By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Dec 14 2015 (IPS)

When, in June 2006, former US National Security adviser and, later on, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, spelled out the George W. Bush administration new, magic doctrine for the Middle East, tons of ink was poured and millions of words said in a harsh attempt to speculate with what she really did mean by what she called “Creative Chaos.”

Baher Kamal

Most Middle East analysts concluded then that the new doctrine would lead to or build upon a new wave of conflicts and violence in the region.

Whether they were right or not, this is at least what has been happening. No Need to recall what is now going on in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and even Tunisia and Egypt-–the so-called “Arab Spring” countries.

Now another U.S. neo-liberal, neo-conservative Republican “hawk,” John R. Bolton, has just come out with a new vision that might explain the rational behind that “Creative Chaos” doctrine.

“Create a New State”

In his recent article in the New York Times, published on 25 November 2015 under the eloquent header “To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State” this scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and former US ambassador to the United Nations (August 2005 to December 2006), poses this question: “What comes after the Islamic State?”
Bolton then explains that “Before transforming Mr. Obama’s ineffective efforts into a vigorous military campaign to destroy the Islamic State, we need a clear view, shared with NATO allies and others, about what will replace it. It is critical to resolve this issue before considering any operational plans…”

Iraq and Syria Are Gone!

According to Bolton -who could hold a key post in the US coming administration should a Republican like Donald Trump be elected- “Today’s reality is that Iraq and Syria as we have known them are gone…”

He then says that defeating the Islamic State means restoring to power President Bashar Assad in Syria and Iran’s puppets in Iraq, and “that outcome is neither feasible nor desirable… Rather than striving to recreate the post-World War I map, Washington should recognize the new geopolitics.”

“The best alternative to the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq is a new, independent Sunni state.”

An Oil Producer “Sunni-stan”

Bolton explains further: This “Sunni-stan” has economic potential as an oil producer (subject to negotiation with the Kurds, to be sure), and could be a bulwark against both Mr. Assad and Iran-allied Baghdad. The rulers of the Arab Gulf states, who should by now have learned the risk to their own security of funding Islamist extremism, could provide significant financing. And Turkey — still a NATO ally, don’t forget — would enjoy greater stability on its southern border, making the existence of a new state at least tolerable.”

He believes that the Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia “must not only fund much of the new state’s early needs, but also ensure its stability and resistance to radical forces. Once, we might have declared a Jordanian “protectorate” in an American “sphere of influence” for now, a new state will do.”

Bolton’s visionary plan for the new Middle East would then explain what has been behind the “Creative Chaos” doctrine. And it would clearly revamp the nearly 100-year-old Sykes-Picot map (link to Middle East Part II – 99.5 Years of (Imposed) Solitude https://www.ipsnews.net/2015/12/middle-east-part-ii-99-5-years-of-imposed-solitude/.

Such vision would be just another step on the successive US-West roadmaps for the region. In fact, in addition to the “Creative Chaos” doctrine, the George W. Bush second term administration came out with a new name for the region: the “Greater Middle East,” which would include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Cyprus, Somalia, and eventually also Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The Middle East Is “Served”, the “Creative Chaos” Has Worked

The “Creative Chaos” has turned to be a reality. The whole region has been boiling specially over the last five years. Violence, death and terrorism have been rapidly growing everywhere: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, even in Tunisia. Tensions between Arabian Peninsula kingdoms and principalities and Iran,all of them oil producers, have been ramping.

Mercenary groups, under a more than doubtful religious flag have been gradually dominating the region and tragically though sporadically also some Western countries.

In short, the scenario could not be more “chaotic”. The new Middle East has been served.

The Doors of Hell Are All Open

Though Bolton’s vision should not be taken for “biblical,” things could well go in that direction.

For now, (Shii-ruled) Iraq has warned (Sunni) Turkey against deploying its troops in the DAESH-controlled Mosul area; Washington paves the ground for further military actions in conjunction with the axis Paris-London; (Sunni Wahhabi Saudi Arabia works intensively with (Sunni) Egypt for setting up a joint Army/military intervention force to fight terrorism, and (Shii) Iran warns that any attempt to remove Assad in (Alaui) Syria is a “red line”, etc.

