Author: Jim Lobe

MSNBC and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) are reporting that Gov. Palin met this afternoon with the board of directors of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Sen. Joe Lieberman to, in the words of one McCain campaign official cited by MSNBC, put “the American Jewish community at ease over her understanding of US-Middle East relations.” It’s worth noting that Palin, who has obviously been completely off-limits to reporters since she was rolled out as McCain’s running-mate in Dayton Friday, stiffed a reception in her honor sponsored by none other than Phyllis Schlafly a couple hours later. (One wonders what other lobbies have tried to arrange a meeting with Palin in the last 96 hours and with what success.)

“We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we were pleased that Gov. Palin expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel,” AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said after the meeting. “Like Sen. McCain, the vice presidential nominee understands and believes in the special friendship between the two democracies and would work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership in a McCain/Palin Administration.”

“She was extremely well received,” McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb said, noting that Palin was interrupted by applause twice,” according to the JTA account. He added that Palin spoke about “the relationship between Israel and American national security, and the threats to Israel from Iran and others.”

Evidence of nervousness in the McCain campaign about Palin’s impact on Jewish voters and donors was made clear when the Likudist Republican Jewish Coalition circulated a video of her Alaska office in which it found a small Israeli flag, in the words of Politico, “poking out from behind a drape.”

“I think it speaks volumes that she keeps an Israeli flag on the wall of her office,” RJC’s executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico in an e-mail. “It clearly shows what’s in her heart.” Politico’s analysis is well worth reading. As I noted Friday, a Nexis search of the two years previous to her selection as McCain’s running-mate failed to find a single published article in which Palin ever mentioned Israel. I suspect it may make it into her acceptance speech Wednesday night.

I was really surprised by the news, first reported by Laura Rozen on her blog on Mother Jones, that Michael Ledeen, who had been under Richard Perle’s wing at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for some 20 years, has moved to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) and taken his “Freedom” chair with him. I have no inside information on the reasons for the move (I was declared persona non grata at AEI five years ago and told I shouldn’t try to attend any of its events) , and don’t buy his own explanation, although his reference to a “rising” FDD suggests his association there might be more lucrative, particularly as FDD, which earlier this year suffered major Democratic defections, is competing strongly for Sheldon Adelson’s largess. (And I have no doubt at all that Ledeen’s obsession with Iran would definitely appeal to the multi-billionaire casino magnate who reportedly shares that obsession).

One possible explanation is that the AEI’s incoming president (as of Jan. 1), Syracuse University Prof. Arthur Brooks, is hoping that AEI’s public image on foreign policy — dominated as it has been for so long by hard-line neo-cons like Perle — might be softened somewhat. But, while Ledeen clearly belongs on the radical fringe (just read his latest article in the National Review Online (NRO) on how Russia has joined the “terror masters” in Tehran and Damascus and how China is about to invade Taiwan), he’s certainly not nearly as visible as someone like former UN Amb. John Bolton, a bona fide extremist (albeit more nationalist than neo-con). On the other hand, Bolton’s frequent op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph, if not his cachet as a Bush alumnus willing to denounce his former boss as an appeaser to the mainstream press, no doubt raises a lot more money for AEI. By contrast, Ledeen’s relative obscurity probably attracts only a few grateful donors.

Indeed, apart from National Review Online, on which he appears to be publishing less and less, Ledeen has become lincreasingly invisible over the last couple of years, rarely participating even in AEI forums, so his departure may be due to the fact that he’s simply not producing enough. (I understand that his colleague, Joshua Muravchik, has recently been complaining worryingly to friends that AEI management has been pressing him to publish more.) In fact, a quick review of Nexis over the past three years shows that his annual article output for NRO has fallen quite sharply from more than 40 in the Aug 2005-06 period to just 18 in the last Aug 2007-08 period, which is particularly remarkable given all the speculation over the past year about attacking Iran. His television appearances also declined over the past two years, while his latest book, The Iranian Time Bomb (Sept 2007), was all but ignored by the major newspapers (with the exception of the New York Times which predictably panned it).

I would think that FDD, while certainly part of the same Likudist network as AEI’s Middle East cadre, marks a major comedown in prestige and power for Ledeen, and I have a hard time believing that he would go there willingly unless he were offered significantly more money than he is able to earn from his AEI perch. In Time Bomb, Ledeen stressed what a “singular blessing” it has been to work at AEI “where I can find out most anything I need to know by walking down the hall and asking some brilliant and collegial person.” And he singled out for praise the outgoing DeMuth who, he noted, has “always supported my work…” So, was he pushed, or did he jump? Either way, it’s an intriguing development.

I’m still on vacation but, like everyone else, have been quite amazed at the ongoing Georgia crisis, particularly the failure so far of the administration and the campaigns of the two presidential candidates to absorb its potential significance and the need for Washington (and the West more generally) to fundamentally reassess its global position and how over-stretched it has become. (Remember that Georgia was one of Rumsfeld’s first foreign destinations after 9/11 and was followed by a significant deployment in early 2002 of U.S. Special Forces — over Russian protests — there in what was clearly part of a much larger strategy to use the “war on terror” to build the military infrastructure for the “New American Century” in and around Eurasia.)

Two articles — both quite provocative — have appeared in the mainstream press since the crisis broke that have underlined the potential historic significance of the ongoing crisis. While they are not completely convincing, they nonetheless are well worth reading and meditating over. The first is Paul Krugman’s “The Great Illusion” which appeared in the NY Times August 15. It suggests that the latest events may herald the curtain’s fall on the second great age of globalization, the first having taken place from the end of the 19th century to August, 1914. Of course, the comparison of the two ages — with respect to terrorism (then anarchism), vast social dislocations caused by industrialization and imperialism, as well as the high degree of economic integration — is hardly new, but Krugman’s thumbnail analysis is, as I noted, thought-provoking.

