entirety of their nuclear situation has been addressed” and warned that “(r)emoval of any existing sanctions must depend on Iran’s halting of its nuclear program.”

Apart from the nuclear front, speculation about U.S.-Iranian cooperation on regional issues has grown quickly in the wake of the U.S.-Russian accord on placing Syria’s chemical weapons under international control, particularly since Rouhani and Zarif have endorsed it.

Obama himself has hinted that he is prepared to lift U.S. opposition to Iran’s participation in a Geneva II conference to end the civil war in Syria, while Washington’s chief envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Amb. James Dobbins, suggested to IPS last week that Iran could play a useful role in the transition in Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO troops withdraw their combat forces next year as it did at the Bonn Conference 10 years ago.

Both moves, but particularly its involvement in Syria peace talks, would offer Iran something it has long sought: de facto recognition of its importance in a revised regional security structure – a move to which U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel have long been opposed.

“Obama will face potent opposition from Israel, its supporters in the United States, and countries like Saudi Arabia,” wrote Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt on his foreignpolicy.com blog Friday. “These actors would rather keep Washington and Tehran at odds forever, and it’s a safe bet that they will do everything they can to run out the clock and thwart this latest attempt to turn a corner in the troubled U.S. relationship with Iran.”

Nonetheless, “(t)he opportunity for a breakthrough with Iran after 34 years of isolation is tantalizing for Obama and his foreign-policy team,” wrote David Ignatius, a columnist with excellent access to senior administration officials and whose views often represent those of the senior foreign-policy elite, in Sunday’s Washington Post.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Just three weeks ago, Washington’s hawks, particularly of the pro-Israel neo-conservative variety, were flying high, suddenly filled with hope.

President Barack Obama, having trapped himself with his own “red-line” rhetoric, appeared on the verge of ordering air strikes designed not only to deter Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad from re-using his chemical weapons, but also, at their urging, to degrade his military machine in a way that could shift the tide of battle toward the rebels in the two-year-old civil war that Obama had desperately tried to stay out of.

It was win-win all the way. In addition to landing a heavy body blow against Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world, they whispered to themselves that such an attack might also sabotage prospects for serious negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme with its moderate and dangerously appealing new president, Hassan Rouhani.

In any event, a strike would serve as a valuable precedent for similar – if even more ambitious – action against Iran’s nuclear facilities some time in the next year, as well restore U.S. military credibility in a region from which U.S. power was seen to be dangerously in retreat.

Today, with those promising attacks suspended indefinitely, the same hawks are down in the dumps, not to say downright desperate. Some are even comparing the chain of events over the past two weeks to the West’s “appeasement” policies that contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

“…[S]yria is merely Act One. Next week Act Two opens at the United Nations,” wrote Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, co-founder of The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Friday.

“There, we’ll see a charm offensive worthy of Richard III by the new Iranian president and veteran deceiver of the West, Hassan Rouhani. In response the Obama administration will move on from punting in Syria to appeasing Iran.

“Smaller retreats lead to larger ones. The West’s failure to resist Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 – and his troops’ use of poison gas – was merely a foretaste of the failure to resist Hitler when he took the Rhineland in March 1936,” he warned, evoking Winston’s Churchill’s denunciation in the British Parliament of London’s appeasement policies in the run-up to the World War Two.

Ironically, it was the British Parliament that appears to have set off the extraordinary chain of events that brought the hawks to their current depths of despond. Its vote against participating in any military action against Syria persuaded Obama to yield to a rising bipartisan tide in Congress demanding that he seek its formal authorisation before launching strikes.

The administration mounted an intense lobbying effort, enlisting key Republican hawks, notably Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham (who demanded stronger military action and enhanced military aid for the rebels as the price for their backing), as well as the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel groups in the cause, but popular support for an attack was not forthcoming.

Worse, because of the August recess, most lawmakers were in their home districts among their constituents, rather than in the “Beltway Bubble” where elite opinion and the “talking heads” who dominate the airwaves tilted generally in favour of military action. And while the Congressional leadership of both parties supported the authorisation, they said members were free to vote their conscience.

As Congress reconvened, it became clear that the White House would be lucky to win in the Senate but had no chance of prevailing in the House. Despite the efforts of McCain and Graham, who had long been treated by the mainstream media as the party’s chief spokesmen on foreign policy issues, Republican support for the authorisation virtually collapsed. Both Obama and the hawks faced certain defeat.

It was at that moment that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s most influential foreign backer, threw Obama a lifeline.

By offering a deal whereby Damascus agreed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and place its chemical arms under international control, he permitted Obama to suspend both Congressional and military action pending implementation of the plan, the operational details of which are now being worked out.

If the White House was relieved, the hawks were furious.

“What could be worse for America’s standing in the world than a Congress refusing to support a President’s proposal for military action against a rogue regime that used WMD [weapons of mass destruction]?” asked the Wall Street Journal’s neo-conservative editorial page. “Here’s one idea: A U.S. President letting that rogue be rescued from military punishment by the country that has protected the rogue all along.”

“The Iranians will take it as a signal that they can similarly trap Mr. Obama in a diplomatic morass that claims to have stopped their nuclear program,” it went on, a point ceaselessly echoed since by other hawks, including McCain and Graham.

But several polls have shown overwhelming public support for the deal – as high as 80 percent, even as majorities also voice scepticism that the agreement will be effective. The findings are widely seen as an expression of the country’s deep war-weariness and opposition to any new Middle East military adventures in the absence of any clear and imminent threat.

Indeed, the events of the past few weeks suggest that the public has lost confidence in the war hawks and their military solutions. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, a prominent foreign-affairs commentator, noted this week that McCain is becoming “a kind of Republican version of Jesse Jackson” whose proposals “have no political support at home”.

While the Syria crisis unfolded, of course, a bigger threat to neo-conservatives has been developing in Tehran, where Rouhani appears to have consolidated his authority over foreign policy and carried out a highly sophisticated public-relations campaign.

This has ranged from the release of political prisoners to tweets wishing Jews a happy Rosh Hashanah, to an interview with a U.S. television network and an op-ed in Friday’s Post, all aimed at conveying the impression that he is someone the West “can do business” with (as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of Mikhail Gorbachev after their first meeting in 1984) in the run-up to his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week.

That both Tehran and Obama disclosed this week that they have exchanged letters and speculation that the two leaders may actually meet – even if it’s only momentarily in a U.N. corridor — Tuesday when each addresses the General Assembly have only increased the hawks’ anxiety that a 21^st version of “Munich” (shorthand for the 1938 accord that permitted Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia) is at hand.

Taking their cue from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned Thursday that “the Iranians are spinning in the media so that the centrifuges can keep on spinning,” several pro-Israel groups here, including AIPAC and FPI, demanded Friday that Washington increase pressure against Tehran on all fronts and ignore growing calls to take a more conciliatory approach.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

President Barack Obama meets with Members of Congress to discuss Syria in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Sep. 3, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s decision to put off a vote by Congress on the use of military force against Syria in order to pursue a Russian proposal to place Damascus’ chemical-weapons arsenal under international control has evoked both cheers and jeers from across the political spectrum here Wednesday.

While Obama’s supporters defended his decision – which he announced in a much-anticipated address to the nation Tuesday night – as both politically and diplomatically astute, hawks denounced it as what they see as yet another abdication of U.S. leadership in global affairs.

“The move may rescue Mr. Obama and Congress from the political agony of a vote on a resolution to authorize a military strike on Syria,” the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal wrote in its lead editorial Wednesday. “But the diplomatic souk is now open, and Mr. Obama has turned himself into one of the junior camel traders.

“A weak and inconstant U.S. President has been maneuvered by America’s enemies into claiming that a defeat for his Syria policy is really a triumph,” it declared, adding that Obama’s opting for delay and diplomacy could make an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities more likely.

On the other hand, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, one of the few Democrats who came out in strong support of Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action, praised his decision.

“Pres. Obama’s leadership brought diplomatic solutions back to the table, shows his willingness to exhaust every remedy before use of force,” she tweeted immediately after Obama concluded his speech.

The 15-minute address had originally been intended as the capstone of an intense week-long lobbying effort to persuade reluctant lawmakers to approve his request for an Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to punish Damascus for its alleged use of chemical weapons. It came less than 48 hours after Russia, Syria’s most important ally, unexpectedly tabled its proposal to bring Syria’s chemical arsenal under international control.

The proposal was immediately welcomed by Syria’s foreign minister, who subsequently declared his government’s willingness to join the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and open its sites for international inspection.

“It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force,” Obama said, adding that he had ordered the military “to maintain our current posture and to be in a position to respond if diplomacy fails.”

He also announced that he was sending Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva Thursday to begin negotiations on how the proposal will be implemented and in what time frame.

Those questions were uppermost in the minds of most analysts here who voiced varying degrees of scepticism about whether Assad was indeed prepared to give up his chemical arsenal, which is believed to be one of the world’s largest, and how feasible it would be, given the ongoing civil war and resulting lack of security in Syria.

Some hawks argued that Obama should have rejected the Russian proposal outright and launched missile strikes as he originally said he would several days after the alleged chemical attack Aug. 21 that, according to the White House, killed more than 1,400 people.

However, most observers agree that he had little choice once he asked Congress – in the wake of the British Parliament’s rejection of the UK’s participation in any military action – for the AUMF.

Initially, the administration thought that a combination of loyal Democrats and hawkish Republicans would give it the majorities it needed to pass some form of authorisation for one or two days of missile strikes that was narrowly aimed at deterring Damascus from using chemical weapons again.

But it soon became clear that public opinion strongly opposed any action that could involve the U.S. in yet another civil war in the Middle East. And, as the administration tried to appease Republican hawks like Senator John McCain, who favoured broader strikes designed to weaken Assad’s military machine, popular opposition to any military action grew.

“The administration’s best chance to get public support was to stick to the normative argument [that it was necessary to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons] and not to get involved in affecting the course of the civil war,” Stephen Kull, director of worldpublicopinion.org, told IPS.

“But the normative argument got muddied by more talk about trying to affect the outcome of the war and that – combined with the fact that there was no U.N. Security Council approval – clearly bothered people.”

Thus, despite intensive lobbying by the administration, which also enlisted the active and uncharacteristically public support of the powerful Israel lobby, opposition to military action surged from about 50 percent 10 days ago to around 70 percent of respondents, according to a flurry of polls taken over the past weekend.

By Monday, several senators who had been thought to be with the administration deserted it, casting the outcome in the Democratic-led upper chambre into doubt and forcing Majority Leader Harry Reid to put off a test vote scheduled for Wednesday. In the Republican-led House, which had always been considered an uphill climb, the chances of approval were considered close to nil.

Thus, when Moscow unexpectedly put forward its proposal, the White House, after some initial confusion, grabbed it as a way to avoid what was turning out to be a political – if not a diplomatic – catastrophe.

It also brought some considerable relief to lawmakers on Capitol Hill who clearly were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar position in which Obama had placed them – sharing responsibility for committing an act of war.

Even McCain, who found himself unable to rally most of his Republican Senate colleagues behind him but who blamed the administration’s incompetence in presenting the case for military action, said Washington had to test Russia’s proposal.