One last question, for now: where would DAESH go once it has been militarily defeated? Libya would appear to be the next DAESH stronghold. After all, this country lacks stability, is full of weapons (up to 25 million arms) out of the government’s control, it is a big oil producer, and DAESH has an active operational branch there.

And, should this be the case, would DAESH further expand its deadly operations from Libya to neighbouring countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, in addition to some Africans countries in conjunction with Nigerian Boko-Haram?

(End)

Excerpt:

Credit: Twitter/@AntDeRosa

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 22 2014 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited by Kitty Stapp

U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday his intention to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

In a statement from the White House Rose Garden, Obama said he expects to reduce U.S. troops levels from the roughly 32,000 which remain there now to 9,800 by the end of this year, and to cut that number by about half by the end of 2015.

After this year, U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan will be used only for training and counter-terrorism operations against Al Qaeda, he said.

The withdrawal plan will depend, however, on the signing of a pending Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) between Washington and the next president of Afghanistan, who is expected to take office by the end of the summer after presidential elections that are set to take place next month.

Without the BSA, according to senior administration officials who briefed reports, the U.S. would resort to the so-called “zero option” – or withdrawing all of its troops at the end of the year.

President Hamid Karzai, whose relations with Washington have become increasingly rocky during Obama’s tenure, has refused to sign the BSA, insisting that the decision be left to his successor. The two candidates in next month’s run-off election, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, have publicly supported the agreement.

In his statement, Obama, who will deliver a major foreign policy address at the U.S. Military Academy Wednesday, put the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the context of what he depicted as a larger transition in Washington’s global military strategy, including its ongoing struggle against radical Islamists linked to Al Qaeda.

“The bottom line is, it’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “When I took office, we had nearly 180,000 troops in harm’s way.”

“By the end of this year, we will have less than 10,000. In addition to bringing our troops home, this new chapter in American foreign policy will allow us to redirect some of the resources saved by ending these wars to respond more nimbly to the changing threat of terrorism, while addressing a broader set of priorities around the globe,” he declared.

Obama was making an implicit reference to his administration’s promised “rebalancing” of U.S. strategic assets toward the Asia-Pacific region, as well as more recent concerns about Russian intentions toward its closest neighbours.

He also suggested that Washington will not leave Afghanistan having accomplished all of the objectives for which it first sent troops under George W. Bush in October 2001, in the weeks that followed the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
“I think Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them,” he said. “…We have to recognise that Afghanistan will not be a perfect place, and it is not America’s responsibility to make it one. The future of Afghanistan must be decided by Afghans.”

Obama’s announcement came under immediate attack from neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks who have long insisted that Kabul will need more trainers to protect and stabilise the country after the end of 2014, the date on which the U.S. and other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries had previously agreed would mark the transfer of all combat responsibilities to Afghan government forces.

They were particularly angry about Obama’s promise to remove all U.S. troops by the end of 2016.

“The President came into office wanting to end the wars he inherited,” said Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte in a joint statement. “[He] appears to have learned nothing from the damage done by his previous withdrawal announcements in Afghanistan and his disastrous decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq.”

“Today’s announcement will embolden our enemies and discourage our partners in Afghanistan and the region. And regardless of anything the President says tomorrow at West Point, his decision on Afghanistan will fuel the growing perception worldwide that America is unreliable, distracted, and unwilling to lead,” the three senators insisted, in what has become a standard theme in Republican and neo-conservative attacks on Obama’s foreign policy.

“Putting aside the fact that [10,000] is the lowest number military advisors estimated was necessary to maintain training and some counter-terrorism capability in country over not just one year but several, the decision to halve and then zero out those forces by 2016 (sic) is a reminder not only of how seriously unserious this president on strategic matters can be but also how cynically partisan he is,” wrote Gary Schmitt, a national security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), in the neo-conservative ‘Weekly Standard’ blog.

