Month: August 2010

Former Reagan Justice Department official Bruce Fein appeared on Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Thursday night. He spoke on America as Empire.

Fein is the author of the just-released book: American Empire: Before the Fall.

You can get a complimentary copy of the new Fein book by making a tax-deductible donation of $100 or more to Antiwar.com during our fund drive.

Watch the video:

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for August 13th, 2010:

Huffington Post: Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch calls for the United States to bomb Iran. Citing the concerns of Sunni Arab allies, Israel, and even Europeans, who Koch says would be within range of rockets being developed by Iran, Koch quotes 2008 Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain that, the only “thing worse than military action against Iran… is a nuclear-armed Iran.” Koch concludes, “President Obama hopefully will reach the same conclusion.” Most of the post is dedicated to calling for an end to negotiations and comparing U.S. “carrots” for Iran to Neville Chamberlain’s concession of Czech Sudetenland to “Herr Hitler” before World War II, going so far as to explicitly compare Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. For a take-down of the right’s constant use of the Hitler analogy, check out Matt Duss’s Wonk Room post on the subject where he writes, “Just as Churchill had to deal with the consequences of Chamberlain’s misjudgment of the historical moment, so Obama continues to wrestle with problems created and exacerbated by the incompetence of his predecessor, George W. Bush.”

The Weekly Standard Blog: Michael Makovsky and Lawrence Goldstein argue that in order to secure crude supply oil from the Persian Gulf the Obama administration must pursue a three-track policy of diplomacy, sanctions, and a visible preparation for a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The Obama administration has focused mostly on the first two tracks. However, diplomacy and sanctions will only have the chance to be effective when simultaneously coupled with an active and open preparation for the military option,” they write. Makovsky and Goldstein do acknowledge that, “U.S. or Israeli military action in Iran would trigger a jump in oil prices,” but, “A far greater threat to the oil market would be Iran’s attainment of a nuclear weapons capability.”

The Washington Post: Janine Zacharia reports on the growing disagreement between the White House and members of Congress seeking to cut U.S. military aid to Lebanon. Several members of Congress have called for a discontinuation of U.S. military aid to Lebanon after last week’s deadly skirmish between Lebanese soldiers and the Israeli Defense Forces. But the State Department has emphasized that supporting the capacity and capability of the Lebanese army is in the United States’ national interest. The United States has supplied over $700 million in military aid to Lebanon since 2006 to help train and equip the Lebanese army and help counter Iran’s support of Hezbollah. Zacharia interviewed many policy-elites in Lebanon and reports that, “…many expressed concern that severing U.S. aid could feed instability in Lebanon and weaken democratic forces that have lost ground since the Cedar Revolution in 2005 swept a pro-Western government to power. Iran immediately said it would make up whatever shortfalls the Lebanese army incurs by a U.S. aid cut.” (Eli wrote about the attempts to suspend military aid to Lebanon on Wednesday.)

The following appeared in the Gallipolis Daily Tribune last week and in today’s Union Daily Times.

CNN has become the latest to brand Anwar Awlaki, a US citizen born and raised in the United States, as not just a “terrorist,” but indeed the “New bin Laden.” Awlaki, we learned in April, became the first American citizen in history to be officially and publicly added to the CIA’s assassination list.

Much has been made of the damage done to America’s increasingly tenuous claims to being a nation of the rule of law by the large-scale detentions (beginning in the Bush Administration and continuing to this day) of terror suspects without charges, but to the extent that he has found his way into the news at all, coverage of the New Mexico cleric has focused largely on sensationalizing the non-specific allegations against the popular internet cleric and outspoken critic of US foreign policy, and rarely, if ever, is the legal basis for targeting him ever mentioned.

As appalling as the detention of so-called “enemy combatants” has been, the Awlaki situation is doubly bad, with the Obama Administration claiming the authority to order his assassination without a trial, and without having charged him with any crimes at all. Awlaki’s father, a well-respected academic, has been soliciting legal help in the US to contest this impending execution.

