Democrats May Kick Out Joe Lieberman If He Addresses The Republican National Convention

Good riddance.  The only reason Lieberman is still with the Democrats is because they needed him to make a majority.

Lieberman's favorite line is that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him.  But the problem with Lieberman began far before he lost the Democrattic primary in 2006; Joe Lieberman cast his lot with the Republicans years ago.  It's just finally catching up to him.

The problem isn't that Lieberman votes against the Democratic Party line.  That's not a bad thing--politicians sometimes vote their consciences or their constituents, and a lot of times that means voting against the party line.  Having members who break with their leadership is a good thing, because it ensures that Congress' agenda has broad appeal; it keeps them in check.

Ronald Reagan had a saying, known as the 11th Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.  It's a good philosophy--you don't throw members of your party under the bus until it's absolutely necessary.  The problem with Joe Lieberman is that he made a career throwing Democrats under the bus--not only would he support right-wing policies, but then he would go out and use right-wing talking to attack his fellow Democrats.

Now, it's expected that Republicans will attack Democrats--that's pretty much a 'dog bites man' story.  A lot of people don't take those attacks seriously because they see them as simple partisan sniping.  But when a Democrat starts criticizing other Democrats--using the same arguments as Republicans--then it validates those attacks; it gives them the appearance of bipartisanship.  This was the problem with Joe Lieberman--he would give Republican smears credit by using them against his colleagues.

It's fine to disagree with your fellow Democrats.  It's fine to agree with the Republicans now and again.  But it's not okay to do the Republicans' dirty work for them--it's not okay to become part of their noise machine.  That's where the dissatisfaction with Joe Lieberman came from--the fact that he cast his lot with the Republicans and built a career on attacking other Democrats.

Lieberman is trying to have his cake and eat it too--he wants to vote with the Republicans but reap the benefits of being in the Democratic majority.  We tolerated it because we needed his vote to make a majority.  But, come January of 2009, there will be plenty of new Democrats to solidify our majority, and Lieberman won't be necessary anymore.

And the reality is that Joe Lieberman knows this.  It's why he's attaching himself to John McCain--if McCain wins in November, Lieberman will get a cushy cabinet position and won't have to worry about facing angry Connecticut voters with serious buyer's remorse in 2012.

I say strip him of his seniority, strip him of his committee chairmanship, and kick him out of the caucus.  It's not like we'll be losing a vote, since Lieberman votes with the Republicans on a variety of issues anyway.  And if McCain loses, I'm sure the GOP will accept Joe Lieberman into their caucus with open arms, rewarding him handsomely for his loyalty.

As for me, I'm looking forward to 2012, because I'm hoping we can send Joe to the Old Senators' Home and win his seat back once and for all.

Reuters:

"Today, we are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty," Maliki told Arab ambassadors in blunt remarks during an official visit to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

"One of the two basic topics is either to have a memorandum of understanding for the departure of forces or a memorandum of understanding to set a timetable for the presence of the forces, so that we know (their presence) will end in a specific time."

The White House has frequently criticized those who have voiced support or advocated a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S forces, saying that to do so would embolden the enemy and permit them to lay low until U.S forces have left, allow Iran and other militant elements within the country to surface once U.S forces are gone and seize that country and exercise their influence. The Bush Administration reacted to the news, by repeating that an orderly exit from Iraq should be based on the progress and circumstances in the country and Iraqi government as opposed to based on dates as would be done if a timetable for withdrawal was used.

Asked about Maliki's comments, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters: "With respect to timetables I would say the same thing I would say as respects to the security situation -- it is dependent on conditions on the ground."
Whitman said the United States had made clear "that we have no long term desires to have forces permanently stationed in Iraq."

"But time lines tend to be artificial in nature," he said. "In a situation where things are as dynamic as they are in Iraq, I would just tell you, it's usually best to look at these things based on conditions on the ground."

The state Department meanwhile, responded by saying that may have been a miscommunication or misinterpretation of Prime Minister Al-Maliki's remarks.

At the State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment without further clarification of Maliki's remarks

But Tuesday Iraq's National Security Advisor not only reinforced the sentiments expressed by maliki, but says that a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S forces is essentially a deal breaker in any effective status of forces agreement that can be agreed upon by both the Iraqis and the Americans.

Iraq's National Security Advisor Muwafaq al-Rubaie said Tuesday that his country will reject any security pact with the United States unless a specific date for withdrawal of U.S.-led troops is set, according to reports from the holy city of Najaf.
"Our stance in the negotiations with the Americans will be strong. We will not sign any memorandum of understanding without specifying a date for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq," Rubaie told reporters in Najaf.

Despite his coyness on the issue of withdrawal now Bush said the following in 2007 at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden.

We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It's their government's choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.

MY TAKE: The Bush administration for the past five years has argued that if that country remains in a state of turmoil and disorder, with violence and bedlam, we as a country will have to bare the burden and our soldiers will have to sacrifice both life and limb to secure that country which we helped plunge into chaos.

However, now Bush and his defenders say (although it is certainly debatable) that now that we have made progress, we as a country should be rewarded by leaving thousands of troops away from their families and indefinitely in the line of fire of insurgents and other elements hostile to the U.S. In other words, if we are victorious we stay and if we are not we stay.

So either way we either have to or are rewarded with building somewhere between 58-60 permanent U.S military bases within that country, having a U.S embassy as large as the Vatican, and much more forever.

If Bush ever really cared about the U.S soldiers, a 'culture of life', 'freedom', and winning the battle of perceptions that we find ourselves engaged in with al-Queda and other elements of the Arab world he would view the latest remarks by Al-Maliki and the Iraqi government as an opportunity to be embraced and not something to be shunned. Maliki through his remarks is in a way, is offering the U.S an honorable way out. We can leave, coming to an agreement with Maliki and the Iraqis that now is the time to leave and that the Iraqis now must chart their own course and become reliant on themselves. That in the end it is their war to win and to develop, and that we can not do anymore. An acknowledgement that western forces eternally embedded and occupying eastern Arab country is undesirable and unsustainable by both Iraqis and by most Americans (with the exceptions of the neocons and those who seek to exploit the war to do business).

From then on, if they succeed , it is a success story for the Iraqis (although don't expect the words of Jefferson to ring out throughout the land and a chapter of Common Cause be formed in Iraq anytime soon). If not and they fail, we are out of there. Either way at the end of the day, the Iraqis will have made the decision and the thousands of soldiers still won't be maimed or killed. And we can stop spending money on a war that in the end will bare little fruit for us. We have already lost over 4,000 U.S soldiers in Iraq, there voices silenced and their bodies forever still by a blast or a gunshot. As many as 30-35,0000 have already lost their limbs and soundness of spirit and mind. And we have already spent at least a trillion dollars. Our image has already been sullied. We have suffered and our men and women in uniform have already suffered more then any human being should for a cause that remains elusive.

But then again, Bush/Cheney it seems have never cared. Even when a possible and desirable way out is right in front of their faces. it is a mystery how such people can sleep soundly at night.

THE Americans and the Israelis are acting in concert vis-à-vis Iran. The unmistakable message they are putting out loud and clear is that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is on the cards in the event Tehran doesn’t cave into their demands. Are they bluffing as part of an arm-twisting strategy or are they seriously planning to transform this region into an inferno?

Pundits have been analyzing the probability of a US or Israeli attack on Iran for several years now. Some have even come up with likely dates but most of those have come and gone eroding the analysts’ credibility and dulling fears. There’s been so much chatter on the subject that we may reach the point when a “will they or won’t they?” discussion will turn into nothing more than an academic exercise on the basis it hasn’t happened so, therefore, it probably never will. The danger is Iran and the region could easily be lured into letting down its guard. Certainly, members of the Iranian leadership have indicated they don’t take the threat very seriously even though they are planning for every contingency and threatening to set the Middle East aflame if attacked.

In recent weeks, since the Israelis launched a supposed dry run in the eastern Mediterranean using 100 fighter planes and aerial tankers, the chatter has reached a crescendo. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has vowed, “Iran will not be nuclear”. Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz has termed a strike on Iran “unavoidable”.

Retired Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit warned that if Israel doesn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities within a year, Israel would be vulnerable to nuclear incineration. He says that even if Israel doesn’t receive a green light from the US, it should be prepared to go it alone. Shavit believes there is a window of opportunity before the upcoming US election when the deed should be done in case of a win by Barack Obama, who has advocated jaw-jaw before war-war.

ARCH neoconservative and former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton says he believes Israel is poised to strike in November once the ballot has taken place.

Knesset member and retired Maj. Gen. Dani Yotom, who isn’t known for his hawkish views, says sanctions against Iran aren’t working and so “a military operation is needed”. Even the normally moderate Israeli historian Benny Morris recently said, “If the issue is whether Israel or Iran should perish, then Iran should perish”.

