We're Really Leaving Iraq Juan Cole Salon - March, 2009http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/03/02/obama_iraq/index.html

Why Syria Will Not Get the Golan Back: Why Israel and the Arabs will continue at War
Joshua Landis
Syria Comment - March, 2009
The barriers standing in front of a successful peace process are many. First, the debilitating imbalance of power between Syria and Israel stands out above all others. Second, the US is not an impartial or neutral mediator, but a lawyer for Israel. Third, underlying these problems are the radically different world-views of each side and deep mistrust for each other, due to decades of demonization and warfare.

http://joshualandis.com/blog/?p=2250

Update on the Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Arab Countries World Bank - February, 2009 Most Arab countries are already experiencing decline in export growth as a result of global economic downturn and/or lower oil prices. However, the economic impact of global slowdown will vary, depending upon initial fiscal and external account positions, as well as the degree of economic integration with highly impacted regions.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/C...:256299,00.html

The Return of Benjamin Netanyahu
Mustafa Barghouti
Huffington Post - March, 2009
The result of this election will not bring us closer to a one or two-state solution; it will bring us no solution. And if we continue down this path much longer, 'no solution' will manifest itself in the death of the two-state dream and continued Apartheid for the Palestinian people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mustafa-barg...e_b_170353.html

Geithner's folly
As US unemployment rises inexorably, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is playing his part in ensuring that the trend will continue, while his explanation of "why we are here" overlooks his own role in that descent into economic madness. - Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KC10Dj05.html

CREDIT BUBBLE BULLETIN
Washington's guilty sermonizers
The pulpit posturing of US legislators and Federal Reserve officials who sermonize on the financial crisis and efforts to end it blindly overlook the direct role they and their like played in bringing about the present mayhem.

SPENGLER
Obama and his magic lamp

President Barack Obama was expected to adjust United States foreign policy to the constraints of rising foreign debt and existing entanglements. Instead, Obama has strode forth with a magic lamp in hand, namely the US's bottomless capacity to borrow. Struggling countries - such as Turkey - will smile and nod and take American checks, at least for the moment, while there still are functioning governments to take American checks. (Mar 9,'09)

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...icle%2FShowFull

Yadlin: 'Iran crossed nuclear tech threshold'
By HERB KEINON

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street
By Felix Salmon Email 02.23.09
In the mid-'80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly... until one of them devastated the global economy.
Photo: Jim Krantz/Gallery Stock
Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now!

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multitrillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

A bond, of course, is just an IOU, a promise to pay back money with interest by certain dates. If a company—say, IBM—borrows money by issuing a bond, investors will look very closely over its accounts to make sure it has the wherewithal to repay them. The higher the perceived risk—and there's always some risk—the higher the interest rate the bond must carry.

Bond investors are very comfortable with the concept of probability. If there's a 1 percent chance of default but they get an extra two percentage points in interest, they're ahead of the game overall—like a casino, which is happy to lose big sums every so often in return for profits most of the time.

Bond investors also invest in pools of hundreds or even thousands of mortgages. The potential sums involved are staggering: Americans now owe more than $11 trillion on their homes. But mortgage pools are messier than most bonds. There's no guaranteed interest rate, since the amount of money homeowners collectively pay back every month is a function of how many have refinanced and how many have defaulted. There's certainly no fixed maturity date: Money shows up in irregular chunks as people pay down their mortgages at unpredictable times—for instance, when they decide to sell their house. And most problematic, there's no easy way to assign a single probability to the chance of default.

Wall Street solved many of these problems through a process called tranching, which divides a pool and allows for the creation of safe bonds with a risk-free triple-A credit rating. Investors in the first tranche, or slice, are first in line to be paid off. Those next in line might get only a double-A credit rating on their tranche of bonds but will be able to charge a higher interest rate for bearing the slightly higher chance of default. And so on.

For the rest of the article, go to http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant

A Prudent Alternative to Bank Nationalization

In his latest syndicated column, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa discusses an alternative approach to bailing out and nationalizing troubled banks. The title of his piece says it all: "Let Those Banks Fail!"

"Nationalization would compound the problems caused by the credit craze that led us to where we are, kick taxpayers in the stomach, and do in a convoluted way what the market would do swiftly," he writes.

Allowing insolvent banks to fail need not disrupt credit markets permanently or significantly, Vargas Llosa explains. Federal and state authorities could encourage the chartering of new banks. Along with many of the nation's surviving banks, they could take over the consumer loans, auto loans, and mortgage loans of the insolvent banks.

"Let Those Banks Fail!" by Alvaro Vargas Llosa (3/4/09) Spanish Translation
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2446

Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, edited by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
http://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=73

U.S. Policymakers Should Avoid Japan's Mistakes, Not Repeat Them

In the 1990s, Japan tried to revive its moribund economy with deep cuts in interest rates, bank bailouts and nationalizations, and multiple fiscal stimulus packages--including a 1998 spending program that amounted to a whopping 8.5 percent of gross domestic product. Despite those drastic measures, however, the economy languished: the 1990s were Japan's "lost decade."

Economic policymakers in the United States have taken a cue from their Japanese counterparts, enacting similar policies but doing so more quickly. Unfortunately, it is the basic similarity of their approach that is cause for alarm, according to Benjamin Powell, a research fellow at the Independent Institute.

"Bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus bills don't work because they strive to maintain the status quo," writes Powell. "But the status quo is the problem and exactly what needs to be corrected.... To achieve long-term economic recovery, market forces, not political forces, need to direct capital and labor to their most productive uses."

"Avoid Japan's Mistakes," by Benjamin Powell (Washington Times, 3/8/09)

Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development, edited by Benjamin Powell

Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, edited by Randall G. Holcombe and Benjamin Powell

Six Bad Economic Ideas

At least 95 percent of what public officials and pundits have said about the causes of and cures for the current economic recession has been appallingly bad, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs.

"I call this pseudo-intellectual mishmash vulgar Keynesianism," writes Higgs in a new op-ed. The six worst mistakes of vulgar Keynesianism, Higgs explains, pertain to aggregation, relative prices, the rate of interest, capital and its structure, malinvestment and money pumping, and regime uncertainty. The logical fallacies, conceptual flaws, and inductive errors of vulgar Keynesianism have been identified many times over the decades--and yet they persist.

Writes Higgs: "It's the same claptrap that has passed for economic wisdom in this country for more than fifty years and seems to have originated in the first edition of Paul Samuelson's Economics (1948), the best-selling economics textbook of all time and the one from which a plurality of several generations of college students acquired whatever they knew about economic analysis. Long ago, this view seeped into educated discourse and writing in the news media and in politics and established itself as an orthodoxy."

"Recession and Recovery: Six Fundamental Errors of the Current Orthodoxy," by Robert Higgs (3/5/09)

Depression, War, and Cold War, by Robert Higgs

Neither Liberty nor Safety, by Robert Higgs

Video: Robert Higgs on War, Taxes and Economic Crises (YouTube)

“Two States”

Sanctimonious Hypocrisy

By Uri Avnery

Binyamin Netanyahu has a similar vision, but differently worded: the Arabs will “govern themselves”. They will govern their towns and villages, but not the territory, neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip. They will have no army, of course, and no control of the airspace over their heads, neither will they have any physical contact with neighboring countries. . Continue http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22175.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0902232_pf.html

Tim Geithner's Black Hole

By David M. Smick
Tuesday, March 10, 2009; A13

Pity Barack Obama's economic advisers. The blogs are now demanding their scalps, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and his colleagues face a nasty dilemma: There are no solutions to the banking crisis without extraordinary political and financial risks. Thus, they have adopted a three-pronged approach, delay, delay, delay, in the hope that somebody comes up with a breakthrough.

Here's the problem: Today's true market value of the U.S. banks' toxic assets (that ugly stuff that needs to be removed from bank balance sheets before the economy can recover) amounts to between 5 and 30 cents on the dollar. To remain solvent, however, the banks say they need a valuation of 50 to 60 cents on the dollar. Translation: as much as another $2 trillion taxpayer bailout.

That kind of expensive solution could send the president's approval rating into a nose dive. Consider: $2 trillion is about two-thirds of the tax revenue the federal government collects each year.

The logical alternative -- talk show hosts' solution du jour -- is to temporarily restructure or nationalize the banks and leave taxpayers alone. Remove the toxic assets, replace management and cut the too-big-to-fail financial dinosaurs into smaller, nimbler entities. Then reprivatize these smaller banks and let the recovery begin.

Oh, if it were that simple. I suspect Obama's advisers would like nothing more than to dismantle an irresponsible firm such as Citigroup. They are afraid to do so, for one reason: All the big banks are connected to a potentially lethal web of paper insurance instruments called credit default swaps. These paper derivatives have become our financial system's new master.

The theory holds that dismantling a big bank could unravel this paper market, with catastrophic global financial consequences. Or not. Nobody knows, because the market for these unregulated financial derivatives, amounting potentially to over $40 trillion (by comparison, global gross domestic product is now not much more than $60 trillion), is the financial equivalent of uncharted waters.

Geithner has reason to be terrified. He was part of the Henry Paulson-led team that underestimated the devastating global-contagion effect of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Geithner won't make the mistake of underestimation again.

Geithner also knows that the mood in Congress has changed. Were a global financial brush fire to break out as a result of bank restructuring or nationalization, today's populist Congress might just let it burn. Congressional anger is likely to intensify when policymakers realize that credit default swaps demand a stream of premium payments like a life insurance policy, not just a payment due at termination. And recent signs indicate that firms such as Citigroup, in recycling their taxpayer bailout funding, may have helped other financial firms, including some in Europe, meet these payment obligations.

In addition, Geithner worries that because the troubled insurance giant American International Group (AIG) is a conduit for the banks' use of credit default swaps, a collapse of AIG (as an unintended consequence of dismantling the big banks) could be catastrophic. AIG's more than 300 million terrified holders of insurance-related investments and pension funds, who have investments totaling $20 trillion (U.S. GDP is $14 trillion), could suddenly rush for redemptions -- the equivalent of a run on a bank. Geithner would face a worldwide insurance collapse to accompany his global banking collapse.

Or again, maybe not. Nobody knows.

Here's another likely Geithner fear -- that Congress forces the banks' bondholders to take a hit. So far, only stockholders have lost out because of the banking crisis. One reason for the fragility in the credit default swap market of late is that markets fear that bank bondholders, who today are protected even before U.S. taxpayers, could soon see their status change. The worry is that if even bondholders are put at risk, U.S. and foreign investors alike would stop financing all corporate America. The administration says that won't happen, but market participants believe (probably correctly) that this White House can't control Congress.

So our Treasury secretary has no choice but to talk of bank stress-testing and other tactics to buy time before the big bank bailout. Notice that the president's budget already contains a contingency fund of up to $750 billion for a future bank bailout -- a politically shrewd number that roughly matches the size of the Paulson bailout. The true cost is likely to be two or three times as much, unless some last-minute intellectual breakthrough -- a tax holiday for derivatives? -- arises.

The Obama team needs to remember that we got into this mess because of a lack of financial transparency. It's time to tell the American people what the stock market already knows: that the path to recovery will probably be expensive and politically unpopular, perhaps explosively so. This dire situation could take us all down, which is why Obama should name a proven, world-class problem-solver who is not from Wall Street as his bank workout czar. James Baker, the former Republican secretary of state and Treasury secretary, comes to mind. Other possibilities: former Democratic senators Bill Bradley or George Mitchell. Perhaps the White House should name a team.

In the end, at least one thing is certain: Our present position is unsustainable. The longer we delay fixing the banks, the faster the economy deleverages, the more credit dries up, the further the stock market falls, the higher the ultimate bank bailout price tag for the American taxpayer, and the more we risk falling into a financial black hole from which escape could take decades.

David M. Smick is a global financial strategist and the author, most recently, of "The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy."

Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States

Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet

ForeignPolicy: Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil.

The pluses of a regional grand bargain
By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff



The United States in the greater Middle East is doing the equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time - in other words doing more than one thing at a time, and tackling more than one political issue at a time. The Obama administration has named envoys to the Middle East peace process and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is simultaneously re-establishing lines of communication with Syria and Iran. President Barack Obama this week said the US should consider speaking with some elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to wind down that country's war.


This is a worthy approach that will probably be supported widely in the US and abroad. It was also one of several key themes that dominated a fine two-day conference I just attended at the Issam Fares Center of the Fletcher School at Tufts University near Boston. The knowledgeable and experienced participants - academics, journalists, former senior military and political officials - kept returning to two core issues: a "grand bargain" is likely to be needed to resolve the tensions between the US and Iran that are so pivotal to other conflicts in the Middle East; and, the US has much work to do on this front because it knows nothing about key aspects of Iran's strategic aims, nuclear goals or motivations, or decision-making system.


Washington and Tehran have not talked in a sustained way for 30 years, since the overthrow of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The list of things the US and the West do not know about Iran is long, including crucial things like how the inner circle of decision-makers operates; what Iran will settle for in a deal on its nuclear enrichment capabilities; whether it wants a nuclear bomb or just the capability to make one if needed one day; and how it sees its vital national interests served through long-term relations with partners and allies throughout the Arab world.


Iran has already achieved its important first goal, despite intense American-led threats, warnings and sanctions. It has established a spinning-centrifuge-based system for enriching uranium. Having faced down the demand to stop enrichment, Iran probably feels that it can negotiate from a position of strength. Now confronted with the Obama approach of talking rather than only sanctioning, the Iranians now face many new possibilities.


The most intriguing but complex one is the idea of a "grand bargain," in which multiple players reach agreements to resolve several problems at once. Iran (like Syria on a smaller scale) is strategically placed to both talk and work on many fronts. Its links with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, for starters, provide opportunities for new understandings that could be strategically valuable for the US. It can certainly cooperate to make the American withdrawal from Iraq easier, and perhaps help cool down the conflict in Afghanistan.


In return, it will want American and Western recognition of its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, along with more intangible things like "respect" for its status and acknowledgment of its role as a major regional power. Conceding enrichment should be no problem, as Iran has already achieved this. Preventing the ultimate move towards creating a nuclear bomb will be the main issue to be negotiated here, and will require the Iranians being clearer about precisely what they desire and what they will settle for in their negotiations.


Yet some experts who actually go to Iran and know it warn that the Iranian leadership may actually fear a grand bargain with the US, because the tension with Washington is a major source of regime legitimacy in Tehran. The only way to find out, they say, is for the Iranians and their adversaries in the West to meet and talk. Such a process will quickly separate the real grievances that both sides have against each other from the side issues or the third-party concerns of Israel or Arab Gulf states that have been taken up by the US.


Achieving a grand bargain is a very complex operation, requiring juggling several different issues, and placating multiple interests among many players. The Americans, however, should have no trouble achieving this, because they have an impressive legacy of this sort of thing in the sports world: the three-way trade among professional basketball teams. This time-consuming endeavor requires knowing the precise weaknesses, strengths, aspirations and needs of several different teams, then crafting trades that send players moving around among three teams.


The process works - and can be elegant at times - because those making the deal take the time to study its component elements realistically, and try to work out a deal that satisfies the minimum needs of each team. A grand bargain on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Arab-Israeli peacemaking would require the same sort of complex analysis leading to agreements that satisfy the needs of all sides.


Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.
The pluses of a regional grand bargain
By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff



The United States in the greater Middle East is doing the equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time - in other words doing more than one thing at a time, and tackling more than one political issue at a time. The Obama administration has named envoys to the Middle East peace process and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is simultaneously re-establishing lines of communication with Syria and Iran. President Barack Obama this week said the US should consider speaking with some elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to wind down that country's war.


This is a worthy approach that will probably be supported widely in the US and abroad. It was also one of several key themes that dominated a fine two-day conference I just attended at the Issam Fares Center of the Fletcher School at Tufts University near Boston. The knowledgeable and experienced participants - academics, journalists, former senior military and political officials - kept returning to two core issues: a "grand bargain" is likely to be needed to resolve the tensions between the US and Iran that are so pivotal to other conflicts in the Middle East; and, the US has much work to do on this front because it knows nothing about key aspects of Iran's strategic aims, nuclear goals or motivations, or decision-making system.


Washington and Tehran have not talked in a sustained way for 30 years, since the overthrow of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The list of things the US and the West do not know about Iran is long, including crucial things like how the inner circle of decision-makers operates; what Iran will settle for in a deal on its nuclear enrichment capabilities; whether it wants a nuclear bomb or just the capability to make one if needed one day; and how it sees its vital national interests served through long-term relations with partners and allies throughout the Arab world.


Iran has already achieved its important first goal, despite intense American-led threats, warnings and sanctions. It has established a spinning-centrifuge-based system for enriching uranium. Having faced down the demand to stop enrichment, Iran probably feels that it can negotiate from a position of strength. Now confronted with the Obama approach of talking rather than only sanctioning, the Iranians now face many new possibilities.


The most intriguing but complex one is the idea of a "grand bargain," in which multiple players reach agreements to resolve several problems at once. Iran (like Syria on a smaller scale) is strategically placed to both talk and work on many fronts. Its links with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, for starters, provide opportunities for new understandings that could be strategically valuable for the US. It can certainly cooperate to make the American withdrawal from Iraq easier, and perhaps help cool down the conflict in Afghanistan.


In return, it will want American and Western recognition of its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, along with more intangible things like "respect" for its status and acknowledgment of its role as a major regional power. Conceding enrichment should be no problem, as Iran has already achieved this. Preventing the ultimate move towards creating a nuclear bomb will be the main issue to be negotiated here, and will require the Iranians being clearer about precisely what they desire and what they will settle for in their negotiations.


Yet some experts who actually go to Iran and know it warn that the Iranian leadership may actually fear a grand bargain with the US, because the tension with Washington is a major source of regime legitimacy in Tehran. The only way to find out, they say, is for the Iranians and their adversaries in the West to meet and talk. Such a process will quickly separate the real grievances that both sides have against each other from the side issues or the third-party concerns of Israel or Arab Gulf states that have been taken up by the US.


Achieving a grand bargain is a very complex operation, requiring juggling several different issues, and placating multiple interests among many players. The Americans, however, should have no trouble achieving this, because they have an impressive legacy of this sort of thing in the sports world: the three-way trade among professional basketball teams. This time-consuming endeavor requires knowing the precise weaknesses, strengths, aspirations and needs of several different teams, then crafting trades that send players moving around among three teams.


The process works - and can be elegant at times - because those making the deal take the time to study its component elements realistically, and try to work out a deal that satisfies the minimum needs of each team. A grand bargain on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Arab-Israeli peacemaking would require the same sort of complex analysis leading to agreements that satisfy the needs of all sides.


Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.

The Attack on Syria's al-Kibar Nuclear Facility
By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

The new issue of inFocus is devoted to discussion of Syria, and the possibility of engagement with the country. My colleague Josh Goodman and I contributed an article about Israel's attack on Syria's al-Kibar reactor in September 2007. An excerpt:

Syria's response in the wake of Israel's bombing was curious. The regime sought no retaliatory measures. It did not even ask the U.N. Security Council to discuss or condemn the incident. Rather, satellite photos show Syria's efforts to scrub the site of any traces of the nuclear reactor that Syria denied having. Reuters reported that Syria bulldozed the area, "removed debris and erected a new building in a possible cover-up." Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, president of the prestigious Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), told the New York Times, "It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity. But it won't work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing."

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Mohammed ElBaradei condemned the U.S. and Israel for their "shoot first and ask questions later" approach. Nonetheless, the IAEA began probing Syrian nuclear activity, and Syria gave its inspectors access to the al-Kibar site in June 2008. (Syria later refused IAEA requests to revisit al-Kibar and examine three other related sites.)

The IAEA released a report on November 19, 2008, containing a number of relevant data points. The report establishes that construction of the al-Kibar facility began between April 26 and August 4, 2001. Based on analysis of satellite imagery, the IAEA also notes:

Imagery taken prior to and immediately after the bombing indicates that the destroyed box-shaped building may have had underground levels. Its containment structure appears to have been similar in dimension and layout to that required for a biological shield for nuclear reactors, and the overall size of the building was sufficient to house the equipment needed for a nuclear reactor of the type alleged.

To read the whole article, click here: http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/826/the-...uclear-facility

The Economic Crisis: Al Qaeda's Response

By Michael Jacobson


The Washington Institute just published a piece by Richard Barrett, the head of the monitoring team for the UN's 1267 al Qaeda/Taliban Committee. Richard's piece discusses how al Qaeda has responded to -- and tried to take advantage of -- the global financial crisis.

Here is an excerpt:

The deepening global financial crisis has focused international attention on failing companies, rising unemployment, and diving stock markets. Little attention, however, has been given to the downturn's significant effect on terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, which has altered its central message and is facing dwindling financial resources. Although the economic situation has likewise affected government and private-sector counterterrorism efforts, steps can be taken to improve the current counterterrorism financing regime even in these troubled times.

Background

Al-Qaeda's immediate reaction to the financial crisis has been to claim credit for the economic misfortunes of the West. The group argues that today's financial problems are the consequences of the September 11 attacks and the cost of the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda leaders have always regarded the West's consumerism as a key vulnerability and have consistently espoused attacks against economic targets. Despite complaining that the Muslim world's resources benefit Western countries and their allies more than they do the Muslim community, terrorist leaders regard oil as the treasure of their future caliphate.

It was notable that both Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri issued statements encouraging attacks on oil refineries in the months before the failed attack on the Abqaiq oil-processing plant in Saudi Arabia in February 2006. Considering that Abqaiq is the largest facility of its kind in the world and represents 60 percent of Saudi Arabia's daily output, a successful terrorist attack there would have significantly disrupted global energy supplies. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issued a statement following the attack, stating that it was part of "the war against Christians and Jews to stop their pillage of Muslim riches."

Al-Qaeda's focus on economic targets will likely sharpen under the current economic conditions, prompting more strikes on oil facilities on land or against ships at sea -- a capability already demonstrated by the attack on a French tanker off the coast of Yemen in October 2002.

To read the rest of the piece, click here:http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/03/the_economic_crisis_al_qaedas.php

The Myth of the Two Talibans
By Walid Phares

Taliban.jpg
Taliban Militias

In an interview with the New York Times this week (March 7), President Barack Obama said he “hopes U.S. troops can identify moderate elements of the Taliban and move them toward reconciliation.” The proposition came as a conclusion to a larger picture: the battlefield situation in Afghanistan. According to the New York Times he said the United States “was not winning the war in that country” and thus the door must be opened to a “reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.”

Following these statements a flurry of comments exploded throughout the international media: while most of the mainstream press and networks in the West praised the “new daring turn” in US policy, that is, the readiness to “engage the Taliban,” most of the pan Arabist and Jihadi sympathizer outlets in the region warned the move won’t be successful. In a panel discussion on BBC TV Arabic in which I participated, a noted expert in Islamist affairs from Amman said “there is no such thing as Taliban independent from the high ups like Mullah Umar.” Another panelist, a seasoned Afghan journalist from Kabul added: “In Iraq, you have a bigger US force, and a totally different geopolitical context than in Afghanistan. Besides, he added, why would Washington want to engage a Terror force which is not accepted by the population?” This was a small sampling of the brouhaha reigning in the debate about the real strategic intentions of the Obama Administration.

Read More »

The Imbroglio of Good and Bad Taliban

In fact by my observations, it is even more complicated than that: the US Administration is being advised that any change in strategy in Afghanistan is better than the previous situation. It is being told that the surge model as applied in Iraq may work, if modified to meet Afghanistan’s “complexities.” The President must also be attracted to the idea that an “engagement” with some quarters of the Taliban will fit perfectly with the global idea of engagement, sit down and listening that he seems to have adopted for the entire region.

But many questions still need to be answered. Does the plan require a dialogue with the Taliban organization as a whole or with elements “within” the organization? Apparently the US channel is to be established with “elements” not with the leadership of the network. Then the next question is: if they aren’t part of the top leadership, are these elements able to sway the entire organization towards engagement? Apparently not, according to experts on the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, the goal is to sway these factions – called moderates - from the Taliban, not to steer the entire group in another direction.

mullah omar.jpg
Mullah Omar, supreme emir of the Taliban

Here we have to pause and come to the first “complex” conclusion: while President Hamid Karzai has extended an olive branch to Mullah Omar to join the Government, an invitation quickly rejected, President Obama is announcing a more modest goal that is to identify “moderate elements” from the Taliban and “strike a deal with them.” But the modest narrative of the goal doesn’t make it necessarily reachable. Here is why.

If the “moderate Taliban” we’re looking to identify are “inside” the network, when they engage with the US, they will be lethally ejected by the hard core of the group, backed by al Qaeda. Hence the next question will be to know if those “dissidents” would actually secede and form a “moderate Taliban” organization working with the US and the Karzai Government. From the names available on such a list, including the former “Taliban ambassadors” to Pakistan and the international community and those who sought Saudi Arabia’s help in launching a dialogue, we can’t see strong commanders willing to surge militarily against the mother ship. As far as we can project, there are no leaders and radical clerics who would carry that task of establishing an all-out new “good Taliban,” even with millions of dollars as incentive. A Taliban civil war is not going to happen, for now. But is there another more attainable goal? According to the Obama Administration and some experts, there may be other options.

Little “talibans?”

In recent months a new concept has been pushed via the Defense and counter terrorism circles arguing that instead of chipping off from the actual “Taliban” militia on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, attention must be focusing on harvesting the local “taliban” (little ts). According to this theory, the little “ts” are individuals and groups who have joined the large umbrella under Mullah Umar but not the membership of the organization, or have proclaimed themselves as “taliban affiliates.” Hence, in comparison with the Iraqi Sahwa movement backed by US Coalition, these sub-militias of all walks of life would become the target of American political charm and dollars. If identified and reached out to – so believe the architects of the forthcoming Afghan “surge” - they will become the Afghani parallel to the Sahwas of Mesopotamia. Note that President Obama specified that it will be the “American military who would reach out to these moderate elements.” Meaning they will be dealt with from a lower level rather than from a full fledged diplomatic perspective.

Abdul Salam Zaeef.jpg
Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador

In that case, unlike what the media has been speculating about, this is not a US dialogue with the party it is at war with, headed by Mullah Umar and his emirs. It is not even an attempt to break the mother ship into two and recuperate the more moderate branch. There are no takers for a massive retreat from the Taliban into the arms of Kabul’s Government or Washington’s “infidel” generosity.

What the US move is about is much more pragmatic and realistic: nibbling off from the wide pool of angry people and shifting them from frustration with Karzai to enmity towards Umar. Indeed, there are tens of thousands of armed males aggregating in villages, clans, tribes and neighborhoods, who wear turbans and sometimes claim they are Taliban for a thousand reasons. These sub-militias aren’t particularly ideological or maybe do not even understand much of the doctrine they claim following. A number of experts and some strategists believe today that these men of the Afghan underworld can become the “new army” against the “bad Taliban.” Can they?

In fact not only it is possible but it should have been the case eight years ago. However, there are two fundamental mistakes not to make.

Don’t announce them as the “moderates”

First, the Obama Administration and the US military strategists must not see these new war constituents, nor announce them as who they aren’t. These sub-militias sought to turn the tide against the real Taliban aren’t your “moderate” guys. In reality they have no firm ideological affiliation. With few exceptions perhaps, the tribal and urban forces to be targeted for “integration” will simply shift alliances or allegiance for money and power. The American, Western and international public must not be led to believe that a piece of architecture will be successful in transforming radicals into moderates or swaying away bands of armed men from extremism, let alone Jihadism. The mutation to moderation happens not via cash deals but through years of schooling, an efficient media and perseverant NGO work. It happens from younger into older age. Hence forget about the “identification of moderate” part of the Obama strategy. Inducing civil societies into liberalism, or even moderation, needs Government crafting of a kind that doesn’t exist in Washington or Brussels for the time being.

In addition, these militias and militants to be swayed away from Waziristan’s exiles aren’t going to produce a national reconciliation. They do not represent the radical ideological web which is behind the war against the new Afghan democracy. National reconciliation takes place between two or more large, historical and strategic forces. Instead we’re talking about recuperation of elements extracted from the Taliban, not reconciliation with the latter. Hence US stated goals should be even more modest in this regard.

Don’t call them “taliban”

The second fatal mistake not to commit is to call them Taliban, proto-Taliban or crypto-Taliban. Even if for publicity purposes it suits the goal of soothing the US and Western public, constructing a fictive identity to a plethora of tribal-urban sub militias will backfire on the whole campaign. Here is why.

Since they aren’t a breakaway faction from the main organization, they can’t form another Taliban to challenge the Mullah Umar leadership. And since they have no ideology of their own they won’t be able to de-radicalize others. Hence if they are baptized as the other “taliban,” instead of using the credibility of the name to push back against the bad guys, the name will ultimately transform them into what we don’t want them to be: Taliban! Void will be filled by the forces with a greater doctrinal power, forceful clerics, and historical leadership. If we call them nice Taliban or “little ts” we would be throwing them back into the arms of the forces we want to sway them from. Knowing what I know from the Jihadist strategies, it won’t take long before the two Talibans would eventually sit down and strike a deal, and overwhelm the Kabul Government.

Learn from Iraq

If the Iraq Sahwa model is the inspiration for an Afghan engagement with local forces, we need to learn the right lessons from it. In Iraq, the US didn’t create good al Qaeda versus bad al Qaeda; it didn’t identify moderate elements from al Qaeda to pit them against the mother force. The political dimension of the surge, relied heavily on recruiting tribes, social cadres and Sunni elements regardless of their affiliations and empowering them via a “new” organization, called Sahwa Councils. We gave these new local allies an identity of their own, not the identity of the forces they fought.

But more important, the greater dimension of the surge wasn’t the mere rise of the Sahwas but the moving forward of the democratic political process with its political parties, NGOs, movements and media. Swaying Sunni militias against al Qaeda was only one component of the strategy; the larger strategy was to sustain pressures until Iraqi forces, legislators and ministries are up and running. By comparison in Afghanistan, we should make the case of a similar, not necessarily identical process: mobilizing popular militias, giving them an identity of their own, not calling them Taliban, and not expecting them to be the missing link to the future but a force helpful in pushing the political process forward until it can resist, contain and reverse the Taliban.

