By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Feb 3 2011 (IPS)

The ongoing crisis in Egypt has resulted in a rare split among U.S. hawks, as some leading neo-conservatives have called for Washington to help oust President Hosni Mubarak, while others have joined the Israeli government in quietly supporting Egyptian leader against protesters calling for his ouster.

In part, the disagreement may indicate that the neo- conservative “democracy promotion” agenda has diverged from the Israeli government’s desire for a stable and largely co- operative ally on its border. Yet neo-conservatives themselves have been split over how to respond to Egypt, reflecting the movement’s ambivalent relationship to democracy promotion over the course of its history.

Since the anti-Mubarak protests began Jan. 25, reactions here have played out largely according to script. Foreign- policy liberals and leftists in the U.S. have been overwhelmingly supportive of the protesters, while mainstream media have been broadly sympathetic to them and hostile to Mubarak.

In Israel, by contrast, the possible end of Mubarak’s three- decade rule has been met with a sense of foreboding, if not outright dread. Many Israelis seem to feel that if Mubarak falls, “it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power,” as Israeli commentator Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in Wednesday’s New York Times.

“In a state of chaos, an organised Islamic group can take over a country,” noted Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Monday. “It has happened. It happened in Iran,” he noted in a refrain that has been much repeated by many U.S. neo-conservatives, as well as other leaders of the so-called “Israel lobby”, with which neo-conservatives are usually closely associated, over the past week.

The fear is that an Egyptian government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood might go so far as to renounce Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, a pillar of Israeli regional security strategy.

Although many Egypt experts discount the Brotherhood’s ability to dominate a successor regime, or seriously threaten Israel militarily even if it did so, they agree that any government emerging from truly free and fair elections would almost certainly be less cooperative with Israeli security policies – such as enforcing the blockade of the Gaza Strip – than Mubarak has been.

For that reason, the Netanyahu government has been quietly supporting Mubarak against the protesters and urging Washington against taking any action that would weaken him – or his new vice president, Gen. Omar Soleiman, who, as Mubarak’s intelligence chief, has been the president’s key interlocutor with Israel for years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pro-Israel groups in the U.S. have been similarly wary of the protesters and supportive of Mubarak. For instance, earlier this week Malcolm Hoenlein, the influential vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, denounced the leading Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei as a “stooge of Iran”.

More surprisingly, however, many U.S. neo-conservatives – who have typically been close allies of the Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party – have broken with Israel by calling for Mubarak to step down, and even gone so far as to scold Israelis for short-sightedness.

Elliott Abrams, the former top Middle East aide in the George W. Bush administration who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wrote on Tuesday that the Israeli reaction to the current crisis “shows a deep misunderstanding of the situation in Egypt.”

Others, such as Abrams’s CFR colleague Max Boot, suggested that the split refutes those critics of the neo- conservatives who have accused them of doing Israel’s bidding. “[M]ost Israelis fall firmly into the realpolitik camp,” he wrote on Tuesday, in stark contrast to neo- conservatives who claim they are chiefly motivated by their “idealistic” desire to spread democracy and liberal values.

But while some commentators heralded a stark disagreement between neo-conservative and Israeli goals, the actual reaction among neo-conservatives has been more mixed and ambiguous, and many have been more supportive of Mubarak than Abrams and Boot.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, for instance, described Mubarak’s regime as “fairly benign,” and has suggested that Washington’s “ultimate objective” must be to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. The clear implication was that another Mubarak-style strongman, such as Soleiman, would be preferable to a popularly elected Islamist government or even a secular one that included Islamists.

“The U.S. should make clear in an unambiguous way that a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt is a danger to American interests and could even lead to American intervention,” David Wurmser, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s senior Middle East adviser, told the “Forward”, the largest- circulation Jewish weekly, Thursday.

This ambivalence among neo-conservatives over Egypt may reflect a deeper ambivalence over democracy promotion. Both neo-conservatives and their critics often portray democracy promotion as the central tenet of the movement, but the historical record undercuts this portrayal.

The early tone of the movement regarding foreign policy was set by Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which argued for supporting “friendly” authoritarian governments against their left-wing enemies. Kirkpatrick’s vision helped guide neo-conservative foreign policy throughout the 1980s, when neo-conservatives – notably including Elliott Abrams – helped prop up or defend military dictatorships throughout Latin America, and even apartheid South Africa, as Cold War allies against the Soviet Union.

While the movement became more explicitly committed to democracy promotion in recent decades, its democratisation efforts have unsurprisingly been far more focused on hostile, rather than friendly, regimes – left-wing governments during the Cold War; more recently, governments that are seen as antagonistic to either the U.S. or Israel.

When elections have brought enemies rather than allies into power – as occurred in 2006 when Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections – neo-conservatives have been among the first to call for punitive actions.

Thus, when John Bolton, the hawkish former U.S. ambassador to the UN, cited Jeane Kirkpatrick in a Thursday interview with Politico to argue that the U.S. should support Mubarak, he could stake a claim to being as much the legitimate heir of neo-conservatism as the anti-Mubarak neo-conservatives themselves.

The uncertainty about what might follow Mubarak complicates matters further. Few of the neo-conservatives who have called for Mubarak’s resignation have discussed what sort of government they would consider an acceptable replacement.

The key question, still largely unanswered, is whether they would accept a democratically elected Egyptian government that included the Muslim Brotherhood, or whether they would respond to such a scenario by backing another Mubarak-style secular autocrat.

In the latter case, the current disagreement between U.S. neo-conservatives and Israeli hawks would likely be remembered as merely a brief spat in an otherwise harmonious relationship.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Dec 20 2010 (IPS)

Few in Washington want to talk much about Iraq these days.

Eager to avoid refighting the intense political battles over Iraq during the George W. Bush administration, both Democrats and Republicans seem to have tacitly agreed on a set of lowest-common-denominator premises: the initial decision to invade may have been questionable, but the 2007 surge worked, and Iraq is now on a slow-but-sure path to recovery.

Stability and prosperity will gradually improve, or maybe they won’t, but in any case Iraqis will have to sort out their problems for themselves.

Reidar Visser’s forcefully argued new book, “A Responsible End? The United States and the Iraqi Transition, 2005-2010” (Just World Books, 2010), takes aim at this complacent consensus. His pessimistic assessment is that the “U.S. fail[ed] to exploit a real window of hopefulness in Iraq between July 2008 and January 2010, thanks above all to the combined illiteracy of the Bush and Obama administrations” concerning Iraqi politics.

As a result, what halting political progress there has been since 2003 is now being reversed, as the possibility of a nationally-based and non-sectarian Iraqi politics slips away.

Most writing in English about Iraq tends to be directed almost exclusively through the prism of the security situation, dwelling on body counts and suicide bombings while tacking on perfunctory warnings about the necessity of vaguely-defined “political progress” at the end.

The strength of Visser’s book, which collects and expands writings published between 2005 and 2010 on his websites Historiae.org and Gulf Analysis, is precisely its in-depth exploration of the political situation and its sharply-drawn conclusions about what sort of political progress is necessary for Iraq.

Visser makes no attempt to conceal his sympathies. In his view any viable political solution must be relatively centralised rather than partitioned, broadly nationalist rather than narrowly sectarian, indigenously-rooted rather than dependent on Iran.

These views are themselves rooted in his somewhat revisionist take on Iraqi history. Most amateur observers of Iraqi politics – the present reviewer included – have been brought up on the familiar story that Iraq was an artificial creation stitched together by the British after World War I from three distinct and rather incompatible Ottoman provinces (one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Kurdish).

By this interpretation, sectarian conflict is virtually hard-wired into Iraq’s DNA, and the natural temptation is to look for a solution either in an authoritarian strongman or in some form of federalism or partition along ethnic and sectarian lines.

In what is perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter, Visser argues against this “artificiality” thesis. For one thing, he suggests, Iraq’s supposedly distinct constituent parts have always been far more heterogeneous, both ethnically and religiously, than is widely supposed. More than that, Iraqi nationalism has been a widespread and viable phenomenon dating back to Ottoman times.

To this day, therefore, outside observers consistently underestimate the level of allegiance felt by Iraqis to the Iraqi national state as such, and overstate the degree of popular support among the Iraqi people for various federalist and separatist alternatives.

Visser is excoriating in his criticism of various public figures, most notably U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and author and diplomat Peter Galbraith, who have urged forms of “soft partition” for Iraq. While fiercely critical of the initial 2003 invasion and the Bush administration’s handling of the war, Visser suggests that the Democrats, in their zeal to arrive at an alternative to the Bush approach, have been rather indiscriminate and insufficiently critical about the alternatives they have proposed.

More than simply resulting in faulty analysis, Visser suggests, misconceptions about Iraqi sectarianism have concrete implications for policy, leading the U.S. to devote inordinate attention to identifying representative leaders of each group and bringing them “inside the tent” – arrangements that often come at the expense of effective governance at the national level.

In line with his emphasis on the necessity of a centralised nationalist government, Visser is generally sceptical of what he terms the “centrifugal forces” pushing for greater decentralisation, such as the Kurdish parties and particularly the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly SCIRI) – the Shiite Islamist party with close ties to Iran.

One of the ironies of U.S. policy, Visser notes, is that although the U.S. has frequently agonised about Iranian influence in Iraq, for much of the war it stubbornly refused to look beyond ISCI to other potential Shiite partners who were more distant from Iran.

Foremost among these, he argues, were the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr – who, despite his frequent description in the Western media as an “Iranian proxy”, had little relationship with Tehran until U.S. hostility pushed him into the Iranian orbit. As a result of its myopic reliance on ISCI, the U.S. actually ended up empowering precisely the pro-Iranian Shiites whom it claimed to fear.

In any case, the brief window beginning in 2008 when a viable non-sectarian politics was possible has in Visser’s view likely passed. In the wake of the 2010 elections – which were marred by the disastrous de-Baathification campaign masterminded by onetime U.S. favourite Ahmed Chalabi – he concludes that “Iraq’s democratization could hardly be described as anything other than a failure.”

There is little to find fault with in Visser’s thorough and depressing book, although it would have been useful to see him examine his core analytic assumptions in more depth. He generally treats achieving a strong, centralised, nationalist Iraqi government as a self-evidently worthwhile goal, and it may very well be.

Yet this sort of government is, of course, perfectly compatible with a great deal of authoritarianism and brutality. In addition to arguing against sectarians and partitionists, therefore, Visser could usefully have dwelled a bit more on how a strong central state might safeguard against, or at least mitigate, such authoritarian tendencies.

On the whole, however, Visser’s account is well worth reading for anyone interested in the fate of the U.S. adventure in Iraq. Without understanding the failures of U.S. policy thus far, he shows, there can be no realistic hope for a better future.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 16 2010 (IPS)

A new report denouncing the threat to the U.S. from sharia, or Islamic law, marks the latest development in a summer filled with intensifying attacks on Islam in the United States.

Several Republican members of Congress endorsed the new Center for Security Policy (CSP) report, “Shariah: The Threat to America”, at a press conference in the U.S. Capitol Wednesday afternoon.

The report proposes the alarming conclusion that many apparently-lawful U.S. Muslims are waging a “stealth jihad” to impose sharia on the U.S. through peaceful means, and that virtually all major Muslim-American organisations are affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni fundamentalist organisation.

Critics charge that the current alarm over sharia is rooted in paranoia, bigotry, or simple ignorance of Islam. But this school of thought has made increasing inroads into mainstream conservatism in recent months, and Wednesday’s press conference illustrated the ways in which it has captured the ear of prominent Republican politicians.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who is the influential ranking member of the House intelligence committee, attended the press conference to show his support, as did Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who heads the House Tea Party Caucus, also sent a letter in support.

At the conference, CSP president Frank Gaffney warned of Muslim radicals “destroying Western civilisation from within”, aiming to impose sharia through force if possible but through “a more stealthy technique” if necessary.

“If we…convey the idea we are submitting to those who espouse sharia, we are signaling to them that it is now practicable to revert to the more forceful way of achieving their ends,” Gaffney said. He warned that the resultant attempt “to impose sharia upon us through force” could make the Sep. 11 attacks “look like a day at the beach”.

Suggesting that sharia is “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time”, the report offers far-reaching – and to critics, draconian – proposals for how to combat it.

These include banning Muslims who “espouse or support” sharia “from holding positions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States”. The report similarly recommends prosecuting those who espouse sharia for sedition, and banning immigration to the U.S. by those who adhere to sharia.

Few scholars of Islam would agree with the report’s conception of “sharia”. The word (typically translated as “the way”) is a broad term referring to Islamic religious precepts, and thus there are as many interpretations of sharia as there are interpretations of Islam.

Even moderate practitioners of Islam, like all religious believers, strive to adhere to their conception of what sharia requires. This does not, however, mean that they necessarily aim to impose sharia, much less a fundamentalist version of sharia, on others.

“Assuming all Muslims follow medieval Islamic rules today is like assuming that all Catholics follow 9th century canon law,” writes Sumbul Ali-Karamali, author of “The Muslim Next Door: the Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing”. “Being Muslim does not require a governmental imposition of something called ‘sharia law’, any more than being a Christian requires the implementation of ‘Biblical law’.”

Because adherence to some form of sharia is common to all practicing Muslims, critics of the anti-sharia movement charge, discriminating against those who “espouse or support” sharia amounts to discriminating against Muslims as such.

The CSP report, by contrast, insists that “there is ultimately but one shariah. It is totalitarian in character, incompatible with our Constitution and a threat to freedom here and around the world.”

When asked for the names of Muslim scholars or theologians whom the team had consulted in preparing the report, however, Gaffney did not provide any.

The debate over sharia has heated up in large part due to this summer’s controversy over the planned construction of the Park51 Islamic centre in lower Manhattan – what critics have dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque”.

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, is credited by many with giving increased mainstream visibility to the anti-sharia movement. In a Jul. 28 statement he issued against the Park51 centre, Gingrich linked its construction to the problem of “creeping sharia in the United States”, making him the first prominent politician to speak out against the perceived sharia threat.

While Gingrich was widely criticised for his statements, alarm over sharia seems to have gained significant popular traction on the right. A Newsweek poll from late August found that 31 percent of respondents, and 52 percent of Republicans, agreed with the statement that U.S. President “Barack Obama sympathises with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world”.

This allegation echoes charges made by Andrew C. McCarthy, a co-author of the CSP report, who argues in his new book “The Grand Jihad” that President Obama is a “neocommunist” whose administration is aiding Muslim radicals in their attempt to impose sharia in the U.S.

The CSP report was billed as a work of “Team ‘B’ II”. This was a reference to the 1970s “Team B”, a group of outside analysts that was given access to classified intelligence by the CIA and which argued that official U.S. intelligence estimates downplayed Soviet aggression and military capabilities.

The original Team B’s conclusions have been widely criticised for overstating Soviet capabilities and for making predictions that were subsequently shown to be unfounded.

The “Team ‘B’ II” that produced the sharia report was not given access to classified material, but Gaffney and other supporters portrayed the group as offering a similarly- needed corrective to an administration that was unwilling to reckon with the magnitude of threats to the U.S.

If his views draw charges of bigotry or Islamophobia, Gaffney suggested, then so be it.

“The traditional approach of the Muslim Brotherhood, when confronted by people like us or by facts like those we’re presenting, is to use those sorts of ad hominem attacks,” Gaffney said.

“Precisely because, as we make clear in the report, one of the great vulnerabilities of our society is our multiculturalism, our political correctness, our unwillingness to be seen to be giving offence to anyone.”

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 7 2010 (IPS)

Leaders of some three dozen mainstream U.S. religious denominations Tuesday condemned what many commentators have called a rising tide of Islamophobia touched off by the recent controversy over the construction of a Muslim community centre in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from the site of the twin World Trade Centre towers destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“As religious leaders in this great country, we have come together in our nation’s capitol to denounce categorically the derision, misinformation and outright bigotry being directed against America’s Muslim community,” the group declared in a statement.

“We are profoundly distressed and deeply saddened by the incidents of violence committed against Muslims in our community, and by the desecration of Islamic houses of worship,” the statement continued, adding, “We stand by the principle that to attack any religion in the United States is to do violence to the religious freedom of all Americans.”

The group, which included national leaders of the Muslim and Jewish communities, as well as from the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches, singled out the threat by one Florida church to publicly burn copies of the Qu’ran to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The planned burning, which the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen.David Petraeus, warned Monday could endanger the lives of U.S. troops there and in Iraq, “is a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on September 11,” the inter-religious group said.

Also on Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a leading Jewish civil rights organisation, announced the formation of a new Interfaith Coalition on Mosques to combat a wave of anti-Muslim incidents across the country.

The move by the ADL, which itself attracted intense controversy in August for opposing the Islamic centre’s proposed construction in New York, was another sign of the growing concern among communal leaders that the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment triggered by the rancorous debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque”, as its critics dubbed it, has reached dangerous heights.

Most mainstream critics of the project, including the ADL, did not deny the legal right of Muslims to build mosques where they choose. They argued instead that the location of the centre so close to the “sacred ground” of the World Trade Centre site showed insensitivity.

Defenders of the project noted that the proposed location was in a commercial area that already featured restaurants, bars, and strip clubs – not to mention other mosques just a few blocks away.

The controversy, however, soon touched off a broader wave of incidents targeting Muslims and mosques.

In the most notorious case, a New York City cabdriver was stabbed several times late last month by a passenger who asked whether asked him whether he was Muslim. Days later, the construction site of a mosque in Tennessee was the target of what federal investigators have described as an arson attempt.

Vandals also struck against mosques and Muslim congregations in California and New York State, while plans to build new mosques or expand existing ones have reportedly been put on hold in a number of communities across the country.

“Having spoken to many families across the country over the last few weeks, I have heard many Muslim Americans say they have never felt this anxious or this insecure in America since directly after Sep. 11,” Ingrid Mattson, head of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), told reporters at the press conference where the inter-religious group released its statement.

The Saturday’s 9/11 anniversary is expected to spur more controversy.

In addition to the planned Qu’ran burning, a major rally in Lower Manhattan against the Proposed Islamic centre is also planned for Sep. 11, led by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, two bloggers who have been leading critics of the project.

Both have until recently been widely considered “fringe” figures, although their work has been praised or supported by a number of prominent far-right or neo-conservative personalities and groups, such as the Center for Security Policy (CSP), which itself is funded by major U.S. defence contractors and several wealthy Jewish donors who also have supported radical Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank; former U.N. Amb. John Bolton of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Middle East Forum; and the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

The rally, however, will also feature Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician who has been denounced by the ADL and other groups for Islamophobia, and members of the English Defense League, a British far-right group. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is believed to be preparing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 and who delivered an incendiary speech against the proposed Islamic centre at AEI, originally agreed to participate in the rally but subsequently withdrew.

A growing number of foreign policy analysts and officials have warned that the escalation in anti-Muslim acts and rhetoric is rebounding against U.S. national security interests by fueling perceptions in the Islamic world that the United States is anti-Islam.

Speaking of the planned Qu’ran burning, Petraeus, widely considered Washington’s most popular military leader of the past generation, warned in an email to reporters that “Images of the burning of a Qu’ran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence.” He told the Wall Street Journal it could “endanger (our) troops and …the overall effort” – a message that was echoed Tuesday by both the White House and the State Department.

Some of the members of the inter-religious group made similar statements Tuesday. “If (Petraeus) is correct, then we’re really in trouble,” said Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. “The story of bigotry and intolerance will be taken by others as a statement of America,” he noted.

Expressions of hatred for Muslims “do real damage to America around the globe,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, the executive director for Reform Judaism. “It is not what our religions are about.”

“You may have heard some of the loud voices of those who hate Muslims,” Mattson said, addressing herself directly to fellow-Muslims during the press conference. “But they don’t represent America. Don’t use these incidents to justify any kind of hatred against America or American Christians and Jews,” she said.

Richard Cizik, a former head of the National Association of Evangelicals and currently president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, was particularly harsh toward those “mainly conservative Christians …who are responding with open bigotry and hatred” toward fellow citizens because of their faith. Not only are they rejecting the Constitution’s first amendment protecting freedom of religion, but they “bring dishonour to the name of Jesus Christ”, he said.

He also noted that the “principles that protect Muslims today will protect Christians and Jews tomorrow.”

Many religious leaders have noted similarities between the current attacks on Islam and earlier attacks on U.S. religious minorities, such as Jews and Catholics, especially during periods of economic distress.

R. Scott Appleby and John T. McGreevy, two prominent historians of Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, recently warned in the New York Review of Books of “the revival of a strain of nativism” and “a debased effort to whip up partisan fervor” that echoes traditional attacks on U.S. Catholics.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
CHICAGO, Jun 22 2010 (IPS)

A year and a half into the presidency of Barack Obama, any hopes that he would usher in a dramatic rethinking of U.S. foreign policy have been more or less definitively dashed.

Notwithstanding the wild-eyed warnings of right-wing hawks who see Obama as “the first post-American president”, with a covert agenda that is part Saul Alinsky and part Frantz Fanon, the president has so far proven himself to have little inclination to break with the past when it comes to foreign policy.

If the George W. Bush administration introduced the U.S. public to names like Guantanamo, Fallujah, and Blackwater, it is in the Obama administration that counterparts like Bagram, Waziristan and Predator have become ubiquitous.

To be sure, this does not mean, as some disillusioned Obama supporters have suggested, that Obama is “no different” from Bush – particularly if it is the assertive and unchastened Bush of the first term that they have in mind – or from the likely alternatives.

While Obama’s diplomacy with Iran, for instance, has been largely uninspired – witness the great amount of energy devoted to passing sanctions that are simultaneously provocative and toothless – his administration has by all indications been working actively to avoid an outright war. This is more than one could say about the likely course under a President McCain or Palin.

Similarly, Obama has thus far caved in his confrontations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he has at the very least demonstrated an awareness that Bush-style blank-cheque support for Israel is untenable – as opposed to his Republican opponents, many of whom seem to fully endorse the Greater Israel ideology of the Israeli settler movement.

But if Obama has refrained from the most egregious excesses of his predecessor, he has nonetheless remained solidly within the mainstream of what Andrew Bacevich has termed the U.S. “ideology of national security” that has reigned since World War II. Whether this sort of caution has been the result of heartfelt belief or political constraints is largely beside the point.

The real question, however, is: should anyone be surprised? Was there any cause to believe that an Obama presidency would signal a major shift in U.S. foreign policy, or did Obama’s progressive supporters simply pin hopes upon the candidate that were unjustified by the evidence?

On some issues, like detainee policy, President Obama has certainly backpedaled on Candidate Obama’s promises, but on many others – most notably the escalation of the war in Afghanistan – he has simply followed through on his stated intentions.

In “The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s” (Haymarket Books, 2010), Tom Engelhardt provides a clear- eyed examination of U.S. foreign policy in the Bush and Obama years, and details unsparingly how Obama has inherited – and in many cases exacerbated – the ills of the Bush era.

While Engelhardt does not address explicitly the question of whether things had to be this way, he refuses throughout to fall into the satisfying simplifications of personalised analysis – to contrast Obama the Crusader riding into Washington to change everything with Obama the Cynic sacrificing principle for political expediency.

In doing so, he forces the reader to confront the likelihood that the forces that have made U.S. foreign policy what it is run far deeper than mere personalities, and conversely that changing the U.S.’s stance in the world will require far more than simply voting the “good guys” into power.

Engelhardt is best known as the man behind TomDispatch.com, the site that since the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks has hosted some of the most trenchant criticism of U.S. foreign policy by analysts ranging from Bacevich on the right to Noam Chomsky on the left. His book collects some of his own essays written for TomDispatch from 2004 to 2010.

