Category Archives: neoconservatism

EDITORIAL: Neoconservatism 2.0

Neoconservatism 2.0
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 28, 2008

“We cannot survive in a world in which we are confronted with people who do not share our values, who unfortunately are in the majority in terms of numbers, and who are extremely hungry to see success. So, if we want to survive, we have to stand together. And I think that is a view which the majority in Europe shares, and I think also the majority in the United States understands.” General Dr Klaus Naumann, former Chief of the Defense Staff of Germany and former Chairman of the Military Committee of NATO, Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 10, 2008

When the post-Bush era starts a year from now, much of America and most of the world will let out a big sigh of relief. But we won’t be out of the woods. The leading neoconservatives might have been thoroughly discredited and effectively marginalized, but in a sense, they were always merely a caricature of important trends in the Western outlook that have much deeper roots, much greater breadth, and in the course of history have wrought much more destruction than did the small minds that shaped the Bush agenda.

Outside the glare of media attention a new circle of proponents of this outlook has emerged and their objectives are no less sweeping than those that gave rise to the neocons’ dream of a New American Century. The advocates of this new vision are regarded by others and see themselves as hard-headed realists. As retired generals, none will ever be dubbed a “chickenhawk.” But what the generals have in mind could very well provide the building blocks for what could fittingly be called, neoconservatism 2.0.

Important lessons have been learned. This time America won’t place itself in the bullseye as a target for global animosity. Instead, rather than striving for the preservation of the American hegemon, now the primary objective is the defense of the West, providing security for the citizens of every nation between Finland and Alaska. The Manichaean terms of a war of good against evil are being dropped; instead the conflict is being framed in dryly abstract terms: certainty versus irrationality. And just to make it clear that this is unequivocally about the preservation of secular Western preeminence, Zionism is kept well out of the picture.

The new message comes from a group of retired generals who self-effacingly describe themselves as “dinosaurs” and are known affectionately to their acolytes as “the gang of five.” Their aim is to restructure and empower NATO — a mission which will likely capture the interest of few outside the foreign policy communities on either side of the Atlantic. After all, how many Americans even know what the letters N-A-T-O stand for? Yet underpinning this objective there is a wider goal no less sweeping and not far removed from that advocated by Bernard Lewis, Norman Podhoretz and their merry band of followers: the defense of the West from the threat posed by those who do not share our values.

This time the plot unfolds not inside the reason-insulated walls of the American Enterprise Institute but instead comes from a bastion of realism, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. It was there recently that five distinguished military leaders presented their vision for a new world order in a manifesto they title, Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World – Renewing Transatlantic Partnership. [PDF] In his introduction to the so-called “Gang of Five,” CSIS president, John Hamre, described them as “some of the best minds that we have in defense intellectual circles”

They are, from the United States, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General John Shalikashvili, joined from Europe by General Dr Klaus Naumann (former Chief of the Defence Staff of Germany and former Chairman of the Military Committee of NATO), Field Marshal Lord Inge (former Chief of the Defence Staff of the United Kingdom), Admiral Jacques Lanxade (former Chief of the Defence Staff of France and former Ambassador to Tunisia) and General Henk van den Breemen (former Chief of the Defence Staff of the Netherlands). They have all served together in NATO.

Put together any group of retired generals and it’s predictable that they will hanker after some of their lost power, but when it comes to this particular group their credentials guarantee that even in retirement their authority is hard to ignore. As commentator Dr Pascal Boniface notes, one can assume that “former military chiefs of staff are not free riders. Their document is probably a way to test ideas for NATO’s current leaders: since the latter cannot afford to be so blunt publicly, they let their former colleagues do it for them.”

The palliative that the generals present for a Western world threatened by disorder should be seen for what it is — a martial vision:

We seek to uphold a common and stable experience, shunning the arbitrary in favour of closure in debate. Certainty can promote strong society and social interdependence. While 100 per cent certainty may be unattainable, it is clear that in periods of great – even overwhelming – uncertainty something serious is happening to our institutions and our societies.

Certainty in our world is today being eroded by a proliferation of information, knowledge and choice. The erosion of certainty is accelerated by rapid technological, social and cultural change. On occasion, that change occurs too fast for some of our major institutions to cope with.

In certain important senses, we are today operating in a mist. Through that current mist a wide range of challenges are appearing. The challenges are acute, and no less so because our certainties are in retreat. If they were stronger, our resolve to address these problems might have stiffened. But the loss of familiar certainties reveals that we lack such resolve.

While the generals have as their stated aim, to provide “security for the citizens of all nations between Finland and Alaska,” they clearly lack confidence that in its current state the West can save itself from the corrosive effects of irrationality. In their eyes, an insidious process has already weakened our culture. What they call, “the problem of the rise of the irrational,” the generals perceive in “soft examples, such as the cult of celebrity, which demonstrate the decline of reason,” and in “harder examples, such as the decline of respect for logical argument and evidence, a drift away from science in a civilisation that is deeply technological,” and finally in their ultimate example, “the rise of religious fundamentalism, which, as political fanaticism, presents itself as the only source of certainty.”

At this point one might say, they’re entitled to their opinion and at least in America, with its deeply-rooted anti-intellectual tendencies, we might welcome some strong voices willing to speaking out in defense of reason. Even if the outlook of the Gang of Five expresses a form of cultural imperialism, is it not at the same time in its own terms quite reasonable?

If the Grand Strategy often seems measured and thoughtful, it is not until we come to the generals’ views on deterrence that it becomes clear that this is a genuinely radical manifesto. Understandably this is the part of the document that caught a few headlines:

One truly indispensable element of any strategy in the 21st century is deterrence. This will no longer be deterrence by punishment, nor the threat of total destruction, which served us so well in preserving peace during the Cold War.

In the Post-Westphalian world, and against non-state actors, such deterrence does not work. What is needed is a new deterrence, which conveys a single, unambiguous message to all enemies: There is not, and never will be, any place where you can feel safe; a relentless effort will be made to pursue you and deny you any options you might develop to inflict damage upon us.