How to measure victory and defeat

President Obama, and before him President Bush, were always trying to measure the success in the war in Afghanistan. While the latter spoke of victories, our current President speaks of failures. The real issue is how to measure victory or defeat. Is destroying al Qaeda and Taliban bunkers a definitive indicator of victory? Are the relentless terror attacks by the Jihadists the other definitive measurement of failures? I don’t think either parameter gives us an answer. Rather it is the battle taking place over the conquest of the minds and hearts of the school children and teens of the country that will make or break that burgeoning Democracy. Unfortunately neither the past nor the current Administration seems to see the war of ideas with such urgency.

Let’s be accurate and transparent

My recommendation to the Obama Administration is to be relentlessly accurate in describing the choices it intends to make in Afghanistan and in the confrontation with the Jihadists worldwide. If its final intention is to cut a deal with the Taliban – in this article I won’t argue about the choice - it must faithfully inform the US public of this choice instead of developing a phased narrative of disengagement.

But if it seriously intends to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda by isolating them further inside Afghanistan and mobilizing the international community, the Administration also needs to prepare the American and Western public for that choice. For in this age of hyper globalization, the Jihadi forces have an astonishing capacity to outmaneuver the smartest strategies devised by their enemies and, on the other hand, the public here at home has developed a surprising ability to understand the intentions of both the Terror forces and of its own Government. Transparency is everything in this age.
***********

Dr. Walid Phares is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy and the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad


March 9, 2009 12:49 PM
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/03/th...wo_talibans.php

Edition 10 Volume 7 - March 12, 2009

Obama's initial regional deployment: Iran and Iraq

• Focus on rebuilding a strong Iraqi state - Saad N. Jawad
Leaving Iraq without solving the problem of the Iranian domination of Iraqi politics would be a strategic mistake.

• Shifting Washington's strategic focus - Waleed Sadi
Obama has made Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan the center of his focus.

• Caution required on both fronts - Wayne White
The US withdrawal from Iraq could become quite complicated--even ugly.

• Overtures toward Iran - Sadegh Zibakalam
Neither Obama nor Clinton has made any statement that implies a demand for substantial changes by Iran.

Focus on rebuilding a strong Iraqi state
Saad N. Jawad

Will President Barack Obama keep the promises he made during his election campaign? It may be too early to say, but some observers think he already went back on one promise in the case of Iraq. His promise to pull out early was, under pressure from the US army, changed. His decision now is to keep a bigger force in Iraq and for a longer time.

The decision was not a surprise to the anti-occupation elements in Iraq. They have always argued that the two main reasons for the occupation in the first place were oil and the security of Israel. It is impossible for the US to leave Iraq without securing these two objectives.

In terms of oil, the US has had some success, and others are in the pipeline, including the 50/50 agreements signed with the central and Kurdish federal governments. Supply routes, however, are not yet fully secure, and the unstable domestic Iraqi situation will not yet allow a guaranteed flow of oil.

The second objective is far from being achieved. True, Iraq's military capabilities and resources were either destroyed or squandered, but the subsequent chaos led to the emergence of two new challenges: Iranian power, which in the absence of an Iraqi counterbalance is left unchallenged in the region; and the emergence of fundamentalist Islamic resistance in Iraq following the Hizballah model. Indeed, Iraq, because of this senseless American adventure, has been turned into a haven for foreign fanatics.

But Iran remains the key. Any sensible observer, whether in the US or Israel, must see that the situation in Iraq is still fragile and volatile. Leaving Iraq without solving the problem of the Iranian infiltration--one might better say domination--of Iraqi politics would be a strategic and catastrophic mistake from US or Israeli perspectives.

Both Iraqis and Iranians seem very keen, each for their own reasons, to see US forces leave as soon as possible. The Iraqis think they can deal with their own problems without the patronage of the US. The Iranians are very happy with the mess created by the US invasion of Iraq that made them the second regional power in the Middle East after Israel and the only one in the Gulf.

That position will be very much enhanced if Obama keeps his promise to pursue a negotiated settlement with Iran. Most nationalist Iraqis fear that US-Iranian negotiations will concern the future of Iraq. Tehran, which has denied any interference in domestic Iraqi affairs, announced few days ago that it is ready to help the US in Iraq and Afghanistan if the US turns a blind eye to its atomic energy program, in itself an indirect admission of its involvement and influence in Iraq. The other danger of withdrawing troops without building a strong Iraqi government and a viable and secure Iraqi state is not only that it could spell the end of Iraqi independence, but that it could cause the collapse of security in the whole Gulf region, as Iranian designs become clearer.

I believe the toughest promise Obama needs to keep is to rebuild or allow the re-establishment of a strong Iraqi state. In order to do so, the new US administration needs to address the many injustices Iraq has suffered recently, including the two devastating wars waged against it by the US, the inhuman sanctions that were imposed on it for more than a decade, the unjust demarcation of its borders, the heavy and unfair compensations and reparations it was made to pay and the strengthening and encouragement of decentralized elements to defy the central authority.

In order to create a regional counterbalance to Iran's power, a strong Iraqi state is a necessity. It is evident that neither Israel nor Iraq's southern or eastern neighbors let alone the two dominant Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan want to see this happen. But such an eventuality is the only reasonable course of action for the US in the region. There are still some elements in the US who want to incite Iraq and the Gulf countries against Iran, in the hope of controlling Tehran through a series of regional wars. There are others who favor the Israeli plan to wage an air offensive against Iran. But after the catastrophic experiment in Iraq, such actions will only cause greater regional upheaval and Israel and the US will be the only losers.- Published 12/3/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Saad N. Jawad is professor of political science at Baghdad University.

Shifting Washington's strategic focus
Waleed Sadi

US President Barack Obama ran his campaign for the White House on a platform of sweeping change to his country's domestic and foreign policies. So far, he seems to have stuck to his guns on these promises, especially on the domestic scene, most recently by lifting the ban on stem cell research.

Obama's vision for change, however, is constrained by the severe global and US recessions and the domestic and international financial crisis that has brought down several major US and international banks. The higher than expected unemployment rate in the US and the failure of several stimulus packages to shake the US economy from its torpor have forced the new president to focus more on the domestic scene than on foreign affairs.

No wonder then that Obama has been outshone until now by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the foreign scene. Clinton has traveled the width and breadth of the world since the new administration assumed office, promoting the US foreign policy agenda. The inward looking perspective of the US president has somewhat undermined the promise of change on foreign issues.

Despite this, Obama did commit his administration to an accelerated withdrawal of US soldiers from Iraq, albeit not at the promised pace. Improvement in security conditions in Iraq has made it possible for Obama to live up to his election promise for an early withdrawal, if only to bolster the US military presence in Afghanistan.

Judging by the tone and content of the declared policies of some of Obama's key advisers who supported his bid for the White House right from the start, Obama's perspectives as far as the Middle East and southwest Asia are concerned are pretty clear. One key adviser and possible mentor for the new president on Middle East affairs is Dennis Ross who endorsed Obama's bid for the presidency of the US out of a deep conviction that Obama would be a breath of fresh air for his country.

Ross has said enough and written sufficiently on the perspectives of the new president to make us cognizant of where Obama might be heading when it comes to the Middle East and the adjacent region to the east. We know by now that Obama has made Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan the center of his focus in the Middle East and the neighboring regions. His decision to disengage from Iraq is intended first and foremost to engage in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. That's where the center of gravity has now shifted for Obama's foreign policy.

Redeployment in Iraq therefore means a more forceful US military presence in Afghanistan, where an additional 17,000 US troops will be deployed soon, especially in the south of the country where the Taliban insurgency is picking up steam. US military strategists have also convinced Obama that Afghanistan and Pakistan are two sides of one coin and are therefore organically linked as far as US efforts to defeat terrorism and extremism from that part of the world are concerned. Pakistan, US military experts have long concluded, serves as a sanctuary for Taliban militants. The Taliban cannot be defeated in Afghanistan unless these sanctuaries are eliminated or rendered useless.

Obama appointed Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as his special envoy to both Afghanistan and Pakistan out of recognition that the defeat of terrorism must be conducted on both the Pakistani and Afghani fronts. In deference to his promise to be open minded on engaging the enemy, Obama has said he would engage moderate elements within the Taliban movement, something Afghan President Hamid Karzai enthusiastically welcomed.

Yet US engagement in these nations has not diverted US attention from Iran, with its links to Middle East conflicts on the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese fronts. Obama has long endorsed the proposition that a nuclear Iran poses a threat not only to Israel but also the US, hence the decision to deploy additional US missiles in Eastern Europe.

Obama's focus in the Middle East, for the time being at least, can therefore be classified as security-oriented rather than predicated on the advancement of peace processes between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, including of course the Palestinians. There is enough evidence to corroborate the growing conviction that the new president believes that an imposed settlement on the Arab-Israel fronts will not make sense, based on the rationale that an imposed peace is no peace at all.

Obama subscribes to the need for engagement with the parties to the Arab-Israel conflict on condition these engagements are waged without illusion, meaning without too high expectations. He seems to believe that conditions on the ground are not favorable to lasting peace deals between the parties and that this hostile environment to peace arises not only because Palestinian ranks are in disarray and the domestic Israeli scene is not much better, but also because of a lack of propitious conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan on the one hand and Iran on the other. In other words, peace in the Middle East must be preceded by peace and stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the end of the Iranian threat.

True to his promise to engage even the fiercest opponents of his country, Obama is keeping the door open for direct talks with Iran not only for the sake of talking but also out of a deep conviction that the conflict with Iran is solvable. There are presidential elections in Iran in June when the incumbent Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinezhad will face stiff competition from moderate candidates and therefore may not win re-election. In addition, the leadership hierarchy in Iran is such that the center of power lies with the ayatollah system and not in the hands of the head of state. The US, meanwhile, is promoting the idea of extending a nuclear umbrella to the countries of the region in a bid to convince Tehran that the acquisition of nuclear weapons will only bring it more hardship and neither clout nor hegemony in the region.

Against this backdrop, the Middle East process can expect to "enjoy" a respite until conditions in southwest Asia are more secure and stable. However, this brings its own dangers, and it is not surprising to see that Israel has stepped up the pace of settlement building on Palestinian land to effectively foreclose any peaceful option in the area.- Published 12/3/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Waleed Sadi is a former Jordanian ambassador to Turkey and the UN and other international organizations in Geneva. He is currently a columnist for the Jordan Times and Al Rai newspapers.

Caution required on both fronts
Wayne White

Too much focus has been placed on President Barack Obama's new withdrawal plan and too little on other aspects of the situation likely to impact on US Iraq policy. Likewise, regarding Iran, excessive attention has been accorded renewed interest in US-Iranian engagement and questions like the possible adverse impact of the appointment of Dennis Ross on that process, while neglecting other important drivers affecting this complex equation. All things considered, developments related to both Iraq and Iran could fall well below expectations.

This year will bring a series of events that could bear heavily on the Obama administration's new withdrawal plan for Iraq. One such juncture is the July referendum on last December's US-Iraq agreement: so much opposition to the agreement arose from various quarters in Iraq that the Iraqi parliament agreed to submit the pact to a popular referendum. Should the agreement fail to pass this July, the deadline for total withdrawal might move up to July 2010 from December 2011, a potentially sizeable disruption.

Of more immediate concern is the agreement's requirement that US combat troops withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns by the end of June. In mixed areas, US forces are still separating or "sitting on" populations of various ethno-sectarian communities that remain, in many cases, hostile toward or deeply suspicious of each other. No one knows to what degree this withdrawal will result in violence. Most observers apparently expect at least some, but do not know whether such outbreaks can be contained by Iraqi security forces.

The failure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to achieve much of the communal reconciliation so desperately needed (the main goal of the reduction in violence since mid-2007) has greatly aggravated this potentially explosive situation. And it is difficult to know whether parliamentary elections in late 2009 will foster stability and reconciliation or increased uncertainty. If, for example, the Sunni Arab under-vote in the recent provincial elections is repeated (and Sunni Arab representation in parliament is, therefore, unexpectedly low), that restive minority could become more problematic.

Obama may well be prepared to order US forces to re-enter problem areas of the country if violence were to rebound seriously. Should this happen, a question arises: when could they be removed? Unless the Iraqi government changes its tune regarding political reconciliation, in this scenario US forces could remain in such areas a long time with political disputes going unresolved. Additionally, US troops involved in any such intervention could be caught in situations in which they would be perceived as taking sides, possibly increasing US casualties once again.

Concerning Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just suggested that her Iranian counterpart attend an Afghanistan conference later this month. Yet, an Iranian presence of some significance at such gatherings also occurred during the Clinton administration, and the inclusion of Iranian officials in Afghanistan consultations took place during the early Bush years.

There has been considerable debate over the recent appointment of Dennis Ross as special Gulf and southwest Asia advisor at the State Department. But Clinton (and Obama) will likely be calling the shots on Iran, not Ross. Yet there is some reason for concern on that score, too, because Clinton herself traditionally has been inclined toward taking a fairly tough stance toward Iran.

On the Iranian side, the success of US-Iranian engagement ultimately rests with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, not the more notorious President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad. A defeat of Ahmadinezhad by reformer Mohamad Khatami later this year would be helpful, but Khamenei and others around him remain key. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week of their uncertainty that Khamenei favored significantly improved relations with Washington. Iranian missile launches are merely efforts to ensure that Iran is not viewed as weak, but Khamenei's March 4 expression of deep skepticism over US intentions is more disturbing, casting doubt on his interest in robust US-Iranian diplomacy.

Despite the increased open-mindedness of the new US administration regarding contact with Iran, some sobering historic context must be borne in mind. When the Clinton administration last attempted engagement in the late 1990s, Khatami was already president, the overall atmospherics were even more positive and Khamenei and other conservatives felt compelled to give ground in the face of a tide of pro-reform sentiment. Most importantly, there was no thorny nuclear issue hanging over the entire process. As a result, engagement now could prove more difficult than during the failed effort of a decade ago.

So, on both the Iraqi and Iranian fronts caution is warranted with respect to expectations. The US withdrawal from Iraq could become quite complicated--even ugly. And so long as the new US administration hews to policies on Iran like retaining Iranian nuclear enrichment as a red line, keeping additional sanctions very much on the table and not clearly taking the military option off of it, the prospects for progress toward markedly improved relations with a suspicious Tehran will remain somewhat iffy.- Published 12/3/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's intelligence office for the Near East and South Asia, is an adjunct scholar at Washington's Middle East Institute.

Overtures toward Iran
Sadegh Zibakalam

After nearly two months in office, the new US president appears to be approaching the Islamic regime in Tehran with a great deal of caution. He has been careful to distance himself from the radical stance his predecessor adopted. Gone are the days when the US president called the Islamic regime part of the "axis of evil". The new administration seems also to have departed from another principle of US policy toward Iran: for many years, successive US officials maintained that Iran must halt its uranium enrichment before any negotiations could begin with Tehran.

Moreover, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a somewhat cordial message to Iran inviting the Islamic regime to take part in an upcoming regional conference on the future of Afghanistan, attended by that country's neighbors and the NATO members involved militarily there. The Iranian government spokesman responded positively to the invitation stating that "the Islamic regime has always been prepared to help Afghanistan and its people in any way it could."

Additional US conditions such as those demanding an end to Iran's alleged support for "terrorism" in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, including support for Hamas and other militant groups, have also taken a back seat in Obama's approach toward Tehran. But does this really mean that the US has adopted an entirely new approach toward Iran? Are we to assume that the long-held strategy according to which "Washington will not tolerate a nuclear Iran" has ceased to exist and the US has succumbed to a nuclear Iran? Is Iran indeed no longer asked to stop "supporting international terrorism" before it can be allowed into the international community?

