Month: June 2008

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page is as hard-line as ever, today featuring a lengthy and by now familiar meditation by AEI “Freedom Scholar” and perennial intrigue entrepreneur Michael Ledeen on “Iran and the Problem of Evil.” Actually, the headline is a bit of a distortion because, in typical neo-conservative fashion, Ledeen compares the conflated threats emanating from the Arab world and Iran — or, as Ledeen puts it, “from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranians Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahabis” — to those posed by Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia. To his credit, Ledeen decided to forgo the use of “Islamofascism,” a decision which no doubt will get him in trouble with David Horowitz, Frank Gaffney, and James Woolsey, among others of his hard-line fellow-neo-cons. But, of course, by putting “Iran” and the other assorted threats in the same context, he really doesn’t have to use the word itself. In any event, the lesson — and I guess here is where the headline that features “Iran” alone — is clear enough: “As it did in the 20th century, it means war.”

Ledeen often describes himself as a historian, and, as such, I would expect Ledeen to be scrupulously careful of his facts, but one assertion about anti-Semitism in Iran in his essay really stuck out at me; namely, that The Protocol of the Elders of Zion is now circulating in a Farsi edition. I did a quick Nexis search for the “Protocol” and “Protocols”, “Iran”, and “Farsi” and could find only two articles that appeared to corroborate Ledeen’s statement. One was a 2005 article in the Likudist New York Sun by Benny Avni, who asserted that “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ the classic anti-Semitic fraud, is a best seller in Iran…” No further evidence to support that assertion was offered. A second article, which appeared in the November 2006 edition of Playboy, by frequent New Republic contributor Joseph Braude, also asserted that the notorious forgery had been translated into Farsi with the financial help of the Islamic Republic. Again, however, he offered no supporting evidence.

I also checked with the State Department’s nearly 100-page “Global Anti-Semitism Report” published less than three months ago and could find no mention of a Farsi edition of the Protocols, although it did note that new editions had appeared in English, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Russian, and Serbian since 2003. The report also noted that the Protocols had recently become “best sellers” in Turkey (a strong ally of Israel’s and hence, presumably, irrelevant to Ledeen thesis on “evil”) and Syria.

Now, it is true that the Iranian delegation to the 2005 Frankfurt International Book Fair displayed an English-language edition of the Protocols among its wares, but I doubt that it would have become a ”best seller” in Iran in that form, as the Sun’s Avni had asserted.

Ledeen also wrote that “calls for the destruction of Jews appear regularly on Iranian ….television,” and, while Ahmadinejad’s periodic calls for the elimination of Israel (from the pages of time, from history, from the map — depending on the translation), not to mention the “Death to Israel” sloganeering that has been staple of government rallies in Iran since the Revolution, I don’t have enough knowledge or research time to assess the truthfulness of this assertion. I would note, however, that Iran continues to boast by far the largest Jewish community in the region outside Israel; that Jews are an officially recognized minority free to worship as they wish; that the vast majority have shunned substantial financial inducements to emigrate to Israel; and that, despite Ahmadinejad’s well-publicized Holocaust scepticism, the government television station has broadcast a popular series about the Holocaust based on a true story about an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied France. That doesn’t mean anti-Semitism in Iran does not exist; on the contrary, most experts believe it is indeed on the rise there, spurred in considerable part by regional tensions and the crescendo of threats and counter-threats between the Israel and Iran. But lumping Iran in with more clearly anti-Semitic movements and governments — not to mention his blithe assertions about the popularity of the Protocols’ Farsi edition — does not enhance Ledeen’s — or the Journal’s op-ed fact-checkers’ — credibility.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Leading neocon Daniel Pipes (director of the Middle East Forum) said in an interview posted Wednesday at National Review Online, that if Barack Obama is elected, George Bush would attack Iran in the remaining ten weeks of his term.

“Should the Democratic nominee win in November, President Bush will ‘do something.’ and should it be Mr. McCain who wins, he’ll ‘punt,’ and let Mr. McCain decide what to do.

He called on powers such as Russia and China to prevent a US unilateral strike by helping Washington increase pressure on Tehran. “Look, if you don’t want an American attack, then you have to join us in being very serious with the Iranians and making clear to them we will attack if they don’t stop.”

Later in the interview, Pipes commented that Israel’s nuclear capability is “substantial.”

Antiwar Radio’s new YouTube channel, YouTube.com/AntiwarRadio, is doing great. Anders Knight put it together and has already made some great videos to go along with the interview archives of my show and that of the heroic Charles Goyette of KFNX 1100 AM in Phoenix, Arizona.

Check ’em out, subscribe and please help us spread them around. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Gareth Porter – John Cusack – Michael Scheuer – Ron Paul – Michael Schwartz – Vincent Bugliosi – Pat Buchanan – Victor Navasky – The Other Scott Horton – Gordon Prather – Christopher Ketcham – Gareth Porter

Clark Hoyt, the public editor, or ombudsman, of the New York Times, went after Edward Luttwak in his weekly column today for the military historian’s controversial May 12 op-ed on why Sen. Obama would be considered an “apostate” by many Muslims and thus particularly susceptible to assassination attempts if, as president, he were to go on a state visit to a Muslim nation. After consulting with five Islamic scholars at U.S. universities on whether Luttwak’s argument was consistent with Islamic law, Hoyt concluded that Luttwak’s assertions were essentially baseless and “extreme” and strongly implied that the op-ed should not have been published at all. (The headline of Hoyt’s essay was “Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts?”) Hoyt also took to task the op-ed editor, David Shipley, for publishing only letters to the editor in response to the original op-ed and not providing space for a full rebuttal.