Suspicions that an attack might be in the pipeline were heightened after leaks supposedly forced the Israeli prime minister to admit he had secretly met with Aviam Sela, a brilliant military tactician said to be the architect of Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. It is believed that Sela was asked to give his opinion on the feasibility of similarly putting Iran’s nuclear facilities out of action.

There is no doubt that Israelis genuinely fear a nuclear-armed Iran, which they believe would constitute an existential threat, but why are Israelis being so upfront about their intentions when history tells us they normally strike first and answer questions later?

Given that Iran is not Iraq circa the 1980s as far as airpower, weaponry, technology and sophisticated communications go and in light of the fact Iran’s main nuclear facilities are buried under layers of steel and concrete as much as 100 feet underground, eradicating Tehran’s nuclear capability would be challenging for any military unless it was prepared to unleash nuclear bunker-busters. Moreover, unlike the Osirak surprise strike, an attack on Iran would trigger serious military repercussions that could involve Syria, Hezbollah and pro-Iranian Shiite Iraqi groups. Such a pre-emptive move would probably result in a massive loss of life on all sides and would have a devastating effect on the global economy with oil prices reaching hitherto unimaginable heights.

Further, since neither Israel nor the US are in any position to launch a ground invasion without the complicity of anti-government Iranian surrogates, strikes on Iranian nuclear plants would probably result in Tehran not only reconstructing but setting their sights on developing nuclear weapons even if they’ve no plans to do so now. It’s worth mentioning that the Osirak reactor was for peaceful purposes and it was only after it was hit that Saddam Hussein actively sought a bomb.

According to the New Yorker’s veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in an article titled “Preparing the Battlefield”, President George W. Bush has sanctioned covert operations and requested $400 million designed to destabilize Iran outside the sphere of the US military. These will largely be carried out by Iranian dissidents rather than Americans in the field, he says. But, once again, Iran is not Iraq. It’s a far more cohesive country and although not all of its citizens support the government, most identify themselves as proud Iranians who harbor a historical aversion to neoimperialist plots. There is no doubt that Israel and the US would like the Iranian government to be wiped off the face of the earth along with its nuclear ambitions but both countries are divided on what to do. So far their joint and separate belligerency isn’t working. If their bellicose words and provocative actions are, indeed, a giant bluff they are ineffective. They are simply causing the Iranian leadership to dig its heels in further and assert its right under the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Even if this is a coordinated bluff, it could so easily reach the point of no return when to maintain strategic credibility, the players will have to make good on their threats. Certainly, one Iranian commander Brig. Gen. Mir-Faisal Baqerzadeh is taking these to heart already. According to Press TV, he has already got his troops digging more than 320,000 graves within Iran’s bordering provinces to provide any invading force with “the respect they deserve”.

Now here is a interesting letter that a reader wrote to this article today.

War drums

To add to the excellent overview by Linda Heard (July 1), I wish to state the following:

1. Is not Jerusalem sacred to all of Islam? What are the Israelis thinking? I cannot imagine any nation of Islam launching any kind of nuclear strike on Israel for the simple reason that in doing so, Jerusalem would become either destroyed or simply irradiated to the point of making any pilgrimages to it untenable.

2. Iran has become too important to many nations in the region. With its current pipeline projects to supply gas and other cooperative ventures in its neighboring states, Iran has shown itself to be a valuable resource to those neighboring countries. An attack on it would endanger its important role in helping stabilize the nations of the region, a role for which Washington is no doubt jealous.

3. The truth has become transparent. Democracy is spread by subversion! The right of a people to choose its own government and its own form of government is a myth as proven by the election of Hamas in Gaza and the resultant oppression by America and Israel against it. The right of a nation not engaged in aggression to be secure within its borders is a myth. It is shameful for a nation that cries democracy for the world to use terrorists and dissidents to undermine those governments that it is in contention with. In the case with Iran, it is now clear that the only aggressors in the region are the US and Israel.

4. Who are Israel’s real enemies? It is not the Arabs. History has shown that Arabs have historically protected and sheltered their Semitic brethren, the Jews, when they were being persecuted and murdered by the Europeans. While the Arab states are opposed to the illegal creation of Israel and the dispossession of Arab peoples from Palestine, it has been Europe that has shown the greatest hatred toward Jews and even to this date, despite harsh laws criminalizing anti-Semitism such hatred remains. Even in the US many groups exist that hold Jewry in disdain. As the current economic crises deepen within America, this hatred is bound to increase as it becomes obvious who the rich are. Perhaps Israel should be looking westward to see if the dragon is rising out of the sea, as foreseen by John in Revelation, and recognizing just who that dragon is.

5. The only solutions to the dilemmas facing the Middle East must come from the nations of the region, not from outsiders.

The obligation of each nation in the region including Israel is to protect the integrity of the region. This means protecting it against any hegemonic interests that would attempt to dominate the region for whatever excuse. While hatred exists among nations it is time to put aside such feelings. While accepting that major differences do exist and that there are valid reasons for those feelings, what is more important is to find a way so that each can exist without allowing outsiders to impose their might or will upon the region. Be warned the dogs are at the doors; whether you let them into your home is your choice. (Even though the beasts have already entered by the back door!) With all due consideration.

Jerry Copeland, United States published 5 July 2008

Bolton speaks so strongly of a country (North Korea) that consistently does not keep its word in international agreements and suggest that the Bush White House must be in a daze if it thinks North Korea will keep it this time.  Never once does Bolton consider the obvious... so what if they do not keep to this agreement?  What could we do anyways?

Or consider that North Korea boarders China and is also very close to the Soviet Union.  Both of these nations have little to gain with any of their neighbors proliferating nuclear weapons.  One or the other is also key to the support of a country that can not support themselves (in other words, North Korea depends upon the good will of China and Russia).  With both Russia and China on the ascendancy and enjoying a return to the "good life", they have little tolorance for a wild card country.  With any type of international diplomacy and cooperation, the US could gain these allies in offsetting the fear of North Korea with nuclear weapons.

John Bolton has written before about North Korea and has chastised the Bush Administration on its handling of these negotiations.  I simply wonder if there is any connection between Dick Cheney's preferred style of negotiating and the fact that both Bolton and Cheney were key members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and sing from the same choir book.  For reasons still unexplained (other than there were no other options since our military is already over committed to Iraq), the State Department won this policy battle.  It tells you a lot that Bolton writes so vitriolic about the President that made his UN appointment while Congress was adjourned.  The neocons take no prisoners.

Gordon Prather has an article arguing that the Bush administration legacy will be "the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime," and Scott Horton has interviewed him on the subject. Prather shows a touching incredulity that nothing the Bush administration does in this area seems to make much sense.

Iraq has gone from second to fifth in the Foreign Policy Failed States Index, illustrating perfectly the success of the 'surge'. William Pfaff has a truthdig article, The Illusion of Saving Nations from Themselves, reminding us of how we got here:

The Bush government was elected in 2000 on a platform including vigorous opposition to the United States Army’s doing “nation-building.” Swedes, Danes, the European Union, and NGOs did nation-building. The United States Army was a fighting army.

This was the principle on which the new U.S. volunteer army was formed after Vietnam. It is the explanation why, after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the army looked on, bemused, while the people of Baghdad hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, tore down the phone and power wires, dug up the copper pipes, and destroyed the power generators of the city infrastructure, looting their own capital city of everything that had value and could be sold.

For those who haven't seen it Seymour Hersh has an article at the New Yorker on Cheney's covert activities of dubious legality in Iran. By spreading death and destruction in Iran it will probably strengthen the existing regime and undermine similar programmes elsewhere (in Afghanistan) may, whatever the ethics, at least have some chance of success.

Scott Ritter believes military action will be taken in Iran before the 2009 swearing in ceremony.

Time to move the recking ball on to the next victim to distract ourselves from all those high oil prices and the messes we have already created.

You would think that being one of the main architects of the Iraq War - quite possibly the greatest strategic blunder in American history - would be enough to disqualify you from pontificating on anything (like your favorite movie), much less the direction of foreign policy.  Unless you happen to live in Washington.  In which case, erring on the side of war - even if you're miserably wrong - is always a good decision*; doing so will leave you with many lucrative career opportunities.  Exhibit A of this phenomena is Richard Perle's recent op-ed in the Washington Post, where he disparages multilateralists for failing to "contain" Iran's nuclear ambitions:

"A successful multilateral coalition" is how Condoleezza Rice described those countries, "united in confronting Iran," on which the administration's Iran policy critically depends.

"A complete failure" is Barack Obama's description of the Bush administration's Iran policy.