Neither President Barack Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made any statement that implies a demand for substantial changes by the Iranian regime. Thus, assuming that there has indeed been a substantial policy change by the new US government toward the Iranian regime, the important question is: what have been the Islamic leaders' responses to these presumed changes?

To begin with, it appears that senior Iranian leaders have avoided passing judgment on Obama and his new approach toward the Islamic regime. They have of course stated that Obama must demonstrate in practice by taking meaningful and positive steps that he is not continuing George Bush's hostile policies toward Islamic Iran. But neither Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad has attacked Obama on the record. Nor have they rebuked or challenged him on his statements on Iran and on the Middle East in general.

Perhaps one may optimistically conclude that the Iranian leadership is prepared to give Obama time before unleashing the customary anti-US rhetoric that has characterized official Iranian policy toward the US over the past three decades. This optimism is justified by the prompt and positive response Tehran gave to Clinton's invitation to take part in the talks concerning the future of Afghanistan.

Still, Tehran is not putting all its eggs in one basket when it comes to dealing with the "Great Satan". Although senior Iranian leaders have avoided dismissing Obama, the US has been seriously challenged in other sectors of the Iranian polity.

Since the Obama presidency commenced, many Iranians have been trying hard to cultivate the idea that the US has merely changed its strategy toward Tehran. They argue that US hostility against Iran continues unabated and that the Americans are still determined to overthrow the Islamic regime. In their opinion, the strategy toward Iran adopted by George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives failed to bear fruit. After eight years of sustained economic sanctions, surrounding Islamic Iran with American armed forces and threatening Tehran with possible military strikes, Iran emerged both regionally and internationally stronger than at the start of the George W. Bush administration.

Hence, proponents of this hypothesis argue, US policymakers have been forced to change their strategy toward Islamic Iran. The new US strategy is dubbed the "soft approach" or "intelligent approach". Rather than trying to bring about a regime change in Iran through military invasion, the threat thereof or economic sanctions, the new strategy allegedly seeks to dislodge the Islamic regime from within by cultivating internal opposition to it. This is the strategy that, according to these Iranian sources, the US intelligence apparatus employed in some ex-Soviet bloc countries, resulting in so-called "velvet revolutions".

The "soft strategy" or "velvet revolution" theory has not gone unchallenged inside Iran. One Iranian academic referred to it as "a tool designed by the regime to silence its critics by linking them to a new US drive to topple the regime". The theory has however been gathering momentum and more and more Iranian hardliners argue that Obama has adopted a velvet revolution strategy against Islamic Iran.- Published 12/3/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Sadegh Zibakalam is professor of Iranian studies at Tehran University.

I do hope that everyone reads and absorbs Carlotta Gall's piece in the
NYT. This knowledge should be the basis of discussions going forward,
and it should be reflected in the "new Afghanistan strategy."

Key points, based on conversations with Afghan officials and Western
diplomats in Kabul:

- Far from being "pie in the sky," discussions with the Taliban
leadership are already underway and could be developed into more
formal talks with the support of the US.

- Afghan parliamentarians involved in the talks said they were waiting
for President Karzai to secure guarantees of support for the process
from foreign governments, in particular the United States, before they
could go further.

- Talks with "moderate" and/or "low-level" Taliban aren't going to cut it.

- "Surrender" isn't "reconciliation." There has to be a new political
process that includes the Taliban.

As U.S. Weighs Taliban Negotiations, Afghans Are Already Talking
Carlotta Gall, New York Times, March 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/world/asia/11taliban.html

Chas Freeman Walks the Plank
Obama Caves to the Lobby

By RAY McGOVERN

On Tuesday morning Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, employed the indicative mood in describing the high value that Chas Freeman, his appointee to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC), will bring to the job—“his long experience and inventive mind,” for example. By five o’clock in the afternoon, Freeman announced that he had asked that his selection “not proceed.”

Not one to mince words, Freeman spelled out the strange set of affairs surrounding the flip-flop and the implications of what had just happened. Borrowing the pointed warning from George Washington’s Farewell Address against developing a “passionate attachment” to the strategic goals of another nation, Freeman made it clear that he was withdrawing his “previous acceptance” of Blair’s invitation to chair the NIC because of the character assassination of him orchestrated by the Israel Lobby.

The implications? Freeman was clear:

“The outrageous agitation…will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues...[It casts} doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government…

“The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views…and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those it [the Lobby] favors.”

Foreign policy analyst Chris Nelson described the imbroglio as a reflection of the “deadly power game on what level of support for controversial Israeli government policies is a ‘requirement’ for U.S. public office.” Before the flip-flop on Freeman was announced, Nelson warned, “If Obama surrenders to the critics and orders Blair to rescind the Freeman appointment, it is difficult to see how he can properly exercise leverage, when needed, in his conduct of policy in the Middle East. That, literally, is how the experts see the stakes in the fight now under way.”

The fight is now over.

Schadenfreude

Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-New York) led Lobby boasting just minutes after the Freeman debacle was announced. Schumer was clear: “His [Freeman’s] statements against Israel were way over the top…I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

And, as Glen Greenwald has noted, “Lynch mob leader Jonathan Chait [of the New Republic and author of a recent Washington Post op-ed on the subject], who spent the last week denying that Israel was the driving force behind the attacks on Freeman,” now concedes the obvious.

Greenwald quotes Chait: “Of course I recognize that the Israel Lobby is powerful, and was a key element in the pushback against Freeman.”

Neoconservative Daniel Pipes offered an anatomy of the crime, blog-bragging about how it was conducted:

“What you may not know is that Steven J. Rosen of the Middle East forum was the person who first brought attention [on February 19] to the problematic nature of Freeman’s appointment…Within hours, the word was out and three weeks later Freeman has conceded defeat. Only someone with Steve’s stature and credibility could have made this happen.”

The same Steve Rosen? The same one who is currently on trial for violations of the Espionage Act involving the transmission of classified information intended for Israel? Yes, one and the same! This has to be the purest brand of gall that ever came down the Pipes.

This “morning after,” I find myself wondering when White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—another staunch supporter of the Lobby who reportedly was Schumer’s go-to guy on the get-Freeman campaign—saw fit to let Admiral Blair in on the little secret that no way could he have Freeman. And why Blair tucked tail.

In a March 8 letter to Admiral Blair, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) endorsed his appointment of Freeman and decried the campaign to derail it. We seven signatories (with cumulative experience of 130 years) noted that the Freeman case was the first time we witnessed such a well-coordinated campaign to reverse the appointment of an official to an intelligence job not requiring Senate confirmation.

In other words the influence of the Israel Lobby is seeping ever deeper into the ranks of the intelligence community.

Military Mindset

It seems altogether possible that Admiral Blair, accustomed to military command authority, assumed he had the right to appoint his senior staff and did not think to check out the naming of Freeman with White House and other politicians hypersensitive to pressure from the Lobby.

And this points up a host of other problems. One is that of having military officers, active or retired, running national intelligence. It appears to be beyond their ken to consider resigning on principle.

I imagine it never occurred to Blair that he might have quit on the spot as soon as he learned that Freeman was being jettisoned a couple of hours after Blair had praised him to the skies; or that, earlier, he might have threatened to resign if the Obama administration let itself be bullied in this way.

Blair is no neophyte, but he clearly underestimated the Lobby’s power compared with his own. It appears the White House told Blair to treat the Freeman appointment as though in the subjunctive mood—long enough to “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes,” as the saying goes.

Then, when the Lobby made sure there were no salutes, but rather the strongest and most scurrilous spitting, Freeman was hauled on down. That may be the way they do things in Chicago, as well as in Washington.

The Freeman flip-flop is merely the latest sign that Obama is afraid to take on the Lobby. But the world is watching the new president. Most will interpret the new president’s acquiescence in this charade as a sign of weakness—of his not being his own man. This is a distinct liability as Obama prepares to meet next month with the likes of Vladimir Putin who will be taking his measure.

The encounter with Putin brings to mind another young president’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961.

Khrushchev had studied the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961; he would have understood if Kennedy had chosen either to leave Castro alone or to destroy him. When Kennedy was rash enough to approve a strike on Cuba but not bold enough to finish the job, in Khrushchev’s view, the latter decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed—one who would shrink from hard decisions.

Kennedy later said of his encounter with Khrushchev in Vienna, "He beat the hell out of me." The meeting gave him to believe that Kennedy might well back down if the USSR put missiles in Cuba.

As for Israel, the Russians were better able to understand Washington’s “passionate attachment” to Israel in strategic terms, as the Cold War played out in the Middle East and Washington had a perceived need to have Israel as a permanent “battleship” there. Now the Russians see the power of the Israel Lobby for what it is—who can miss it? The Obama administration is seen as caving under political pressure.

Although the Russians continue to be amazed at the Lobby’s strong influence over U.S. policy, the Russians are happy as clams to sit back and watch as the identification of the U.S. with Israeli policy inflicts incalculable damage to U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond.

Though a sportsman, Putin is best at chess. He is likely to shy away from playing basketball with our new president. Obama will have to beat Putin at his own game—and Obama now has shown himself easy to push around.

Israeli Adventurism

With Freeman’s withdrawal, there is surely much gloating among the politically aware in Israel. Gloating is one thing; dangerous miscalculation is another.

The danger is particularly high as Benjamin Netanyahu takes over as Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu and his close “neoconservative” friends in the U.S. make no bones about their preference for a Bush/Cheney-style preventive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

As Gareth Porter and I write in today’s Miami Herald, the specter of such a strike takes on more reality with Netanyahu as prime minister. He, too, is taking the measure of our young president and may draw very dangerous conclusions from his subservience to the Lobby, as well as the key role played by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel in the White House.

Impact on Intelligence

The effect of the Freeman affair on the intelligence community is easy to predict. Those who were looking forward to a fearless integrity will be deeply disappointed. They may seek honest work elsewhere, if they perceive that Blair is only titular head of intelligence and that pro-Lobby political operatives like Emanuel are calling the shots.

On the other hand, those managers and analysts who were pleased as punch to be sent over to brief the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), created by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will be delighted. This briefing practice, encouraged by the Bush/Cheney administration, was highly irregular for a non-partisan intelligence community to be engaged in. It can be expected to flourish now, with the abject object lesson of Freeman’s demise.

Unconscionable Timidity

On October 5, 2007 I published an article on Israel’s deliberate attempt, on June 8, 1967, to sink the USS Liberty in international waters off the Sinai, killing 34 of the Liberty crew and wounding over 170 in the process.

The lead was:

“So Who’s Afraid of the Israel Lobby? Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat—Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.”

The point? In June 1967, the Israelis learned that they could get away, literally, with murder and still not endanger their influence in Washington.

Events of the past weeks demonstrate that they and their Lobby are equally good at character assassination. It is embarrassingly shameful to watch President Obama acquiesce in all of this.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, DC. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern03122009.html

Defensible Missile Defense
Theodore Postol, The New York Times
ObamaIn his recent letter to President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, President Obama offered to modify the previous administration’s plans for a missile defense system in Europe. He was right to do so. A continued impasse with Russia might have prevented future arms reductions, created divisions with our European allies, done irreparable harm at the 2010 review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and impaired efforts to deal with Iran’s growing potential to become a nuclear weapons state.

President Obama has correctly shown skepticism about the missile defense system promoted by the Bush administration: its performance is unproven, it requires unending additional resources and it faces problems that cannot be solved with existing science.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/opinion/12postol.html?_r=1

US May Soon Make Overture to Iran Leader\ Farah Stockman, The Boston Globe The Obama administration is leaning toward making a major diplomatic overture to Iran before the country's presidential elections in June. This initiative could come in the form of a letter from President Obama to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to two senior European diplomats who have met in recent weeks with key State Department officials crafting a new US policy toward Iran.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washingt...to_iran_leader/

5 Years After It Halted Weapons Programs, Libya Sees the U.S. as Ungrateful
Michael Slackman, The New York Times
When Libya gave up its nuclear and chemical weapons programs in late 2003, President George W. Bush pointed to the decision as a victory in Washington's so-called war on terror and as a potential model for pressing Iran and North Korea to give up their weapons programs, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/world/africa/11libya.html

Another Wake-up Call Ashley Tellis and Michael Krepon, Space News Debris poses a clear, present and growing danger to space operations. The latest wake-up call to take steps to address this danger was provided by the Feb. 10 collision between a dead Cosmos satellite and a revenue-producing Iridium satellite. This dreaded event may have produced the second worst debris field in the history of the space age.

http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive09/k...noped_0309.html

China: Exports Drop
March 11,2009 | 1651 GMT
China's exports in February fell by 25.7 percent from a year earlier, dashing expectations that the country's crucial export sector would hold up better after January's 17.5 percent slowdown in export value, according to China's customs bureau on March 11. The sudden and sharp drop reveals that China's most critical source of business and government revenues are far from recovery and are running dry due to depressed global demand.

In the past few weeks, the Chinese government and state press have drawn attention to signs that the domestic economy is improving. Bank lending increased substantially in January and February in support of struggling businesses and consumers, as well as government-prompted development projects. The purchasing managers index (PMI), a rough measure of overall manufacturing activity, climbed for the last 3 months to a reading of 49 in February, and the government is predicting positive growth of 54 percent in March. (A reading above 50 indicates growth, while one below 50 indicates contraction.) Even in the February export news released March 11, the losses are allegedly offset by a 26.5 percent increase in January's and February's fixed asset investment, slightly over the 2008 growth rate of 26.1 percent, possibly indicating that fiscal stimulus policies are having an effect.


Nevertheless, exports are vital for the Chinese economy, comprising about 40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). By means of robust trade surpluses, China manages its day-to-day expenditures and puts away foreign currency reserves in case things get worse. February's trade surplus, however, fell to a mere $4.84 billion, down from $39.1 billion in January. China still retains its nearly $2 trillion in reserves to resist the economic downturn, but it is reluctant to tap this last resort and prefers to rely on trade surpluses — which are now dwindling.

February's export numbers do not bode well for China's recovery — the similarly drastic 24.1 percent drop in imports also indicates how badly domestic demand has been struck, especially given the vast amount of effort Beijing has devoted to trying to increase that demand. China's latest trade data, while not complete, reveal the increasingly high toll that the global recession is taking on the Chinese economy. Ultimately, the pain in China's export sector will contribute to social problems that are already bubbling up from unemployment. This in turn will increase the heat on the Communist Party as it steps up security efforts and tries to maintain order.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14394

Charles Freeman's Victory
Forced to withdraw, he took the Israel lobby down with him
by Justin Raimondo

The nixing of Charles "Chas" Freeman from a post as head of the National Intelligence Council is not, as is commonly averred, a victory for the Israel lobby. It is, instead, a Pyrrhic victory – that is, a victory so costly that it really amounts to a defeat for them. Sure, they managed to keep out a trenchant critic of their Israel-centric and grossly distorted view of a proper American foreign policy, and, yes, they managed to smear him and put others on notice that someone with his views is radioactive, as far as a high-level job in the foreign policy establishment is concerned. And yet – and yet ….

