WASHINGTON – When it comes to the troop surge in Iraq, a bunch of arm chair generals in Washington are influencing the Bush Administration as much as the Joint Chiefs or theater commanders.
A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a calamitous failure in Iraq, almost single handedly convinced the White House to change its strategy.
They banded together at AEI headquarters in downtown Washington early last December and hammered out the surge plan during a weekend session. It called for two major initiatives to defeat the insurgency: reinforcing the troops and restoring security to Iraqi neighborhoods. Then came trips to the White House by AEI military historian Frederick Kagan, retired Army Gen. John Keane and other surge proponents.
More and more officials began attending the sessions. Even Vice President Dick Cheney came. “We took the results of our planning session immediately to people in the administration,” said AEI analyst Thomas Donnelly, a surge planner. “It became sort of a magnet for movers and shakers in the White House.” Donnelly said the AEI approach won out over plans from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command. The two Army generals then in charge of Iraq had opposed a troop increase.
Quite aside from whether the surge is working or not (I have no idea, although the continuing death tolls in Iraq would suggest it hasn’t done much outside of a few areas), should think-tankers trump generals in planning wars? Isn’t this what you always learn is a bad thing for military performance — like Hitler taking over war-planning from the Wehrmacht? (Obviously I am not comparing the AEI to the Nazi Party, trolls.)
Harpers’ Scott Horton has a really good post linking the great writer Elias Canetti, notably his Crowd and Power, and the Bush administration’s emotional management of its war dead. Do read the old Harpers’ review article on Canetti from 1980 too if you can.
Rudy Giuliani apparently wants to be known as the neo-con candidate in the US presidential race. I was aghast enough that he chose pro-Israel agitator Martin Kramer as his Middle East advisor, but now he’s gone one step further and taken on grand-daddy of all neo-cons Norman Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor:
WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) — Republican candidate for the presidency Rudy Giuliani, the leading hawk among presidential hopefuls, has appointed Norman Podhoretz senior adviser for foreign policy.
A founding member of the neo-con movement, Podhoretz, in the June issue of Commentary magazine, called for an immediate attack on Iran. Either we bomb Iran now, or “we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then.” The geopolitical label for the process is the “Islamization” of Europe, which neo-cons say is a rerun of Hitler’s conquest of Europe in the 1930s and 40s.
Giuliani’s eight-member foreign policy team also includes Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American expert on Shia Islam at Harvard and a fellow with both the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center (“for the development of Zionist thought”). Kramer once said the tendency by American Middle Eastern academics to neglect radical Islam as an issue was partly to blame for the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Well, at least we’ll know clearly where he stands. It’s rather alarming, though, considering that Giulani (despite being a well-known nutter) has the potential to appeal beyond the Republican mainstream and cross-over to some Democrats and swing voters because of his more liberal social views, has taken foreign policy advisors that only care about Israel. If he’s elected, we’re not likely to see the same drift on US foreign policy outside the Middle East that we saw during the Bush administration. With these people (and with neo-conservatives more generally) it’s Israel, Israel, Israel.
And here’s Podhoretz foaming-at-the-mouth piece in favor of bombing Iran, which is an interesting example of the paranoid delusional mindframe.
President Bush announced plans yesterday to appoint an envoy to an organization of Islamic nations with the intention of improving the battered image of the United States in the Muslim world.
Speaking at the rededication of the half-century-old Islamic Center in Washington, Bush said the new U.S. representative to the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference “will listen to and learn from the representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America’s views and values.”
“This is an opportunity for Americans to demonstrate to Muslim communities our interest in respectful dialogue and continued friendship,” said Bush, who has not yet named anyone to the job.
Negar Azimi has a long piece on US democracy promotion efforts in Iran called Hard Realities of Soft Power. It includes reference to US policymaking, the misguided attacks on VOA Persian (widely considered to be an excellent service, both as a radio station and a program that increases esteem for the US in Iranian eyes) — something similar happened with VOA Arabic as discussed several times in this blog), the arrests of activists who have links to the US, the debate over the “kiss of death” theory of American democracy-promotion, and more.
Many Iranians have grown paranoid about anything vaguely linked to the West. Conference and workshop attendance, travel and even e-mail and phone contact with foreign entities is suspect. In the last three months, at least three prominent NGOs have been shut down indefinitely. Kayhan, the semiofficial newspaper, editorializes almost daily about an elaborate network conspiring to topple the regime. Called “khaneh ankaboot,” or “the spider nest,” the network is reportedly bankrolled by the $75 million and includes everyone from George Soros to George W. Bush to Francis Fukuyama to dissident Iranians of all shades. In this vision, the network gets its “orders” from the Americans.
It is particularly telling, perhaps, that some of the most outspoken critics of the Iranian government have been among the most outspoken critics of the democracy fund. Activists from the journalist Emadeddin Baghi to the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to the former political prisoner Akbar Ganji have all said thanks but no thanks. Ganji has refused three personal invitations to meet with Bush. A member of a U.S.-based institution that has received State Department financing and who works with Iranians told me that the Iranians had expressly asked not to have their cause mentioned in presidential speeches. “The propaganda campaign surrounding the launch of this campaign has meant that many of our partners are simply too afraid to work with us anymore,” she told me on condition of anonymity. “It’s had a chilling effect.”
One thing that strikes me among the many issues raised in Negar’s piece is that one does not get the impression that the “believers” among the democracy promotion crowd have really done a “lessons learned” from policy Iraq. Or that there is much of plan beyond providing $75 million to whoever will take it.
Anyway, the debate over democracy promotion apparently continues — for more lofty-minded types, here is Francis Fukuyama’s latest position on the issue. Read it quick before he changes his mind.