“The fact is you can’t pass up this opportunity if it is one,” he told CNN. “But you’ve got to right away determine whether it’s real or not.”

The big question now is whether Kerry and Lavrov, who will also meet with the U.N.’s Special Envoy on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, can agree on a plan to begin implementing the Russian proposal within a short period of time.

A bipartisan group of mainly hawkish senators, including McCain, are working with the administration on a revised AUMF that would authorise strikes if implementation has not begun within a fixed period of time– reportedly from 45 to 90 days – or if chemical weapons are believed to have been used again.

Whether such an AUMF would have a better chance of gaining approval in light of the events of the past two weeks, however, is the source of considerable debate.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Some analysts suggest that Obama’s failure to line up support from more G20 leaders suggests that the U.S.-created global order is no longer sustainable. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 6 2013 (IPS)

With a week of intense lobbying behind him, U.S. President Barack Obama looks increasingly beleaguered – both at home and abroad – in his effort to rally support for a military strike against Syria to punish its government for its alleged Aug. 21 chemical-weapons attack outside Damascus.

At home, most political observers say Obama faces a particularly difficult task in bringing a majority of the Republican-led House of Representatives, which begins debating his proposed Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) next week on return from its August recess, over to his side.“The lack of consensus within G20 is confirmation of what we already knew, which is that there is limited support for military action in Syria within the international community." -- Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations

Congressional offices, even those whose bosses favour Obama’s position, are reporting overwhelming opposition in telephone calls and emails from their constituents, while public meetings held by lawmakers in their home districts have been dominated by anti-intervention forces from both the right and the left.

And polls released over the past week suggest that the administration has made little headway in moving public opinion its way.

A new Gallup poll taken at mid-week and released Friday found that support for U.S. military action “to reduce Syria’s ability to use chemical weapons” – 36 percent – was the lowest on the eve of any military intervention Washington has undertaken in the last 20 years. Fifty-one percent of respondents opposed a strike.

In a reflection of White House concern over opposition to military action, Obama himself announced Friday that he will address the nation about his intentions Tuesday. At a press conference at the Group of 20 (G20) meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, he acknowledged that getting both house of Congress to approve an authorisation was “going to be a heavy lift”.

He spoke just after his deputy national security adviser, Tony Blinken, told National Public Radio (NPR) that, even though Obama retained the constitutional authority to strike Syria without Congressional authorisation, “it’s neither his desire nor intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him.”

Meanwhile, on the international front, Obama also appeared to be faring poorly in his bid to gain support for military action.

In St. Petersburg, The White House released a “joint statement” signed by the leaders of only 10 members, including the U.S., of the G20 plus Spain voicing “support efforts undertaken by the United States and other countries to reinforce the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons” and calling for “those who perpetrated these crimes (to be) held accountable.” The statement stopped short, however, of endorsing military action.

The signatories included the leaders of Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, as well as the U.S. Absent from the list, however, were all members of the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – as well as Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, and Germany.

The European Union (EU), a G20 member in its own right, also did not sign due to a lack of consensus among its membership.

Independent observers described the statement as a serious setback not only to Washington’s efforts to rally international support.

“It seems to have been a remarkable investment of American diplomatic energy not to have achieved the support of even a majority of the G20, and they tried to give the appearance of half plus one through sleight of hand,” noted Daniel Levy, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), who pointed to larger problems caused by the way the administration has acted over the Syria issue.

“Look at the institutions they’ve weakened in this process: the U.N. Security Council itself; the European Union by implicitly underlining its failure to gain consensus; the Arab League where the three most populous Arab states – Egypt, Iraq and Algeria – have all come out against military action; and even the G20 – all in order to achieve a statement that is far from an unequivocal endorsement of American military action,” he told IPS.

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), also suggested that the administration’s latest diplomatic move underscored its weakness on the issue.

“The lack of consensus within G20 is confirmation of what we already knew, which is that there is limited support for military action in Syria within the international community,” he said.

Back at home, advocates of military action, the most vocal of whom are pro-Israel activists and organisations worried that Congress’ failure to back up Obama’s threats against Syria will embolden Iran and its regional allies, are increasingly making the argument that both the president’s and Washington’s international credibility is at stake.

“This is not longer just about the conflict in Syria or even the Middle East,” wrote former Sens. Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl, co-chairmen of the American Internationalism Project of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a neo-conservative think tank that played a leading role in championing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“It is about American credibility. Are we a country that our friends can trust and our enemies fear? Or are we perceived as a divided and dysfunctional superpower in retreat, whose words and warnings are no longer meaningful?” they asked in an op-ed entitled “Inaction on Syria Threatens U.S. Security” published by the Wall Street Journal Friday.

Failure to authorise a strike will be a “green light” for Iran to “speed toward nuclear weapons” and “confirm the worst fears of our ally, Israel, and moderate Arab states like Jordan that the U.S. cannot be relied upon to stand by its commitments. This will dramatically raise the risks of a regional war that could upend the global economy,” they stressed.

But others have argued that the credibility argument is overdrawn in this case.

“We heard this argument many, many times before, and always when the objective case for war was weak,” according to Stephen Walt, a prominent international relations expert at Harvard University. “To refrain from using force when vital interests are not at stake and when bombing could make things worse is not weakness; it is good sense.

“The United States has fought five wars since the Cold War ended and is using drones and special forces in several countries already,” he told IPS. “Nobody is going to question U.S. credibility when its interests are genuinely engaged and it has a clear objective in mind.”

Some liberal interventionists, notably Secretary of State John Kerry in his various public remarks, have also stressed the credibility argument, arguing that Washington’s failure to act could have profound implications for world order.

“For better or worse…” William Galston of the Brookings Institution argued in the Journal earlier this week, “the United States is the guarantor of the global order, which we took the lead in creating.

“Mr. Obama will need to convey this idea to the American people …from the Oval office,” he wrote.  “He must be prepared to go all-in to win what is shaping up as a tough fight on Capitol Hill. One thing is clear: A loss would shatter his presidency, and a lot more.”

But Kupchan said Obama’s failure to line up support from more G20 leaders suggested that the U.S.-created global order was no longer sustainable in any case.

“It’s clear confirmation of the degree to which there is a fundamental difference in geopolitical perspective between developed and emerging powers,” he told IPS.

“That the BRICS countries voted as a bloc is a sign of how difficult it’s going to be to fashion international consensus as global power continues to diffuse.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

With Congress still deliberating over Barack Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action against Syria, the powerful Israel lobby here has taken the lead in pressing the president’s case.

But in addition to echoing the administration’s view that Damascus’ alleged violations of international norms against the use of chemical weapons must be punished, pro-Israel groups are  focusing their appeals at least as much, if not more, on stopping what they say is Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme.

“The Syria issue needs to be largely understood through the context of Iran,” said Michael Makovsky, the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), as he unveiled his organisation’s latest report, “Strategy to Prevent a Nuclear Iran,” here Wednesday.

“Stopping a nuclear-capable Iran is the gravest, most pressing national security threat facing the United States today,” he added, quoting from the introduction of the report, the product of a task force that included several former George W. Bush administration officials, several retired flag officers, and Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top adviser on Iran for most of his first term.

“(I)f there isn’t a [Congressional] response to the crossing of the red line [against the use of chemical weapons], the Iranians will draw the lesson that when we create red lines, we don’t mean it,” Ross said.

“So when the administration makes it clear that prevention [of Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon] is the objective, [the failure to act on Syria] will make it look more rhetorical than real,” according to Ross, who currently serves as counsellor to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank.

“So, I think there’s a direct relationship between what’s going on on Syria and how the Iranians would perceive it.”

Those warnings came as the administration appeared to make progress on Capitol Hill Wednesday in rallying Congress behind military action.

In a 10-7 vote, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution authorising Obama to conduct military strikes against Syria. Two Democrats and five Republicans, including presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, opposed the resolution. Another Democrat abstained.

To rally a majority, the resolution’s authors limited the authorisation to 60 days – with a possible 30-day extension – and banned the use of ground forces in Syria “for the purpose of combat operations”.

But they also appeased hawkish forces, led by Republican Sen. John McCain, by adding a statement that any action should aim to “change the momentum on the battlefield” in favour of the rebels in order to enhance the chances of a negotiated settlement to the two-year-old civil war. The resolution, which will go to the floor next week, also urged an increase in U.S. military aid to the rebels.

The draft resolution submitted by the White House had called for a “limited” action to prevent the use or proliferation of chemical weapons in Syria.

While some administration officials initially predicted a campaign of only two or three days of cruise-missile strikes that would not necessarily affect the current balance of power in the war, stronger action now appears more likely unless the Republican-led House of Representatives votes no or places more limits on its version of the authorisation when it meets next week.

The administration’s efforts to gain authorisation have been significantly bolstered by the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had maintained a public silence on the issue. However, some of its more important institutions had been quietly pressing both the administration and lawmakers for a more aggressive policy toward Damascus for weeks, even before the alleged Aug. 21 chemical attack that killed more than 1,400 people, according to the White House.

On Tuesday, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the lobby’s most powerful group, came out strongly in support of the authorisation, as did the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organisations and the Anti-Defamation League.

They were followed by, among others, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a group dominated by strongly anti-Obama wealthy donors who have provided millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and are closely associated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

While most of the group echoed the administration’s position that the use of chemical weapons must be punished, they also stressed that Washington’s credibility regarding its enforcement of “red lines” was at stake, particularly with respect to Iran.

“This critical decision comes at a time when Iran is racing toward obtaining nuclear capability,” AIPAC stressed in its endorsement.

“Failure to approve this resolution would weaken our country’s credibility to prevent the use and proliferation of unconventional weapons and thereby greatly endanger our country’s security and interests and those of our regional allies.”

That was very much the message conveyed by the new JINSA report and its two co-chairs, Ross and Bush’s former undersecretary of defence for policy, Eric Edelman, among other task force members present for the report’s release.

“I do think it’s important …for the credibility of the president’s statements [to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon] with regard to Iran that the Congress authorise the use of force,” Edelman said.

“Unless Iran believes there is a credible military option underpinning the willingness to negotiate, there will not be a successful negotiation,” he added in reference to the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) talks with Iran that are considered likely to resume later this month.

JINSA’s task force consists largely of members of a previous task force that issued a series of very hawkish reports on Iran for the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) over the past five years.

It said Washington’s explicit policy objective should be “to render Iran unable to develop a nuclear weapons capability” which it defined as the point at which Iran could “manufacture fissile material for a nuclear device in less time than would be required to detect and respond to such activity.” According to some experts, that threshold is likely to be reached by mid-2014.

With the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, it said, Washington should “try to make diplomacy work,” although the task force failed to reach agreement on what terms would be acceptable.

While some members of the task force, including Ross, said the U.S. should offer a deal that would permit Iran to enrich uranium up to five percent and limit its stockpile of enriched uranium subject to a strict inspections regime, others said Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capability.

In the meantime, the task force argued against recent calls by think tanks and Iran experts for Washington to make goodwill gestures, such as recognising Iran’s right to enrich or “preemptively signal a willingness to lift sanctions during talks”.