They are both right. The secretary of state, whose born-again multilateralism has redeemed her standing at the State Department and among our allies, can rightly claim to have forged a coalition on Iran. But Obama (whose enthusiasm for multilateralism is at least as fervent) can rightly claim that Rice's coalition has failed to slow, much less halt, Iran's unrelenting nuclear weapons program or diminish its support for terrorist groups.

The coalition that Rice thinks a success, and Obama a failure, is, at best, a "do nothing decisive" group, with at least half its members -- Germany, Russia and China -- maneuvering for self-serving advantage in their dealings with the mullahs in Iran. [...]

For their part, the Iranians, undeterred by Rice's "successful multilateral coalition," are relentlessly building a nuclear weapons program while supporting terrorism and subversion in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The mullahs took only scornful notice of President Bush's appeals to an even larger coalition, "the world," when he said, on May 18, "To allow the world's leading sponsor of terror to gain the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." But allow it does.

Perle's op-ed rests on two claims: first, that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program, and second, that multilateral negotiations have been an utter failure.  Unfortunately for Perle however, the first claim is demonstrably false, and the second is highly misleading.  In the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, the American intelligence community had this to say about Iran's nuclear weapons program:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.

This assessment echoes a statement Mohamed El Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made in October 2007 (a month before the NIE was released):

"We have information that there has been maybe some studies about possible weaponization," said Mohamed ElBaradei, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency. "That's why we have said that we cannot give Iran a pass right now, because there is still a lot of question marks."

"But have we seen Iran having the nuclear material that can readily be used into a weapon? No. Have we seen an active weaponization program? No."

More importantly though, is the reason the NIE gives for Iran's relative inactivity:

We judge with high confidence that that he halt, and Tehran's announcement of it's decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response  to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work.

If we can draw any conclusions from this and North Korea's recent disclosure of its nuclear program, it is that Richard Perle is completely, utterly wrong.  Multilateral negotiations, coupled with a good-faith effort to resolve tensions, can be very effective in achieving policy goals.  With regards to Iran's continuing "subversion" in Iraq, it's not that multilateralism has failed, it's that the United States has not been acting in good-faith.  Not only have we spent the last several years threatening regime change, but we've even gone so far as to contemplate using nuclear weapons against Iranian targets.  Which, you know, probably wouldn't be a good idea.

When it comes down to it though, the United States and Iran are mutually invested in a stable Iraq, and if the United States were willing to sit down to good-faith negotiations, there is a fair chance that we'd leave with something constructive.

But, judging from the shoddy quality of his op-ed, Richard Perle isn't actually interested in solving problems as much as he is desperate to satisfy his bloodlust before Bush leaves office.

*Signing onto a war isn't always the best idea.  See Hillary Clinton, presidential campaign.

Update:  Added a picture!

(photo from flickr user david_nimrod)

Now you might think that I ought to know the cause of the break. But why? This is one of our greatest confusions with ethics. Most people are aware that the motivation is crucial, but few are aware of the epistemological problem of determining one's own motivation. (Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind alerted me to this; by no means do I agree with Ryle on everything, but he got some things right and this was one of them [the linked-to Penguin edition of Ryle's book replaced Ryle's preface with Dennet's dribbling introduction: this ought to be a capital offence].) How often do I hear people saying that my motivation is pure (Anthony Blair was a master of this), and believe me all these people are careful to fool themselves in the first instance. If everyone that Blair held dear to him were living in Iraq he would have behaved quite differently in 2002, believe me. This is not to say that in the hypothetical situation his judgment wouldn't be equally shot, but the counterfactual illustrates the reality of his profession to have the interests of Iraqis at heart, along with every single person that I have seen advancing this justification: entirely bogus. Of course there is no end to this as people can claim that they really would start a war where everyone they cared about was living, but that they claim this doesn't say anything about their altruistic intentions. Whatever was driving the push to war we can be perfectly sure that it wasn't care for Iraqis. (The situation now is more complicated of course, but needless to say, our continued involvement is not driven purely by the welfare of Iraqis.)

The extraordinary thing is that some people who vehemently opposed the war from the outset will still distinguish Anthony Blair from the American Neoconservatives. I remain unconvinced. He set out in the 1999 Chicago speech the political blueprint that was followed for the Iraq war, he lied his party, parliament and country into the war (especially in his case about when he was committed to war), and was astonished that anyone should think that it was anything other than his own policy and his own convictions. The crucial distinction was that he politically needed the appearance of a coalition of the willing whereas the Bush administration didn't. When given the option by Rumsfeld of not taking part in the invasion, we saw panic and declarations that "If the Americans go in, we go in too".

A paragraph from the above article by Rawnsley on Blair's convictions is remarkable.

Instead of staying in the Commons, the Prime Minister took up an invitation from ITN's political editor Nick Robinson to argue his case with six sceptical members of the public. When the cameras had stopped recording, he did not sweep off to his next engagement. Despite his frantic schedule and the agitation of his aides, he took the six into the Cabinet Room where he spent another half hour trying to persuade them. So utterly embedded is Mr Blair's conviction that he is right, he believes that if only he could reason with every member of the public in person, he would convert the whole country.

It is this passionate belief in his own rightness and righteousness in the face of all the evidence that is the hallmark of a Neoconservatives. The passion of his conviction leads us modern sentimentalists to believe that he may be confused but that his intentions were honest. But this cannot be (as Jane Austen understood so well.) It just leads to the development of supremely gifted method actors who convince themselves first, from which they have the perfect platform to use executive power to do anything at all (whatever the actual motivation) on the basis that they are being totally sincere. Alexander Chancelor got it about right.

God did so despite the fact that His vicar on Earth, and leader of the church that Blair recently joined, considered that invading Iraq was a bad thing to have done. So what made Blair so certain that he was doing right when even the Pope disagreed?

Blair seems to have fallen for some Lewis Carroll-type logical fallacy that runs something like this: I believe in God; people who believe in God are good; people who are good do not do wrong; therefore, what I do is good. Maybe Blair is not quite as mad as that, but sometimes it feels like it. It sometimes even feels as if he measures the rightness of his actions by the amount of opposition they provoke.

I always suspected Blair of unwholesome self-righteousness, and now he has come very close to confirming it. With the born-again George Bush suffering from the same problem, the poor Iraqis never had much of a chance.

This scepticism about our own intentions is a crucial first step to what used to be called self-knowledge (a point that pervades all of Austen's writing, where the reading of the novel itself can become a tool of self-exploration). Just as with science we study physical causation by aggregating observations, looking for correlations and making predictions, so we have to do the same in ethics. We call in a physician rather than just assuming we know what is going on in our body; shouldn't the same care be taken with our minds?

Ye shall know them by their fruits (Mathhew 7:16). Could it be that the most important and perhaps elusive one to know is no. 1.

I am disappointed by the absence of a link but I know I haven't earned one either.

The refugee statistics are so appalling that they have become almost mundane. Four million of Iraq's 23 million people have fled their homes – until recently, at the rate of 60,000 a month – allegedly more than 1.2 million to Syria (a figure now challenged by at least one prominent NGO), 500,000 to Jordan, 200,000 to the Gulf, 70,000 to Egypt, 57,000 to Iran, up to 40,000 to Lebanon, 10,000 to Turkey. Sweden has accepted 9,000, Germany fewer – where an outrageous political debate has suggested that Christian refugees should have preference over Muslim Iraqis. With its usual magnanimity – especially for a country that set off this hell-disaster by its illegal invasion – George Bush's America has, of course, accepted slightly more than 500.

This collection of pictures is therefore an indictment of us, as well as of the courage of Iraqis. The madness is summed up in an email message sent to Van Kesteren by a Baghdad Iraqi. "This summer," he wrote, "a workman wanted to quench his thirst by putting ice in his tea. A car pulled up, the driver stepped out and began to beat and kick the man, cursing him as an unbeliever. 'What do you think you're doing? Did the Prophet Mohamed put ice in his water?'

The man being attacked was furious and asked his assailant: 'Do you think the Prophet Mohamed drove a car?'"

John McCain continues to claim he has passed the Commander-n-Chief test for supporting the 'surge' in early 2007 but success is relative, eh.  With the rate at which millions of Iraqis were being killed and dispersed in 2006-7 that the inferno had to burn itself out whatever the American force deployments, the ethnic cleansing reached its logical conclusion in the middle of '07. But what about the judgement that gave us this fiasco in the first place and insists on doubling down on it?

McCain decided to wheel out James Wolsey on yesterday's conference call to attack as delusional Obama's position  that the September 2001 attacks should be considered a law and order issue, the very same James Wolsey that took to print on the 24th September 2001 in The New Republic to tell us that invading Iraq was the best way of dealing with what had happened on the 11th September:

In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, attention has focused on terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks--whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.