“By itself, …the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically,” Krugman writes. “But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.” The article brings in a number of pertinent examples of rising nationalism in the economic, as well as the strategic and political spheres, that today’s policymakers, politicians and publics might well consider before reflexively taking Georgia’s side. Serb nationalists had a pretty good case against the Austro-Hungarian Empire back in 1914, too.

The second article, by former Singaporean diplomat and veteran provocateur Kishore Mahbubani, appeared in yesterday’s Financial Times under the headline “The West is Strategically Wrong on Georgia.” Mahbubani, who notes the hypocrisy of U.S. outrage (and how it appears to publics in Latin America and the Islamic world, in particular) over Russian actions, is particularly succinct about the strategic choices faced by the U.S. and the West at this juncture and argues for a fundamental strategic reassessment based on an understanding that the West can no longer “dictate terms” to the rest of the world as it has assumed it could do since the end of the Cold War. In fact, he argues, both the U.S. and the West have become terribly isolated from what the Bush administration loves to call “the international community.” His analysis of what strategic choices are now available to the West –it can afford only so many enemies and so should be much more discriminating in its choices — is particularly acute. Interestingly, Mahbubani, author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (2008), ends on a more optimistic note than Krugman (although I, presumably like Krugman, believe that nationalism in Asia is as likely to undermine the burgeoning “Pacific Century” as U.S. over-extension and arrogance have wreaked havoc with Bill Kristol’s and Bob Kagan’s cherished but chimerical “New American Century”.)

While the notion that the Georgia crisis takes us back to the end of the Cold War and the “return of history” has become a cliche among most of the commentariat (while some neo-cons predictably compare it to the Sudetenland, Munich and 1938), both columns see the present moment as signaling much deeper historical and even epochal challenges to U.S. and western hegemony in what is now, ever more clearly, a multipolar world that rejects Pax Americana. And, if U.S. leaders, actual and imminent, continue to insist on a hard line toward Russia, that rejection will very likely extend to Europe, as well. Indeed, western (or “old”) Europe, in particular, has some major strategic decisions of its own to make, having seen where its habitual deference to Washington has gotten it.

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

True to his benefactor’s wishes, Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies Chairman Anatol Sharansky today endorsed John McCain for president, calling Sen. Obama a “risk” for Israel. Sharansky, an old pal of Richard Perle’s as well as a beneficiary of multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, made his endorsement during an interview on Shalom TV, a Jewish-American cable network. “In the case of McCain, we know exactly where his policy is,” said Sharansky. “I know, personally, McCain for 20 years. He is a person of principle, and he is also a person who has absolutely a great record of supporting Israel. Getting to Obama, there is no record. Nobody can know for sure what will be. It can happen to be good. It can happen to be very bad. It’s a risk.”

(In addition to his Institute at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, Adelson, of course, is the major funder of Freedom’s Watch and is himself the beneficiary (although I imagine he pays handsomely) of Karl Rove’s political advice, according to a recent account by the National Journal. An intriguing report from Adelson’s Las Vegas headquarters suggests that he may be having some problem with his Macau interests.)

Sharansky’s intervention comes in the wake of warnings several days ago on the reliably Likudnik Wall Street Journal’s editorial page by two other Adelson beneficiaries and Institute officials, Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevy, against any attempt by outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to continue pursuing peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority or with Syria before he leaves office. “Members of Mr. Olmert’s party, Kadima, and of the governing coalition need to ensure that all substantive negotiations with Arab leaders are suspended until a new prime minister assumes office,” they argue. “Allowing Mr. Olmert to negotiate over life-and-death issues means continuing to hold Israel hostage to his political maneuvers.”

Having read and even reviewed (rather unfavorably) the first book in the thoroughly anti-semitic “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, I found this analysis of the recent McCain ad on Obama as “The One” pretty persuasive. It doesn’t follow book one exactly (Obama is not from central Europe or Carpathia/Romania), but it’s close enough. The ad can be found on the link to beliefnet.com.

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

Citing most of the same evidence that I have written about over the past few weeks, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, whose access to key policymakers (outside of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office) is second to no other Washington daily journalist argues in his Sunday column that the Bush administration is unlikely to bomb Iran before it leaves office. It’s an important column, not only because he is more specific about the messages conveyed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, (and DNI chief Adm. Michael McConnell before him) to top officials in Israel this summer — that the U.S. would “oppose overflights of Iraqi airspace to attack Iran” — but also because he has been told by a “senior official” that the administration will announce what has been rumored for the past month — that Washington will indeed open an interest section in Tehran. Given the trauma of the 1979-81 hostage crisis, I personally believe that the presence of U.S. diplomats in Tehran virtually guarantees that the U.S. will not attack Iran so long as they remain there. If the prediction of Ignatius’ senior official comes true, it’s a very, very big deal in my view.

Ignatius is particularly close to both the Pentagon brass and the intelligence community (and he’s writing a book to be published in September with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft). His mention of the study by the Washington Institute for Near Policy (WINEP) — which clearly tries to downplay the international consequences of a U.S. and/or Israeli preventive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — is particularly interesting in that respect. The study, which its authors have strenuously denied is aimed at making such an attack much more “thinkable,” is nonetheless quite concerning, even more so because Tony Lake and Susan Rice (among Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers) effectively endorsed it. It’s clearly on the minds of some people who count.

After reading the column, you should also look at Col. Pat Lang’s caution about it on his always-incisive blog. He generally agrees with Ignatius’ analysis, expands on it in important ways, but notes that the current commander-in-chief could prove disturbingly unpredictable in the wake of the November elections. If, on the other hand, U.S. diplomats are in place by then, I think his options will have narrowed considerably.