03/05/09 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Jim Loeb.
He's Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service.
That's IPS.org.
He keeps his own blog at IPS.org slash blog slash Jim Loeb.
And you can, of course, find him on the blog at Antiwar.com and at Antiwar.com slash Loeb, where you will find articles on more than a daily basis there most of the time.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Oh, okay.
It's a pleasure.
It's good to have you here.
I saw an interesting thing on – I forget if it was on TV or on the Internet.
I guess it was on the Washington Post website.
There was a video of Richard Perl's little conference at the National Interest something, I think, where he was denying that there's such a thing as neoconservatism.
And I saw you in the background there diligently taking notes.
And was that the most ridiculous site you've ever seen?
Or what exactly happened there anyway?
Oh, no.
I live in Washington.
Many ridiculous sites.
That's nothing, huh?
Well, I mean, it was something.
It ranks, but it's certainly one of many.
Well, and what exactly happened there?
Richard Perl came and sat down.
It looks like he had pretty much an all-star cast of people that he was having to defend himself against in terms of people who've written about the neoconservative movement and that sort of thing.
Did it seem like he even believed the case he was making?
Or was this just a big joke?
Or what happened there?
Well, Perl's very smooth and projects an aura of considerable self-confidence.
And, you know, his verbal skills are quite formidable.
I think the only time he was really kind of touched was when his old adversary in the Reagan administration, Richard Burt, took him on over Russia and Palestinians on the question of to what extent Perl really believed his own rhetoric that you can't negotiate with a country that's not democratic.
But, I mean, you know, he was generally polite.
It was a Washington affair where people are very gentle with each other, that there's a certain kind of etiquette, and that prevailed.
I mean, it wasn't the most meaningful event I've ever been to, and he was essentially recapitulating some of the arguments he made in an article that was published, I believe, in the January edition of the National Interest, which is the publication of the Nixon Center, which is where the lunch took place.
And basically his point was that all of the stories, as written by you, for example, that explain the importance of the neoconservative movement to the foreign policy agenda, especially of the first term of the George Bush Jr. presidency, is all just a bunch of make-believe, huh?
Well, I don't know.
I personally find it very difficult to follow his argumentation.
I mean, despite his polemical skills, I mean, he essentially denied there is or he declined to identify what was a neoconservative philosophy or worldview.
And, you know, the Washington Post had a good kind of article about that.
Dana Milbank was the author, and your listeners may want to look that up.
I think it was titled something about the Prince of Darkness doesn't recognize his own existence or something like that.
But, I mean, he essentially argued that, I mean, there were no such things as neoconservative, and even if there were, they didn't have as much influence as people generally think they did.
And he praised, you know, the decision to go to war in Iraq, and he didn't hide the fact that he supported the decision to go to war in Iraq, but he said that the second Bush term was a big disappointment, which undoubtedly it was for neoconservatives.
And again, I think it was a very, his argumentation was essentially sophistry, and I think everybody there understood it that way, although nobody really accused him of that because it's part of the Washington theme.
Yeah, that's interesting.
When you deal with, in dealing with the most violent of power, the most gentlemanly and put on their very best manners and never offend.
Well, I mean, there was also an exchange between him and Stefan Halper, who co-wrote a book called America Alone.
It was one of the first books that attacked the neoconservatives as a movement and blamed them for the more aggressive trajectory of US policy after 9-11.
And they had a fairly angry exchange, but the moderator ensured that it didn't go too far.
So that was the only time in which normal etiquette went, was suspended briefly.
Well, I think it was in Milbank's piece in The Post where he quotes Richard Perle from a few years back when being the kind of architect of the Project for a New American Century and the plans to invade Iraq was supposedly to his credit still, where he bragged that if Brent Scowcroft and James Baker had picked the national security staff instead of Dick Cheney, then we wouldn't have been so lucky to have this great war that we had.
Right.
I mean, again, you know, essentially the discussion wasn't very substantive, and it was, to me, it was sophistry and mildly entertaining at times, but not revealing in any sense the word.
I mean, he really, in some ways, he didn't say anything that he hadn't either said or written before.
Well, it's interesting to note just the complete unwillingness for any of these people to take responsibility for what they've done, if nothing else.
Yeah, generally.
But, you know, the human brain often works like that.
I mean, I don't think that's necessarily a neoconservative trait.
No, no, that's probably true.
All right, well, so I'm interested in some of the developments about Barack Obama's appointments, especially in regards to Middle East policy and which factions these people represent.
You're kind of the ultimate criminologist right there in the heart of Moscow, Jim, reporting on, you know, who all these people are and what their job title really means and all these kinds of things.
So I guess perhaps we could start with maybe you could help us understand the so-called school of foreign policy that Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrooke represent.
I guess they're the so-called realists, right?
Although Hillary tended to outflank Bush on a few issues on the right during the last few years, such as Iran policy and that kind of thing.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, they certainly...
Frankly, I see Secretary of State Clinton as an opportunist with liberal internationalist leanings.