Deterrence in our time thus still avails itself of creating uncertainty in the opponent’s mind – no longer reactively but proactively. What is needed is a policy of deterrence by proactive denial, in which pre-emption is a form of reaction when a threat is imminent, and prevention is the attempt to regain the initiative in order to end the conflict.

As deterrence might occasionally either be lost or fail, the ability to restore deterrence through escalation at any time is another element of a proactive strategy.

Escalation is intimately linked to the option of using an instrument first. A strategy that views escalation as an element can, therefore, neither rule out first use nor regard escalation as pre-programmed and inevitable. Escalation and de-escalation must be applied flexibly. Escalation is thus no longer a ladder on which one steps from rung to rung; it is much more a continuum of actions, as though there is a ‘trampoline’ that permits the action to be propelled up into the sky at one moment and just to stand still the next.

Such a concept of interactive escalation requires escalation dominance, the use of a full bag of both carrots and sticks – and indeed all instruments of soft and hard power, ranging from the diplomatic protest to nuclear weapons. As flexible escalation and de-escalation are the crucial instruments in gaining and maintaining the initiative, fast decision making is of the essence. The traditional forms and methods of governments and international organisations will today (in a world of instantaneous global communications) no longer be capable of meeting this requirement. Thus a thorough review and adaptation is required. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate instrument of an asymmetric response – and at the same time the ultimate tool of escalation. Yet they are also more than an instrument, since they transform the nature of any conflict and widen its scope from the regional to the global. Regrettably, nuclear weapons – and with them the option of first use – are indispensable, since there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world.

What might this mean in practical terms?

The future we are facing requires more, not less, international integration; but as the national state is – and will remain for the foreseeable future – the core of decision making, we must stress that governments need to think about adapting the organisation of government, as well as about dramatic changes in national decision making.

The generals regard winning “the hearts and minds of their own people” as one of the many challenges facing Western governments. They also believe that we have already entered a “Post-Westphalian world” in which the nation state has lost much of its power. While many observers who might share a similar view would see at this time a need for the rejuvenation of democracy, for these distinguished military thinkers the security of the West hinges on a “restoration of certainty” derived from a greatly empowered Western alliance under the auspices of NATO.

Whereas in the narrative of the post-Cold War history of nation states we were, until quite recently, living in a world where the power of the United States was unchallenged, the authors of the Grand Strategy implicitly envisage a new unipolar moment in which among international entities NATO can assume a position of unchallenged supremacy. They claim that NATO’s actions would remain tethered to the will of nation states (“the core of decision making”), yet the NATO they envision would appear to have more power and less accountability than the United States has had under George Bush. It would be led by a triumvirate directorate — the President of the United States, the Secretary General of NATO, and the soon-to-be-established President of the European Council. There can be little doubt that the latter two would be subservient to the former. And while the generals seem to be purposefully vague in saying that there need to be adaptations in the organization of government, along with “dramatic changes in national decision making,” the thinly-veiled implication is that NATO must be unshackled from the currently slow moving wheels of democracy and international consensus building.

As a military entity, the new NATO would have the greatest destructive power that any nation can now wield, minus the inflexibility (whose actual source is political accountability — not that the authors care to mention this), providing military forces with the very same strengths that terrorists now use to such great effect:

Asymmetry will be used by all conflict parties, which means both that our side must be more prepared for the unexpected than ever before, and that the opponent must never know how, where or when we will act. To act asymmetrically could well be an instrument in regaining the initiative and could require deployment of the full range of options, from diplomacy to military intervention. Nuclear escalation is the ultimate step in responding asymmetrically, and at the same time the most powerful way of inducing uncertainty in an opponent’s mind.

It is important, furthermore, to have dominance over the opponent’s ability to calculate his risks. It is a very important element of strategy to keep things unpredictable for the opponent, who must never be able to know, or calculate, what action we will take. It is essential to maintain this dimension of psychological warfare by instilling fear in an opponent, to retain an element of surprise and thus deny him the opportunity of calculating the risk.

What the authors neglect to spell out is that there is actually only one way of credibly employing such a strategy: A willingness to engage in nuclear escalation would have to be proved through the use of nuclear weapons; otherwise it will be seen as an empty threat.

When the Grand Strategy was presented to the foreign-policy wonks at CSIS, the nuclear issue was not even mentioned. The realists would prefer to couch this strategic initiative in the seemingly benign terms of a much-needed renewal of the much-revered transatlantic alliance. This, they want to suggest, is a significant departure from the unilateralism of the Bush era and a recommitment to cooperation and a recognition of mutual dependence between long-allied nations. This is a welcome return to internationalism.

Select the right strands of the analysis and this is what one might come up with. But then we have to return to Gen. Klaus Naumann’s unvarnished remarks that appears at the top of this article. The issue here is not merely about re-tooling the operational structure of NATO; it’s about beating back the barbarians who are pounding at the gates. They, he says, out number us. Our survival is at stake. If we are going to effectively defend ourselves we need to unleash our ultimate strength and enter a brave new world of nuclear warfare. This goes beyond the boilerplate of “keeping all options on the table” — this is about shaping expectations by using those options.

As a policy document, who is to say whether the Grand Strategy will soon be forgotten and gather dust as quickly as have so many others. Its significance, however, may lay elsewhere, not as much in its details but as an enunciation of a broadly felt sense that Western power is threatened; that the relative stability of the West has been a testament to our values more than our ability to dominate the rest of the world; that the enterprise of Westernizing the world is now doomed to fail and that self-preservation has become the primary challenge.

To those who regard Western global dominance as a testament to the West’s inherent superiority, Western power must be guarded vigilantly. What the Western preservationists fail to admit is that the civilization they are so desperate to defend, no longer exists.

CAMPAIGN 08: An inability to recognize ourselves in one another

Islamofascism’s ill political wind
By James Carroll, Boston Globe, January 21, 2008

In contrast to the way militant zealotries of other religions have been perceived, there is a broad conviction, especially among many conservative American Christians, that the inner logic of Islam and fascism go together. Political candidates appeal to those Christians by defining the ambition of Islamofascists in language that makes prior threats from, say, Hitler or Stalin seem benign. The point is that there is a deep religious prejudice at work, and when politicians adopt its code, they make it worse.