On the contrary, the report urges increasing the pressure on Iran by imposing new sanctions and preparing and developing “a very real military strike capability against Iran’s nuclear and strategic facilities, and an array of opportunities for pursuing political warfare against the Iranian regime.”

With respect to the former, Ross suggested “we should have a demonstration [of a 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster bomb’], put it on YouTube, let it go viral, let the Iranians see it; this is a capability that was developed basically to deal with them…”

“I still think at this point, given where we are in Syria, the most important thing right now is to act on the resolution and do it in a way that is seen as being effective and meaningful and serious,” he added.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

President Barack Obama meets with his National Security Staff to discuss the situation in Syria, in the Situation Room of the White House, Aug. 30, 2013. From left at the table: National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice; Attorney General Eric Holder; Secretary of State John Kerry; and Vice President Joe Biden. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 4 2013 (IPS)

In an important boost for President Barack Obama, two key Republicans and the Israel’s lobby’s two most influential groups Tuesday announced their support for a proposed Congressional resolution authorising limited military strikes against Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

“I believe that my colleagues should support this call for action,” said Rep. John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, after emerging from a White House meeting with Obama. The Republican majority leader, Eric Cantor, who also took part in the meeting, echoed his endorsement.

Several hours later, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which advertises itself as “the most influential foreign policy lobbying organisation on Capitol Hill”, came out with its own endorsement, implicitly linking military action to past pledges by Obama to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons, by military means if necessary.

“This is a critical moment when America must …send a message of resolve to Iran and Hezbollah – both of whom have provided direct and extensive military support to [Syrian President Bashar Al-] Assad. The Syrian regime and its Iranian ally have repeatedly demonstrated that they will not respect civilized norms,” the group said.

“That is why America must act, and why we must prevent further proliferation of unconventional weapons in this region,” it added.

A key Jewish group, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, also came out in favour of military action based on much the same argument.

Referring to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against an opposition stronghold outside Damascus that the administration has said killed more than 1,400 people, the group declared, “Those who perpetuate such acts of wanton murder must know that they can not do with impunity.

“Those who possess or seek weapons of mass destruction, particularly Iran and Hezbollah, must see that there is accountability,” according to the Conference. “Failing to take action would damage the credibility of the U.S. and negative impact the effort to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capacity.”

The endorsements came on the second day of what some administration officials called a “full-court press” to persuade lawmakers to back the resolution when Congress officially returns from its August recess next week. They do not guarantee its passage, but are seen as key milestones along the way.

They marked the latest developments following Obama’s surprise decision this past weekend to seek authorisation to carry out limited strikes against Syria – an action which most observers had expected would have taken place by now – from Congress.

That decision was bitterly denounced by neo-conservatives and other hawks, such as Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham, as an abdication of leadership and the latest in what they regard as a disastrous series of moves by Obama to extricate the U.S. from the Middle East.

It followed the unexpected defeat in the British House of Commons last Thursday of a preliminary motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to authorise military action against Syria.

The vote, which effectively deprived Washington of its most loyal military ally, stunned the administration. With many lawmakers from both sides of the aisle here also pressing for a vote, Obama, who had seemed increasingly determined in the preceding days to carry out cruise-missile strikes from warships in the eastern Mediterranean as early as last weekend, apparently decided to yield to their demands.

Still, the White House has said Obama retains the authority as commander-in-chief to go ahead without Congress’ approval.

Obama announced his decision in a televised address Saturday and subsequently submitted a draft Authorisation to Use Military Force (AUMF) which will serve as the basis for the Congressional debate.

If approved in its present form, it would give Obama the authority to use the military “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria” in order to “prevent or deter” their “use or proliferation” and “protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons.”

Hawks, the most visible of whom have been McCain and Graham, initially said they could not support the resolution because it was too limited in purpose and did not appear to be “part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the President’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict.”

After meeting with Obama at the White House Monday, however, the two men came out in support of the resolution both because, in McCain’s words, a no vote would be “catastrophic” for Washington’s international credibility and because of their understanding that the president was committed to “very serious’ strikes against Syria beyond the “shot across the bow” that he had spoken of earlier in the week.

In addition, they suggested that Obama had assured them that Washington will step up military aid to Syrian rebels, something which he has long been reluctant to do.

But appeasing the hawks may make it more difficult to overcome the concerns of the anti-war faction in his own party, as well as the embryonic coalition of libertarians, neo-isolationists, and fiscal conservatives among Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives whose members are traditionally more sceptical of foreign entanglements than the Senate where Obama should have an easier ride.

While the top two House Democrats have endorsed the proposed resolution, others have said they will support it only if it is drawn more narrowly, such as explicitly excluding the use of ground troops and setting limits on its duration in time and its geographical scope to within Syria’s borders. Of course, if Obama agrees to such limits, he risks losing support from the hawks.

As for the Republicans, Boehner and Cantor are considered relatively weak leaders who have repeatedly failed to keep their caucus in line on many issues. Newer members, many of whom associate themselves with the “Tea Party” movement and are reflexively anti-Obama, been particularly unruly.

Moreover, with public opinion among both Democrats and Republicans – although Republicans are somewhat more evenly split – running against military action, Obama could face a difficult climb in getting the House behind him. A Pew Research Centre poll conducted over the weekend found 48 percent of respondents opposed to airstrikes on Syria, while 29 percent approved.

While only 33 percent of respondents said they thought such strikes would be effective in deterring the use of chemical weapons, 74 percent said they thought a regional backlash against the U.S. was likely to occur if the attacks took place, and 61 percent said strikes would likely lead to a long-term military commitment.

Still, active lobbying by AIPAC and the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had publicly maintained a discreet silence about how Washington should react to the alleged chemical attacks, could prove decisive to the outcome in Congress.

The New York Times this weekend called AIPAC “the 800-pound gorilla in the room” whose unquestioned influence was needed by the administration to prevail. (Significantly, the Times omitted the quote in updated online versions of the story.)

While the group argued in a reference to the alleged chemical-weapons attack that “barbarism on a mass scale must not be given a free pass,” it suggested that Iran and its nuclear programme – which successive Israeli governments have denounced as the number one threat – loomed as large or larger in considering how to respond.

In an echo of the tactics they used to promote U.S. intervention in the Balkans, Iraq and Libya, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives published a letter Tuesday urging President Barack Obama to go far beyond limited military strikes against Syria in retaliation for its government’s alleged use last week of chemical weapons that reportedly killed hundreds of people.

Signed by 66 former government officials and “foreign policy experts” – almost all of them strongly pro-Israel neo-conservatives – the letter, which was released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), called for Washington “and other willing nations [to] consider direct military strikes against the pillars of the Assad regime” as part of more ambitious strategy to support “moderate” Syrian rebels and dissuade Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Any military action should aim to ensure that the government of President Bashar al-Assad will be unable to use chemical weapons and should deter or destroy its “airpower and other conventional military means of committing atrocities against civilian non-combatants,” according to the letter.

The letter’s most prominent signatories included several senior officials of the George W. Bush administration, such as his top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams, former Undersecretary of Defence Eric Edelman and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser, John Hannah, and was given a bipartisan gloss with the inclusion of former Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman and several liberal interventionist commentators identified with the Democratic party who signed previous statements by the FPI and its predecessor, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

The letter also called on Obama to “accelerate efforts to vet, train, and arm moderate elements of Syria’s armed opposition” to help them prevail against both Assad and growing Al Qaeda-affiliated or extremist factions. It was released amidst growing indications that the Obama administration, which Monday called the alleged attack a “moral obscenity”, is determined to take limited military action – most likely through cruise-missile strikes launched from naval vessels based in the eastern Mediterranean – against selected targets in Syria for up to three days, possibly as early as this weekend.

It is expected that Britain and France and possibly Turkey will also take part in operations under a NATO mandate and with the support of the Arab League which, meeting in Cairo Tuesday, blamed Syria for the attack and called for its perpetrators to be brought to justice.

Despite the fact that U.N. inspectors, who on Monday visited the site of the alleged attack outside Damascus and took blood and tissue samples from some victims, have not yet submitted their findings, administration officials said they had concluded that the attack did take place and that government forces were responsible.

At the White House Tuesday, spokesman Jay Carney said the administration will release a report detailing the basis for its conclusions later this week and that Obama was currently considering various options prepared by the Pentagon, although he also insisted that any action taken by the United States will not be intended to achieve “regime change” in Damascus.

That assurance will no doubt frustrate neo-conservatives, many of whom have long held the Assad dynasty in their sights and who  had hoped that the 2003 invasion of Iraq – which they promoted through organisations like PNAC, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the Foundation for Defence of Democracy (FDD) – would lay the foundations for Assad’s ouster, too.

Indeed, a number of neo-conservatives, including signatories of the FPI letter, are insisting that U.S. action aim to end Assad’s regime.

One, Eliot Cohen, argued in a Washington Post op-ed Monday that “a bout of therapeutic bombing is an even more feckless course of action than a principled refusal to act altogether,” a point echoed on the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page – a favourite neo-conservative forum – Tuesday.

Another signatory, Reuel Marc Gerecht, who promoted the Iraq war at AEI and is now based at FDD, called for a “devastating” attack targeting “elite military units, aircraft, armour and artillery; all weapons-depots; the myriad organisations of the secret police; the ruling elite’s residences; and other critical Alawite infrastructure” in a New York Times op-ed Tuesday.

Founded by two prominent neo-conservatives in 1997, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC published a series of letters and manifestos that helped shape the foreign policy trajectory, especially regarding the Middle East, of Bush’s first term. Among its charter members are eight men who held key posts under Bush, including Cheney; his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; Abrams and the Pentagon’s foreign policy chief, Peter Rodman.

In 1998, PNAC published letters favouring legislation adopting “regime change” as official U.S. policy toward Iraq that was eventually signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. Nine days after 9/11, it published another letter to Bush signed by 41 policy analysts – virtually all neo-conservatives – that laid out an ambitious agenda for his “global war on terror”.

It insisted that failure to remove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” It also urged that Bush “should consider appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they refused to comply with demands that they cease support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

PNAC faded into oblivion by the beginning of Bush’s second term as the situation in Iraq deteriorated and neo-conservatives lost influence. In early 2009, however, Kagan and Kristol founded FPI and were joined as directors there by Edelman and Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.

In January 2011, FPI published a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former Bush administration officials, calling on Obama to press NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Libya and the country’s naval vessels.

By the following summer, it joined with FDD in calling for tough economic sanctions against Syria and the creation of no-fly or no-go zones in Syrian territory to protect civilians, and in December 2011, it released a letter signed by 58 individuals – most of whom also signed Tuesday’s letter – calling for military aid to opposition forces “whose political goals accord with U.S. national security interests”.

Among the more notable signatories of the most recent letter are French writer Bernard-Henri Levy, who played a key role in mobilising international support for the NATO intervention in Libya; Christian Right activist Gary Bauer, who, with Kristol, was a founding board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel; Bush political adviser Karl Rove; the former head of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, Randy Scheunemann; and former CPA chief, L. Paul Bremer, as well as Kagan and Kristol.