And Holbrooke, I think, is a little bit...
I think he's very much a liberal internationalist.
I would say he's a liberal interventionist myself.
But he's intellectually quite strong and I think has a lot of realist grounding.
I mean, realists tend to respect him just because of his ability to put himself in the place of the person he has to deal with, which is in a sense a realist talent.
But generally, I would put them more, certainly Holbrooke, more in the liberal internationalist and even interventionist category.
Does that explain why, for example, Hillary would be more hawkish than Bush on Iran over the past few years?
Because is that how you define liberal internationalist or tend to be more interventionist than a realist?
Well, I think it depends kind of on the region you're talking about.
Because what I would say is, on the one hand, you have neoconservatives who are very unilateralist, very aggressive and tend to see the world in the similar terms as the Likud party in Israel and are very Israel-centered.
And then you have realists who try to assess what are the interests of the United States, what are the interests of other countries, and are adept at putting themselves in the shoes of people they're dealing with or opposite in order to assess how they see the world.
And they often see the world in terms of balance of power.
I mean, it's a long tradition of ways of looking at international politics.
And the main exponents of realism include, you know, like Brent Scowcroft and James Baker in the first George Bush one administration.
On the democratic side, it would be somebody like Zbigniew Brzezinski is more of a realist.
And then you have kind of liberal internationalist tradition, which, like neoconservatives, takes off somewhat from the end of World War II.
And I should explain that a little better.
The roots of liberal internationalism lie with Woodrow Wilson and the ideas he expounded at the end of World War I.
The idea of a world that has multilateral institutions where countries pursue their interests, their national interests, but within a multilateral framework and within a framework of international law.
And after World War II, I think, especially because FDR very much accepted this vision and actually established institutions that oversaw or have overseen this kind of world that liberal internationalists have aspired to, it was given a great deal of momentum by World War II itself and the Holocaust in particular.
And, you know, you get the genocide treaty out of World War II and a real determination, especially among liberals in this country, to create a rule of law where a genocide like that would be impossible.
Now, because of the nature of the Holocaust, because it targeted Jews, because Israel kind of rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust, many liberal internationalists feel a special attachment to Israel.
And I would say that there's a kind of split among liberal internationalists, between those who really consider Israel to be an exceptional case and who believe Israel should be defended much more vigorously than any other state, or that the rule of law we talk about, such as each country or each people to have the right to self-determination should be, under some special circumstances, should be suspended until there are better conditions.
And this would apply, like, to the Palestinian people.
In other words, among some liberal internationalists, Israel occupies a special place from which the normal rules of international conduct, one might suspend.
And then there are other liberal internationalists who believe the rule of law is the rule of law.
Israel occupied Arab territories in 1967.
Israel has an obligation to withdraw from those territories, and that, for example, Jewish settlements in Palestinian land are illegal, and they should not be permitted.
So, there's a kind of split among liberal internationalists.
Now, Clinton, particularly having represented the state of New York, definitely leans to the pro-Israel side of liberal internationalists.
And so, when it comes to the Middle East, you don't actually see liberal internationalists necessarily behaving like liberal internationalists.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, yeah, no, I see what you said.
Yeah, well, I guess the realists are defined more as being kind of the representatives of the oil companies, and what the neocons always criticized as the leaders of amoral foreign policy, whereas the neocons and the liberal internationalists put human rights at least at the front of their propaganda, if not at the front of their actual philosophy, and therefore tend to, at least in some cases, advocate for more intervention than the typical oil men might want to do.
Well, I think oil men have never been shy about intervention.
Oh, well, yeah, I don't mean to defend them, don't get me wrong.
But like the Iraq war, for example, Brent Scowcroft wrote, Don't Attack Saddam.
Before the war, in the Wall Street Journal, there was a big kind of split about what was going on there, right?
Yeah, because it didn't just have to do with oil companies.
There was a perception that the United States, in going to war with Iraq, could actually lose influence in the region.
That turned out to be the case.
Well, if you're a realist, the last thing you want to do is lose interest, influence, in an area of the world that you considered vital to your national interest.
So, I mean, he was doing a calculation based on what he knew about Iraq, and based on what he knew about the U.S. military, and what he felt was likely to happen, would likely be the reaction of the countries around Iraq, as well as of Iraqis, to a U.S. invasion.
And he made a calculation.
He said, We have more to lose than we have to gain.
In fact, he said, I don't see particularly what we have to gain if we invade Iraq.
I think that's where Scowcroft was essentially coming from.
Conservatives were interested, because for them the issue was security of Israel, and actually changing a world order that instead is based on multilateral institutions like the United Nations, is actually based on the projection of U.S. power.
And to make the world understand that the United States was prepared to go to war, would go to war, if what it regarded as its vital interest, such as access to oil, or other countries' access to oil, or especially potential rivals' access to oil, might be affected by what's going on.
Right.
Yeah, especially that last point.