To this end, investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: The mastermind behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit. But late last year, AEI Press published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a careful book about the bombing by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie. The book's startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by James Fox (the FBI's chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his replacement in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi agent who had assumed the latter's identity when police files in Kuwait (where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait. If Mylroie and Fox (who died in 1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again.

(h/t Yglesias.)

Meanwhile Paul Krugman has noted that we are in Ground Hog day with McCain's non sequiturs on tax policy being dutifully echoed by the press. Others are observing that McCain manifestly doesn't understand his climate policy.  And Andrew Sullivan explains that McCain shows no evidence of having mastered foreign policy while Marc Ambinder, presumably part of the McCain base, seems incapable of absorb what he is hearing.

I am not naive enough to imagine that any of this will actually determine the outcome of the election campaign. As even William Kristol acknowledges McCain-08 seems to be a shambles, so we might, if we are lucky, avoid a rerun of 2000 and 2004. I hope so. But it can't be at all healthy to have one of the candidates running entirely on smoke and mirrors (and I would really prefer it wasn't so).

On the supposition that finetuning the provisions that Iraqis find obnoxious to their sovereignty will bring them or their government around, Bush remains optimistic about the outcome.

President Bush said Saturday he is confident the United States can reach a long-term security agreement with Iraq, one that will not establish permanent U.S. bases there.

"If I were a betting man, we'll reach an agreement with the Iraqis," Bush told a news conference in Paris.

Bush has been wrong about virtually everything having to do with Iraq. He overplayed his hand one too many times, and SOFA is done for.

[Update: Please read the companion article, The Love Buzz, explaining why it is important to seek out everyone's point of view, especially those of people that you find offensive, and that this process in no way condones their actions.]

In an eerie coincidence, as soon as I completed my essay, Why Fisk is Wrong about Ahmadinejad, that finished with Jeffery Goldberg, I read Goldberg's article, Mearsheimer and Walt: Apologists for Ahmadinejad, responding to Stephen Walt comments in a lecture in Jerusalem:

A professor criticized the authors for failing to condemn Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. "I don't think he is inciting to genocide," Walt responded.

Goldberg starts with the infamous mistranslation:

October, 2005: "Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine... I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.”

despite it being well known that more accurate translations exist.

The Imam [Khomeini] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. This statement is very wise.

It is clear from the context that Ahmadinejad was comparing Israel to The Soviet Union, the Shah and Saddam Hussein's regime, i.e., corrupt and unjust regimes that collapsed though their internal contradictions (see "Wiped off the Map" - The Rumor of the Century and the excellent Wikipedia article, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel, for analysis and links—there is really no excuse). Indeed this is just the sense we get in another of Goldberg's quotations.

November, 2007: "It is impossible that the Zionist regime will survive. Collapse is in the nature of this regime because it has been created on aggression, lying, oppression and crime…”

It is really interesting that Ahmadinejad criticizes Israel and predicts that it is unsustainable, and Goldberg hears an existential threat to Israel being made by Ahmadinejad. There is a difference between saying highly offensive things about something and predicting its demise, and promising to bring about its destruction. One of the reasons that Ahmadinejad is extremely popular in the region is that he says the kinds of things that people in the region think, and in doing so tramples over the sensibilities of the colonial powers (especially the USA and UK). (I repeat I find this assault on Israeli sensibilities revolting.) It is this defiance that is the source of his popularity in the region, the 'Arab street' finding their ruler's servile attitude towards the the industrial nations demeaning, and similarly because we are so used to to having our sensitivities respected we find it shocking.

While I find his way of talking about Israel as repulsive as anyone, I am much more ambivalent about his disregard of European and North American sensibilities given the way we have been perpetuating real genocides, smashing the lives of millions and millions of people in the region with our neocolonial projects. That people have been deliberately twisting Ahmadinejad's words and positing a Iranian nuclear weapons programme for which there is not a shred of objective evidence that withstands scrutiny, dehumanising the Iranian leadership by suggesting they are irrational and insane enough to use a crude nuclear weapon to try and attack a state with sophisticated second strike nuclear-weapons that are capable of obliterating Iran; all of this to gin up support for a military attack on Iran—using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary—and that would result in just the kind of genocidal consequences that these people are accusing Ahmadinejad of inciting.

To make it perfectly clear. On the one side we have the twisting of Ahmadinejad's words to suggest that he is trying to commit genocide that anyone with an ounce of common sense knows he can never possibly bring about. On the other we have people with a clear record of genocide making every effort to continue that career, with the twisting of Ahmadinejad's deeply unpleasant rhetoric an important plank in that strategy. This can't reflect well on anyone that put their shoulder to that wheel.

As President Bush makes his valedictory visit to our shores Martin Rowson reflects on his victim, skewering him as effortless in words as he did in pictures.

As it is, taking the piss out of the way he looks (which he can't, after all, do much about) was more than justified by the way he behaved, demonising and often seeking to criminalise all opposition in the name of "Freedom" while pursuing the violent export of free-market democracy (just tell 'em about it in Florida) and wallowing in a heady mixture of incompetence, incomprehension and mawkish militarism. And all of this heading up an administration which showed every sign of being run by the Corleone family, but where they'd picked Fredo as Godfather instead of Michael.

[Update: See also The Love Buzz, an important companion article without which this article may seem a little puzzling, and Goldberg is also Wrong on Ahmadinejad.]

Latest reports suggest that there could be a resolution to the nuclear dispute between Iran and the USA on the horizon? If it is so then Ahmadinejad had better if the Iranians kept Ahmadinejad out of the way. But before I come to these reports I would like to look at how the President of Iran may have influenced the process. He is portrayed, even by great instigative journalists as insane, but others have detected method in his madness. To do that you have to avoid getting distracted by the hysterical projections of his detractors and treat him seriously.

The great instigative journalist is Robert Fisk, who has a new article in Saturday's Indie, The Middle East never tires of threats. Until the end of the article it is vintage Fisk, looking at the absurd, boastful theatrics that makes up so much of conflict, and especially Middle Eastern politics. His best shot comes when the boasts stop.

The problem about threats, of course, is that once you've made them, you've either got to carry them out or pretend you were misunderstood. I never believed George Bush would invade Iraq; not, that is, until I turned up at UN headquarters in New York and actually heard him ranting on about the powerlessness of the UN. And then he actually did invade Iraq. And I still have my notes of an interview with a certain Osama bin Laden, and his last words to me were: "I pray that God permits us to turn America into a shadow of itself." And I wrote in the margin the one word "rhetoric?". September 11 cleared that one up.

For those that haven't already read Commander Huber's essay on how we all walked into the trap, I recommend it, for it America has become a shadow of herself, even if, despite extensive south-west-Asian commitments, her ability wreak death and destruction remains formidable . I mean the American brand is a shadow of itself, though its not irreparable (and already underway?).

Unfortunately Fisk gets carried away with his story and finishes with the most hackneyed of comparisons, and following a narrative lovingly constructed by the purveyors of the meaningless, lazy and empty rhetoric that Fisk despises so much.

And when Ahmadinejad talks of annihilating Israel, he cowers, of course, under the shadow of Hitler. And he intends, I think, to make us fear him – although no Iranian military force would let him get his hands on anything nuclear. "Annihilating" Israel – always supposing anyone would truly contemplate it – also means annihilating the West Bank and Gaza and much of Lebanon and Jordan and probably the whole Middle East.

But Hitler is dead and we need to escape from the world of threats. Was it not King Lear who once shouted: "I shall do such things, what they are yet I know not – but they shall be the terrors of the earth." Poor old Lear.

It is worth looking at just how we have got where we have, why Ahmadinejad is so successful in drawing the attention he does, and whether the things he says even make sense. For that we have to review what has happened to Iran since 2001, from the Iranian perspective.

Iran, 2001-5

We now know that in late 2001General Wesley Clarke, reported the following from a trip to the Pentagon:

"'Oh, it's worse than that,' he said, holding up a memo on his desk. 'Here's the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We're going to take out seven countries in five years.' And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran."

At this stage we had Ayatollah Khatami's reformist government in power in Iran vigorously trying to repair relations with Washington. The reason that the USA was able to walk into Afghanistan was because Tehran had organised the whole show for them, the Northern Alliance being as much in Iran's sphere as the Taliban was Pakistan's (see Leverett & Mann interview and Parsi's Treacherous Alliance, pp. 228-30). Iran was also one of the largest aid donors to Iran initially pledging $570m, later adding $100m.

In the January 2002, in his State of the Union speech President Bush announced that the Iranians were a part of the axis of evil. From John Richgardson's interview of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know:

The Iranians had been engaging in high-level diplomacy with the American government for more than a year, so the phrase was shocking and profound.