Similar concerns were voided by Gen. David Barno (ret.), who led U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank influential with the administration.

“While the number [of troops] for next year seems about right, the publicly announced speedy departure plan for those troops will now unquestionably sow doubt among American friends and Afghan supporters,” he noted.

“But here at home, the biggest and – for the President – the most important takeaway …will be the certainty that by the end of 2016, America’s longest war will truly be over. After 13 years and thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of billion dollars spent, and wholly inconclusive results, today’s speech marks the end. Few Americans will mourn this war’s passing,” he added.

Tuesday’s announcement also came on the eve of a key NATO meeting at which Washington will seek commitments from its allies to provide around 4,000 additional troops to operate alongside U.S. troops next year and about half that number through 2016, according to administration officials.

Those officials expressed confidence that Afghanistan’s own army and police were sufficiently strong to hold off any major military challenge by the Taliban, and pointed to their performance during the first round of the presidential and provincial elections in April as evidence of major progress in U.S. and NATO training efforts to date.

Continued training of Afghan forces, combined with preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing a presence in Afghanistan, will remain the two main foci of U.S. troops there once full responsibility for security is transferred to Afghan forces at the end of the year, they stressed.

They also emphasised that the recent developments across the Greater Middle East and North Africa required adjustments to Washington’s counter-terrorism strategy.

“[A]s we have seen Al Qaeda core [in Afghanistan and Pakistan] pushed back and we’ve seen regional affiliates seek to gain a foothold in different parts of the Middle East and North Africa, what makes sense is a strategy that is not designed for the threat that existed in 2001 or 2004,” one official told reporters in a conference call briefing before Obama’s appearance.

“We need a strategy for how it exists in 2014 and 2016, and that is going to involve far more partnership and support across the entire region and less of the type of presence that the United States had in Afghanistan over the last 13 years.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservative connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money is power

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

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

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

Excerpt:

Party allegiances apparently mean little in the U.S. when it comes to the debate over domestic government surveillance.

A study released this morning by the Pew Research Center, a major U.S. polling agency, revealed that 57 percent of Democrats approve of government spying, along with 44 percent of Republicans.“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties." -- William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution

“There is a real division within each party on this issue,” Norman J. Ornstein, a renowned expert on U.S. politics, told IPS.

This was evident in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, when a vote to curtail domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) sundered the Democratic and Republican parties alike.

The vote was the first of its kind to take place since the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which, when published by The Guardian newspaper, exposed a degree of domestic surveillance far greater in scale and scope than was previously understood by the public.

The 217-205 decision to reject an amendment blocking spending on NSA domestic spying was so close that one political commentator called it a “nail biter”. Of the 205 votes in favour, 111 were from Democrats and 94 from Republicans, and of the 217 votes opposed, 83 were from Democrats votes and 134 from Republicans.

“You’re not going to see many votes like this,” says Ornstein, who is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank.

William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank here, agrees that the outcome was unusual.

“It did not conform to standard party lines but instead saw an unusual coalition of the libertarian right and the liberal left voting against the centres of both parties,” Galston told IPS.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, a research organisation which advocates individual liberties and limited government, told IPS that there are historical reasons for civil liberties being a major issue for members of both parties.

“The libertarian strain is a natural dimension of Republican ideology which was diminished by the immediate reaction to [the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001], and now it is sort of naturally reasserting itself,” says Sanchez.

“[On the other hand,] progressive activists have frequently been the targets of abusive intelligence powers,” he added, citing historical examples of government crackdowns on unions, civil rights groups and other leftist organisations as lessons that help explain Democratic opposition to spying.

Rising Tide

Both Ornstein and Galston told IPS that the narrow decision in congress was reflective of public opinion.

“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties,” says Galston.

U.S. citizens, Ornstein told IPS, are “strongly divided as a whole”.

Indeed, the Pew poll indicates more U.S. citizens favour being surveilled by their own government, but only by a slim margin.

Of the 1480 adults surveyed, 50 percent overall said they approved of the domestic surveillance programme, while 44 percent actually said they disapproved.