Well, I guess in the run-up to the war, as the so-called, I guess you could call them centrists, if not moderates in the foreign policy realm, were skeptical, the Brent Scowcrofts of the world, it really was an alliance of the neoconservatives on the right, and those of the liberal internationalists who have that Israel exception to their principles, in terms of the rule of law, on the left side, as led by the New Republic and people like that, in order to push for this Iraq war from their side of the aisle.
That's true, but I would also add to that, there were some liberal internationalists, who were not necessarily pro-Israel, who also supported the war, because of their perception that there was a duty to protect, because I think of their good faith perception, that human rights had been grossly abused, and that Saddam retained the ability to essentially commit mass murder, and it would be a good precedent set to oust him on human rights grounds.
I don't think that was a particularly influential group of liberal internationalists, but they were present, and they were part of the coalition.
And these didn't necessarily, some of these same liberal internationalists, find Israel's occupation of the occupied territories to be repulsive and repellent.
Well, and of course there are a lot of liberal internationalists who oppose the war outright, with no exceptions, don't want to leave them out.
Okay, now let me ask you about Dennis Ross.
If you could please share with the listeners a little bit of the history of this man's role in American foreign policy, and which think tanks he hangs out at, and that kind of thing.
And then I'm under the impression that there's some controversy about him announcing his new job a bit early, and then if I read your blog right, it turns out he got a lower-sounding post than he had originally claimed for himself, but then again it turns out that he's going to have quite a bit of power and influence in this new administration in regards to Middle East policy, and for some reason this guy Dennis Ross is an important character, even though he's merely the deputy undersecretary of something people will never hear of.
No, actually he's a special advisor, and he has an office on the 7th floor of the State Department, as we found out late last week, which is an indication of power.
Where you sit is very important at the State Department.
I get like Yertle the Turtle.
Yeah, that's right.
Ross began his career in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer, as a Soviet expert, and he was very close during the first Bush administration, that is during the Gulf War.
He became a very senior advisor to James Baker, who's a realist, and most people see Ross as a realist, but also something of a highly opportunistic, because his importance didn't diminish when Bill Clinton became president, and he was essentially taken on by the Clinton administration as the chief negotiator for Arab-Israeli peace, specifically under the Oslo process between Israel and the Palestinians.
And he worked on that for seven years.
Ultimately, he failed, and there's a lot of questions about why he failed.
I mean, some people say that the Oslo process was doomed from the outset, because it was based on a series of mistaken assumptions.
Of course, the fact that one of its principal founders, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated, dealt a very, very serious blow to the process.
Some people have criticized the U.S. role, and particularly Ross's role, because in the negotiations, especially around Camp David in the summer of 2000, a number of his co-negotiators, including some of his U.S. colleagues, have suggested that he essentially acted as Israel's lawyer, rather than an honest broker between the two parties.
Well, this is a real important story, in that in the official history of this, the Israelis gave the entire West Bank everything that they could possibly give to Yasser Arafat, and he refused the deal he couldn't possibly refuse, and the poor Palestinians are the victims of their own leadership there.
So Ross is one of those who put out that kind of version of the story, and Bill Clinton quickly endorsed it.
So it's not entirely his, Ross's, responsibility.
His boss also put out that version of events.
But others who were involved in the process say that really wasn't the case.
My point is, though, that really is the official one that stuck, because that's what the average guy thinks happened there.
It's kind of the one that's endlessly repeated by people who identify more closely with Israel, in any event.
But it appears that Ehud Barak, who was then prime minister, really never was willing to write anything down, and the whole process was very frustrating to those who were involved, because Barak would offer and then never follow through with an offer.
I mean, it's not to say that Arafat himself didn't make mistakes, or was completely blameless in how it turned out.
But I think the important point, for purposes of your question, is that there was a pattern of Ross going to the Israelis and saying, well, what can you accept?
And kind of getting everything cleared by the Israelis before he'd go to the Palestinians.
And hence, there was this argument that the Americans, led by Ross at these negotiations, essentially acted as Israel's lawyer rather than as an honest broker between the two parties.
After the Clinton administration, he was unemployed, but he quickly associated himself, and has done so since, in various ways with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is abbreviated as YNEP.
And YNEP, you have to understand, is an organization that was spun off of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee back in the mid-80s.
And it's essentially a think tank for AIPAC.
And in that respect, it's really at the heart of what can be called the Israel lobby.
And he's taken a number of positions at YNEP, which kind of confirms the notion that he sees himself, or that he is acting, essentially, as Israel's lawyer.
And he since has chaired an organization, I can't think of the exact acronym it stands for, but JPPCP, something like that, which was established by the Jewish Agency, which is the agency that helped establish Israel, and that's essentially hosted in Israel.
I mean, it's hosted by Israel.
It really has become an arm of the Israeli government.
He chaired that organization beginning a few years ago when it was set up, which is designed to kind of represent the interests of diaspora Jews, and try to make them compatible with those of Israel, or try to assure that Israel, in making its own decisions, will take into consideration the interests of diaspora Jews.
Ross's mother, I believe, was Jewish.
