Month: February 2013

Senator Lindsey Graham, reigning ultra-nationalist of the Republican Party, is really offended by secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s supposedly shocking positions on Israel. So, he has sent a letter asking Hagel to clarify his views.

As The Weekly Standard explains, a law student named Kenneth Wagner attended a 2010 speech that Hagel gave at Rutgers University. Wagner apparently has friends at the Washington Free Beacon and emailed them his thoughts on Hagel’s speech.

“I am sitting in a lecture by Chuck Hagel at Rutgers,” Wagner wrote in the email. “He basically said that Israel has violated every UN resolution since 1967, that Israel has violated its agreements with the quartet, that it was risking becoming an apartheid state if it didn’t allow the Palestinians to form a state. He said that the settlements were getting close to the point where a contiguous Palestinian state would be impossible.”

“He said that he [thought] that Netanyahu was a radical and that even [former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi] Livni, who was hard nosed thought he was too radical and so wouldn’t join in a coalition [government] with him. … He said that Hamas has to be brought in to any peace negotiation,” Wagner wrote.

So Graham apparently reads the Free Beacon (big surprise there) and has now written a formal letter to Hagel, asking: “Senator Hagel, did you say this? Have you said anything similar? Does this contemporaneous email accurately reflect your views?”

Because if your answer to any of those questions is yes, you should be immediately disqualified as a candidate for Secretary of Defense for harboring such extreme views! At least, I’m guessing that’s what Graham wanted to say.

Leaving aside the fact that all of Hagel’s comments, relayed by Wagner, are basically true, it might be relevant to ask who else harbors those views.

The Times of Israel reports today that Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general and ex-ambassador to South Africa, believes Israel currently qualifies as an apartheid state.

“In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state — in the hope that the status quo is temporary — is an apartheid state,” Liel said recently in Jerusalem.

“As someone who knows the original apartheid well, and also knows the State of Israel quite well – I was born here, grew up here, served and fought for it for 30 years — someone like me knows that Zionism isn’t apartheid and the State of Israel that I grew up in wasn’t an apartheid state,” Liel  emphasized.

“I’m here today because I came to the conclusion that the occupation of the West Bank as it exists today is a sort of Israeli apartheid,” said Liel. “The occupation became a hump on the back of Zionism; it has now become the hump of the State of Israel.”

There is a real danger of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank becoming an integral part of the state, he said. “When that happens, when the West Bank and [Israel in the pre-1967 lines] become one, and the Palestinian residents of the West Bank will not have citizenship — we’re apartheid,” he said.

So does Graham not include Liel in his constant glorification of the state of Israel? Should Graham, or his equivalent in Israel (Danny Danon, maybe?) be writing letters to Liel grilling him on these views and edging him out of any further government service?

More likely, Graham is unaware that the scope of debate in Israel about these issues is much wider than it is here in the US. Graham thus continues to badger Hagel for holding views based on facts, and continues to claim that he is wildly out of the mainstream, which he is not.

Update: I should have mentioned that the “apartheid” label has been applied to Israel by many, many others, including dozens of other high-level Israeli officials, British government officials, former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, former US President Jimmy Carter, and the leaders of countries like Jordan, who Graham consistently votes to provide with billions in US aid.

Congressman Mike Coffman, Republican from Colorado, has made public a broad plan for where exactly to make the approximately $500 billion in cuts mandated by the sequestration deal. You know, the cuts that almost every notable official in the White House, Pentagon, and Congress claims are too drastic and would be devastating to US national security. Coffman, no dove, makes targeting areas of waste look easy:

1. $150 billion. Require annual reductions in defense spending by the Department of Defense through reducing programs and activities which do not contribute significantly to military capability, allowing leaders of Defense to use their expertise to combat wasteful earmarks and respond to changing environments.

2. $100 billion. Adopt “sea swap” policies for cruisers, destroyers, and amphibious ships by flying crews out to ships instead of changing crews at home ports.

3. $53 billion. Use local civilian contractors instead of military personnel to perform commercial-type activities at military bases.

4. $52.5 billion. Shift Army and Marine Corps troops to Reserves, preserving ground combat strength but returning active duty forces to pre-9/11 levels.

5. $52 billion. Reduce spending for the Pentagon’s “Other Procurement,” which covers non-major equipment replacement. Our overseas deployments are ramping down, and everyday equipment will last longer now than in wartime.