The elder Awlaki’s quest to save his son’s life is an uphill battle, of course, as President Obama claims the authority to assassinate his son on essentially his own word, and there does not appear to be any obvious legal recourse. He is, in essence, fighting to get the court to hear the argument that his son is not guilty of capital crimes, when he hasn’t been charged, let alone convicted yet, and the evidence is entirely secret, hinted at only tangentially by unnamed Administration officials quoted in media outlets that seem only too eager to condemn Awlaki themselves.

Officials have claimed in recent days that an indictment against Awlaki may eventually be in the offing, but he has been an official target of assassination for at least three months already, and the administration aided a Yemeni government attack which they at one point believed had assassinated him in mid-December, though it was later revealed that this attack had killed only a large number of civilians.

Officials likewise claim that it is Awlaki’s “operational” role in terrorist activities, a claim never substantiated by a shred of publicly available evidence, that is the reason for his assassination. Throughout the Muslim world Awlaki is well known primarily as a critic of US foreign policy, however, and his assassination will be read as a political assassination, in no small part because the claims against him, when they get specific at all, always harken back to comments he made critical of the Bush and later Obama Administrations, and claims that those comments in and of themselves amount to material aid for terrorism.

Awlaki’s suspiciously foreign-sounding name aside, all Americans should be extremely concerned with the administration’s latest claims, which amount to a blanket permit for the president to order the assassination of any American citizen living overseas on the basis of secret evidence and whispered allegations of ill-defined crimes which, even assuming they are crimes, don’t appear to rise to the level of a capital offense.

If President Obama is going to claim the authority to order summary executions, it would behoove Americans to ask where this power came from and why it is needed. If the administration goes ahead with its plans to kill Awlaki, we ought to again ask why, and not accept sloganeering efforts to christen him as the “new bin Laden” as the answer.

from LobeLog: News and Views Relevant to U.S.-Iran relations for August 12th, 2010:

Foreign Policy: Michael Eisenstadt and David Crist, both fellows at the AIPAC-formed and often hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, write that President Obama must “convince Tehran that his outstretched hand can be formed into a fist.” Eisenstadt and Crist argue that some “key” Iranian leaders are likely to instigate a confrontation with the U.S., “unless Washington, acting with both caution and firmness, moves to avert such an eventuality.” They call for a warning that the U.S. will “not necessarily respond in a symmetrical or proportionate manner to Iranian provocations,” citing the example of the failed containment effort against Iraq in the 1990s.

The Washington Post: While not specifically addressing and Israeli strike against Iran, Columnist George Will feeds the talking point of a weak Obama and a determined Netanyahu, with his “focus firmly on Iran.” Will, writing from Jerusalem, draws a caricatured contrast between the two: “Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist.” Will ends with an anecdotal boast about Netanyahu’s unwillingness to bend to Washington: “Netanyahu, whom no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: ‘You live in Chevy Chase. Don’t play with our future.’”

The Atlantic: Robert D. Kaplan makes the case that containment might be the best strategy to deal with a nuclear Iran. Basing his argument on Henry Kissinger’s writings on limited nuclear war, Kaplan concludes that the costs of stopping Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program is dangerously high while the real risks posed by a nuclear weapons possessing Iran is lower than many would acknowledge. The numerous shared interests between Shiites and the U.S. and the demographic and likely positive ideological and philosophical shifts underway in Iran lead Kaplan to conclude that, “Given this prognosis, and the high cost and poor chances for success of any military effort to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, I believe that containment of a nuclear Iran is the most sensible policy for the United States.”

Reuters: Russia’s LUKOIL together with China’s state-run Zhuhai Zhenrong are resuming gasoline sales with Iran. Chinese companies have provided half of Iran’s gasoline imports in recent months.

The Pentagon is caterwauling that the next round of WikiLeaks’ disclosures of US government documents will be even more damaging than the last round.

It is always touching to see the world’s most powerful military machine portray itself as a “pitiful, helpless giant” (the phrase Nixon used in his speech announcing his illegal invasion of Cambodia).

WikiLeaks is wreaking havoc primarily because the U.S. government has shoveled so much bilge on Afghanistan for the last 9 years.

The easiest way for the US government to reduce WikiLeaks’ impact is to disclose the truth at the time events occur.

But that is like asking a king to surrender his sovereign immunity….