The Democrats gain little by shaping their rhetoric to appeal to the Republicans’ conservative religious base, but a readiness to denigrate Islam shows up on their side, too. In last week’s debate, moderator Brian Williams put to Barack Obama a question about Internet rumors that claim he is a Muslim. The tone of the question suggested that Obama was being accused of something heinous. He replied with a simple affirmation that he is a Christian. He did not then ask, “And what would be wrong if I were a Muslim?” Had he done so, it seems clear, he would have cost himself votes in the present climate. [complete article]

Obama reaches the mountaintop
By John Nichols, The Nation, January 21, 2008

… in his Sunday speech at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Barack Obama went to a higher ground — to that mountaintop that King occupied until his death on April 4, 1968, and that Bobby Kennedy stood for a brief and remarkable political moment that played out between April and June of that fateful year.

“Unity is the great need of the hour – the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country,” Obama told a audience that hung on the every word of the most emotionally-effective orator to seek the presidency since Kennedy.

“I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans,” explained Obama. “I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.” [complete article]

What does it mean to be the pro-Israel candidate?
By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, January 18, 2008

The main reason that Democratic candidates are less frightening to a progressive Israeli worrying about his country’s future, as my progressive friends in Washington remind me, is that the Democrats may be jiving. That is, because they are sensible folks otherwise, we can assume they don’t really mean this stuff. They even hide small hints of moderation in their rhetoric. The Republicans’ sincerity is truly scary.

I suggest that it’s time to talk about what “pro-Israel” should mean. Not because the discussion will change campaign rhetoric: The candidates will stick to cliches. But after the election, one will have to govern. Members of Congress will need to decide how to vote on the usual strident resolutions backed by AIPAC. Debate now on what it means to support Israel might mean that a year from now, elected leaders will be able to refer to publicly recognized ideas to justify acting more sensibly. [complete article]

FEATURE: The war on diplomacy

Off target
By Kurt Pitzer, Mother Jones, January/February, 2008

Linda Gallini, one of the State Department’s leading experts on nuclear nonproliferation, stepped into an empty room at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and placed a call to Washington. A senior delegate to the iaea, she’d spent the past week strategizing how to keep dangerous materials out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists. But as dusk settled over the Danube that evening in September 2005, Gallini was more worried about what was brewing back home.

When she got her boss, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear nonproliferation Andrew Semmel, on the phone, he confirmed her worst fears. Carrying out a plan announced two months earlier by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, neoconservative political appointees were about to replace some of State’s most knowledgeable wmd experts with Republican loyalists. Gallini’s heart sank. “If that’s what they’re going to do, pretty much everyone else is going to leave,” she said. “Yeah,” she recalls Semmel telling her. “That’s what they want.”

As she resigned a year later, Gallini gave a series of interviews to Mother Jones, providing an insider’s view of how the Bush administration has gutted the nation’s expertise on wmd. Presidents come and go, but State Department staff like Gallini have long been the backbone of U.S. foreign policy—the “ballast,” as she puts it—that keeps political appointees grounded in reality. “Our job is to be the informed, helpful, supportive folks who guide them when they arrive clueless to the issues,” she explains. [complete article]

REVIEW: They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons

Fathers and sons
By Tomothy Noah, New York Times, January 13, 2008

To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler. “Truly Hitlerian,” the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer pronounced Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, opined that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers “misread our system as one that’s weak, that can’t take casualties. … Hitler made that mistake.” Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, said of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last spring, “Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system.” In the same month, the defense analyst Richard Perle mused on whether it had been “a correct reading” of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat “to believe that business could be done with him that would produce a result? I don’t think so. These are the difficult decisions. Diplomacy with Hitler. Chamberlain went to Munich, presumably on the theory that you talk to your enemies and not to your friends, and what did it produce?”

Just about the only place the neoconservative movement can’t locate Hitler is Nazi Germany. As late as 1944, the founding-neocon-to-be, Irving Kristol, publicly dismissed the “near hysterical insistence upon the pressing military danger,” Jacob Heilbrunn reports in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.” While the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers, Kristol, then a 24-year-old Trotskyist, held fast to his conviction that the Allies were no different from the Axis in their imperialism. Kristol took this view because he was “indulging in an abstract crusade for a better world.” [complete article]

ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The Iranian strategic threat – shattered or just fractured?

They stole the threat from us
By Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, December 10, 2007

Iran is indeed deceptive, but it is not crazy. It operates according to a systematic political and diplomatic rationale. But since 1979 this political rationale has been swallowed up in international rhetoric, mainly American and Israeli, which has portrayed Iran as the ultimate global enemy. This is why the American report is such a great blow to Israel. The report does not dismiss the Iranian threat – though it does not substantiate it – but it snatches an important strategic asset from Israel. No longer can Israel play the regional power that charts the map of global strategic threats; the state that mobilized the world against Iran will now assume the role of nudnik.

But Israel’s real problem is that Iran is also losing its status as a strategic threat because of the report, and Israel will find it difficult to “enlist” Iran to promote its regional policy. For example, what justification will Israel have for demanding that Syria sever its relations with Iran as a condition for conducting negotiations once American intelligence has certified Iran as being somewhat acceptable? What good can come from emphasizing the ties between Iran and Hamas or Hezbollah when Iran is now portrayed as a state that no longer threatens the region? And why should the Annapolis conference be described as designed to stymie Iran?

Israel is not the only one with this problem. Its Arab counterparts, who are stuck in the same anti-Iran pit, are also panicking. When Iran’s nuclear threat is not recognized, two fronts collapse: the Iranian-Shi’ite front, which brought Israel closer to some of the Arab states, and the Israeli front against radical organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, or against Syria. In each of these fronts, Iran serves as a connecting axis, an enemy against which coalitions of interests were built and agreements between rivals were generated.

Thus, for example, most Arab countries perceive Iran’s involvement in Lebanon as not just an intervention by a foreign state in Arab affairs, but as a penetration by a hostile state. And Israel intensifies Hezbollah’s tactical threat into a strategic threat because of the Iran connection. Hamas is also accorded the status of a super-threat because of Israel’s efforts to link it with Iran, the mother of all threats, so that we almost forget that the Hamas threat is based only on Qassam rockets.