In a separate question, 56 percent agreed that federal courts have failed to impose adequate limits on intelligence gathering.

Based on the Pew findings, age and gender seem to be factors in where citizens stand on the issue.

By a ratio of about two-to-one, 60 to 29 percent, young respondents said they were more concerned about the government doing too much to weaken civil liberties than they were about it doing too little to defend the nation from terror. In terms of gender, 51 percent of men agreed with this statement, as opposed to only 29 percent of women.

In the report, Pew concludes that the views of U.S. citizens on this issue are “complex”, a conclusion based in part on the relative lack of correlation with party leanings.

Spill Over

Ornstein believes that the cross-cutting divide splitting both major parties is “issue-specific” and unlikely to spill over into other major controversies, for example on social issues such as spending on health care.

To an extent, Galston agrees.

“The liberal left has strict views on economic questions that are poles apart from the views of the libertarians,” Galston says, “and it would be very hard for them to find common ground.”

Liberal Democrats, Galston explains, would have difficulty accepting the small-government solutions often championed by libertarian Republicans.

He notes, however, that more legislation on government spying will take place in the foreseeable future, and that the closeness of Wednesday’s vote was indicative of a strengthening bipartisan opposition to intrusive government tactics.

Cato’s Sanchez believes this like-mindedness could spill over into over issues, namely those related to civil liberties.

“There are civil libertarian wings of both parties, so I expect we could see cooperation on other things, such as free speech issues,” Sanchez says.

It is widely speculated that the de facto leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, Senator Rand Paul, will make a run for the presidency in 2016. One early poll has placed him as the current top contender for the Republican nomination.

Galston told IPS that this issue has opened the way for “conversation” between Paul’s faction of the right and the liberal left.

“Now that they’ve discovered each other, there is likely to be more conversation across party lines,” says Galston.  “This is probably a beginning rather than an end.”

A U.S. soldier stands watch at the Kindi IDP Resettlement Center near Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 16, 2009. Credit: U.S. Navy Photo

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 20 2013 (IPS)

Ten years after President George W. Bush launched his “shock and awe” campaign to overwhelm Iraq – and the rest of the world – with the futility of resisting Washington’s military might, the public and much of the foreign policy elite appear remarkably uninterested in marking the anniversary, let alone assessing the results.

The lack of interest may be explained by the fact that media attention to Iraq dwindled rapidly after 2008 as President Barack Obama instituted a rapid drawdown – ultimately withdrawing virtually all U.S. troops from Iraq by late 2011 – the same time that he more than doubled the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

“The only way Americans learn about the rest of the world is when we get involved in foreign wars,” noted one Washington veteran.

The lack of interest may also be explained by the fact that the war was an experience that many – even some of its defenders – would prefer to forget.

After all, the balance sheet doesn’t look very good: nearly 4,500 U.S. military personnel and another 3,400 U.S. private contractors killed and tens of thousands more badly wounded both physically and psychologically, while direct war-related costs to a cash-strapped Treasury exceeding two trillion dollars over the decade, according to the latest estimates of the Costs of War Project at Brown University released last week.

The Project also estimated the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war at at least 134,000. It stressed, however, that that figure should be considered very conservative and, in any case, did not include deaths caused by war-related hardships which it said could total many hundreds of thousands more.

Also not included in the Project’s report were the more than 50 people killed in Baghdad Tuesday in a series of bombings – probably by Sunni insurgents – designed apparently to both mark the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and remind the world that Washington’s goal of restoring stability to Iraq remains elusive at best.

The anniversary would seem to offer an important opportunity for reflection. This is particularly so given the growing domestic pressure here to intervene more forcefully in Syria – a “Free Syria Act of 2013” authorising the administration to spend 150 million dollars in lethal and non-lethal aid to the rebels was introduced by the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Monday — and the still-looming possibility of war with Iran.

Yet, with just a couple of exceptions, Washington’s most prominent foreign policy think tanks, as well as cable news and newspapers, focused their discussions and op-eds this week far more on Obama’s trip this week to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan than on the Iraq War and the lessons learned from it.