6. $36.7 billion. Cut the number of Department of Defense civilian bureaucrat positions through attrition.

7. $20 billion. Cut U.S. troops stationed in Europe.

8. $15 billion. Cut the number of consultants and contractors at headquarters.

9. $9 billion. Cap experimental fuel procurement.

10. $7.1 billion. Consolidate the management of retail stores on military bases.

11. $7 billion. Postpone procurement of the Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle.

12. $4.6 billion. Unify the military medical system.

13. $3 billion. Delay refurbishment of the Abrams tank.

14. $1.8 billion. Spend less on military bands.

15. $800 million. Reduce the top-heavy number of Pentagon generals and admirals.

“All that would make for $512.5 billion saved over 10 years,” Coffman writes.

Most of the defense budget buys exorbitantly priced weapons systems that are obsolete in the type of 21st century warfare that Washington expects to wage. They want ’em just to keep defense corporations filthy rich and to continue to be able to “project power” around the world.

Still, we have President Obama saying just yesterday that “the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf.”

Aw, poor aircraft carrier! How are we supposed to rule the world with one less aircraft carrier intimidating Iran in the Persian Gulf!?

As Gopal Ratnam reports at Bloomberg News, “the defense budget contains hundreds of billions of dollars for new generations of aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, tanks that even the Army says it doesn’t need and combat vehicles too heavy to maneuver in desert sands or cross most bridges in Asia, Africa or the Middle East.” 

And yet our overlords in Washington say nothing can be cut.

One of the things itching the people who demand more transparency and accountability in Obama’s drone war is that the secrecy of the program means that the government doesn’t publicly release casualty estimates. This has led a number of journalistic and think-tank organizations to do their due diligence and come up with their own estimates with their own methodologies. Even United Nations special rapporteur Ben Emmerson is in the beginning stages of an investigation into drone deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

But none of this means the government doesn’t maintain their own, classified casualty estimates.

Micah Zenko, at his CFR blog, caught an obscure statement Sen. Lindsey Graham made yesterday during a speech at the Easley Rotary Club in Easley, South Carolina. Graham issued the boilerplate defense of the drone war and then might have let something slip.

Graham then added:  “We’ve killed 4,700. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we’re at war, and we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al-Qaeda.” His estimate of the death toll of suspected terrorists and militants by U.S. nonbattlefield targeted killings is higher than any other reported.My report, Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies, compiled the averages found within the ranges provided by New America Foundation, Long War Journal, and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and produced a number about 1,200 fewer.

It is notable that Graham’s estimate nearly matches the TBIJ’s highest estimated range for “total reported killed” in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia: 4,756. Either Graham is a big fan of TBIJ’s work, or perhaps he inadvertently revealed the U.S. government’s body count for nonbattlefield targeted killings.

It should be noted also that TBIJ, despite their rigorous methodology, was for a long time shunned by a mainstream media that refused to cite their casualty estimates, simply because it recorded the highest ones available. Newspapers and TV typically used the middle-of-the-road estimate, which was New America Foundation. Graham – with his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee – is almost certainly privy to some secret government numbers on drone war casualties. The fact that he might of let it slip here – and the fact that it’s way higher than virtually anybody in the mainstream reports – should be something of a lesson, I think.

Update: Just a reminder to help put this 4,700 in context: the Standford/NYU study of the drone war found that, “The number of ‘high-level’ targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low—estimated at just 2%.”

In recent weeks, conservative media and politicians have been up in arms over a speech Hagel allegedly gave to the group “Friends of Hamas.” Hagel is paling around with terrorists! they cried.

But according to Dan Friedman, a reporter with the New York Daily News, the speech never happened and “Friends of Hamas” doesn’t even exist, and never has.

“I know,” Friedman writes, “because I was the unwitting source.”

Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.

On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.

But then the fiction caught like wildfire and was picked up by conservative media. First it was Breitbart.com, and then others followed. Eventually Republican politicians trying to block Hagel’s nomination caught wind of the rumors.

Breitbart.com, for their part, is calling Friedman a liar. They deny he was the original source for their Hagel, Friends of Hamas story, and insist the group is real.

Dave Weigel at Slate reported almost a week ago that Friends of Hamas doesn’t exist. And the Breitbart reporter, Ben Shapiro, who first published the fake scandal and is stubbornly sticking by it never did his due diligence to check on that.