These enemies will revert to being only “local enemies,” not part of an axis of evil (which also collapses because of the American report). They will no longer be emissaries of a nuclear monster. Israel will have to go back to routine, boring enemies whom it can fight using checkpoints and electricity cuts. Back to Annapolis. Back to the grind.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, some people said the U.S. would have to manufacture a new strategic threat. It will be interesting to see what Israel does after the American report shattered its strategic threat. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The NIE, if viewed as a precision attack aimed at preventing military strikes on Iran in 2008, almost certainly hit its target. But if viewed as a strategic weapon designed to re-shape America and Israel’s approach to the Middle East, it remains to be seen whether an intelligence report alone is capable of bringing about such a sweeping effect.

Consider the difference between American views of Iran and North Korea. It is widely recognized that the North Korean people suffer a depth of oppression from their own government far greater than do the Iranians. The Islamic Republic of Iran, having become distanced from its revolutionary roots, is in many ways the most modern and Westernized of Middle Eastern countries. North Korea on the other hand is for good reason often referred to as the Hermit Kingdom. Iran put its nuclear weapons program on hold while North Korea forged ahead and put its own nuclear weapons to the test. North Korean power is concentrated in the hands of a mercurial leader, while Iranian power is more diffused through a complex power structure.

Why then should the NIE’s most significant “revelation” be the following claim?

Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.

To say that Iran may be more vulnerable to influence than previously judged actually says more about that previous judgment than it says about Iran. And that judgment reveals the critical difference between the views of Iran and those of North Korea.

Iran is the nation state upon which American and Israeli Islamophobia is most sharply focused. Even though there are fewer reasons to regard North Korea as a rational actor, fear of North Korea’s sometimes unpredictable leadership is not matched with an image of some amorphous, demonic Korean threat.

North Korea’s inclusion in the “axis of evil” always looked like a feeble attempt to deflect the charge that the administration was waging a war on Islam. Yet in spite of its inclusion there was no matching and full-blooded demonization. As a result we are now witness to a spectacular turnaround in the Bush administration’s approach to a pariah state, known to be involved in nuclear proliferation. President Bush has just written to “Dear Chairman” Kim Jong Il, and the New York Philarmonic orchestra will soon land in Pyongyang in an effort to serenade the hermit out of its shell.

What hope is there that we might witness such conciliatory gestures aimed at Tehran?

The challenge for Iran is not merely that it nurture a budding understanding in Washington that the United States is actually dealing with a rational actor. The greater challenge lies in the undoing of a pervasive fear that has long been merchandised by people who have no interest in now either owning up to a purposeful deceit or abandoning a deep-seated prejudice.

NEWS: Republicans want intelligence to their liking

Review of Iran intelligence to be sought
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, December 7, 2007

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources.

The move is the first official challenge, but it comes amid growing backlash from conservatives and neoconservatives unhappy about the assessment that Iran halted a clandestine nuclear weapons program four years ago. It reflects how quickly the NIE has become politicized, with critics even going after the analysts who wrote it, and shows a split among Republicans.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: When reason prevails

When reason prevails
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, December 5, 2007

To some political observers there is something vaguely disappointing about witnessing events shaped by reason. Reasonable behavior is somewhat predictable and lacks the zest and drama of the unexpected.

In as much as news-watching is driven by the stimulating effect of the shock of the new, there is then a tendency for one revelation to trigger a desire that this be followed by a cascade of revelations. In the current context, this is provoking a notion that now, anything could happen.

In a game of whack-a-mole, as soon as the National Intelligence Estimate had knocked down the notion of the “mad mullahs”, the image of “mad dog” Israel popped up.

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by “mad mullahs” — clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be “deterred.”

“Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs,” states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be “deterrable” if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, “That is the implication.” He added: “Diplomacy works. That’s the message.”

But not so fast, says Seymour Hersh — “there’s always Israel… Israel can always decide to take military action.” And on CNN last night, Hersh continued. “I’m told that Olmert had a private discussion with Bush about it during Annapolis — before Annapolis. Bush briefed him about it.” This contradicts National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley’s claim that Bush was not briefed on the NIE until Wednesday — the day after the Annapolis Conference. Indeed, there is further evidence that the Israelis were informed well before the conference.

In today’s Haaretz, Amos Harel writes:

Israel has known about the report for more than a month. The first information on it was passed on to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and to Shaul Mofaz, who is the minister responsible for the strategic dialog with the Americans. The issue was also discussed at the Annapolis summit by Barak and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and it seems also between Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

What surprised Israel is the sharp turn from the previous line presented by the DNI [Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell], and the fact the report was made public. Based on his short comments yesterday, it seems Barak, like Olmert, is trying to avoid open disagreement with the U.S. government.

But the issue of the NIE is expected to create tension on two levels. It will cloud the tight cooperation between the two countries intelligence agencies, since now it will no longer look as if it is only a disagreement over timing, but a fundamental disagreement over Iran’s intentions. It will also cause a feeling of distress on the Israeli side, as now it will seem that the U.S. is abandoning Israel to fight alone.

But is there really much likelihood that Israel would take on the fight alone?

Some would argue that Israel’s September 6 strike on Syria was intended as a warning shot — a signal to Tehran that “mad dog” Israel can, if it chooses, just as easily strike Iranian targets. At the time, it was certainly easy to accept such an interpretation. Now, things look different.

It seems more reasonable — in accordance with the principle of Ockham’s razor (cleaving to the simplest explanation) — to believe that bombs dropped on Syria were intended to send a message to Syria, not Iran. The message? Just because of last summer’s mess in Lebanon, don’t get the idea that you’d stand a chance in a military confrontation with Israel. We can hit you whenever we want, wherever we want. Now we’ve made that clear, we’re ready to talk.

When it comes to Iran, the political challenge now is for those who until very recently were hysterically presenting Iran as the greatest threat to the world, to make an about face without losing face and say that Iran can now effectively be engaged.

