The Strategy Washington Is Pursuing in the Middle East Is the Only Strategy Worth Pursuing
by Michael Doran
The Strategy Washington Is Pursuing in the Middle East Is the Only Strategy Worth Pursuing
America needs to back up its allies (Israel, Saudi Arabia, and potentially Turkey), and isolate its adversaries (Iran, Russia, China, Islamic State). Everything else is secondary.
President Trump’s surprise December 19 announcement of an immediate withdrawal of American forces from Syria hit some Israelis like a sucker punch. “With this withdrawal, the United States abandons Syria and leaves Israel alone,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While conceding that “the effect of the U.S. decision is primarily psychological and diplomatic,” Amidror continued: “In those arenas, this is a very significant decision.” Subsequent reports to the effect that the drawdown of forces will be slower than originally announced and coordinated with America’s allies have softened the blow, but the shock still remains.
In retrospect, the announcement shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, Trump has never hidden his conviction that extended military operations in the Middle East are futile. He campaigned on the theme in 2016 and then returned to it last April. The United States, he declared then, had “spent $7 trillion in the Middle East in the last seven years. We get nothing out of it, nothing.” To this general observation, he added a specific promise: “We’ll be coming out of Syria . . . very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”
In the intervening months, however, the president’s top advisers seemed to suggest that the withdrawal would never happen. “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” said National Security Adviser John Bolton last September. Given Bolton’s proximity to the president, the promise sounded authoritative.
The shock in Israel, then, was understandable, and it quickly gave way to related fears. Trump’s Syria decision is clearly part of a larger effort that includes patching up American relations with Turkey, a goal that leaves Israelis decidedly cold. For over a decade, Jerusalem’s relations with Turkey have been abysmal, with no prospect of improvement on the horizon. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, who aligns with the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world, would appear to have made hostility to Israel an enduring part of his political persona. To make matters worse, the American withdrawal will likely entail a downgrading of U.S. relations with the Syrian Kurdish forces that have aided the United States in the fight against Islamic State.
For reasons both romantic (Kurds as a stateless people struggling to establish a homeland) and strategic (Kurdish aspirations seen as blocking the regional ambitions of Ankara) Israel is sympathetic to Kurdish nationalism. Thus, shortly after Trump’s announcement, Netanyahu made a point of publicly labeling Erdogan as an “anti-Semitic dictator” who “has an obsession with Israel because he knows what a moral army is and what a real democracy is, in contrast with a military that massacres the Kurds.”
But the greatest source of Israel’s fears is not Turkey; that distinction is held by Iran. The American presence in Syria had formed the primary obstacle in the way of Iran’s completing a land bridge and an unbroken corridor of political influence from landlocked Tehran to Beirut on the Mediterranean shore. With only 2,000 soldiers, the United States was controlling, indirectly, about a third of the entire country, yet this small force was still large enough to overwhelm any potential combination of adversaries, as it proved last February when it annihilated some 200 Russian mercenaries in a matter of hours, with no losses on the American side.
No question, the American withdrawal will indeed create a vacuum in the region that Iran—and behind Iran, Russia—will inevitably seek to fill, thereby escalating clashes on the ground with Israel. Indeed, within days of Trump’s decision, Israel launched a premonitory airstrike deep into Syrian territory on Iranian targets, causing serious ripple effects in relations between Jerusalem and Moscow.
As Israel squares off against this Russian–Iranian axis, what kind of support will it receive from the White House? Not much, if American congressmen and senators, and major pundits in the media, know what they’re talking about. The prevailing view among them is not just that Israel feels sucker-punched; it is that Israel has indeed been sucker-punched.
The truth is less alarming, however.
I. Trump/Obama
No sooner had Trump announced the withdrawal than two interlocking themes immediately moved to the fore of the national discussion. The first stressed that Trump is a dangerously mercurial leader and utterly resistant to sound advice from wizened aides. The resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, an event apparently sparked by the Syria decision, helped to bolster the idea that the Syria withdrawal was a decision worthy of King George III, “the mad king who lost America.”
The second theme focused on the difficulties the decision will impose on allies like Israel—difficulties said to be almost entirely of Trump’s making but to which he seems completely indifferent. Mattis’s letter of resignation helped feed this motif in pointing out that the defense secretary’s own “views on treating allies with respect” were at odds with the president’s.
In some circles, these motifs led immediately to invidious comparisons between Trump and Barack Obama. Yes, the argument went, Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem; and yes, Nikki Haley, his first ambassador to the United Nations, was a vast improvement over her predecessor. But such gestures of support to Israel are symbolic only, and symbolism, however welcome, won’t keep the wolf from the door. When it comes to the hard security of Israel, the analysis continued, Trump is unreliable, far more so than his predecessor, who may have reached out in friendship to Iran, but did so in a systematic and fully thought-out fashion.
The Economist aptly summarized this prevailing view of the withdrawal decision in a few arresting lines. Trump’s decision-making, the magazine editorialized, reflected the defects of his instinct-driven character. In contrast to Obama, who had conducted his Middle East policy with sobriety and deliberateness, Trump had impulsively “lobbed missiles at Syria and menaced Iran.” But, the editors speculated, “as he swings between threatening to crush foes and getting out entirely, the latter instinct will dominate.” Therefore, when all is said and done, he “will mostly prove even more detached than Obama,” but in a way bound to provoke “unpredictability, ineffectiveness, and prolonged chaos.”
This leads us to an important substantive point that has been largely overlooked in the high dudgeon directed at the president’s modus operandi. The essential choice, the Economist would have us believe, is between the orderly, reasonable withdrawal from the Middle East offered by Barack Obama and the chaotic, blustery one currently being orchestrated by Trump. The end result, however, is the same: withdrawal from the Middle East and the end of American “hegemony” there.
Give the Economist its due. Trump’s Syria decision does place significant risks before America’s allies. The decision, furthermore, forces us to contemplate competing approaches to withdrawing the United States from the Middle East. To this we might add that choosing between them would be the most consequential decision that Americans would make regarding the Middle East in the coming decade. So the stakes could not be higher.
The Economist gets the big story about Syria completely wrong—as do most of the prestige media.
But the Economist also gets the big story completely wrong—as do most of the prestige media. The choice that actually faces us, the one muddled by all the handwringing over the president’s personal character and by the crocodile tears being shed, momentarily, for Israel, is of a different order entirely.
It is a choice between, on the one hand, a withdrawal of American power based on the conviction not just that the situation has become hopeless but that over the decades the U.S. choice of allies, including Israel, has made it worse—the Obama position—and, on the other hand, a withdrawal of direct American military engagement while ensuring that the United States will continue reliably to support those same historic allies and others drawn to its and their side, thereby enhancing the possibility of a stabilized Middle East in the next decade.
II. The Palin Doctrine
To dig out the truth about Trump’s Syria decision requires us to spool back five years and refresh our memories of what might be called “the Palin doctrine.” In a political speech in 2013, Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and former Republican vice-presidential candidate, offered her own preferred solution to problems like the then-raging Syrian civil war: “let Allah sort it out.” This idea has exercised far greater influence on American policy than most observers have realized.
In 2013, Sarah Palin offered her own solution to problems like the then-raging Syrian civil war: “let Allah sort it out.” This idea has exercised far greater influence on American policy than most observers have realized.
Around the time that Palin announced her solution, Barack Obama began making his own case for non-intervention in the Syrian civil war. If Palin’s justification carried about it more than a whiff of anti-Muslim sentiment, Obama exuded empathy for the dying Syrians and agonized elaborately over the trade-offs he was nevertheless compelled to make between the need to honor our “highest ideals and sense of common humanity” and the need to “advance our security.” As president, Obama reminded us, he was “more mindful” than most people of “our limitations.” And so, though it pained him greatly, he, too, would favor leaving Syria’s fate to Providence.
Indeed, he’d already done so. Recall that in August 2012, Obama had drawn his famous “red line,” threatening severe retaliation if the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad were to use chemical weapons. A year later, following a particularly heinous chemical attack, the president came under political pressure to make good on his threat. But even as he readied a military response, he was working in secret to erase his red line. In this he was helped by, in effect, the Palin doctrine, now embodied in the persons of the Tea Party Republicans on Capitol Hill. Obama knew that, if these isolationist types were asked to authorize an attack on Syria, they would refuse. And so, making as if the Constitution gave him no choice but to seek congressional approval for a strike, and fully expecting to be turned down, he did ask them.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s national security adviser for strategic communications, later revealed how Obama explained this move to his aides. “The thing is,” Rhodes quotes the president as saying, “if we lose this vote [in Congress], it will drive a stake through the heart of [interventionist] neoconservatism—everyone will see they have no votes.” Thus did Obama shrewdly turn Palin’s doctrine into something close to a bipartisan consensus.
Sure enough, in the 2016 elections, the two candidates on the left and the right who whipped up the most enthusiastic support were Donald Trump and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Both campaigned on a non-interventionist platform. Like Obama before him, Trump had concluded that his personal certainty about the futility of military deployments in the Middle East was backed by a powerful electoral imperative. Today, there is no reason to imagine that other major presidential candidates in 2020 will arrive at a different conclusion. Whether delivered in the abrasive style of Sarah Palin or the silky tones of Barack Obama, the Palin doctrine is now the baseline American position.
It is not, however, the baseline position of the pundit class.
III. A Coherent Vision
Two groups produce much of the most significant analysis about the Middle East in the American media: neoconservatives on the right, former Obama officials on the left. Both groups are hostile to Trump, convinced that he is a danger to the country and that his policies are woefully misguided. The second group is politically more influential than the first.