Surprisingly absent from the list were some of the most visible and controversial architects and supporters of the Iraq war and those who had previously associated themselves with PNAC or FPI, such as Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, former CIA director James Woolsey, and AEI’s Richard Perle, who chaired the Defence Policy Board under Rumsfeld.

Paul Singer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2013. Credit: WEF/cc by 2.0

By Charles Davis
LOS ANGELES, Jul 31 2013 (IPS)

Vulture capitalist Paul Singer has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in his legal battle with Argentina over the country’s 2001 debt default.

The promise of a huge payday has led the Wall Street hedge fund manager to sink a small fortune into a campaign against the South American nation portraying it as a close – and anti-U.S. – ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran. (See series, Part One)

One way he has done this is by issuing press releases through the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), a trade group he helped found, and buying full-page ads in major newspapers.

Giving money to politicians is another way to affect the debate in the United States.

Senator Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, has been a vocal critic of Argentina, writing a letter to the country’s president denouncing her agreement with Iran to investigate the the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. That letter was later quoted in an ATFA ad.

As it turns out, Kirk has received more than 95,000 dollars from employees of Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics. Indeed, many letters expressing concern about Argentina’s ties to Iran appear are signed by lawmakers who have received campaign cash from Singer and his close associates.

A Jul. 10 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, for instance, urged the Justice Department not to side with Argentina in its legal battle before the Supreme Court, citing both the AMIA agreement and Argentina’s expanding trade with the Islamic Republic “at a time when the rest of the world (including the United States) is attempting to isolate Iran to pressure it to give up its nuclear programme.”

“Rewarding Argentina’s decision to flout well-established international principles regarding the orderly restructuring of sovereign debt has clearly emboldened its leaders to defy other international norms with impunity,” the 12 lawmakers wrote.

Those who signed the letter received more than 200,000 dollars last year from companies and PACs tied to Singer.

One signer, Congressman Michael Grimm, a New York Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, was reelected to Congress last year after receiving 38,000 dollars from Elliott Management, nearly twice as much as his next largest donor.

Grimm has cosponsored legislation demanding “full compensation” for Argentina’s bondholders – the sponsor of that bill, former Congressman Connie Mack, took in 39,000 dollars from Singer’s company – and has urged the Barack Obama administration to investigate Argentina’s relationship with Iran. ATFA has commended Grimm for his work.

Another lawmaker who signed the letter to Holder is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She accuses the Argentine government of colluding with the Islamic Republic to cover up its alleged role in the AMIA bombing and undermining U.S. interests “by giving Iran a larger footprint in the Western Hemisphere”.

But she isn’t just worried about Iranian-backed terrorism. In a 2012 press release, she said it was “troubling that Argentina refuses to honor its outstanding debts, and evades U.S. court decisions.”

Ros-Lehtinen received 108,000 dollars last year from the American Unity PAC. The PAC was founded in 2012 with a one-million-dollar investment from Singer, accounting for more than a third of the group’s budget.

New Jersey Republican Scott Garrett, chair of the House Financial Services subcommittee on capital markets, also signed the letter to Holder. On Jun. 7, 2012, Garrett held a hearing to address the Obama administration’s support for “deadbeat foreign governments . . . at the expense of our own U.S. investors.”

At the hearing, he decried that “U.S. investors are taking billions of dollars in losses, despite Argentina having the money to pay the bill.”

Garrett received 35,000 dollars from employees at Elliott Management last year, more than all but one of his other campaign contributors.

On Jul. 9, a House subcommittee chaired by South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan held a hearing entitled “Threat to the Homeland: Iran’s Extending Influence in the Western Hemisphere”, the primary purpose of which was to rebut a recent report from the State Department that said Iran’s influence was on the decline.

Duncan received 10,000 dollars in 2012 from the Every Republican is Crucial PAC, which was heavily supported by the executives of Wall Street hedge funds, including Singer.

At the hearing, Douglas Farah, a former Washington Post reporter turned right-wing foreign policy analyst, testified that Argentina “is rapidly becoming one of Iran’s most important allies.”

He accused the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of taking steps “aimed at absolving senior Iranian leaders of their responsibility in a major terrorist attack,” while also embracing “a series of seemingly irrational economic and political polices that favour transnational organised crime, are overtly hostile to U.S. interests, and could offer Iran a lifeline in both its economic crisis and its nuclear programme.”

That testimony was followed by a Jul. 11 letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, signed by a bipartisan group of politicians, including Singer-supported lawmakers Duncan and Grimm.

The letter, which warned that “Argentina may be seeking to aid Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons programme,” urged the secretary to weigh the Fernández government’s “ties with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” when considering whether the State Department will side with Argentina in its legal battle with U.S. hedge funds.

Farah, whose testimony was cited in the letter, wrote a Jun. 26 column for the Miami Herald in which he referred to Argentina’s “increasingly cozy relationship with the ayatollahs,” citing the 2012 Nisman report to claim Iran is using the country as a base from which to conduct intelligence and terror operations with the ultimate goal of “exporting the Iranian revolution”.

The column also asserts that the president-elect of Iran “would have been infinitely familiar with the planning” of the 1994 AMIA bombing, a claim echoed by other right-wing pundits but which Nisman himself rejected a day before the column was published.

The column was co-authored by Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank that has been highly critical of Argentina’s relations with Iran. This year, FDD and its analysts have published more than a half-dozen such critiques.

“Why is Argentina letting Iran examine the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, a crime Hezbollah surely committed?” asked Lee Smith, an editor at The Weekly Standard and fellow at FDD, in a column for Tablet magazine. In The Atlantic, FDD’s vice president of research, Jonathan Schanzer, explored the “dark connections between Argentina’s government and Tehran”.

Since 2008, Singer has given FDD at least 3.6 million dollars, according to a 2011 tax filing seen by IPS.

Conservative connections

FDD is but one of many neoconservative organisations with ties to Singer. Since there aren’t that many neoconservatives to begin with, those who don’t recoil at the label all tend to know each other – and serve on each other’s boards.

William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, serves on the board of the Singer-funded FDD, as well as the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank that advocates hands-off capitalism and an interventionist military policy; Singer is the chairman of the institute’s board.

In the small world of neoconservative politics, even when there aren’t necessarily financial ties, everyone still knows each other. Still, there are usually financial ties.

In March, Roger Noriega, another former Bush administration official, wrote a piece with José Cárdenas – another Bush official who now works at Noriega’s consulting firm – calling on the U.S. government to hold Argentina accountable “for its failures to abide by its obligations to international financial institutions” and “troubling alliances with rogue governments”. The piece was published by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential neoconservative think tank in Washington.

Noriega has been paid at least 60,000 dollars (in 2007) by Elliott Management to lobby on the issue of “Sovereign Debt Owed to a U.S. Company.” A tax filing that was mistakenly disclosed and reported on by The Nation shows that the publisher of Noriega’s piece, AEI, received 1.1 million dollars from Singer in 2009. Filings for subsequent years have not been made public.

Asked to comment, an AEI spokesperson told IPS that the think tank had “looked into the matter” and found Noriega “has no conflicts of interest in this regard”.

The other people and organisations named in this article did not respond to requests for comment.

Money is power

Singer has used his riches the way a lot of other wealthy people do: to get richer, of course, but also to promote what he believes – and fund the politicians and pundits who will promote it too.

At the very least, those who benefit from his generosity are going to think twice about opposing his interests; one doesn’t bite the hand that feeds. Some may even see the money they receive from Singer as a reason to actively promote his interests.

One thing is clear: no matter how his case against Argentina turns out, Paul Singer is going to be a very rich and powerful man. If he wins, though, he will be richer. And money in the United States means the power to shape the debate not just on financial matters, but war and peace.

Excerpt:

Samantha Power, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nominee for the post of ambassador to the United Nations, made a strong case for her confirmation Wednesday with strong pro-Israel and interventionist statements that will appeal to many of the hawks in the U.S. Senate.

Samantha Power. Credit: Angela Radulescu/cc by 2.0

Speaking at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Power called defending Israel at the United Nations her top priority.

Listing those priorities, Power said, “First, the U.N. must be fair… The United States has no greater friend in the world than the State of Israel. Israel is a country with whom we share security interests and, even more fundamentally, with whom we share core values – the values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

“America has a special relationship with Israel. And yet the General Assembly and Human Rights Council continue to pass one-sided resolutions condemning Israel above all others…Israel’s legitimacy should be beyond dispute, and its security must be beyond doubt… I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it.”

Power’s nomination was initially questioned by some observers, based on comments made over a decade ago which were deemed offensive to Israel.

In 2002, she suggested that if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which at that time was at a high point of violence, continued to worsen, the United States should consider a large protection force, which she said may mean “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import,” a clear reference to the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

Based on that statement, far right-wing and neoconservative groups blasted Power’s nomination in early June. The Republican Jewish Coalition, still reeling from their failed opposition to Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel’s nomination earlier this year, stepped carefully.

Its executive director, Matt Brooks, said that “Samantha Power has a record of statements that are very troubling to Americans who support Israel… She must respond to the strong doubts about her views raised by (her) record…The U.S. has an important role to play in the United Nations to defend freedom, Western values, and our democratic allies.

“We need an ambassador who will fight for U.S. interests in the international arena. Samantha Power must show the Senate and the American people that she can fill that role.”

The Zionist Organization of America went further, largely misrepresenting even her most controversial views by saying that, “Ms. Power’s record clearly shows that she is viscerally hostile to Israel, regards it as a major human rights abuser, even committing war crimes, and would like to see the weight of American military and financial power go to supporting the Palestinian Authority, not Israel. In contrast, she has spoken of Iran as though it scarcely poses a problem.”

But as early as 2008, with Obama in line for the presidency and recognising her own potential for a key role in his administration, Power disavowed her 2002 statements, and reached out to the heart of the pro-Israel lobby.

As described by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who shares with Mitt Romney the dubious distinction of being a failed 2012 Sheldon Adelson-financed Republican candidate, Power addressed a closed-door meeting of Jewish-American leaders and “…became deeply emotional and struggled to complete her presentation as she expressed how deeply such accusations (of her being anti-Israel) had affected her.”

The outreach worked. Hawks lined up in support of Power’s nomination. They included the neo-conservative writer Max Boot, Republican Senator John McCain and the notorious pro-Israel attack dog, Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz expressed the belief that Power was well-positioned to defend Israel at the United Nations. “She’s a perfect choice. A perfect choice,” he said. “She has real credibility to expose the U.N.’s double standard on human rights. She also understands the principle of ‘the worst first’ – you go after the worst human rights abusers first.”

Power’s long-standing support of military intervention was reinforced by her statements about Syria at the hearings. Speaking about perceived failures of the United Nations, Power was also implicitly critical of Obama’s policy regarding the ongoing atrocities in that country.

“We see the failure of the U.N. Security Council to respond to the slaughter in Syria,” she said. “(It is) a disgrace that history will judge harshly.”

Obama has pursued a careful policy in Syria, condemning the violence of the regime of embattled President Bashar al-Assad, but consistently displaying reluctance to actively intervene in the conflict.

Power has long been identified as a “liberal interventionist”, denoting her liberal credentials along with her belief that military intervention is a preferable option in cases where there is a threat of atrocities being committed. She is widely credited with being a key force in pressing Obama into his intervention in Libya.

