Author: Jim Lobe

The more one looks into it, the more Elliott Abrams’ rendition of how Iran allegedly smuggles weapons to Hamas in Gaza via Somalia and Eritrea just gets weirder and weirder. Remember: he was Bush’s top Middle East adviser from December, 2002, until January 20 and, as such, had access to the most sensitive information available to the U.S. intelligence community. Yet he seems to be lending himself to an extraordinarily crude Israeli disinformation campaign in which Somalia, which is some 1500 miles from Gaza, is depicted as a key trans-shipment point for the alleged supply of weapons from Iran to Hamas.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has now posted the Abrams transcript, including the relevant passage on the alleged Iranian-Gaza smuggling routes. Among other things, he says that “the bulk” of Iranian-origin weapons for Hamas travel the Gulf of Aden route to Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea or “places like that” before moving by land through Sudan and Egypt to the Sinai. By “the bulk,” I assume he means most. Yet it seems that the only sources who have spoken of such a land route are unidentified Israeli officials. Last week, I spoke with three experts on Somalia and piracy there, and all three said they had never heard of such a route and considered it fanciful, to say the least.

Here is the relevant passage in the interview:

GWERTZMAN: How — if I could just intersperse a question — how did the Iranian arms get to Gaza in the first place?

ABRAMS: Well, if you ask the Egyptians they will tell you that some of it comes by sea and that the Israelis need to do a better job at guarding the coastline.

I didn’t find any Israeli officials who accepted that view. They believe that these things actually do come in the tunnels. And the tunnels have, you know, one should not think of, sort of, tiny, dirty hole in the ground. These tunnels are industrial strength. Many of them have electricity and lights and there is a tunnel infrastructure in Gaza. There are tunnel courts where disputes are resolved. There are permits for tunnels. So this is really rather well regulated by Hamas.

GWERTZMAN: I mean, I’ve heard that these weapons go to Sudan and up and just up the Nile?

ABRAMS: Well, it appears that they come by sea, most of them, by sea from Iran and go around Gulf of Aiden [sic] and, right, and up ultimately they don’t, we don’t think they go through the canal, most of them by ship and out into the Mediterranean and then into Gaza. Rather, it seems that they hit land in places like Yemen or Somalia or, I guess, Eritrea to some extent, places like that, you could look at the map. And then cross over into Sinai and are taken across Sinai and then sneaked into Gaza. I don’t think this is, you know, accounts for 100% of the shipments but that seems to be the bulk of them.

Now, you will remember that at the end of the Gaza War there were pledges by the United States and a number of European countries that we would try to help interdict the seaborne part of this. And the Egyptians were supposed to try the Sinai part, before you get into the area right on the border. I don’t know whether there has actually been in the last month or so any significant increase in the maritime policing.

GWERTZMAN: Right. Next question.

Before Abrams spoke about it on the record, by far the best dissection of the story on which Abrams seems to have based his assertions about the land route appeared Feb 1 on the Moon of Alabama website which I strongly urge you to visit. Entitled “The ‘Iranian’ Weapon Ships,” it does a masterful job – far better and more detailed than I can do here — of tracing the convoluted story of the Cypriot-flagged Russian container ship Monchegorsk, which was boarded and searched by the U.S. Navy January 19 near the entrance to the Red Sea after passing through the Gulf of Aden. It was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who really drew attention to the incident when, asked about it by an Israeli reporter at the Foreign Press Center here January 27, Mullen suggested that unidentified weapons carried aboard the vessel were bound for Syria but were “going to end up in Gaza.” He provided no theory, however, on how they might get from Syria to Gaza.

Read the rest of Jim’s post and comment on his blog.

Dennis Ross’ appointment was finally announced today. This appeared as a “press release” on the State Department’s website late this afternoon:

Appointment of Dennis Ross as Special Advisor for The Gulf and Southwest Asia

Robert Wood
Acting Department Spokesman
Washington, DC
February 23, 2009

The Secretary is pleased to announce the appointment of Dennis B. Ross to the position of Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia. This is a region in which America is fighting two wars and facing challenges of ongoing conflict, terror, proliferation, access to energy, economic development and strengthening democracy and the rule of law. In this area, we must strive to build support for U.S. goals and policies. To be successful, we will need to be able to integrate our policy development and implementation across a broad range of offices and senior officials in the State Department, and, in his role as Special Advisor to the Secretary, Ambassador Ross will be asked to play that role.