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The neoconservatives, rejecting the notion that non-interventionism is now an inescapable reality, continue to push muscular answers as if they enjoyed mainstream support. Here, for example, is the columnist Bret Stephens inveighing against the president in the New York Times: “He has done nothing to prevent Iran from continuing to arm Hizballah. He shows no regard for the Kurds. His fatuous response to Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi is that we’re getting a lot of money from the Saudis.”
The neoconservatives, rejecting the notion that non-interventionism is now inescapable, continue to push muscular answers as if they enjoyed mainstream support.
Unfortunately, these three short sentences, if translated into policy, would simultaneously put Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran into a straitjacket, nullifying the strategic fact that they are not at all the same—the first being a once and possibly future ally, the second a longstanding and current ally, and only the third an enemy. Whatever this amounts to, it is not foreign policy.
As for the second foreign-policy group, it functions both as a brain trust of the moderately progressive wing of the Democratic party and as a whisperer for the prestige liberal media. Its members, too, seek to tarnish Trump personally, but the alternative they favor for the Middle East is Obama’s policy of engaging America’s enemies, especially Iran. Thus, last spring, as Trump moved to withdraw from Obama’s nuclear deal, former Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity designed to thwart the president’s initiative—activity that, the Boston Globe stipulated in its report, was, to say the least, highly “unusual” for a private citizen.
Nor was Kerry operating alone. As the Globe noted, he is the point man of Diplomacy Works, an organization of former Obama officials aiming to influence public opinion through the media. The group produces a regular newsletter that, according to the Globe, it distributes to a network of “nearly 4,000 policy makers and foreign-policy experts,” and as of last year it claimed responsibility for “100 news articles, 34 television and radio hits, and 37 opinion pieces,” all touting the 2015 Iran deal “as a major factor for stability in the Middle East and for global nuclear non-proliferation.”
In two years’ time, Diplomacy Works and related groups hope, Trump will be voted out of office and a new president can return American foreign policy to the grooves that Obama defined. And so, when the Economist both likens and contrasts Trump’s approach to Obama’s, it is not simply making an academic comparison. To the degree that Obama-style courting of America’s enemies is the shadow foreign policy of “centrist” Democrats, the magazine is describing today’s electoral options—sophisticated and deeply considered versus frivolously whimsical and frighteningly dangerous—as it sees them.
It would no doubt be too much to expect a news outlet to undertake a study of the actual (as opposed to the alleged) logic of the current administration’s position and its goals, and how the Syria withdrawal serves them. And yet that decision is in fact part of a coherent vision, neither interventionist in the neoconservative sense nor isolationist in the Palin/Obama sense, of a new American order in the Middle East.
IV. Three Obstacles, Three Friends
The United States may lately have grown deeply skeptical of military action, but it retains a vital interest in building a stable order in the Middle East, if for no other reason than to keep the region’s worst pathologies at bay. In the Trump administration’s conception, three key obstacles stand in the way of an order amenable to American interests and to the interests of peace.
The first is what might be called jihadistans, zones of chaos defined by failed states like Syria and Yemen. Offering no easy or immediate path to a better future, the jihadistans are problems that must nevertheless be somehow managed. The second is the problem posed by Sunni terror groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State, which take root and prosper in the jihadistans. The third is the rise of Iran, which, abetted by Russia, is training and equipping Shiite militias based on the Hizballah model; these it deploys to project its power into at least four different Arab countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
The administration seeks to contain both the Sunni terror groups and Iran simultaneously. If the deployment of American forces on the ground is the tool of last resort, and therefore to be avoided if at all possible, then the next best option—indeed, the only sensible option—is to work through allies.
When, however, one surveys America’s traditional friends in the Middle East, very few have the ability to project power beyond their borders. Only three truly stand out in that regard: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Notably, the Obama administration, in pursuing its Iran policy, fell out with all three.
Only three of America’s friends in the Middle East can project power. The Obama administration, in pursuing its Iran policy, fell out with all three.
In each case, Obama was careful to present the tensions with those allies that his policy had itself created as the result of conflicts over values—a construal that implicitly put his administration on the side of the angels. Saudi Arabia was a Wahhabi state with a democracy deficit. Turkey was led by Erdogan, an authoritarian who was turning a blind eye to al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Syria. Both countries were trying to drag the United States into a destructive Sunni-Shiite conflict—as if their policies derived from base sectarian motives rather than (as was the case) a shared fear of the Iranian–Russian alliance. Somehow, the White Houses’s vaunted commitment to humanitarian values never induced it to rethink its own shameless outreach to the regime in Tehran, more brutal and more sectarian than its Sunni rivals.
By contrast, from the moment Trump took office it was obvious that he planned to work with, and through, Israel and Saudi Arabia. His plans for Turkey have been less apparent, so let’s start there.
Rebuilding the American alliance with Ankara is a formidable task. The source of the difficulty resides primarily in the deal brokered by the Obama administration with the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish Forces that the United States turned into its primary partner in defeating IS.
Critics of Trump’s Syria withdrawal routinely make two points. First, the actual cost of maintaining the 2,000 Americans in Syria was negligible. Second, that being the case, the abandonment of the Kurds entailed by the withdrawal reveals the administration to be just another in the long line of American governments that could never be trusted to keep their word.
Both points ignore the simple fact that, by developing the relationship with the YPG in the first place, Obama had himself betrayed a treaty ally. And it was a costly betrayal. The YPG is the Syrian wing of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey that any Turkish president, not just Erdogan, would regard as a mortal enemy. By mid-century, Kurds are estimated to make up over one-third of Turkey’s population. The Kurdish question therefore is the most significant in the country’s domestic politics and in its foreign policy. The issue is, in a word, existential for the Turkish Republic.
By aligning with the YPG, the United States drove Turkey into the arms of Russia, and sowed the seeds of a multiyear Kurdish–Turkish war. Out of a misguided commitment to these Kurdish “allies,” any American forces still in Syria would therefore be obligated to remain ensconced there for many years to come. Trump’s Syria withdrawal cut the Gordian knot that Obama’s ill-considered policy had created. Whether it can help lead to more positive outcomes between Washington and Ankara remains to be seen.
Next, Israel. Trump’s conception of the Middle East is hardly a dream world. To an ally like Israel, it presents, to put it mildly, very serious challenges—one of which stands out: if the Israelis have any hope of preventing Syria from becoming a permanent Iranian military base, they must act alone. Only independent military action can solve their problem. This is indeed a daunting prospect, especially when one considers that behind Iran stands Russia, making the risk of an Israeli–Russian war a very real possibility.
But it is a mistake to interpret Israel’s loneliness as a direct result of Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. The withdrawal focuses the mind on an unpleasant reality, one that the withdrawal did not create. After all, the 2,000 American troops had no legal mandate to engage Iranian troops unless directly threatened by them (as they were last February). Significant Democratic voices in Congress, joined by a few Republicans, were already loudly underscoring this point and demanding a timely withdrawal, a demand that grew even sharper teeth after November’s mid-term elections. Even if Trump had been personally more inclined to keep the troops in place, he likely would have come under pressure to pull them out, especially if Turkish operations against the Syrian Kurds put the Americans in harm’s way.
Israel’s fate is a lonely one, but Israel is very powerful militarily, possibly more powerful than at any time in its history, and it is not at all isolated. In the administration’s conception, the United States fervently desires to see Israel succeed in curtailing Iranian power. Trump and his foreign-policy advisers, led by Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, will likely be eager to provide Israel with any weapons and intelligence it may lack to do the job. They will also continue to coordinate closely with it politically, and ensure that the United States serves as a deterrent to Russian military action.
In their sudden solicitude for Israel, the administration’s critics, for their part, have drawn a false distinction between the “symbolic” steps that Trump has taken in favor of the Jewish state, like moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and the supposedly “real” support that the 2,000 troops were providing and that would now be lost. In international affairs, however, “symbolic” support with tangible diplomatic, political, and historical consequences, like moving the embassy, is real support—as few know better than Israel’s leaders.
As against the charge that Trump has left Israel in the lurch, Israel’s government remembers that the architect of the Iranian land bridge that now threatens war on Israel’s northern border was none other than Barack Obama. Nor have Netanyahu and his aides forgotten such key aspects of the Obama administration’s approach as, to list just the highlights: falsely accusing them of spying on America; leaking information about sensitive Israeli military operations in Syria; coaching the press on Israel’s cooperation with Azerbaijan against Iran, and how it was allegedly undermining American security; duplicitously concealing the Iran negotiations from them; tacitly condoning hostile action against Israel in the UN Security Council; ceaselessly hectoring them about Israel’s supposed recalcitrance in negotiations with the Palestinians; berating them in the media for insufficient concern regarding civilian deaths in Gaza; lecturing them endlessly on West Bank settlements; funneling financial assistance to their opponents during the Israeli election while calling Netanyahu himself “a chickenshit.”
About six months into the Trump presidency, I asked a senior Israeli official to describe the difference between working with the Trump and the Obama administrations. “The Obama administration treated us to a non-stop diet of hostility and contempt,” he answered. “With the Trump administration, we are experiencing chaotic friendship.” He paused to clarify: “chaotic friendship is better.”
Obama and the former officials in his “echo chamber” (to use Ben Rhodes’s impudent term for the network of politicians, pundits, reporters, and broadcasters who faithfully parroted his White House narrative of Obama’s Iran policy) have insinuated that their adversarial attitude toward Israel arose out of one of those tragic clashes of values so dear to the former president’s mentality. In this rendition, Obama cared deeply about democracy and human rights—meaning Palestinian rights—whereas the chauvinistic government of Benjamin Netanyahu did not. Granting that Obama did sincerely disagree with Netanyahu on the Palestinian issue, this claim was nevertheless a dodge. In plain fact, the attitude toward Israel was itself part and parcel of the Obama administration’s approach to regional order: the outreach to Iran required a downgrading of America’s traditional allies, among whom democratic Israel was clearly the most irksome.