This is not the first time that Luttwak, who has long gloried in his role as an unconventional policy provocateur (usually, but not always, on behalf of hawkish, if not neo-conservative, forces in Washington), has written attention-grabbing op-eds that are based on no factual evidence of any kind. I haven’t compiled them in any systematic way, but one example some 20 years ago really stands out as a warning to all op-ed editors at elite newspapers that Luttwak was not the most careful of researchers.

On November 22, 1987, Luttwak published an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “A Member of Moscow’s Exclusive Club” which argued that the fact that then-Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was seated next to East German leader Erich Honecker and Polish President Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski “in the section reserved for the leaders of Leninist governments in good standing” at the opening of the Communist Party Congress in Moscow conveyed a “very definite message: the Sandinista regime has been admitted to the very exclusive club of governments that the Soviet Union regards as permanent, organic allies.” [emphasis in original] The conclusion:

“If there were any suspicion that the Sandinistas might actually allow the democratization required by the Arias peace plan, creating the possibility of a peaceful change of government by free elections, Ortega would not have been seated where he was.”

Within the op-ed space, the Post reprinted the AP photo cropped in a way that only Ortega’s face was visible.

There was only one problem with both the photo and Luttwak’s analysis (aside from the fact that the Sandinistas did indeed accede to a peaceful change of government by free elections under the Arias plan): Ortega was not seated next to Honecker and Jaruzelski. What Luttwak had thought was one photo of the three leaders seated together that had appeared in the Times and other newspapers on November 3 was actually two distinct photos separated by a thin white line: one of Honecker and Jaruzelski seated next to each other, the other of Ortega and a man whom the Times later identified as Gus Hall. In fact, the latter two were seated in an entirely different section of the hall, as was indicated by the entirely different angles of Ortega’s face (presumably fixed on Gorbachev at the podium) and those of Honecker and Jaruzelski.

Luttwak, in other words, had based his entire analysis (and he was very close to senior Reagan administration officials, such as then-Undersecretary for Policy Fred Ikle and Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams) at the time –that the Soviet Union now considered Nicaragua as as integral a part of its empire as Poland and East Germany — on a total visual misapprehension.

“Am I the only person who has seen the photographs published in all our newspapers,” he asked. “Americans are still furiously debating the nature of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and its intent in regard to the Arias peace plan, but surely that question has been settled conclusively by the photos that appeared on Nov. 3, the day after the opening of the Party Congress in Moscow.”

Despite several letters to the editor (including one from me sent the day of the op-ed’s publication) pointing out the obvious error, the Post never issued a correction or an explanation. (After all, in order to crop Ortega’s photo to incorporate it into Luttwak’s op-ed, the newspaper’s editors should have known that the factual premise on which his analysis was based was completely faulty.) So It fell to a Post columnist, the late and great Phil Geyelin, to write his own op-ed in rebuttal one week after Luttwak’s article came out. In reply to Luttwak’s question whether he was the only person who had seen the “telltale photographs,” Geyelin wrote:

“No, Edward, you are not the only one; but you may be the only one who failed to notice that the photographic display in The New York Times actually consisted of two photographs, one of Honecker and Jaruzelski seated side by side, and another of Ortega alone. There was white space between the two shots and nothing in the caption to suggest that the three men were even in the same room.

“Nor was there, according to authorities I’ve talked to, a special section ‘reserved’ for ‘Leninist governments.’ True, the communist countries of Eastern Europe were lumped together. But Ortega was no closer to them than he was to a mixed gaggle of Socialist leaders, including representatives of India’s ruling National Congress, the Italian Communist Party, and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat. So much for the ‘political precision’ of Soviet seating arrangements or the claim that ”the nature” of the Sandinistas, or their intentions, has been ’settled conclusively.’

So, the next time you see an analysis by Edward Luttwak, be sure to scrutinize the factual premises very carefully. That goes especially for editors and talk-show producers.

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

The sad news just reached us that retired General William E. Odom has died of an apparent heart attack. He was 75.

Odom served as director of the National Security Agency during Ronald Reagan’s second term. He had a reputation as a military hard-liner who opposed any compromise with the Soviet Union. Earlier in his career, as an Army officer in Vietnam, Gen. Odom had privately come to oppose U.S. involvement in foreign wars that brought, in his view, little benefit to the United States. He drew parallels between Vietnam and Iraq and believed that the only sensible path for the United States was a complete and immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

When the Bush Administration prepared for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Gen. Odom warned that military action in Iraq would be foolhardy and futile.

Odom was later known for his view that the US could withdraw from Iraq quickly and safely. He became a fixture on news programs and never altered his critical stance toward the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Iran.

Antiwar.com ran Odom’s “What’s Wrong With Cutting and Running?” in October 2005. Odom was interviewed last year by Antiwar Radio’s Charles Goyette.

Gen. Odom’s prudent and thoughtful variety of foreign policy conservatism will be missed.

---

Here are some other great articles by Odom:

Stop Training Local Forces in Iraq with Lawrence Korb, 7/19/2007

‘Supporting the Troops’ Means Withdrawing Them, 7/6/2007

Exit From Iraq Should Be Through Iran, 5/29/2007

Victory Is Not an Option, 2/11/2007

Strategic Errors of Monumental Proportions, 1/26/2007

Six Brutal Truths About Iraq, 12/15/2006

The Case for Getting Out of Iraq, John McLaughlin interviews Gen. William Odom (ret.), 11/6/2006

How to Cut and Run, 10/31/2006

Cut and Run? You Bet, 5/2/2006

Iraq Through the Prism of Vietnam, 3/8/2006

What’s Wrong With Cutting and Running?, 10/3/2005