One striking feature of the book is how seamlessly it flows, despite the fact that some of its contents were written in the first Bush term while others were written only a few months ago. This, in itself, is one indication of how little has changed.

Engelhardt’s earlier book, “The End of Victory Culture”, was a perceptive analysis of the ways that U.S. pop culture shaped the triumphalist narrative of the Cold War; here, too, he is especially good at demonstrating the ways that culture and the mass media influence what might ordinarily be considered the realms of high politics.

The first chapter examines how the Sep. 11 attacks have shaped the political landscape for the past decade in ways both obvious and subtle, but also the ways in which the attacks themselves found particular resonance with a population that had long been psychologically preparing for the apocalypse in film.

How different, Engelhardt asks, would the course of history have been if neither World Trade Centre tower had fallen in the attacks? Without the cinematic horror of the towers falling, perhaps politicians would have felt less need to respond with a full-blown “global war on terror”.

Or perhaps the public thirst for revenge would have been slaked with the toppling of the Taliban, and the U.S. would not have proceeded to Iraq out of a perceived need to “go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something” in response (as Thomas Friedman put it).

Later chapters examine the progressive “garrisoning” of the earth as the archipelago of U.S. bases spreads across the globe, the ways that the antiseptic and allegedly “surgical” nature of air power has moved the carnage of war out of the sight and minds of the U.S. public, and the mangling of media language used to disguise the nature of the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The observation that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter is by now a familiar one, but Engelhardt marshals an impressive amount of evidence to reveal just how far the twisting of language has gone.

The pieces on air power and the drone war are particularly good. One extended analysis of a single August 2008 incident in Azizabad, Afghanistan illustrates how a compliant media has conspired with the military to discredit and downplay reports of civilian casualties.

(After initially claiming that 30 “Taliban militants” had been killed in the incident after attacking coalition forces, the military was ultimately forced – following weeks of stonewalling and gradual backpedaling – to give credence to reports that the real death toll consisted of 90 civilians, including 60 children.)

And for all the talk of the “lessons learned” from Vietnam, Engelhardt expertly details how many of the features of the U.S.’s current wars – from the debates over body counts to the faddish embrace of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine as universal panacea – are throwbacks to the Vietnam era.

“The American Way of War” is, all in all, a very depressing read. But for that very reason, it is an important book for anyone hoping to understand how the U.S. arrived at its current predicament during the Bush years, and how it remains in this predicament despite Obama’s best efforts – or perhaps because of them.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 11 2009 (IPS)

As nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West continue to move slowly, U.S. President Barack Obama is coming under growing pressure from what appears to be a concerted lobbying and media campaign urging him to act more aggressively to stop Iran’s nuclear programme.

Obama has given Tehran an end-of-September deadline to respond substantively to his offer of diplomatic engagement. But already hawks in the U.S. – backed by hardline pro-Israel organisations – have pressed him to quickly impose “crippling” economic sanctions against Tehran, and some are arguing that he should make preparations for a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The pressure campaign kicked off in earnest this week. On Thursday, hundreds of leaders and activists from the U.S. Jewish community descended on Washington to lobby for harsher sanctions, while widely-publicised media reports suggested that Iran is already nearing the verge of a nuclear capability.

Leaders from Jewish groups came for a national “Advocacy Day on Iran”, during which they met with key Congressional figures.

Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, suggested that the clock “has almost run out” on Iran’s nuclear programme, and indicated that he would move ahead next month with a bill imposing sanctions on Iran’s refined petroleum imports “absent some compelling evidence why I should do otherwise”.

The bill, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), has for months been the top lobbying priority of hawkish pro-Israel lobbying groups led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). To their frustration, Berman has held up consideration of the bill for most of the past year

Not all U.S. Jewish groups are lining up behind the legislation, however.

Americans for Peace Now (APN), for instance, issued a statement arguing that “arbitrary deadlines are a mistake” and that “pursuing sanctions that target the Iranian people, rather than their leaders, is a morally and strategically perilous path that the Obama Administration must reject”.

M.J. Rosenberg, a foreign policy analyst at Media Matters Action Network, suggested on the website TPMCafe that the advocacy day “marks the start of the fall push on Iran”.

The advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has launched an intensive television advertising campaign this month claiming that the U.S. “must isolate Iran economically to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon”.

UANI’s two co-founders are now both high-ranking officials in the Obama administration – Dennis Ross, currently overseeing Iran policy at the National Security Council (NSC), and Richard Holbrooke, now the State Department special representative in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Also on Thursday, the New York Times published a front-page story claiming that U.S. intelligence agencies believe “that Iran has created enough nuclear fuel to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon”, although the article did not provide an estimate of when Iran could have a nuclear capability.

The same day, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by former Senators Charles Robb and Daniel Coats and retired four-star Air Force General Chuck Wald. Claiming that Iran “will be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 2010”, the authors urged Obama “to begin preparations for the use of military options” against Iran.

However, official U.S. intelligence estimates provide a far slower timeline. In February, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair told Congress that Iran would be unable to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU) until at least 2013, and stated that there is “no evidence” that Iran had even made a decision to produce HEU.

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is intended solely for civilian purposes. In 2007, the U.S. intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate suggesting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

The campaign comes on the eve of a series of key international meetings in late September, including the annual opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh.

Iran and its nuclear programme are expected to be a major topic for world leaders who will attend these meetings, and hawks in Washington and Jerusalem hope that Obama will use them to push for the imposition of far-reaching economic sanctions by the U.N. Security Council as soon as possible.

While Obama faces pressure to move quickly to sanctions, the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still struggling at home to overcome challenges to its legitimacy resulting from the disputed presidential election in June. Many analysts suggest that Iran’s government is currently in no position to respond coherently to U.S. engagement.

This week, Ahmadinejad’s government finally issued a formal reply to proposals by the P5+1 powers – the U.S., China, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany – for talks on its nuclear programme and related issues.

But the five-page-reply has been deemed too vague by Washington, with State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley dismissing it Thursday as “not really responsive” to U.S. concerns.

Other analysts suggested that the Iranian proposal was more promising than initial media reports would indicate.

“Iran’s uncompromising stance and its cursory references to nuclear matters are most likely an opening bid, and not a red line,” wrote National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi in the Huffington Post.

He suggests that the proposal’s language “may offer an opening to push strongly for transparency and acceptance of intrusive inspections and verification mechanisms”.

The Obama administration, however, continues to hold out hope for the engagement strategy.

“We’ll be looking to see how ready Iran is to actually engage, and we will be testing that willingness to engage in the next few weeks,” Crowley said.

At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov all but ruled out his country’s cooperation with new sanctions against Tehran at the Security Council, and called instead for renewed negotiations based on Iran’s reply.

Lavrov’s comments came shortly after a secret and still-mysterious visit to Russia by Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The latest developments – along with growing amount of attention being paid to U.S. policy in Afghanistan, at the expense of Iran – have only added to the frustration of Iran hawks in Washington. They believe increasingly that economic sanctions alone, even if they are imposed multilaterally, are unlikely to be enough to persuade Tehran to halt what they see as its drive to obtain a nuclear weapon.

For this reason, many suggest that the U.S. should either make preparations to attack Iran militarily itself, or step aside and allow Israel to do so.

“No one should believe that tighter sanctions will, in the foreseeable future, have any impact on Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, a noted hardliner, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month. “Adopting tougher economic sanctions is simply another detour away from hard decisions on whether to accept a nuclear Iran or support using force to prevent it.”

Earlier that month, the Journal featured an article by Gen. Wald – who was one of the co-authors of Thursday’s op-ed urging preparations for a military strike – entitled “Of Course There’s a Military Option on Iran”.

But critics suggest that the constant threats of military action against Tehran will only make the regime’s leadership more intransigent on the nuclear issue.

“Pointing a gun at their heads merely reinforces their desire for a reliable deterrent, and probably strengthens the hand of any Iranian officials who think they ought to get a bomb as soon as possible,” wrote Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, on the website of Foreign Policy magazine.

Excerpt:

By Eli Clifton and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2009 (IPS)

The United States Congress returns to work Tuesday after a turbulent summer recess that has raised doubts over President Barack Obama’s ability to face down domestic opposition from Republicans and enforce party cohesion on issues ranging from healthcare reform to troop commitments in the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan.

Expectations are high for Obama’s address to a joint session of the House and Senate on Wednesday night, when Democrats hope he will push back against attacks from Republicans and moderate Democrats and provide a more cohesive argument for the necessity of health reform and how he intends to deliver it.

Obama has spent the better part of the summer trying to explain his plan for healthcare reform in the face of opposition which claims that the plan smacks of government intervention into the private lives of citizens.

The noisy protests at town hall meetings – and the much-publicised (if unfounded) allegations by prominent Republicans that the healthcare plan would create “death panels” to promote euthanasia – came to dominate media coverage of the healthcare debate.

The White House has been seemingly blindsided by opposition from both Democrats in the Senate – some of whom have come out against a ‘public option’ in healthcare reform and others who have started to voice increasing concern about war in Afghanistan – and Republicans who have opposed almost every initiative Obama has put forward except for a stepped-up war effort in Afghanistan.

Indeed, the administration seemed to be under attack for every policy proposal it made this summer. The trend reached a height last week, when the administration was forced to spend a great deal of time and energy defending Obama’s superficially uncontroversial decision to deliver a televised address to schoolchildren on their first day back at school.

To many political analysts, the ”schoolchildren address” controversy showed both the willingness of the administration’s opponents to offer opposition to even the most innocuous actions taken by Obama as well as the administration’s seeming inability to shrug off attacks or hit back against critics.

A number of Democrats have expressed frustration about the White House’s inability or unwillingness to actively promote its domestic and foreign policy agenda in the face of opposition. Many suggest that the administration has allowed centrist Democrats in Congress (the so-called “Blue Dogs”) to wield too much power in shaping the president’s agenda.

”We all lose as a party if we allow the moderates and the Blue Dogs to continue,” said Obama’s former deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, at a gathering in San Diego.

“The Republicans are loving it, and they should. When are we going to start standing up to these people? Tell [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid] to start leading and holding the 52 Blue Dogs accountable,” he said.

While the health care debate has dominated the airwaves this summer, the summer has also been rocky for the administration in terms of foreign policy.

Public support for the war in Afghanistan – widely seen as Obama’s most important foreign policy initiative – has been slipping dramatically.

A recent McClatchy poll found that 54 percent of U.S. citizens believe the U.S. is not winning in Afghanistan and 56 percent oppose sending more combat troops.

While the Pentagon is expected to request as many as 45,000 additional U.S. troops to join the 68,000 already committed to Afghanistan, Democratic support for a larger troop commitment is lukewarm, and even some prominent conservatives – such as Washington Post columnist George Will – have turned against the war.

In a sign of the continued turmoil within Afghanistan, the Afghan electoral commission announced Tuesday that it had found “clear and convincing evidence” of fraud in last month’s presidential elections and demanded a recount – a further blow to the unpopular U.S.-backed incumbent, President Hamid Karzai.

The most ardent support for the war in Afghanistan comes from Republican and neo-conservative circles. On Monday, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – a neo-conservative group widely seen as the successor to the defunct Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which played a pivotal role in pushing for war in Iraq – issued a statement urging Obama to “fully resource” the war in Afghanistan.

In an illustration of the topsy-turvy state of the Afghanistan debate, one notable signatory was former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin – who attracted controversy for propagating the “death panels” myth about Obama’s healthcare plan.

Other foreign policy challenges loom as well – most notably, a likely showdown this month on Capitol Hill over Iran.

In the wake of public outcry over Iran’s disputed Jun. 12 presidential elections and its subsequent repression of demonstrators, the Obama administration gave Tehran a September deadline to respond to diplomatic outreach concerning its nuclear programme, which critics allege is intended for military purposes.

On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited members of the so-called “P5+1” group – comprising the U.S., Britain, China, Russia, France, and Germany – to Tehran for talks, but stated that discussion on the nuclear issue is “finished”, the Washington Post reported.

Many experts argue that the continued political disarray within Iran following the election crisis makes it virtually impossible for Tehran to respond to engagement in the near future, and that the U.S. should stand back for the moment to let the Iranian political situation play out.

However, hawks within Congress are pushing the administration to institute harsher sanctions against Tehran. Hardline and influential “Israel lobby” organisations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations are preparing a major lobbying push this month in support of sanctions legislation, according to the Forward.

On another signature foreign policy item, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the administration has also run into obstacles.

The right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted U.S. demands to cease settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the administration intended to pave the way for final-status negotiations regarding a two-state solution. The latest flare-up came last week, when the administration criticised Netanyahu’s approval of the construction of hundreds of new West Bank housing units.

While the Obama administration reportedly plans to unveil plans for new peace negotiations this fall, some analysts fear that its peace plans have gotten bogged down in what journalist Tony Karon labeled “roadmapolis” – a reference to the George W. Bush administration’s two failed Middle East peace initiatives, the 2002 “road map for peace” and the 2007 Annapolis conference.

While it remains far too early to write the administration’s political obituary, and much of the media commentary proclaiming Obama a failure has come from ideological opponents eager to make this image into a reality, it is becoming clear that the White House must take a new tack if it is going to keep its most high-profile domestic and international goals alive.

Wednesday’s address to Congress on health care will be a start, as the president attempts to regain possession of a health care debate that slipped out of his control over the course of the summer.

Only time will tell whether this fall will be remembered as a time when the administration recovered its footing – as Obama did last fall during the 2008 presidential campaign – or as a period of continued decline in its political fortunes.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 4 2009 (IPS)

The White House reprimanded the Israeli government Friday over reports that Israel plans to build hundreds of new housing units in West Bank settlements, the latest in a series of showdowns between Washington and Jerusalem over settlement construction.

The new construction plans represent a direct challenge to the Barack Obama administration’s Middle East peace plans, which have thus far been based around demands for a full settlement freeze in return for normalisation gestures from Arab countries.

Citing senior Israeli sources, multiple media reports claimed Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu planned to approve the new units prior to implementing a temporary freeze of West Bank settlements

The hundreds of new units would be in addition to some 2,500 units that are already under construction, and Netanyahu has also refused to include Jerusalem in any settlement freeze.

On Friday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs issued a statement expressing “regret” about the reports of new construction, calling it “inconsistent with Israel’s commitment under the [2002] Roadmap [For Peace]”.

“As the president has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop,” Gibbs said.

The European Union (EU) also denounced the new construction, while Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called it “not acceptable”.

Abbas has stated that a settlement freeze is a prerequisite for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Dovish pro-Israel organisations in the U.S. praised the Obama administration for its statement.

J Street, the new pro-Israel lobby, stated that it is “deeply dismayed” by the new construction plans, noting that “continued settlement growth will make it impossible to achieve a negotiated, peaceful two-state solution to the conflict, which is critical to Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic homeland”.

“We commend the White House for setting the record straight,” said Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now (APN). “We also reiterate that a settlement freeze is not just in the interest of the United States. First and foremost, it is in the national security interest of Israel”.

Nir also noted that the proposed construction would render any temporary settlement freeze merely “virtual”.

Israeli Labour MP Ophir Pines-Paz criticised the construction as unnecessary and damaging, Ha’aretz reported.

The Obama administration and its top Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, have pressed Netanyahu for a full settlement freeze in accordance with the 2002 Roadmap.

While Netanyahu may hope to alleviate this pressure by agreeing to a temporary freeze – which reports suggest will likely last for less than a year – the decision to approve the new units is sure to inflame tensions with Washington.

But this may be Netanyahu’s intention. Acquiescing to the U.S. on settlements would be likely to splinter his right-wing coalition, which relies heavily on pro-settler parties.

Instead, Netanyahu has sought to bolster his once-shaky political position within Israel by publicly standing up to the U.S. on settlements.

The latest spat is far from the first public clash over the settlements issue in recent months.

In July, Netanyahu announced that a planned building project in East Jerusalem would proceed despite U.S. protests, and defiantly proclaimed that Israeli sovereignty over a “united Jerusalem…cannot be challenged”.

Since all major plans for a two-state solution involve Palestinian control of East Jerusalem as a capital city, Netanyahu’s statement posed a direct challenge to the Obama administration’s policy – and undercut his much-publicised acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state in June.

But settlement construction in Jerusalem enjoys more support both in Israel and among the U.S. Jewish community than construction in the West Bank, leading Netanyahu to use Jerusalem as a rallying point in the dispute with Washington.

Some hardline pro-Israel groups did in fact take Netanyahu’s side in the Jerusalem dispute. The Conference of Presidents of Major Americans Jewish Organisations issued a statement calling the administration’s objections to the proposed building project in East Jerusalem “disturbing”.

Soon thereafter, Israel evicted Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, prompting the U.S. State Department to complain to Israeli ambassador Michael Oren about what it called “provocative” and “unacceptable” actions.

Since Mitchell began pushing for a full settlement freeze in January, the Israeli government has argued that any freeze must make an exemption for “natural growth” in the settlements.

But critics note that “natural growth” has in recent years served as a loophole to legitimise all settlement growth, and the Obama administration has accordingly refused to make a natural growth exception.

Netanyahu’s allies in Israel and the U.S also pointed to agreements that were allegedly brokered between the governments of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon by Bush’s top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams. In particular, they highlight a 2004 letter from Bush to Sharon recognising Israel’s right to many large settlement blocs that they suggest will remain under Israeli control under any final-status agreement.

Abrams himself has argued that Obama should recognise these agreements and desist in his calls for a full settlement freeze throughout the occupied territories.

However, Sharon’s former chief of staff Dov Weissglas told The Washington Times in July that no such agreement was ever finalised because the U.S. and Israel never agreed on where construction would be permitted.

As Washington considers how to deal with the reported new settlement construction, many analysts express concern that the Obama administration has become mired in the settlements dispute, and the related goal of Arab normalisation measures, at the expense of the broader peace process.

Some urge Obama to move quickly to negotiations to solidify a final-status agreement that would establish borders the Israeli and Palestinian states, thereby establishing exactly where Israel can and cannot build.

The Obama administration appears to be thinking along similar lines. Reports suggest that the administration is planning to make an announcement regarding new Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations later this month.

The continued and rancorous dispute over settlements, however, has already left many observers increasingly pessimistic about the negotiations’ prospects for success.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 3 2009 (IPS)

Frustrated by the continued intransigence of the Honduran regime that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, the U.S. State Department followed through Wednesday on threats to cut off aid to Honduras.

"Restoration of the terminated assistance will be predicated upon a return to democratic, constitutional governance in Honduras," the State Department said in a statement.

Calling Zelaya's removal a "coup d'etat", the U.S. also stated that it would not recognise the results of the scheduled November presidential elections in Honduras under the current circumstances.

The State Department did not elaborate on the aid cutoff, and there were conflicting reports as to exactly how much aid was being terminated.

A U.S. official told Reuters that the total cuts were over 30 million dollars, while the New York Times put the total at around 22 million dollars. The board of the Millennium Challenge Fund, which currently provides about 135 million dollars to Honduras, will discuss whether to cut off its aid next week, the Times reported.

After weeks of hesitation, the State Department made the decision to cut aid after the de facto government rejected the San Jose Accord, an agreement moderated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias that would return Zelaya to power until the November elections.

"The Secretary of State has made the decision, consistent with U.S. legislation, recognizing the need for strong measures in light of the continued resistance to the adoption of the San Jose Accord by the de facto regime and continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule to Honduras," the State Department said.

Also on Wednesday, Zelaya met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington. A day earlier, he called on U.S. President Barack Obama to take a harder line on the de facto government of Honduras, which is currently led by interim President Roberto Micheletti.

The State Department called the removal of Zelaya a "coup d'etat", which would appear to compel the withholding of Millennium Challenge funds.

The U.S. also noted that is in the process of revoking the visas of individual members and supporters of the de facto regime.

The decision to get tougher with the de facto government drew praise from many Latin American analysts.

"It's critically important that the U.S. government has stated that they won't recognise the November elections," said Vicki Gass of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). "But I think it would've been stronger if they had declared the coup illegal, demonstrating to the de facto regime that they're serious about a return to constitutional order."

But right-wing politicians and commentators in the U.S. who have supported Zelaya's removal were quick to denounce the decision.

"I believe this decision will significantly undermine U.S. national security interests and foreign policy priorities in Honduras and the region as a whole," said U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican.

Ros-Lehtinen accused the Obama administration of "punish[ing] those in Honduras struggling to preserve the rule of law, fundamental liberties, and democratic values".

On Jun. 28, the military seized Zelaya at his home and forced him onto a plane to Costa Rica.

The de facto government and its supporters in the U.S. argue that Zelaya's removal was legal and a defence of democracy in Honduras.

They point to Zelaya's attempts to conduct a referendum to determine whether there was support to modify the constitution and end presidential term limits.

Zelaya's opponents argue that this amounted to an illegal power grab, and highlight his friendship with left-wing Latin American leaders such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Zelaya dismisses these accusations, saying that the "poll was non-binding, and it was a democratic exercise," and that his opponents are "seeking to legalise the coup."

The State Department said Wednesday that it "recognises the complicated nature" of the events leading to Zelaya's removal, but nonetheless maintains that it constituted a coup.

In the weeks following Zelaya's removal, the de facto government took steps to quiet international criticism by agreeing to take part in negotiations mediated by Arias.

In July, Robert Micheletti, the interim president under the de facto government, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to argue that "the way forward is to work" with Arias.

But after it became clear that Arias would insist on Zelaya's return to power, Micheletti and his government refused to abide by the results of the San Jose Accord.

By holding out until the schedule Nov. 29 elections, the de facto government hoped to make Zelaya's return a moot point.

In response, the OAS – along with a number of Latin American governments – refused to recognise the results of the November elections, and on Wednesday the U.S. joined them.

The elections "must be undertaken in a free, fair and transparent manner… must also be free of taint and open to all Hondurans to exercise their democratic franchise," the State Department said.

While stating that it could not currently recognise the election results, the U.S. noted that "a positive conclusion of the Arias process would provide a sound basis for legitimate elections to proceed".

Many human rights observers have become increasingly critical of the actions taken by the government to quiet dissent within Honduras.

Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have reported violence against demonstrators opposed to the coup as well as intimidation of the media. Zelaya himself claims that since June, 1,500 people have been detained for political reasons, and that his supporters have been beaten, raped, and murdered.

Analysts hope that a resolution of the crisis that began Jun. 28 can allow Honduras to deal with deeper-seated problems.

"People want a return to constitutional order, but they also want issues of poverty, impunity, inequality and corruption to be addressed," WOLA's Gass told IPS. "They don't feel the current system does this, and there are larger long-term issues that need to be addressed."

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Sep 1 2009 (IPS)

A prominent right-wing political pundit has called for the U.S. to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, the latest sign of a growing disenchantment with the war in the U.S.

Hawkish commentators have already assailed Washington Post columnist George F. Will for his Tuesday column, entitled “Time for the U.S. to Get Out of Afghanistan”.

While a growing number of analysts have recently questioned the course of the war in Afghanistan, Will’s column is especially notable in that it comes from a pillar of the Washington right-wing media establishment – making his call for a withdrawal difficult to dismiss as a product of liberal anti-war sentiment.

Support for the war among the U.S. public at large has also plummeted in recent months, with 51 percent of respondents believing the war is not worth fighting, according to an August Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Will’s call for a U.S. pullout comes as the Barack Obama administration appears to be leaning toward a further escalation of the war effort.

On Monday, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, submitted a classified assessment of the war calling for a new strategy on the ground, according to media reports. McChrystal’s report is widely seen as setting the stage for a further troop increase to supplement the 68,000 U.S. forces already in Afghanistan.