Joseph Biden, the former vice-president, recently expressed the matter with admirable clarity. “Our biggest problem is our allies,” he said in an interview. While in office, Biden had made the same statement, but in the belief that he was speaking off-the-record. When the statement became public, the ensuing controversy forced him to retract and apologize. As we now see, it was no mere slip of the tongue but in fact his considered judgment.
V. The Saudi-Israeli Convergence
Finally, Saudi Arabia. Nowhere has the Biden mindset been more pervasive, or more pernicious, than in the prevailing attitude among liberals and Democrats (and some Republicans) toward Saudi Arabia, which, under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has committed the unpardonable sin of working closely with the Trump administration to dismantle the Iran deal and to reconstitute a coalition dedicated to containing Iran. The crown prince has been depicted as spoiled and reckless, and his erratic behavior, so the story goes, is a major threat to stability in the Middle East and a danger to the United States.
Before swallowing this tale whole, one would do well to ask a few pointed questions. In the Middle East, which state of consequence shares Israel’s interest in preventing Iran from developing a nuclear-weapons capability? Which state is similarly dedicated to curtailing Iranian power on the ground in Syria and Yemen? Which will help promote a strategic view of the Middle East that correctly sees the rise of Iran, and not the Palestinian question, as the key problem to be solved? Finally, which Arab leader has done the most to advance a general warming of relations with Israel and, incidentally, shares with Israel a deep distrust of the growing influence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Arab world?
In brief, the convergence of interests between Israel and Mohammad bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia is both startling in its breadth and historically significant. It also comes at a fortuitous moment, when other regional allies of the United States can no longer take Washington’s support for granted. Indeed, the Saudi–Israeli convergence is, in part, a response to the fact that, on the international scene, America has gone wobbly.
The convergence of interests between Israel and Mohammad bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia is both startling in its breadth and historically significant.
Trump’s conception of regional order quite openly seeks to further the Saudi–Israeli convergence and to build upon it, in hopes of constructing an effective policy of containment even in an era of domestic wariness regarding military commitments abroad.
Of course, it is no secret that this initiative has been met recently by a ferocious countereffort to anathematize Mohammad bin Salman and throw ice water on any idea of America’s engaging Saudi Arabia altogether. The weapon was handed to the administration’s critics when Saudi assassins murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Now the very same critics who claim vociferously that Trump’s Syria withdrawal has betrayed America’s allies, including Israel, are mounting a no-holds-barred attack on Israel’s tacit partner in confronting the Iranian threat and America’s own longest-term ally in the Arab world.
There can be no disputing that the murder of Khashoggi deserves a very sharp response from the United States. But influential voices are calling for much more, advocating what amounts to a restructuring of U.S.–Saudi relations and thereby of U.S. strategy altogether in the Middle East: withholding arms sales and defense cooperation, pressuring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to make concessions to the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, and even working to have Mohammad bin Salman removed from power. (In March 2015, it was he, then the kingdom’s defense minister, who presided over the Saudi-led intervention in neighboring Yemen after the Houthis, an Iranian proxy trained and equipped by Hizballah and Tehran, had occupied the capital Sanaa, seized the presidential palace, and placed the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi under house arrest.)
Indeed, one of the greatest achievements of this campaign has been to convince people, even people with foreign-policy experience, that Khashoggi’s murder is more than just a point of bitter contention between Riyadh and Washington; it is a matter of the utmost strategic significance for America.
For some time now, Saudi Arabia has been in the crosshairs of the Democratic party’s progressive wing. In September 2017, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders expressed his hostility to the Saudis in the sharpest of terms. “Do I consider them an ally? I consider them to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world,” he said. “No, they are not an ally of the United States.” The Khashoggi affair has now pulled more moderate elements of the party toward the Sanders position, not least because it offers a good line of attack against the president. “We have a president who is part of the cover-up as to what happened in that consulate or embassy when Mr. Khashoggi was murdered,” Hillary Clinton said recently. “And we have a president and those closest to him who have their own personal commercial interests.”
Nor have Republicans been paragons of strategic clarity. To take a single instance: instead of directing the resources of his office to the machinations of the primary enemies of the United States, the Tennessee senator Bob Corker, outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, busied himself with the weighty task of thwarting Trump over the Khashoggi murder. He hauled Gina Haspel, director of the CIA, to Capitol Hill to give a bipartisan group of like-minded senators a detailed intelligence briefing on the crown prince’s involvement in the affair. Corker, together with Senator Bob Menendez, also sent a letter to Trump demanding a formal determination as to whether bin Salman was personally responsible for the killing of Khashoggi. Under the terms of the Global Magnitsky Act, such a determination would automatically trigger sanctions against the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor and former senior official of the State Department, has been a key player in connecting the murder of the journalist with the global defense of democracy and freedom. “We’ve always believed we stand for these values . . . and for an honorable person like Khashoggi to be interrogated and murdered by a government that’s friendly to the U.S., we have an obligation to speak out and disavow and condemn it,” Burns said. “We have to uphold these values. If we don’t uphold them, who’s going to uphold them in the world?” Expanding the range of his vision, he pointed to the threat posed to America by the rise of Russia and China. “The democracies of the world need to check the actions of these authoritarian powers,” he intoned, “so [the Khashoggis murder] is a test for us.”
But what makes Khashoggi a test in the competition with authoritarian powers? Over the last three months, as the American media have been obsessed by the Khashoggi affair, stories have broken regarding, among other things, the forcible detention by China of one-million Uighurs and the kidnapping and forcible return to China of Meng Hongwei, the former president of Interpol. Both are far more consequential for American foreign policy than the Khashoggi affair, yet they have received a fraction of the attention.
The case of Meng is particularly noteworthy. In recent years, Beijing has kidnapped, forcibly repatriated, incarcerated, and tortured numerous Chinese nationals. Among the hundreds captured in this brazen worldwide operation, code-named Fox Hunt, are dozens of individuals from Canada and Australia; others have even been snatched from American soil. How many well-informed Americans can identify by name a single one of them, or even identify the American cities where they were taken? How many American pundits and politicians screaming to punish Mohammad bin Salman have made similarly urgent arguments about the need to punish Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his multiple affronts to American sovereignty?
Exaggerating the significance of Khashoggi’s murder sends a signal of American confusion to the world.
Exaggerating the significance of Khashoggi’s murder sends a signal of American confusion to the world. It suggests that the world’s only superpower has lost the meaningful capacity to differentiate one heinous misdeed by a close ally from continuous threats posed by its true enemies, not least in the Middle East itself. Every word expended on the Khashoggi affair has been a lost opportunity to discuss, for example, such simultaneous machinations as the plot by Iran to carry out an assassination in Denmark, the second such plot in Europe this year, or the discovery of tunnels being dug by Hizballah from Lebanon into Israel.
Over the last two months, the Khashoggi media campaign succeeded in generating in the Senate a “moral panic,” a widespread fear of a rising evil so great as to demand an unchallengeable need for action. The panic reached its apogee in the week before Christmas, when a bipartisan clutch of senators raced to advance legislation to combat the threat. The spirit of the Senate was well captured in the title of the resolution sponsored by the Republican senator Lindsey Graham—a title made absurdly long so as to cover every conceivable evil:
A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia be held accountable for contributing to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, preventing a resolution to the blockade of Qatar, the jailing and torture of dissidents and activists inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the use of force to intimidate rivals, and the abhorrent and unjustified murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Although Graham’s resolution covered all the bases, it has yet to go to a vote. But two similar resolutions did pass, both of them bipartisan and one of them, co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, invoking the War Powers Act. If the paltry, non-lethal support the U.S. is offering to the Saudi-led coalition actually constitutes war-fighting, then virtually every act of U.S. foreign policy would similarly fall under the purview of that act.
In Yemen, however, what will determine the course of events is indeed the iron logic of war. The Houthis are an Iranian proxy force. If they win, Iran will win. If they merely force a stalemate, Iran will retain a base on Saudi Arabia’s southern border from which rockets and missiles provided by Iran can target Riyadh. Precisely as it has done in Lebanon for Hizballah, and against Israel, Iran will have every incentive to increase the size and power of that arsenal.
No senatorial display of outrage can refute this logic. A policy of punishing Saudi Arabia will not improve “the humanitarian crisis in Yemen,” and it will not stop the fighting there. It will succeed only in handing Iran a victory and the U.S. a strategic defeat. By contrast, the only way to insure that we do end the killing, end the humanitarian crisis, and achieve our strategic goal of containing Iran is to work for a Saudi victory.
This is the stark logic of war. If the humanitarian cost of a Saudi victory is too high for our moral sensibilities to bear, then the only answer is for the U.S. to become more engaged, to help the Saudis with their strategy and their tactics, to bring the war to a quicker and more decisive outcome that will destroy the lives of fewer people. Those are the real options—moral and strategic. No one in the Senate is discussing them.
Call it the punitive agenda: one that will weaken the American position in the Middle East and expose Israel to further risks, as some Israelis themselves have made abundantly clear. “Don’t throw the prince out with the bathwater,” the Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer urged. It is wise counsel, unfortunately unheeded by American senators who, full of passionate intensity, have lent bipartisan legitimacy to a program designed to destroy any effective containment policy of the kind outlined above. No good can come from this, and it has the potential to do much harm.
VI. The Only Viable Strategy
The challenges of the Middle East are many and complex. Trump’s strategy of refraining from direct military engagement while assuring support to one’s allies, therefore, is by no means guaranteed to succeed. But in an era of deep skepticism about the deployment of American forces in general, it represents the only viable strategy if the twin goals of American policy are to contain the Sunni terror organizations and Iran simultaneously. The successful containment of Iran would, in turn, reduce the power of Russia, whose expanded influence in the region is largely dependent on Iranian-led ground forces.