Specifically, as Special Advisor, he will provide to the Secretary and senior State Department officials strategic advice and perspective on the region; offer assessments and also act to ensure effective policy integration throughout the region; coordinate with senior officials in the development and formulation of new policy approaches; and participate, at the request of the Secretary, in inter-agency activities related to the region.

Ambassador Ross brings a wealth of experience not just to issues within the region but also to larger political-military challenges that flow from the area and have an impact outside of the Gulf and Southwest Asia, and the Secretary looks forward to drawing on that experience and diplomatic perspective.

There will no doubt be a wealth of commentary about what precisely this announcement will mean for Ross’s future authority and influence. But, if you compare it with the way the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) advertised it to its Board of Trustees early last month — Ross will be “ambassador-at-large” and “the secretary’s top advisor on a wide range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process to Iran” — it seems to fall significantly short. Short, that is, not just with respect to with the “topness” of his status as Clinton’s adviser, but also short in terms of his geographical scope since it appears his brief will be confined to the Gulf and Southwest Asia — regions in which, contrary to the press release’s words, he has very little, if any, direct experience.

That doesn’t mean Ross will not be influential in developing Iran policy, in particular, but his role seems to be a) strictly advisory, with no direct policy-making responsibility; and b) confined to the State Department, unless Clinton asks him to work with other agencies as well. His exclusive responsibility to the secretary — there is no mention of any direct tie to the president or the White House — stands as a rather dramatic contrast to both Special [Middle East] Envoy George Mitchell and Special [AfPak] Representative Richard Holbrooke whose authorities and responsibilities are linked explicitly linked to the White House, in addition to the secretary of state. That impression is naturally bolstered by the fact that Mitchell’s and Holbrooke’s appointments were announced in person by Obama, as well as by Clinton, and they will be reporting to the White House, in addition to the Secretary.

Read the rest of Jim’s post and comment on his blog.

Elliott Abrams just confirmed that he will be official mouthpiece of Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud Party at the Council on Foreign Relations and on the pages of The Weekly Standard (and probably in the Wall Street Journal, too).

In reading the article, ironically entitled “The Path of Realism or the Path to Failure: Laying a Foundation for Peace in Palestine,” what can’t help but be struck by the coincidence in views between Abrams and the Likud leader on virtually every single issue regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from reviving the notion of a Jordanian option to seeing the conflict as “part of a broader struggle in the region over Iranian extremism and power.” Also noteworthy is the clarity with which he expresses his total opposition to his former boss’s (President George W. Bush) stated policy, particularly with respect to the Annapolis process (although it apparently didn’t occur to him to offer his resignation under the circumstances) and his explicit embrace of Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (”reliable and trustworthy”) and the PA’s U.S.-tutored security forces who “acted in parallel, and sometimes in concert, with Israeli forces” during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. I’m sure both Fayyad and the PA’s security forces appreciate such a fulsome endorsement from Netanyahu’s alter ego.

With friends like Abrams, who seems to think that democratic reform — remember, he was in charge of global democracy promotion, as well as the Middle East, in Bush’s National Security Council — consists mainly of building Palestinian security forces that can maintain Israel’s occupation indefinitely and fails to mention the word “settlements” in a 3,200-page essay on “realism” and laying a foundation for peace in Palestine, who needs enemies?

As first reported by Laura Rozen and subsequently confirmed by Chris Nelson, it appears that Chas Freeman has been appointed chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the body that is charged by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) with synthesizing the analyses of the entire U.S. intelligence community and producing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) — the most famous of which was the December 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program that put paid to the hopes of hawks who favored a military action against Tehran — that are used to guide policymakers on critical issues facing U.S. security.

To me, this is a stunning appointment. There are very few former senior diplomats as experienced and geographically well-rounded (just look at this bio here), knowledgeable, entertaining (in a mordant sort of way), accessible (until now at least), and verbally artful as Freeman. He can speak with equal authority about the politics of the royal family in Saudi Arabia (where he was ambassador), the Chinese Communist Party — he served as Nixon’s primary interpreter during the ground-breaking 1972 visit and later deputy chief of mission of the Beijing embassy, and the prospects for and geo-strategic implications of fossil-fuel production and consumption over the next decade or so. But, more to the point, he was probably the most direct and outspoken — and caustic — critic of the conduct of Bush’s “global war on terror,” especially of the influence of the neo-conservatives — of any former senior member of the career foreign service. His appointment constitutes a nightmare, for the Israeli right and its U.S. supporters, in particular, (and for reflexive China-bashers, as well).