One notable exception was the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the neo-conservative stronghold whose pre-war “black coffee briefings” and close ties to Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld ensured its “scholars” a leading role in both promoting and actually planning the invasion and subsequent occupation – under the careful guidance of Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi banker and confidence man who had hoped to be installed as the country’s new president.

In a one-hour briefing Tuesday afternoon that dwelled heavily on the supposed “success” of the 2007 so-called surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops to prevent Iraq from falling into an all-out sectarian civil war, AEI associates, joined by Sen. John McCain, defended their advice throughout the war.

They have also run a flurry of op-eds published this past week, including one for FoxNews by former Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, entitled “Iraq War taught us tough lessons, but world is better off without Saddam Hussein.”

Wolfowitz, a key architect of the war and major backer of Chalabi, argued that Washington should have adopted a Surge-like counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy much earlier in the war, a particularly ironic observation given his very public denunciation on the eve of the war of Gen. Eric Shinseki, then-Army chief of staff, who warned Congress of the need for several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace after the U.S. invasion.

Indeed, the war’s defenders – mostly neo-conservatives and aggressive nationalists, like Cheney and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton, another AEI “scholar” – spent most of the past week insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

“If I had to do it over again, I’d do it in a minute,” Cheney told an interviewer about invading Iraq in a television biography that aired last Friday.

Like his fellow hawks, the former vice president insisted that U.S. and other intelligence services were convinced that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that he was theoretically prepared to give to terrorists – and that, in the wake of 9/11 – justified the invasion.

Indeed, the notion that the only flaw in the decision to go to war was “bad intelligence” has become a mantra of the war’s defenders who, like Wolfowitz, appear to miss the irony of their complaints, given their own interference in the intelligence process in the run-up to the war.

“Intelligence did not drive or guide the decision to invade Iraq – not by a long shot, despite the aggressive use by the Bush administration of cherry-picked fragments of intelligence reporting in its public sales campaign for the war,” according to Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time.

Indeed, the White House systematically ignored key reports by the intelligence community and the State Department that warned of the likely consequences of invading Iraq, even if it had WMD and was inclined to share them with terrorists, according to Pillar and a 2007 report by the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Among other things, these reports accurately predicted a breakdown in civil order – for which the Pentagon was completely unprepared — after the invasion.

It also predicted – accurately, it turns out — that a far-reaching de-Baathification programme of the kind promoted heavily by AEI and Chalabi would lead to violent sectarian conflict; that political Islam and anti-U.S. sentiment would surge across the region; and that any successor government would align itself more closely with Iran.

As for the general public, it, too doesn’t appear too inclined toward a major re-appraisal of the war. A spate of polls released this week suggests that opinions about the war have remained relatively stable over the past five years.

A majority (58 percent) told an ABC/Washington Post poll earlier this month they believed the war was “not worth fighting” – down from a high of 64 percent in late 2008), while 59 percent in a CNN survey released Tuesday characterised the decision to invade as a “dumb thing to do”.

A Pew Research Center poll released Monday found a virtually even split among respondents when asked whether using military force against Iraq was a “right” or “wrong” decision and whether the U.S. “mostly succeeded” or “mostly failed” in achieving its goal in Iraq.

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

A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama was seen as certain to collect the majority of women’s votes in the Nov. 6 presidential election. Four days before the election, however, the women’s vote is thought to be divided equally between Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

A poll released last week by the Associated Press-GfK found women are split right down the middle, with each candidate receiving 47 percent of the vote. These numbers mirror the tightness of the popular vote overall and are a significant turnaround from a month ago, when the same poll showed Obama with a 16-point lead among women voters.

“Presidential races always tighten towards the end as local trends come to the national level – this is not a surprise,” Judy Lloyd, executive editor of Thoughtfulwomen.org and an appointee for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, told IPS.

Even so, Obama does appear to have suffered a dramatic loss in his lead with women voters. According to many analysts, the shift could be due to women focusing on the economy rather than on the “women’s issues” for which Obama has been fighting, such as equal pay in the workplace or funding for family planning.