In a January 2014 interview with David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, Barack Obama made clear that although the allies of the United States expected him to help them contain Iran militarily, he refused to play that role. Instead, he envisioned “a new geostrategic equilibrium” in which the United States would mediate between its traditional allies and Iran. From 2014 on, Obama sought to implement this conception, which his acolytes continue to tout.
Obama saw the Middle East as a roundtable, at which Iran and Russia would be prominently seated. The job of the United States, in this conception, was to advance proposals for stabilizing the region that would be acceptable to all of the “stakeholders” around the table. But this approach suffered from a debilitating fallacy or, rather, delusion: namely, that the true ambitions of Iran (and Russia) were purely defensive and, therefore, limited. Its advocates assumed that Tehran’s public rhetoric calling for the expulsion of American forces from the region and for the ultimate destruction of both Israel and the United States was just that: rhetoric. What Iran truly coveted, they believed, was legitimacy and security. It was looking for a deal. If the United States would only treat Tehran with respect, the Islamic Republic would become a reasonable partner for stabilizing the region.
During the Obama presidency, Iran pocketed every tangible concession from the United States while offering largely token concessions in return.
During the Obama presidency, Iran pocketed every tangible concession from the United States while offering largely token concessions in return. As Iran’s militias on the ground gobbled up territory, the regime grew more solvent, stronger militarily, and more confident of its ability to threaten American allies with impunity, as evidenced by, among other things, its ever more aggressive support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen. As a result, the region grew more violent and more unpredictable, and America less reliable.
Iran today is more than happy to continue nurturing this delusion through limited diplomatic engagement, provided that America continues to turn a blind eye to its military advances on the ground while offering Tehran a short path, by means of the nuclear deal, to a completely unfettered nuclear program. Thus has Obama’s conception of regional order led not to the “equilibrium” that he imagined but to chaos and the pronounced weakening of the American security system.
In the Trump conception, by contrast, the Middle East is not a round table but a rectangular table. On one side are the United States and its traditional allies. On the other side are its adversaries: Russia and Iran, their proxies, and the Sunni terror groups. The job of the United States, in this conception, is to elevate the power of its friends over its adversaries while simultaneously mediating among the allies, who are a fractious bunch.
To repeat: the choice faced by Americans and their allies in the Middle East is plain. It is between seeking to co-opt Iran through American concessions and emoluments and, instead, seeking to contain it (and Russia) through American financial pressure and military and diplomatic pressure from allies. And that is really no choice at all, because abject failure is baked into the previous administration’s approach. The current approach is the only viable option that holds out any chance of success.
Last March, when the Senate first addressed the question of whether to punish the Saudis over Yemen, Lindsey Graham, who had not yet fallen victim to the moral panic, spoke judiciously. “The flaws of the Saudi government are real,” he said. “But my [Republican] friends on the other side . . . constantly put Saudi Arabia and Iran on the same footing. I think that is a very unwise analysis—to suggest that Saudi Arabia is just as bad as Iran is just missing the point big time.”
The “big-time” point is this: an ally is a state that supports the American security system. Two questions should thus decide whether America treats a state as a friend or as a foe. Will the state actively help to defend that system against those—Russia, China, and Iran—who seek to weaken or destroy it? If it won’t take action, will it at least deny its territory and resources to America’s enemies?
In the Middle East, if not in the world, these questions should take precedence. When an ally stumbles, we should help it to its feet. When our enemy stumbles, we should help keep it down and on the ground. Any consideration that subverts this elementary logic, no matter how “moral” it may appear on the surface, is fundamentally unsound. The choices in the Middle East are stark: either the United States will build a security system with its own military or with its allies’ militaries, or it won’t have one at all. In the absence of a viable security system, its moral influence in the world will decline significantly.
“Without bread,” the Jewish sages say, “there is no Torah.” In foreign policy we might similarly say, “Without basic security, there are no American values.” There are lessons in this for American politicians in both parties, for supporters of Israel, and for lovers and promoters of liberty around the world.
Friday, December 6, 2019
5 Reasons BuzzFeed’s Story Should Never Have Been Accepted by the Mainstream Media Phelim McAleer Townhall 1-19-19
5 Reasons BuzzFeed’s Story Should Never Have Been Accepted by the Mainstream Media
Phelim McAleer Townhall 1-19-19
https://townhall.com/columnists/phelimmcaleer/2019/01/18/5-reasons-buzzfeeds-story-should-never-have-been-accepted-by-the-mainstream-media-n2539304?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=01/19/2019&bcid=9930c656b2212929c884960baf64bc5a&recip=26163198
MIL-ED Posting note:
BuzzFeed was the original online publisher of the “Trump dossier” Here too, they very publicly claimed the authenticity of their sources
It should be noted that an overwhelming portion of the mainstream media jumped on this story and then further extended its impact by speculating that this was a proven offense rising to the standard of impeachment... and then immediately jumping to “the very likely possibility of this “offense” as being the initiator of impeachment action against Donald Trump.
Particular offenders include representative Adam Schiff, Sen. Dick Durbin, Representative Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Charles Schumer. Media culprits include the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, PBS, AP.
Clarifications from sources within Robert Mueller’s office are clear and direct that the BuzzFeed statements relating to any evidence and/or any witnesses are 100% fabrications.
.The Special Counsel’s office has issued a statement debunking the BuzzFeed “bombshell scoop” that President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.
The story was widely regurgitated by the mainstream media, with the smallest of caveats, and then they marched full on pointing out that suborning perjury is an impeachable offense. They were excited, gleeful almost but here are five reasons they should never have reported the story in the first place. They are five red flags about Jason Leopold, one of the journalists behind the story, that meant they should not run a story on the report without independent verification. These are Jason Leopold’s five red flags:
1. In 2006 Leopold ran a detailed story stating that Karl Rove had been informed he was about to be indicted for leaking the name of CIA agent Valarie Plame. The story stated very authoritatively that Rove himself had “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” that he was going to be charged. The indictment never happened. Just like the Trump story, Leopold said he had multiple sources for a story that turned out not to be true.
2. Of course anyone can make a mistake and maybe Leopold was misled by his “multiple sources” but in another story it looks like Leopold was involved in fraud and forgery of documents bolstering a story. In a 2002 story for Salon about energy company Enron, Leopold quoted a damning email which the subject of the story denied ever writing. After much prevaricating, Leopold eventually produced a “faxed copy of the email” with no headers or other identifying details. He never produced an original. The story was eventually removed from Salon’s archive.
3. Sources he quotes say he never spoke to them. In the same story Leopold claims he was given information by a source but the source denied this.
Leopold told Salon’s editors his phone bill would show the calls to the source. Again after much prevaricating, Leopold produced the phone bill and it showed just one call - less than a minute long and it occurred five days after he submitted the first draft of the story.
4. Leopold has plagiarized stories. Salon found he had lifted almost verbatim 480 words from a Financial Times story.
Leopold apparently submitted a forged document to cover his plagiarism. He told Salon that he had not plagiarized the FT story because the FT story was in fact based on a Dow Jones story that he had originally written. He sent them a copy of a story that he claimed the FT had ripped off. Salon and Dow Jones could find no record of Leopold’s alleged “original” story in the Dow Jones archive, however.
5. Leopold can’t even be truthful when he tries to confess to not being truthful. In 2005 Leopold wrote a confessional memoir. He wrote about how he “engaged in lying, cheating and backstabbing…and was looking for a path to redemption.” However just days before the book's release, the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, pulled it off the shelves after one of the sources quoted in the book claimed Leopold made up quotes.
In truth the mainstream media should never have run the BuzzFeed story without verifying it themselves. It is just too serious a claim to report without proof that they themselves should have seen and checked. But they didn’t care. We hear a lot about how President Trump has apparently damaged institutions and democracy. The media claim he is “ethically challenged.” But perhaps the real story to emerge from this presidency is how the media is ethically challenged and have thrown all standards aside in their desire to bring the president down.
US STATE DEPARTMENT/ CIA...THE TRACK RECORD OF PAST BLUNDERS Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger December 23, 2018
US STATE DEPARTMENT/ CIA...THE TRACK RECORD OF PAST BLUNDERS
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger December 23, 2018
Western policy in the Middle East – from Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, through Jordan, Egypt and North Africa - has largely failed due to a multitude of erroneous assessments made by well-intentioned policy-makers, researchers, academicians and journalists.
The track record of past blunders
For example, the State Department “wise men” opposed the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State - which they viewed as a potential ally of the Soviet Bloc - contending that it was doomed militarily, demographically and economically. In 1977-79, the US foreign policy establishment courted Ayatollah Khomeini and deserted a critical strategic ally, the Shah of Iran, assuming that Khomeini was seeking human rights and peaceful-coexistence. In 1981, the US punished Israel – militarily, economically and diplomatically - for destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which spared the US a potential nuclear confrontation in the 1991 Gulf War. Until Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US showered the ruthless Iraqi dictator with intelligence-sharing and commercial agreements. In 1993 and 2005 the US embraced the Israel-PLO Oslo Accord and Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, maintaining that they would advance peace, while in fact they fueled Palestinian hate-education and terrorism.
The 2010-11 eruption of the still-raging Arab Tsunami was greeted as an “Arab Spring,” “Facebook Revolution” and “Youth Revolution;” supposedly, leading Arab societies closer to democracy. During 2009-11, the US sacrificed pro-US Egyptian President Mubarak on the altar of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Sunni-Muslim terrorist conglomerate. In 2011, the US led the NATO toppling of Libya’s Qaddafi - who previously surrendered his infrastructure of weapons-of-mass-destruction to the US and systematically fought Islamic terrorism – contending that a post-Qaddafi Libya would be more democratic and pro-Western. In 2018, Libya is one of the largest platforms of Islamic terrorism. In 2015, the US led the JCPOA accord with Iran’s Ayatollahs, which provided the inherently anti-US rogue regime with an unprecedented tailwind to topple all pro-US Arab regimes, intensify terrorism in the Middle East and Africa, and try to push the US out of the Persian Gulf.