They – the Lobby – have now been forced out in the open. "A lobby," says Steve Rosen, the ringleader of the "get Freeman" lynch mob, "is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." If so, then the Israel lobby is slated for oblivion, because as frenetically – and pathetically – as they tried to mask the centrality of their involvement, and as much as they tried to make this about other issues (his alleged ties to Saudi Arabia, his supposed views on China), everybody knows it was really all about Israel and Freeman's contemptuous view of the "special relationship" which requires us giving Tel Aviv a blank check, moral as well as monetary. As a foreign policy realist, he thinks we ought to put our own interests first, in the Middle East and elsewhere, not those of a foreign country, no matter how much political clout – and campaign cash – its American fifth column can muster.

This, in the current atmosphere in Washington, is "extremism," a charge that hung over Freeman's appointment from the get-go. Jonathan Chait, writing in the Washington Post, went so far as to call Freeman a "fanatic." A charge which seems counterintuitive, considering that we're talking about an adherent of a foreign policy perspective that coldly calculates American interests in what the righteous would disdain as shockingly amoral terms. Oh, says Chait, he's not like those neocons, with their "simplistic" division of the world into "good guys" and "bad guys." No, instead, Freeman doesn't recognize any "good guys" he's the sort who opposed our bombing of the former Yugoslavia and our support to the narco-Mafioso "Kosovo Liberation Army," the precursor to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which, likewise, lured us into a foreign war under false pretenses. But the Kosovo war "halted mass slaughter," says Chait: apparently the death of hundreds of Serbians at American hands is a slaughter not considered "mass" enough to merit mention. Yet the alleged "genocide" the Serbs were supposedly committing turned out, in the end, to inhabit the same nonexistent country as Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction." It was, in short, war propaganda, of the sort we have become all too familiar with of late.

To be sure, Chait says: "Realism has some useful insights. For instance, realists accurately predicted that Iraqis would respond to a U.S. invasion with less than unadulterated joy."

This is a lot more than Chait managed to do: to this day, he defends his forceful support for the biggest strategic blunder in American military history. "I don't think you can argue that a regime change in Iraq won't demonstrably and almost immediately improve the living conditions of the Iraqi people," Chait said on television as our troops massed for the attack. No one would think of uttering such nonsense today – at least with a straight face. Oh, but don't forget, it's those nasty realist ideologues – not the neocons or their liberal interventionist allies – who are the real danger.

As the Iraq disaster unfolded, the magazine of which Chait is employed as a senior editor declared "the central assumption underlying this magazine's strategic rationale for war now appears to have been wrong," and yet "if our strategic rationale for war has collapsed, our moral one has not." Two years later, however, Chait and his fellow editors issued a shamefaced apology: "The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war."

The "liberal" interventionism that Chait invoked in support of the war actually flew the flag of "humanitarianism." One million Iraqi deaths later, such a claim has a rather sinister ring to it. He also invoked the principle of "international law" – this, in support of a lawless occupation and an unprovoked attack on a people who had no ability to strike back. "Multilateralism" was another "principle" invoked by Chait, the great liberal – and yet who else but a genuine fanatic would make such an argument about a war that had little to no support from our allies?

Chait is unconcerned about the actual fanatics who have done so much damage – with his help – to the country and its interests abroad. Forget the neocons, his erstwhile allies, and let's concentrate on the real danger, the enemies of the Israel lobby:

"Taken to extremes, realism's blindness to morality can lead it wildly astray. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, both staunch realists, wrote ‘The Israel Lobby,' a hyperbolic attack on Zionist political influence. The central error of their thesis was that, since America's alliance with Israel does not advance American interests, it could be explained only by sinister lobbying influence. They seemed unable to grasp even the possibility that Americans, rightly or wrongly, have an affinity for a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships. Consider, perhaps, if eunuchs tried to explain the way teenage boys act around girls."

Putting Israel first is as natural as heterosexuality – but only if you work for Marty Peretz.

Why Chait and his confreres continue their denialism when it comes to the demonstrable power of the Israel lobby – which, after all, has succeeded in blocking Freeman, and many others from positions of influence – is beyond me. AIPAC went out of its way to deny any hand in the lynch mob that went after Freeman, and yet, as Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan point out, this is just a subterfuge: their top media relations guy has his fingerprints all over this hit job, and a very effective job it was.

Effective, yet oddly forced and unconvincing: for example, it seems curious to argue that Freeman is afflicted by a "blindness to morality" when it is precisely a sense of justice that gives rise to Freeman's apparent sympathy [.pdf] for the plight of Palestinians who chafe under the constraints of life in the occupied territories. It is precisely a sense of offended morality that drives the vast Arab anger at Israel, and causes realists like Freeman to question our unbending fealty to the inhumane and unsustainable policies of the Israeli government toward their Palestinian helots. If anyone is afflicted with moral blindness, when it comes to this question, it is Chait and the editors of the magazine for which he works.

Chait then cites Freeman's by now infamous remarks on the Tiananmen Square incident, and yet this China trope was never really all that convincing. To begin with, even in the truncated quote served up as evidence of his supposed pro-crackdown views, it is clear that Freeman was not expressing his personal view, but rather that of the average Chinese, as perceived through his own eyes:

"[T]he truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than – as would have been both wise and efficacious – to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at 'Tian'anmen' stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action." [Emphasis added]

The phrase "in this optic" indicates – to any literate person – that the author is not speaking in his own voice, but in what he imagines to be the voice of the Chinese people. Does Chait imagine we're too stupid to see this? I'm afraid he and the Washington crowd he epitomizes believe precisely that. But they'd better watch it: if they get too careless, someone may call them out on it – and then they'd have to admit that Freeman's alleged "links" to China had nothing to do with the real objections of his detractors. So, he served on the advisory board of a Chinese company – so what? If everyone with a commercial connection to China had to drop out of consideration for government work, a large proportion of those currently working in Washington would be missing.

The complete disingenuousness with which Chait made his argument is so transparent that it makes me wonder if, perhaps, the Israel lobby has abandoned all attempts at subtlety, and is now working on the assumption that it doesn't matter any more if they come out in the open. The nightflower has been exposed to the light of day, and, rather than wilt, perhaps its nurturers have decided that it's better to brave the sun. That's why the Mearsheimer-Walt book has become such a target, to the point that anyone who praises it, as Freeman has done, is deemed unfit for office in Washington. This explains why former AIPAC top lobbyist Steve Rosen, the indicted spy who stole classified information on behalf of Israel, openly led the anti-Freeman movement (see this timeline) and didn't even try to hide his key role in the affair.

The Lobby was desperate to keep Freeman out of the NIC because it's an agency that provides key intelligence for the President and Congress. If you'll recall, that's how the War Party lured us into fighting an unnecessary war against Iraq – by manipulating the intelligence, and even resorting to forgery to achieve their ends. With Freeman at the helm of the intelligence-gathering machinery, they'd never be able to pull if off again. In his absence – well, they just might. That's just what they're getting ready to do in the case of Iran, which, we are told, is gathering "weapons of mass destruction." Part of the NIC's job is to prepare the daily presidential briefings, and with such access to the President, Freeman would have been in a good position to block the War Party's machinations. Which is why Chait's parting salvo is such an outrage:

"This is the portrait of a mind so deep in the grip of realist ideology that it follows the premises straight through to their reductio ad absurdum. Maybe you suppose the National Intelligence Council job is so technocratic that Freeman's rigid ideology won't have any serious consequences. But think back to the neocon ideologues whom Bush appointed to such positions. That didn't work out very well, did it?"

The neocons uphold a set of beliefs, they have an ideology: so too do the realists believe in a comprehensive worldview. However, the question is: what do they believe? Chait only mentions two realist principles: the pursuit of American interests abroad, and hostility to those who would put the interests of "a fellow imperfect democracy" above the realists' "cold analysis." Yet rational analysis, however "cold" its temperature may be, seems a necessary antidote to the hysteria that followed in the wake of 9/11. And as for that "imperfect democracy" of Israel – what will Chait and his fellow "liberals" do when Avigdor Lieberman becomes its public as well as its private face?

Freeman himself said it best in his statement explaining his withdrawal:

"The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors."

The real fanatics are the Israel-firsters, who have used every subterfuge, no matter how low, to maintain their parasitic grip on the American policymaking process. The really dangerous ideologues are the Likudniks and their American amen corner who willfully distort and deform American policy into a means to empower and succor a militaristic settler colony that is increasingly anti-democratic and aggressive. The Freeman affair has exposed the Israel lobby for precisely what they are: it has flushed them out of the woodwork, and brought them in from the shadows. That in itself is a great victory, one that means much more in the longterm than anyone presently imagines.
~ Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14394

Scott Ritter's Columns
Barack Obama, Meet Team B

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200903...ma_meet_team_b/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4754

How to Discourage the Speaking of Truth to Power

By Paul R. Pillar

Page 1 of 1
Posted March 2009
The damage done by the Chas Freeman saga.

The truth hurts: National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair testifies before Congress.

The aborted appointment of Charles "Chas" Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council inflicts multiple costs on the U.S. national interest, some of which Freeman enumerated in characteristically lucid fashion in his withdrawal statement (reproduced at The Cable). The affair demonstrates anew the strength of the taboo against open and candid discussion in the United States of policy involving Israel. It thus perpetuates damage from U.S. policies in the Middle East formed without benefit of such discussion. It also perpetuates damage to the ultimate interests of Israel itself, where, ironically, no comparable taboo prevails. Not least, the Freeman matter demonstrates the power of calumny and misrepresentation to kill something as desirable as the appointment of an experienced and insightful public servant.

Less immediately apparent but also serious is the damage to objectivity and professionalism in the U.S. intelligence community. Intelligence officers can see through the smoke screens thrown up by Freeman's attackers, involving Saudi donations or out-of-context comments about China, and perceive the affair as exactly what it is: the enforcement of political orthodoxy about U.S. policy toward Israel. (If any intelligence officers could not perceive this, they would be abysmally poor analysts.) The message to intelligence officers is clear: Their work will be acceptable only if it conforms to dominant policy views. This standard is exactly the opposite of what a professional and impartial intelligence service should provide.

The application of this or any other litmus test regarding policy views to the filling of an intelligence position is contrary to the very nature of intelligence, which does not make policy. It is contrary to the concept that good intelligence officers are bright, perceptive, creative, and committed people -- and thus are bound to have their own views on policy, including foreign policy -- but do not let those personal views intrude into the performance of their jobs. That concept applies both to career intelligence officers and to anyone appointed to senior positions from the outside, à la Freeman. (The difference is that those from the outside have had earlier opportunities to express their policy views in public.)

Americans place heavy expectations on their intelligence officers to save them from the follies of their elected leaders, and from the public's own delusions or inattention. Those expectations became enormous in recent years because of the Iraq war, which the Bush administration had sold to the public through an assiduous campaign that involved the twisting and selective exploitation of intelligence. As the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 and 2005, I saw firsthand how the intelligence community was expected to make judgments that others would use as a politically convenient substitute for making their own judgments about policy, to articulate details about those judgments that others did not make time to absorb, to resist the excesses of a propagandizing administration that others did not resist, to convey politically inconvenient truths to the public while others who were much better positioned to speak publicly did not convey them, to force water down the throat of a policymaking horse that not only did not want to drink but did not even want to be led to the water, and to call the horse to account while it was stomping on the intelligence community's chest with its hooves.
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A fundamental impediment to the intelligence community's meeting such expectations is that it is as much a part of the executive branch, commanded by the president, as those who make policy. It is extremely difficult to try to perform the sort of miracle work that those who have soured on the Iraq war have come to expect from intelligence officers without becoming vulnerable to the charge -- which we also heard repeatedly in recent years from proponents of the war -- that officers who begin to sound out of step with the administration's message are pursuing their own policy agenda. This is why there is a long history in the United States of intelligence bending to policy imperatives, even in environments less intense than the one the Bush administration created regarding Iraq. The intelligence community needs all the encouragement it can get -- not just retrospective recriminations -- to exercise any independence at all.

The Freeman affair gives it the opposite of such encouragement. If even a former ambassador, speaking out as a private citizen, has crossed a line rendering him ineligible for service in the intelligence community, the lines constraining those already within the intelligence bureaucracy are several times more confining. And the confining has to do not just with public statements but with privately rendered judgments.

The main impact of this affair on intelligence work is not likely to involve the Arab-Israeli dispute, even though it is what concerns those who shot down Freeman. The most important facts and patterns about that tragic conflict are an open book; we don't need the National Intelligence Council to tell us the implications of continued expansion of Israeli settlements, the consequences of rockets fired at Israelis, or the effects of unending occupation on the emotions of those under occupation. The main effects will instead come, perhaps subtly and invisibly, with other issues on which a dominant policy imperative emerges -- such as the Iraq war, though not necessarily with as intense an environment as what the Bush administration created to sell that initiative. The effects will consist of intelligence officers being at least marginally less willing than they otherwise would be to challenge the ethos surrounding the policy and to point out ways in which the policy might be misguided. Some such policies will be misguided, will come a cropper, and will lead to the usual recriminations about how intelligence failed.

When that happens, those in Congress and elsewhere who acquiesced in the character assassination of Chas Freeman -- or even worse, participated in it -- should ponder two things about intelligence. First, they should ask how they could expect intelligence officers to show superlative courage in bucking political orthodoxy when they showed so little themselves. Second, they should reflect on how their own pusillanimity in the face of the lobby that gunned down Freeman has made it even less likely that intelligence officers will be able to muster such courage in the future.

Paul R. Pillar is a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and a visiting professor at Georgetown University.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070814.html

Is a right-wing government the answer?

13/03/2009

By Henry Siegman


A right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is widely seen as spelling the end of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Given the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Netanyahu has promised to accelerate, no other outcome seems conceivable.

While this view is undoubtedly correct, the belief that a center or center-left government would conclude a two-state agreement is a delusion Western leaders seem unable to discard, no matter how egregiously the current Kadima/Labor government continues to undermine a two-state solution - with continued seizures of Palestinian territory, expansion of existing settlements, and closing off Jerusalem to West Bank Palestinians.

And yet, a good case can be made for the counter-intuitive notion that only a right-wing government of the kind now being formed by Netanyahu holds the remaining hope for viable Palestinian statehood. Such an argument has nothing to do with the popular Israeli belief that, like Nixon's 1972 visit to China, "only Likud can make peace, and only Labor [or Kadima] can make war," for it ignores the fact that Nixon wanted to go to China, whereas no member of a right-wing Israeli government wants a Palestinian state. What Netanyahu and his prospective radical-right coalition parties want is more Palestinian territory and a Palestinian entity emptied of every vestige of sovereignty.

The argument in favor of a Netanyahu-led government derives from the certainty that a centrist government is equally incapable of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians. For all the protestations by Kadima's Ehud Olmert and Labor's Ehud Barak that they are desperately seeking a peace agreement with their favored Palestinian peace partner Mahmoud Abbas, without unprecedented U..S. pressure on Israel to reach an agreement approximating the Clinton proposals, they are no more likely than Netanyahu to do anything other than use the peace process they champion as a cover for the continued expansion of settlements and the closing off of East Jerusalem to any future Palestinian entity.

After all, this is exactly what they have been doing since the Oslo accords and the various ensuing agreements, including the road map and the Annapolis-sponsored peace talks. The only remaining hope to prevent the two-state solution from disappearing entirely is a decisive change in America's Middle East policy - from "facilitation," which in the past meant helping Israel do what it wanted to do, to active intervention. This means presenting both parties with America's outline for a permanent status agreement, endorsed by the international community and supported by significant and evenhanded sanctions on whichever side obstructs it.