Former Senator Joseph Lieberman, a committed hawk who left the Democratic Party in his last years in the Senate over differences regarding foreign policy, offered strong support to Power, drawing a distinction between her views and those of the president who has nominated her.

“Generally speaking from her writings, Samantha is probably more personally interventionist as a matter of American foreign policy based on human rights than this administration has been,” Lieberman said.

Power also struck a friendly chord with the Senate by vowing to press for financial reform at the U.N., a cause that is embraced by many Democrats while being overwhelmingly popular among Republicans. “The U.N. must become more efficient and effective,” Power told the Committee.

“In these difficult budget times, when the American people are facing tough cuts and scrutinising every expense, the U.N. must do the same. This means eliminating waste and improving accounting and internal management…It means getting other countries to pay their fair share. And it means closing down those missions and programmes that no longer make sense.”

Power is also a well-known advocate for human rights. Much of her testimony was devoted to this cause.

“The U.N. Charter calls for all countries ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person.’ But fewer than half of the countries in the world are fully free. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights is universally hailed and yet only selectively heeded.”

Even this statement followed the general tone of her testimony, which was often critical of the U.N. and often characterised its best qualities as an extension of U.S. foreign policy.

This raises serious questions about whether the Obama administration’s commitment to multilateralism is waning or if this was simply a charm offensive toward a Congress that has become more and more hostile to the U.N.

With Syrian government forces and their allies scoring a major victory over Western- and Gulf Arab-backed rebel forces this week, neo-conservatives and other anti-Damascus hawks are trying hard to turn up the pressure on President Barack Obama to sharply escalate U.S. support for the opposition.

Sen. John McCain has been the most outspoken Congressional proponent of military action in Syria. Credit: Dan Raustadt/cc by 2.0

But their appeals appear increasingly to be falling on deaf ears, not only in a White House which has long been reluctant to intervene in yet another Muslim country, but also on an electorate that, according to the latest polling, is turning increasingly non-, if not anti-, interventionist, particularly regarding the Middle East.

Indeed, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released Friday, only 28 percent of respondents said they believe that Washington has a “responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria”, while 61 percent rejected that notion.

Similarly, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Wednesday found that only 15 percent of respondents said they favoured taking military action, or providing arms directly to the rebels (11 percent) – the latter, an option the administration has said it has been actively considering for two months.

Another 42 percent said they preferred to confine U.S. involvement to humanitarian assistance (of which the U.S. has been made the main financier), while 24 percent favoured no action at all.

In what was billed as a major policy address at the Brookings Institution Thursday, Republican Sen. John McCain, who, along fellow-Republican Lindsay Graham, has been the most outspoken Congressional proponent of military action, vented his frustration with both Obama and the public.

“I’ve puzzled for nights figuring out why it is the president will not act more decisively in the face of the events that are taking place,” he said, warning that “the entire Middle East is now up for grabs, and our enemies are fully committed to winning.

“What is more disturbing, however, is how little most Americans seem to care,” said McCain, who last week became the highest-ranking elected official to visit rebel-held territory.

“Most are weary of war and eager to focus on domestic issues. But some hold a more cynical view: they see the Middle East as a hopeless quagmire of ancient hatreds, and a huge distraction from worthier priorities…”

He spoke amidst confirmation that the strategic rebel-held border town of Al-Qusayr, which sits at a critical crossroads connecting Damascus with Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and points further north, including Aleppo, had fallen to the Syrian army and hundreds of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters who joined the fight in April.

Analysts in the region described the government victory, the most important of a series of recent regime advances around Damascus, near the Golan region, and along the main highway to Jordan, as primarily tactical, but one that could signal a tipping point in the war.

“For the past six months, the two sides have been in a situation of dynamic equilibrium,” Yesid Sayigh, a Syria expert at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said this week at a briefing organised by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). “We may be entering a phase in which the equilibrium will tip …and in the regime’s favour.

“Between now and the end of the year, we could see the armed opposition in complete disarray,” he said, noting that the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) was “on the verge of collapse” while its Western and Arab League backers, the “Friends of Syria”, are “clearly getting cold feet” about increasing their support.

While the White House insisted that the situation was not so dire, increasingly exasperated hawks, who have long favoured strong U.S. military intervention short of putting “boots on the ground”, described it in more apocalyptic — and global — terms.

Insisting that Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s intervention in the battle for Al-Qusayr was decisive to the outcome, the Washington Post’s hard-line neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called the battle “a huge victory not just for Tehran but also for Moscow,” Assad’s biggest arms supplier.

The losers, he said, included Turkey, Jordan, Washington’s Gulf allies, as well as the U.S. itself “whose bystander president” failed to take measures long favoured by the hawks, including “arming the rebels, helping Turkey maintain a safe zone in northern Syria, grounding Assad’s murderous air force by attacking airfields – all the way up to enforcing a no-fly zone by destroying the regime’s air-defense system”.

According to Krauthammer, Obama also failed to “understand that if America is completely hands-off, it invites hostile outside intervention.”

Similarly, Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which played a key role in the march to war in Iraq and also championed the U.S. intervention in Libya, depicted Obama’s failure to provide critical support to the rebels as a potentially catastrophic abdication of Washington’s historic role of “keep(ing) the worst from happening in the Middle East.”

“It would be rash to draw too many conclusions from a fight over a town of just 30,000 residents,” he wrote in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, “but the specter that looms is nothing less than the near-complete collapse of the U.S. position in the Middle East.”

Indeed, many independent analysts are increasingly concerned that the spill-over effects and internationalisation of Syria’s civil war risk further destabilising the entire Levant, including Iraq.

However, they also fail to see how any U.S. military action, short of invasion and occupation, can make a decisive and beneficial difference, particularly given the disunity within rebel ranks and the important presence among them of radical Islamist groups that are at least as hostile to the U.S. and Israel as Iran and Hezbollah, if not more so.

Even many of McCain’s fellow Republicans, including the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, appear leery of any military involvement, including providing “lethal” assistance to the rebels (in addition to the “non-lethal” aid, such as body armour and night-vision goggles, already being provided offered by the administration).

A measure of the dismay felt by McCain and some other hawks is their praise for Obama’s most recent appointments – U.N. Amb. Susan Rice as his new national security adviser and Samantha Power to replace Rice at the U.N.

Long considered humanitarian interventionists, both Rice and Power, who served as a top National Security Council (NSC) official during Obama’s first term, were reported to have played key roles, along with Hillary Clinton, in persuading the president to intervene in Libya, the most oft-cited precedent McCain and others have cited for any Syria intervention.

“I want to work with them,” McCain said Thursday.

But even if they lean in McCain’s direction, they would face an uphill fight given the current political mood, as described by Michael Hirsh in the latest edition of The National Journal, entitled “The New Isolationism.”

Not only has there been “virtually a reversal of direction” in the public from the “neo-conservative strain of a decade ago,” according to Hirsh, but “(t)he idea of ‘humanitarian intervention that dominated policy debates before 9/11 has become, for the Obama team, the ‘notion that we shouldn’t just do things to make us feel better,’ in the words of one administration official.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

In Aleppo, Karm al Jabal. This neighbourhood is next to Al Bab and has been under siege for six months. Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Jun 1 2013 (IPS)

A series of reversals for Syria’s rebels this month has prompted its supporters here to call for much greater U.S. military intervention in the civil war in order to give them a stronger bargaining position in advance of any peace negotiations.

In particular, some opposition advocates here are calling for President Barack Obama to go beyond providing arms directly to selected rebel groups, an option that the administration has reportedly had under active consideration since reports surfaced last month that the Syrian army had used chemical weapons against rebels.“A no-fly zone has mission creep written all over it." – Joshua Landis

Given the current weakness of the opposition, they argue, it makes little sense to go into negotiations next month in Geneva with representatives of the government of President Bashar al-Assad – as proposed by both Washington and Moscow – without first trying to decisively turn the tide of battle.

“(T)he only hope for an acceptable political settlement in Syria lies in an intervention that would decisively shift the balance of Syria’s war – through arms supplies to the rebels and airstrikes to eliminate the regime’s air power” (emphasis added), declared the lead editorial in the Washington Post Friday.

“If Mr. Obama is unwilling to take such steps, he ought also to eschew diplomacy that makes his administration appear foolish as well as weak,” the Post’s hawkish editorial board wrote.

Many of the rebels’ advocates here are urging the creation of one or more “no-fly zones” over Syrian territory to protect the opposition and permit it to set up a rival government on Syrian territory that could then request additional military intervention by its Western and Arab allies.

“Such a government would be entitled to request assistance in its defence from those who recognise it,” according to Frederic Hof, a former State Department special adviser on Syria at the Atlantic Council, who spoke earlier this week as part of a panel that favoured strong U.S. military intervention at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).

“The United States and others would be entitled to offer defensive assistance to counter the (Bashar Al-) Assad insurgency and its foreign fighters.”

“This scenario would not preclude national unity negotiations between the new Syrian government and an entity in Damascus still recognised by Russia, Iran, and others,” according to Hof.

Hof’s proposal, as well as other options, came amidst a series of military, diplomatic and political reversals suffered by the opposition that have resulted in the perception that the Assad government – with critical help from key foreign backers, notably Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — has regained the offensive in the two-year-old civil war.

Hezbollah’s involvement in the fighting in and around the border town of Qusayr has enabled the government to secure key arms smuggling routes in and out of Lebanon and to re-open supply lines between Damascus and the Mediterranean coast, as well as northern provinces along the Turkish border, notably Latakia, Idlib and Aleppo.

Citing Germany’s chief intelligence officer, Charles Dunne, who heads Middle East programmes at Freedom House, wrote on CNN’s website that recent government advances on the ground meant that Assad’s rule “is more stable than any time in the last two years, and he is likely to retake the southern half of the country by the end of this year.”

Meanwhile, disarray in the opposition ranks was on vivid display during a meeting of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces in Istanbul this past week as Islamist and secular factions battled over control and representation at any Geneva peace conference, to the evident exasperation of their backers in the West and Gulf states.

That disarray was increasingly reflected in Syria itself as four of the leading rebel groups on the ground sharply criticised the continuing discord in Istanbul amidst reports of increased tension and actual fighting between units of the Free Syria Army and Islamist groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, filtered out of northern Syria.

While Britain and France managed to persuade the EU to lift its embargo on supplying arms to the rebels effective Aug. 1, Russia countered by announcing that it will proceed with the transfer to Damascus of its S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile system – widely considered one of the most potent anti-aircraft missile systems in the world.

While deployment of the system is unlikely before next year – assuming Moscow follows through with the transfer despite Israeli threats to destroy it on delivery – Russia’s announcement underlined its determination to trump any escalation of Western support for the rebels.

Moreover, the addition of S-300s to Syria’s already formidable air-defence system would make the implementation of a no-fly zone or similar action requiring U.S. and Western airpower that much more problematic, thus adding urgency to whether or not to intervene as urged by Hof and others.