Will, on the other hand, called for the U.S. to “rapidly revers[e] the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan” by substantially reducing force levels.

In place of an intensive nation-building effort that he labeled “impossible”, Will proposed an alternate strategy: “America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units” to attack al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

He quoted estimates that the Afghan government controls only a third of its country’s territory, and mocked efforts to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium trade as “Operation Sisyphus”, after the figure from Greek mythology eternally condemned to a futile effort to push a boulder up a hill.

Predictably, Will’s call for withdrawal provoked immediate and fierce attacks from neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks.

“It is a column that could have been written in Japanese aboard the USS Missouri,” wrote former George W. Bush administration official Peter Wehner on the website of Commentary magazine – a reference to the Japanese surrender that ended World War II.

Wehner called Will a “defeatist” who “sound[s] more like Michael Moore than Henry Kissinger”.

William Kristol, the neo-conservative editor of the Weekly Standard, accused Will of “urging retreat, and accepting defeat”.

And Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who is a leading proponent of a “surge” of U.S. troops into Afghanistan, called Will’s column “reprehensible”.

To be sure, Will’s is far from the only prominent voice questioning the wisdom of an escalated and open-ended nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

On Friday, for instance, U.S. senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called on Obama to set a timeline for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But hawks have sought to portray all war sceptics as being, like Feingold, liberal and dovish. Opposition to the war, its supporters argue, is almost exclusively a left-wing phenomenon that is opposed by both the centre and the right.

“Conservatives support a president they generally distrust because they think it important the country win the war in Afghanistan,” Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard in August. “As for today’s liberals: They just don’t want America to win wars, do they? They’re ready, willing, and able to see America lose in Afghanistan.”

Will’s turn against the war, coming on the heels of the recent poll results showing that a majority of U.S. citizens oppose it, is a reminder that discontent over Afghanistan is not restricted to the left.

In fact, Will’s narrower conception of the U.S. national interest and scepticism about ambitious nation-building efforts has traditionally been more prevalent on the right than the left, at least until the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks.

Then-presidential candidate George W. Bush famously attacked opponent Al Gore in the 2000 presidential debates for “using our troops as nation-builders”.

In the wake of the Sep. 11 attacks, these strands of conservative foreign policy doctrine were marginalised, as neo-conservatism – an unabashedly interventionist tendency calling for the U.S. to exercise “benevolent global hegemony” – became ascendant on the right.

But the Iraq war – which the Bush administration ultimately came to justify as an exercise in democracy promotion – undoubtedly did much to sour both the public and the foreign policy establishment on armed nation-building efforts.

Will, who initially supported the Iraq war, called it “perhaps the worst foreign policy debacle in the nation’s history”.

And while there are few signs that neo-conservatism is close to being unseated as the dominant foreign policy doctrine within the Republican Party, an increasing number of conservatives have come forward to question the war in Afghanistan.

Harvard University professor Rory Stewart, who recently announced plans to run for Parliament in the U.K. on the Conservative Party ticket, published a widely-discussed July article in the London Review of Books that expressed deep skepticism about the entire war effort and called nation-building efforts in Afghanistan “impossible”.

Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, who served in the administrations of both George H.W. and George W. Bush, recently suggested in the New York Times that Afghanistan is a “war of choice” rather than a war of necessity.

Haass suggested that the Obama administration consider alternate policies up to and including full withdrawal from Afghanistan, although he stopped short of endorsing them outright.

Obama now faces a series of difficult decisions – faced on the one hand by hawks calling for more troops and more resources, and on the other hand by declining support for the war among the public at large.

The Aug. 20 Afghan presidential elections, which were marred by widespread allegations of fraud, have done nothing to increase public confidence.

Incumbent President Hamid Karzai has led in the preliminary vote counts released so far, although not by enough to avoid a runoff with challenger Abdullah Abdullah.

Still, few in Washington have high expectations for either candidate’s ability to govern or to serve as an effective partner in the fight against the Taliban.

Top U.S. officials have called on skeptics to give McChrystal 12 to 18 months to implement his new strategy and demonstrate progress.

But as the controversy over Will’s column indicates, there appears to be little patience in the U.S. for a costly and extended war effort. In Washington, the political clock is ticking.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Aug 26 2009 (IPS)

Washington continues to wait on results from last week's elections in Afghanistan, but few analysts here expect the outcome to provide much of a boost to the U.S.-backed campaign against the Taliban, regardless of who wins.

This scepticism about the elections is just one symptom of a growing sense of disillusionment in the U.S. about the course of the war in Afghanistan, both in the foreign policy establishment and among the general populace.

Recent weeks have seen an unprecedented debate in the U.S. media about whether the war – at least in its current incarnation as an intensive counterinsurgency and development effort aimed at defeating the Taliban and building a strong Afghan central state – is worth fighting at all.

War supporters argue in response that President Barack Obama and his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, should be given a 12- to 18-month window to turn the war effort around – setting up a potential showdown around the time of the 2010 U.S. congressional elections.

Early results from the Aug. 20 Afghan elections began to trickle out this week. On Wednesday, the country's Independent Election Commission said that incumbent President Hamid Karzai has received 42 percent of votes counted so far, compared to 33 percent for his leading challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah.

The current results would leave Karzai short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff, but it is difficult to extrapolate from the ballots counted so far without a geographical breakdown of where they came from.

Abdullah has already alleged fraud on the part of the Karzai campaign, and analysts in the U.S. do not discount the possibility. Last week, IPS's Gareth Porter reported that Karzai was collaborating with leading Afghan warlords to pad his vote total and avoid a runoff election.

Other analysts note the importance of Karzai's alliances with warlords for his reelection campaign.

If Karzai wins in the first round, "he almost certainly will owe it to the endorsements that he got in the days just before the election from several warlords… most notably Abdul Rashid Dostum", said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and National Security Council (NSC) analyst who chaired the Obama administration's Afghanistan/Pakistan strategic review earlier this year, at a Brookings Institution panel on Afghanistan Tuesday.

Dostum, the most powerful leader among Afghanistan's Uzbek minority, is known for a human rights record that is widely considered to be atrocious even compared to his fellow warlords.

"If Karzai is returned to office now because of Dostum's support, then hopes for anti-corruption, good governance, and the rest are going to be rather weak in the second round of the Karzai administration," Riedel said.

Karzai has been widely criticised for the perceived corruption of his government, and appears to have lost much of the confidence of his U.S. backers. Still, most analysts see Afghanistan's problems as more institutional than personality-driven.

"Regardless of who wins, we will not have people capable of governing," said Anthony Cordesman, an influential military strategist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), at the Brookings panel. "Karzai is corrupt and lacks capacity; Abdullah has governed precisely nothing in the way of a large-scale structure."

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the situation in Afghanistan is "deteriorating".

Cordesman, if anything, was more pessimistic. He claimed that the Karzai government has either lost control or is at high risk of losing control in 40 percent of its territory, and that the latest U.S. government and media estimates of the growth of the Taliban threat have been "flatly dishonest".

Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War and a leading Afghanistan hawk, agreed with Mullen's assessment, but claimed that a stepped-up counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign could turn the tide.

Kagan argued that a successful COIN campaign would require both a further increase in the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and a reallocation of troops within the country.

In the wake of what has frequently been portrayed as the success of the "surge" strategy in Iraq – of which Kagan's husband, Frederick Kagan, was a chief proponent – many hawks have argued that the lessons of the surge and of COIN can be applied to Afghanistan as well.

Mullen and Defence Secretary Robert Gates installed McChrystal and ousted his predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, in large part due to the belief that McChrystal was better suited to run an unconventional COIN-style campaign.

Since his accession, McChrystal has emphasised civilian protection as the foundation of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, and Obama has added 17,000 troops to the U.S. force. Many suggest that further troop increases will soon prove necessary.

Supporters envision a redoubled civilian development effort to complement the military effort, in accordance with the COIN mantra "clear, hold, and build".

But critics argue that the decline in violence in Iraq was due to a number of factors, many of them having little to do with the U.S. "surge", and that hawks have been too quick to embrace COIN as an all-purpose solution to the current woes in Afghanistan.

"We need to stop talking about 'smart power' as if we have it," Cordesman said Tuesday. "As yet, you cannot find anywhere in American military literature a definition of what 'hold and build' means, or a single statement by any U.S. official to indicate when the capability… to provide hold and build will be deployed."

He described the situation in Afghanistan as "all-too-familiar, not just to Iraq, but to Vietnam".

Other COIN skeptics also make the Vietnam analogy – a reference to the last time COIN was ascendent in military circles, and the U.S. entertained hopes of reshaping hostile societies through force of arms joined to civilian expertise.

As Obama leans toward an escalated COIN campaign in Afghanistan, a growing number of commentators have begun to ask whether the U.S. is taking a wrong turn.

While support for the war has declined dramatically among the U.S. public – with 51 percent of U.S. citizens believing the war is not worth fighting, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll – recent weeks have been notable for the sudden willingness of voices within the foreign policy establishment to question the war.

Last week, Council of Foreign Relations president Richard Haass took issue with Obama's claim that Afghanistan is a "war of necessity", arguing in The New York Times that Afghanistan is "not just a war of choice but a tough choice".

Haass offered tentative support for Obama's strategy, but urged the consideration of alternative policies, up to and including the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

A blunter assessment came in July from Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor and British parliamentary candidate, who wrote in the London Review of Books that "it is impossible for [the] allies to build an Afghan state", and labeled the entire allied strategy "the irresistible illusion".

The influential COIN-themed blog Abu Muqawama, which generally focuses on tactical and operational issues related to COIN rather than broader political questions, went so far as to host a week-long debate this month on whether the war is in the interests of the U.S. and its allies.

Adm. Mullen told the Washington Post Wednesday that with the right resources, the U.S. and its allies could make progress against the insurgency within the next 12 to 18 months.

Many war supporters have echoed this timeline in response to sceptics, with both Riedel and Kagan saying Tuesday that the allies should be given 12 to 18 months to show progress before any decision on whether to scale back the war effort is made.

A 12- to 18-month timeline would mean a reassessment of the war in late 2010 or early 2011 – right around the November 2010 U.S. congressional elections.

*Not for publication in Italy.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Aug 13 2009 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Irish President Mary Robinson Wednesday, despite a vigorous campaign from hardline supporters of Israel urging him to rescind the award.

Critics in Congress and the media claimed that Robinson’s stint as U.N. high commissioner on human rights – during which she oversaw the controversial 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa – marked her as an incontrovertible enemy of Israel.

The campaign against Robinson was the latest in a series of largely symbolic battles pitting hardliners within the so-called “Israel lobby” against the Obama Administration.

In particular, many observers saw similarities to the campaign against retired Ambassador Charles Freeman, who resigned his appointment to a top intelligence post in March after his public criticisms of Israel prompted a vitriolic media and congressional campaign against him.

But unlike the Freeman affair, the anti-Robinson campaign marked a defeat for pro-Israel hardliners.

“It failed because it was so far from the pro-Israel lobby’s legitimate area of interest,” said M.J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum. “They have as much standing to protest a White House award to an Irish President as they have to protest a Heisman Trophy for best college [football] quarterback.”

“They made themselves look both out of touch with reality and silly,” Rosenberg told IPS.

Obama awarded Robinson one of sixteen Presidential Medals of Freedom in a White House ceremony, praising her as “a trail-blazing crusader for women’s rights in Ireland, and a forceful advocate for equality and human rights around the world.”

Also honoured Wednesday was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-apartheid crusader who has similarly been attacked for his criticisms of Israel.

The main charge that critics levelled against Robinson was her role in presiding over the 2001 Durban Conference.

The U.S. and Israel pulled out of the conference after draft text linked Zionism to racism, charging that the conference had focused disproportionately on Israel rather than on racism in general.

However, Robinson’s defenders argued that she had fought back against the widespread criticism of Israel at the conference – working to remove anti- Israel language from the final text.

In February, the U.S. pulled out of the sequel to the Durban conference held in Geneva, informally known as “Durban II,” due to concerns that it would similarly become a forum for Israel-bashing.

Robinson’s critics also highlighted other statements she had made criticising Israeli policies as evidence of a deep-seated anti-Israel bias.

The anti-Robinson campaign was in many ways similar to the campaign against Freeman – originating on right-wing blogs before spreading to mainstream media outlets, pro-Israel organisations, and ultimately Congress.

It began on Jul. 30, soon after the announcement of Robinson’s award, with a blog post by Jennifer Rubin on the website of neo-conservative Commentary magazine arguing that “[t]here are no words to describe how atrocious a selection this is.” Commentary’s blog would serve as one of the loci of the anti-Robinson campaign over the next two weeks.

Other neo-conservative-aligned blogs soon joined in the attacks on Robinson.

The controversy intensified when prominent pro-Israel organisations entered the fray. On Aug. 3, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called the Robinson award “ill-advised.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful and hawkish lobbying group, weighed in Aug. 4 with a statement saying that it was “deeply disappointed” by the Robinson pick.

“AIPAC respectfully calls on the administration to firmly, fully and publicly repudiate her views on Israel and her long public record of hostility and one- sided bias against the Jewish state,” the statement said.

The AIPAC statement was notable in that the group generally refrains from publicly criticising U.S. administrations, particularly on matters that are tangential to core policy-making issues.

During the Freeman affair, for instance, AIPAC did not take a public position on the controversy, although it quietly furnished anti-Freeman information to journalists.

More liberal U.S. Jewish organisations, such as J Street and Americans for Peace Now, declined to get involved in the Robinson controversy.

However, Israeli human rights organisations did rally to Robinson’s defence. On Aug. 10, the leaders of seven such groups issued a statement saying that “Mrs. Robinson deserves this honour for a lifetime of unflagging support to the cause of human rights in its many dimensions.”

The Israeli rights groups added that they were “greatly saddened by the media furore that has been generated by statements from AIPAC and the ADL… [which] contain factual errors and are misleading, particularly with regard to the Durban anti-racism conference.”

Other prominent figures, including American Jewish World Service President Ruth Messenger and former World Bank head James Wolfensohn, also issued statements defending Robinson.

Robinson herself denounced the attacks on her record as “totally without foundation.”

“There’s a lot of bullying by certain elements of the Jewish community”, Robinson said. “They bully people who try to address the severe situation in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Still, the media campaign against Robinson only intensified in the final days leading up to the awards ceremony. The attacks spread beyond the confines of right-wing blogs, as anti-Robinson opinion pieces appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, among other places.

The campaign also acquired some momentum in Congress. Two Democratic representatives, Eliot Engel of New York and Shelley Berkley of Nevada, issued statements condemning the pick.

On Tuesday, 45 Republicans in the House of Representatives called on Obama to reconsider the award.

But whereas the campaign against Freeman won the support of several key figures in the congressional Democratic leadership, such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the campaign against Robinson was unable to attract significant bipartisan support.

Aside from Berkley and Engel – both of whom are considered relative outliers in their hardline support for Israel – no other congressional Democrats publicly denounced the award.

The anti-Robinson forces similarly failed to attract much bipartisan media support. Whereas some prominent liberal pundits participated in the anti- Freeman campaign, criticism of Robinson remained largely confined to neo- conservative commentators.

Perhaps surprisingly, Robinson’s critics refrained from attacking her fellow medal recipient Tutu, who has previously been denounced by pro-Israel hawks for levelling many of the same criticisms of Israeli policies as Robinson.

While the Robinson affair ended in defeat for her critics, few are inclined to read too much significance into the controversy.

The Obama Administration has larger problems to worry about, as it clashes with Israel over West Bank settlements and how best to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme. By all indications, the administration viewed the entire spat as an unexpected and unwelcome distraction, and many observers expressed surprise that the award attracted as much attention as it did.

Nevertheless, the Robinson controversy is yet another reminder that Israel’s hardline supporters in the U.S. retain the ability to create headaches for the president. It is unlikely to be the last reminder.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Aug 12 2009 (IPS)

In the face of mounting pressure from hawks in Washington and the continued threat of military action from Israel, the Barack Obama Administration has been taking a harder line in its latest pronouncements about Iran.

Recent media reports have suggested that the administration is leaning toward an end-of-September deadline for Tehran to respond to U.S. diplomatic outreach concerning its nuclear programme, at which point it will consider stepping up sanctions against the Iranian energy sector.

This course would cut against the advice of a growing number of Iran analysts, who have cautioned both that the Tehran regime is in no position to negotiate at the moment and that sanctions are likely only to solidify the power of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But the administration is facing a great deal of pressure to move quickly to sanctions from congressional hawks – backed by hardline organisations within the so-called "Israel lobby" – who have been pushing for a tougher line against Tehran since well before the Jun. 12 elections that triggered Iran’s current political crisis.

While it remains too early to tell whether the Obama administration intends to follow through on threats of sanctions before the end of the year, recent statements by administration officials have sounded increasingly impatient with the rate of diplomatic progress.

"We need to take stock in September," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday in a television interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. "If there is a response, it needs to be on a fast track. We’re not going to keep the window open forever."

Clinton also stated that the U.S. is working with allies to prepare "a very robust set of sanctions that we can get the international community to sign off on" in case engagement does not bear fruit.

The administration has suggested that a Sept. 30 U.N. General Assembly meeting will be the deadline for a diplomatic response from Tehran.

This end-of-September deadline is itself a testament to the political pressure the administration has come under from the right.

When Obama took office in January, he was reluctant to set an explicit timetable for engagement. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May, Obama eventually suggested that the administration would perform a "reassessment" of progress at the end of the year.

The turmoil that followed Iran’s June elections has led some analysts to propose a pause in the engagement schedule – since Iran remains preoccupied with its internal crisis and its political situation fluctuates on a daily basis.

Instead, the engagement timetable seems, if anything, to have been expedited. While the administration has retained the end-of-year timetable for tangible diplomatic progress, the end-of-September deadline for a response is comparatively new.

Few expect Iran to be able to resolve its internal turmoil by Sept. 30, leaving open the question of how the U.S. intends to respond if the deadline passes without a response.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), is among those calling for a "tactical pause" in engagement. Parsi cautioned Monday in the Huffington Post that, "the biggest mistake the U.S. can commit is to begin setting deadlines that no one – including the U.S. itself – believes can be held up."

Hawks in Congress, however, have other ideas. Congressional leaders plan to push new anti-Iran sanctions legislation in September – barring any major change in the diplomatic situation.

The most prominent piece of sanctions legislation is the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), which would impose penalties on firms exporting refined petroleum products to Iran. The IRPSA is co-sponsored by more than half the members of Congress.

Hardline "Israel lobby" organisations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations are planning a major September lobbying push in support of the legislation, the Forward reported last week.

The Obama Administration has refrained from public comment on the IRPSA and other pending congressional legislation.

But, last week, a flurry of media reports suggested that the administration was giving increased consideration to new sanctions.

Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported Jul. 31 that U.S. National Security Advisor James Jones had briefed Israeli officials on U.S. plans for new sanctions. Similar reports in The New York Times and The Guardian soon followed.

However, these reports relied primarily on anonymous Israeli and European officials – leaving open the possibility that outside actors were leaking information in order to try to box the administration in to new sanctions.

In any case, all signs suggest that if the administration turns to sanctions, it will aim for multilateral sanctions in conjunction with allies rather than the unilateral sanctions being pushed by Congress.

"The coverage of the Obama administration’s stance on sanctions has been pretty disingenuous," NIAC Acting Legislative Director Patrick Disney told IPS. "I believe the administration has communicated that if Iran does not accept by the end of September the invitation to begin talks, then the U.S. will begin the process for another round of multilateral sanctions."

"[But] there is no evidence that the administration has communicated anything remotely supportive of the [petroleum] sanctions legislation to Congress," Disney added.

Proponents of petroleum sanctions claim that they will weaken the regime by exploiting its reliance on refined petroleum imports. Despite its natural oil reserves, Iran lacks refining capacity and must import between 25 and 40 percent of its refined petroleum.

Even some hawks concede, however, that unilateral sanctions measures such as the IRPSA would be of limited utility in depriving Iran of refined petroleum. Multilateral sanctions would be more effective – however most analysts are sceptical that Russia and China would sign on to such measures.

But, a growing number of commentators have suggested that even effective petroleum sanctions would be self-defeating. They argue that the brunt of these sanctions would be borne by innocent Iranian civilians rather than the regime itself, and that they would be likely to solidify the regime’s power by allowing it to rally against a common enemy.

Sanctions opponents point to the example of Iraq, where strict sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003 were blamed for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths – without weakening the Saddam Hussein regime’s hold on power.

"[T]here is absolutely not a shred of evidence that any major or even minor opposition leader – from [presidential candidate] Mir Hossein Moussavi to [presidential candidate] Mehdi Karrubi to [former president] Mohammad Khatami, or any of their related political organs or legitimate representatives – has ever uttered a word that could possibly be interpreted as calling for or endorsing any sort of economic sanction against Iran," wrote Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi on CNN.com.

"As in the Iraqi case, imposition of economic sanctions on Iran will have catastrophic humanitarian consequences, while it will even more enrich and empower such critical components of the security and military apparatus as the Pasdaran and the Basij," Dabashi wrote.

On Tuesday, Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi warned against sanctions because of the harm they would do to the Iranian people, Reuters reported.

Beyond the argument over sanctions looms the threat of Israeli military force. Israel has repeatedly signalled that it would consider a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities if it is not satisfied with the progress of negotiations.

Some observers suggest that the Obama Administration’s increased talk of multilateral sanctions is primarily intended to placate Israel and its hawkish allies in the U.S., thereby giving the administration some breathing room to work on a deal.

But these same hawks are determined to force the administration to follow through on its talk of sanctions, and matters seem likely to come to a head in the days leading up to the Sept. 30 deadline.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 2009 (IPS)

Iran is unlikely to be able to produce the highly enriched uranium (HEU) necessary for a nuclear weapon until at least 2013, according to a U.S. government intelligence estimate made public Thursday.

The estimate, which sets a notably later date for Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability than other claims that have recently been circulated in the media, was prepared by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair submitted it in written testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February.

The publication of the estimate comes at a particularly sensitive time in Washington, as the U.S. debates how best to proceed in dealing with Iran in the wake of June’s disputed election and the Iranian government’s subsequent crackdown on protesters.

Many Iran analysts have called for the U.S. to do nothing for the time being while the political situation within Iran develops – holding off on its planned engagement with Tehran while at the same time avoiding confrontational measures such as the imposition of additional sanctions.

But hawks in the U.S. and Israel have argued that there is no time to spare in dealing with the Iranian nuclear programme, and that the U.S. should quickly move to sanctions targeting Iran’s refined petroleum imports if engagement does not bear fruit by the end of September.

There has also been a great deal of speculation about whether Israel would undertake a unilateral military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if it is not satisfied with the progress of negotiations – Israeli leaders have refused to rule out the possibility.

The INR estimate, which comes on the heels of other estimates suggesting that Iran is years away from a nuclear capability, may serve to defuse the crisis atmosphere that has come to characterise discussion of the issue in Washington and Jerusalem, and bolster those calling for patience in dealing with Tehran.

Blair’s testimony to the Senate, in which the estimate appeared, was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and published by Aftergood on the FAS website Thursday.

The INR estimate stresses that it is not taking a position on whether Iran will make a "political decision" to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a nuclear weapon, but rather on when Iran would have the "functional ability" to produce HEU should it choose to do so.

Iran has denied that it intends to produce a nuclear weapon, insisting that its nuclear programme is for civilian use only.

Blair’s testimony to the Senate states that although Iran has "made significant progress since 2007 in installing and operating centrifuges, INR continues to assess it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce HEU before 2013."