While such an initiative can only be led by the U.S., it is unlikely to be undertaken while a center-left government is in place in Israel. American presidents do not enjoy challenging the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, and Congress by going toe-to-toe with Israeli leaders who are perceived in this country, however mistakenly, as truly committed to a two-state solution.

However, a Netanyahu-led government with coalition partners like Avigdor Lieberman and other extreme right-wing parties that do not enjoy much popular support in the U.S. (or anywhere else for that matter) would allow President Barack Obama and his administration to advance such an initiative. It is often forgotten that Netanyahu's obstructionism while serving as prime minister from 1996-1999 was so unpopular that president Clinton was able to bar him from the White House, with hardly a whimper from the Israel lobby.

Given the imminent disappearance of the two-state solution and Israel's military and diplomatic dependence on the U.S. (which has only increased with the growing anti-Israel mood in the region and beyond), an American president who is prepared to say "Enough" to the two adversaries, and present them with clear parameters for a permanent status agreement, is far more likely to do so with a recalcitrant right-wing government led by Netanyahu than with a centrist government headed by those who claim to seek an end to the conflict.

Netanyahu's right-wing government would not yield to such pressure. But having finally established clear parameters and defined the red lines of what kind of peace agreement is acceptable to the U.S. - something a U.S. president is not likely or able to do when a centrist government is in power - such parameters would remain in place once Netanyahu's government collapses, as it surely will, and a center-left coalition returns. This is the only conceivable scenario for a fair and sustainable peace accord that can prevent the disintegration of the Palestinian national struggle into another violent intifada that will do away with the two-state paradigm.

So far, other than appointing George Mitchell as the president's personal emissary, little has happened to warrant the belief that the Obama administration is prepared to pursue a course markedly different from that of its predecessors. Indeed, nothing could be more discouraging than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's March 3 statement in Israel in which she qualified her strong support for the two-state solution with the observation: "But obviously, it is up to the people and the government of Israel to decide."

Even the Bush administration did not argue that Israelis and their government can deny the Palestinian people the right to a "viable and sovereign" state of their own, as provided by the road map and international law.

One must hope that this was an impromptu, well-intentioned, but ill-considered off-the-cuff remark that does not represent the secretary of state's position or that of the administration. Otherwise, the Kaddish should be recited for the two-state paradigm.


=

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

On Chas Freeman's withdrawal
Wed, 03/11/2009 - 10:35am

As you might expect, I have a few thoughts on Charles Freeman's decision to withdraw from consideration as chair of the National Intelligence Committee. (For Freeman's own reaction, see FP's The Cable here; for other reactions, see Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Phil Weiss, and MJ Rosenberg.

First, for all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful "Israel lobby," or who admitted that it existed but didn't think it had much influence, or who thought that the real problem was some supposedly all-powerful "Saudi lobby," think again.

Second, this incident does not speak well for Barack Obama's principles, or even his political instincts. It is one thing to pander to various special interest groups while you're running for office -- everyone expects that sort of thing -- but it's another thing to let a group of bullies push you around in the first fifty days of your administration. But as Ben Smith noted in Politico, it's entirely consistent with most of Obama's behavior on this issue.

The decision to toss Freeman over the side tells the lobby (and others) that it doesn't have to worry about Barack getting tough with Netanyahu, or even that he’s willing to fight hard for his own people. Although AIPAC has issued a pro forma denial that it had anything to do with it, well-placed friends in Washington have told me that it leaned hard on some key senators behind-the-scenes and is now bragging that Obama is a "pushover." Bottom line: Caving on Freeman was a blunder that could come back to haunt any subsequent effort to address the deteriorating situation in the region.

Third, and related to my second point, this incident reinforces my suspicion that the Democratic Party is in fact a party of wimps. I'm not talking about Congress, which has been in thrall to the lobby for decades, but about the new team in the Executive Branch. Don't they understand that you have to start your term in office by making it clear that people will pay a price if they cross you? Barack Obama won an historic election and has a clear mandate for change -- and that includes rethinking our failed Middle East policy -- and yet he wouldn't defend an appointment that didn't even require Senate confirmation. Why? See point No.1 above.

Of course, it's possible that I'm wrong here, and that Obama's team was actually being clever. Freeman's critics had to expend a lot of ammunition to kill a single appointment to what is ultimately not a direct policy-making position, and they undoubtedly ticked off a lot of people by doing so. When the real policy fights begin -- over the actual content of the NIEs, over attacking Iran, and over the peace process itself -- they aren't likely to get much sympathy from DNI Blair and it is least conceivable that Obama will turn to them and say, "look, I gave you one early on, but now I'm going to do what's right for America." I don't really believe that will happen, but I'll be delighted if Obama proves me wrong.

Fourth, the worst aspect of the Freeman affair is the likelihood of a chilling effect on discourse in Washington, at precisely the time when we badly need a more open and wide-ranging discussion of our Middle East policy. As I noted earlier, this was one of the main reasons why the lobby went after Freeman so vehemently; in an era where more and more people are questioning Israel's behavior and questioning the merits of unconditional U.S. support, its hardline defenders felt they simply had to reinforce the de facto ban on honest discourse inside the Beltway. After forty-plus years of occupation, two wars in Lebanon, and the latest pummeling of Gaza, (not to mention Ehud Olmert's own comparison of Israel with South Africa), defenders of the "special relationship" can't win on facts and logic anymore. So they have to rely on raw political muscle and the silencing or marginalization of those with whom they disagree. In the short term, Freeman's fate is intended to send the message that if you want to move up in Washington, you had better make damn sure that nobody even suspects you might be an independent thinker on these issues.

This outcome is bad for everyone, including Israel. It means that policy debates in the United States will continue to be narrower than in other countries (including Israel itself), public discourse will be equally biased, and a lot of self-censorship will go on. America's Middle East policy will remain stuck in the same familiar rut, and even a well-intentioned individual like George Mitchell won't be able to bring the full weight of our influence to bear. At a time when Israel badly needs honest advice, nobody in Washington is going to offer it, lest they face the wrath of the same foolish ideologues who targeted Freeman. The likely result is further erosion in America's position in the Middle East, and more troubles for Israel as well.

Yet to those who defended Freeman’s appointment and challenged the lobby's smear campaign, I offer a fifth observation: do not lose heart. The silver lining in this sorry episode is that it was abundantly clear to everyone what was going on and who was behind it. In the past, the lobby was able to derail appointments quietly -- even pre-emptively -- but this fight took place in broad daylight. And Steve Rosen, one of Freeman's chief tormentors, once admitted: "a lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." Slowly, the light is dawning and the lobby's negative influence is becoming more and more apparent, even if relatively few people have the guts to say so out loud. But history will not be kind to the likes of Charles Schumer, Jonathan Chait, Steve Rosen et al, whose hidebound views are unintentionally undermining both U.S. and Israeli security.

Last but not least, I cannot help but be struck by how little confidence Freeman's critics seem to have in Israel itself. Apparently they believe that a country that recently celebrated its 60th birthday, whose per capita income ranks 29th in the world, that has several hundred nuclear weapons, and a military that is able to inflict more than 1,300 deaths on helpless Palestinians in a couple of weeks without much effort will nonetheless be at risk if someone who has criticized some Israeli policies (while defending its existence) were to chair the National Intelligence Council. The sad truth is that these individuals are deathly afraid of honest discourse here in the United States because deep down, they believe Israel cannot survive if it isn't umbilically attached to the United States. The irony is that people like me have more confidence in Israel than they do: I think Israel can survive and prosper if it has a normal relationship with the United States instead of "special" one. Indeed, I think a more normal relationship would be better for both countries. It appears they aren't so sure, and that is why they went after Charles Freeman.

SHAY SHMUELI/AFP/Getty Images
Stephen M. Walt

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/0...mans_withdrawal

All To Protect The Lies
Terrell E. Arnold
3-13-9

Tuesday, a distinguished public servant and former officer of the US Foreign Service, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman, decided that the better part of valor was not to take the key intelligence community job of National Intelligence Council Director.

His statement indicates that he did that in response to a fire storm of lies, accusations, and distortions of his record, largely if not entirely by Israel supporters, that would make any sensible person cringe at the mere thought of public service. He evidently did that because he knew he could only be himself, a man of integrity, broad foreign policy experience, intellectual brilliance, and a willingness to speak truth to power.

That makes him one of the few, if not the only candidate for an official position ever to be rejected because of the likelihood that he would do the job right.

Doing the job right was what his enemies could not stand. That would have meant for the first time in decades that reports about events, key actors, and governments in the Middle East would not be filtered through a pro-Israeli optic. It would have meant that Mossad would lose its preferred position as the interpreter of Middle East intelligence. It would have meant that the information feed for US policy decisions would be centered on illuminating matters of vital US interests, not merely on sensitivity for what the Israelis want the US to think.

In an ironic sense, that Israeli concern was immensely flattering to the Obama administration. Having gotten Obama's pledge of allegiance to AIPAC before the election, Israel supporters could assume, they thought, that the new President would not seriously pursue his promise to work diligently toward a Middle East peace. That should mean specifically that Obama would abide by Israeli judgments on the feasibility and timing of any peace talks with the Palestinians.

In that regard, the appointment of George Mitchell as Middle East envoy was unsettling. After all, based on his Northern Ireland experience, Mitchell had a reputation for actually getting things done. Having Freeman in the NIC chair would assure that Mitchell and the President had clean intelligence to support their Middle East policy moves. In simple terms, Israel's long-standing hammerlock on US Middle East policy was about to be blasted.

For those reasons, the Israel lobby and friends staged the most arrogant and offensive political assassination that Washington has seen. This was not the work of a US congressional extremist such as Joseph McCarthy. It was the work of nominally private groups of Israel lobbyists and think tanks led by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that probably have better access to power in Tel Aviv than the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

There is a clear message to President Obama in this experience. Since Harry Truman was harassed and threatened by Zionists into being the first in line to recognize the emergent state of Israel, a growing list of American politicians has found their resistance to Israeli wishes politically expensive. Those include some leading lights such as late Senator William Fulbright, former Congressman Paul Findley, late diplomat and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and at least a half dozen others. This is the political debris from a pattern of political harassment that only too recently was fully exposed by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."

There are two sets of losers in this experience. The first is the American public, because the future quality of American foreign policy may have been undermined by the loss of someone with Chas Freeman's intelligence and detachment in the NIC chair. That would certainly be so if the candidate finally chosen is a proven and unshakable friend of Israel, as the lobbyists would hope. The second is the Israeli public, because if that small state is to survive and prosper it must eventually embrace the realities of the region and reach a fair and human accommodation with the Palestinian people. With a pro-Israeli policy in Washington, that is simply unlikely to occur, because the Zionists will settle for nothing less than all of Palestine for Israel, the future of the Palestinian people be damned.

The ultimate irony of this whole nasty demonstration of the brutal ways American politics can work is that the Zionists are betting on the wrong horses. The people of the book who, as reported in the book of Daniel, must have control of the Temple Mount and rebuild the temple in time for the end of days, are a present day mix of Palestinian Christians, Jews and Muslims, with some secular subscribers in their midst. The European Jews who dominate Israeli politics have no historic claim to anything, but they want all of Palestine for themselves, and they will stop at nothing to assure that they succeed.

AIPAC and its supporters evidently feared that the appointment of Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council might jeopardize their control of American policy on this matter. That was simply too much to risk. They acted deliberately to protect the Israeli lies and pretenses that drive much of present American policy on Palestine.

Hopefully President Obama will recover from this political stab wound in ways that preserve the integrity of his administration. That means he will appoint someone who can help assure that a fair and balanced US Middle East policy will flow naturally from the applications of clean intelligence.

___________


The writer is the author of the recently published work, A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US Department of State whose overseas service included tours in Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Brazil. His immediate pre-retirement positions were as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National War College and as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter Terrorism and Emergency Planning. He will welcome comment at
<mailto:wecanstopit@charter.net>wecanstopit@charter.net

http://www.rense.com/general85/allto.htm

Uri Avnery
14.3.09

The Rape of Washington

RETURNING HOME from a very short visit to London, I found the country in the grip of uncontrollable emotions.

No, it was not about the looming danger of the radical right gaining control. It is now almost certain that the next government will consist of an assorted bunch of settlers, explicit racists and perhaps even outright fascists. But that does not evoke any excitement.

Nor was there much excitement about yet another interrogation of the (still) incumbent Prime Minister in his various corruption affairs. That is hardly news anymore.

All the excitement was about a “press conference” given by the former President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, after the Attorney General announced that he might be indicted for rape.

Katsav, it may be remembered by those who remember such things, was accused by several of his female staff of persistent sexual harassment and at least one case of rape. He had to resign.

An Iranian-born immigrant and a protégé of Menachem Begin, Katsav had made a career based on a kind of affirmative action. Begin believed that, for the sake of integration, promising young immigrants from Oriental countries should be promoted to positions of responsibility. Katsav, a rather nondescript right-wing politician with all the customary right-wing opinions, became Minister of Tourism and then was elected by the Knesset to the ceremonial post of President, mainly to spite the rival candidate, Shimon Peres. Wags said that the Knesset was reluctant to spoil Peres’ (then) unbroken record of lost elections.

Since his abdication two years ago, the Katsav affair has dragged on and on, almost to the point of farce. Revelations were leaked by the police, several women disclosed lurid details, the ex-President made a plea agreement admitting to lesser offences, he then revoked the deal, the Attorney General procrastinated and now he seems to have made up his mind about the indictment.

So Katsav called a press-conference in his remote home-town, Kiryat Malakhi (the former Arab village of Qastina, now within reach of the Qassams). It was an unprecedented performance. The ex-President spoke solo for nearly three hours, airing his grievances against the police, the Attorney-General, the media, the politicians and almost everybody else. All this was, incredibly, broadcast live on all three of Israel’s TV channels, as if it had been a State of the Union address. Katsav rambled on and on, repeating himself again and again. No questions were allowed. Respected journalists, hungry for scoops, were evicted if they dared to interrupt.

So when I came back yesterday morning, I found this feat dominating the front pages of all our newspapers. Everything else was banished to the back pages..

BECAUSE OF this, Charles Freeman got hardly a mention. Yet his affair was a thousand-fold more important than all the sexual activities of our ex-President.

Freeman was called by Barack Obama’s newly-appointed Chief of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, to the post of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. In this position, he would have been in charge of the National intelligence Estimates (NIE), summarizing the reports of all the 16 US intelligence agencies, which employ some 100,000 people at an annual cost of 50 billion dollars, and composing the estimates that are put before the President.

In Israel, this is the job of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the officer in charge has a huge influence on government policy. In October 1973, the then intelligence chief disregarded all reports to the contrary and informed the government that there was only a “low probability” of an Egyptian attack. A few days later the Egyptian army crossed the canal.

Throughout the 1990’s, the man in charge of intelligence estimates, Amos Gilad, deliberately misled the government into believing that Yasser Arafat was deceiving them and was actually plotting the destruction of Israel. Gilad was later openly accused by his subordinates of suppressing their expert reports and submitting estimates of his own, which were not based on any intelligence whatsoever. Later, as the guru of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Gilad coined the phrase “We have no Palestinian partner for peace”.