I don't remember exactly what, but I think his Judaism has become increasingly important to him over a long career, although he's definitely secular.
For example, he has very little patience for Benjamin Netanyahu.
I mean, he's not a Likudist, but he does have this history of association with the Israel lobby, or what we call the Israel lobby.
Now, what happened there with him announcing he was going to get one job, and then he got the other?
Well, it wasn't he who announced it.
It was YNEP who announced it, and they didn't announce it to the public.
They announced it to their board of trustees, and the memo from the director of YNEP about Ross's appointment was leaked.
The memo to the board of trustees was leaked to Chris Nelson, who writes an insider newsletter in Washington, and it became known that an appointment that had not been officially announced was the done deal, and that Ross would be a kind of czar, based in the State Department on the seventh floor next to Hillary's office, over the Middle East, focusing especially on U.S. strategy and policy toward Iran.
He was going to be an ambassador at large and a special envoy or something.
They were saying some kind of title like that.
That was about two months ago that they had said this, and in fact, his appointment was finally, as special advisor, was announced about ten days or two weeks ago.
And now, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm just going from memory here, but wasn't his name on a report that was put out by a kind of so-called bipartisan study group of people outside of government with Chuck Robb and others that came out, former Senator Robb, that came out, what, early last fall or something like that?
Yeah.
In September, an organization called the Bipartisan Policy Center put out a report, which was a very detailed strategy about what you should do, what any new administration should do about Iran.
And Ross was a member of the task force that put the report together and endorsed the report.
But the report was actually written by two pretty, quite hardline neoconservatives, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute and Michael Makovsky, who had worked for Douglas Spice at the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon.
And to me, I called the report a roadmap to war, which I think it was, because the assumptions that it made at the outset about Iran and what was acceptable to the United States in terms of their nuclear program, I mean, essentially it made it inconceivable that the two countries could avoid confrontation.
Well, but are you saying that we shouldn't necessarily assume that that's going to kind of be Dennis Ross's position, he wasn't the real author of the thing?
Well, he put his name on it.
You know, I don't think he doesn't have the same politics as Rubin and Makovsky.
Again, he's not a Likudist, and they are.
I mean, if given a choice, they would have voted for Netanyahu, if not even somebody from the settler movement.
I mean, Ross is not sympathetic, I don't believe, to the settler movement.
But he is sympathetic to the idea of Israel's security, and he's, I think, very strong on that.
I just wonder if, you know, here's the thing that I get hung up on, is I'm sympathetic to the idea that there is such a person as Mohammed ElBaradeh, and that he keeps certifying that Iran has not diverted their nuclear material to any other purpose than right there in front of his face, enriching to a measly 3.6%.
And there are people who admit that that's the case, that Mohammed ElBaradeh exists, and then there are people who go around in this world pretending that there's just no such thing as a safeguards agreement or a nonproliferation treaty or any inspectors or anything like that.
And I'm very leery of these people in the Obama administration who sound just like the Bushes, who just kind of pretend that all evidence to the contrary doesn't exist at all.
I mean, I'm not an expert on nuclear programs and uranium enrichment.
I think what this bipartisan policy center said, their bottom line was that Iran should not be permitted to enrich uranium at all.
If it wants a nuclear program, it should have to rely on external sources, be they Russia or an international consortium, for the uranium they would need to run their nuclear plant.
And if Iran did not accept that, in other words, if Iran did not abandon its enrichment program altogether, then the United States should be prepared or should consider going to war or attacking Iran militarily.
Now, I think the consensus, if you pressed the people who are likely to occupy the key positions that will deal with this issue within the Clinton administration, probably including Dennis Ross, despite his signature on that report, they would say they prefer that Iran not enrich any uranium on its territory.
And I am sure that if and when they go into actual negotiations with Iran on this point, that will be their opening position.
But I think their consensus view is that that is not a realistic position anymore anyway.
And so their goal would be to reach a settlement or an agreement with Iran that Iran could enrich uranium at very, very low levels, subject to very intrusive international inspection.
And I think both the Obama administration and Iran, I can't speak for Iran, but I think the consensus view within the Obama administration will be that that is acceptable.
Really?
But at very, very low levels with very intrusive inspections.
That's almost the status quo.
I mean, they're cranking this stuff out 3.6 percent now.
I only know that from the newspapers.
I'm not a nuclear expert myself.
Right.
But they would probably call for some reduction in, for example, the number of centrifuges.
I'm not a nuclear expert.
But I don't know whether Iran would accept that.
Whether Israel would accept it, I think, is a really key question on this point.
And I'm not sure.
I mean, obviously, Israel much prefers the no enrichment option.
And I suspect that this is what's going to be debated once everybody is in place in the Obama administration, which is taking an awful long time to get people in place for something as important as this.
In the meantime, I think Israel and what we call the lobby will be agitating for very, very serious pressure on Iran.
And that's what Ross is trying to do.