The administration has so far confined its support to the rebels to humanitarian aid and “non-lethal” assistance – even while it has encouraged the Gulf states and Western Europe to provide arms directly – and has shown little enthusiasm for escalating its military involvement, to say the least.

When reports surfaced last week that it was indeed considering a no-fly zone, the Pentagon was quick to deny them, even while insisting that it is prepared for all contingencies.

At the USIP conference, Joseph Holliday, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, a spin-off of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), presented four options for implementing a no-fly zone, ranging from supplying rebels with advanced surface-to-air missiles to a direct U.S. air attack on Syria’s air-defense system, aircraft, and related infrastructure followed by U.S. and allied air patrols over parts of the country.

But whether these ideas can be sold to the administration or to a war-weary public – for which there is virtually no appetite for providing anything more than arms to the rebels, according to recent polls — there is far from a consensus on the no-fly zone.

“A no-fly zone has mission creep written all over it,” according to Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of the syriacomment.com blog “It does nothing to guarantee that the opposition would win, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that the ‘moderate’ opposition would get the jump on the Islamists and al-Qaeda, who are better positioned to exploit an Assad defeat, should it come.”

“In Libya, the no-fly zone turned into a no-Gadhafi zone within 48 hours, because the only way to stop the killing was to destroy Gadhafi and his military,” he told IPS. “There is no point in imposing a no-fly zone on Syria, if the U.S. air force is not willing to destroy the Assad regime and his military.”

Wayne White, a former senior Middle East State Department intelligence analyst, agreed that, as in Libya, a no-fly zone would likely expand into something more, particularly “with the rebels on the defensive and losing ground…”

Indeed, he said, “another argument against (a no-fly zone) now could be that regime forces are doing so well on the ground that they might be able to continue making gains against the rebels without air support – relying instead on tanks, other armoured vehicles, heavy artillery, and heavy mortar fire.”

The result, he said, would likely result in “aerial interdiction against all manner of regime military targets on the ground, making it an even more demanding affair.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

While preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is preferable, the United States could successfully contain a nuclear Iran, according to a new report released here Monday by the Center for a New American Security, an influential think tank close to the administration of President Barack Obama.

The report, “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlines a detailed “containment strategy” designed to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, and persuade other regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities."We have to consider the possibility that prevention efforts - including the use of force - could fail." -- CNAS' Colin Kahl

“The United States should do everything in its power to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, and no option should be left off the table,” said Colin Kahl, the lead author of the 80-page report and the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official during most of Obama’s first term.

“But we also have to consider the possibility that prevention efforts – including the use of force – could fail,” he added in an email to IPS. “In that case, we’d need a strategy for managing and mitigating the threats a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to vital U.S. interests and allies. That’s what we’re focusing on.”

The administration, according to the report, has so firmly committed itself to a prevention policy – including threatening military action if diplomatic efforts and economic pressure fail – that cannot explicitly endorse a different approach “without damaging the very credibility it needs to effectively address the Iranian nuclear challenge,” according to the report.

At the same time, however, Tehran may be able to achieve “an unstoppable breakout capability” or build a weapon in secret before preventive measures have been exhausted. In addition, a U.S. or Israeli military strike may inflict only minimal damage to Iran’s nuclear programme while strengthening hard-liners in the regime who believe a nuclear deterrent is the only way to ensure its survival.

“Under any of these scenarios, Washington would likely be forced to shift toward containment regardless of current preferences,” the report notes, arguing that Washington needs to think through the requirements for an effective strategy.

The new report adds to a growing literature about U.S. options in dealing with Iran, which has itself repeatedly denied that its nuclear programme is designed to develop nuclear weapons.

The U.S. intelligence community has also reported consistently over the last six years that Iran’s leadership has not yet decided to build a weapon, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made. U.S. intelligence agencies have expressed confidence that they will be able to detect any effort by Iran to achieve a “break-out” capacity.

Since coming to office in 2009, the Obama administration has described its efforts to dissuade Iran from developing a nuclear weapon as a “dual-track” approach involving both diplomatic outreach through the so-called P5+1 process of negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, and economic pressure exerted primarily through the imposition of harsh economic sanctions – some multilateral, most unilateral – designed to “cripple” the Iranian economy.

While the sanctions have clearly damaged Iran’s troubled economy, Tehran has so far rejected far-reaching concessions demanded by the Western members of the P5+1, such as suspending all operations at its underground Fordo enrichment facility and shipping most of its 20-percent enriched-uranium stockpile out of the country.

While there have been some exchanges between the P5+1 and Iran since their last meeting in Almaty, Kazakhstan last month, the diplomatic process appears to have been put on hold pending next month’s presidential elections in the Islamic Republic.

The lack of progress on the diplomatic front combined with technological advances in Iran’s nuclear programme – with estimates that Tehran will have likely enough enriched uranium to build a bomb within a very short period by next spring or summer — has provoked a simmering conflict here.

It revolves around pro-Israel and proliferation hawks pushing for yet more draconian sanctions and “credible threats of force” by the administration on the one hand and more dovish forces who are calling for more emphasis on the diplomatic track.

Much of the foreign policy establishment, including former senior military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials, lean to the latter camp; recent reports by blue-ribbon task forces of The Iran Project, the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for the National Interest have shown a developing elite consensus in favour of greater U.S. flexibility at the negotiating table.

In Congress, where the Israel lobby enjoys its greatest influence, however, the emphasis remains on the pressure track. Measures currently being circulated in both houses of Congress target foreign companies and banks in ways that, if enforced, would impose a virtual trade embargo against Iran.

The new report, the latest in a series by CNAS on Iran policy, does not address either strategy, although Kahl has in the past argued for greater U.S. flexibility in negotiations.  It is likely, however, to fuel the ongoing debates between the hawks and doves on whether Washington can indeed live with a nuclear-armed Iran if its “prevention” strategy fails.

A containment strategy, according Kahl and his two-co-authors, Raj Pattani and Jacob Stokes, would integrate five key components: deterrence, defence, disruption, de-escalation and de-nuclearisation.

Deterrence would involve, among other steps, strengthening Washington’s threat to retaliate in kind if Iran uses nuclear weapons and extending the U.S. nuclear umbrella to other regional states in exchange for their commitment not to pursue independent nuclear capabilities.

Defence would aim to deny Iran any benefit from its nuclear weapons by building up U.S. missile-defence capabilities and naval deployments in the region and increasing security co-operation with Gulf countries and Israel.

Disruption would include “shap(ing) a regional environment resistant to Iranian influence” by, among other steps, building up Egypt and Iraq as strategic counterweights; “promoting evolutionary political reform” in the Gulf; and increasing aid to moderate elements among Syrian rebels and the Lebanese Army as a counter to Hezbollah.

De-escalation would be designed to prevent any Iran-related crisis from spiralling to nuclear war “persuading Israel to eschew preemptive nuclear doctrine and other destabilizing nuclear postures,” creating crisis-communication mechanisms and exploring confidence-building measures with Iran; assuring Tehran that “regime change” is not Washington’s goal, and providing it with “’face-saving’ exit ramps” during crises.

Finally, de-nuclearisation would try to constrain Iran’s nuclear programme and limit broader damage to the non-proliferation regime by maintaining and tightening sanctions against Iran and strengthening interdiction efforts.

The report stressed that such a strategy would entail major costs, including “doubling down on U.S. security commitments to the Middle East,” making the administration’s military “rebalancing” to the Asia/Pacfic more difficult; “greatly complicate efforts to promote reform” allied Arab states; and “increase the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy at the very time the Obama administration hopes to move in the opposite direction.”

The CNAS report was immediately assailed by several prominent neo-conservatives who have long been warning that Obama, given his clear reluctance to risk war in another predominantly Muslim country, would himself eschew his prevention strategy in favour of “containment by another name.”

But, as noted by Kahl, the hard-line neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute published a paper 18 months ago that concluded that “containing and deterring” a nuclear-armed Iran could be the “least-bad choice” for U.S. policy if Washington can “demonstrate that it can deter both Iran’s use of nuclear weapons and aggression by Tehran’s network of partners and terrorist proxies.”

Kahl’s position on containment is also expected to be echoed with the anticipated publication by Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution, of his new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy’. Pollack’s 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to back the invasion.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Kurdish militias in Syria have controlled the oil rich area of Rumelan since early March. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.

While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.

“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”

The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.

Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel.

War-weariness and public disillusionment with U.S. interventions they championed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as President Barack Obama’s oft-expressed reservations about the wisdom of engaging in yet another war in a predominantly Muslim country, had kept the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks at bay.

But a combination of an ever-climbing death toll, Hezbollah’s increased involvement, the rise of radical Islamist groups within the insurgency, and the initial –albeit yet to be confirmed — estimates by U.S., Israeli, and Western European intelligence agencies that Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, as well as Obama’s apparently offhand public warnings during last year’s election campaign that such use would cross a “red line”, have propelled some prominent liberals – most recently, New York Times columnist Bill Keller and former senior Obama policy official Anne Marie Slaughter — into their camp.

Led by the Wall Street Journal and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives remain the most aggressive among the hawks in their advice, just as they were in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Thus, providing weapons to selected rebel groups – an option which the administration is considered most likely to exercise if the evidence of chemical weapons use by government forces is confirmed – is no longer considered sufficient.

“At this stage, (a better outcome of the conflict), this would require more than arming some rebels,” according to the Journal editorial. “It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces.

“We would not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons,” the editorial writer added in a notable deviation from assurances offered by the hawks’ two most prominent Congressional champions – Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham – who, in deference to public opinion, have said repeatedly that putting U.S. “boots on the ground” should be off the table.

This echoed Kristol’s own editorial in the Standard published on the weekend. Arming the rebels, he wrote, “could well be too little, too late. …It’s hard to see what a serious response would be short of direct American engagement – perhaps a combination of enforcement of a no-fly zone and aerial attacks. And no serious president would rule out a few boots on the ground…”

The Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-policy columnist, Bret Stephens, weighed in with even more specific advice Tuesday.

He called for Obama to “disable the runways of Syrian air bases, including the international airport in Damascus; …[u]se naval assets to impose a no-fly zone over western Syria; …[s]upply the Free Syrian Army with heavy military equipment, including armored personnel carriers and light tanks; [and b]e prepared to seize and remove Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, even if it means putting boots (temporarily) on the ground.”

Liberal hawks have been less precise about what needs to be done, but their sense of urgency in favour of escalating U.S. military intervention – beginning with supplying the rebels with weapons – appears no less intense.

Slaughter, who served for two years as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning chief and, as an influential Princeton University international-relations professor, urged U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Libya, published an op-ed in the Washington Post that warned that Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria brought forth the spectre of the Rwandan genocide.

“For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act,” she wrote, without prescribing precisely what he should do.

Keller, who described himself as a “reluctant hawk” in an influential 1,500-word op-ed on the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, provided somewhat more detailed advice in 1,300-word, very prominently placed op-ed entitled “Syria is Not Iraq” Wednesday in which he quoted Slaughter, among other liberal hawks.

“The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels – funnelling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiation an orderly transition to a non-sectarian Syria,” he wrote.

“We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.”