The fight for the women vote has grown more heated as each candidate vies for women’s attention by criticising his opponent’s policies.

“The Obama campaign has engaged in a despicable game of gender politics and fear-mongering this election in an effort to shore up a critical Democratic constituency – single women.” Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of Independent Women’s Forum, a group with “a mission to expand the conservative coalition”, told IPS. “But it’s clear the War on Women rhetoric has failed.”

Such rhetoric refers to the Obama campaign’s claim that Republican policies run counter to women on issues that are critical to them.

According to the AP-GfK poll, Obama’s rhetoric may not be bringing him female votes, but he is still seen as the better candidate for women’s issues. Of likely voters polled, 53 percent think Obama is making the right decisions on issues directly affecting women, compared to 40 percent who think Romney is doing so.

Even so, it now appears many women are not basing their vote on women’s issues.

“The economy is undoubtedly the number one issue for women going into this election,” Lloyd told IPS.

During the second presidential debate on Oct. 16, each candidate was asked what he would do to achieve equal pay for men and women in the workplace. This is a significant economic issue, as women currently make less than three-quarters what men typically make for the same job.

Obama immediately referenced the first bill he signed as president, a law that makes the pursuit of wage discrimination claims easier.

Romney cited his record of hiring women as part of his cabinet while he was governor of Massachusetts. But he also said that the priority should be getting women into the workplace in the first place.

Indeed, the question many women voters seem to be asking themselves is simply who will create a better economy for them and their families.

“As for women’s issues, although I’m retired, I understand that women need jobs, and Romney is the best hope for restoring the economy,” Judy Smith, a retired voter in the state of Virginia, told IPS.

Yet Romney’s specific plans on how to strengthen the economy also worry many women who work and benefit from government programmes he plans to end.

“Many of Romney’s budget policies are job killers for women, such as his plan to slash funding for social programmes that disproportionately serve and employ women,” wrote Terri O’Neill, president of the National Organisation of Women, a group of feminist activists, after the second debate.

Beyond the economy

Although the economy is front and centre for many as the Americans head to the polls, some voters, particularly young ones, are looking beyond the country’s dire financial state to changes in social and foreign policies that could be a large part of their adult lives.

“I realise that the economy is a disaster and we need to get to a balanced budget. However, I can’t justify solving this problem by voting for someone who would take us backwards in terms of social policies,” Taylor Dempsey, 22, a New York state voter and Peace Corps volunteer, told IPS.

Feminists disagree that the economy is even the central issue for the presidential race.

“The issues women are voting on are the big health care issues,” Eleanor Smeal, the president and founder of Feminist Majority Foundation, told IPS. “They are voting for the right to birth control, to affordable health care, and health care coverage throughout their retirement.”

“The gender gap is alive and well, and Romney has chosen to be against us women on the issues that are most important to us,” Smeal continued.

Obama has worked hard throughout his administration and campaigns to appeal directly to women voters on  issues he thinks drive their vote. Yet many women voters are frustrated with the Obama campaign’s isolation of women from men on voter’s issues.

“I am frustrated by what I perceive to be the Obama campaign’s pandering to women on a very narrow range of women’s health issues, and I do not appreciate the assumption that women vote solely on such issues,” Julissa Milligan, a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told IPS.

Despite Romney’s attempt to keep the conversation focused on the economy and job creation, his Republican colleagues around the country continue to stoke controversy on women’s issues.

When asked about his “no exceptions” stance on abortion last month, Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee in Missouri, said that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy.

During a debate last week, Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate nominee in Indiana, said in defence of his opposition to abortion, “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

While Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have distanced themselves from these comments, they continue to support their fellow Republicans’ candidacy.

With four days left before votes are cast, candidates have no more time to waste on issues that won’t drive people to the ballot box.

“The fact is, women voters today know that there is a lot of good news for women and girls in the United States today, and they want a president who wants to help grow our economy, not play gender politics,” said Schaeffer.