His job, it's pretty clear to me, are to figure out ways to pressure Iran, both within the region and through the United Nations and through willing partners in the EU and through Russia by being willing to trade off the missile defense system to put maximum pressure on Iran to surrender its enrichment program.
And I think that's his main focus.
I think that's his main job.
But I think he's going to and I think he already is influencing the way Clinton, in any event, is perceiving the region.
And what's important here, I think, is that there's a kind of Cold War redux going on, where everything that goes on now in the Middle East is seen through a prism of Iran versus the United States.
And therefore, local movements like Hamas or Hezbollah in Lebanon are not seen as independent actors.
They're seen as proxies of Iran.
And if they gain, then we lose and that kind of thing.
So I think what Israel is trying to do, the current Israeli government, and certainly Netanyahu will do it if he becomes the next prime minister, and what the so-called Israel lobby here will be doing and has already started doing, and I think to some extent what Dennis Ross will be doing as the most senior kind of Israel lobby person in the foreign policy apparatus, in the administration, will be trying to depict what's going on in the Middle East in terms of this big chess game between Iran and the United States.
And I think that carries certain risks.
I mean, that carries very serious risks for the further loss of U.S. influence in the region.
Because I don't think it's going to get us anywhere very effectively.
And it will make Iran much less inclined to compromise.
What do you make of this new YNEP report?
I always thought it was Winep, but what do I know?
Well, no, it goes in by different – YNEP may be my pronunciation.
Oh, I'm just playing.
But anyway, I'm sure you saw this article.
I haven't seen the report itself yet, but there's the article in the Jerusalem Post, Israel seriously considering Iran military op.
Do you think there's any significance that they release this right as Hillary Clinton has just finished leaving Iran?
And apparently in the Times she's announcing she wants to work with them on fighting against the Afghans and that kind of thing.
Right.
Well, I mean, again, I think we're still in a real process of transition.
It's very difficult to get a sense of coherence from Clinton's trip to the region.
I mean, I found a lot of it kind of contradictory.
And I also found it quite disappointing in certain respects.
But I think because we're in a period of transition, all the people who want influence, all the organizations, foreign governments who want influence in Washington, are trying to affect the debate.
And releases of reports, which really began already last October and even before, I mean, are designed to affect the transition and to affect the jockeying in power.
So I'm not sure that they timed the release to Clinton being in the Middle East.
But this would be a time to put something out like that.
I mean, again, the idea is, if you're looking at it from Winup's point of view or Winup's, however you wish to pronounce it, from their point of view, they are trying to establish this Cold War type dichotomy of Iran versus the United States.
And by putting out a report that says, you know, Israel really could pull this off and they're really serious about it.
They see that as part of a coordinated strategy of intimidation, which really began like a year ago, of talking up the possibility that Israel may strike on its own.
And everybody knows that if Israel strikes on its own, Iran will blame the United States, because how else are Israeli fighter jets or bombers going to get to Iran, except by flying over Iraq and we control the skies over Iraq, so we need to be complicit in some way.
I mean, it's a way of framing the debate and of putting pressure on the United States to, you know, fish or cut bait or, you know, to get ready for this, because the Israelis are determined to do this, and there's no stopping them, so you have to live with the consequences.
I mean, everyone's jockeying in this period when the policies are not yet clear, but people are trying to influence how the policy debate will run its course.
When you say that, it seems like the administration is even as flexible as perhaps being willing to entertain the continued enrichment of uranium inside Iran, which is, of course, the Bush administration demanded complete capitulation on that issue before any talks could even start.
Well, that was just a matter of freezing, yeah, that's right.
Right.
Well, and also, I guess there's really, it seems to be a consensus that the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the various admirals in the area, I don't know about Petraeus, but it seems like there's, you know, at least above Petraeus, everybody seems to be agreed that they don't want to attack Iran, they don't want to have anything to do with it.
You know, I talked with Robert Dreyfuss the other day, and he said that that was his view, that just, there's no way.
Mullen and Blair and Clinton and Obama, they are not going to bomb Iran.
And at the same time, you have Israel, as you're saying, threatening that, well, you know, maybe we'll just do it ourselves without you.
And I asked Robert Dreyfuss if he thought that Israel would ever do that if they'd been explicitly told no by the American administration, and he said absolutely not, they just never would do that.
So do you think it's even a fair bet, I guess, that Obama has instructed Clinton or will soon instruct her to tell the Israelis that in fact the option of bombing Iran is off the table, and that, you know, from now on, when I read these scary stories in the Jerusalem Post, I won't have to worry anymore, or what?
Well, look, there's a review underway on Iran, as there is on every other major foreign policy crisis area which the administration faces.
The review, as I understand it, is being co-chaired by Ross and by Bill Burns, who's the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the State Department, and he's the person who was sent by the Bush administration to Geneva to sit down with the Iranians last summer to talk about nukes.
Now, Burns is clearly a realist.
Ross is, well, he's a realist too, but he has strong sympathies for Israel.
And in any event, I don't think we're going to get an answer to that question.