Notwithstanding the failure of all well-intentioned US initiatives to advance Israel-Arab peaceful-coexistence, the US may introduce another peace initiative, overlooking the face that the only successful peace initiatives were directly negotiated between Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan. And the list goes on….
Assessing the track record of past blunders
Such a track record provoked systematic criticism by “The Gang of Four,” who were the leading experts/authors on the Middle East: Prof. Elie Kedourie (London School of Economics & Political Science), Professor P.J. Vatikiotis (London School of Oriental and African Studies), Prof. Bernard Lewis (Princeton University) and Prof. J.B. Kelly (University of Wisconsin). Their criticism, which has been in publication since the 1960s, has been resoundingly vindicated by the Arab Tsunami, which has traumatized the Middle East, and threatened the West, since 2010.
The four luminaries highlighted the Western tendency to oversimplify the highly-complex, fragmented, unpredictable, unstable, intolerant, violent, frenzied and tenuous inter-Arab reality of the Middle East – irrespective of the Arab-Israeli conflict - which is dominated by ruthless minority-regimes, and is yet to experience inter-Arab peaceful coexistence.
For example, Prof. Elie Kedourie exposed the fumbled US policy which energized Iran’s Ayatollahs, stabbed the back of the Shah of Iran – the US Policeman in the Persian Gulf – dealt the US a game-changing setback, and placed a machete at the throat of each pro-US Arab regime in the Middle East: “An emergency was in the making, which involved the regime in Iran, a pillar of US and Western interests. This emergency was the most serious foreign policy test… which President Carter and his leading officials failed…. The Carter Administration was willing to see [the Shah] go because it had persuaded itself that the alternative would institute democracy and human rights…. From Teheran, Ambassador Sullivan argued that Khomeini was anti-Communist, that the young officers were generally pro-Western, that economic ties with the West would subsist, that Khomeini would play a ‘grandpa like role’, and that election would be likely to produce a pro-Western Islamic republic. In Washington, there was a chorus of academic and official voices singing the praises of Khomeini and the National Front….”
According to Prof. P.J. Vatikiotis: “For the foreseeable future, inter-Arab differences and conflicts will continue…. Inter-Arab relations cannot be placed on a spectrum of linear development… Rather, their course is partly cyclical, partly jerkily spiral and always resting occasionally at some ‘grey’ area…. What the Arabs want is not always – if ever – what Americans desire; in fact, the two desires may be diametrically opposed…. Even without the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Middle East would have been a conflict-ridden and conflict-generating area…. Arrangements or alliances made by foreign powers with [Arab] regimes are problematic, dangerous, transient and even meaningless….”
Moreover, “a political challenge to any of these [Arab] regimes can come only in the form of a violent confrontation. Opposition is subversion; political disagreement is treason. The tolerance of opposition is scarce – in fact, nonexistent…. Power changes are therefore possible only via rebellion or revolution….”
The litany of books and essays on the Middle East by Prof. Bernard Lewis have exposed a self-defeating Western policy, sacrificing realism on the altar of wishful-thinking and oversimplification. Many of them were authored before the 1979 toppling of the Shah, the bombing of the US Embassy and Marine Headquarters in Beirut in 1983, the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, the 2001 Twin Towers devastation and the current proliferation of Islamic terrorism in Europe.
Prof. Lewis highlighted features of Islam, which have not been fully-comprehended by Western policy-makers, who tend to sacrifice reality on the altar of rapprochement with Islam: “[Non-Muslims] may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy…. That Muslim should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal…. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature…. Islam was associated with power from the very beginning…. The world is divided basically into two. One is the community of the Muslims, the other that of the ‘unbelievers.’”
Western policy in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf was severely criticized by
Prof. J.B. Kelly: “While the Russians may have miscalculated at times, they have attempted to ground their policy upon reality, not upon wishful-thinking. Western policy, on the other hand, has been based upon illusions, self-deception and calculations of short-term advantage. Nowhere is this more evident than in the formulation and execution of American policy towards Arabia and the Gulf…. In Arabia and the Gulf, the US government allowed itself to be seduced into adoption and implementing ARAMCO’s plans and those of its Saudi Arabian clients…. The State Department lent its unobtrusive support…. Just how great a part-illusion, self-deception and willful-obtuseness have played in fostering [this policy] is clearly revealed in the transcripts of hearings on the subject of American relations with the Gulf states held by the Senate Foreign Relations and the House International Relations Committees from 1972 onward…. None of this [former Secretary of State Joseph Sisco’s Congressional testimony] bore the remotest resemblance to reality…. It was then, and remains still, a mirage….”
Prof. Fouad Ajami, who was the Director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote: “Arabs and Israeli are ready for peace, it is said by many in the US and in the Middle East. The missing ingredient, they argue, is the American role and American peace plan. The other side of this promise is a threat: dire consequences are predicted, for the region and for American interests, if the [US] Administration fails to embark on an activist policy. In reality, the promise is a mirage, the dire consequences an empty threat…. The notion of [the US’] indispensability is a trap. We should not walk into that trap when others set it for us. Certainly, at least, we should be able to avoid entrapping ourselves.”
Repeat or avoid past blunders?
Have Western policy-makers learned from precedents by avoiding – or repeating – costly mistakes? Are they aware that unrealistic policies tend to be self-defeating, yielding more injustice and casualties than that which they intend to cure?!
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger December 23, 2018
Western policy in the Middle East – from Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, through Jordan, Egypt and North Africa - has largely failed due to a multitude of erroneous assessments made by well-intentioned policy-makers, researchers, academicians and journalists.
The track record of past blunders
For example, the State Department “wise men” opposed the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State - which they viewed as a potential ally of the Soviet Bloc - contending that it was doomed militarily, demographically and economically. In 1977-79, the US foreign policy establishment courted Ayatollah Khomeini and deserted a critical strategic ally, the Shah of Iran, assuming that Khomeini was seeking human rights and peaceful-coexistence. In 1981, the US punished Israel – militarily, economically and diplomatically - for destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which spared the US a potential nuclear confrontation in the 1991 Gulf War. Until Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US showered the ruthless Iraqi dictator with intelligence-sharing and commercial agreements. In 1993 and 2005 the US embraced the Israel-PLO Oslo Accord and Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, maintaining that they would advance peace, while in fact they fueled Palestinian hate-education and terrorism.
The 2010-11 eruption of the still-raging Arab Tsunami was greeted as an “Arab Spring,” “Facebook Revolution” and “Youth Revolution;” supposedly, leading Arab societies closer to democracy. During 2009-11, the US sacrificed pro-US Egyptian President Mubarak on the altar of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Sunni-Muslim terrorist conglomerate. In 2011, the US led the NATO toppling of Libya’s Qaddafi - who previously surrendered his infrastructure of weapons-of-mass-destruction to the US and systematically fought Islamic terrorism – contending that a post-Qaddafi Libya would be more democratic and pro-Western. In 2018, Libya is one of the largest platforms of Islamic terrorism. In 2015, the US led the JCPOA accord with Iran’s Ayatollahs, which provided the inherently anti-US rogue regime with an unprecedented tailwind to topple all pro-US Arab regimes, intensify terrorism in the Middle East and Africa, and try to push the US out of the Persian Gulf.
Notwithstanding the failure of all well-intentioned US initiatives to advance Israel-Arab peaceful-coexistence, the US may introduce another peace initiative, overlooking the face that the only successful peace initiatives were directly negotiated between Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan. And the list goes on….
Assessing the track record of past blunders
Such a track record provoked systematic criticism by “The Gang of Four,” who were the leading experts/authors on the Middle East: Prof. Elie Kedourie (London School of Economics & Political Science), Professor P.J. Vatikiotis (London School of Oriental and African Studies), Prof. Bernard Lewis (Princeton University) and Prof. J.B. Kelly (University of Wisconsin). Their criticism, which has been in publication since the 1960s, has been resoundingly vindicated by the Arab Tsunami, which has traumatized the Middle East, and threatened the West, since 2010.
The four luminaries highlighted the Western tendency to oversimplify the highly-complex, fragmented, unpredictable, unstable, intolerant, violent, frenzied and tenuous inter-Arab reality of the Middle East – irrespective of the Arab-Israeli conflict - which is dominated by ruthless minority-regimes, and is yet to experience inter-Arab peaceful coexistence.
For example, Prof. Elie Kedourie exposed the fumbled US policy which energized Iran’s Ayatollahs, stabbed the back of the Shah of Iran – the US Policeman in the Persian Gulf – dealt the US a game-changing setback, and placed a machete at the throat of each pro-US Arab regime in the Middle East: “An emergency was in the making, which involved the regime in Iran, a pillar of US and Western interests. This emergency was the most serious foreign policy test… which President Carter and his leading officials failed…. The Carter Administration was willing to see [the Shah] go because it had persuaded itself that the alternative would institute democracy and human rights…. From Teheran, Ambassador Sullivan argued that Khomeini was anti-Communist, that the young officers were generally pro-Western, that economic ties with the West would subsist, that Khomeini would play a ‘grandpa like role’, and that election would be likely to produce a pro-Western Islamic republic. In Washington, there was a chorus of academic and official voices singing the praises of Khomeini and the National Front….”