The testimony also states that "Iran probably would use military-run covert facilities, rather than declared nuclear sites, to produce HEU."

According to Blair, the broader intelligence community has "no evidence that Iran has yet made the decision to produce highly enriched uranium, and INR assess that Iran is unlikely to make such a decision for at least as long as international scrutiny and pressure persist."

The INR’s estimate is in line with other recent intelligence estimates suggesting that Iran is years away from a deliverable weapon, if it chose to pursue one.

Meir Dagan, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, said in June that Iran would be capable of launching a bomb by 2014.

But more alarmist estimates have frequently been circulated in the media, providing grist for hawks who suggest that time is running out to prevent an Iranian bomb.

On Monday, the Times of London reported that Iran "has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb."

Citing unnamed "Western intelligence sources," the Times claimed that Iran "could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order" from Khamenei.

The "one year" estimate – which is met with scepticism by most intelligence analysts – was quickly picked up by hawks as proof that there is no time to waste on engagement.

On Tuesday, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton appeared on Fox News, citing the Times report in suggesting that "pressure [is] building" on Israel to strike Iranian nuclear facilities.

Bolton warned that "we are so close to Iran actually getting a weapon that these fine calibrations that we have got six months, or eight months, or 10 months, all you have to do is be wrong by one day" for the U.S. and Israeli strategic calculus to change dramatically.

On Thursday, Israeli newspaper Haaretz suggested that the "one year" estimate was leaked to the Times by Israeli military intelligence.

Citing the fact that the head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Research Brigade used "almost identical terms to those of the Times" in a Tuesday briefing, Haaretz argued that the "timing of the articles implies that someone in Israel’s defence establishment wanted to deliver an explicit, public declaration" to the media.

The INR report is not the first time that a U.S. intelligence estimate has helped to frame the debate over Iran policy.

In 2007, the release of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme – as opposed to its civilian nuclear programme – in 2003 was widely seen as critical in alleviating political pressure to take a tougher line on Tehran.

In his February Senate testimony, Blair refused to comment on the status or content of the upcoming NIE. The NIE is the consensus judgment of the all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, and hence its findings are likely to be the subject of even more heated discussion than the just-released INR estimate.

The release of the Blair’s testimony comes as Iran hawks in the U.S. are exerting increasing political pressure on the Obama administration to ramp up sanctions on Tehran.

Last week, the Forward reported that congressional leaders and hawkish Jewish organisations are planning a concerted political and lobbying effort in September to rally support for increased sanctions.

The primary bill under consideration, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, would punish firms exporting refined petroleum products to Iran.

The Obama administration has suggested that Iran will have until the Sep. 30 meeting of the U.N. General Assembly to respond positively to Washington’s engagement, at which point it will consider more punitive measures.

However, many Iran experts have suggested that Tehran is in no position to negotiate at the moment, due to the political turmoil that followed the Jun. 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which critics denounce as fraudulent.

As a result, many have called for a "tactical pause" in the U.S. engagement strategy, in the words of National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi.

The latest intelligence estimate may give the U.S. some political breathing room to pursue such a pause.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2009 (IPS)

As the clash between the U.S. and Israeli governments over settlements in the occupied territories intensifies, many of Israel's traditionally staunch defenders in Washington have been pushing back, tentatively but with increasing assertiveness, to urge the Barack Obama administration to alleviate its pressure on Israel.

The settlements battle has put these defenders in a delicate position, since Obama remains extremely popular among U.S. Jews, most of whom oppose settlement growth, and since a settlement freeze has been a core U.S. demand for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Rather than opposing the administration outright on the settlement issue, therefore, most hawkish commentators and organisations have instead sought to persuade the administration to tone down its demands and seek a compromise – particularly one that would make dealing with Iran's nuclear programme a higher priority than an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, and would allow continued construction within settlement blocs close to the Israeli border.

Some hawks have also launched what many see as a concerted media campaign to portray Obama's settlement push as being on the brink of failure, and box the administration into backing down on settlements.

Despite reports to the contrary, however, the administration has so far shown no signs of letting up on the settlement issue, suggesting that the clash between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to come to a head. Already, Netanyahu's refusal to stop a planned building project in East Jerusalem has ratcheted up the intensity of the diplomatic conflict.

"Settlements were a difficult issue to defend, so the conservative establishment in the [U.S. Jewish] community made the argument that the disagreements shouldn't be in public, and there should be pressure on the Arabs to do more," former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, now a fellow at the New American Foundation and the Century Foundation, told IPS.

"Now there will be a third component to their pushback, which is Jerusalem, but I do not think this will gain serious traction, nor will it divert the administration from their course," he said.

From the outset of the settlements battle, prominent and traditionally hawkish pro-Israel organisations have walked a fine line in discussing the administration's policy.

To be sure, a few notably hardline groups have given outright expressions of support for the settlers and denunciations of Obama's policy.

The Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA), for example, issued a statement saying that "it is utterly racist and anti-Semitic to suggest that Jews cannot build within the borders…of their communities in Judea and Samaria", referring to the West Bank using the terminology of the pro-settler movement.

Similarly, pastor John Hagee, head of the controversial group Christians United for Israel (CUFI), defended on Tuesday "Israel's sovereign right to grow and develop the settlements of Israel as you see fit and not yield to the pressure of the United States government."

But most mainstream Jewish organisations have been wary of appearing out of step with the administration. ZOA was notably excluded from a meeting held Jul. 13 at the White House between Obama and the leaders of major Jewish organisations.

More typical was the statement of David Harris, president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

"To be sure, the settlements are an issue," Harris wrote on the website of the Jerusalem Post, in a piece that was adapted from his remarks to Senate Democrats earlier this week. "But they are not the underlying cause of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. They should be addressed in the context of negotiations, not treated as a sine qua non for talks, as Palestinian leaders are doing now."

Harris also stated that "Israel cannot and will not return to the fragile armistice lines of 1967," suggesting that Israel would have to keep possession of close-in settlement blocs in any final status agreement.

Many of those criticising Obama's stance on settlements argue that Israel should be permitted to continue building in these blocs to accommodate "natural growth" of their existing populations.

They point to agreements that were allegedly brokered between the governments of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon by Bush's top Middle East aide, Elliott Abrams, and in particular to a 2004 letter from Bush to Sharon recognising Israel's right to these settlement blocs.

Abrams himself has argued that Obama should recognise these agreements and desist in his calls for a full settlement freeze throughout the occupied territories.

However, Sharon's former chief of staff Dov Weissglas told The Washington Times on Wednesday that no such agreement was ever finalised because the U.S. and Israel never agreed on where construction would be permitted.

Critics also note that excepting "natural growth" from a settlement freeze has in recent years served as a loophole serving to legitimise all settlement growth, and the Obama administration has accordingly refused to make a natural growth exception.

On Monday, Abrams attracted more controversy when he wrote an article for National Review Online claiming that the U.S. had backed off its demands for a total freeze and was now asking for a compromise that would allow all construction projects underway to be completed.

Abrams also cited unnamed reports that Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, plans to leave the administration at the end of the year.

Mitchell responded by calling reports about his planned retirement "an utter fabrication", reported The Cable, a blog on the website of Foreign Policy magazine.

Other experts similarly dismiss Abrams's claim that the Obama administration is on the verge of accepting a compromise solution.

"We are quite confident that the Obama administration is standing by its demand that Israel's government live up to its commitment to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank," Ori Nir, spokesman for the group Americans for Peace Now (APN), told IPS.

In early July, a senior administration official rebutted similar rumors of an imminent compromise, telling The Washington Post that "we have not changed our position at all…nor has the president authorised any negotiating room".

Besides Abrams, several other hardline supporters of Israel have argued recently that Obama's Israel-Palestine policy is floundering – a trend that some analysts see as a concerted media campaign to shape public perceptions.

"A number of…remarkably similar pieces over the last few days…have seemed geared towards creating the impression that Obama's strong position on Israeli settlements have backfired and put his overall policy in jeopardy," wrote Marc Lynch, a Middle East scholar at George Washington University, on the Foreign Policy website.

Lynch dismisses these arguments as "advice from those who aren't worried that [Obama will] fail, they want him to fail…The objective, most likely, is to derail his push towards a two-state solution that they fear might succeed and to embolden those who are uncomfortable with his approach but had been unwilling to challenge a popular President."

It was in part to reassure Jewish community leaders about his push on settlements that Obama held his Jul. 13 meeting with them at the White House. By most accounts, the meeting was a success, with Obama restating his commitment to Israel's security and the attendees offering expressions of support for the administration.

However, tensions have increased once again following Netanyahu's Sunday announcement that a planned Israeli housing development in East Jerusalem will proceed despite U.S. protests, and his defiant proclamation that Israeli sovereignty over a "united Jerusalem…cannot be challenged".

Since all major plans for a two-state solution involve Palestinian control of East Jerusalem as a capital city, Netanyahu's statement posed a direct challenge to the Obama administration's policy, and thrust the settlements debate back into the spotlight.

While the results of the current clash over Jerusalem remain to be seen, some prominent Jewish groups have already lined up with Netanyahu.

On Tuesday, the hawkish and influential Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations issued a statement calling the administration's objections to the proposed building project "disturbing".

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jul 18 2009 (IPS)

The U.S. should proceed cautiously in its engagement strategy with Iran, while moving quickly toward final-status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, according to a new report by a team of veteran diplomats and Middle East policymakers.

The policy paper, released Wednesday by the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), an organisation that promotes U.S. diplomatic engagement in the Middle East, expresses support for President Barack Obama’s ambitious Middle East strategy.

Entitled “After Cairo and Iran: Next Steps for U.S. Diplomacy in the Middle East”, it recommends continuing attempts to engage Iran, but shifting primarily to back-channel rather than public talks in response to the recent political turmoil following June’s disputed presidential elections.

The report also advocates accelerating the 2002 “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian peace by convening an international conference that would set the stage for final-status negotiations, sponsoring unofficial “Track Two” talks between Israel and the Arab states, and pursuing an Israeli-Syrian agreement at the same time as an Israeli-Palestinian one.

The IPF policy paper was produced by a task force of 15 veteran Middle East hands, including Samuel Lewis and Edward Walker, both former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, former ambassador to Egypt Robert Pelletreau, and former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) executive director Thomas Dine.

At a time when hawks in the U.S. have attacked the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy, calling on it to take a harder line against Iran and alleviate its diplomatic pressure on Israel, the report offers a notable show of support for the administration’s strategy – along with a number of suggestions for “fine-tuning” it.

Perhaps the most contentious issue the report considers is how to proceed with Iran, where alleged fraud in the Jun. 12 reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the government’s subsequent crackdown on protesters have thrown the engagement strategy into question.

Proponents of continued engagement have argued that the election crisis does not change the basic U.S. strategic calculus regarding Iran’s nuclear programme, and that the Iranian leadership under Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may be more willing than ever to reach a deal with the U.S. to shore up its domestic support.

Critics have argued that public engagement with the regime risks legitimising Khamenei and Ahmadinejad at the expense of dissenters.

The IPF report suggests dealing with these problems by continuing engagement with Tehran, but urges that “initial contacts be more private and secret than would have been anticipated originally”. It also raises the possibility of Track Two negotiations, in which “participants acting in their private capacity have the support of their respective governments to talk, but not to negotiate”.

The report praised the administration’s approach, saying that “President Obama has taken just the right combination of caution and firmness.”

However, one partial dissent included as an addendum to the report was more pessimistic, arguing that the Islamic Republic’s leadership has become more intransigent and that the prospects for a diplomatic settlement are dim.

On the Israeli-Palestinian front, the task force argued that the Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank was a worthwhile first step, but cautioned against getting “stuck… indefinitely” on the issues of settlements and Palestinian incitement.

Instead, it advocates moving quickly to negotiations, skipping phase two of the “road map” – the creation of a provisional state with temporary borders – and moving directly to phase three, an international conference that would prepare the way for a final-status agreement with permanent borders.

Regarding the current split in Palestinian leadership between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the report stopped short of making concrete recommendations, but left the door open to Hamas participation and suggested “exploring new diplomatic possibilities” through secret talks and through the Arab states.

“There wasn’t a lot of consensus in the group about what to do about [Hamas], it’s a huge roadblock,” said Amb. Lewis, while adding that “the last statements made by the Hamas leadership… suggest more and more that Hamas wants to find a way into the political process.”

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Thomas Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and to the U.N., met last month with Hamas officials in Geneva in an unofficial capacity.

However, the U.S. government maintains that it will only deal with Hamas if the group renounces violence, recognises Israel, and agrees to abide by previous agreements.

The IPF report also suggests building on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which Israel would received full diplomatic recognition from all Arab League states within the context of a two-state settlement, by pursuing Track Two discussions between Israelis and Arabs.

It particularly urges the parties to deal from an early stage with the status of Jerusalem under a final agreement – which, the report argues, is both the “thorniest issue” and “the key to drawing [the Arab states] into the process”.

As part of the Israeli-Arab peace process, the report urges simultaneous diplomatic engagement with Syria. From the U.S. standpoint, this would involve consulting with Turkey to facilitate the resumption of talks between Israel and Syria under Turkish mediation.

In June, the Obama administration announced plans to return a U.S. ambassador to Damascus following an absence of almost four years, a major step in the road to reconciliation with Syria.

The IPF report is notable as a show of support for an active U.S. diplomatic push in the Middle East at a time when hawkish critics have urged Obama to scale back his ambitions.

The stature of its participants within Middle East policy circles in Washington is likely to bolster the weight of the report’s recommendations.

Also on Wednesday, the Centre for American Progress (CAP) released a report of its own concerning the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The CAP report suggests “four concrete steps” that the Obama administration should take in the coming months.

These include preparing for potential Palestinian elections in 2010, creating an integrated institution-building plan for the Palestinian territories, taking steps to address the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, and conducting an enhanced public diplomacy effort in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Israeli public opinion.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jul 1 2009 (IPS)

When the Honduran military deposed President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday, in an incident that stirred memories of Cold War military coups in Latin America, it also seems to have caused at least some foreign policy commentators here to revert to positions reminiscent of the Cold War.

The Honduran president addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Jun. 30, 2009. Credit: UN Photo/Jenny Rockett

The hawks’ support for the coup, which came as media reports from Honduras described a violent police crackdown against demonstrators and a government-imposed media blackout throughout the country, may have been surprising to many observers.

After all, only days before many of the same commentators were fiercely decrying similar scenes coming out of Tehran, and calling for U.S. President Barack Obama to stand up for democracy in Iran against what was frequently described as a coup by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But to those with longer memories, this apparent discrepancy was anything but surprising.

For although neo-conservatism has in recent years become identified with former President George W. Bush’s "Freedom Agenda", and aggressive U.S. support for democracy promotion in the Middle East and beyond, the ideology has a very different history in Latin America.

During the Cold War, neo-conservatives were known as staunch defenders of right-wing authoritarians as counterweights to leftist movements in the region. These included Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Jose Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala, and the military junta in Argentina – not to mention the former Honduran Chief of Staff, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who was so brutal and imperious that his fellow officers threw him out of the country in 1984.

Support for right-wing authoritarianism, both in Latin America and in Iran, and blistering criticism of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy comprised the core of the movement’s early manifesto, Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous 1979 essay in Commentary magazine, "Dictatorships and Double Standards". Ronald Reagan was so impressed with the article that he made Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations.

The current debate over Honduras serves as a reminder that the simple polarities of recent foreign policy discussions, in which a "neo-conservatism" identified with democracy promotion is contrasted with a "realism" identified with acceptance of authoritarian governments, disguise a more complex history.

After all, even as neo-conservatives championed democratic "transformation" in the Middle East during the Bush administration, they applauded the attempted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002 and were deeply disappointed by its failure.

Two years later, they welcomed the forcible exile of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide aboard a U.S. Air Force jet in the face of an uprising by former military officers and their paramilitary allies.

At the time, they argued that the two presidents were dangerous, power-hungry – albeit democratically elected – demagogues who, if left unchecked, would wreck the constitutional order and threaten U.S. interests.

They have made similar claims against Zelaya who had clearly managed to antagonise other branches of government, including the Supreme Court. The Court ruled that his effort to hold a non-binding referendum on the possibility of amending the constitution was unconstitutional, precipitating a series of events that culminated in his ouster.

"Yes, Zelaya was elected, but Hitler was as well, and Chavez also was," said influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. "A coup isn’t a nice thing, but it’s preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy."

Similarly, the right-wing National Review editorialised that "[t]he Honduran soldiers who escorted Pres. Manuel Zelaya from his home on Sunday were acting to protect their country’s democracy, not to trample it".

But the actual means by which he was ousted – specifically the decision by the military to intervene in what was essentially a political dispute by arresting him and dispatching him to Costa Rica – bore all the hallmarks of a conventional coup d'etat, even if it was ratified by the Congress immediately afterward.

The OAS has already resolved "to condemn vehemently the coup d’etat" against Zelaya, called for his "immediate, safe, and unconditional return" to office by a deadline of Friday, and vowed that "no government arising from this unconstitutional eruption will be recognised." After some hesitation, Obama Monday also condemned the military’s actions as "not legal" and called for his restoration. In addition to arguing that Zelaya had himself acted in an unconstitutional manner, neo-conservatives also stressed his ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leftist leaders – and the alleged threat they pose to democracy in the region – as a justification for deposing him, whether by legal or illegal means.

"Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, [Nicaraguan president] Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins [Raul and Fidel Castro of Cuba], you ought to reexamine your assumptions," Krauthammer noted.

Others depicted Zelaya as one more pawn in Chavez’s efforts to expand his influence, in much the same way that Kirkpatrick described Ortega and the Sandinistas as puppets of Moscow and Havana 30 years ago.

Kirkpatrick criticised Carter for allegedly taking a harder line against right-wing but pro-U.S.-backed dictators than against their left-wing, Soviet-backed counterparts. As brutal as they may be, she argued, "traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies" and, generally, "more compatible with U.S. interests".

In an echo of the late ambassador’s criticism of Carter’s human rights policy, former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner complained about Obama’s alleged double standard in, on the one hand, denouncing the coup in Honduras while, on the other, allegedly failing to criticise election fraud in Iran strongly enough.

"[T]here doesn’t seem to be any consistency on when Obama decides to meddle, beyond his tendency to take actions that make life easier for those who do not wish America well," Wehner, who now heads the neo-conservative Ethics and Public Policy Centre, wrote on the website of Commentary.

"As a general matter, I’m not in favor of military coups," he added, in another echo of decades-old rhetoric. "On the other hand, I’m not in favor of Zelaya doing to Honduras what Chavez has done in Venezuela."

Although the Reagan administration was fiercely criticised by human rights advocates for its support of military dictators against leftist movements that frequently enjoyed widespread popular support, neo-conservatives argued that the larger threat to freedom posed by Soviet influence outweighed any injustice involved in suppressing opposition to "friendly authoritarians", as they were sometimes called.

If this argument seems jarring, it is likely because the popular image of neo-conservative doctrine has undergone a marked change in recent years. This was in large part because of their own efforts to depict themselves as "idealists" dedicated to universal democratisation, as laid out in Bush’s 2005 second inaugural address and his so-called "freedom agenda".

On closer examination, however, their zeal for democratisation appears to depend significantly on whether the target is considered friendly or hostile to U.S. interests. In that respect, not much has changed.

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jun 28 2009 (IPS)

Two weeks after allegations of fraud in Iran’s presidential elections triggered massive and instantly-iconic protests, partisans here of President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, are debating whose policies deserve more credit for encouraging the Iranian mobilisation.

Experts caution against giving either man too much of the credit for the so-called “green wave” that formed around moderate presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi.

Many suggest that the determination in Washington to see U.S. presidents as prime movers in Iranian politics is merely a sign of narcissism, and note that Iran has a history of reformist political mobilisations – such as that which brought former president Mohammed Khatami to power – that predate either Bush’s or Obama’s time in office.

But as is often the case in Washington, the argument about what brought Iran to this point has more to do with the future than the past, and it is largely rooted in differing views of how to proceed going forward rather than a strict concern for historical accuracy.

Those inclined to credit an “Obama effect” tend to argue that Obama’s strategy of conciliation and engagement with the Muslim world – on display in his high-profile speech in Cairo earlier this month – is most likely both to further U.S. interests and ultimately to foster democratic reform in the Middle East.

They argue that a confrontational strategy based around the overthrow of hostile governments is more likely to shut down democratic reform than to promote it, by allowing authoritarian regimes to use nationalist sentiment to solidify their power.

Those who credit Bush’s “freedom agenda” for the recent developments in Iran suggest that the former president’s preference for “hard power” and regime change as tools of democracy promotion must remain at the centre of U.S. foreign policy.

Many of the prominent commentators in the second camp are themselves former Bush administration officials.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, for instance, argues that “George Bush’s Freedom Agenda planted seeds that have started to grow in the Middle East”.

One motive for the protesters, Fleischer told the Washington Post, was “because Shiites in particular see Shiites in Iraq having more freedoms than they do. Bush’s tough policies have helped give rise to the reformists and I think we’re witnessing that today”.

Although few Iran experts feel that the Iraqi example played a major role in the protests – noting, for instance, that Iraq has barely been mentioned by Iranian reformist leaders – others on the right have echoed the idea of Iraqi inspiration.

The notion that a democratic and pro-Western Iraq would trigger a wave of democratisation throughout the Middle East was, of course, one of the original promises of war supporters. The neoconservative-aligned Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami, for instance, wrote in a Feb. 2003 Wall Street Journal op-ed that a liberated Iraq would have a “contagion effect” on neighbouring Iran.

But more than rehabilitating Bush himself, or even the Iraq war as a whole, those who take the Iran protests as a vindication of his policies seek to rehabilitate an entire foreign policy mindset that was widely seen as discredited in the wake of Obama’s accession to the presidency.

On Friday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson – who, as Bush’s chief speechwriter, was the main drafter of the 2005 second inaugural address that is considered the classic statement of the “freedom agenda” – argued that “spring is returning” in the Middle East.

It would be an overstatement to say that Obama has renounced democracy promotion as a goal.

His Cairo speech of Jun. 4 argued that “the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose… are not just American ideas, they are human rights… and that is why we will support them everywhere”.

But the Obama administration has acted more cautiously, partly out of a belief that aggressive democracy promotion, particularly in the Middle East, is likely to backfire.

This view was on display during the Iran protests, as Obama refused to take the aggressive line against the Iranian regime that many right-wing commentators were calling for, arguing that such a stance would risk delegitimising the protesters.

More broadly, Obama has resisted making regime change the central goal of democracy promotion efforts, and using “hard power” measures such as military strikes and sanctions as its primary tools.

Rather, his foreign policy has operated on the assumption that engaging with repressive regimes, and offering assurances that the U.S. is not plotting regime change against them, is likely to open up political space for internal dissent and reform.

Obama’s use of the Iranian state’s formal name, the Islamic Republic of Iran, was widely seen as a gesture intended to signal U.S. respect and good intentions.

Many commentators have argued that this strategy bears at least some responsibility for Moussavi’s surge of support in the last days of the campaign.

On Thursday, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair denied that it was “hubris” for the U.S. to think that Obama had an impact on recent events in Iran. Blair said that Obama’s election was viewed from the outside as a “revolutionary change”, and that his Cairo speech “has had a really, really significant impact” on public opinion in the Middle East.

Obama’s approach offers a marked tonal shift from that of his predecessor. Bush’s freedom agenda was rooted in a more confrontational mentality that held that “evil” powers were unlikely to reform, and that the U.S. should support regime change, backed when necessary by military force, as the only long-term solution.

