Month: December 2009

What happened to the “antiwar” members of Congress?

Only 12 voted against new sanctions on Iran, 3 of them Republicans. 412 voted in favor.

Here is the honor roll who voted against:
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)
John Conyers (D-MI)
John Duncan (R-TN)
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
Stephen Lynch (D-MA)
Jim McDermott (D-WA)
Gwen Moore (D-WI)
Ron Paul (R-TX)
Pete Stark (D-CA)

Voting Present: E.B. Johnson (D-TX), Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Maxine Waters (D-CA)

As predicted, Bob Kagan follows in Kristol’s wake. Afghanistan is so passé; it’s clearly time to focus on Iran. Check out the last paragraph in his column in Sunday’s Washington Post — specifically, the order in which the problems facing Obama are presented, and then the singling out of Iran:

“It is only natural that President Obama should respond to unexpected or shifting circumstances by reevaluating his approach. Events in Iran, Afghanistan or China do not occur in isolation. You cannot expect a president to escalate a war without it affecting his broader attitude toward the questions of war and peace. You cannot expect Iran’s spurning of his good-faith offer to have no effect on his broader perception of the strategy of engagement. For Obama, as for all of us, these events, these decisions and these lessons affect our broader perceptions and understandings, about the way the world works and about America’s proper role in the world. Obama’s current understanding was on display at Oslo last week. People at home and abroad should take notice.”

The neo-cons clearly see a great opportunity in Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan and the follow-up of the Nobel speech in Oslo. They’re trying hard to re-establish alliances they made with liberal interventionists in and around Bill Clinton and the Balkans in the 1990s by appealing to that “great tradition of hawkish Democrats fighting wars both hot and cold: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy, as well as that one-time Democrat, Ronald Reagan.” (Make sure you read Kristol’s and Fred Kagan’s editorial in the December 14 Weekly Standard, “Support the President.”)

Read the rest of the post

Now that he and presumably his friends at the Foreign Policy Initiative got a lot of what they wanted from Obama on Afghanistan, Bill Kristol is once again pivoting westward – this time to Iran, rather than Iraq – as he did eight years ago with the infamous September 20 PNAC letter. Look for more of this to come from Kristol and the neo-cons in the coming weeks, as they re-align themselves with AIPAC and like-minded groups after their three-month campaign on behalf of Gen. McChrystal and the COINistas.

As eager as he is for war with Iran – the lead editorial in the new Weekly Standard is “A Nobel War Speech? Did Obama lay the groundwork for an eventual strike against Iran?” – Kristol doesn’t ask what may be the impact on McChrystal’s efforts of war with Iran. There’s every reason to believe, at least at this point, that the Pentagon is probably the national-security institution most adamantly opposed to an attack on Iran – be it by Israel or its own forces – precisely because it would greatly complicate Washington’s position throughout the region. But that’s not the point. Now that Obama is committed in Afghanistan, the neo-con priority moves to Iran, with urgency.

In January and February 1966, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, J. William Fulbright, held a series of televised public hearings to discuss the deepening military involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Fulbright summoned to testify three pro-Administration witnesses (Secretary of State Dean Rusk, AID Administrator David E. Bell, and General Maxwell D. Taylor, Ret.) and two non-Administration witnesses (Lieutenant General James M. Gavin and Dr. George F. Kennan, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union). An abridged transcript was published under the title The Vietnam Hearings (Random House, 1966).

Historians have been struck in particular by the prescience of Kennan’s warning against the use of American arms to prop up a government that lacks the popular support to defend itself. In the comment reprinted here, prompted by a question from Senator Frank Carlson (R-KS), the only changes necessary for a translation to the present war are to substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam, and to substitute the Taliban for the Communists. ~DB

---

from Testimony of the Honorable George F. Kennan, Thursday, 10 February 1966

SENATOR CARLSON: This morning you stated in response to a question, and this is not an exact quote but as I took it down, “We cannot order the political realities or views of other nations by our military power.” Would you want to elaborate a little on that? If we are not going to do it by military power in this age when we are confronted with nations who seem to respect only military might, what can we do?