After that, the Iranian diplomats skipped the monthly meeting in Geneva. But they came again in March. And so did Mann. "They said they had put their necks out to talk to us and they were taking big risks with their careers and their families and their lives," Mann says.

The Iranians kept the channels open and proposed shortly after the Americans swept into Baghdad a new strategic relationship with the Americans, settling all outstanding issues, including securing the Iranian civili nuclear programme, the demilitarization of Hezbollah, ceasing support of rejectionist Palestinian groups, de facto recognition of Israel and cooperation over Iraq. According to Colin Powel's chief of staff, the Vice President had decided that 'we don't speak with evil'.

And here we have Scott Ritter in the Summer of 2005 in The US War with Iran has Already Begun.

Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.

Ahmadinejad Arrives

It was at this point that Khatami's government was swept from power and the populist mayor of Tehran scored a surprise victory over the establishment conservatives. Khatami's party was spiked by the establishment through the Guardian Council which disqualified most of the liberal candidates from standing for election.

Is it remotely surprising that the Iranians should dump Khatami in the circumstances. Ahmadinejad's point was that the Khatami government had been extremely naive in hoping that they would be taken seriously by merely offering to cooperate., that there is no point in the Iranians trying to appease this kind of aggression. Ahmadinejad's logic was that it did the Taleban and Saddam Hussein's government no good and Iran were simply being set up in the same way. (Added to this were the farcical nuclear negotiations with the US through the EU-3, which reinforces this same message, and makes clear that negotiating with the monkey in place of the organ grinder is pointless: see Ritter's Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change, where the Europeans are designated 'The Great Appeasers' in the chapter headings.)

It was at this point that Ahmadinejad made his infamous speech to the World without Zionism conference, where he said:

The Imam [Khomeini] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. This statement is very wise.

In doing so he cited three examples: the Shah of Iran, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's regime. The logic is inescapable, that Israel is being likened to corrupt and unjust regimes that must unravel through the fatal flaws in their architecture. The quote is an old one from Khomeini when Israel was one of the very few countries helping Iran to repel Saddam Hussein, backed as he was by almost everyone else. It seems that the 'wiped off the face of the map' quote came from the Iranian media—would this be the first time in history that a media organisation has sensationalized a politician's words? (See "Wiped off the Map" - The Rumor of the Century for analysis of the speech and the source of the mistranslations.)

(Trita Parsi has pointed out in an email to me that 'Both Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and other Iranian officials have called Israel a cancerous tumor that must be removed'.)

It also has to be said that there are some abiding contradictions in Israel and the policy that all governments have colonised the West Bank (see Uri Avnery, para 51) yet as Megan McCardle points out this is manifestly unsustainable. In a sense Ahmadinejad is quite right, that the current situation is untenable and it will have to be replaced by something else, something that accommodates the Palestinians. His way of saying it is incendiary (I will come to that), but he is by no means the first to say it—indeed it may be acknowledged by the majority of Israelis at some level.

You can accuse Ahmadinejad of many things—of being eccentric, of being divisive, of being particularly offensive where Israel is concerned—but you can't accuse him of being mad or of wild blustery rhetoric, or of promising to annihilate Israel.

The Columbia Speech

It is worth examining the main occasion where Ahmadinejad sought to address Western audiences in his September 2007 address to Columbia University, from which it is evident (to me at least) that he is a disciplined thinker.

In fact I thought Ahmadinejad's speech and handling of the occasion was courageous (bearing in mind the extraordinary hostility of the occasion) and quite brilliant. In order to understand and connect with anyone it is essential that the recipient have some kind of an open mind and that something in common is shared between speaker and listener, conditions that were here almost entirely lacking. He is clearly a religious thinker and tried to find some common ground with his audience in the Old Testament, but unfortunately a liberal University is one of the few places in the USA where you can be sure that references to the Old Testament will not act as a meaningful point of reference. My own experience is that there is a kind of thinking that religious people use that just doesn't connect with those of a more secular disposition (see On Love and comments, and More Earthquake Follies and the article it responded to, Karma, Retribution and the Actress and its comments).

Ahmadinejad's main power comes from his mouth. He has almost little power under the Iranian constitution, certainly none over defence, foreign affairs or the nuclear policy (as Fisk made clear); he must do as he is told in these areas and follow the agreed script.

Ahmadinejad's Game

However Ahmadinejad has been doing actually makes a certain kind of sense. He has been pursuing a course of total rhetorical defiance to the industrial powers, trampling on all of our sensibilities, and nowhere are we more sensitive than where Israel is concerned. This serves the Iranian purpose in two important ways. In the first place it makes him extremely popular with the 'Arab street' that resents their rulers' servile client relationship with the imperial powers, making it even more unthinkable for these regimes to acquiesce in a US attack on Iran. (See this scurrilous attack on Musharaf, comparing him with the pious, ascetic Ahmadinejad, in the lead up to the Pakistani elections; this kind of thing is dynamite; the spontaneous response of an Iranian friend who is neither Islamic nor a friend of the regime was 'I want to marry this guy'.)

Secondly it demonstrates that the Iranians will not be cowed or bullied, and makes sure that that while the industrial powers can of course hurt Iran militarily, everybody would lose terribly from such a move.

Ahmadinejad has been fighting a war of nerves and the longer this has gone on with the industrial powers running on bluster and laying down red lines, only for the Iranians to repeatedly walk though them (especially where enrichment of uranium is concerned), the more that their authority has been undermined.

It is difficult to be sure but the dynamics of this defiance may have made the difference between a catastrophic attack on Iran and averting it. We are all told to stand up to bullies and this has been the Iranian policy. But here is Gary Hart in September 2007 with some Unsolicited Advice to the Government of Iran:

For the vast majority of Americans who seek no wider war, in the Middle East or elsewhere, don't tempt fate. Don't give a certain vice president we know the justification he is seeking to attack your country. That is unless you happen to like having bombs fall on your head.

I couldn't believe I was reading this, especially astonishing coming from an ex-senator. If the American people didn't want such a war and had in 2006 delivered Congress to his party on an anti-war ticket, why on earth is he pleading with Ahmadinejad to start appeasing the Vice President. As he knows, the US constitution requires that the President get authorization from Congress before going to war. Could not Congress have taken a lead from the Iranians and grown some spine?

And look at what neoconservatives like Arthur Herman were writing in October 2007 (We’re Already at War with Iran):

2. At the same time, American Stealth fighters and bombers would target Iran’s air defense and anti-ship missile sites scattered around the Gulf, followed by what military analysts call an “Effects Based Operation,” as Air Force and Navy warplanes took out Iran’s extremely vulnerable military and economic infrastructure, including its electrical grid, transportation links, gasoline refineries, port facilities, as well as suspected nuclear sites.

[...]

Fantastically expensive?

From start to finish, such an operation would probably require no more than one more carrier group than is already in the area, as well as one Airborne Brigade Combat Team and one Marine Expeditionary Brigade, combined with Special Ops units-fewer troops than reinforced General Petraeus’s current surge in Iraq. In a matter of days or weeks, the key components of the Iranian oil industry would be in American hands even as Iran itself ground to a halt. Iranian crude oil would continue to flow to the world’s economy. Foreign investors in Iran’s energy industry like Russia and China would see their investments kept safe, which would help to defuse their predictable outrage over unilateral military action against Iran.

That this kind of thing can be written at all in public, even if it is sabre rattling, says a great deal about our collective contemporary sickness in the industrial world. If the concept of evil means anything I can't see how it can avoid being applied to these kinds of fantasies, and it is difficult to imagine of any higher justification for this kind of public speculation.

And here is Scott Ritter in On the Eve of Destruction:

Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.

After the release of the NIE on Iran in November, where all of the US intelligence agencies agreed that there was evidence to that Iran had any nuclear weapons programme, Ahmadinejad lowers the volume:

"We do hope there will be one or two steps forward so as to make a different atmosphere for finding solutions," he told reporters. "If further steps are taken, then our problems will be less complicated."

The suggestion is unmistakable that Iran was willing to parley if it could find some serious negotiation partners that weren't using the process as a cover for pursuing regime change, that the Iranians may be open to revisiting the kind of strategic bargain proposed in 2003. It is only the hint of a suggestion, of course.

A Resolution on the Horizon?

But yesterday the EU chief negotiator on the Iranian nuclear programme led an EU delegation to meet with his Iranian counterpart with proposals to help the Iranian civil nuclear programme in return for Iran ceasing to enrich Uranium, and Condoleesa Rice released a statement that she was seeking a diplomatic solution to the standoff. Despite the call for the Iranians to cease enrichment of uranium the Iranians said they would consider the proposal.