ZOA says Abbas is not a moderate, and wants his Fatah Party to reform its charter to remove what ZOA says are articles calling for Israel’s destruction. The Palestine Liberation Organization, where Fatah predominates, has already had such articles removed from its charter.
Earlier this week, a pro-Israel dovish group, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, lobbied lawmakers to fund Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.
But the “doves” did. And do check out the ZOA press release with the quotes from American lawmakers attacking Fatah, calling for the US embassy to be moved to Jerusalem, calls for “repudiating the ‘right of return'” etc.
The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.
The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.
“Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.
Hopefully there’ll be tons of information on the Middle East. Some things I’d like to see:
Details of CIA involvement in the coup against Mussadeq
CIA contacts with Saddam Hussein in Cairo in the late 1960s
CIA covert action against the Nasser regime
CIA covert action in support of Morocco’s Hassan II in the 1970s
Whether there’s any truth to the weird conspiracies you hear about the CIA and the Church of Scientology in the 1970s in the Middle East, and other bizarre stories
CIA information about the Israeli nuclear program in the 1960s (long alleged to have been repressed)
The rabidly Zionist, MEMRI outlet, New York Sun has an interesting piece by Eli Lake, a reporter formerly based in Cairo who knows the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about how the State Dept. and other US agencies are considering engaging with the MB. Robert Leiken, who recently wrote a Foreign Affairs piece advocating engagement (see posts on that here and here), participated in the findings.
Today the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research will host a meeting with other representatives of the intelligence community to discuss opening more formal channels to the brothers. Earlier this year, the National Intelligence Council received a paper it had commissioned on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood by a scholar at the Nixon Center, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Department meeting today to present the case for engagement. On April 7, congressional leaders such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, attended a reception where some representatives of the brothers were present. The reception was hosted at the residence in Cairo of the American ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, a decision that indicates a change in policy.
The National Security Council and State Department already meet indirectly with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through discussions with a new Syrian opposition group created in 2006 known as the National Salvation Front. Meanwhile, Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, is a leader of Iraq’s chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. His party, known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, has played a role in the Iraqi government since it was invited to join the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.
These developments, in light of Hamas’s control of Gaza, suggest that President Bush — who has been careful to distinguish the war on terror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his predecessors to accept the movement fighting for the merger of mosque and state in the Middle East.
I personally think Leiken has a tendency to put the various Muslim Brotherhoods in the same basket. Whatever the links between them, they are clearly separate entities with local leaderships and warrant different approaches from the US. For instance, from a practical standpoint the US is forced to deal with the MB in Iraq, and from a political one engaging the Syrian MB makes sense if one is pursuing a policy of regime change in Damascus, particularly as exile Syrian groups have relationships with the Syrian MB. In Egypt, the situation is quite different: engagement with the MB has been extremely cautious, restricted to parliamentarians and is subject to close scrutiny from a regime that is close to Washington. In Palestine, engagement with Hamas is left to countries like Egypt since dealing with Hamas directly would contravene every ideological tenet the Bush administration holds dear, and presumably anger their neocon friends.
However, there are signs that the Egyptian MB can be useful: last week, reports emerged that Fatah’s strongman in Gaza and US-Israeli tool Muhammad Dahlan (who is blamed even by his Egyptian intelligence handlers for starting the recent violence in Gaza) had sent out an emissary to MB Supreme Guide Muhammad Akef, asking him to reach out to Hamas. The Egyptian intelligence services have used Akef’s good offices with Hamas for a while now, it seems, and despite the ongoing crackdown against the MB domestically, the regime realizes they can be useful (and perhaps the MB hopes to win some lenience in return), even if the MB’s official support for the Hamas government clashes with Egypt’s decision to only recognize the Fatah-backked Fayyad government in the West Bank (and Egypt’s help in making sure Hamas leaders cannot leave Gaza and other forms of coordination of the blockade with the Israelis, even if some Israelis are unhappy.)
It’s also worthwhile noting that Hamas is making an attempt to get the US to engage directly with them — note that Ismail Haniyeh’s advisor Ahmed Youssef had op-eds in both the NYT and WaPo yesterday advocating engagement and defending Hamas’ democratic credentials. Hamas has also been making noise about negotiating the release of of BBC journalist Alan Johnston (what were they waiting for, anyway?)
In the context of this debate about engaging the various Muslim Brotherhoods, it’s worth highlighting that Human Rights Watch has put up interviews of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood detainees who were imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptian security services. It’s a novel and unusual attempt by an establishment institution to put a human face on the MB, which tends not to make front-page news when its members are (routinely) arrested and mistreated. HRW is not only defending their human rights, but also the MB’s freedom of association and expression, which is bound to make many in Cairo (and not just in government) unhappy. The full list of interviews is on the page linked above, but here’s a YouTube version of the interview with Mahmoud Izzat, the Secretary-General of the MB, recalling the brutal 1965 wave of arrests, which was widely credited for radicalizing a part of the MB and creating the spinoff groups that would become Islamic Jihad, and ultimately join al-Qaeda.
Al Hayat’s Muhammad Salah on Congress’ threat to withhold military funding from Egypt:
Strikingly, there are many objections raised by Egyptian opposition forces against the use of aid as a pressure card on the Egyptian government. Moreover, Egyptian political parties and opposition forces vied for opposing the US president’s statements and then the decision of the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on the US aid to Egypt. This seems logical. The prevailing feelings in the Egyptian street are always against American policies, which the majority of Egyptians believe to be against Arabs and Muslims. Opposition newspapers also adopt a theory based on the fact that the US demands for reform do not reflect principled attitudes, but are rather used when the Egyptian government refrains from meeting a particular demand.