Keller, who several years after the Iraq invasion offered a somewhat muted apology for supporting that war, stressed that he did not “mean to make this sound easy,” but stressed that a disastrous outcome “is virtually inevitable if we stay out [of the conflict]. …Why wait for the next atrocity?” he asked.

“Iraq should not keep us from doing the right thing in Syria…,’’ according to the op-ed’s subhead.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Boys in Al Raqqa, Syria, Apr. 11, 2013. Credit: Beshroffline/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 4 2013 (IPS)

Despite renewed pressure by hawks in Congress and the media, U.S. President Barack Obama appears determined to avoid sharply escalating U.S. involvement in the ongoing civil war in Syria.

While administration officials insist that all options for responding to the recent alleged use by the Syrian military of chemical weapons against anti-government strongholds remain on the table, insiders suggest that the likeliest choice will be, at most, to begin supplying selected groups of rebels with “lethal” defensive weapons, albeit nothing like the surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank rockets they have been calling for.

“They’re worried about more-sophisticated weaponry falling into the wrong hands,” said one well-connected Congressional staffer here this week, noting that reports that Islamist groups – at least one of which, the Al-Nusra Front, has declared fidelity to Al-Qaeda – now dominate the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency.

So far, Washington has provided rebels with only “non-lethal” assistance, including communications gear and food rations. Just before the chemical-weapons charges surfaced, the administration  had decided to add body armour and night-vision goggles.

Throughout the conflict, it has turned a blind eye to supplies of “lethal” equipment from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, even as it became increasingly concerned that the recipients of that aid are almost uniformly Sunni Islamists.

While the public might rally behind stronger action – for example, creating a “no-fly zone” over all or parts of the country, as hawks like Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham have repeatedly urged — the administration would have to mount a major “information” campaign to get that support, recent polls suggest.

Asked last week whether they would support the U.S. and its allies using force against Syrian forces if their use of chemical weapons is confirmed, a plurality of 45 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey said they would, while 31 percent said they would oppose military action.

In a New York Times/CBS poll taken at the same time, however, 62 percent of respondents said they did not feel the U.S. “has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria…,” while only 24 percent disagreed.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon also appears highly reluctant to take military action.

“Whether the military effect would produce the kind of outcome I think that not only members of Congress, but all of us would desire – which is an end to the violence, some kind of political reconciliation among the parties and a stable Syria …It’s not clear to me that it would produce that outcome,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters earlier this week.

While he assured his audience that the Pentagon was constantly updating its contingency plans and could prevail – albeit not nearly as easily as in Libya – over Damascus’s Russian-built air-defence system to set up a no-fly zone, he also raised serious questions about the wisdom of such a strategy. Dempsey pointed out that Assad’s air force was responsible for only about 10 percent of rebel and civilian casualties.

“The other 90 percent are through direct fire or artillery. So the question then becomes: If you eliminate one capability of a potential adversary, will you be inclined to find yourself in a position to be asked to do more against the rest?” he asked.

Meanwhile, Pentagon sources, with the evident approval of their superiors, briefed the Wall Street Journal on just how formidable Syria’s air defences were, noting that Dempsey himself had told Obama it would be very difficult for U.S. aircraft to take out mobile and other systems that were installed after the Israeli attack on a suspected secret nuclear reactor in 2007.

Even many of McCain’s and Graham’s Republican colleagues have failed to rally behind their calls for direct military action, opting instead for arming “moderate”, secular rebel groups, which, according to a major New York Times account last month, scarcely exist in what has become a sectarian conflict similar in many respects to that which nearly tore Iraq apart in 2006-07.

Indeed, neo-conservatives and other Republican hawks have been so disappointed by the tepidness or indifference of their colleagues’ response to Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons that they have added it to a growing list of charges of creeping “isolationism” in the party.

Of course, most of their fire has been directed at Obama, not only for failing to intervene in the conflict earlier, when “moderate” groups may have been more of a force within the insurgency, but also and, more importantly, for damaging U.S. “credibility” by, first, warning Assad that his use of chemical weapons would be a “game-changer” and cross a “red line” that would provoke “enormous consequences” from Washington, and then by arguing, as he did last week, that he needs more evidence and a broader international consensus that the government did indeed deploy such weapons before taking any action.

Even some more-dovish voices who have long been sceptical about any escalation in U.S. involvement in Syria have argued that Obama has put U.S. credibility on the line and must follow through on his threat, lest Iran and North Korea, for example, draw the wrong conclusions.

“If you draw a line in the sand, especially in the turbulent and passionate Arab world, and dare someone not to cross it, you had better back up the threat when he does,” wrote former Under Secretary of State for Policy Nicholas Burns on GlobalPost this week, although he also defended Obama’s desire to gain confirmation of the chemical-weapons reports.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a liberal interventionist who served in a top policy post in Obama’s State Department, evoked the memory of Rwanda in appealing in a Washington Post op-ed for Obama to take action. “…(T)he White House must recognize that the game has already changed,” she wrote. “U.S. credibility is on the line.”

Still, other interventionists who had supported more-aggressive action by the U.S. early in the conflict now said they were now much more ambivalent, particularly in light of the reported dominance of more-radical Islamists among the rebel ranks.

“I lean now much more to caution,” said former Amb. Morton Abramowitz, who played a key role in persuading the Clinton White House to intervene in the Balkans in the 1990s and initially favoured a no-fly zone in Syria to protect the peaceful opposition.

That preference for caution – combined with the universal rejection of putting U.S. “boots on the ground” for anything but the most dire humanitarian emergencies (such as the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons against a civilian population or large stocks of chemical weapons falling into the hands of Hezbollah or Al-Qaeda-affiliated rebel groups) – will make it much easier for Obama to finesse his “red line” warning and avoid direct military intervention.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

After a week of retrospectives on the tenth anniversary of Washington’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, the most compelling consisted of a retrospective of the retrospectives.

It came from Marc Lynch, an expert on Arab public opinion at George Washington University and prominent blogger on the foreignpolicy.com website. The flood of retrospectives that materialised over the week, he wrote, has “almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans.”This self-absorbed world view also assumes that the United States can always control any events if it just chooses the right tools and puts the right people in charge.

Lynch even did a tally. The New Republic, an important liberal publication, ran commentaries by eight writers, none Iraqi. Foreign Affairs, the country’s most influential foreign-affairs journal, featured 25 contributors, none Iraqi. The New York Times did slightly better: one Iraqi out of six commentators.

Foreign Policy itself, in cooperation with the Rand Corporation, featured 20 participants in a lengthy discussion on lessons learned from Iraq. Not a single one was Iraqi.

Most major newspapers – and cable news channels — ran a scattering of stories from Iraq in which officials and citizens voiced their satisfaction or, more often, their disillusionment with the results of the invasion and subsequent eight-year occupation, as well as their hopes and fears for the future. But these were largely overshadowed on the international news front by the growing drumbeat for U.S. intervention in Syria and President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel.

“Strategic narcissism,” as Lynch called it, is neither new in U.S. relations with the rest of the world, nor is it something that the still-reigning global superpower has by any means shed as a result of the Iraq debacle. “The notion that what the United Sates does is the most important aspect of every development pervades American foreign-policy punditry, whether about Iraq or Egypt, Syria and the Arab uprisings,” he wrote.

Indeed, strategic narcissism, combined with a remarkable lack of interest in foreign peoples for an imperial power that has long been insulated by exceptionally weak neighbours and two great oceans, was in many ways responsible for the last great foreign-policy debacle of the post-World War II era: the Vietnam War.

According to Robert McNamara, that war’s defence secretary and later World Bank president, the U.S. foreign-policy elite saw Ho Chi Minh primarily as a puppet of an aggressive and expanding Soviet-Chinese Communist empire rather than as a Vietnamese nationalist.

“The basic lesson is: understand your opponent,” McNamara ruefully told the New York Times in 1997. “We don’t understand the Bosnians, we don’t understand the Chinese and we don’t really understand the Iranians.”

Of course, in the case of Iraq, the key policy-makers – and the commentariat that supported them – claimed to understand the locals quite well, primarily through long-time exiles; most importantly, Ahmad Chalabi, a wealthy banker and confidence man who helped persuade them that invading U.S. troops would be greeted with “flowers and sweets” by a grateful population, and whose ideas about de-Baathification – or “de-Sunnification”, as one military participant in the Rand seminar called it – would set the stage for the bloody sectarian conflict that followed the invasion.

They were also reassured by the neo-conservative views about Arabs of the eminent Islamic historian and ardent Zionist, Bernard Lewis, who, however, in an academic career spanning six decades, had never actually set foot in Iraq.

The ouster of Saddam Hussein by the U.S., they told their credulous – and highly narcissistic — interlocutors would not only put an end to a particularly ruthless and reckless dictator. It would also liberate the Iraqi people, serve as an example (and a first democratic domino) for the rest of the region, intimidate Iran and Syria, and ensure that the U.S. would have a reliable ally in the heart of the Middle East for generations.

Of course, it was not as if the government knew nothing about Iraq or how Iraqis might react to a U.S. invasion. Decades of federal support for Middle East Studies centres at major universities, as well as the accumulation of experience with the region built up in key bureaucracies, notably the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had produced high levels of expertise, much greater than those on Indochina in the build-up to the war there.

In fact, a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the State Department organised an ambitious “Future of Iraq” project that, in addition to U.S. experts, involved dozens of Iraqi professionals. At the same time, the intelligence community, using its own contacts and expertise, produced a series of reports that sharply questioned the confident predictions of the war hawks both in and outside the administration.

They warned, among other things, that de-Baathification would lead to the sectarian violence that followed, that a successor government could be more a boon for Iran than the U.S., let alone Israel, and that Washington’s ability to shape the consequences of the invasion was far more limited than the White House believed.

The studies, however, were ignored or discarded by the policy-makers and their mainly neo-conservative advisers who believed that the experts involved in these studies were “Arabists” and hence too sympathetic toward the subjects of their study – in this case, Iraqis – to be trusted.

In a recent Foreign Policy article, neo-conservative Elliott Abrams, who served under Ronald Reagan as a top Latin America aide and then as George W. Bush’s senior Middle East adviser (with little Spanish and no Arabic skills, respectively) stressed that every administration should establish a “shadow government of presidential loyalists” to ensure that experts in the relevant bureaucracies do not wrest control of policy.

That approach was vividly described some years ago by Col. Pat Lang (ret.), a former Green Beret and the top Middle East analyst in the Defence Intelligence Agency who had spent most oif his career in the region and who had been recommended to head the Pentagon office of special operations under Bush.

Asked by Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative close to Abrams, whether it was true he knew Arabs well and that he spoke Arabic fluently, Lang replied affirmatively. “That’s too bad,” Lang quoted Feith as telling him. “And that was the end of the interview.”

Thus, it was not only Iraqis who were not listened to; also ignored were those in and outside the government who were most knowledgeable about Iraqis and understood that the Chalabi-fuelled dreams of the policy-makers on top were in fact delusions designed to appeal to the imperial narcissists at the top.

While this week’s retrospectives partially rectified the latter problem by including many of those experts, Iraqis, who, like the Vietnamese a generation ago, suffered far more from the decisions taken in Washington, remained almost entirely absent, as stressed by Lynch.