According to Prof. P.J. Vatikiotis: “For the foreseeable future, inter-Arab differences and conflicts will continue…. Inter-Arab relations cannot be placed on a spectrum of linear development… Rather, their course is partly cyclical, partly jerkily spiral and always resting occasionally at some ‘grey’ area…. What the Arabs want is not always – if ever – what Americans desire; in fact, the two desires may be diametrically opposed…. Even without the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Middle East would have been a conflict-ridden and conflict-generating area…. Arrangements or alliances made by foreign powers with [Arab] regimes are problematic, dangerous, transient and even meaningless….”
Moreover, “a political challenge to any of these [Arab] regimes can come only in the form of a violent confrontation. Opposition is subversion; political disagreement is treason. The tolerance of opposition is scarce – in fact, nonexistent…. Power changes are therefore possible only via rebellion or revolution….”
The litany of books and essays on the Middle East by Prof. Bernard Lewis have exposed a self-defeating Western policy, sacrificing realism on the altar of wishful-thinking and oversimplification. Many of them were authored before the 1979 toppling of the Shah, the bombing of the US Embassy and Marine Headquarters in Beirut in 1983, the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, the 2001 Twin Towers devastation and the current proliferation of Islamic terrorism in Europe.
Prof. Lewis highlighted features of Islam, which have not been fully-comprehended by Western policy-makers, who tend to sacrifice reality on the altar of rapprochement with Islam: “[Non-Muslims] may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy…. That Muslim should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal…. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature…. Islam was associated with power from the very beginning…. The world is divided basically into two. One is the community of the Muslims, the other that of the ‘unbelievers.’”
Western policy in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf was severely criticized by
Prof. J.B. Kelly: “While the Russians may have miscalculated at times, they have attempted to ground their policy upon reality, not upon wishful-thinking. Western policy, on the other hand, has been based upon illusions, self-deception and calculations of short-term advantage. Nowhere is this more evident than in the formulation and execution of American policy towards Arabia and the Gulf…. In Arabia and the Gulf, the US government allowed itself to be seduced into adoption and implementing ARAMCO’s plans and those of its Saudi Arabian clients…. The State Department lent its unobtrusive support…. Just how great a part-illusion, self-deception and willful-obtuseness have played in fostering [this policy] is clearly revealed in the transcripts of hearings on the subject of American relations with the Gulf states held by the Senate Foreign Relations and the House International Relations Committees from 1972 onward…. None of this [former Secretary of State Joseph Sisco’s Congressional testimony] bore the remotest resemblance to reality…. It was then, and remains still, a mirage….”
Prof. Fouad Ajami, who was the Director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote: “Arabs and Israeli are ready for peace, it is said by many in the US and in the Middle East. The missing ingredient, they argue, is the American role and American peace plan. The other side of this promise is a threat: dire consequences are predicted, for the region and for American interests, if the [US] Administration fails to embark on an activist policy. In reality, the promise is a mirage, the dire consequences an empty threat…. The notion of [the US’] indispensability is a trap. We should not walk into that trap when others set it for us. Certainly, at least, we should be able to avoid entrapping ourselves.”
Repeat or avoid past blunders?
Have Western policy-makers learned from precedents by avoiding – or repeating – costly mistakes? Are they aware that unrealistic policies tend to be self-defeating, yielding more injustice and casualties than that which they intend to cure?!
DID OBAMA-APPOINTED UKRAINE AMBASSADOR INTERVENE TO HELP ANTI-TRUMP UKRAINE GROUP? Judicial Watch 12-6-19
DID OBAMA-APPOINTED UKRAINE AMBASSADOR INTERVENE TO HELP ANTI-TRUMP UKRAINE GROUP?
Judicial Watch 12-6-19
As the coup abuse against President Trump accelerates, Judicial Watch focuses on the real Ukraine collusion scandal. We just sued the State Department for documents related to a reported “untouchables list” given by former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko in late 2016 (Judicial Watch vs. U.S. Department of State) (No. 1:19-cv-03563).
Lutsenko recently told The New York Times that Yovanovitch “pressed him not to prosecute anti-corruption activists.” Lutsenko previously reportedly said the do-not-prosecute list included a founder of the Ukraine group Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), which was funded by George Soros foundations and the U.S. federal government, and two members of the Ukrainian Parliament who vocally supported the Soros group’s agenda:
The implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.
Recently, Rudy Giuliani stated that AntAC “was co-funded by the Obama administration and far-left billionaire financier George Soros,” and “was ironically under investigation for alleged corruption, namely a ‘misplaced’ $4.4 million in U.S. funds designated to ‘fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic,’ during the 2016 presidential election in America.”
Amb. Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her Ukraine post in May of this year by President Donald Trump, was a key witness for Democrats last month in their public impeachment hearings. Yovanovitch denied providing any do-not-prosecute “list.”
We filed our FOIA lawsuit here in DC after the State Department failed to respond to our September 24, 2019, FOIA request for:
All records of communication between the Department of State and any representative of the Ukrainian government regarding any actual or proposed investigation or prosecution of the AntAC; the International Renaissance Foundation [Open Society Foundations’ office in Ukraine]; and/or Transparency International.
All records concerning any meeting or telephonic conversation between former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
All records related to the list of individuals and entities provided to Lutsenko by Yovanovitch in late 2016.
Amb. Yovanovitch is on our radar for a number of issues. On October 9, 2019, we filed a FOIA request for State Department records related to the possibly illegal collection of information by Yovanovitch on prominent conservative figures, journalists and persons with ties to President Donald Trump.
Reports suggest that the Ukrainian Embassy was a hotbed of anti-Trump, Deep State activism and tried to promote and protect leftist allies in Ukraine and the United States. As the coup attack on President Trump continues, this new federal lawsuit is designed to get to the real truth of the Deep State’s games in Ukraine.
Judicial Watch Sues for Key Docs Of Deep State Official At Center of Latest Coup Attack on Trump
It’s all too easy for our intelligence agencies, acting behind their curtains of secrecy, to abuse their power. Fortunately, Judicial Watch takes them to court to get to the truth. One Deep State player in particular was likely up to no good, and we’re going to find out.
We have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department for communications records of Michael K. Atkinson – former Assistant Attorney General in DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) from 2016 to 2018 and currently Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (ICIG).
The records we are seeking are regarding Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and/or presidential impeachment. We’re also seeking all emails and text messages of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) and members of Schiff’s staff.
We sued after the Justice Department failed to respond to our October 1, 2019, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-03566)). We asked for:
All emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts) and text messages sent to or from former Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Michael K. Atkinson regarding Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and/or presidential impeachment.
All emails and text messages between former Senior Counsel Atkinson and Representative Adam Schiff or any member of Mr. Schiff’s staff.
All travel requests, travel authorizations and expense reports of former Senior Counsel Atkinson
All calendar entries of former Senior Counsel Atkinson.
All SF50s and SF52s of former Senior Counsel Atkinson.
The NSD falls under the direct supervision of the assistant attorney general.
During Atkinson’s tenure at NSD, he was senior legal counsel, first to NSD head John Carlin (Robert Mueller's former chief of staff when Mueller directed the FBI) and later to acting NSD head Mary McCord. McCord accompanied then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates to see White House Counsel Don McGahn regarding Michael Flynn.
During the period Atkinson was legal advisor to Carlin and later McCord, the FISA court found there was “significant non-compliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data,” otherwise known as spying, under the Obama Administration. Additionally, during this period, DOJ-NSD was working in coordination with the FBI Counterintelligence Unit on Operation Crossfire Hurricane, which included former FBI officials Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Page was the intermediary between FBI Counterintelligence and DOJ-NSD.
Since becoming Inspector General, Atkinson also has come under scrutiny for his handling of the so-called “whistleblower” complaint raising concerns about President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, which became the basis for the ongoing impeachment proceedings against Trump:
Atkinson changed the standing practice of requiring whistleblowers to present firsthand information in order to have their complaint considered both “credible” and “of urgent concern” for submission under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act.
After receiving the complaint and a recommendation from Atkinson that it be referred to Congress, the DNI refused to forward the complaint because, based on an opinion of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, “The complaint submitted to the ICIG does not involve an ‘urgent concern.’” In testimony before Congress, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, said the complaint was essentially “hearsay” and not “corroborated by other folks.”
After the existence of the whistleblower was leaked to the press, Atkinson told Congress he was unaware the whistleblower had first gone around him to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and his staff with his complaint before submitting it to the IG’s office.
After listening to Atkinson testify about the whistleblower behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee on October 4, ranking Republican committee member Republican Devin Nunes (R-CA) said of him:
[The ICIG is] either totally incompetent or part of the deep state, and he’s got a lot of questions he needs to answer because he knowingly changed the form and the requirements in order to make sure that this whistleblower complaint got out publicly. So, he’s either incompetent or in on it … he’s either a quack or he’s lying … and he’s going to have more to answer for, I can promise you, because we are not going to let him go; he is going to tell the truth about what happened.
Rep. Adam Schiff has yet to release Atkinson’s testimony.
Atkinson has been a key Deep State official involved with questionable and abusive investigations of President Trump. As Adam Schiff keeps Atkinson’s testimony on the impeachment attack on President Trump secret, we’re going to court for transparency under the law.
Court Tells FBI It Can’t Hide Records about FBI-Clinton Lawyer Meeting on Russia
The Justice Department wanted to pretend that a meeting between an FBI official and a Clinton lawyer didn’t happen, telling Judicial Watch that they would “neither confirm nor deny” it. And the DOJ wanted a U.S. District Court to go along. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wasn’t having any of it.
The judge denied the effort to block the release of communications between former FBI General Counsel James Baker and Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie law partner and former DOJ attorney, who reportedly met with Baker to share information targeting Donald J. Trump during the presidential campaign.
While at Perkins Coie, Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the time Perkins Coie secretly paid for the development of the anti-Trump dossier the DOJ used to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. The court specifically rejected the FBI’s argument that it needed to protect the “privacy” of Hillary Clinton’s lawyer.