Those still feeling the sting of the NIE’s claims will predictably revive Rumsfeld’s line of reasoning that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But this always was, and remains, a faultless yet deceptive line of reasoning since the absence of evidence is not evidence of concealment. Just as there are still those who believe that Saddam Hussein’s WMD were never found because they were so well hidden, the same line is being used again: “The Israelis interpret the evidence to mean the Iranians have almost certainly continued to conduct their military nuclear program in secret.”

That’s all well and good, but while the masters-of-secrecy argument might have some limited value in sustaining the image of Iran’s government as a nefarious and deceptive entity, at the same time, it’s hard to plausibly argue in favor of missile strikes on targets so well hidden that their locations are unknown.

The neocons know the game is up and some of them are being surprisingly quick to concede the fact. Norman Podhoretz sees the intelligence community engaged in a scheme to “head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.” But even if the father of neoconservatism doesn’t like what he sees, he concedes that the plot has worked.

Robert Kagan, perhaps the most nimble-minded among the neocons, says, “With its policy tools broken, the Bush administration can sit around isolated for the next year. Or it can seize the initiative, and do the next administration a favor, by opening direct talks with Tehran.” Part of Kagan’s motive for advocating talks now is that this “would give the United States a better chance to frame the discussion, at home and abroad.” Which is to say, a better chance for Kagan and his friends to frame the issues.

Be that as it may, the opportunity that has now opened up needs to be grasped. The question is, who is going to quickest off the mark in becoming the strongest advocate of a bold and strategic policy shift? Those who have nothing to advocate will do no more than sustain the culture of political reactivity in which nothing really gets said and nothing much gets done.

So far there are no signs that inside Bush’s brain there are any new neuronal pathways being tickled by an action potential. It’s time for Iran to “come clean” he says — and Ahmadinejad could say just the same. If the absence of cunning is a precondition for U.S.-Iranian talks, they’re not going to happen.

But Bush’s isn’t the only voice that needs to be heard right now. There are a bunch of folks waltzing around America at the moment claiming they want to lead the nation. OK. Now’s the time to show your mettle. And just in case anyone needs reminding: whether or not Iran has an active program for developing nuclear weapons, it does remain the strategically most important country in the Middle East.

The release of the NIE may have the effect of making presidential candidates think that Iran can quietly be dropped from the political agenda. This would be a mistake. The opportunity here is not limited to finding a new way to approach Iran; with some courage and imagination the conversation could actually start to shift away from its myopic focus on national security threats and towards a new focus on engagement. Instead of talking about how America must lead the world, save the world or protect itself from the world, it’s time to start talking about working together and raising America’s awareness of a convergence of national and global interests.

OPINION: Empire to-go

America loses faith in imperialism
By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, November 20, 2007

Well, that was quick. In 2003, the idea of empire became fashionable in Washington, DC. But the flirtation has lasted little more than three years. The imperial eagles are being put back in the cupboard. The challenge for the US now will be to avoid sliding straight from imperialism to isolationism.

It is true that President George W. Bush always insisted that the US had no imperial ambitions. But – as ever – his vice-president had his own agenda. In 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq, the Christmas card that Dick Cheney sent to his friends read: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” [complete article]

EDITORIAL: The box on the Euphrates

The box on the Euphrates
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, October 29, 2007

Writing in The American Conservative, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi sees in the Syrian-nuclear-reactor story the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign:

In the intelligence community, a disinformation operation is a calculated attempt to convince an audience that falsehoods about an adversary are true, either to discredit him or, in an extreme case, to justify military action. When such a campaign is properly conducted, information is leaked to numerous outlets over a period of time, creating the impression of a media consensus that the story is true, as each new report validates earlier ones.
[…]
The [news] pieces [on the target of the Israeli air attack in Syria] have a common thread: they rely entirely on information provided by Israeli sources without independent corroboration. And the ongoing play they are getting in the international media, without much critical commentary and without direct attribution to Israel, mark them as classic disinformation.

As nuclear proliferation expert Jeffery Lewis notes, the latest revelation — that the “box-on-the-Euphrates” is at least four years old, its existence having already been noted by the intelligence community (IC) — provides a compelling explanation why national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley has kept such a tight lid on the dissemination of the “new” intelligence: “we’d already looked at the building and Hadley knew what the IC would say.”

In the absence of further hard evidence, the ensuing commentary and analysis, most of which is extremely sketchy, has nevertheless become conventional wisdom in part because a few usually reliable sources have given the narrative a veneer of credibility:

faint square

Global Security

the middle of nowhere

images of the barren location

middle of nowhere

Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona

originally being convinced

won over

Congressional testimony

So what do we really know at this point?

A large cube-shaped building next to the Euphrates was visible from space in 2003. Given its size it must have taken a while to construct. The primary structure looked pretty much the same from above in August 2007. New images reveal that it’s not there now, the site has been leveled and it is reasonable to assume that the site clearing occured after, and very likely as a result of, an Israeli air force attack on September 6, 2007.

Do we have hard evidence that Syria was engaged in constructing a nuclear reactor? Not yet. Are any journalists hunting down that hard evidence? Probably not — why go to the trouble when you can kick back and get paid for schmoozing with John Bolton.

Meanwhile, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei is pissed off about the “bomb first and then ask questions later” approach. “I think it undermines the system and it doesn’t lead to any solution to any suspicion, because we are the eyes and ears of the international community. It’s only the agencies and inspectors who can go and verify the information.” He notes that in all the years that John Bolton and his cohorts have been making accusations about a Syrian nuclear program, “we have not received information about any nuclear-related activities, clandestine nuclear-related activities in Syria.”

Perhaps then we can infer that the real target of the Israeli strike was not a nuclear facility: it was the IAEA inspections process — a troublesome log that the neocons are eager to clear off the road leading to Tehran.

NEWS: Neocons angling for a return

Mideast hawks help to develop Giuliani policy
By Michael Cooper and Marc Santora, New York Times, October 25, 2007

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s approach to foreign policy shares with other Republican presidential candidates an aggressive posture toward terrorism, a commitment to strengthening the military and disdain for the United Nations.

But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

Their positions have been criticized by Democrats as irresponsible and applauded by some conservatives as appropriately tough, while raising questions about how closely aligned Mr. Giuliani’s thinking is with theirs.