In the US, the intelligence chiefs famously supplied President George W. Bush with the (false) intelligence he needed to justify his invasion of Iraq.

All this shows how vitally important it is to have an estimates chief of intellectual integrity and wide experience and knowledge. Admiral Blair could not have chosen a better person than Charles Freeman, a man of sterling character and uncontested expertise, especially about China and the Arab world.

And that was his undoing.

AS A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Freeman is an expert on the Arab world and the Israeli-Arab conflict. He has strong opinions about American policy in the Middle East, and makes no secret of them.
In a 2005 speech, he criticized Israel's "high-handed and self-defeating policies" originating in the "occupation and settlement of Arab lands," which he described as "inherently violent."
In a 2007 speech he said that the US had "embraced Israel’s enemies as our own" and that Arabs had "responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies." Charging the US with backing Israel’s "efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations" and to "seize ever more Arab land for its colonists," he added that "Israel no longer even pretends to seek peace with the Palestinians.”
Another conclusion is his belief that the terrorism the United States confronts is due largely to "the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by an Israeli occupation that has lasted over 40 years and shows no signs of ending."
Naturally, the appointment of such a person was viewed with great alarm by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. They decided on an all-out attack. No subtle behind-the-scenes intervention, no discreet protestations, but a full-scale demonstration of their might right at the beginning of the Obama era.
Public denunciations were composed, senators and congressmen pressed into action, media people mobilized. Freeman’s integrity was called into question, shady connections with Arab and Chinese financial interests “disclosed” by the docile press. Admiral Blair came to his appointee’s defense, but in vain. Freeman had no choice but to withdraw.

THE FULL meaning of this episode should not escape anyone.
It was the first test of strength of the lobby in the new Obama era. And in this test, the lobby came out with flying (blue-and-white) colors. The administration was publicly humiliated.
The White House did not even try to hide its abject surrender. It declared that the appointment had not been cleared with the President, that Obama had no hand in it and did not even know about it. Meaning: of course he would have objected to the appointment of any official who was not fully acceptable to the lobby. The portrayal of the power of the lobby by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, has been fully vindicated.

THIS HAS a significance which goes far beyond the already far-reaching implications of the affair itself.
Many people in Israel, who view the establishment of the new rightist government with apprehension, cite as their main fear the danger of a clash with the new Obama administration. Such a clash, they believe, could be fatal for Israel’s security. But the rightists deride such arguments. They assert that no American president would ever dare to confront the Israeli lobby. The captive congressmen and senators, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government in the media and even in the White House itself, would sink on sight any American policy opposed by even the most extreme right-wing government in Israel.
Now the first skirmish has taken place, and the President of the United States has blinked first. Perhaps one should not rush to conclusions, perhaps Obama needs more time to find his bearings, but the signs are ominous for any Israeli interested in peace.
It may be too early to call this episode the Rape of Washington, but it is certainly vastly more important than Katsav’s sexual escapades.

BY THE WAY, or not by the way, a word about my trip to London.
I went there to lend support to a group of Jewish personalities, well-known in academic and other circles, who have set up an organization called “Independent Jewish Voices”.
Recently they published a book called “A Time To Speak Out”, in which several of them contributed to the debate about Israel, human rights and Jewish ethics. The views expressed are very close to those current in the Israeli peace camp. But when they offered their book for presentation in the Jewish Book Week, they were rudely rejected. In protest, they convened an event of their own, and that’s where I spoke.
I believe that it is of utmost importance that such Jewish voices be heard. In several countries, including the US, groups of brave Jews are trying to stand up to the Jewish establishment that unconditionally supports the Israeli Right. In the US, several such groups have sprung up, some quite recently. One of them, called “J Street”, is trying to compete with the formidable and notorious AIPAC.
It is important for governments and peoples to know that the unconditional support for the Israeli Right does not represent the majority of Jews in the US, the UK and other countries. The Jewish public is far from monolithic. The majority is liberal and believes in peace and human rights. Until now this was a silent majority, out of fear of a repressive establishment. It is indeed “a time to speak out”.
I believe that it is in the interest of Israel to support these groups – and that their activities are somewhat more important than Mr. Katsav’s exploits.
=

A U.S. Role Is Crucial For Peace
By Chas. W. Freeman Jr.


No American politician ever lost an election by speaking too fondly of Israel or too poorly of the Palestinians. But this is a time for sober calculation about events in the Holy Land and their implications for American interests, not for emotionally or electorally satisfying rhetoric.

The credibility of the United States as mediator between Israelis and Arabs is at an all-time low, the cease-fire agreement reached yesterday between the Israelis and Palestinians notwithstanding.

Israelis had hoped the Oslo accords would persuade Arabs to accept their presence on the West Bank and even to thank Israelis for giving back some land taken in 1967, not to mention give Israelis a greatly enhanced sense of security. They expected acquiescence in their continued control of Jerusalem. What they got was continued animosity from Palestinians, pressure for additional concessions, a near doubling of the rate at which Israeli Arabs murdered Israeli Jews, and a rising challenge to their sovereignty in Jerusalem. They now face a resurgent intifada.

Palestinians had expected that Oslo would lead to the end of Israeli land seizures, paramilitary colonization and martial law. They hoped for the rapid return of land seized by Israel, emergence of self-government in their own state and recognition of their right to establish their capital in Jerusalem.

What they experienced was expanded Jewish settlements, repeated delays in deadlines for Israeli withdrawal and the consolidation of Israeli-controlled corridors on the West Bank. They saw the emergence of a territorial jigsaw puzzle rather than a state, and Israel's stance on Jerusalem was far short of their political requirements. Fewer Palestinians were dying at the hands of Israeli soldiers, but settlers were killing twice as many as before.

The ill-timed and ill-prepared summit at Camp David in July clarified these gaps between expectation and reality, but did not narrow them. Israelis and most Americans acclaimed broad concessions by Ehud Barak as bold departures from Israel's previous stands on the core issues.

But Palestinians, other Arabs and most Muslims saw Israeli final offers that would produce a Palestinian Bantustan, relegate Arabs to a permanent position of inferiority in the Holy Land and force Muslims to bow to Jewish control of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem -- what Ariel Sharon's heavily armed visit to the Haram al Sharif sought to emphasize.

Camp David thus set the stage for confrontation, not peace. Its aftermath may have ended Mr. Barak's power to negotiate. He can thump and temporize; he can no longer compromise. Few expect him to be in office long. Likewise, the Palestinian people have curtailed Yasir Arafat's mandate to make peace with Israel. He has no authority to accept anything like what Mr. Barak offered him at Camp David even if that were still on the table.

At the summit meeting in Egypt, President Clinton struggled to bequeath his successor something other than a complete disaster in the Middle East. But even if the efforts he has just made to contain the violence work, hard-liners on both sides will have gained a lot of ground. Mr. Barak now seeks to make common cause with Mr. Sharon; Mr. Arafat strives to bring Hamas into his administration.

At some point it may dawn on Israelis that continued seizures of Palestinian land and other arbitrary acts are incompatible with mutual respect and reconciliation. And Palestinians may realize that acts of violence against innocent civilians create fear and hatred rather than a desire to end the aggravations and injustices. One or both sides may even discover the principle that those who wish to be loved should first do something lovable.

For now, however, Palestinians face the possibility of even more humiliation, dispossessions and deaths than those they endured under the Oslo process. And Israel is retreating into a self-destructive siege mentality.

Thirty-three years of occupation have brutalized the Israeli conscript army, replaced Zionist idealism with cynicism and devalued Israel's self-image. The occupation has polarized Israeli politics and imbued it with issues of race and class. Many of Israel's best and brightest have emigrated to the United States.

In the end, neither Israelis nor Palestinians can live indefinitely with the situation they have created. Most understand that, distasteful as it may be, they have no realistic alternative to an eventual return to the negotiating table.

Many in the Arab and Muslim worlds now discount the ability of the United States to continue as mediator, following the Clinton administration's embrace of Israeli positions at Camp David. To convene this week's meeting, it took the Egyptian president, the secretaries general of the United Nations and the European Union and the king of Jordan.

It is true that President Clinton's participation made the crucial difference. The summit showed once again that the only nation with leverage over both Israelis and Palestinians remains the United States.

But Mr. Clinton has run out of time and credibility. He cannot restart the peace process, and his successor, whoever he is, will have to rebuild trust with both sides. Succumbing to campaign pressures for political posturing could make doing so much harder. The best gifts a presidential candidate can give himself and the people of the Middle East are a pause in rhetoric and a chance for a fresh start at peacemaking after the election.

Chas. W. Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council, was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...753C1A9669C8B63

Israel Lobby Is Put in the Spotlight: Luban/Lobe

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lubanlobe.php?articleid=14400

The Intel Czar’s Picks: Not Too Intelligent?
By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK

http://www.newsweek.com/id/189282

posted March 15, 2009 5:46 pm
Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, The Freeman Affair


Because one man, conceding defeat, didn't issue the typical statement indicating that he preferred to spend more time with his family, and instead launched a frontal attack on those who had attacked him, the foreign policy equation in Washington might have changed in discernable ways last week. On withdrawing from his nomination as director of the National Intelligence Council, Charles Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a rare provocative thinker in Washington, let loose with a broadside against his enemies. Of accusations from the generally right-wing groups and individuals who claim to represent the Jewish community in official Washington, he wrote:

"There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government -- in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel... This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."

Thus began a firestorm of commentary, debate, and argument in the mainstream media about, among other things, the very existence of an "Israel lobby." Below, Robert Dreyfuss, who writes the Nation's Dreyfuss Report blog and is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, offers a powerful, needed assessment of what the Freeman affair may mean for the Obama administration and American policy in the Middle East.

One thing I find odd in the debate about that lobby is this: both those who believe it exists and those who deny its existence generally act as if such a lobby was sui generis in American politics. No such thing. It's just that few bring up the obvious -- if, like all history, not exact -- analogy.

An "island" nation in the Middle East, Israel today plays a role arguably similar to that of an actual island which held formidable sway in American domestic politics decades ago. Known then as Formosa, it became "the Republic of China" after Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a fierce civil war by Mao Ze Dong's communist movement, moved what was left of his government there. From the late 1940s deep into the 1950s, that island version of China had a firm grip on what room for maneuver was available to any American government when it came to China policy. With various Nationalist Chinese representatives and their congressional and media allies, then known as the China Lobby, putting key issues and realities beyond discussion, the results were disastrous. It's a cautionary tale that shouldn't be ignored in the present debate. Tom

Is the Israeli Lobby Running Scared?
Or Killing a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys
By Robert Dreyfuss

Is the Israel lobby in Washington an all-powerful force? Or is it, perhaps, running scared?

Judging by the outcome of the Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman affair this week, it might seem as if the Israeli lobby is fearsome indeed. Seen more broadly, however, the controversy over Freeman could be the Israel lobby's Waterloo.

Let's recap. On February 19th, Laura Rozen reported at ForeignPolicy.com that Freeman had been selected by Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, to serve in a key post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC, the official in-house think tank of the intelligence community, takes input from 16 intelligence agencies and produces what are called "national intelligence estimates" on crucial topics of the day as guidance for Washington policymakers. For that job, Freeman boasted a stellar resumé: fluent in Mandarin Chinese, widely experienced in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and an ex-assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration.

A wry, outspoken iconoclast, Freeman had, however, crossed one of Washington's red lines by virtue of his strong criticism of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Over the years, he had, in fact, honed a critique of Israel that was both eloquent and powerful. Hours after the Foreign Policy story was posted, Steve Rosen, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), launched what would soon become a veritable barrage of criticism of Freeman on his right-wing blog.

Rosen himself has already been indicted by the Department of Justice in an espionage scandal over the transfer of classified information to outside parties involving a colleague at AIPAC, a former official in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and an official at the Israeli embassy. His blog, Obama Mideast Monitor, is hosted by the Middle East Forum website run by Daniel Pipes, a hard-core, pro-Israeli rightist, whose Middle East Quarterly is, in turn, edited by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute. Over approximately two weeks, Rosen would post 19 pieces on the Freeman story.

The essence of Rosen's criticism centered on the former ambassador's strongly worded critique of Israel. (That was no secret. Freeman had repeatedly denounced many of Israel's policies and Washington's too-close relationship with Jerusalem. "The brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending," said Freeman in 2007. "American identification with Israel has become total.") But Rosen, and those who followed his lead, broadened their attacks to make unfounded or exaggerated claims, taking quotes and emails out of context, and accusing Freeman of being a pro-Arab "lobbyist," of being too closely identified with Saudi Arabia, and of being cavalier about China's treatment of dissidents. They tried to paint the sober, conservative former U.S. official as a wild-eyed radical, an anti-Semite, and a pawn of the Saudi king.

From Rosen's blog, the anti-Freeman vitriol spread to other right-wing, Zionist, and neoconservative blogs, then to the websites of neocons mouthpieces like the New Republic, Commentary, National Review, and the Weekly Standard, which referred to Freeman as a "Saudi puppet." From there, it would spread to the Atlantic and then to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, where Gabriel Schoenfeld called Freeman a "China-coddling Israel basher," and the Washington Post, where Jonathan Chait of the New Republic labeled Freeman a "fanatic."

Before long, staunch partisans for Israel on Capitol Hill were getting into the act. These would, in the end, include Representative Steve Israel and Senator Charles Schumer, both New York Democrats; a group of Republican House members led by John Boehner of Ohio, the minority leader, and Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican Whip; seven Republican members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and, finally, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who engaged in a sharp exchange with Admiral Blair about Freeman at a Senate hearing.

Though Blair strongly defended Freeman, the two men got no support from an anxious White House, which took (politely put) a hands-off approach. Seeing the writing on the wall -- all over the wall, in fact -- Freeman came to the conclusion that, even if he could withstand the storm, his ability to do the job had, in effect, already been torpedoed. Whatever output the National Intelligence Council might produce under his leadership, as Freeman told me in an interview, would instantly be attacked. "Anything that it produced that was politically controversial would immediately be attributed to me as some sort of political deviant, and be discredited," he said.

On March 10th, Freeman bowed out, but not with a whimper. In a letter to friends and colleagues, he launched a defiant, departing counterstrike that may, in fact, have helped to change the very nature of Washington politics. "The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth," wrote Freeman. "The aim of this lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views."

Freeman put it more metaphorically to me: "It was a nice way of, as the Chinese say, killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." By destroying his appointment, Freeman claimed, the Israel lobby hoped to intimidate other critics of Israel and U.S. Middle East policy who might seek jobs in the Obama administration.

On Triumphs, Hysterias, and Mobs

It remains to be seen just how many "monkeys" are trembling. Certainly, the Israel lobby crowed in triumph. Daniel Pipes, for instance, quickly praised Rosen's role in bringing down Freeman:

"What you may not know is that Steven J. Rosen of the Middle East Forum was the person who first brought attention to the problematic nature of Freeman's appointment," wrote Pipes. "Within hours, the word was out, and three weeks later Freeman has conceded defeat. Only someone with Steve's stature and credibility could have made this happen."

The Zionist Organization of America, a far-right advocacy group that supports Israel, sent out follow-up Action Alerts to its membership, ringing further alarm bells about Freeman as part of a campaign to mobilize public opinion and Congress. Behind the scenes, AIPAC quietly used its considerable clout, especially with friends and allies in the media. And Chuck Schumer, who had trotted over to the White House to talk to Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, later said bluntly:

"Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position. His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration. I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing."