I mean, I don't think the administration, I'm sure the administration has not decided on this question yet.
The policy review will have to be completed before it is prepared to address a question as fraught as that one.
Officially, of course, attacking Iran is not off the table.
We know that from Obama's own election campaign.
And I think that's what everybody understands to be the case at the moment.
But, I mean, I think a lot depends on what the Iranians themselves do.
I mean, we're looking at a very, very fluid Middle East at the moment.
And there are many things that could happen that could have a huge impact on U.S. interests at this point.
And so I think it's difficult to say that the United States will be prepared to tell Israel this early, that under no circumstances will the United States attack Iran, and under no circumstances would it support an attack by Israel on Iran.
I think it's too early to say that.
I agree with Bob that I believe the military would oppose such an attack, because I think they believe that the greater threat, or the threat they really need to dispose of, lies in what they can now call AFPAC, in Holbrooke's domain, and that Iran does not present a compelling military threat to the United States, and they're also very concerned about how Iran could retaliate if anybody attacks Iran on U.S. forces, particularly in Iraq, also in Afghanistan.
Yeah, such an important point that even George Bush eventually got that one, the risk to the American soldiers in Iraq.
Yeah, so it's been reported by David Sanger.
Yeah, and I think that will continue to be a theme.
It's interesting to me that neoconservatives, who are now out of power, seem to be now kind of pounding on the theme.
I've seen about three articles or interviews in the last couple of weeks that Iraq is sufficiently stable that Iran could not really effectively retaliate against U.S. forces, or would not retaliate against U.S. forces in Iraq for fear of alienating the Iraqi government more.
Really?
Yeah, Elliot Abrams has argued this, and I think Michael Rubin has alluded to this, but it might have been somebody else that I read.
I wish I knew which coffee shop these guys got together at when they decided this.
And that's kind of, it's silly except for how dangerous it is, right?
Yeah.
Well, I don't even know how silly it is.
I mean, you know, they're making arguments, they're trying to frame the debate.
Oh, I'm just saying it's a silly argument, not that it's silly that they're making one.
Oh, I see, I see.
Well, I mean, again, I don't pretend to be an Iraq expert.
I don't know to what extent the country is pacified, and I mean, I just don't have those kinds of contacts, so I'd be reluctant to give my own assessment.
Yeah.
It just sounds like the kind of wishful thinking, like, oh, yeah, we're going to go in there with 5,000 guys and install Ahmed Chalabi, kind of wishful thinking by guys who don't really know anything about it, you know?
No, I certainly accept that.
But, yeah, I'm no expert either.
And I'm sorry, Jim, because we are, I've already kept you over time here, but if I can keep you just a couple seconds, I wanted to ask you about George Mitchell and how optimistic you are that there actually could be a move toward a Palestinian state.
It sort of seems like the clock is running out, that the West Bank is being so divided up at this point that the viability of ever putting a state there is in jeopardy.
And I guess some people are more optimistic than others.
I'd like to hear your view of George Mitchell and his ability to carry out such a thing, if possible.
I don't know.
I think it depends on how much backing he has from the president, and that's not clear yet, how much backing he has from Clinton.
Frankly, that's not clear yet.
He doesn't have an office yet in the State Department.
We don't know if he'll be on the seventh floor.
I mean, I personally have a lot of respect and confidence in Mitchell's fair-mindedness.
But based on the kind of thing that Clinton was saying during her trip this weekend, I have much less confidence in her fair-mindedness.
I think one of the big issues around Washington, just since Netanyahu was elected, is the two-state solution debt.
I mean, that's being debated at various think tanks around town quite a bit, because with Netanyahu, you're very, very unlikely to get any serious negotiations.
There is hope that the Arab League is kind of reunifying that Saudi Arabia and Syria, which has been at daggers drawn for three, four years now, are actually making a major effort at reconciliation.
And if they can accomplish that, there's a much stronger chance of the Arab League kind of sponsoring a government of national unity or national accord for the Palestinians, essentially forcing Hamas and Fatah to get back together in order to make a credible partner for whatever Israeli government emerges.
And the hope is that if they can create a credible coalition government, whereby Hamas goes back to its old position that Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, which is supported by the United States, can negotiate on behalf of all the Palestinians, provided that any final agreement is approved by a referendum of all Palestinians, that if they go back to that, that would be the opportunity for Mitchell and for the United States to exert serious pressure on Israel to negotiate seriously, because obviously any credible progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord would very much strengthen the U.S. position in the region and its credibility, particularly among the Arab states, where it has lost quite a lot.
So it's seen as desirable, but when you have Clinton going to the region and telling everybody that the Palestinian Authority is the only government that we recognize as legitimate, Mahmoud Abbas is the only person we recognize as legitimate, Hamas is a terrorist group, it essentially deserves what it got in the December-January military campaign by Israel, and so on and so forth.
That tends to make Arab unity more difficult to achieve for the Palestinians, and that kind of talk tends to divide the Arab League as well.