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination. [complete article]

OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: In defense of hate

Defending Islamofascism
By Christopher Hitchens, Slate, October 22, 2007

The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch “Islamofascism Awareness Week” on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It’s quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it’s ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn’t use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion. He and others don’t want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn’t applied to any other religion. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The word “Islamofascism,” is not a conceptual tool of discrimination. It does not circumscribe a phenomenon and thereby shine light upon and bring clarity to our understanding of the world. Hitchens implicity admits as much by focusing all his attention on what he sees as the suitability of the second half of the formulation — fascism — and nothing on how “Islamo” fits. Google, on the other hand, makes it perfectly clear how the prefix “Islamo” fits — almost exclusively as a lead in to fascism/ist. By this self-fulfilling coupling, the term Islamofascism displays itself as a purely political tool used to twist perceptions and bolster support for reckless policies.

When Hitchens speaks up in defense of the word Islamofascism, he should recognize that the use of this term has nothing to do with semantics and everything to do with the promotion of fear and hatred.

During my current trip to the UK, I met a young family from Syria. After their recent arrival and within a few hours of entering the country, a British child exclaimed in their direction, “I hate terrorists.” The object of this child’s hatred was the meekest looking couple cradling a bonneted six-month old baby. They had rudely been informed what it means to be visibly Muslim in a nation that has loudly and repeatedly been warned about the Islamofascist threat. Christopher Hitchens, Tony Blair, David Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, and George Bush — these are among the prominent voices that have been watering the seeds of fear, suspicion and hatred inside those who see, in the Muslims they encounter, the face of terrorism.

“Islamofascism” is Islamophobia. It is the anti-Semiticism of our era.

OPINION: The invention of a global threat

Stalin, Mao and … Ahmadinejad?
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, October 20, 2007

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on? [complete article]

ANALYSIS: The sparks of a conflagration

Ticking clocks and ‘accidental’ war
By Alastair Crooke, Conflicts Forum, October 14, 2007

Whilst Washington looks at the Iranian prospects through the prism of a binary, to bomb or to acquiesce decision, facing President Bush over the remainder of his presidency, the actors in the region see the conflict as imminent and arriving in a roundabout way, through the backdoor – either via escalation of Western and Israeli tension with Syria; or from events in Lebanon, or a combination of both interacting with each other. All these key actors are convinced that conflict, should it occur, will convulse the entire region. They see the Wursmer ‘engineered’ war that ultimately will extend to Iran, as almost upon them; and they wonder at the silence from Europe and from informed observers in the US. Is it, they speculate, that everyone is so focused on Iraq, and so convinced that Iraq will be the arena in which the decision on Iran will be shaped, that they have forgotten to attend to the backdoor that David Wurmser (until last month Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser) already has a foot around? [complete article]

OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The phoenix of preventive war arises from Syrian ashes

Preemption, Israeli style
By Joshua Muravchik, Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2007

Last month, one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of the Arab-Israel conflict began to leak slowly into the news. Although the facts are still unconfirmed, what seems to have happened has major implications not only for the region but even more for the laws of war and preemption that President Bush has been trying to redefine ever since his 2002 national security strategy paper.

First, Syrian spokesmen complained that Israeli planes had violated their country’s airspace on Sept. 6 — and had been driven off, or so they said. Within a few days came stories — mostly from anonymous sources — that the planes had fired into Syria; these were followed by still other stories that a target had in fact been hit. But what was it?

After further journalistic digging, the most plausible accounts said that the Syrian targets were related to nuclear weapons activity and may even have been manned by North Koreans. Later reports suggest some dispute within the U.S. government about how far Syria had progressed in achieving its nuclear ambitions, but these same reports confirm that this is what Israel was targeting.

The obscurity of this episode results in part from uncharacteristically tight lips in Jerusalem and Damascus. But that is not the whole of the reason. There has also been a deafening silence from the international community and especially from the other states of the region. This highly unusual reaction is one of the oddest parts of the whole episode and, in some ways, the most meaningful. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The neoconservatives and their Iraqi allies famously predicted that American soldiers would be greeted in Baghdad with sweets and flowers. As if to outdo themselves in making wild predictions, with Iran now the target, the suggestion being floated by Joshua Muravchik and other neocons is that alarming predictions about the consequences of a US/Israeli attack on Iran are being vastly overstated. The lesson from Syria, so we are supposed to believe, is that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities will be greeted by deafening silence.

Eager to boost her stock in the Israel lobby and implying to neocons that there is such a thing as life-after-Cheney, Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in expressing her support for the Israeli attack:

“We don’t have as much information as we wish we did. But what we think we know is that with North Korean help, both financial and technical and material, the Syrians apparently were putting together, and perhaps over some period of years, a nuclear facility, and the Israelis took it out. I strongly support that.”

Clinton’s Iran vote: the fallout
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, October 14, 2007

Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted against it. Senator Barack Obama said he would have voted against it if he had voted. Former Senator John Edwards implied he would have voted against it if he could vote.

And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton? She voted in favor of the measure in question, which asked the Bush administration to declare Iran’s 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. Such a move — more hawkish than even most of the Bush administration has been willing to venture so far — would intensify America’s continuing confrontation with Iran, many foreign policy experts say.
[…]
Think of it as Iran declaring that the United States military is a terrorist organization because it carries out President Bush’s orders. Such a move, say some Iran experts — including some advisers to the Clinton campaign who declined to publicly criticize their possible boss — runs the risk of further alienating the Iranian population, because many Iranians are tied to the Revolutionary Guard or its many offshoots and enterprises in some way.

“What Senator Clinton and the other legislators who voted for this bill don’t seem to realize is that the Revolutionary Guards are not Al Qaeda,” said Karim Sadjapour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They’re not a group of voluntary jihadists signing up to fight the United States. Many are conscripts taken from the regular army.” [complete article]

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Time for Israel to cut the crap

Syria tells journalists Israeli raid did not occur
By Hugh Naylor, New York Times, October 11, 2007

Israel has been unusually quiet about the attack on Sept. 6 and has effectively imposed a news blackout about it. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli opposition leader, on Sept. 19 became the first public figure in Israel to acknowledge that an attack had even taken place. Some Israeli officials have said, though not publicly, that the raid hit a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip, but they have not specified where.