Postscript

In a recent article in the Atlantic, My Amygdala, My Self, Jeffrey Goldberg, for whome '30 percent of my brain is obsessed with the Holocaust', reported the results of having his brain scanned while viewing various images. Images of President Carter and Osama Bin Laden triggered predictably negative reactions, but an image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicated a serene response.

Bin Laden, I was pleased to learn, stimulated predictably negative brain activity, but the neuroscientists were flummoxed by my reaction to the sight of Ahmadinejad, who apparently stimulated, in a most dramatic way, my ventral striatum. “Reward!” Iacoboni said. “You’ll have to explain this one.”

Clearly a conventional explanation will reason that because Goldberg thinks the situation is under control he isn't bothered by the sight of Ahmadinejad, but this strikes me as pretty feeble.

I was however intrigued to notice in a previous video interview of Goldberg at the Atlantic, at the end in the teaser section that advertised the next installment of the interview (which I never encountered) Goldberg suggested (maybe jokingly) 'What should have happened after World war 2? The Jews should probably have been given Barvaria.' (The video is excellent, by the way.)

[brightcove vid=1482434988&exp=1460906593&w=486&h=412]

This is just the same thought that Ahmadinejad has pursued in his inimtable offensive style (making a gratuitously offensive yet unserious proposals to move Israel to Alaska). Could it be that Goldberg finds Ahmadinejad so off the wall that he can't take him seriously, or maybe his open antagonism is just easier to deal with. But reward? Perhaps there is some hidden, mystical connection!

These waves of diplomatic offensives against Iran and attendant meaningless references to abstract entities remaining on tables are starting to become comical, at least that is the analysis of the latest Mozaic Intelligence Report, and Commander Huber and Gordon Prather recap the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the whole shabby parade.

I do really hope nobody does anything really, really stupid.

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of
Israel, Iran and the United States

by Trita Parsi (2007)

This is one of the best books I have read. I read it over six months ago yet it seems as clear as if I had read it yesterday and still feel excited about what Trita Parsi has achieved with this book, demonstrating that while the evolution of the relationship between Israel and Iran has had a deeply ideological face, underneath this façade geopolitical factors have been the real drivers and the real causes of their gradual transition from allies to enmity. Again, their current enmity is not founded in the Iranian revolution at the end of the 1970s but the termination of the cold war and the defeat of Iraq in the first Persian Gulf war in the 1990s. Parsi bases his analysis on 130 interviews of senior officials in charge of the foreign policy of the three countries covering the period from the decline of the Shah to the 2006 Lebanon war.

Strikingly Parsi shows the way geopolitical realities caused Iran and Israel to continue the track they were in before the revolution. Khomeini, whether he knew it or not, pursued the same objectives that the Shah had done, inherited the same problems and found himself needing Israel as an ally, despite his ideology.

The sharpest conclusion for today really concerns the third member of the triangle, the USA. While ideology is of course essential (George H. W. Bush called it 'that [elusive] vision thing') but it must take account of the realities; if they are allowed to come into opposition then reality will win every time, even in a unipolar world where you have a crushing military advantage over everyone else. While there is every sign that the Iranians have learned this lesson, the current US administration has forgotten it, and until it relearns it things will probably get worse in the Middle East.

It is interesting to review the geopolitical factors that have been driving Israeli and Iranian policy. Many of them are actually mental or cultural in character—in other words, ideological realities. Firstly there is the historical fact of the Persian dominance of the gulf which gives Iranians a sense of entitlement to leadership in the region. This is as true for Khomeini and Khamanei as it was for the Shah and drove their foreign policy. Below their very different ideological faces this reality could always be found.

The second reality that confronted the ambitious rulers of Iran was that in order to assume such a position of leadership they had to find a way of appealing to the diverse groups of Arabs on the other side of the gulf, being naturally wary of the relatively unified northern Persians. The manifest reality of these different cultural traditions may be obvious but it is nevertheless an important factor.

The third ideological reality is the creation of the state of Israel, and the dispute as to how to provide a home for the Palestinian Arabs that became displaced in the process. While the Arabs have been to war several times with Israel, the final reality is that no contemporary Arab state seeks the dissolution of Israel—indeed, whatever their rhetoric, they would each view such a prospect with terror as the consequence of the resulting chaos could well see their own destruction. (I was prepared for these kind of paradoxes through a knowledge of the politics of the Republic of Ireland during the 'troubles': whatever the rhetoric of politicians in the southern twenty six counties, they would look on the prospect of a united Ireland with horror and dread—or at least the wise ones did.) It is not going to happen. Nevertheless the Arab leaders can’t ignore or abandon the Palestinians either: it has such emotional resonance. The Palestinians may be in a sense geopolitically irrelevant but the emotional resonance of the cause creates its own reality, just as the Israeli cause produces an emotional resonance in Europeans and North Americans that creates its own reality. The reality of the ideas of Israel and Palestine in Europeans, Americans and Arabs drives a great deal (in addition to the manifest geopolitical factors, such as the fact that much of the Christian-dominated industrial nation’s oil happens to be located in the ground under the predominantly Shiah-Muslim Arabs and Persians).

One such consequence was that, although the Shah’s Iran and Israel formed a de facto alliance against the Arabs, the Shah wanted to remain on friendly terms with the Arabs and so couldn’t formally recognise Israel and make the alliance public. Until the Palestinian issue has been resolved de jure recognition of Israel will be a slow and uncertain business in the Arab world (and the wider Islamic world).

As Parsi shows, the Shah’s fatal mistake was negotiating and signing the 1975 Algiers accord with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, so was dumping the Iraqi Kurds whom the Shah and the Israelis were using to keep Saddam’s Iraq tied down. In pursuit of his Arab policy the Shah upset the balance in the region, much to the chagrin of the Israelis, leading Saddam to pursue an aggressive military build up that menaced Iran and Israel alike. The consequence was the Iran-Iraq war which saw the Americans backing Saddam’s Iraq, and the Israelis siding with the Iranians, and indeed trying to patch things up between the Americans and Iranians in what we now know as the Iran-Contra scandal. The Israelis were one of the very few people to come to the aid of the Iranians in their dire hour of need when practically the rest of the world lined up behind Saddam: the USA and her allies, the Soviet Union and her allies and all the Arabs.

Here you could see the typical complexities of the triangular relationship that Parsi describes so poignantly. Although the Iranians were only too happy to repair the relationship with the US, the US remained highly ambivalent about doing business with the regime that had kidnapped their diplomats. While the Israelis wanted a more a more cordial relationship with Iran, the Iranians were shockingly ungrateful for the lifeline the Israelis were throwing them. It was at this point that Khomeini turned up the rhetoric against Israel to cover his tracks, providing us with the quotation that would almost define today’s relationship between Iran and Israel when Ahmadinejad repeated it shortly after his election in an obscure 2005 conference in Tehran.

The Imam [Khomeini] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.

[Interestingly Parsi offers a different translation on page one that states ‘This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history’ (my emphasis). Others have insisted that Ahmadinejad’s statement was declarative rather than imperative, and that this is backed up by the context of Ahmadinejad's speech (see Arash Norouzi); the difference is not minor.] The Israelis didn’t pay much attention to the rhetoric trusting that Khomeini would come round. If he did it was too late.

Khmomeini’s Arab policy involved binding together the Arabs and the Persians through Islam to drive out the influence of the Christian imperialists by exporting his revolution. While the expansionary Persian nationalism of the Shah made the Arabs wary, Khomeini exporting the revolution, based as it was on Shiah Islam, terrified the Sunni Arab rulers of the gulf, making them only too happy to underwrite Saddam’s great Persian adventure. Like the Shah before him, Khomeini’s Arab policy was a complete disaster, something that has long been recognised (quietly) in Tehran, making the mullahs into skilful pragmatists (though Khomeini’s willingness to deal with the Israelis illustrates that they were always quite pragmatic).

The Palestinian issue also interacted with the Israeli ideology with consequences for the Israel-Iran relationship and disastrous consequences for the Israelis. Likud founded as it was on revisionist Zionism, aiming to achieve a greater Israel that is simply incompatible with handing over the occupied territories to the Palestinians to form their own state, so when the Likud came to power after the signing of the Oslo accords they viewed the peace process and the Arab policy with extreme distaste.

Historically, when Israel was at war with the Arabs they form alliances with the likes of Turkey, the Kurds and Iran, known as the ‘periphery’ strategy. The prize was Iran. So it is that when the Israelis pursue their own Arab policy and try to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians they tend to cast off the Iranians and, as Khomeini had done to the Israelis, demonise the Iranians to gather support for their Arab policy, and this is just what the Israeli Labour Party did when they engaged in the peace process. The Iranians react predictably to this move to isolate them by supporting rejectionist Palestinian groups in order to break up the move to isolate them. In so doing they tend to appeal to the ‘Arab street’, rallying them against any moves by their client rulers to ‘sell out’ the Palestinians. Ahmadinejad is an expert at this.