Baker testified before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that he received documents as well as computer storage devices on Russian hacking from Sussmann. The Mueller report, however, concluded that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign improperly colluded with Russia.
In March 2019, Judicial Watch filed suit after the FBI failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated October 5, 2018 (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00573)). The lawsuit seeks:
Any and all records of communication between former FBI General Counsel James Baker and former Department of Justice attorney and current Perkins Coie Partner Michael Sussmann.
Any and all records created in preparation for, during, and/or pursuant to any meeting between Mr. Baker and Mr. Sussmann.
Any and all calendars, agendas, or similar records, either in paper or electronic format, documenting the schedule and activities of Mr. Baker.
The FBI would neither confirm nor deny the existence of records. Judicial Watch successfully argued that:
[T]he sworn testimony of Baker, the former FBI general counsel, confirms that Sussmann was sharing the same documents with the media.… Rather than privacy, this confirms that Sussmann was seeking to obtain attention for his activities. Hence, this is far from a typical case … Sussmann had no expectation of ‘personal privacy,’ as he was actively seeking publicity for himself and the information he wanted to share.
In any event, the public interest in disclosure of the existence of records is manifest.
Judge Boasberg ruled:
“[A]ny risk of invasion [of privacy] evaporated once Baker publicly testified that he had received documents from Sussmann, as well as met with and spoken to him on multiple occasions in 2016.”
In October, Baker testified before the U.S. House Judiciary and Oversight committees in October 2018, where he stated: “It was like — my recollection was it was a stack of material I don’t know maybe a quarter inch half inch thick something like that clipped together, and then I believe there was some type of electronic media, as well, a disk or something.”
In his testimony Baker acknowledged that Sussmann’s information related to the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation. He also testified that Sussmann had shared the same information with the media, stating that Sussmann had told him “some elements of the press had this information as well and were going to publish something about it.”
In August, another federal court judge rejected FBI efforts to protect of the privacy of Clinton spy Christopher Steele and ordered the FBI to conduct a search for certain records about Steele’s work with the FBI during the Mueller investigation.
The FBI is corruptly trying to keep secret documents to protect those behind the Russiagate smears of President Trump. Two federal courts have now rejected the FBI’s desperate attempts to hide the details of its anti-Trump conspiracy with Hillary Clinton’s Fusion GPS-FBI spy operation. Why is Director Wray allowing the corrupt cover up the FBI’s Russiagate collusions with the Clinton gang?
Judicial Watch previously obtained heavily redacted copies of FISA warrants used by the Obama-era DOJ to spy on the Trump campaign, which seem to confirm the FBI and DOJ misled the courts in withholding the material information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC were behind the “intelligence” used to persuade the courts to approve the FISA warrants that targeted the Trump team. One of the FISA warrant renewals was granted in June 2017 and did not expire until September 2017, some eight months after President Trump assumed office.
I’ll be sure to let you know about any major revelations as more documents come in.
Judicial Watch
425 3rd St Sw Ste 800
Washington, DC 20024
202.646.5172
FDR, Rabbi Wise and the Truth [Book Review By: Rabbi Rachel Esserman, Executive Editor As published in The Jewish Reporter (Jewish Federation of Broome County, NY) - Nov. 26, 2019 http://thereportergroup.org/Article.aspx?aID=5377 ]
FDR, Rabbi Wise and the Truth
[Book Review By: Rabbi Rachel Esserman, Executive Editor As published in The Jewish Reporter (Jewish Federation of Broome County, NY) - Nov. 26, 2019 http://thereportergroup.org/Article.aspx?aID=5377 ]
When I was young, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was spoken of highly by members of my family. As the years passed and more information about FDR – particularly the way he manipulated people and the media – was revealed to the public, my feelings about him changed. A new book offers an even more disturbing view of FDR, particularly his positions about Jewish immigration and the Holocaust. In “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise” (The Jewish Publication Society), Rafael Medoff shows how FDR successfully manipulated Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to prevent the Jewish community from publicly protesting his policies relating to the Jews of Europe. However, Medoff also shows how Wise’s own blinders about FDR and his refusal to form coalitions with those who did not support progressive policies prevented him from being an effective voice for European Jews.
Although FDR’s policies for the United States were progressive, his attitude toward Jews and immigration were not. While FDR was not in favor of the Nazi government, he strove to keep the U.S. on good terms with Germany before the war. It’s clear that FDR was antisemitic – a mild, aristocratic form that allowed him to be friends with some Jews. Medoff notes that FDR’s “private remarks about Jews seem to allude to a distinction in his mind between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews.” In addition, “Roosevelt’s unflattering statements about Jews consistently reflected one of several interrelated notions: that it was undesirable to have too many Jews in any single profession, institution, or geographic locale; that America was Protestant by nature, and should remain so, an overwhelmingly white Protestant country; and that Jews on the whole possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics.” This was, of course, not the side of himself FDR showed to Wise.
The reality was that FDR had no desire to allow the Jews of Europe to enter the United States. Not only did he not want increased immigration, he supported the State Department’s refusal to fill the quotas that were already in place. For example, the annual immigrant quota in 1936 for Germany was 25,957, but only 20 percent of those spots were used. This was not a one time thing, but something that consistently occurred during the pre-war years. One of the excuses was that an influx of Jews into this country might lead to a rise in antisemitism, a thought that did resonate with some Jewish leaders. FDR led Wise to believe the lack of immigration was not caused by the White House in order to prevent Jewish protests against his immigration policies. That was where FDR’s manipulation of Wise was most successful.
Medoff shows that Wise was very proud of his relationship with FDR, as if FDR was a personal friend. It becomes clear, though, that FDR manipulated Wise to prevent Jews from publicly protesting his policies before and during the war. Since Wise was a supporter of FDR’s other policies, he felt conflicted between what he felt was good for the country and what was good for the Jews of Europe. Wise sought to gather support from progressive Christian leaders, who disappointed him with their lack of interest. For Wise, FDR’s re-election was extremely important and that overrode any thoughts he had about Jewish immigration.
Medoff notes that “a Christian outcry might have prompted President Roosevelt to at least permit the quota of legal immigrants from Germany to be filled to the legal limits, a step that would have resulted in a haven for tens of thousands of Jews in 1933-1934... For such an outreach effort to have succeeded, however, Rabbi Wise and his colleagues would have needed to seek the support of clergy from across the religious and political spectrum. This is not to say that all evangelical or conservative Christians necessarily would have been responsive to such appeals, but it is likely that Wise would have found at least some support from fundamentalists who regarded the rescue of Jews, and especially the prospect of Jews ingathered to the Holy Land, as precursors to the messianic age.” Unfortunately, Wise couldn’t see past his progressive political leaning to approach them.
Not all members of the Jewish community agreed with Wise’s policies, but Wise did his best to silence those who opposed him. He was not above trying to smear their names in the community or suggest that their policies would be disastrous. Rather than respecting those who disagreed with him, he saw them as a personal threat to his position in the community. This was even during the last days of the war, when Wise’s health prevented him from being effective: he was reluctant to turn the reins over to someone with more energy to pursue the work. Medoff shows how Wise reacted badly to everyone from rabbinical students who wanted to take a more active role in supporting immigration to Zionist representatives who wanted to change American policy to allow Jews to enter Palestine. Wise’s feelings about FDR blinded him to the way he was being manipulated. As the author notes, “[Wise’s] interactions with Roosevelt were shaped by his deep personal loyalty to the man, his policies, and his party. In private correspondence, Wise revered FDR as ‘the great man’ and ‘the All Highest’... Wise wrote to a friend... ‘[his] election is not only essential to the well-being of America, but to the highest interests of the human race.’” Unfortunately, FDR was not deserving of Wise’s high opinion.
“The Jews Should Keep Quiet” contains far more material than can be discussed in this review. Of particular interest to some readers will be the arguments about American policy relating to Palestine, and the difference between Wise and those Zionist leaders who wanted the U.S. to pressure Britain to allow for more immigration. FDR’s thoughts on the matter were clearly in line with his other thoughts about Jews: he was not going to do anything to actively support immigration to Palestine. Also shown is FDR’s refusal to bomb railway tracks leading to concentration camps or to allow immigrants to travel on warships returning to the U.S. that could have easily transported them. Medoff clearly shows both men with all their flaws: a manipulative, uncaring FDR, whom I can no longer bring myself to admire, and Wise, who let his ego get in the way of protecting the Jewish community. Neither comes off as the hero he would like to have been. Readers interested in American Jewish history or American politics will definitely want to read this unsettling, but important, work.
Wednesday, December 4, 2019
US STATE DEPARTMENT/ CIA...THE TRACK RECORD OF PAST BLUNDERS Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger December 23, 2018
US STATE DEPARTMENT/ CIA...THE TRACK RECORD OF PAST BLUNDERS
Western policy in the Middle East – from Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, through Jordan, Egypt and North Africa - has largely failed due to a multitude of erroneous assessments made by well-intentioned policy-makers, researchers, academicians and journalists.
The track record of past blunders
For example, the State Department “wise men” opposed the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State - which they viewed as a potential ally of the Soviet Bloc - contending that it was doomed militarily, demographically and economically. In 1977-79, the US foreign policy establishment courted Ayatollah Khomeini and deserted a critical strategic ally, the Shah of Iran, assuming that Khomeini was seeking human rights and peaceful-coexistence. In 1981, the US punished Israel – militarily, economically and diplomatically - for destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor, which spared the US a potential nuclear confrontation in the 1991 Gulf War. Until Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the US showered the ruthless Iraqi dictator with intelligence-sharing and commercial agreements. In 1993 and 2005 the US embraced the Israel-PLO Oslo Accord and Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, maintaining that they would advance peace, while in fact they fueled Palestinian hate-education and terrorism.