On Monday, journalists toured the agricultural center at the government’s invitation to prove, Mr. Mehdi said, that no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there. “The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mr. Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

“There was no raid here — we heard nothing,” he added. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — It’s much harder to prove that something didn’t happen than that it did but Syria has shown where the bombs didn’t fall. The onus is now on Israel. Stop playing games. Release the IAF in-flight videos so that we can see the time, the coordinates, the targets, and the explosions. If no such evidence is forthcoming, then the Syrians should be believed. And in that event, the press needs to engage in some serious self-examination. Why is it still so willing to allow itself to be the delivery system for imaginary weapons of mass destruction?

ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Iran – Israel’s enemy of convenience

Iran, the inflatable bogey
By Dr. Trita Parsi, Rootless Cosmopolitan, October 9, 2007

If Iran is, as Netanyahu and his allies in the U.S. suggest, irrationally aggressive, prone to a suicidal desire for apocalyptic confrontation, then both diplomacy and deterrence and containment are ruled out as policy options for Washington. The “Mad Mullahs,” as the neocons call them, are not capable of traditional balance of power realism. In the arguments of Netanyahu and such fellow travelers as Norman Podhortez and Newt Gingrich, to imagine that war against the regime in Tehran is avoidable is to be as naïve as Chamberlain was in 1938.

However, as I discovered in the course of researching my book Treacherous Alliance – the Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States, not only does Netanyahu’s characterization of Iran have little relationship to reality; Netanyahu himself knows this better than most. Outside of the realm of cynical posturing by politicians, most Israeli strategists recognize that Iran represents a strategic challenge to the favorable balance of power enjoyed by Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East over the past 15 years, but it is no existential threat to the Israel, the U.S. or the Arab regimes.

And that was the view embraced by the Likud leader himself during his last term as prime minister of Israel. In the course of dozens of interviews with key players in the Israeli strategic establishment, a fascinating picture emerged of Netanyahu strongly pushing back against the orthodoxy of his Labor Party predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, which treated Iran as one of Israel’s primary enemies. Not only that, he initiated an extensive discreet program of reaching out to the Islamic Republic. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Without wanting to understate Israel’s capacity for irrational behavior, it’s worth asking whether for the Israeli right there is one issue to which all others are subordinate. I would say that there is and that it is the consolidation of the territorial expansion that Israel has been engaged in for the last 40 years through building settlements in the West Bank. Even today, The Guardian reports on yet more seizure of Palestinian land that will allow a huge expansion of settlements. The greatest threat to this ongoing expansionist enterprise would come from the revival of the long-stalled peace process. The relentless construction of settlements, the construction of an apartheid road system separating Israeli and Palestinian traffic, and the construction of the so-called security barrier — these are all ways of making it clear, declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, that Israel has no intention of withdrawing to the 1967 borders.

And how does Iran fit into this equation? It presents a useful diversion through which in the shadow of a supposed existential threat, the development of the West Bank can continue all the way to the end of a window of opportunity — otherwise known as the Bush administration.

While Netanyahu’s neoconservative supporters in Washington can’t wait to see the bombs rain down on Iran, my suspicion (and it’s nothing more than that) is that Bibi will play the 1938 rhetoric for all it’s worth even while the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran doesn’t cause him to loose a wink of sleep. Indeed, a silver-lining for Israel from a nuclear Iran is that that would provide the Jewish state with the perfect opportunity to come out of its own nuclear closet. It could claim that it was remaining true to its assertion that it would not have been the first state to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the region even if it was the first to deploy them — it simply didn’t make a fanfair about the fact; there was no declaration, no introduction. And with the balance of power having shifted towards Iran, the Israel lobby in Washington would have an easy time sustaining the United States’ financial commitment to Israel’s defense into perpetuity.

Having said that, a line that’s almost as popular as Netanyahu’s “1938”, is John McCain’s, “There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option, that is a nuclear armed Iran.” The question thus remains, does the US and/or Israel truly believe that in such an attack the benefits outweigh the risks?

If Israel’s recent incursion into Syrian airspace was really as momentous an event as all the neocon chest-thumping would suggest, how come we still don’t know what happened? What might have been seen as a muscle-flexing exercise directed at Iran, at this point looks more like a very cautious dip of one toe in some icy water. While its success as a PR exercise is beyond question, its military significance remains in doubt.

And while the Iran-baiting rhetoric coming from American officials in Iraq has been escalating for months and months, it remains possible that the threshold will never be crossed from words to war. Everyone is playing an extremely dangerous game, yet the contest between those competing for the title, “master of destiny,” is a struggle between men, not one of whom has a clear view of the future.

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The longer this goes on, the less we know

An Israeli strike on Syria kindles debate in the U.S
By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, New York Times, October 10, 2007

It has long been known that North Korean scientists have aided Damascus in developing sophisticated ballistic missile technology, and there appears to be little debate that North Koreans frequently visited a site in the Syrian desert that Israeli jets attacked Sept. 6. Where officials disagree is whether the accumulated evidence points to a Syrian nuclear program that poses a significant threat to the Middle East.

Mr. Cheney and his allies have expressed unease at the decision last week by President Bush and Ms. Rice to proceed with an agreement to supply North Korea with economic aid in return for the North’s disabling its nuclear reactor. Those officials argued that the Israeli intelligence demonstrates that North Korea cannot be trusted. They also argue that the United States should be prepared to scuttle the agreement unless North Korea admits to its dealing with the Syrians.

During a breakfast meeting on Oct. 2 at the White House, Ms. Rice and her chief North Korea negotiator, Christopher R. Hill, made the case to President Bush that the United States faced a choice: to continue with the nuclear pact with North Korea as a way to bring the secretive country back into the diplomatic fold and give it the incentive to stop proliferating nuclear material; or to return to the administration’s previous strategy of isolation, which detractors say left North Korea to its own devices and led it to test a nuclear device last October.

Mr. Cheney and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, also attended the meeting, administration officials said.

The Israeli strike occurred at a particularly delicate time for American diplomatic efforts. In addition to the North Korean nuclear negotiations, the White House is also trying to engineer a regional Middle East peace conference that would work toward a comprehensive peace accord between Arabs and Israelis.