So when the ‘hawkish’ Likud of Aerial Sharon came to power we see a return to security from the periphery the Labour rhetorical attacks on the Iranians being directed at the Palestinians instead.

The pivot that set the Iranians and the Israelis on their current collision course was the collapse of the Soviet Union and then Iraq. The US no longer needed Iran as a bulwark against the red menace to the North and Israel and Iran no longer needed each other to counter the Arabs. The imperative was now a partnership with the US, and the Israelis feared that they would get marginalised if the US restored its alliance with Iran, geopolitical logic pointing to Israeli interests being sacrificed by the US in the cause of a better relationship with the Islamic-majority oil-rich states (as happened after the first Persian Gulf War with the Madrid Conference).

To understand all this, and find out how the Iranians delivered Afghanistan politically and militarily to the Americans in 2001, and how Hezbollah won the 2006 Lebanon war with the aid of Iranian training (suggesting to me that some of the bluster and hubris we hear today concerning the effortless invincibility of armies with unopposed armour and close air support might be misplaced), and much else besides, read the book.

Treacherous Alliance tears away the smokescreens created by the rhetorical games, and it is easy to see how the lessons apply today. Whether it is the Neocons (or Ziocons) telling us that the mad mullahs are trying to get their hands on the doomsday machine so that they can fulfill their dark fantasies of destroying Israel (and themselves, and everyone else) or Ahmadinejad courting the Arab street with his violent rhetorical attacks on the colonial power’s sensibilities, the scales fell from my eyes.

[Also check out Harry Kreisler's interview with Parsi at Berkeley for the Conversation with History series and Trita Parsi's home page.]

Review

"This is a riveting book." —Paul Craig Roberts, PhD, syndicated columnist; former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; and former associate editor, Wall Street Journal

"The time is right for an unvarnished examination of the origins, history, and agenda of the neoconservative policy bloc in Washington and in Tel Aviv. The Transparent Cabal helps to provide one." —Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, USAF (ret.), PhD

"The timing of Dr. Sniegoski's book could not be better. The only aspect of U.S. Middle East policy not in controversy is that no one knows what to do; Sniegoski's book may help the debate break through this barrier." —Joseph Douglass Jr., PhD, author, America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical/Biological Warfare and Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America

"I have known Dr. Sniegoski for many years. He is a thorough researcher with a capacity for independent thought and the courage to advance and defend his analyses." —Wayne S. Cole, PhD, professor emeritus, University of Maryland

"Sniegoski leaves no stone unturned in exposing the Israeli-neocon alliance and its catastrophic consequences in the Middle East. Timely and important, his book should provoke a much-needed debate about who truly benefits from current US policies in the region." —Jonathan Cook, author, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations

"That the security of Israel has been central to the foreign-policy worldview of the neo-conservatives is one of the least discussed and most taboo aspects of the movement. Sniegolski has long been among the most dogged researchers who have tried to bring this to light." —Jim Lobe, Washington Bureau Chief, Inter Press Service (IPS).

"Sniegoski breaks new ground and pulls no punches in his analysis of the neocon-driven policies that brought about war with Iraq. He broadens the inquiry into many areas that desperately need sunshine and clarity." —Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer, partner in Cannistraro Associates, national security consultants, and contributing editor, The American Conservative

"Telling the truth in America today is more professionally risky than ever before, but happily Sniegoski couldn't care less. His rendition of recent American history is utterly absorbing." —Thomas Woods, Ph.D., New York Times bestselling author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

Product Description

Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war in Iraq, this book forcefully argues that the neocons' goal was not the spread of democracy, but the protection of Israel's interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement has always identified closely with the interests of Israel's Likudnik right wing, the discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote the flow of oil. Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives, including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will, but as ready after 9/11 for retaliation.

Paul Jay provides a typically incisive three-part interview with Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell 2002-5. In the first part Wilkerson explains that the 2003 strategic bargain offered by Iran was turned down by Cheney on the grounds that such negotiations would legitimise the Iranian regime. This is quite timely as I am in the middle of a discussion on the merits of this Neoconservative approach to foreign policy with Hey Skipper on the Obama's Realist Iran Policy article. As Wilkerson makes clear the issue is one of Neoconservative policy, not conservative policy, or Republican policy, or even Bush administration policy (the Bush State Department under Powell wasn't Neoconservative). If any episode illustrates the total folly of the Bush/McCain approach then this story does, Wilkerson underlining in the second and third interviews the horrible stupidity of it all and why he won't be voting for McCain in the election (but he is waiting for more details from Obama).

(The back story to the strategic bargain discussed in the interview is given in the Leverett & Mann Esquire interview. General Wesley Clark was told of a plan to transform the M.E with a blitzkrieg through seven countries in five years in a visit to the Pentagon in late 2001.)

Cheney blocked talks with Iran

Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson on how Cheney turned down talks with Iran (1/3) June 6, 2008

[The other two segments of this story don't seem to be available on YouTube: click though to view them on the RealNews web site.]

Iranian influence is a fact, negotiations a must

Powell's former Chief of Staff Wilkerson: War with Iran would reinforce strategic failure in Gulf (2/3) June 7, 2008

Obama, McCain and the world

Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson gets candid about the candidates (3/3) June 8, 2008

The differences between McCain and Obama are clear enough; Obama wants a bare-bones U.S. presence in Iraq, and McCain is willing to tolerate a much larger one; Obama believes that the presence of U.S. troops exacerbates the tension and gives Iraqis a crutch to delay political reconcilliation. McCain does not. One would think that those differences are a sufficient basis upon which to launch a political attack.

If I tell my parents that I really don't want to burn the family home down yet keep playing with matches, and proclaiming that I will keep on playing with them, what are my parent supposed to think? Of course I don't want to burn the house down, but obviously it isn't a very high priority, and anyway, whatever my professed intentions, my actions are going to lead to these consequences anyway.

For people that oppose the war, the occupation of Iraq is a neo-colonial operation and a continuation of the war and the fact that John McCain can't see this is of great significance.  It would be incompetent and irresponsible of any anti-war candidate to gloss over and ignore McCain's remarks and his continued defence of them; this issue should be attacked until it is properly understood, the kid of confused thinking it betrays being responsible for the current Iraq disaster.

It is really no wonder that Obama supporters take issue with Marc Ambinder's professed neutrality.

In an article over at the Daily Duck I opined that Barack Obama had most realistic policy on Iran, and Susan's husband demurred.

If you think Obama has a good grasp on the strategic issues surrounding Iran, we'd love to hear what that is. Talks without preconditions? Talks with preconditions? Different from the Bush Administration how, exactly? Everything I have heard from Obama on Iran leads me to the exact opposite conclusion, that he has no idea whatsoever what's going on there or what to do, but is just winging it, shifting his position moment by moment to dodge the incoming flack.

Fair enough. I have listened carefully to Obama on Iran with some trepidation, expecting the usual nonsense but I saw no major mistakes (I am thinking especially of the Russert interview). That is not to say that he really does understand the issues but I think it does suggest that his advisers understand the situation and that he has mastered the brief.

Note that while it is not my reason for supporting his policy, recent polling suggests that the public seems to be swinging behind Obama's readiness to deal with Iran diplomatically.

The notion that you set preconditions—ones that you know the other side won't accept—before the negotiations is just daft. The understanding of diplomacy that has generally taken hold, that it means that we talk nicely to people, to give them a chance to agree with us, before bombing the c**p out of them instead of doing it straight away, is, at least historically speaking, a strange notion of diplomacy, as is the idea that any policy that is less aggressive would be appeasement. I have no idea whether that crude characterization in any way reflects the understanding of the author of the above comment but it seems characterise the general idea of what diplomacy means nowadays (especially in the USA and UK) and of course reflects a Neoconservative view of the world. Reagan after all chose to negotiate with the evil empire.

The evidence suggests that the zero-sum ultra-aggressive approach that the neoconservatives have taken has empowered the Iranians, whether through the invasion of Iraq, the hard-line approach to the Iranian civil nuclear programme, the freezing out of Hamas after their 2006 election victory and triggering the subsequent civil war, or supporting and encouraging the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. All have lead to a decisive strengthening of the Iranian position in the region and a weaking of the US and Israeli position. Please note that this is not because of Iranian aggression but Neoconservative aggression that has allowed the Iranians to naturally benefit from these disastrous policies. (While the Iranian mischief-making with Hezbollah and Hamas is well known, the Israeli and American mischief making in Iran through support for various separatist and revolutionary groups is less well known.)