The 2010-11 eruption of the still-raging Arab Tsunami was greeted as an “Arab Spring,” “Facebook Revolution” and “Youth Revolution;” supposedly, leading Arab societies closer to democracy. During 2009-11, the US sacrificed pro-US Egyptian President Mubarak on the altar of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Sunni-Muslim terrorist conglomerate. In 2011, the US led the NATO toppling of Libya’s Qaddafi - who previously surrendered his infrastructure of weapons-of-mass-destruction to the US and systematically fought Islamic terrorism – contending that a post-Qaddafi Libya would be more democratic and pro-Western. In 2018, Libya is one of the largest platforms of Islamic terrorism. In 2015, the US led the JCPOA accord with Iran’s Ayatollahs, which provided the inherently anti-US rogue regime with an unprecedented tailwind to topple all pro-US Arab regimes, intensify terrorism in the Middle East and Africa, and try to push the US out of the Persian Gulf.
Notwithstanding the failure of all well-intentioned US initiatives to advance Israel-Arab peaceful-coexistence, the US may introduce another peace initiative, overlooking the face that the only successful peace initiatives were directly negotiated between Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan. And the list goes on….
Assessing the track record of past blunders
Such a track record provoked systematic criticism by “The Gang of Four,” who were the leading experts/authors on the Middle East: Prof. Elie Kedourie (London School of Economics & Political Science), Professor P.J. Vatikiotis (London School of Oriental and African Studies), Prof. Bernard Lewis (Princeton University) and Prof. J.B. Kelly (University of Wisconsin). Their criticism, which has been in publication since the 1960s, has been resoundingly vindicated by the Arab Tsunami, which has traumatized the Middle East, and threatened the West, since 2010.
The four luminaries highlighted the Western tendency to oversimplify the highly-complex, fragmented, unpredictable, unstable, intolerant, violent, frenzied and tenuous inter-Arab reality of the Middle East – irrespective of the Arab-Israeli conflict - which is dominated by ruthless minority-regimes, and is yet to experience inter-Arab peaceful coexistence.
For example, Prof. Elie Kedourie exposed the fumbled US policy which energized Iran’s Ayatollahs, stabbed the back of the Shah of Iran – the US Policeman in the Persian Gulf – dealt the US a game-changing setback, and placed a machete at the throat of each pro-US Arab regime in the Middle East: “An emergency was in the making, which involved the regime in Iran, a pillar of US and Western interests. This emergency was the most serious foreign policy test… which President Carter and his leading officials failed…. The Carter Administration was willing to see [the Shah] go because it had persuaded itself that the alternative would institute democracy and human rights…. From Teheran, Ambassador Sullivan argued that Khomeini was anti-Communist, that the young officers were generally pro-Western, that economic ties with the West would subsist, that Khomeini would play a ‘grandpa like role’, and that election would be likely to produce a pro-Western Islamic republic. In Washington, there was a chorus of academic and official voices singing the praises of Khomeini and the National Front….”
According to Prof. P.J. Vatikiotis: “For the foreseeable future, inter-Arab differences and conflicts will continue…. Inter-Arab relations cannot be placed on a spectrum of linear development… Rather, their course is partly cyclical, partly jerkily spiral and always resting occasionally at some ‘grey’ area…. What the Arabs want is not always – if ever – what Americans desire; in fact, the two desires may be diametrically opposed…. Even without the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab Middle East would have been a conflict-ridden and conflict-generating area…. Arrangements or alliances made by foreign powers with [Arab] regimes are problematic, dangerous, transient and even meaningless….”
Moreover, “a political challenge to any of these [Arab] regimes can come only in the form of a violent confrontation. Opposition is subversion; political disagreement is treason. The tolerance of opposition is scarce – in fact, nonexistent…. Power changes are therefore possible only via rebellion or revolution….”
The litany of books and essays on the Middle East by Prof. Bernard Lewis have exposed a self-defeating Western policy, sacrificing realism on the altar of wishful-thinking and oversimplification. Many of them were authored before the 1979 toppling of the Shah, the bombing of the US Embassy and Marine Headquarters in Beirut in 1983, the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, the 2001 Twin Towers devastation and the current proliferation of Islamic terrorism in Europe.
Prof. Lewis highlighted features of Islam, which have not been fully-comprehended by Western policy-makers, who tend to sacrifice reality on the altar of rapprochement with Islam: “[Non-Muslims] may receive the tolerance, even the benevolence, of the Muslim state, provided that they clearly recognize Muslim supremacy…. That Muslim should rule over non-Muslims is right and normal…. That non-Muslims should rule over Muslims is an offense against the laws of God and nature…. Islam was associated with power from the very beginning…. The world is divided basically into two. One is the community of the Muslims, the other that of the ‘unbelievers.’”
Western policy in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf was severely criticized by
Prof. J.B. Kelly: “While the Russians may have miscalculated at times, they have attempted to ground their policy upon reality, not upon wishful-thinking. Western policy, on the other hand, has been based upon illusions, self-deception and calculations of short-term advantage. Nowhere is this more evident than in the formulation and execution of American policy towards Arabia and the Gulf…. In Arabia and the Gulf, the US government allowed itself to be seduced into adoption and implementing ARAMCO’s plans and those of its Saudi Arabian clients…. The State Department lent its unobtrusive support…. Just how great a part-illusion, self-deception and willful-obtuseness have played in fostering [this policy] is clearly revealed in the transcripts of hearings on the subject of American relations with the Gulf states held by the Senate Foreign Relations and the House International Relations Committees from 1972 onward…. None of this [former Secretary of State Joseph Sisco’s Congressional testimony] bore the remotest resemblance to reality…. It was then, and remains still, a mirage….”
Prof. Fouad Ajami, who was the Director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote: “Arabs and Israeli are ready for peace, it is said by many in the US and in the Middle East. The missing ingredient, they argue, is the American role and American peace plan. The other side of this promise is a threat: dire consequences are predicted, for the region and for American interests, if the [US] Administration fails to embark on an activist policy. In reality, the promise is a mirage, the dire consequences an empty threat…. The notion of [the US’] indispensability is a trap. We should not walk into that trap when others set it for us. Certainly, at least, we should be able to avoid entrapping ourselves.”
Repeat or avoid past blunders?
Have Western policy-makers learned from precedents by avoiding – or repeating – costly mistakes? Are they aware that unrealistic policies tend to be self-defeating, yielding more injustice and casualties than that which they intend to cure?!
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
DID BARACK OBAMA START THE TRUMP HATE MOVEMENT WHICH IS NOW DIVIDING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?
DID BARACK OBAMA START THE TRUMP HATE MOVEMENT WHICH IS NOW DIVIDING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?
Lee Smith is a well-regarded writer.
ISRAPUNDIT.ORG is a very useful and informative website which is highly regarded in various elements of the US intelligence community.
MILED is linking directly to a article in American Spectator and an entry at ISRAPUNDIT that all participants should read/ view carefully as we look for additional details will emerge.
OR
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/judge_jeanine_obama_started_the_trump_hate.html
Click on the above links to view the video interview by Judge Jeanine with Lee Smith.
Judge Jeanine: ‘Obama started the Trump hate’
Almost four years into the war on Donald Trump, any mention of Obama’s role in the banana republic tactics has been covered up. The fact that high-ranking Obama-appointed FBI/CIA/intelligence officials have been caught plotting to delegitimize an election and remove President Trump from office makes it a sure bet that Obama, the consummate community organizer, had a tight leash on everything going on in the White House. During her show this past Saturday, Judge Jeanine Pirro and her guest, The Plot against the President author Lee Smith, specifically called out Barack Obama for “interfering in the peaceful transition of power” in 2016. It’s about time.
The five-minute interview ,which aired on Fox’s Justice with Judge Jeanine, boiled this impeachment nightmare down to its essence: Barack Hussein Obama is the first president to orchestrate a coup against an incoming administration. Smith even went on to suggest that Obama has set up a command post less than two miles from the White House. As the “de facto head of the Democratic Party still … Barack Obama is right in the middle of the anti- Trump operation,” according to Smith.
Judge Jeannine then recalled Obama’s actions weeks before the 2016 election:
Watching Barack Obama taking the week off and doing nothing but campaigning for Hillary Clinton … to me I just remembered thinking to myself that’s a little weird, um, I know Presidents support incoming but that was full-on, all-in Barack Obama worried about Trump, making fun of Trump, it had never happened that way in the history of this country. He started the Trump hate.
In October 2016, a Sun-Sentinel article reported that the Clinton campaign had “deployed the President to key battleground states.” At each stop, Obama mocked, derided, and attacked candidate Trump. When it looked as though a tough New York real estate mogul might actually beat Hillary Clinton, and worse, if elected, have the cojones to expose the Obama regime as the third-world Marxist corruptocrats they are, President Obama put everything on hold and went all in, as Judge Jeanine observed.
Obama’s strategy of inciting hatred of candidate Trump was nothing new. For eight years, Obama had inspired his followers to hate America; rich white people; the police; corporations; private enterprise; and, most of all, those ‘God, family, country’ conservatives who would rise up in 2016 to reject yet another hater.
Barack and Michelle Obama’s record of malice toward this country, from Michelle’s racist Princeton thesis to her speech in South Carolina calling the U.S. “a downright mean country” to candidate Obama’s disdain for working-class “gun and religion clingers,” laid the foundation of hate from which Trump Derangement Syndrome would emerge.
The unprecedented attempted overthrow of a duly elected president continues this week in more impeachment hearings as the Democrats throw everything at POTUS, hoping something sticks. Against all logic, the Democrats and their voter base really, really hate Trump’s guts. Jeanine Pirro rightly puts the blame for this hate-filled mockery of our Constitution on the Deep State’s figurehead: Barack Hussein Obama.
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