The current and former American officials said Israel presented the United States with intelligence over the summer about what it described as nuclear activity in Syria. Officials have said Israel told the White House shortly in advance of the September raid that it was prepared to carry it out, but it is not clear whether the White House took a position then about whether the attack was justified. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Never has a story been told at such length while revealing so little.

Ever since this story broke, among the neocons, the engine that has kept it running is this bizarre proposition: the unprecedented Israeli veil of secrecy concerning the nature of its target is what “proves” that the target was so significant. But on the contrary, what the secrecy has done is create on open field for speculation ranging from this being a “dry run” in preparation for an attack on Iran (though since that would have undermined the element of surprise, a bit of Iran-directed saber rattling is more plausible); a demonstration of Israel’s ability to disable Syria’s air defenses (though it’s hard to understand why, if they could do this, Israel would want to publicize the fact and thereby give their adversaries a heads-up); and of course, an attack on a “nuclear facility.” And whereas last month it was being reported that Israeli commandos had gathered “samples” at the site providing forensic evidence of the connection to North Korea (North Korean mud off a North Korean boot?), we’re now told that “officials disagree … whether the accumulated evidence points to a Syrian nuclear program that poses a significant threat to the Middle East.” Strip away New York Times waffle, and that can be read as, there is no clear evidence that there is anything qualified to be called a Syrian nuclear program.

When it comes to the known facts, at this point we don’t actually know for a fact that Israel did anything more than penetrate Syrian air space. One of the few journalists who has actually attempted to report this story by visiting the location of the “strike” was told by locals that they heard sonic booms but no explosions.

How many more weeks do we have to wait before the neocon rumor mill runs out of steam and we can conclude what could have been assumed well before now: the reason the veil of secrecy has been held down so tight is because there’s nothing behind it!

As for my own theory about what happened, it is this: Israel’s new defense minister and would-be future prime minister, Ehud Barak, wanted to demonstrate that he’s a man of action who can restore Israel’s military pride after last year’s disastrous performance in Lebanon. The “strike” was a fake act of war in which the IAF gambled that Syria would not rise to the bait. The absolute secrecy was intended to hide this risky charade. Instead it provided an open season for neocon rumormongering about North Korea, Iran, the State Department and any other conceivable target of opportunity.

FEATURE & EDITOR’S COMMENT: A romantic’s anguish

Kanan Makiya – regrets only?
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, October 7, 2007

Kanan Makiya spent years in exile advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The war he supported brought about an Iraq he never imagined.

Where did it go wrong? Makiya asks himself. Or, more precisely, where did he go wrong? It’s the second question that Makiya is finding the most troubling, for it concerns a lifetime of believing, as he puts it, that hope can triumph over experience. “I want to look into myself, look at myself, delve into the assumptions I had before the war,” he told me.

Makiya’s life is no longer what it was. In 2003, on returning to Iraq, he reunited with his sweetheart from high-school days, married and took her back to Cambridge. He also found out he has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the same disease that killed Edward Said, the Palestinian-born Columbia University professor and Makiya’s intellectual nemesis.

On Iraq, he says, there certainly were clues before the war began — for instance, that meeting in the Oval Office with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, two months before the war. Sitting across his wide desk from Makiya, President Bush declared that the United States was launching not one campaign but two, the first to topple Hussein and the second to rebuild Iraq. Makiya recalls: “Bush turned to Rice, who was seated on the other side of the room, and he said to her, Our preparations for rebuilding Iraq are well advanced, right? And Rice looked down. She could not look him in the eye. And she said, Yes, Mr. President. She looked at the floor.”

That the Americans committed error after error in Iraq, Makiya takes as a given: their biggest mistake, he maintains, was the decision to occupy Iraq and govern the country themselves, rather than allowing the Iraqis to take over. “I did not want to see the United States micromanage Iraqi affairs because, I feared, that is where things might go wrong,” he said. Makiya now believes, though he did not at the time, that the Iraqi Army should have been held together, that the bad people could have been culled and the rest of it left intact. “We had this phobia of the army, that it would be used domestically, that it would mount coups, that it would get involved in domestic politics,” he told me. “That was a mistake.”

Editor’s Comment — Dexter Filkins provides a conclusion that, as yet, Makiya is reluctant to articulate: “You exposed a terrible dictatorship, and for the noblest of motives you signed on to an invasion that ended in catastrophe. You misjudged your native country, and your adopted one too.”

Makiya’s misjudgment of America is no more clearly evident than in his hope that having toppled Saddam, the US would then defer to Iraqis in the reconstruction of their own country. Such a hope could only be entertained by those who chose to ignore the overarching motive of the Bush administration: that toppling of Saddam would repudiate the challenge posed by 9/11 by demonstrating to the world America’s supreme military might. In other words, what Makiya chose to ignore was that George Bush and Dick Cheney didn’t give a fuck about Iraq, per se.

Yet this particular error of judgment — one among many that have spawned no end of if-onlys, dreamed of as precursors to a happy ending — seems to be a way of glossing over the most fundamental error: the presumption that a bunch of exiles living comfortable lives in the West, had either the right or ability to assume an instrumental role in determining the fate of a remembered nation that animated their thoughts but that only from a distance shaped their lives.

In Makiya’s view, the one person who could have stopped [the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-]Hakim and his like-minded cohorts — the one person who could have slowed Iraq’s gallop toward civil war — was Ahmad Chalabi. If Iraq was going to turn out like South Africa, Makiya reasoned, then it would need its Mandela — someone who could rise above revenge and parochial interests and steer the country toward a united future. Makiya said he believed that Chalabi could have been Iraq’s Mandela.

Editor’s Comment — The difference between Nelson Mandela and Ahmad Chalabi is the difference between a cell in Robben Island maximum security prison and an apartment in London’s Mayfair. It’s the difference between being willing to sacrifice ones own life for what one believes in, versus the willingness to sacrifice the lives of others. Kanan Makiya will likely wrestle with his doubts and his anguish for the rest of his life, but he chooses to do so in the comfort of his Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather than the turmoil of Iraq. That speaks louder than any of his words.