While McCain and his advisors have a more Neoconservative leaning, Obama and his advisers are taking a realist position. One of the sharpest and best commentators in this school is Trita Parsi, student of recanted-Neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama, and arch-realist Zbigniew Brzezinski. Trita Parsi an American-Iranian, the president of NIAC and has written a brilliant book, Treacherous Alliance, about the relationship between the USA, Israel and Iran, based on a mass of interviews with the people who have been in charge of Iranian and Israeli foreign policy going back to the Shah's time when all three countries were allies. Israel and Iran remained allies of sorts after the revolution and Israel tried to patch up the alliance, because it was in Iran's and Israel's strategic interest. During the Gulf War the Israelis were one of the few countries supplying the mullahs with spare parts. This was the time when Khomeini uttered the phrase that Israel would fade from the page of time that Ahmadinejad quoted shortly after his election and has been lovingly quoted by Neoconservatives ever since. If Khomeini was going exchange sorely needed oil for guns with the Jewish state then he needed a rhetorical smokescreen, and Ahmadinejad has had his own reasons for reheating these remarks. To understand why you will have to read the book which I recommend everyone does (I will write a review). I also recommend Harry Kreisler's interview with Parsi at UC Berkeley as part of the Conversations with History series.

The evidence points to a desire for the the Iranians to partner with the US in Iraq and the region (see, for example the Leverett & Mann interview and Juan Cole's latest dispatch and even Ahmadinejad's remarks shortly after the release of the NIE report on Iran in November). Khamanei agreed to a grand strategic bargain in 2003 (see the Leverett & Mann interview) and he would surely do the same again, but it will require the State Department working out is needed from the Iranians and what can be offered return—diplomacy 101 and something that seems to be a distant and hazy memory. This was the point that Gates made recently. There is much scope for cooperation with the US and Iranian governments backing the same administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Note that the Iranians (and of course Khamanei, the supreme leader) were happy in 2003 to countenance demilitarising Hizbollah, ending support for rejectionist palestinian groups, working to stabilize Iraq (which they have been doing anyway), putting in place guarantees for their nuclear programme and de facto recognition of Israel (see the Leverett & Mann interview). In return tyhe Iranians want a strategic partnership with the USA and an end to their civil nuclear programme being obstructed.

This is all on the public record but it forms no part of the standard narrative, just as it was well known that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no threat in 2002 but it was ignored because it didn't fit the regime change narrative settled on after the '91 gulf war. Also on the record is the assistance the Iranians provided in the invasion of Afghanistan (they facilitated the whole show, at a time when they were actively persuing détente—see, for example, Treacherous Alliance), yet this is ignored also, the public discourse seemingly content to operate in a near information vacuum and happy to follow the lead set by the governmetns. I recommend reading the writings of Scott Ritter, Trita Parsi, Juan Cole, Gareth Porter and especially Leverett & Mann on the subject, people with diverse poliical backgrounds and who have expended no little effort observing and investigating reality as it relates to relations between the US and Iran.

Barack Obama statements suggest that he (or his advisers) are adhering to the realist school's analysis and will pursue this line. We do not need more reality-challenged Neoconservative belligerence.

I have indeed taken an interest in Leo Strauss and read some of the critiques of his thinking. (Drury’s I thought was interesting–I wrote a little in the ‘neoconservative’ section of a previous article and here).

I think this whole area needs to be treated with great care and sensitivity. There is plenty of objective evidence that Jews on average are highly liberal, tolerant, educated and so on being much far more sceptical of the neocon nutty Iraq project than the population on average. As an ethnic group I find it particularly easy to think highly of them (and my ethics says that we should strive to think well of everyone).

There is peculiar post-Holocaust dynamic. I believe that Europeans have a horrible history of persecuting Jews and Europeans were collective collaborators in the mid-20th century attack on European Jewry, not just the ‘good Germans’ (and it may have been true of North America too, which is and was not so culturally separated from Europe).

Now we see a huge guilt complex which I think is unhealthy (see my recent post on modern guilt and why I think it is unhealthy). While the Holocaust traumatised the Jews I think it also traumatised gentiles, maybe equally.

The consequence is that unscupulous people, quite unconsciously I am sure, can exploit the the traumas of both parties and this I think is what we are seeing. Some of them may be Jews, but many aren’t, and in any case the unscrupulous ones are in such a tiny minority that it is a terrible mistake to spread the accusation beyond those responsible, and people should be very careful of doing this, especially given the well worn habit of blaming Jews once things go wrong. As I said, the objective evidence makes it really, really easy for me to dismiss any such thoughts.

Instead we must try and get beyond these guilty taboos and talk about the kind of issues you raised honestly.

That is why, after a hesitation, I decided to approve your comment. I think it is important that these things are discussed. The problem is that it is such a radioactive issue that people can easily get the wrong idea. I really much prefer to discuss these things openly, provided everyone is engaging in the discussion with the aim of reaching a better understanding. But at the same time I had to write a reply.

I hope you understand.

I am in a bit of a quandry. For the reasons I state above I think it is actually not a good idea to suppress such arguments but to unpack them and reach a rational conclusion. But I don't want the blog to become a platform for demonising any group. The issue remains such a raw wound that it is really tempting to just avoid it altogether (as is the standard practice), but I believe there are risks in everyone just letting it fester. For the moment I will let it stand and I remain open to well-motivated comments and advice but will close the discussion down if it starts generating more heat than light.

Only the other day I was explaining to my brother why, while I was and remain delighted with the huge protests, the moment of clarity and non-violent action, it did not absolve us of the vast and horrible crime against the Iraqi people dating from the first gulf war (with the illegal bombing of Iraqi civilian infrastructure to magnify the impact of sanctions with the express purpose of destabilising the regime and maybe punishing the Iraqi people—see Barton Gellman's '91 article). While I rejoice in the protests 9and they were important) they were still far too transient and the grat bulk of us, having had our moment of clarity and made our point have gone back to letting the war criminals get on with the job (however incompetently and short-sightedly executed) of securing the oil that is so critical for our fantastically materialistically-rich and spiritually impoverished lives.

Of a very, very few people of courage among us can we truly say they have responded to the enormity of the crime—people like Denis Halliday and Scott Ritter. It was entirely predictable that folks would pile into Monbiot for reminding us of this and it was equally predictable that Monbiot would have little difficulty in shredding their arguments and expose them all these years later as clinging to obvious media scams to ease people's consciences in the path to war, such as the Niger-uranium fiasco (that only took the IAEA about half an hour's work with Google to expose as a fraud when finally handed the documents—see Hersh's Chain of Command).

Yet I sense a tinge of defensiveness, a scent of apology in Monbiot's article of defence. There should be none. Some of us feel a little less soiled, and a little more human for the protests of Monbiot.

I am convinced that modern guilt is both useless and self-indulgent. Before the romantic era the concept may well have been associated with a clean and healthy attitude (see, for example, Park Honan's account of Jane and Henry Austen's attitude towards Henry's bankruptcy [pp. 376-8] for an excellent example of healthy Christian guilt in action). In Buddhism, four 'powers' need to be present to counteract the proliferating consequences of a negative action (making it a habit): the power of support (more about this below), the power of regret for having committed the action, the power of resolve not to commit it again and the power of the antidote, which we can think of as some action that will extend the meditation over time and give the practice a chance to transform our minds. Catholics recite on the rosary and Tibetan Buddhists do likewise. Clearly to bring the power of support, regret and resolve together for some fraction of a second, only to forget about it isn't going to do much. The powers must be as sincere and powerfully present as possible and this must be held for some time for the meditation to be effective. Finally it is helpful once the practice is finished to have some confidence that the practice has been effective.

The power of support really entails tuning into our enlightened or divine potential, a mental distancing from our temporal, contingent, imperfect state (in Christian terms, our fallen state; in Buddhist terms our unenlightened state). It is not that we are denying being human, but just stepping back from it temporarily so that we can confront and properly absorb what we have done or the pattern that has given rise it. Having confronted it and realised how counterproductive the action or behaviour is (and for the exercise to have any meaning this mustn't be fake--you really have to understand how the negative action will only bring trouble on you in the long run, not merely that it is wrong because of some social convention or because someone says it is so), and then generated a sincere resolve, and sustained it in meditation, can the practice be effective. (It is called a confession practice.)

Collectively we haven't even begun this process and risk a repetition of the crime. The skilful management of the mullahs and some guardian angels in the US national security structure have kept us from plunging further into the abyss. Until we properly confront and understand what we have done we remain at risk of repetition.

This is why Monbiot's protest, and Haw's, and all the others that refuse to acquiesce in this monstrous crime is important. As long as we remain in denial we risk spreading the poison. Only by facing up to it can we hope to move beyond it.