For a taste of both his rhetorical style and his politics, see, for example, this speech he gave to the U.S. Information Agency Alumni Association two years ago or, better yet, this one to the Pacific Council on International Policy in October 2007 in which he says:

“In retrospect, Al Qaeda has played us with the finesse of a matador exhausting a great bull by guiding it into unproductive lunges at the void behind his cape. By invading Iraq, we transformed an intervention in Afghanistan most Muslims had supported into what looks to them like a wider war against Islam. We destroyed the Iraqi state and catalyzed anarchy, sectarian violence, terrorism, and civil war in that country.

Meanwhile, we embraced Israel’s enemies as our own; they responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies. We abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel’s efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations. We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists. This has convinced most Palestinians that Israel cannot be appeased and is persuading increasing numbers of them that a two-state solution is infeasible. It threatens Israelis with an unwelcome choice between a democratic society and a Jewish identity for their state. Now the United States has brought the Palestinian experience – of humiliation, dislocation, and death – to millions more in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel and the United States each have our reasons for what we are doing, but no amount of public diplomacy can persuade the victims of our policies that their suffering is justified, or spin away their anger, or assuage their desire for reprisal and revenge.”

He doesn’t pull punches.

Michael Ledeen, who 25 months ago announced to the world that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had died — he got this from such an exclusive source that not even Amir Taheri, another neo-con fantasist, could confirm or deny the story — once again has his hand on the pulse of the Iranian people (and possibly a mind meld on the Supreme Leader himself). In an op-ed published by the reliably hard-core Wall Street Journal editorial page today, Ledeen, who, apparently due to apparently irreconcilable differences with Danielle Pletka, took his “Freedom Chair” at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) front known as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), not only connects last week’s successful Iranian satellite launch with “medieval Shiite texts” heralding the return of the 12th Imam and the end of days, but also reprises his certitude (dating back many years now) that the Iranian people are ready to rise in revolt against their regime.

The argument predictably concludes that “(T)he U.S. must not make the mistake of limiting demands (on Iran) to the nuclear program. A free Iran must be the objective,” and, while the logic of the whole article is a howl — no doubt adding fodder to the Journal’s news staff’s contention that the paper doesn’t need a comics section because you can find it on the editorial pages — what is most interesting is the direct appeal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the Obama official most likely to argue Ledeen’s position within the administration. So it seems as if even hard-line neo-cons like Ledeen see Clinton as the link in the new power configuration that may be most susceptible to their arguments for aggressive “democracy promotion” abroad.

As he makes clear in this post, The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan has finally come to the conclusion that the democracy claptrap that neo-conservatives have spouted since 9/11 has been a facade for their core foreign-policy worldview with Israel at its heart.

“I took neoconservatism seriously for a long time, because it offered an interesting critique of what’s wrong with the Middle East, and seemed to have the only coherent strategic answer to the savagery of 9/11. I now realize that the answer – the permanent occupation of Iraq – was absurdly utopian and only made feasible by exploiting the psychic trauma of that dreadful day. The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right. That’s the conclusion I’ve been forced to these last few years. And to insist that America adopt exactly the same constant-war-as-survival that Israelis have been slowly forced into. Cheney saw America as Netanyahu sees Israel: a country built for permanent war and the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of waging it (with a few war crimes to keep the enemy on their toes).”

(Sullivan’s post has predictably infuriated John Podhoretz, the keeper of the neo-con flame at Commentary.)

Given their long-established affinity for “friendly authoritarian” regimes, I never understood why so many foreign-policy and other intellectuals were gulled by the neo-cons’ efforts to dress up their Arabo- and Islamophobia in the guise of Wilsonianism and democracy promotion (although I accept that Wolfowitz — a neo-con who is not a Likudnik — may have been sincere). The contradictions in their arguments, let alone with their historical record, always seemed so glaringly obvious. (How can you be a Wilsonian and indefinitely deny self-determination to Palestinians or condition it on their becoming Finland, as one of Ariel Sharon’s closest advisers suggested?) Just this past week, I attended a presentation by Council on Foreign Relations fellow Stewart Patrick, the author of a new book on the origins of U.S. multilateralism, who described them as Wilsonians who disdain multilateral institutions. The sooner people disabuse themselves of the notion that the spread of Wilsonian democracy is a core tenet of neo-conservativism, the more realistic any discussion of the movement and its contribution to the disastrous situation both the United States and Israel now face in the Middle East will be.