Regarding Iran, which Bush referred to as part of the “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea in 2002, neoconservatives and their allies continue to maintain that the only satisfactory solution is the outright overthrow of the Islamic Republic.

On Friday, for instance, Bush’s former U.N. ambassador John Bolton wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “Obama’s policy, and that of the United States, should be the overthrow of the Islamic revolution of 1979”.

Although Bolton argued that a policy of regime change would be supported by the Iranian people, Moussavi and most of his supporters have gone out of their way to emphasise their allegiance to the Islamic Republic and their desire to return to the spirit of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

On Saturday, Moussavi said that the purpose of his presidential candidacy was “to re-invite to the Islamic Revolution as it had to be, and the Islamic Republic as it has to be”. He called for “a reform by return to the pure principles of revolution”.

Regardless of the protesters’ intentions, their demonstrations have already spurred calls in Washington for more aggressive democracy promotion measures.

On Thursday, three senators with strong ties to neoconservatives – John McCain of Arizona, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – unveiled legislation that would increase funding for U.S.-produced radio programming within Iran, as well as for technology that would hamper Iran’s ability to restrict telecommunications within the country.

Ironically, some experts allege that the most forceful U.S. advocates of democracy promotion in Iran are guilty of ignoring the voices of the Iranian people.

Stepping up U.S. democracy assistance programs in Iran “would be precisely the wrong move – not because it would compromise the climate for nuclear negotiations, but because Iran’s own activists have consistently rejected such funding”, wrote Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution on the website of Foreign Policy magazine. “They don’t want it, and elections-related news such as the massive reformist vote monitoring effort suggests they don’t need it.”

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jun 18 2009 (IPS)

As U.S. President Barack Obama attempts to navigate the treacherous currents of the ongoing political crisis in Iran, he faces a heated attack on his right flank from neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks, who are urging him both to offer unequivocal support to the protesters supporting moderate presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi and to scuttle his planned diplomatic engagement with Tehran.

So far, Obama’s cautious stance has earned praise from Iranian activists, area experts, and much of the Washington foreign policy establishment, who warn that an enthusiastic U.S. embrace of the protesters would threaten to delegitimise them.

"What happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard," Nobel Peace Prize-winning Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi told the Washington Post on Thursday. "I respect [Obama’s] comments on all the events in Iran, but I think it is sufficient."

Still, the right-wing attacks have put a great deal of political pressure on the president to take a more activist stance, and may pave the way for a domestic political backlash against him if the Iranian government ultimately represses the protesters and keeps hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in place.

Leading the charge have been prominent congressional Republicans, such as Senator John McCain and Representative Eric Cantor, as well as neo-conservative pundits such as Robert Kagan, whose Washington Post column on Wednesday argued that Obama’s "strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government's efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts."

Similarly, influential neo-conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer called the administration’s rhetoric "disgraceful" and claimed that Obama was offering "implicit support for this repressive, tyrannical regime".

Those calling for a firm pro-Moussavi stance "are playing with dynamite", according to Patrick Disney of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a group that has defended the protesters' right to demonstrate and denounced the violence against them.

"At best, such grandstanding would give the hardliners in Iran a reason to paint the reformist camp as a stooge of the West; at worst, it could incite the crowds even more and risk blowing the top off an already tumultuous situation," Disney wrote in the Huffington Post.

Perhaps more significantly, many hawks in the U.S. are already looking beyond the current political crisis – which some argue will inevitably end in defeat for the protesters – to argue against any diplomatic outreach to Tehran.

They have held up the regime’s alleged rigging of the elections for Ahmadinejad and its repression of demonstrators as evidence that the Islamic Republic’s leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is too brutal and aggressive to be negotiated with.

"Rarely in U.S. history has a foreign policy course been as thoroughly repudiated by events as his approach to Iran in his first months in office," wrote neo-conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens on Wednesday. "Even Jimmy Carter drew roughly appropriate conclusions about the Iranian regime after the hostages were taken in 1979."

But underlying this consistent criticism of Obama are a number of tensions in neo-conservative attitudes toward Iran. Among hawks, the protesters’ prospects of success remain a matter of debate – as does the question of what the opposition’s ultimate goals are.

A growing sentiment on the right – increasingly held outside neo-conservative circles – holds that full-blown regime change in Tehran is the only acceptable resolution to the Iranian problem.

However, Moussavi and his supporters have never called for overthrowing the Islamic Republic, but rather have co-opted the rhetoric and iconography of the Islamic Revolution for their cause.

Moreover, Moussavi – like all candidates in last week’s presidential elections – is adamant that he will continue Iran’s civilian nuclear programme, although he has suggested that Iran would be willing to negotiate on the issue of nuclear weapons.

Barring a drastic reversal resulting in outright regime change – which few experts believe is likely to occur – the U.S. would be likely to face a similar strategic calculus on the nuclear issue whether Moussavi or Ahmadinejad is president.

It is because of this that some neo-conservatives have suggested that an Ahmadinejad victory would be preferable, since his confrontational stance would make it easier to rally popular support for harsher measures – such as sanctions or ultimately military force – against Tehran.

"If I were enfranchised in this election… I would vote for Ahmadinejad," Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes said earlier this month. "I would prefer to have an enemy who’s forthright and obvious, who wakes people up with his outlandish statements."

This line of thought is echoed by many in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party have historically had close ties with U.S. neo-conservatives.

On Tuesday, Meir Dagan, head of the Mossad intelligence agency, told the Knesset that "[I]f the reformist candidate Moussavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element."

For those who view any continued Iranian nuclear progress as an intolerable threat to Israeli or U.S. interests, a reformist victory that stopped short of regime change might therefore be the worst possible outcome, since it would preserve what neo-conservatives view as an intrinsically totalitarian and expansionist regime while undercutting support for hawkish anti-Iran policies.

For this reason, neo-conservatives have been somewhat hesitant in their embrace of Moussavi, with many of them offering support for the protesters while maintaining that he is little different from Ahmadinejad and that it is Ayatollah Khamenei who wields real power in any case.

One notable exception has been Michael Ledeen, a longtime proponent of regime change in Tehran now based at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), who suggests that Moussavi has been radicalised by the events of the past week and bears little resemblance to the moderate seen on the campaign trail.

"Does Moussavi even want to change the system? I think he does, and in any event, I think that’s the wrong question," Ledeen wrote on Monday. "He is not a revolutionary leader, he is a leader who has been made into a revolutionary by a movement that grew up around him."

Ledeen also attacked as "embarrassingly silly" the views of Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh, two fellow neo-conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In a Tuesday op-ed in The New York Times, Pletka and Alfoneh had dismissed the opposition movement as "little more than a symbolic protest" that had been "crushed" by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

For Ledeen, by contrast, "The most powerful leaders in Iran are facing a life and death showdown" and Moussavi’s aim is to bring down the Islamic Republic itself.

However, Ledeen’s positions on Iran have always been idiosyncratic even among neo-conservatives. He has maintained for years that the Islamic Republic is on the verge of collapse and that Iran’s populace is secular-minded, pro-U.S., and merely waiting for an opportunity to throw off their rulers.

Perhaps due to perceptions that Ledeen is "crying wolf" about the end of the Islamic Republic, other hawks seem less inclined to share his confidence in revolution in Iran. Most are preparing to stake out a hard line against Tehran whether it is Moussavi or Ahmadinejad who ultimately emerges as the victor.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jun 15 2009 (IPS)

As protests over Friday's disputed election continue to rage in Iran, the U.S. has thus far reacted cautiously, reflecting the high degree of uncertainty in Washington both about how much support to give the demonstrators and about the implications of the escalating crisis for President Barack Obama's hopes of engaging Tehran in serious negotiations.

Clashes between opposition supporters and police wracked Tehran for a third day Monday, Jun. 15. Credit: dwh90723/flickr/creative commons

This course of action, many analysts say, reflects a political reality in which strong U.S. backing for the protesters might prove to be more of a curse than a blessing, since it could allow the Iranian regime to portray the protesters as agents of a hostile power and thus legitimise their repression.

"This is an issue that is going to be fought by Iranians; there's nothing to be gained by external forces coming into this or trying to influence the outcome," said Gary Sick, a veteran Iran analyst at Columbia University who also served on the National Security Councils of former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

"That would be a terrible mistake, and no matter what was said or done by the administration, it would be interpreted as intervention and would actually undercut severely the position of the reformists as they would be tagged as 'tools of the West,'" he said in an interview Monday with the Council on Foreign Relations.

But the upheaval in Iran nonetheless poses an additional hurdle for the Obama administration's attempt to engage the Islamic Republic diplomatically regarding its nuclear programme.

While it is not clear that the election and its aftermath alter the basic strategic calculus on the nuclear issue – a central issue in Obama's engagement strategy – they almost certainly will alter the political balance of power here, by bolstering anti-Iran hawks and undercutting domestic support for engagement.

"A shamelessly engineered [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad election victory would doubtless magnify already rather significant popular American qualms about negotiating with parties like the Iranian president," warned Wayne White, a former top Middle East analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

"Even more importantly, this also would likely eat into Congressional support for U.S.- Iranian dialogue," he wrote.

Already, many hawks have seized upon the disputed election – and the widespread belief that the results were fraudulent – as proof that Iran's leadership is too aggressive and unreliable to be engaged.

"The vote should prompt Mr. Obama to rethink his pursuit of a grand nuclear bargain with Iran, though early indications suggest he plans to try anyway," the Wall Street Journal’s neo-conservative editorial page complained Monday.

The Journal suggested that Obama should send a message by "remov[ing] his opposition" to pending legislation that would impose sanctions on companies exporting refined petroleum products to Iran.

Meanwhile, independent Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, who is widely regarded as a neo-conservative on foreign policy issues, called on the administration to "speak out, loudly and clearly, about what is happening in Iran right now, and unambiguously express their solidarity" with the protesters.

With the situation in Iran in continued flux, however, most observers in Washington, including the administration itself, are taking a "wait-and-see" approach for the moment.

It remains unclear how much support the protesters have, whether a formal review by the regime's Guardian Council ordered Monday by Khamenei of the election results may yet alter the official outcome – or whether the election was, in fact, stolen in the first place.

On Monday evening, Obama told reporters that he was "deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television", while offering reassurances that "it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be" and that the U.S. "respect[s] Iranian sovereignty".

"To those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was", Obama continued. "And they should know that the world is watching".

Obama also pledged to continue his engagement strategy regardless of the election results.

"I’ve always believed that as odious as I consider some of President Ahmadinejad’s statements, as deep as the differences that exist between the United States and Iran on a range of core issues, that the use of tough, hard-headed diplomacy – diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries – is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests", he said.

That assessment appears for now to reflect the majority view, at least among Iran specialists and most of the foreign-policy establishment here.

"I think that the diplomatic outreach should continue as it started," wrote F. Gregory Gause, a Gulf specialist at the University of Vermont, at the Foreign Policy website. "American interests here are not about Iranian domestic politics. They are about Iran's role in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, the Arab-Israeli arena, and the nuclear programme."

"America deals with all sorts of governments whose domestic arrangements are, to put it mildly, less than compatible with American ideals. (The Saudis are Exhibit A)," Gause added.

But even some realists who have strongly supported engagement have said that the regime's behaviour in the last few days has given them pause.

"Washington now faces a newly fractured Iranian polity ruled by a leadership that is willing to jettison its own institutions and legitimacy in its determination to retain absolute control," according to Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former State Department Iran specialist who still backs diplomacy.

"That does not bode well for Iran's capacity to undertake serious talks and eventually engage in historic concessions on its nuclear programme and support for terrorism," she said.

White, another consistent engagement backer, also suggested that the continued silence of Obama and other western leaders carried risks of its own.

The failure to speak out "is sending [an] unfortunate signal, especially to the many protesters evidently disappointed that the international community has remained so silent, [and] giving the impression that… it probably will be business as usual with Tehran once the dust has settled."

"[T]here is every reason to believe… that at the end of these unpleasant events, Ahmadinejad will be president and Iranian hardliners in power perhaps more confident and brazen in their behaviour than before," White wrote Monday.

Meanwhile, neo-conservative hardliners here have taken the election crisis – and the internal conflicts within the regime that it exposed – as an opportunity to press their own nightmare scenarios.

"The danger… is that if the regime ever collapses under its own weight, the ideologues who would have custody over the nuclear programme might decide to launch, figuring both that they're not long for the world anyway and so have nothing to lose," Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) told National Review Online.

*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jun 11 2009 (IPS)

Wednesday’s killing of a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by an elderly white supremacist is the latest incident in what many see as a potential new wave of right-wing violence triggered, at least in part, by the election of President Barack Obama and the economic downturn.

While it is Islamic terrorism that has dominated U.S. government and media attention in recent years, the Holocaust Museum shooting – which comes on the heels of the assassination of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller and a controversial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report on the threat of right-wing violence – has put homegrown terrorism back on the public radar, perhaps more so than at any point since the 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

The possible resurgence of far-right extremism in the U.S. – which tends to be at once anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, racist, and xenophobic – threatens to disrupt the familiar framework of what the George W. Bush administration called the “war on terror”.

Although some commentators have sought to portray the Holocaust Museum killing as related to, or even the product of, anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, most experts argue that the white supremacist culture that produced the nearly 90-year-old assailant, James von Brunn, is more accurately viewed as an outgrowth of traditional right-wing militant white nationalism than of Muslim anti-Semitism.

The killings in Kansas and Washington have also raised controversy about whether more mainstream right-wing media, such as the popular radio and television talk shows of Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, have helped foster the recent spate of violence.

Von Brunn was wounded and taken into custody Wednesday at the museum, less than one km from the White House, after shooting guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, who was African American. U.S. media soon began poring through von Brunn’s writings, in which he expressed hatred toward Jews and African-Americans and denied the Holocaust.

Soon after, right-wing pundits with a reputation as hardline supporters of Israel and critics of Islam began linking von Brunn’s actions to Muslim anti-Semitism.

“Make no mistake. Muslims created this atmosphere where hatred of the Jews is okay and must be ‘tolerated’ as a legitimate point of view,” wrote right-wing political commentator Debbie Schlussel. “The shooting today is just yet another manifestation emanating from that viewpoint”.

Similarly, Jennifer Laslo Mizrahi, president of the hardline pro-Israel group, The Israel Project, wrote that the anti-Semitic materials produced by a militant group linked to von Brunn “looked similar to those being used frequently in the Arab world today and in the official media of some American allies, including the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

“The words reminded me of the rhetoric of the president of Iran, who denies the Holocaust,” she concluded.

But veteran analysts of the U.S. far right generally dismissed the idea of a link between Islam and white supremacist violence.

“I’m very sceptical of the claim that the anti-Semitism of a small segment of the Muslim population spurred a white supremacist into action,” Chip Berlet, a longtime observer of right-wing groups at Boston-based Political Research Associates (PRA), told IPS. “I think that’s among the least likely motivations.”

Berlet, like others, argues that the growing radicalism of more mainstream right-wing media has contributed to the current far-right violence.

“You have demagogic right-wing pundits that point out scapegoats ranging from abortion providers, to gay people, to Muslims, to Mexican immigrants. This creates a toxic environment in which some people decide they must act, and some of those will be violent,” Berlet said.

O’Reilly, the widely-watched Fox News host, came under intense criticism following the May 31 killing of Tiller, one of the few doctors in the U.S. – and the only in Kansas – who performed late-term abortions, allegedly by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. O’Reilly had frequently denounced Tiller on his show as a “baby killer”.

In April, a DHS report on the threat of far-right terrorism was leaked to the press and provoked a media backlash from right-wing groups and Republican lawmakers who objected in particular to suggestions in the reports that military veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars could be particularly susceptible to targeted recruitment by violent extremists.

DHS head Janet Napolitano initially defended the report, saying that “[W]e don’t have the luxury of focusing our efforts on one group. We must protect the country from terrorism whether foreign or homegrown, and regardless of the ideology that motivates its violence.”

The DHS report warned that the “economic downturn and the election of the first African-American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalisation and recruitment”, an assessment that is echoed by many experts.

Those experts have warned since before Obama’s inauguration that those factors could well result in an upsurge in both organisation and violence by the far right. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Centre have noted a strong uptick in internet activity by such groups and individuals and some increase in assaults on Jewish targets, in particular.

“The shooting at the Holocaust Museum is part of a wave of hate targeting Jews and Jewish institutions and others,” said ADL’s long-time director, Abraham Foxman, Thursday.

“I am more concerned with the threat from the Christian-identity groups than the home-grown Islamic terrorists,” Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the New York-based John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the Washington Times. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen. The fact that (von Brunn) did what he did may be symptomatic of things to come.”

Armed supremacist or far-right groups largely faded into the background after the Oklahoma City bombing, as the federal authorities cracked down hard against them. But with the 9/11 attacks, the domestic intelligence agency shifted their focus toward Islamic groups. An internal DHS-FBI assessment of threats excluded any mention of militias, white-supremacist groups, and violent anti-abortion activists.

Von Brunn’s views of Jews and African Americans are typical of traditional U.S. white supremacists, stressed Berlet.

“They are rooted in conspiracy theories that originated with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion early in the last century,” he said. “After World War II [of which von Brunn was a veteran], when black soldiers returned to the U.S. and demanded their rights, the same groups believed that the crafty Jews were putting blacks and other people of colour into power in American society.”

“Jews and blacks in the White House – that’s threatening to someone who believes that blacks are sub-human and Jews are the children of the devil,” Jack Levin, a criminologist from Boston’s Northeastern University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Tuesday. “The Obama effect (has) generated a backlash of white supremacy.”

Much as in Europe, where far-right candidates made unprecedented gains in the elections to the European Parliament last weekend, may also be contributing to the rise of the far right, according to experts.

Jim Cavanaugh, a 34-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and heads of the Bureau’s Nashville office, told the Washington Post in January that a combination of the internet, immigration and the economic crisis was “molten mixture for these guys. That is the furnace of hate,” he said. “As we speak, this is happening.”

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jun 10 2009 (IPS)

Washington is waiting anxiously on the outcome of Friday’s Iranian presidential elections, as incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attempts to fend off challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi in a contest with significant implications for the diplomatic atmosphere between Iran and the U.S.

Experts say that the concrete policy impact of the elections may not be particularly great from a U.S. perspective. Both leading candidates support a civilian nuclear programme, and the president’s influence on foreign policy in general – although a matter of some debate – is relatively small compared to that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Nevertheless, the overall tone of the U.S.-Iran relationship is likely to be affected by whether Ahmadinejad, whose confrontational style has helped stoke tensions and made him a favourite target for hawks in the U.S., is re-elected.

As the campaign comes down to the wire, a great deal of uncertainty remains about the outcome. In addition to Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, an elder statesman who was Iran’s prime minister during the 1980s, other candidates include former Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commander Mohsen Rezai and former Majles speaker Mehdi Karroubi.

Fairly or unfairly, the election is also likely to be taken as an indicator of the prospects for success of U.S. President Barack Obama’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran, with the two reformist-leaning candidates, Karroubi and Mousavi, emphasising dialogue with the West.

In the U.S., hawks – who have generally been sceptical of Obama’s outreach and have urged him to act against Iran’s uranium enrichment by moving quickly to harsher measures such as sanctions – have been hammering home the point that Khamenei calls all the shots.

"Iran’s presidents are more cheerleader-in-chief than commander-in-chief," prominent Iran hawk Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Clawson argues that the elections matter only because they give the international community a window into Khamenei’s thinking.

But others suggest that although Khamenei may set the broad outlines of Iranian foreign policy, the president has more latitude in implementing this policy than is sometimes recognised.

For instance, the president will appoint the diplomats who would engage in potential negotiations with the West.

"For all their differences on Ahmadinejad’s policies, all the candidates back continuation of uranium enrichment," Robin Wright of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars said last week at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace panel.

"But it is true that the emphasis, the atmospherics, the climate, the style and the civility of both foreign and domestic policy could change enormously depending on who wins," Wright added.

The fact that Iran hawks in the U.S. are emphasising the relative unimportance of Iran’s presidency may be a sign that they have begun to take seriously the possibility of a Mousavi victory.

During Ahmadinejad’s tenure, those pushing confrontation with Tehran generally preferred to highlight the president at the expense of the Supreme Leader, as Ahmadinejad’s controversial statements provoked an international uproar and helped foster alarm about the Islamic Republic.

Ahmadinejad has been favoured to win reelection throughout the campaign, but anecdotal evidence has suggested that Mousavi’s support is surging in the final days. On Tuesday, a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands demonstrated on a Tehran thoroughfare in support of Mousavi.

The movement around Mousavi has grown through the use of internet social media such as Facebook, which was briefly banned by Ahmadinejad’s authorities before being reinstated, and text messages, which were used to get the word out about Tuesday’s rally.

The tactic may be paying off – Mousavi appears to be mobilising young voters, especially in the usually-apathetic urban centres. Some 60 percent of Iranian are under 30 years old – meaning they have no memory of the time before the Islamic Revolution.

Agence France-Presse reported that the electoral committee was expecting a record number of the 46.2 million eligible voters to turnout on Friday, which will likely benefit Mousavi.

Some recent polls have also put Mousavi in the lead, although polling in Iran is notoriously unreliable.

Recent government-funded polls have found that 16 to 18 million Iranians favour Mousavi, while only 8 million support Ahmadinejad, Newsweek magazine reported.

In any case, the Obama administration has suggested that it is waiting until after the elections to pursue diplomatic engagement with Tehran.

In May, Obama suggested that his administration would perform a "reassessment" at the end of the year to judge the progress of diplomacy, although he did not specify any particular benchmarks that would have to be met by that time.

The president is under a great deal of pressure from both hawks in the U.S. and the Israeli government to take a hard line against Tehran. The most frequent suggestion is for his administration to implement sanctions against companies exporting refined petroleum products to Iran if talks do not soon produce a breakthrough on the nuclear issue.

However, even some hawks question whether such sanctions would be effective. In a recent article in The New Republic, Michael Makovsky and Ed Morse – two members of a Bipartisan Policy Centre (BPC) task force that last year produced a hard-line report about the Iranian nuclear programme – argued that sanctions are "unlikely to have much of an impact".

Another member of the BPC task force was Dennis Ross, who is now the Obama administration’s special representative in charge of Iran.

Ross, who was the Bill Clinton administration’s top Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiator and maintains a close relationship with U.S. neoconservatives, has a reputation as the administration’s most prominent hawk on the Iranian nuclear issue. According to former National Security Council (NSC) staffers Flynt Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett, Ross has stated privately that military force against Iran will likely be necessary, and that the primary reason to engage in diplomacy is to built support for military action.

But how much support Ross’s views command within the administration remains unknown, with some suggesting that he is an outlier whose chief role will be to "sell" any U.S.-Iranian deal to Israel.

"[The Obama administration] wants to try to deal with the Iranian government as a unitary actor, as opposed to how President Bill Clinton engaged reformers at the expense of hardliners, and President George W. Bush engaged the people at the expense of the regime," Iran expert Karim Sadjapour of the Carnegie Endowment told IPS.

Indeed, Obama has repeatedly referred to Iran by its official name, "the Islamic Republic of Iran", a formulation shunned by the Bush administration and by hardliners with designs of regime change in Tehran.

Obama’s remarks in Cairo about Iran were notably conciliatory. He became the first president to acknowledge the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that overthrew democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright acknowledged as much in 2000), and refrained from commenting on Friday’s election, saying, "We would never presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election."

Obama also stated that Iran "should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty", while reiterating his opposition to an Iranian nuclear weapon.