Her signaling this past week was in many ways inconsistent with what Mitchell's signaling was the week before, and again I think this is a matter of transition, that the United States really hasn't...all the people are not in place, and there are a lot of mixed signals going out, which are confusing people in the region, and in some cases I think demoralizing people in the region, who are increasingly saying that there's really no change in policy here, and so that there's no prospect of any kind of breakthrough on the Israeli-Palestinian front.
On the other hand, she did make clear during this trip that we are going to engage Syria, and Syria is potentially a very key player in the region, both with respect to Hezbollah, because Hezbollah depends on Syrian territory to get its weapons and other forms of supplies, and on Hamas, because it shelters basically the external leadership of Hamas.
Well, although even then, one of her munchkins came out directly after that, or a day after it or something, and announced that there's more evidence about the supposed nuclear facility that Israel bombed back in 2006, which didn't seem to really be anything new, just another accusation about the same thing.
Right, just as another munchkin, or maybe it was the same one, said in Sharm el-Sheikh to various reporters, that she didn't believe that engagement with Iran would work, because the Iranians wouldn't engage, which of course only strengthens the hardliners in Tehran.
So it's these kinds of things that adds up to a lack of coherence on the part of the administration at this point.
I think they're sending a lot of mixed signals, and that it's just confusing to people there in the region, who are already very cynical.
I mean, I think they were quite hopeful about Obama's election, but generally increasingly cynical about the United States and its ability to understand how they see the conflict, how those in the region see the conflict, particularly between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Well, I guess this is Jim Jones's job.
He's the National Security Advisor.
He's supposed to coordinate.
We can't have the Director of National Intelligence, and then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President all contradicting each other on Iran's nuclear program in the same week.
Everybody's got to get the same Karl Rove talking points sheet, or whatever it is, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that is his responsibility, and it's going to be very challenging, especially with all these special envoys or special advisors in the picture, because it doesn't just involve coordinating a handful of bureaucracies.
It involves coordinating people who consider themselves independent actors, like Richard Holbrooke, or George Mitchell, or even Dennis Ross.
On the personnel front, I think we're facing a very, very serious test in the appointment of Chas Freeman as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for putting out National Intelligence Estimates.
I don't know whether you've been following this controversy, but I think this is the first big test of the influence of the so-called Israel lobby in the administration.
Yeah, that actually was on my list to ask you about, and the most notable part of it to me is that Steve Rosen, the indicted former Director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, is blogging about it and is taking one of the harshest lines against this appointment.
This must be really controversial.
What's up with this guy, Chas Freeman?
There must be something really wrong with him if Steve Rosen doesn't like him.
Well, Rosen kind of started the ball rolling, because he was the first on the right to say, Chas Freeman is a dangerous appointment to those who care about Israel.
I personally don't agree, because knowing Chas Freeman, I think that Freeman strongly believes that Israel and the Bush administration's virtually unconditional support for Israel has actually harmed Israel's long-term interests, and he's made that argument a number of times.
Freeman is quite an extraordinary person.
He was a career Foreign Service officer who first kind of came to public attention because he was Nixon's main interpreter when Nixon went to China in 1972.
He was that fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
He then later was the senior Foreign Service officer at our embassy in China, but he has his advanced degrees in Latin American studies.
He served in Africa.
He was the key person in negotiating independence for Namibia, which was a very complicated negotiation involving Angola, South Africa, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.
He was ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, and he was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, which is essentially their State Department.
He was kind of the head of the State Department of the Pentagon in the first years of the Clinton administration.
I mean, he's held an amazing array of positions and is highly, highly decorated as a Foreign Service officer, and I've heard him speak on any number of subjects, and he's a very witty, a very literate person with just an extraordinary intellect, and like any great realist, an extraordinary capacity to put himself in the shoes of others with whom he is dealing.
He headed something called the Middle East Policy Council until quite recently, which has received money from the Saudi royal family or members of the Saudi royal family.
It's a kind of think tank forum that sponsors lectures and public presentations and publications that deal with Middle East affairs, and he's come under attack for accepting Saudi money in support of the council.
He's also on, he has advised China's biggest, he's on the Board of Advisors or has been on the Board of Advisors of China's biggest oil company.
He has quite long-standing ties to senior Chinese leaders, and his opposition, the opposition that's grown up against this appointment, was able to find an email he sent in which he appeared to justify, or actually to criticize the Chinese leadership's way they handled the democracy movement in China in 1989 that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June of 89.
He said that they should have tried in this email that they got hold of, that they should have tried to nip it in the bud before it came to that quotation, which has brought him criticism from the human rights community.
He's essentially being attacked for his ties to the Saudis, but I think the underlying reason for the attacks, which have become increasingly strong, since his appointment was formally announced a week ago, is that he's very, very critical of right-wing Israeli government, and he's very critical of those in the United States, including the Israel lobby, who he believes have jeopardized both U.S. national interests and long-term Israeli interests by kind of following a particularly aggressive policy, be it in Lebanon in 2006 or just now in Gaza, and he's been extremely outspoken.