KENNAN: I am talking about the internal affairs of other peoples here, and about the—our entering into those internal affairs and deciding what sort of political conditions shall prevail, and this gives me opportunity to say something that I feel very strongly about. When it comes to helping people to resist Communist pressures of all sorts—whether you call them aggression or whatever you call them—it has been my conviction for many years that no assistance of this sort can be effective unless the people themselves have a very high degree of determination and a willingness to help themselves. The moment they begin to place the bulk of the burden on us, I think the whole situation is lost. So strongly do I feel about this that I have often said publicly that the only people worth helping in this world are the people who say, “We propose to survive whether you help us or not, and just because you don’t help us doesn’t mean we are going to go under. It means that we are going to fight to the last ditch anyway but it may be a little easier if you help us.”

Now, the people who take that standpoint, there is something you can latch onto. But I am extremely suspicious every time I hear it said that “If you Americans don’t give us more than you have given us or if you slacken your efforts on our behalf, we will become fainthearted, and then what will become of you?” And I think there is only one answer to this, and that is, “Whatever becomes of us will not be as bad as what becomes of you yourselves if you become fainthearted.”

In other words, I do not believe in the possibility of helping people when it comes to problems that are partly problems of their internal political life, unless they themselves have a very high degree of determination and of internal self-discipline; and if things have deteriorated so far in these countries that they can’t mobilize this sort of public morale and determination, I don’t think any foreign force can put it into them. I think, then, the entry of a foreign force into the situation confuses it and creates new confusing elements which make it all the more difficult, and I think this is what has happened inVietnam, and I have seen it happen in other situations in history.

It now appears that the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), Howard Berman’s sanctions bill targeting Iran’s refined petroleum sector, is likely to come up for a vote in the near future. AIPAC and other hawkish “Israel lobby” groups have made the sanctions bill their top priority for months now, and today brought news that the more moderate J Street is planning to go along with the sanctions bill.

For a comprehensive overview of why this is such bad news, see this post by Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now (APN). She includes a very thorough table summarizing all the flaws with the bill and recommendations for how it could be improved. The upshot, she writes, is that the Berman bill “leads to the very problematic conclusion that the US is seeking to inflict widespread suffering on the Iranian people in order to force them to put pressure on their government.”

Sanctions proponents’ reasoning is based on the rather dubious belief that if the U.S. starves the Iranian civilian population of resources they will blame their own government rather than ours. It is much the same logic that has led Israel to blockade Gaza for the past two and a half years, only to see Hamas become stronger than ever as a result; similarly, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of civilians (by the most conservative estimates) while doing nothing to weaken Saddam Hussein’s hold on power.

Of course, the overwhelming evidence suggests that unilateral sanctions will prove ineffectual in any case. In recent years the Iranian government has moved to decrease its reliance on refined petroleum imports in anticipation of sanctions, and without Russian and Chinese cooperation the measure is likely to have virtually no bite. But since “effective” sanctions would mean in practice “successful in inflicting hardship on the Iranian civilian population,” then “ineffectual” would seem to be the best that we can hope for — better ineffectual than actively pernicious. Of course, best of all would be to do no harm in the first place. While some seem to be calculating that acquiescing on sanctions is necessary to stave off war, it is hard to see what positive result could possibly come from the deeply misguided Berman bill.

The Obama administration is conducting a workshop on government openness for federal employees today.

It is, of course, closed to the public and the media.

While the White House has tried to make the point that the public has a right to know, they have been secretive about many things, including those having nothing to do with national security:

Those include what cars people were buying using the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program (it turned out the most frequent trades involved pickups for pickups with only slightly better gas mileage); how many times airplanes have collided with birds (a lot); whether lobbyists and donors meet with the Obama White House (they do); rules about the interrogation of terror suspects (the FBI and CIA disagreed over what was permitted); and who was speaking in private with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (he has close relationships with a cadre of Wall Street executives whose multibillion-dollar companies survived the economic crisis with his help).

Just last week, a State Department deputy assistant secretary, Llewellyn Hedgbeth, said at a public conference that “as much as we want to promote transparency,” her agency will work just as hard to protect classified materials or information that would put the United States in a bad light.