On Monday, the Boston Globe reported that the Obama administration was looking into creating a "fuel bank" administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which would provide an aboveboard system for countries looking to develop nuclear power to acquire fuel in a monitored setting.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Jun 3 2009 (IPS)

As U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to deliver a major foreign policy speech in Cairo and his administration pushes aggressively for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, neoconservatives and other foreign policy hawks back home are calling on him to scrap the two-state solution altogether and consider alternatives to Palestinian statehood.

The most prominent alternative they are pushing is the so-called "three-state solution" or "Jordanian option", in which the West Bank would be returned to Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip to Egyptian control.

Although calls for a "three-state solution" have cropped up periodically over the years and have been dismissed by most Middle East experts as unrealistic, in recent weeks the three-state approach has received an unusual amount of attention and support on the right.

Part of the reason for this sudden willingness to reevaluate the Middle East peace process may lie in the Obama administration's strong push to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a result of this push, those who could previously offer token support for the two-state solution while remaining confident that it was a remote possibility are now faced with the threat that it may actually become a reality.

The newfound appeal of the three-state approach was evident on Wednesday, when the Heritage Foundation – arguably Washington's most prominent conservative think tank – hosted a conference devoted to alternatives to the two-state solution.

The Heritage event, which was sponsored by right-wing U.S. casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, came only two weeks after right-of-centre Israeli parties hosted a similar conference in Jerusalem.

The keynote speaker at Wednesday's event was Senator Sam Brownback, a prominent Kansas Republican who ran for president in 2008.

Brownback argued that the past 16 years have proven the futility of prioritising Palestinian statehood. "It just doesn't work, and it's time to move on," he said.

He suggested that a better option would be for the West Bank and Gaza Strip to each "pursue confederation with its respective contiguous Arab neighbour".

Brownback also argued that the U.S. should use its economic leverage over the Arab states to persuade them to absorb Palestinian refugees, thereby preventing them from "threaten[ing] Israel with the false concept of a 'right of return'".

Other speakers echoed Brownback's call to consider the "Jordanian option".

Israeli Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a leading "three-state" advocate who was also featured at the Jerusalem conference in May, claimed that "the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is too small to create two viable states". He suggested incorporating the West Bank into a "United States of Jordan", with political and military authority concentrated in Amman.

Alternately, Eiland suggested that Egypt could cede territory from the Sinai Desert that would be joined to the Gaza Strip. This would increase the viability of Gaza, he claimed, while also compensating the Palestinians for territory in the West Bank that Israel would incorporate in order to maintain control of its settlements.

The idea of Israel ceding control of the occupied territories to its Arab neighbours has been discussed for decades, ever since Israel seized the territories from Jordan and Egypt during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

But Israeli hawks and their neoconservative allies in the U.S. have shown a newfound fondness for the idea in recent years, as the costs of occupation have come to seem increasingly untenable and Palestinian leadership has split between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

During the Gaza war in January, the three-state approach was endorsed by prominent U.S. hawks such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton (who acknowledged that the idea "would be decidedly unpopular in Egypt and Jordan") and Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, who also spoke at the Heritage event.

Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs sought to differentiate the proposals being made at Wednesday's event from the traditional conception of the "Jordanian option", in which Jordan would reassume full sovereignty over the West Bank.

"If there was a Jordanian here, he would be terrified by this discussion, because he'd think… [we're] discussing the alternative homeland solution, the nightmare to the Hashemite kingdom," Diker said.

"So I'd like to say for the record that we're not talking about the Jordanian option. We're talking about a new animal, and the animal is a combination of federal and con-federal cooperation between the Hashemite kingdom, the Palestinian authority, and Israel."

Still, many experts view the three-state approach in any form as wildly unrealistic.

Marc Lynch of George Washington University called the approach a "zombie idea", since it "reappears like clockwork whenever there's an Israeli-Palestinian crisis" despite being deeply unpopular with Jordanians, Egyptians, and Palestinians alike.

"The Jordan option, the Egypt-Gaza option, the 'three-state solution' – these are fantasies which have little to do with the real problems on the ground or feasible solutions to this intractable conflict," Lynch wrote in January on the website of Foreign Policy magazine.

Fantasy or not, the sudden flood of events and discussion suggests that variations on the three-state approach are becoming more, not less, popular on the U.S. right.

The Heritage event was the most prominent U.S. forum for the idea's supporters in recent memory. In addition to Brownback, notable speakers included former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director R. James Woolsey, and Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican congressman from Colorado, was also in attendance.

The Jordanian option's newfound popularity comes as the Obama administration has signaled that it plans to make the two-state solution a top foreign policy priority.

While the George W. Bush administration endorsed two states, it proved unwilling to push Israel to make any concessions towards this goal.

Obama, by contrast, has already pushed Israel in blunt terms to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank – something the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has pointedly refused to endorse Palestinian statehood, is unwilling to do.

As a result, the U.S. and Israel appear to many observers to be headed for their most heated diplomatic spat in years, and the two-state solution has become a pressing and divisive issue.

Most hardline supporters of Israel in the U.S. have so far been reluctant to attack the idea of the two-state solution itself, arguing instead that Obama should put the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on the back burner and focus on stopping the Iranian nuclear programme.

Nevertheless, the recent conferences in Washington and Jerusalem suggest that as the U.S. pushes harder for two states, hardliners are growing bolder in questioning the very desirability of Palestinian statehood.

On the other side of the political spectrum, there has been growing talk of a "one-state solution" in the form of a binational state in which Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal political rights.

The one-state solution, which was pointedly ignored in the recent Washington and Jerusalem conferences on alternatives to the two-state solution, was recently the subject of its own conference, held in Boston in March.

Obama's clash with Netanyahu over settlements has set the stage for his speech in Cairo on Thursday, in which the president plans to set forth his vision for a new relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

By all accounts, the president views resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a central step in improving this relationship,and he has suggested that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front would aid the U.S. in dealing with Iran.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, May 29 2009 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting on Thursday with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas was less remarkable for the actual talks between the two leaders than it was for the changed Washington political climate in which it took place.

The meeting between Obama and Abbas seemed to contain no real surprises, as both leaders reiterated their past calls for a two-state solution. The pro forma tone of Abbas’s visit reflected a political reality in which the PA is seen to be largely sidelined, and far more attention is being paid to the interactions between the U.S. and Israeli governments.

But as Abbas made his visit, the clash between Obama and Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was heating up. This week saw the Obama administration call on Israel to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank in language that was unprecedented for its bluntness, while the Netanyahu government continued to reject the idea of a settlement freeze.

Perhaps even more significantly, prominent Israel supporters in the U.S. Congress – traditionally a bastion of support for right-wing Israeli governments – appear to be siding with the Obama administration.

“The Israelis are looking at their best friends in Congress, who are Democrats, and they’re supporting their Democratic president”, M.J. Rosenberg, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, told IPS.

“We are a stalwart ally of Israel and it is in our interests to assure that Israel is safe and secure,” Obama told reporters after meeting privately with Abbas. “It is our belief that the best way to achieve that is to create the conditions on the ground and set the stage for a Palestinian state as well.”

Several times, Obama noted that progress toward a Palestinian state was in the U.S.’s interests as well as Israel’s, and he cautioned that “time was of the essence” to implement a two-state solution.

For his part, Abbas reiterated the PA’s willingness to fulfill its obligations under the 2002 “road map” for peace, and stated that he had shared ideas for peace with Obama that were based on the road map and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002.

He also expressed interest in resuming peace negotiations with Israel, but reaffirmed that these negotiations must be aimed at implementing a two-state solution, which Netanyahu has refused to endorse.

At the moment, Abbas is widely seen as a marginalised figure, dependent on the U.S. and Israel to grant concessions that would build up his diminished credibility among the Palestinians.

“The best news for the Palestinians was that little was asked of them, and the worst news for the Palestinians was that little was asked of them,” former U.S. peace negotiator Robert Malley told IPS. “It’s not necessarily a good sign if you’re the party that isn’t being asked to do anything.”

On the eve of Abbas’s visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.”

Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak have stated that they are willing to evacuate outposts – improvised settlements that both sides agree are illegal – but refuse to curb expansion due to “natural growth”. Since all settlement expansion in recent years has been ascribed to “natural growth”, critics say that such an exception would strip a settlement freeze of any force.

While U.S. presidents have for decades called for an end to settlement activity, Clinton’s statement was notable for its blunt tone. An anonymous confidant of Netanyahu told Foreign Policy’s Laura Rozen that the right-wing prime minister had reacted to Clinton statement by asking, “What the hell do they want from me?”

On Wednesday, Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev said that “normal life” – a euphemism for natural growth construction – would continue while negotiations with the Palestinians were ongoing.

Many experts are also noting a changed tone on Capitol Hill, as congressmen with a reputation as pro-Israel hawks – many with close ties to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby group – are showing a new willingness to press the Netanyahu government.

Last week, a five-person congressional delegation headed by Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Jewish Democrat from New York known as a fervent supporter of Israel, visited Jerusalem and expressed concern over settlement expansion and the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported.

“Obama is choosing to take on the Likud government on the issue that’s the soft underbelly of the Israeli position – settlements,” Rosenberg told IPS. “Most Jewish groups don’t support them, nor do most Jewish members of congress.”

Nevertheless, Rosenberg said that he does not expect to see a full-blown clash between Obama and Netanyahu.

“A head to head clash that’s played out in the newspapers and blogs is not in anyone’s interest,” he said. “Still, I would expect that if Netanyahu does not start playing ball, the Israelis will sense a chill, even if we don’t pick it up here.”

While Obama appears to enjoy strong support from Congress and from the U.S. Jewish community at the moment, it remains unclear whether he would be willing to flex political muscle against Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister remains uncooperative.

At Thursday’s event with Abbas, Obama was asked how he might respond if Israel didn’t end its settlement activities.

“I think it’s important not to assume the worst, but to assume the best,” said Obama, adding, “And that conversation [with Netanyahu] only took place last week.”

“If they do nothing in response to Israeli recalcitrance, they’re going to be seen as feckless,” former U.S. peace negotiator Aaron David Miller told IPS. “But if they go to war with the Israelis, it’s going to have a whole bunch of other consequences.”

“Unless these statements [against settlement construction] are followed by decisive action – perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel – there’s no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective,” wrote Ali Abuminah, a co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website, in the Nation magazine.

A U.S. move to cut aid to Israel might cause a showdown similar to the one that occurred in the early 1990s, when President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, threatened to withhold 10 billion dollars in loan guarantees to Israel unless settlement construction ended.

Bush and Baker ultimately backed down, and U.S presidents since then have been reluctant to risk a repeat of that clash.

In any case, the current skirmishing between the U.S. and Israeli governments has left Abbas on the sidelines.

Most experts argue that a genuine settlement freeze would bolster the standing of Abbas and his Fatah faction, who are facing a crisis of legitimacy among the Palestinians, by demonstrating their ability to secure concrete concessions from Israel.

The possibility of a unity government between Fatah, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, remains a pressing issue, but there has been little progress toward this goal in recent weeks.

On Thursday, Obama praised Abbas for refusing to form a unity government with Hamas until it agrees to renounce violence, recognise Israel, and abide by all previous peace agreements.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, May 22 2009 (IPS)

After an uneventful first meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that seemed to produce no real breakthroughs, hawks in the U.S. and Israel are seizing upon what they claim is a significant concession by Obama: his setting a "timetable" for negotiations with Iran.

Although Obama merely promised a "reassessment" of the situation at the end of the year without providing any benchmarks for progress, in the days since Monday’s meeting those pushing for tougher measures against Iran’s nuclear programme have portrayed his remarks as setting a hard-and-fast cutoff point for diplomacy.

By attaching so much importance to the end-of-year assessment, the Iran hawks – many of whom have publicly supported a significantly earlier deadline – may hope to box the president in politically, setting up a December showdown on Iran policy whether Obama likes it or not.

A relatively short Iran timetable would also suit Netanyahu, who has sought to make the Iranian nuclear programme a higher priority than the Israel-Palestinian peace process and who notably offered no real concessions on the Palestinian front in his meeting with Obama.

On Monday, Obama told reporters that "it is important for us, I think, without having set an artificial deadline, to be mindful of the fact that we're not going to have talks forever".

"My expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian elections, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there's a good faith effort to resolve differences," Obama continued.

"That doesn't mean every issue would be resolved by that point, but it does mean that we'll probably be able to gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year of this approach," he said.

Obama did not set any benchmarks that would have to be met for the administration to judge that discussions were "moving in the right direction", nor did he threaten any specific consequences if talks did not result in progress. This was in keeping with his administration’s stated desire to move away from the "carrots and sticks" approach of incentives and threats, which Iranian officials have called insulting.

"[The end-of-year reassessment] all amounts to nothing," wrote M.J. Rosenberg, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, at the website TPMCafe. "Of course, he will assess how his diplomacy is working and, of course, he would never (publicly) rule out the use of force. This is what Obama always says and said during the campaign."

Similarly, some prominent Iran hawks were sceptical that Obama’s comments implied any real deadline.

"Obama has provided no metric by which to judge progress," wrote Michael Rubin, a neoconservative Iran analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). "If there is a 1 percent chance that talks might advance, will Obama grant a 90-day extension?"

More frequently, however, Iran hawks sought to promote the idea that Obama had endorsed a fixed timetable for diplomacy, and that – barring a major breakthrough – the administration would turn to punitive measures by the end of the year.

"The timeline that [Obama] set openly was that if by the end of the year there is no indication of significant movement with Iran, it's over, and he will turn to strong sanctions," said influential neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal conceded that Obama’s actual statement was far less definite, but argued that "every single media takeaway" took the statement as evidence for a hard deadline, and that Obama sent a message that "they’re going to move to sanctions" at the end of the year.

Indeed, a great deal of mainstream news coverage reflected the hawkish spin that Obama had caved to Netanyahu and set a strict timetable for diplomacy.

The New York Times, for instance, claimed on Wednesday that "Netanyahu got his timetable… [b]ut Obama did not get his settlement freeze" in the West Bank in return. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz went so far as to claim that, "Netanyahu agreed to give Obama until the end of the year" to halt the Iranian nuclear programme.

The Netanyahu government and its allies in the U.S. have been pressuring Obama from the moment he entered office to cut short his diplomatic outreach to Tehran and move swiftly to a stepped-up sanctions programme.

The Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), a bill currently moving through the U.S. Congress, would require Obama to impose sanctions on foreign firms exporting refined petroleum products to Iran. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington’s powerful and hawkish pro-Israel lobby, has been pushing strongly for the bill in Congress.

Even an end-of-year deadline would be significantly later than what most Iran hawks have been urging. Many, such as Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican who is co-sponsoring the IRPSA, have argued that the U.S should wait no later than the summer before turning to sanctions.

Since Iran’s presidential elections will not be held until Jun. 12, a summer deadline would have permitted only a few weeks of post-election diplomacy before the onset of sanctions.

If the notion of an end-of-year deadline for diplomacy becomes conventional wisdom, it may well pave the way for a showdown in December over whether negotiations are "moving in the right direction".

Hardliners in Israel and the U.S. are likely to argue that nothing short of a full suspension of uranium enrichment by Iran – a concession that most experts feel Iran is unlikely to make – would constitute sufficient progress to stave off sanctions.

One subject that went unmentioned at the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, but seemed to be on everyone’s mind in Washington, was the possibility that Israel might unilaterally attack Iranian nuclear facilities if it is not satisfied with the rate of progress.

In March, a Netanyahu advisor told The Atlantic that "if we have to act, we will act, even if America won’t". By contrast, top Obama administration officials – including Vice President Joe Biden, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen – have cautioned that an Israeli attack on Iran would be counterproductive.

Although analysts may disagree about the significance of Obama’s "timetable" remarks, few would contest the fact that Netanyahu refused to budge on the Palestinian front.

Many had expected the Israeli prime minister to offer at least a nominal statement of support for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, but he pointedly did not. Nor did Netanyahu acknowledge the Obama administration’s calls to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank.

On Thursday, the Israeli government dismantled one illegal West Bank outpost, but Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak claimed that the action was not due to U.S. pressure, and the settlers immediately began rebuilding the outpost without resistance.

More significantly, Netanyahu on Thursday reiterated his claim that Jerusalem "shall never be divided". Since all proposals for a two-state solution are built around East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, Netanyahu’s statement marked an explicit rejection of the two-state formula endorsed by the U.S.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, May 10 2009 (IPS)

A potentially major clash appears to be developing between powerful factions inside and outside the U.S. government, pitting those who see the Afghanistan/Pakistan (“AfPak”) theatre as the greatest potential threat to U.S. national security against those who believe that the danger posed by a nuclear Iran must be given priority.

The Iran hawks, concentrated within the Israeli government and its U.S. supporters in the so-called “Israel lobby” here, want to take aggressive action against Iran’s nuclear programme by moving quickly to a stepped-up sanctions regime.

Many suggest that Israel or the U.S. may ultimately have to use military force against Tehran if President Barack Obama’s diplomatic efforts at engagement do not result at least in a verifiable freeze – if not a rollback – of the programme by the end of the year.

Their opponents appear to be concentrated at the Pentagon, where top leaders are more concerned with providing a level of regional stability that will allow the U.S. to wind down its operations in Iraq, step up its counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan, and, above all, ensure the security of the Pakistani state and its nuclear weapons.

In their view, any attack on Iran would almost certainly throw the entire region into even greater upheaval. Both Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have repeatedly and publicly warned over the past year against any moves that would further destabilise the region.

Other key administration players are believed to share this view, including senior military officers such as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Adm. Dennis Blair and Gen. Douglas Lute, the “war czar” whose White House portfolio includes both Iraq and South Asia.

The divide between these factions was on vivid display this past week, when Washington played host to two high-profile – and dissonant – events.

First, top U.S. and Israeli leaders were out in force at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful and hawkish lobby group, where attendees heard a steady drumbeat of dire warnings about the “existential threat” to Israel of an Iranian bomb and calls for increased sanctions – and occasionally even military force – against Tehran.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan were rarely mentioned at the conference, which instead stressed hopes for building a U.S.-led coalition against Tehran that would include both Israel and “moderate” Sunni-led Arab states.

But just as more than 6,000 AIPAC delegates fanned out Wednesday across Capitol Hill to press their lawmakers to sign on to tough anti-Iran sanctions legislation, the arrival of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari for summit talks with Obama and other top officials focused attention on the deteriorating situation in both countries.

The surface cordiality of Karzai’s and Zardari’s visits masked the fact that the U.S. has grown increasingly worried about the ability of either leader to combat their respective Taliban insurgencies.

Most indications are that the Obama administration, including Obama himself and Vice President Joe Biden, sides with the Pentagon, at least for now.

But the AIPAC conference, which was attended by more than half of the members of the U.S. Congress and featured speeches by the top Congressional leadership of both parties, served as a reminder that Iran hawks within the Israel lobby have a strong foothold in the legislative branch, and may be able to push Iran to the top of the foreign-policy agenda whether the administration likes it or not.

Obama pledged during the presidential campaign that he would give AfPak – which he then called the “central front in the war on terror” – top priority, and, since taking office, he has made good on that promise.

He appointed a powerful special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, with a broad mandate to take charge of U.S. diplomacy in the region. Holbrooke, who met briefly with a senior Iranian official during a conference at The Hague in late March, has said several times that Tehran has an important role to play in stabilising Afghanistan.

At the same time, Mullen, the U.S. military chief, has been virtually “commuting” to and from the region to meet with his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, Holbrooke noted in Congressional testimony this week.

Given its preoccupation with AfPak and with stabilising the region as a whole, the Pentagon has naturally been disinclined to increase tensions with Iran, which shares lengthy borders with Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and could easily make life significantly more difficult for the U.S. in each of the three countries.

But the new Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear programme, and his allies in the U.S. have similarly argued that Iran should be a top priority.

For the moment, the Iran hawks have mostly expressed muted – if highly sceptical – support for Obama’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran. But they have warned that this outreach must have a “short and hard end date”, as Republican Sen. Jon Kyl put it at the AIPAC conference, at which point the U.S. must turn to harsher measures.

AIPAC’s current top legislative priority is a bill, co-sponsored by Kyl and key Democrats, that would require Obama to impose sanctions on foreign firms that export refined petroleum products to Iran.

In recent Congressional testimony, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the administration would support such “crippling” sanctions against Tehran if diplomacy did not work, but she declined to say how long the administration would permit diplomatic efforts to play out before taking stronger action.

While sanctions seem to be the topic du jour, the possibility of military action against Tehran remains on everybody’s mind, as does the question of whether Israel would be willing to strike Iranian nuclear facilities without Washington’s approval.

In March, Netanyahu told The Atlantic that “if we have to act, we will act, even if America won’t.”

Asked at the AIPAC conference whether Israel would attack Iran without a “green light” from the U.S., former Israeli deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh joked that in Israel, stoplight signals are “just a recommendation.”

By contrast, Pentagon officials have made little secret of their opposition. In late April, Gates told the Senate Appropriations committee that a military strike would only delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability while “send[ing] the programme deeper and more covert”.

Last month, Mullen told the Wall Street Journal that an Israeli attack would pose “exceptionally high risks” to U.S. interests in the region. (Although the newspaper chose not to publish this part of the interview, Mullen’s office provided a record to IPS.)

Similarly, Biden told CNN in April that an Israeli military strike against Tehran would be “ill-advised”. And former National Security Advisor (NSA) Brent Scowcroft, who is close to both Gates and the current NSA, ret. Gen. James Jones, told a conference here late last month that such an attack would be a “disaster for everybody.”

For the moment, the top Pentagon leadership’s resistance to an attack on Iran appears to be playing a major role in shaping the debate in Washington.

Gates “is a bulwark against those who want to go to war in Iran or give the green light for Israel to go to war”, said former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski last month.

Others dispute the idea, proposed by Netanyahu in his speech to AIPAC, that the Iranian threat can unite Israel and the Arab states.

“The Israeli notion making the rounds these days that Arab fears of Iran might be the foundation for an alignment of interest is almost certainly wrong,” wrote Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, on the Foreign Policy website.

“Nothing would unite Arab opinion faster than an Israeli attack on Iran. The only thing which might change that would be serious movement towards a two state solution [in Israel-Palestine].”

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

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, May 5 2009 (IPS)

The annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful and hawkish pro-Israel lobby, wrapped up on Tuesday with a speech from Vice President Joe Biden, capping three days that were primarily devoted to the threat of a nuclear Iran.

Discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East peace process took a back seat to the Iran issue at the conference, which ended with attendees heading to Capitol Hill to lobby for a bill that would impose sanctions targeting the Iranian energy sector.

While representatives of the Barack Obama administration, the Benjamin Netanyahu government in Israel, and AIPAC itself all sought to emphasise points of consensus and cooperation at the conference, it remains to be seen whether the various parties will be on the same page going forward.

The Obama administration has given high priority to diplomacy with Iran and a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine, but the Netanyahu government has shown distinctly less enthusiasm for these goals, and the mood at the AIPAC conference suggested that most attendees shared Netanyahu’s scepticism.

The conference drew an estimated 6,500 attendees, as well as more than half of the members of the U.S. Congress and numerous U.S. and Israeli political luminaries. It was a stark reminder that although AIPAC may have come under increasing fire in recent years, the group remains a force to be reckoned with in Washington.

Speakers included Biden, Israeli President Shimon Peres, U.S. Senator John Kerry, former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and several top leaders from the U.S. Congress. Netanyahu addressed the conference via satellite, and other notables such as Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel were also in attendance.