He's very, very blunt when he speaks publicly or when he writes, and I think it's deeply alarming to the Israel lobby in particular that a man who is so outspoken and who's also so highly regarded within the national security bureaucracy would be the person in charge of preparing national intelligence estimates.
You remember that in December 2007, the national intelligence estimate came out that said that Iran had abandoned one key component of its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that stopped the neocons, in any way, dead in their tracks at that time when they were trying to create, to rally public opinion and rally Bush in particular, behind the possibility of an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities before Bush left office.
And when that NIE came out, it just took all their momentum that they were trying to build, it just completely dissipated.
Yeah, so they would prefer to have someone in there who's going to write a NIE more along the lines of what they got from Paul Pillar and those guys back in 2002, saying that Iraq had all these weapons of mass destruction.
Right.
Well, Pillar was responsible for the December 2006-2007 NIE on Iran.
Oh, I thought that was Fingar, Thomas Fingar.
Oh, you're right.
I'm sorry.
It's my mistake.
Oh, God, I feel so embarrassed.
You're absolutely right.
Yes, NIEs can be obviously very, very influential, and the idea that this guy who is so independent and has such strong views about the nature of national interest and is such a realist, that he would be the key person to decide the fate of these NIEs, I think is very worrisome to the lobby.
And in the last few days, they've gathered strong support from people in Congress, including the minority leader, John Boehner of the House, and the minority whip, Eric Cantor, for trying to stop this appointment or to have it withdrawn.
And these Republicans are being joined by liberal Democrats who are closely tied to the Israel lobby, such as Shelly Berkley.
Well, and you know, it's really a shame because, as you said, his view, it's not really that controversial of a view.
You say he's very outspoken and maybe he's made some enemies by being gruff or something at some point, this guy.
But the idea that the Bush-slash-Likud policy of the last couple of presidential terms, at least, has been detrimental to American and Israeli security for the long term, that's not controversial even in Washington, D.C. anymore, is it?
I think it is.
I mean, I think among the national security elite, it's not controversial.
But in Washington, where you have to take account of political power and the fact that people vote and people raise money for elections and so on like that, it's still not a majority view.
I mean, I think the idea that Israel has been harmed by the Bush administration's policies has not been accepted, particularly by those who are close to the Israel lobby, to AIPAC and so on.
That's certainly not what they put out.
Well, it looks like we're certainly in for some interesting times here.
No, the fate of his appointment, I think, will be a very interesting test, well, a very important test as to where the administration will be going.
Because if they back down and they withdraw the appointment or persuade Freeman to withdraw, then I don't know.
I mean, that'll be a very, very significant victory for the lobby and a very significant defeat for those who think that the lobby has been detrimental.
Well, tell me about the more liberal side of the Israel lobby, J Street and others.
Have they come to this guy's defense at all?
Or has this argument basically been ceded to the AIPACs of the world?
When I talk about the Israel lobby, I actually don't consider Zionist groups like J Street or Israel Policy Forum or Americans for Peace Now as kind of part of the Israel lobby, because they tend to apply universalist thinking.
They're a Zionist group, but they believe that Israel should be held to the same standards of behavior as all other countries.
And that's, I think, a distinction from the generally right-wing leadership of, say, AIPAC or WNAP or YNAP or other groups, certainly the Zionist Organization of America or the American Jewish Committee or the conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations.
Well, I know that I learned the lesson from the last administration that it really does matter who the deputy secretary of defense for policy is.
And that's the kind of thing that, you know, as a younger man, I would have had no idea or no idea that I needed to know.
And it's really good that there are people like you, and particularly you, Jim, out there keeping track of all the intricate details of these fights, because I think the average American won't have too much chance, really, to hear about some foreign policy circle infighting over who the chairman of the National Intelligence Council is going to be and why it's important to them.
If they do hear about stuff like that, it's going to be from you, and so thanks for that.
Even if I get Paul Pilar confused with Thomas Singer.
Oh, well.
Yeah, no, but to answer your question, I don't think Jay Street has spoken out.
I don't think Americans for Peace Now has said anything, but M.J.
Rosenberg from the Israel Policy Forum has strongly denounced this attack on Freeman.
It's been quoted fairly widely.
It really is amazing to see this guy, Steve Rosen, who's under indictment for passing secrets from the Pentagon on to the Israeli government, right now awaiting trial.
One of his co-conspirators already sentenced to a dozen years in prison, being kind of the ringleader in this sort of thing.
Shouldn't he be laying low right now?
Has anybody talked to his lawyer about this?
Well, he doesn't think so, and he's outspoken himself.
Well, maybe we'll just have to do a two-hour show all about Steve Rosen every time he mentions his own name.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hey, listen, I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Jim.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Everybody, that's Jim Loeb.
He's Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.org.
His blog is loeblog.com.
And, of course, you can find so much of what he writes, maybe all of it, at antiwar.com, either on the blog or at his own archive at antiwar.com slash loeb.