This looks like a lesson in the dangers of confirmation bias. Breitbart.com appeared so eager to get a scoop that they reported a baseless rumor without checking the facts like reporters are supposed to do. And because conservatives were so eager to crucify Hagel (for daring to dissent from the Republican line on foreign policy during the Bush years), they jumped on the rumor and it entered into temporary reality, before the faithful were so rudely awakened by the truth.

A new report from the Center for a New American Security says that “the conventional wisdom” about how a nuclear Iran would spark a dangerous nuclear arms race in the Middle East “is probably wrong.”

“It is widely assumed that Saudi Arabia would respond to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by embarking on a crash program to develop their own bomb or by illicitly receiving nuclear weapons from its close ally Pakistan,” write Melissa G. Dalton, Matthew Irvine, and Colin Kahl, a Georgetown professor and former Obama administration official.

“These scenarios have been repeated so often in Washington and elsewhere that they have assumed a taken-for-granted quality,” they add.

Yet none of these outcomes represent the most likely Saudi response to a nuclear-armed Iran. The Saudis would be highly motivated to acquire some form of nuclear deterrent to counter an Iranian bomb. However, significant disincentives – including the prospect of worsening Saudi Arabia’s security environment, rupturing strategic ties with the United States, damaging the country’s international reputation and making the Kingdom the target of sanctions – would discourage a mad rush by Riyadh to develop nuclear weapons. And, in any case, Saudi Arabia lacks the technological and bureaucratic wherewithal to do so any time in the foreseeable future. Saudi Arabia is more likely to respond to Iranian nuclearization by continuing to bolster its conventional defenses against Iranian aggression while engaging in a long-term hedging strategy designed to improve civilian nuclear capabilities.

The report goes into much more depth about how unlikely it is that Saudi Arabia, or anyone else, would respond to a nuclear-armed Iran by started their own nuclear weapons program.

It’s important to note here, again, that it is still the consensus opinion in the US and Israeli intelligence communities that Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon, despite what politicians irresponsibly spew. So the scenario of a nuclear-armed Iran is entirely hypothetical.

However, it is an important hypothetical, because one of the few scare-stories Washington is able to conjure up about some fictional future nuclear Iran is this arms race script. This scare-story is currently being employed to justify military build-ups in the Middle East, subservience to Israel’s supposed security interests, and cruel collective punishment on the Iranian people in the form of harsh economic sanctions.

These CNAS wonks aren’t the first to debunk the arms race scenario, though. Renowned international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz wrote in Foreign Affairs this past summer that this “oft-touted worry” is “unfounded.”

Properly defined, the term “proliferation” means a rapid and uncontrolled spread. Nothing like that has occurred; in fact, since 1970, there has been a marked slowdown in the emergence of nuclear states. There is no reason to expect that this pattern will change now. Should Iran become the second Middle Eastern nuclear power since 1945, it would hardly signal the start of a landslide. When Israel acquired the bomb in the 1960s, it was at war with many of its neighbors. Its nuclear arms were a much bigger threat to the Arab world than Iran’s program is today. If an atomic Israel did not trigger an arms race then, there is no reason a nuclear Iran should now.

It’s much easier for people to concede that Saudi Arabia would not go for the bomb in response to a nuclear Iran, I think. Washington wonks can list the multitude of disincentives Saudi Arabia would face to developing nukes, but nearly everyone buys into the rhetoric about an Iran determined to get them.

Why? It’s not as if a nuclear Saudi Arabia is any less scary than a nuclear Iran. Hawks, like Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, engender fear about a nuclear Iran by claiming they are a suicidal nation for which “mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent.” The evidence for this is Iran’s supposed support for Hezbollah and Hamas, but Saudi Arabia has a long history of supporting radical Sunni jihadists with habits of suicide bombings (think mujahideen). Indeed, they’re doing so right now in Syria – in contravention of a US decision to officially designate the leading Syrian rebel group, Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group. Shiite Iran, with its competitive political elections and vibrant social sphere, is far less extremist than the authoritarian Saudi version of Wahabism.

But no. Saudi Arabia is Washington’s ally, so it’s harder to evoke credible scare-stories about their speculative drive to get the bomb. Iran, on the other hand, is an official enemy. Scare-stories about official enemies – no matter how outlandish – are at the ready.