During the day, attendees had their choice of a number of panels and information sessions. The Iranian issue loomed large, with six separate panels devoted to it; by contrast, only two panels focused on Palestine.

There were also a number of private panels and master classes that were off the record and closed to the press, with titles like “The Palestinians Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity: The History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”.

The conference’s rhetorical focus on the Iranian menace was in line with AIPAC’s current top legislative priority, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA).

On Tuesday, conference attendees went to Capitol Hill to lobby their representatives in support of the bill, which would require President Obama to impose sanctions on foreign firms exporting refined petroleum products to Iran.

AIPAC argues that the bill will strengthen Obama’s diplomatic outreach to Iran by providing him additional leverage, but other pro-Israel groups such as J Street and Americans for Peace Now have opposed the bill on the grounds that it would send mixed messages and undercut the administration’s diplomacy.

Most speakers at the conference expressed cautious support for Obama’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran, but warned that if it did not bear fruit quickly harsher measures would have to be taken. Sen. Jon Kyl, one of the lead sponsors of the sanctions bill, called for a “short and hard end date” for diplomacy. He and others suggested the summer as a deadline.

The Obama administration has not taken a public position on the legislation. In his speech at AIPAC on Tuesday, Biden alluded to the need to examine “other options” should diplomacy fail, but did not mention the word “sanctions”, which had been a constant refrain during the rest of the conference.

In the conference’s final two speeches, Biden and Kerry both reaffirmed the U.S.’s commitment to a two-state solution, and called on the Israeli government to halt or reverse settlement construction.

“You’re not going to like me saying this, but [do] not build those settlements. Dismantle existing outposts, and allow the Palestinians freedom of movement,” Biden said.

Biden’s prediction about the audience’s reaction appeared to be correct. While the crowd had welcomed him warmly and gave him several standing ovations, his statements about Israeli obligations garnered only scattered applause.

Similarly, Kerry’s calls to freeze settlements, strengthen the Palestinian Authority, and provide a “light at the end of the tunnel” for children in Gaza received a tepid reaction from the audience.

The lukewarm response to Biden’s and Kerry’s statements about the peace process was a reminder that a gulf may remain between AIPAC and the Obama administration.

AIPAC has traditionally been aligned with Netanyahu and his Likud party, and in the 1990s joined him in working to bring down the Oslo peace process behind the scenes, according to a March article by former AIPAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield.

Although AIPAC has broken with Netanyahu in supporting a two-state solution, the group has, like Netanyahu, made dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme a higher priority than the peace progress. The Obama administration, by contrast, has insisted that the two issues must go hand-in-hand.

For his part, Netanyahu told the conference that he supported a “triple track toward peace”, consisting of political, security, and economic measures, and stated that he was ready to resume peace negotiations without precondition. But he stopped short of endorsing a Palestinian state.

Others at the conference struck a more militant tone. Gingrich, the former Republican leader who remains an influential figure within the party, headlined the first day of the conference with a fiery speech calling for regime change in Tehran whose good-and-evil rhetoric recalled George W. Bush.

“We need to break the lawyer’s sophistry that all nations are equal,” Gingrich said. “There are some regimes you will never be able to cut a deal with because they are in fact evil.”

“Talking in good faith and seeking reconciliation with Adolf Hitler would have been a dead end, because he was the personification of evil. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, if he gets the weapons, will be every bit as evil as Hitler.”

Gingrich advocated preemptive military action to take out Iranian and North Korean missiles at their sites, and he supported the petroleum sanctions bill not in order to strengthen U.S. diplomacy but in order to “break” the Iranian economy and “oust the ayatollahs”.

His speech drew sustained applause from the audience, but was quickly denounced by J Street and other critics.

The AIPAC conference came only days after prosecutors moved to dismiss charges against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former AIPAC staffers who were fired and accused of violating the Espionage Act by receiving classified information and passing it to reporters and to the Israeli government.

The story took another turn in late April, when it was reported that Rep. Jane Harman, a powerful Democrat and AIPAC stalwart, had been caught on a government wiretap discussing an alleged “quid pro quo” deal, in which she would intercede with the Justice Department on Rosen and Weissman’s behalf in exchange for help in landing a top congressional intelligence post.

On Sunday, Harman made a defiant appearance at the AIPAC conference, in which she characterised herself as a “warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against the abuse of power”.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, May 3 2009 (IPS)

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington’s powerful and hawkish pro-Israel lobby, kicked off its annual policy conference this weekend during a period of unusual turbulence both for the organisation and for the U.S.-Israel relationship.

AIPAC won a notable victory on Friday, when prosecutors moved to dismiss charges against two former AIPAC staffers who had been accused of committing espionage violations by passing classified information to the Israeli government and to reporters.

But the group remains in a difficult position. It faces a multi-million-dollar lawsuit from the two staffers alleging that they were wrongfully terminated, and it has been swept up in the mushrooming scandal involving alleged espionage and influence-peddling centred upon Rep. Jane Harman.

More broadly, the administration of President Barack Obama appears set to clash with the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom AIPAC has long had close ties, putting the organisation at risk of appearing out of step with the U.S. government.

And the group has faced mounting criticism in recent years on charges that it skews U.S. policy toward Israel in a right-wing direction, and fails to represent the more moderate positions of most U.S. Jews. These concerns led to the formation last year of a rival and more dovish pro-Israel lobby, J Street.

But the AIPAC policy conference, held from May 3-5 in Washington, is a reminder of the considerable influence that the organisation still possesses.

A star-studded roster of lawmakers, including top leaders from both the Republican and Democratic parties, will appear to salute the group and the U.S.-Israel relationship.

These lawmakers will include Harman herself, who is still on the schedule despite the recent scrutiny of her activities, as well as Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and four top congressional leaders from both parties: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor.

Israeli President Shimon Peres will attend the conference, and Netanyahu himself will address it via satellite.

But the main focus of the conference is expected to be Iran rather than Israel-Palestine.

Netanyahu has argued that dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme should be a higher priority than the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and hawkish elements in the so-called “Israel lobby” in the U.S. have tended to support Netanyahu’s position.

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected that argument in congressional testimony in late April, arguing that progress on the Iran and Palestine fronts must go “hand-in-hand”.

Conference attendees will go to Capitol Hill to lobby for House and Senate bills that would let the president step up sanctions against foreign companies that sell gasoline and other refined petroleum products to Iran, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. Iran, despite vast reserves of crude oil, lacks refining capability and is reliant on imports to meet its domestic energy demand.

The bills were introduced last week in the Senate by Sens. Kyl, Evan Bayh, and Joe Lieberman and in the House by Rep. Howard Berman. Berman has stated that he will hold his sanctions bill in committee pending the administration’s negotiations with Iran.

Nonetheless, critics have denounced the bills for sending mixed messages that would undercut the administration’s diplomacy.

The Jewish group Americans for Peace Now, which is opposing the legislation, stated that it “risks weakening, rather than strengthening, the President’s hand as he begins engagement with Iran”. J Street, AIPAC’s recently-formed rival lobby, has also spoken out against the legislation.

The legislation is a reminder that AIPAC remains dominant in lobbying members of Congress. But it is the executive branch that is a bigger worry, as the Obama administration has already begun to contradict publicly the pronouncements of Netanyahu’s government and its controversial foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

Recent polls have suggested that the Obama administration enjoys strong support from both the U.S. population at large and the U.S. Jewish community on the key points of contention with the Netanyahu government, such as settlements in the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state.

AIPAC has traditionally been closely aligned with Netanyahu himself and with his Likud party, and a clash between the U.S. and Israeli governments would therefore put the group in an uncomfortable position.

J Street has already expressed concern about Avigdor Lieberman and the new Israeli government, and its supporters argue that their group is better positioned to represent the opinions of the U.S. Jewish community than groups that typically offer reflexive support for hawkish Israeli policies.

The AIPAC conference comes just days after prosecutors moved to drop charges against former AIPAC staffers Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman.

The two were indicted and fired from AIPAC in 2005 on allegations that they received classified information regarding Iran from a U.S. government source and passed it on to reporters and to the Israeli embassy.

Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon staffer who passed them the information, pled guilty to conspiracy in 2006 and was sentenced to over 12 years in prison.

Prosecutors decided to drop charges against Rosen and Weissman after a series of court rulings that diminished the prospects of winning a conviction. Notably, Judge T.S. Ellis III ruled that prosecutors would have to prove not merely that Rosen and Weissman sought to benefit Israel but that they sought to harm the U.S. – a standard that would have been very difficult to meet.

Now, Rosen and Weissman are filing suit against AIPAC, alleging that the group wrongfully terminated and publicly scapegoated them. They are seeking millions of dollars in damages.

The saga took another turn in late April when reports surfaced that Rep. Harman had been caught on a government wiretap agreeing to intercede on Rosen and Weissman’s behalf if her interlocutor – a suspected Israeli agent who has not been identified – helped lobby to get her a top congressional intelligence post.

According to subsequent reports in the New York Times, the suspected Israeli agent promised to get Haim Saban – a wealthy Israeli-American media tycoon and prominent AIPAC supporter – to withhold campaign contributions from Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi if she did not appoint Harman to the post.

The dismissal of charges against Rosen and Weissman would not necessarily defuse the charges against Harman, since the legality of such a “quid pro quo” deal, if true, would not depend on Rosen and Weissman’s guilt or innocence.

Still, the dropping of charges on the eve of the conference is likely a welcome relief for an organisation that has become increasingly embattled in recent years.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
NEW YORK, Apr 29 2009 (IPS)

“I have never experienced anti-Semitism myself, but it’s a phrase that always seems to be in the air,” begins Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir’s lively new documentary “Defamation”. “Three words seem to appear over and over again: Holocaust, Nazi, anti-Semitism.”

This phenomenon will be equally familiar to viewers in the U.S. Although by almost any measure the U.S is as friendly to Jews as any society in history, the media here is frequently filled with dire warnings about “ancient hatreds” ready to bubble over into genocide.

And although Israel’s hardline defenders in the U.S. concede that in theory criticism of the Jewish state is not synonymous with hatred of Jews, a number of recent controversies have revolved around accusations that various critics of Israel – political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, retired diplomat Charles Freeman, playwright Caryl Churchill – are in fact cunningly disguised anti-Semites.

In this environment, Shamir’s film – which opened last week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York – is a welcome breath of fresh air. While modest in style and lighthearted in tone, it packs a subversive punch.

Its implicit point is that anti-Semitism, at least in Israel and the U.S., is more smoke than fire. Conditioned to see Nazis in every shadow and behind every corner, Shamir seems to say, Jews in the U.S. and Israel often manufacture an anti-Semitism that they perversely want to find.

The film’s star, as it were, is Abraham Foxman, head of the venerable Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who is familiar to U.S. viewers for his frequent denunciations of various critics of Israel for anti-Semitism.

“Defamation” captures Foxman in his element – schmoozing with donors, heading ceremonies alongside Israeli politicians, browbeating foreign officials. It is not, however, a terribly flattering portrayal.

Foxman’s associates whisper behind his back that his views are extreme even by their standards, and an Orthodox Brooklyn rabbi flatly states that Foxman “has to create a problem because [he] needs a job”.

The film’s portrayal of the ADL tends to support the rabbi’s assessment. When pressed to detail recent anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S., an ADL employee can only come up with a few examples of employees who had difficulty getting time off for Jewish holidays. Finally, she settles on the case of a police officer who was overhead privately making a mildly disparaging reference to Jews – and then apologised profusely.

Foxman plainly has trouble reconciling his own power and influence with his vision of Jews as downtrodden victims of anti-Semitism. While being chauffeured to a meeting with Ukrainian government officials, he explains that they value him because of their perceptions of Jewish influence – which are themselves a sign of anti-Semitism. But if they think we have this power, he asks, why not use it?

Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery, who has a memorable cameo, puts it more accurately: if anti-Semitism were truly a major force in the U.S., Foxman and the rest of the Israel lobby would not be able to operate the way they do.

As a counterpoint to Foxman, “Defamation” also gives a prominent role to Norman Finkelstein, the anti-Israel gadfly and author of books like “The Holocaust Industry”.

Finkelstein seems far more thoughtful and articulate than Foxman, and he gets in a few good shots at the “warmongers from Martha’s Vineyard” pushing Likudnik policies in Washington, the “pathological narcissism” underlying rich U.S. Jews’ sense of victimisation, and the misuse of the Holocaust for political purposes.

But he can also be his own worst enemy, as when he responds to attacks on his alleged anti-Semitism by offering a sarcastic Nazi salute to the camera.

In any case, if the somewhat unflattering portrayal of Finkelstein is intended to give the impression of balance, the comparison between him and Foxman is hard to sustain. Foxman is a man of influence, his approval sought after by the world’s power brokers, while Finkelstein is an outcast, having been denied tenure at DePaul University in Chicago due to his political views.

If it is true that both sides have their extremists, as Shamir seems to suggest, it is also true that the right-wing and not the left-wing extremists are the ones running the show.

While Foxman and Finkelstein are the poles around which “Defamation” rotates, many of the most interesting moments come from its less well-known characters.

There are the African-American residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, discussing tensions with their Jewish neighbours and how the Jews control the world, and the Russian Jew claiming that his fellows use anti-Semitism to excuse their own failings.

There is Rabbi Bleich of Kiev, evidently a U.S. expatriate, noting that secular Jews are more preoccupied with anti-Semitism than religious Jews such as himself because it gives them a basis for their Jewish identity that is otherwise lacking.

Most amusingly, there is Shamir’s own Israeli grandmother, who delivers a rant about diaspora Jews that could have come directly from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

All this is interspersed with scenes of a group of Israeli high school students on a class trip to visit Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe. Throughout, they are fed a steady diet of horror from the past and paranoia about the present.

Having been told that the locals are all rabidly anti-Semitic, the students are forbidden to interact with them. In one funny scene, a few of the girls run into three old Polish men, who try to strike up an innocent conversation in Polish. Unable to understand the old men, the girls assume that they are insulting the Jewish people, and run back to their classmates to share this new evidence of the omnipresence of anti-Semitism.

Other scenes are less funny. Watching the formerly happy-go-lucky students stumble out of the Auschwitz memorial in shock and rage, vowing revenge against the Nazis and their present-day “heirs”, it is hard not to see a connection to the desperate us-or-them mentality that spawned the recent Gaza onslaught.

Answering questions at the Tribeca Film Festival, Shamir reminded the audience that these students were now all on the verge of conscription into the military; they will make up the next generation of Israeli soldiers. On film, one of the students’ chaperones worries that obsessively focusing on the Holocaust as the basis for Israeli identity is undermining their ability to behave normally towards other nations.

Responding to criticism that he neglected the prevalence of anti-Semitism outside the U.S. and Israel, Shamir insisted that his film was not really about anti-Semites themselves. “This film is mostly about the effects of anti-Semitism on us, the victims or alleged victims,” he said.

With a light touch, his film effectively makes the case that paranoia about anti-Semitism in many ways has consequences as pernicious as anti-Semitism itself.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Apr 20 2009 (IPS)

A U.S. government investigation of Israeli spying caught a prominent Democratic congresswoman discussing what is alleged to be a "quid pro quo" deal involving the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington’s powerful hawkish pro-Israel lobby.

Representative Jane Harman of California was recorded in 2005 on a National Security Administration (NSA) wiretap promising a suspected Israeli agent that she would intervene on behalf of two AIPAC staffers accused of passing classified information to the Israeli government, and her interlocutor responded by promising to help get Harman appointed to a top congressional intelligence post, according to an article published Sunday by Congressional Quarterly (CQ).

Perhaps even more notably, then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales later halted an FBI investigation of Harman’s actions because of Harman’s political value as a defender of the George W. Bush administration’s much-criticised warrantless wiretapping programme, the CQ report states.

The Harman scandal’s political repercussions appear to be growing, and it sits at the intersection of several controversial issues – among them, the influence of the "Israel lobby" on Capitol Hill, the complicity of top Democrats in Bush-era abuses, and the politicisation of judicial proceedings under the Bush administration.

Harman has a reputation as one of the Democratic Party’s foremost hawks, both on Israel-Palestine and on issues related to the "global war on terror". She has long enjoyed a close relationship with AIPAC, and is scheduled to speak at the group’s annual conference in May.

Allegations of a quid pro quo arrangement involving Harman and AIPAC are nothing new; Time magazine reported in 2006 that the FBI and Justice Department were investigating whether such a deal took place.

What was new in Sunday’s CQ piece, written by reporter Jeff Stein on the basis of conversations with multiple senior national security officials speaking anonymously, were the claims that the deal had been recorded by the NSA wiretap and that attorney general Gonzales had squelched the investigation of Harman for political reasons.

In an online discussion Monday, Stein stated the wiretap was court-approved and did not target Harman; rather, it was directed at the suspected Israeli agent with whom she was speaking.

Harman and her interlocutor were discussing the impending trial of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two senior AIPAC staffers who had been fired and charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for passing classified information to the Israeli government.

(Rosen’s and Weissman’s trial is scheduled to start this summer; Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon staffer who passed them the classified information, pled guilty to conspiracy in 2006 and was sentenced to over 12 years in prison.)

Harman was recorded saying that she would be willing to "waddle into" the AIPAC case to try to get the Justice Department to reduce its charges against Rosen and Weissman. In return, the suspected Israeli agent promised to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, at the time the House minority leader and now its speaker, to convince Pelosi to appoint Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Harman at the time was serving as the Democratic ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, but had a testy relationship with Pelosi; she was ultimately passed up for the committee chair in 2006 in favour of Representative Silvestre Reyes.

The identity of Harman’s interlocutor is unknown, although most analysts are assuming that he or she had significant ties to AIPAC, which has traditionally been dominant in lobbying members of congress on matters pertaining to Israel.

Haim Saban, a prominent Israeli-American businessman, has been frequently mentioned in the "blogosphere" as a possible suspect, but this identification seems primarily to have been based on the fact that Saban’s name was mentioned in the 2006 Time magazine piece about Harman. So far no solid evidence has emerged to link him to the incident.

One anonymous source told the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder that Harman’s interlocutor was a U.S. citizen.

AIPAC denied having participated in any wrongdoing in the Harman scandal. "AIPAC would never engage in a quid pro quo related to a federal investigation or any other federal matter," spokesman Patrick Dorton said. "That is absurd."

Harman’s office also released a statement denying any wrongdoing.

"The CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material to manufacture a ’scoop’ out of widely known and unremarkable facts," the statement said.

"If there is anything about this story that should arouse concern, it is that the Bush Administration may have been engaged in electronic surveillance of members of the congressional Intelligence Committees."

Harman’s concern about the Bush administration’s surveillance policies is somewhat ironic, given that she was previously the strongest defender of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping programme among congressional Democrats – and that she appears to have avoided a federal investigation of her AIPAC ties only as a result of her permissive stance on wiretapping.

Harman had previously helped convince the New York Times not to report on the programme, and after the newspaper finally decided to run the story, she blasted its editors for compromising U.S. national security.

Due to Harman’s value in providing bipartisan cover for the administration’s policies, Gonzales intervened with CIA director Porter Goss to derail a pending FBI investigation of her, including a court-approved wiretap.

(The wiretap targeting the suspected Israeli agent that captured Harman’s conversation had been approved by the special court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and thus was not part of the NSA warrantless wiretapping programme.)

According to Stein’s sources, then, the end of the FBI investigation of Harman was not due to "lack of evidence", as her defenders publicly claimed, but rather due to political considerations by the Bush administration.

The Harman scandal comes at an especially unwelcome time for AIPAC. The organisation has faced mounting criticism in recent years on charges that it – along with other, similarly right-leaning groups within the "Israel lobby" – have for years skewed Washington’s Middle East policy in a hawkish direction and stifled open discussion of Israel-Palestine issues.

These concerns led to the formation last year of a new pro-Israel lobbying group, J Street, which aims to give voice to what it characterises as the more dovish views held by most U.S. Jews.

Now, with its annual conference approaching, AIPAC finds itself once again in the spotlight, linked to a story that its critics are taking as a corroboration of many of the harshest claims made against it.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
NEW YORK, Apr 15 2009 (IPS)

It seems safe to say that the first year of existence for J Street, the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying organisation, was more eventful than anticipated.

The group, which was founded one year ago today, quickly became a lightning rod for criticism from hardliners affiliated with right-wing groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – particularly after it took the lead in questioning the wisdom of Israel’s recent military offensive in Gaza.

But as a growing number of normally hawkish commentators have come forward to argue that the Gaza war was a mistake both morally and pragmatically, and as the Barack Obama administration appears set to clash with Israel’s far-right new Netanyahu-Lieberman government, many feel that J Street’s more critical stance toward Israeli policies has been vindicated by events.

As the organisation heads into its second year, supporters are optimistic that J Street can break the stranglehold on U.S. Israel-Palestine policy traditionally exerted by AIPAC and other right-wing groups.

“I’ve been floored by the response we’ve gotten,” says Isaac Luria, J Street’s campaigns director. “It feels like J Street needed to be here and that there’s a real constituency for what we’re up to”.

Headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, the group was founded last April to promote a two-state solution, diplomatic engagement between Israel and its neighbours, and “honest discussion” of U.S. and Israeli policies.

Through its associated political action committee (PAC), J Street has taken an active role in supporting congressional candidates, giving out more money in the 2007-8 election cycle than any other pro-Israel PAC, and on Wednesday it announced a new university outreach programme to build support on campuses.

Predictably, the group quickly came under fire from neoconservatives at publications like the New Republic and Commentary, which have traditionally been aligned with AIPAC and with Israel’s Likud party.

But it was the group’s public statements about the Gaza war that attracted the most controversy. While staffers for many U.S. Jewish organisations privately expressed doubts about the morality and wisdom of the campaign, J Street was virtually alone in voicing these doubts publicly.

One statement soon after the offensive began, which argued that “neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong” and that “there is nothing ‘right’ in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them”, attracted particularly intense criticism.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union for Reform Judaism with a reputation as a “moderate” voice, quickly published an op-ed in the Forward slamming J Street for being “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment, and also appallingly naïve”.

Neoconservatives and other hardliners quickly seized on Yoffie’s criticisms to argue that J Street was beyond the pale of acceptable “dovish” Jewish opinion, and even supporters privately expressed frustration that the group’s position was imprudent, even if correct.

But if the Gaza war seemed in January to have marginalised J Street, events of the past three months have made the group’s position appear increasingly farsighted. A growing consensus in both Israel and the U.S. holds that the Gaza offensive failed to achieve any worthwhile military objective, and reports of war crimes published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz have spurred a furious debate over the morality of the campaign.

In the past few weeks, several prominent commentators with reputations as pro-Israel hawks, such as Dissent editor Michael Walzer and New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, have belatedly come forward to argue that the conduct of the Gaza war was not merely unwise but immoral.

Still, if J Street staffers feel vindicated, they are careful not to show it. The organisation still treads gingerly when the topic of Gaza comes up, recognising that the issue remains an emotionally loaded one.

“I think that events proved that the position we took at the start of the war was in fact correct,” says J Street executive director Ben-Ami. “I wouldn’t call it vindication; one doesn’t look for positives in such a tragedy.”

“We can only hope that recognising this tragic mistake provides motivation going forward for people within the region and internationally to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.”

J Street chose to stay out of some other battles, such as the fight over the appointment of Amb. Charles Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council.

Freeman’s criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories provoked a fierce lobbying campaign in the media and on Capitol Hill to bring down his appointment, and he finally withdrew in March after coming under fire from neoconservative pundits and pro-Israel hardliners in Congress.