Numerous reporters, including Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast website and Spencer Ackerman of Firedoglake, have effectively documented the role of the Israel lobby, including AIPAC, in sabotaging Freeman's appointment. From their accounts and others, it seems clear that the lobby left its fingerprints all over Freeman's National Intelligence Council corpse. (Indeed, Time's Joe Klein described the attack on Freeman as an "assassination," adding that the term "lobby" doesn't do justice to the methods of the various lobbying groups, individuals, and publications: "He was the victim of a mob, not a lobby. The mob was composed primarily of Jewish neoconservatives.")

On the other hand, the Washington Post, in a near-hysterical editorial, decided to pretend that the Israel lobby really doesn't exist, accusing Freeman instead of sending out a "crackpot tirade." Huffed the Post, "Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister 'Lobby'... His statement was a grotesque libel."

The Post's case might have been stronger, had it not, just one day earlier, printed an editorial in which it called on Attorney General Eric Holder to exonerate Steve Rosen and drop the espionage case against him. Entitled "Time to Call It Quits," the editorial said:

"The matter involves Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former officials for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC... A trial has been scheduled for June in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Holder should pull the plug on this prosecution long before then."

In his interview with me, Freeman noted the propensity members of the Israel lobby have for denying the lobby's existence, even while taking credit for having forced him out and simultaneously claiming that they had nothing to do with it. "We're now at the ludicrous stage where those who boasted of having done it and who described how they did it are now denying that they did it," he said.

Running Scared

The Israel lobby has regularly denied its own existence even as it has long carried on with its work, in stealth as in the bright sunlight. In retrospect, however, l'affaire Freeman may prove a game changer. It has already sparked a new, more intense mainstream focus on the lobby, one that far surpasses the flap that began in March, 2006, over the publication of an essay by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt in the London Review of Books that was, in 2007, expanded into a book, The Israel Lobby. In fact, one of the sins committed by Freeman, according to his critics, is that an organization he headed, the Middle East Policy Council, published an early version of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis -- which argued that a powerful, pro-Israel coalition exercises undue influence over American policymakers -- in its journal.

In his blog at Foreign Policy, Walt reacted to Freeman's decision to withdraw by writing:

"For all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful 'Israel lobby,' or who admitted that it existed but didn't think it had much influence, or who thought that the real problem was some supposedly all-powerful 'Saudi lobby,' think again."

What the Freeman affair brought was unwanted, often front-page attention to the lobby. Writers at countless blogs and websites -- including yours truly, at the Dreyfuss Report -- dissected or reported on the lobby's assault on Freeman, including Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe at Antiwar.com, Glenn Greenwald in his Salon.com column, M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Peace Forum, and Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss. Far more striking, however, is that for the first time in memory, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran page-one stories about the Freeman controversy that specifically used the phrase "Israel lobby," while detailing the charges and countercharges that followed upon Freeman's claim that the lobby did him in.

This new attention to the lobby's work comes at a critical moment, which is why the toppling of Freeman might be its Waterloo.

As a start, right-wing partisans of Israel have grown increasingly anxious about the direction that President Obama intends to take when it comes to U.S. policy toward Israel, the Palestinians, Iran, and the Middle East generally. Despite the way, in the middle of the presidential campaign last June, Obama recited a pro-Israeli catechism in a speech at AIPAC's national conference in Washington, they remain unconvinced that he will prove reliable on their policy concerns. Among other things, they have long been suspicious of his reputed openness to Palestinian points of view.

No less important, while the appointments of Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state and Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff were reassuring, other appointments were far less so. They were, for instance, concerned by several of Obama's campaign advisers -- and not only Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who were quietly eased out of Obamaland early in 2008. An additional source of worry was Daniel Shapiro and Daniel Kurtzer, both Jewish, who served as Obama's top Middle East aides during the campaign and were seen as not sufficiently loyal to the causes favored by hardline, right-wing types.

Since the election, many lobby members have viewed a number of Obama's top appointments, including Shapiro, who's taken the Middle East portfolio at the National Security Council, and Kurtzer, who's in line for a top State Department job, with great unease. Take retired Marine general and now National Security Advisor James L. Jones, who, like Brzezinski, is seen as too sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view and who reputedly wrote a report last year highly critical of Israel's occupation policies; or consider George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, who is regarded by many pro-Israeli hawks as far too level-headed and even-handed to be a good mediator; or, to mention one more appointment, Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell and now a National Security Council official who has, in the past, made comments sharply critical of Israel.

Of all of these figures, Freeman, because of his record of blunt statements, was the most vulnerable. His appointment looked like low-hanging fruit when it came to launching a concerted, preemptive attack on the administration. As it happens, however, this may prove anything but a moment of strength for the lobby. After all, the recent three-week Israeli assault on Gaza had already generated a barrage of headlines and television images that made Israel look like a bully nation with little regard for Palestinian lives, including those of women and children. According to polls taken in the wake of Gaza, growing numbers of Americans, including many in the Jewish community, have begun to exhibit doubts about Israel's actions, a rare moment when public opinion has begun to tilt against Israel.

Perhaps most important of all, Israel is about to be run by an extremist, ultra right-wing government led by Likud Party leader Bibi Netanyahu, and including the even more extreme party of Avigdor Lieberman, as well as a host of radical-right religious parties. It's an ugly coalition that is guaranteed to clash with the priorities of the Obama White House.

As a result, the arrival of the Netanyahu-Lieberman government is also guaranteed to prove a crisis moment for the Israel lobby. It will present an enormous public-relations problem, akin to the one that faced ad agency Hill & Knowlton during the decades in which it had to defend Philip Morris, the hated cigarette company that repeatedly denied the link between its products and cancer. The Israel lobby knows that it will be difficult to sell cartons of menthol smooth Netanyahu-Lieberman 100s to American consumers.

Indeed, Freeman told me:

"The only thing I regret is that in my statement I embraced the term 'Israel lobby.' This isn't really a lobby by, for, or about Israel. It's really, well, I've decided I'm going to call it from now on the [Avigdor] Lieberman lobby. It's the very right-wing Likud in Israel and its fanatic supporters here. And Avigdor Lieberman is really the guy that they really agree with."

So here's the reality behind the Freeman debacle: Already worried over Team Obama, suffering the after-effects of the Gaza debacle, and about to be burdened with the Netanyahu-Lieberman problem, the Israel lobby is undoubtedly running scared. They succeeded in knocking off Freeman, but the true test of their strength is yet to come.

Robert Dreyfuss is an independent investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia. He is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, the Nation, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. He is also the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan). He writes the Dreyfuss Report blog for the Nation magazine.

Copyright 2009 Robert Dreyfuss

Given the mud slung at Chas Freeman, Chairman of the Committee for the Republic, on the issue of "foreign money" the article below from Harper's provides a useful corrective.

HARPER’S

3/12/09

Chas Freeman and Saudi Money

Ken Silverstein

One of the most common charges hurled by the opponents of Charles Freeman Jr., who yesterday withdrew as chair of the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council, was that he “headed a Saudi-funded Middle East advocacy group in Washington.” I’ve written about the influence of money on think tanks and think it’s a valid point of concern, but let’s put this assertion in perspective.

Freeman headed the Middle East Policy Council. I’m not sure how much Saudi money flows to the think tank, but it can’t be much. I checked the firm’s non-profit disclosure form for 2007 and its total receipts for the year were $731,000, and it had assets of $1.3 million. Freeman was paid $87,000 that year.

Compare that to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a conservative think tank that is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and whose board includes Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Martin Peretz. Its receipts for 2007 came to $11.9 million, and it had $26.5 million in assets. Robert Satloff, the institute’s executive director, was paid $307,000. Dennis Ross, now the Obama administration’s special adviser on Iran, was paid $208,000 for duties as a “Distinguished Fellow.”

Then there’s the equally pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute, from where a number of prominent Bush Administration employees came. It had assets of $77 million in 2006 (the last year for which I could find its disclosure form at the Foundation Center), and receipts of $56 million.

None of these groups list funders on their websites, nor are they required to list them on disclosure reports. (AEI says it doesn’t disclose donors; the Washington Institute’s press contact was out today.) The Israeli government doesn’t (as far as I know) back AEI or WINEP, but conservative foundations do and it’s hard to imagine that pro-Israeli organizations and individuals aren’t kicking in large sums as well.

So why is the Middle East Policy Council any more intellectually corrupt than AEI or WINEP? And why is employment at the former a bar to government employment, but a job at the last two is not?

AIG'S TENTACLES.... One of the principal rationales for bailing out American International Group (AIG) -- more than once -- is its reach. AIG, the argument goes, is so interconnected in global finance that its demise would cause cascading failures around the world.

Now that AIG has finally released the names of dozens of trading partners that have received bailout money through the company, the argument seems rather plausible.

Amid rising pressure from Congress and taxpayers, the American International Group on Sunday released the names of dozens of financial institutions that benefited from the Federal Reserve's decision last fall to save the giant insurer from collapse with a huge rescue loan.

Financial companies that received multibillion-dollar payments owed by A.I.G. include Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion), Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), Bank of America ($5.2 billion), Citigroup ($2.3 billion) and Wachovia ($1.5 billion).

Big foreign banks also received large sums from the rescue, including Societe Generale of France and Deutsche Bank of Germany, which each received nearly $12 billion; Barclays of Britain ($8.5 billion); and UBS of Switzerland ($5 billion).

A.I.G. also named the 20 largest states, starting with California, that stood to lose billions last fall because A.I.G. was holding money they had raised with bond sales.

In total, A.I.G. named nearly 80 companies and municipalities that benefited most from the Fed rescue, though many more that received smaller payments were left out.

AIG has posted a press release and a full list of recipients (pdf) online.

The release, which AIG has resisted for quite a while, comes immediately on the heels of widespread disgust over the generous bonuses the company paid to the AIG Financial Products unit, which was largely responsible for the company's mess in the first place.

Last night, on "60 Minutes," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke talked about his own frustrations.

"I understand why the American people are angry," he said. "It's absolutely unfair that taxpayer dollars are going to prop up a company that made these terrible bets, that was operating out of the sight of regulators, but which we have no choice but to stabilize, or else risk enormous impact, not just in the financial system, but on the whole U.S. economy."

If Bernanke thinks that's going to dissipate the public anger, he's likely to be disappointed.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/...9_03/017303.php

AIG's Not Very Transparent List of Counterparties
It's good that AIG has released a list of its counterparties. But if it really believes in "the importance of upholding a high degree of transparency with respect to the use of public funds", this is a very odd way of releasing the information.

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/marke...-counterparties

AIG Bonuses Scandal: CEOs Take Our Billions and Are Accountable to No One By Robert B. Reich, Robert Reich's Blog.


By Robert B. Reich, Robert Reich's Blog. Posted March 15, 2009.

Obama's Treasury secretary didn't even have a clue about where AIG's bailout money was going.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/131721/a...ons_and_are_acc

Saudi Arabia and Iran on a collision course
By Olivier Guitta

I just wrote an article for the Weekly Standard on the recent escalation of tension between Riyadh and Tehran.
You can read the whole piece here. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...16/272acmbf.asp
Here is an excerpt:
A few weeks ago, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader called Bahrain Iran's 14th province. Not only did Bahrain react indignantly, but--more important--so did Saudi Arabia. For, even as a potential conflict between Iran and Israel grabs headlines, tensions have been building between Tehran and Riyadh. The Saudis fear both Iran's nuclear program and its expansionist agenda.

And that's not all. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 launched a far-reaching competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for control of Islam and the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president, Iran has increased its expenditure of money, energy, and time on proselytizing populations, from Africa to the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia, more than any other Sunni country, feels threatened by this new wave of Shiite proselytizing. Saudi social affairs minister Abdel Mohsen al Hakas has called it unacceptable, and King Abdullah himself has accused Shiites of trying to convert Sunnis, pointing the finger at Tehran. The matter is of vital concern to the kingdom, which prizes its position as the cradle of Islam--all the more since Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah are now among the most popular figures in the Arab world.

Iran's expansionist strategy is not limited to religious affairs. Hundreds of Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah fighters who got their military training in Iran have infiltrated the Gulf since last year in order to "militarize" the Shiite communities of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Their mission is to prepare to destabilize these monarchies, targeting vital national interests and Western interests (both embassies and businesses) in the event of a U.S. or Israeli military strike against Iran.
March 16, 2009 11:15 AM
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/03/sa...an_on_a_col.php

March 16, 2009



The Ombudsman

The Washington Post



Dear Sir:



Howard Kurtz is usually quite perceptive but his column in today’s Post indicates that he doesn’t understand what is happening in the US economy or why. Perhaps a little 3^rd grade arithmetic will help.



During the last few week ordinary citizens have seen their “leaders” in Washington (a) expand the federal government’s role in the economy, ( massively increase spending, © promise more of both for the years ahead, (d) assure that taxes will have to be increased, (e) dumped huge debt on future generations, and (f) in summary, scared hell out of consumers and taxpayers.



Meanwhile, a dozen or so Congressional committees are holding hearings and pushing bills that will pile even more costs on consumers and debt on taxpayers.



President Obama’s FY 2010 $3.6 trillion budget indicates that he is behaving like a recent college graduate with thousands in college loans who has discovered that he can run up personal debt on credit cards!



Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid are cooperating. They and President Obama “own” the current economic mood and behavior of consumers and business leaders.



The response from consumers (who normally account for about 70% of US economic activity) is predictable. Anyone with an ounce of common sense who is paying attention will cut their spending, hold on to cash, pay down debt (if possible), avoid new debt (regardless of low interest rates), and buy only what they need to get by.



The reductions in consumer spending alone will more than offset the stimulus effects of previous government rebates, and recent spending bills that may “stimulate” in 2009 - 2011.



Do some arithmetic: If, for example, the average cutback in consumer spending by the 110 million US households is only $10,000 per year, the total reduction in consumer spending would be $1.1 trillion annually. If cuts in average household spending were $15,000 per year, the total reduction would be $1.65 trillion. Either estimate may be low, recognizing the huge reductions in the sale of automobiles and durable goods.



The downward spiral will continue as job losses mount. If each job lost results in only a $40,000 per year reduction in consumer spending, each 1 million lost jobs adds another $40 billion to the problem.



Most Americans are not stupid. They realize the implications of the huge government spending and debt. They will behave rationally and continue to limit their spending. The downward spiral will continue until the Congress and the Administration begin behaving responsibly.



Glenn R. Schleede

18220 Turnberry Drive

Round Hill, VA 20141-2574

ROBERT CREAMER
AIG Bonuses and Wall Street's "Greed is Good" Values The "Greed is good era" is over. It died on September 15, 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the right wing myth that if everyone looks out for his own self interest the "invisible hand" would assure that the public interest would take care of itself. More than Lehman Brothers went bankrupt that day. So did Wall Street's entire system of "greed is good" values.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/200903...eed-good-values

The Financial Sector: "A House Burning Down"
Ben Bernanke’s False Analogy
- by Prof. Michael Hudson - 2009-03-16
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12735

Monetary and Fiscal Failure, Fraud, and Fear of What's Next - by Stephen Lendman - 2009-03-16
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12734

Dollar Crisis In The Making
Before the stampede

by W Joseph Stroupe
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12737