“Lynch is right on the money when he chastises Americans for neglecting Iraqi perceptions of the war,” Stephen Walt, who teaches international relations at Harvard University, told IPS.

“This self-absorbed world view also assumes that the United States can always control any events if it just chooses the right tools and puts the right people in charge. In fact, there are many situations that are beyond our control, and failure to appreciate that fact could sow the seeds of similar debacles in the future.”

“Myopia has consequences,” Lynch wrote. “Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. …The habit of treating Iraqis as objects to be manipulated rather than as fully equal human beings – with their own identities and interests – isn’t just ethically problematic, it’s strategically problematic.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

A U.S. soldier stands watch at the Kindi IDP Resettlement Center near Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 16, 2009. Credit: U.S. Navy Photo

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 20 2013 (IPS)

Ten years after President George W. Bush launched his “shock and awe” campaign to overwhelm Iraq – and the rest of the world – with the futility of resisting Washington’s military might, the public and much of the foreign policy elite appear remarkably uninterested in marking the anniversary, let alone assessing the results.

The lack of interest may be explained by the fact that media attention to Iraq dwindled rapidly after 2008 as President Barack Obama instituted a rapid drawdown – ultimately withdrawing virtually all U.S. troops from Iraq by late 2011 – the same time that he more than doubled the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

“The only way Americans learn about the rest of the world is when we get involved in foreign wars,” noted one Washington veteran.

The lack of interest may also be explained by the fact that the war was an experience that many – even some of its defenders – would prefer to forget.

After all, the balance sheet doesn’t look very good: nearly 4,500 U.S. military personnel and another 3,400 U.S. private contractors killed and tens of thousands more badly wounded both physically and psychologically, while direct war-related costs to a cash-strapped Treasury exceeding two trillion dollars over the decade, according to the latest estimates of the Costs of War Project at Brown University released last week.

The Project also estimated the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war at at least 134,000. It stressed, however, that that figure should be considered very conservative and, in any case, did not include deaths caused by war-related hardships which it said could total many hundreds of thousands more.

Also not included in the Project’s report were the more than 50 people killed in Baghdad Tuesday in a series of bombings – probably by Sunni insurgents – designed apparently to both mark the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and remind the world that Washington’s goal of restoring stability to Iraq remains elusive at best.

The anniversary would seem to offer an important opportunity for reflection. This is particularly so given the growing domestic pressure here to intervene more forcefully in Syria – a “Free Syria Act of 2013” authorising the administration to spend 150 million dollars in lethal and non-lethal aid to the rebels was introduced by the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Monday — and the still-looming possibility of war with Iran.

Yet, with just a couple of exceptions, Washington’s most prominent foreign policy think tanks, as well as cable news and newspapers, focused their discussions and op-eds this week far more on Obama’s trip this week to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan than on the Iraq War and the lessons learned from it.

One notable exception was the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the neo-conservative stronghold whose pre-war “black coffee briefings” and close ties to Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld ensured its “scholars” a leading role in both promoting and actually planning the invasion and subsequent occupation – under the careful guidance of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi banker and confidence man who had hoped to be installed as the country’s new president.

In a one-hour briefing Tuesday afternoon that dwelled heavily on the supposed “success” of the 2007 so-called surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to prevent Iraq from falling into an all-out sectarian civil war, AEI associates, joined by Sen. John McCain, defended their advice throughout the war.

They have also run a flurry of op-eds published this past week, including one for FoxNews by former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, entitled “Iraq War taught us tough lessons, but world is better off without Saddam Hussein.”

Wolfowitz, a key architect of the war and major backer of Chalabi, argued that Washington should have adopted a Surge-like counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy much earlier in the war, a particularly ironic observation given his very public denunciation on the eve of the war of Gen. Eric Shinseki, then-Army chief of staff, who warned Congress of the need for several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace after the U.S. invasion.

Indeed, the war’s defenders – mostly neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists, like Cheney and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton, another AEI “scholar” – spent most of the past week insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

“If I had to do it over again, I’d do it in a minute,” Cheney told an interviewer about invading Iraq in a television biography that aired last Friday.

Like his fellow hawks, the former vice president insisted that U.S. and other intelligence services were convinced that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that he was theoretically prepared to give to terrorists – and that, in the wake of 9/11 – justified the invasion.

Indeed, the notion that the only flaw in the decision to go to war was “bad intelligence” has become a mantra of the war’s defenders who, like Wolfowitz, appear to miss the irony of their complaints, given their own interference in the intelligence process in the run-up to the war.

“Intelligence did not drive or guide the decision to invade Iraq – not by a long shot, despite the aggressive use by the Bush administration of cherry-picked fragments of intelligence reporting in its public sales campaign for the war,” according to Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time.

Indeed, the White House systematically ignored key reports by the intelligence community and the State Department that warned of the likely consequences of invading Iraq, even if it had WMD and was inclined to share them with terrorists, according to Pillar and a 2007 report by the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Among other things, these reports accurately predicted a breakdown in civil order – for which the Pentagon was completely unprepared — after the invasion.

It also predicted – accurately, it turns out — that a far-reaching de-Baathification programme of the kind promoted heavily by AEI and Chalabi would lead to violent sectarian conflict; that political Islam and anti-U.S. sentiment would surge across the region; and that any successor government would align itself more closely with Iran.

As for the general public, it, too doesn’t appear too inclined toward a major re-appraisal of the war. A spate of polls released this week suggests that opinions about the war have remained relatively stable over the past five years.

A majority (58 percent) told an ABC/Washington Post poll earlier this month they believed the war was “not worth fighting” – down from a high of 64 percent in late 2008), while 59 percent in a CNN survey released Tuesday characterised the decision to invade as a “dumb thing to do”.

A Pew Research Center poll released Monday found a virtually even split among respondents when asked whether using military force against Iraq was a “right” or “wrong” decision and whether the U.S. “mostly succeeded” or “mostly failed” in achieving its goal in Iraq.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul speaking to supporters in New Hampshire. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

Ten years after reaching the height of their influence with the invasion of Iraq, the neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks are fighting hard to retain their control of the Republican Party.

That fight was on vivid display last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) here where, as the New York Times observed in a front-page article, the party appeared increasingly split between the aggressively interventionist wing that led the march to war a decade ago and a libertarian-realist coalition that is highly sceptical of, if not strongly opposed to, any more military adventures abroad.

The libertarian component, which appears ascendant at the moment, is identified most closely with the so-called Tea Party, particularly Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, whose extraordinary 13-hour “filibuster” against the hypothetical use of drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. territory on the Senate floor last week made him an overnight rock star on the left as well as the right.

Republican unity was not helped by the hostile reaction to Paul’s performance by Sen. John McCain, and his long-time ally, Sen. Lindsay Graham, whose national security views tilt strongly neo-conservative and who are treated by most mainstream media as the party’s two most important foreign policy spokesmen.

McCain dismissed Paul and his admirers as “wacko birds on the right and left that get the media megaphone” and charged that Republican senators who joined Paul – among them, the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell – during his oratorical marathon should “know better”.

But, beyond drones, the party is deeply divided between deficit hawks, including many in the Tea Party who do not believe the Pentagon should be exempt from budget cuts and are leery of new overseas commitments, and defence hawks, led by McCain and Graham.

The split between the party’s two wings, which have clashed several times during Barack Obama’s presidency over issues such as Washington’s intervention in Libya and how much, if any, support to provide rebels in Syria, appears certain to grow wider, if for no other reason than deficit-cutting will remain the Republicans’ main obsession for the foreseeable future.

For now, it appears that the deficit hawks have the upper hand, at least judging from the reactions so far to the Mar. 1 triggering of the much-dreaded “sequester” which, if not redressed, would require the Pentagon to reduce its planned 10-year budget by an additional 500 billion dollars beyond the nearly 500 billion dollars that Congress and Obama had already agreed to cut in late 2011.

“Indefensible,” wrote neo-conservative chieftain Bill Kristol in his Weekly Standard about Republican complacency in the face of such prospective cuts in the military budget.

“(T)he Republican party has, at first reluctantly, then enthusiastically, joined the president on the road to irresponsibility,” he despaired.

The great fear of the neo-conservatives is that, given the country’s war weariness and the party’s focus on the deficit, Republicans may be returning to “isolationism” – a reference to the party’s resistance to U.S. intervention in Europe in World War II until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941.

Just as Adolf Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war silenced the isolationists, the rise of the Soviet Union after the war – and its depiction as a global threat – ensured that the party remained committed to a hawkish foreign policy over the next 45 years.

The end of the Cold War, however, created a new opening for those in the party – particularly budget-conscious, limited-government conservatives – who saw a big national security establishment with major overseas commitments as a threat to both individual liberties and the country’s fiscal health.

Thus, many Republican lawmakers went along with significant cuts in the defence budget that began during the George H.W. Bush administration. The party also split over a number of military actions in the 1990s, including Bush’s “humanitarian” intervention in Somalia, and Bill Clinton’s campaigns in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

Republican lawmakers also strongly opposed Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Haiti to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994.

Indeed, it was during this period that the neo-conservatives allied themselves with liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party to help prod an initially reluctant Clinton to intervene in the Balkans.

And in 1996, Kristol and Robert Kagan co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” that was directed precisely against what they described as a drift toward “neoisolationism” among Republicans.

The following year, they co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose charter was signed by, among others, eight top officials of the future George W. Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

The new group was not only to serve as an anchor for Republicans who supported its founders’ vision of a “benevolent (U.S.) hegemony” in world affairs based on overwhelming military power, but also as a lobby for ever higher defence budgets and “regime change” in Iraq, as well as a more confrontational relationship with China which it saw as the most likely next challenger to a U.S.-dominated global order.

Occupying key positions in the new Bush administration, these hawks took full advantage of 9/11 and reached their greatest influence when, exactly 10 years ago this week, the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq to “shock and awe” the rest of the world into compliance with the new order.

And while a tiny minority of Republicans, including notably, Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul, and Sen. Chuck Hagel – who was just confirmed as Obama’s defence secretary despite an all-out neo-conservative campaign to defeat him – voiced strong reservations about the war at the time, the overwhelming majority of the party enthusiastically embraced it, sealing the hawks’ own domination of the party.

Ten years later, however, that domination is increasingly under siege, not only because of the growing national consensus that the Iraq invasion was a major strategic debacle, but also because of the increasing popular concern – noted in a number of major polls over the past six months – that Washington simply can no longer afford the kind of imperial vision the hawks have promoted.

And the fact that younger voters – so-called millennials, aged 18-29 – are, according to the same polls, especially repelled by that vision can only strengthen those in the party calling for a more restrained foreign policy.

Still, true to their nature, the hawks will not give up without a fight, and their hold on the party remains strong, as demonstrated most recently by the fact that only four Republican senators, including Paul, voted to confirm Hagel, a Republican realist, in his new post.

“It is way too early for budget hawks to declare victory,” noted Chris Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute on foreignpolicy.com last week. “The neocons won’t go down without a fight, and they will have other chances in the months ahead to ratchet the Pentagon budget back up to unnecessary levels.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.