Although AIPAC denied any role in the Freeman affair, it was subsequently revealed that the group had quietly furnished anti-Freeman material to lawmakers, and the campaign as a whole was spearheaded by Steven Rosen, a former top-ranking AIPAC staffer now facing trial for passing classified material to the Israeli government.

J Street, on the other hand, did not take a position on the Freeman affair, although it did release a statement cautioning that “[i]t cannot be a litmus test for service in the American government that you have never criticised Israel or its policies publicly.”

In any case, these days the apparent disconnect between the new U.S. and Israeli governments is the most pressing issue facing Israel-policy groups in Washington.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rejection of the two-state solution and bellicose rhetoric on Iran, along with the accession of far-right anti-Arab politician Avigdor Lieberman to the post of foreign minister, suggest to many observers that the Israeli government is set to clash with the Obama administration, whose top Middle East envoy George Mitchell has a reputation for even-handedness.

Already this month, Lieberman created a stir in his first speech as foreign minister by announcing that Israel would not be bound by the 2007 Annapolis agreements, which prompted a swift rebuke from President Obama himself.

The Netanyahu-Lieberman government may also undermine support for Israeli policies in the U.S. Jewish community; according to a recent J Street poll, 69 percent of U.S. Jews opposed Lieberman’s campaign platform requiring Arab citizens of Israel to sign loyalty oaths.

Given the strong support among U.S. Jews for Obama and their scepticism about the new Israeli government, many feel that J Street is better positioned to represent U.S. Jewish public opinion going forward than groups that typically offer reflexive support for Israeli policies.

J Street has already produced a video highlighting Lieberman’s inflammatory statements and promoted an open letter calling on Jewish leaders to repudiate his policies.

U.S. public disapproval of the new Israeli government appears to have left Israel hardliners on the defensive. AIPAC, which in the past has enjoyed a close relationship with Netanyahu, has not released a statement on the new government, although it has sought to reassure U.S. Jews that Netanyahu will continue to participate in the peace process.

This is somewhat ironic since, according to former AIPAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield, AIPAC and Netanyahu teamed up in the early 1990s in an attempt to bring down the Oslo peace process behind the scenes.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Apr 10 2009 (IPS)

As the U.S. prepares to reduce its military presence in Iraq while intensifying its war effort in Afghanistan, hawks within both the Republican and Democratic parties have come increasingly to believe that counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine offers a solution to the central security challenges Washington will face in the 21st century.

Drawing on the perceived, if still uncertain, success of the U.S. “surge” in Iraq, many prominent opinion-makers – notably neoconservatives and “liberal hawks” – have joined COIN advocates within the military itself to argue that “small wars” theory should be the cornerstone of U.S. military strategy going forward, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But COIN’s current ascendancy masks several lingering points of contention.

For critics, the current enthusiasm reflects a fundamental overestimation of the efficacy of military force, and a desire for technocratic solutions to strategic problems that presume a neo-imperial nation-building role for the U.S.

Even among hawks, COIN has drawn fire from those who dispute the supposed “lessons” drawn from the surge in Iraq, and from those who argue that conventional warfare against potential rivals like China and Russia should remain a much higher priority than irregular warfare against non-state actors.

COIN is a fundamentally broad-ranging concept, encompassing all “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions” used to defeat insurgency, according to the 2006 Army Counter-Insurgency Field Manual.

It emphasises protecting and winning the “hearts and minds” of civilian populations – summed up in the mantra “clear, hold, and build” – meaning in practice COIN can often shade into “nation-building.”

A team led by Gen. David Petraeus, the most prominent COIN advocate within the military, authored the Army field manual. Now head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Petraeus has become an icon among hawks due to his perceived success in pacifying Iraq.

In the wake of Iraq, many commentators across the political spectrum have called for the principles of the COIN doctrine used in the Iraq surge to be institutionalised as the guide for future campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the hawkish independent Democrat, for example, called in January for an enhanced effort in Afghanistan built around six linked “surges” – in troop strength, strategic coherence, civilian resources, “native” support, regional integration, and political commitment.

While conventional warfare remains the centrepiece of military spending – Defence Secretary Robert Gates estimated this week that “irregular warfare” accounts for only ten percent of the new defence budget – COIN has come to dominate conversation in Washington foreign-policy circles, and many argue that “small wars” will characterise the 21st century.

“In a multipolar world where small wars proliferate, there is reason to believe that [COIN] doctrine will shape not only the next phase of the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the future of the U.S. military,” according to John Nagl, a former Army officer who contributed to the COIN manual and now heads the influential think-tank, Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).

CNAS, which was founded in 2007 and has served as something of a pipeline to senior ranks in the Obama administration, appears to embody the new bipartisan conventional wisdom in Washington. Its ‘mediagenic’ Rhodes Scholar president has become a poster boy for COIN enthusiasts, including influential neo-conservatives who two weeks ago featured Nagl at the kick- off of their newest think-tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).

COIN is especially attractive to many liberal hawks, however, because it emphasises civilian protection and knowledge of local cultures, in contrast to the “shoot-first” style that often characterised U.S. military policy in the early Bush years.

But although advocates portray COIN as a purely pragmatic and non- ideological response to the security challenges of the twenty-first century, critics charge that its focus on “small wars” and nation-building simply assumes that the main goal of the U.S. military should be subduing local populations of far-flung but strategically important countries. In that respect, they argue, COIN can serve as a smokescreen for maintaining U.S. imperial posture.

“Great powers wage ‘small wars’ not to defend themselves but to assert control over foreign populations,” wrote Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel and Boston University professor, in his 2008 book “The Limits of Power”. “Historically, that is, ‘small wars’ are imperial wars.”

“[T]o assume that wars like Iraq define the military’s future evades a larger question. Given what the pursuit of American imperial ambitions in the Greater Middle East has actually produced…why would the United States persist in such a strategy? Instead of changing the military, why not change the policy?” asked Bacevich.

The history of COIN in the U.S. is in fact intimately tied to the history of imperialism, dating back to the “Indian wars” and the suppression of insurgencies in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century.

Many of the classics of COIN literature, such as David Galula’s “Counterinsurgency Warfare”, came out of the French colonial experience in Algeria. The heyday of COIN in the U.S. came in the 1960s, when the U.S. supplemented its military forces in Vietnam with tens of thousands of civilian advisers applying the latest social-science findings to everything from police training to land reform.

The U.S. defeat in Indochina made COIN anathema to a generation of military officers who demanded an end to murky and open-ended nation-building engagements. The “Powell doctrine”, which demanded overwhelming force in the pursuit of clearly defined goals, was emblematic of U.S. military thinking post-Vietnam.

While the immediate post-Cold War period saw the U.S. intervene in ‘small wars’ in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans, the George W. Bush administration came to office promising an end to such commitments. Former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to transform the military into a technology-heavy force designed to defeat rival states quickly and with as few “boots on the ground” as possible.

It was Rumsfeld’s failure to anticipate the challenges of post-invasion Iraq that sent the U.S. officer corps scrambling back to the archives in search of their predecessors’ wisdom about how to conduct counter-insurgency.

Ironically, many of the same neo-conservatives and liberal hawks who now tout the virtues of COIN were previously firm believers in the high-tech Rumsfeld military. This has led critics to charge that these new COIN enthusiasts simply aim to foster a belief in the efficacy of military force and interventionist foreign policy.

Bacevich and other critics caution against falling back into the same illusions about military efficacy that drew the U.S. into Iraq in the first place.

“U.S. leaders should… be wary of the potential moral hazard represented by the COIN [field manual]: thinking they have figured out the journey, they may be tempted to go down the road more often,” Colin Kahl, a CNAS fellow who will head Middle East affairs in the Pentagon under Obama, warned in Foreign Affairs in 2007.

Others dispute the notion that the drop in violence in Iraq was due to the surge and the use of COIN doctrine. Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, now a professor at West Point, has been foremost among these critics, arguing that success was due primarily to other factors – notably the decision to begin paying former Sunni insurgents to stop attacking U.S. forces.

Even among neo-conservatives and other hawks, it remains to be seen whether the current enthusiasm for COIN will outlast the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some, such as influential columnist Robert Kagan, have already begun to argue that state powers such as China and Russia pose a greater long-term threat than terrorism and other non-state actors, which would once again push conventional capabilities to the forefront of Washington’s military priorities.

This focus on conventional warfare would dovetail with the inclinations of many within the military itself, where the newly influential COIN advocates appear to remain in the minority.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Apr 6 2009 (IPS)

Secretary of Defence Robert Gates unveiled the U.S.’s much-anticipated new military budget Monday, which aims to reorient the armed forces toward irregular and counterinsurgency warfare while proposing cuts in several major weapons programs.

The budget is viewed as a major step in the ongoing debate within the U.S. military about whether to focus primarily on conventional warfare against other states or on counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors.

But it is also likely to engender pushback from lawmakers and defence- industry interests who are unhappy about cutbacks in lucrative weapons programmes.

The changes proposed by the new budget – while significant – are far from marking a fundamental reshaping of the U.S. defence establishment, some defence analysts caution.

“They’re calling it a fundamental shift and that’s both true and false,” said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s true because their budget proposes the most ambitious set of cuts to well- entrenched weapons systems since the early 1990s.”

“It’s false, though, because this budget perpetuates the upward trajectory of defence spending, it’s higher than any of the Bush budgets that preceded it, and it increases funding for some programs that I think are a mistake,” Pemberton continued.

The 534-million-dollar budget for fiscal year 2010 – which does not take into account the “emergency supplemental” appropriations that pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – marks a slight increase over the Bush administration’s budget for the previous year.

However, the breakdown of this spending will be considerably different from previous years.

“These past few years have revealed underlying flaws in the priorities, cultural preferences and reward structures of America’s defence establishment,” Gates said. “There have been enough studies, enough hand-wringing, enough rhetoric. Now is the time for action.”

Among the most notable cutbacks was the F-22 fighter programme. Gates announced that the Pentagon would end production after buying four more fighters this year.

Rumours that Gates intended to kill the F-22 – which was originally designed in the Cold War to counter Soviet air power – led to a lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and in the media to save the fighter. A highly-publicised March article in the Atlantic by best-selling author Mark Bowden, for example, warned that F-22 cutbacks would be “paid in the blood” of U.S. fighter pilots.

Other cutbacks include missile defence, which will see its budget reduced by 1.4 billion dollars, and the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) modernisation programme – the vehicle component of which will be cancelled.

However, the budget retained or even accelerated other programmes that were viewed as logical targets for cuts, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter. F-35 purchases will be more than doubled from 14 in 2009 to 30 in 2010.

“I would give the budget a B to B-minus,” said William Hartung of the New America Foundation. “They did a little less than half of what I’d hope they’d do. But under Bush they would have done nothing or gone in the other direction.”

If the budget cuts back on some high-profile conventional war programmes, it compensates by dramatically increasing funding for some irregular operations and counterinsurgency programmes.

Notably, Gates announced an additional 2 billion dollars for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance – including an additional 50 Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial drones. The budget also proposes a five percent expansion of Special Operations forces.

Defence analysts also caution that the budget is likely to face major resistance in Congress from lawmakers whose districts benefit from defence spending and who have been recipients of defence industry largesse.

“They are going to have a huge fight on their hands,” Pemberton said. “Defence secretaries have often tried to cut weapons systems to little avail, and this is just the first stage in the process.”

Already, Senators Jeff Session and Richard Shelby of Alabama have signalled their displeasure with the budget by placing a hold on the nomination of Ashton Carter, who was slated to become the administration’s undersecretary of defence for acquisition, technology, and logistics.

The debate over the budget has divided many in the military into what are sometimes called the “this-war” and “next-war” camps – that is, those focusing on the needs of the current counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those focusing on the potential needs of a future conflict against a state such as China.

Gates is widely considered to be one of the leaders of the “this-war” camp. On Tuesday, he warned against devoting resources to “over-insure against remote or diminishing risk[s]” or to “run up the score” in areas where the U.S. is already dominant at the expense of capabilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But he also argued that the new budget did not mark a radical shift away from conventional warfare, and that only about 10 percent of its spending would be devoted to irregular warfare.

“This is not about irregular warfare putting the conventional capabilities in the shade,” he said. “This is just a matter of giving the irregular-war constituency a seat at the table for the first time.”

At the moment, the “irregular-war constituency” appears to be ascendant in Washington and at the Pentagon. Prominent counterinsurgency advocates include Gen. David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Lt. Col. John Nagl, president of the influential think tank Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).

But counterinsurgency also has its critics. Some – particularly on the right – warn against focusing on non-state actors and neglecting conventional capabilities and threats from state powers.

“[Former defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld denigrated the human element of warfare to focus on high-tech innovation,” wrote Kori Schake, a Hoover Institution fellow and West Point professor, on the Foreign Policy website. “His successor is about to make the reverse mistake.”

Others charge that counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on long-term nation-building commitments is frequently used as a justification or smokescreen for maintaining a long-term U.S. imperial posture throughout the world.

“By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, [counterinsurgency advocates are] effectively affirming the Long War as the organising principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish,” wrote Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor and former Army colonel, in March.

“In this sense, Nagl’s reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate – and perpetuate – the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.”

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Mar 25 2009 (IPS)

A newly-formed and still obscure neo-conservative foreign policy organisation is giving some observers flashbacks to the 1990s, when its predecessor staked out the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy that came to fruition under the George W. Bush administration.

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor – has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. “surge” in Afghanistan.

But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.

PNAC’s charter members included many figures who later held top positions under Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

FPI was founded earlier this year, but few details are available about the group, which has so far attracted no media attention. The organisation’s website lists Kagan, Kristol, and Senor, who came to prominence as a spokesman for the occupation authorities in Iraq, as the three members of its board of directors.

Two of FPI’s three staffers, policy director Jamie Fly and Christian Whiton, have come directly from foreign policy posts in the Bush administration, while the third, Rachel Hoff, last worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee. Contacted by IPS at the group’s office, Fly referred all questions to Senor, who did not return the call.

The organisation’s mission statement argues that the “United States remains the world’s indispensable nation,” and warns that “strategic overreach is not the problem and retrenchment is not the solution” to Washington’s current financial and strategic woes. It calls for “continued engagement – diplomatic, economic, and military – in the world and rejection of policies that would lead us down the path to isolationism.”

The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the U.S., including “rogue states,” “failed states,” “autocracies” and “terrorism”, but gives pride of place to the “challenges” posed by “rising and resurgent powers,” of which only China and Russia are named.

Their prominence may reflect the influence of Kagan, who has argued in recent years that the 21st century will be dominated by a struggle between the forces of democracy (led by the U.S.) and autocracy (led by China and Russia). He has called for a League of Democracies as a mechanism for combating Chinese and Russian power, and the FPI statement stresses the need for “robust support for America’s democratic allies”.

This emphasis may also indicate that FPI intends to make confrontation with China and Russia the centrepiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration, before 9/11, when Kristol’s Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking Washington for its alleged “appeasement” of Beijing.

For its formal coming out, however, FPI has chosen to push for escalating the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. The organisation’s first event, to be held here Mar. 31, will be a conference entitled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success”.

The lead speaker will be Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate and long a favourite of both Kagan and Kristol. In February, McCain gave a well-publicised speech at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) arguing that the U.S. could not afford to scale back its military commitment in Afghanistan and calling for a redoubled effort to win the war.

Other speakers will include AEI fellow Frederick Kagan, Robert’s brother and one of the key proponents of the “surge” strategy in Iraq, counterinsurgency expert Lt. Col. John Nagl, the new director Centre for a New American Security, and hawkish Democratic Representative Jane Harman.

FPI has inevitably drawn comparisons to PNAC, a “letterhead organisation” founded by Kristol and Kagan shortly after their publication in ‘Foreign Affairs’ of an article entitled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” which called for Washington to exercise “benevolent global hegemony” and warned against what they saw as the post-Cold War drift of the Republican Party toward “neoisolationism” after it lost the White House to Bill Clinton.

“This reminds me of the Project for the New American Century,” said Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation. “Like PNAC, it will become a watering hole for those who want to see an ever-larger U.S. military machine and who divide the world between those who side with right and might and those who are evil or who would appease evil.”

PNAC’s membership was a veritable who’s-who of neoconservatives and other future Bush administration hawks. In addition to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, charter members included then-Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was at the time considered a more likely presidential candidate than his elder brother; Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who left the administration after being indicted for perjury in October 2005; and Elliott Abrams, who became Bush’s top Middle East aide at the National Security Council; among several others who later served in senior Bush administration posts.

The group’s June 1997 statement of principles called for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity” that entailed “increas[ing] defence spending significantly” and “challeng[ing] regimes hostile to our interests and values”.

In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to President Clinton calling for “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power”, by military force if necessary. The letter was signed by many who would become architects and backers of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, future deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, and future U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

In September 2001, only days after the 9/11 attacks, another PNAC letter called on President Bush to broaden the scope of the “war on terror” beyond those immediately responsible for the attacks to include Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

And in April 2002, the group labeled Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) “a cog in the machine of Middle East terrorism,” compared Arafat to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and called on the U.S. to end support for both the PA and the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations as a whole.

“Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight,” it said, urging Bush to “accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein from power.”

That FPI’s debut public event should focus on why Washington should escalate its involvement in Afghanistan is ironic given the role played by PNAC and other hawks in and outside the administration in pushing for the invasion of Iraq so soon after the U.S. campaign to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in late 2001. Many experts believe the diversion of military and intelligence resources to Iraq made it possible for both the Taliban and al Qaeda’s leadership to survive and rebuild.

The top priority given by the Bush administration – again, with the strong encouragement of PNAC and its supporters – to Iraq as the “central front in the war on terror” also meant that aid needed to bolster the western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai was unavailable.

PNAC effectively ceased its activities at the beginning of Bush’s second term. This may partly have been due to the large amount of bad publicity the group attracted for its seminal role in bringing about the Iraq war.

But the formation of FPI may be a sign that its founders hope once again to incubate a more aggressive foreign policy during their exile from the White House, in preparation for the next time they return to political power.

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

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2009 (IPS)

As the humanitarian situation in Darfur deteriorates, President Barack Obama’s new Special Envoy for Sudan is likely to find his inbox filled with urgent challenges – none more immediate than how to get relief groups back into the province.

Activists have greeted the appointment of retired air force major general J. Scott Gration as an important step toward coordinating U.S. policy in Sudan.

On Mar.5 Khartoum ordered expelled 13 international humanitarian agencies in retaliation for the issuance of an arrest warrant against President Omar al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Those agencies provided more than half of the assistance sustaining some 1.5 million people who have been displaced by the six-year-old conflict in Darfur.

Aid groups that remain on the ground are reporting a potentially catastrophic situation, including outbreaks of meningitis that have already taken hundreds of lives and threaten tens of thousands more. More than one million people have also lost access to clean water.

“Gen. Gration will need to hit the ground running and spearhead an urgent and sustained diplomatic push – involving China and key African and Arab countries – to establish unimpeded humanitarian access, hold President Bashir accountable for meeting Sudan’s obligation under international law to protect the lives of Sudanese civilians, and move toward lasting peace,” said Jerry Fowler, head of the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of nearly 200 faith-based and human rights groups.

How precisely all of these goals can be met – and which should take priority – has been a matter of considerable debate among human rights and Darfur advocates since last summer, when it first became clear that the ICC’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, would push for a formal indictment against Bashir.

Few here dispute that Bashir deserves to be brought to justice for his role in the brutal and prolonged counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur that is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them members of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic groups.

Obama and former president George W. Bush have both joined rights groups in calling the Darfur campaign a “genocide”, although the ICC chose not to press genocide charges against Bashir.

However, the Darfur movement and rights groups were split on the issue of prosecuting Bashir. Some Darfur advocates warned that initiating judicial action before any political resolution had been reached in the Sudan would only exacerbate the crisis facing the people of the region, where 1.5 million have been displaced and over four million rely on humanitarian assistance.

Their warnings gained additional force in early March, when the Khartoum government responded immediately to the ICC’s issuance of the warrant by expelling the relief groups, which included Oxfam, Medecins San Frontieres, and Save the Children.

The escalating humanitarian crisis created by their expulsion has led some leaders in the Darfur movement to insist that highest priority should be getting the humanitarian groups back into the region – even if it means deferring Bashir’s prosecution.

The Arab League and the African Union (AU) have already asked the UN Security Council to defer exercising the warrant for one year, in accordance with Chapter 16 of the Rome Statute creating the ICC.

Some human rights groups, however, argue that such a move would subvert the ICC’s authority, as well as undermine the credibility of the new U.S. administration, which until now has supported issuing the warrant.

“Who are we to say that Darfuris must pay the price of international justice?” asked Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor who has played a leading role in the Darfur movement. “Despite months of warning that that the regime might well target humanitarian efforts if the ICC went forward, the administration was caught flat-footed without any contingency plans. As a result, I see no option to trading out the ICC indictment for the return of the humanitarian workers.”

Others have pushed for more aggressive measures against Khartoum. In a column published in the Washington Post, Gen. Merrill McPeak, a former air force chief of staff and co-chair of Obama’s presidential campaign, called for the U.S. and its allies to use air power to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested in her confirmation hearings that a no-fly zone was being considered as part of a yet-to-be-concluded policy review, and the proposal has attracted support from others, including former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, influential New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and UN ambassador Susan Rice who, along with another key Obama adviser on his National Security Council staff, Samantha Power, has been an outspoken hawk on Darfur for several years.

But Reeves and other analysts see these threats as largely empty and possibly counter-productive, even if they were implemented.

Aside from working to restore humanitarian aid, Washington’s first priority, he said, should be to strengthen the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID), which, since its inception two years ago, has been hampered by a lack of resources and equipment, particularly helicopters and armoured vehicles, necessary to patrol such a vast territory and transport supplies and personnel where they are needed.

“How can a military threat by the U.S. be taken seriously when we can’t even give UNAMID the minimum they need to do their job?” he told IPS. “Not to have a single tactical helicopter almost two years after (the UN Security Council authorised UNAMID) is absolutely scandalous.”

Activists and U.S. officials, see China, which buys most of Sudan’s oil and, along with Russia, is Khartoum’s major arms supplier, as key to pressing Bashir to permit relief agencies to return. While it has publicly urged Khartoum to address the humanitarian crisis, Beijing last week blocked a proposed Security Council statement demanding the return of the aid workers by insisting that it include a call for suspending the arrest warrant.

China is in a strong position, if for no other reason than Washington needs its help Beijing’s help on a range of other pressing foreign-policy issues, notably curbing Iran’s nuclear programme.

Some observers, such as Sudan specialist Alex de Waal of the New York-based Social Science Research Council and Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, have also urged the administration to go along with delaying the arrest warrant in the larger interest of preserving the tenuous 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

The CPA ended a 21-year conflict between Khartoum and the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement/Army in southern Sudan. Some two million people are believed to have died in that war.

Still, Darfur advocacy groups welcomed the appointment of Gration, whose views reportedly enjoy considerable influence with the president. The two reportedly became close in 2006 when Gration accompanied Obama on a 15-day tour of five African countries, including a stop to visit Darfur refugees in neighbouring Chad. The son of missionaries, the 30-year air force veteran grew up in Africa and is fluent in Swahili.

“Obama’s appointment of Gration as special envoy for Sudan shows that it is a priority for the administration,” said Mark Hanis, executive director of the Genocide Intervention Network, a Washington-based group.

Like Fowler, Hanis added that the appointment must be followed up “with swift action from the administration to reverse the humanitarian expulsions, forge a peace deal for Darfur, reinforce the UNAMID peacekeeping mission, and ensure the (CPA’s) implementation.”

Excerpt: