Here’s how the American neo-conservatives – many of whom love Israel to death, including William Kristol and Liz Cheney – want people to view the Obama administration. Lawyers who defend terror suspects are terrorist sympathisers?
Tag Archive for 'neo-conservatives'
The role of Ahmed Chalabi in the Iraq invasion is infamous. Friend of the neo-cons, feeder of false WMD stories, backer of war and close to Iran.
Seven years on, nothing has changed.
If The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, and Time’s Joe Klein, and Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt, and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, and Gen. Wes Clark (a TNR target), and Howard Dean, and former President Jimmy Carter, and a whole slew of others like them are “anti-semites,” then how terrible of an insult is it? By tossing around the term cynically and to advance personal vendettas, neoconservatives are the authors not only of their own irrelevance but also, more significantly, of the growing irrelevance of the “anti-semitism” charge.
Many fear that this year will see aggressive action against Iran and “regime change” under the guise of supposedly freeing the Iranian people (witness Robert Kagan in the Washington Post this week making this very point; yet another man determined to install a friendly puppet in Tehran. A neo-conservative who doesn’t care one iota for the Iranians who would suffer in the chaos).
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam teaches comparative politics at SOAS at the University of London and writes that Iran’s internal politics are hardly stable but not as confused as many outsiders think:
Despite the systematic efforts of many commentators and media outlets to represent what is happening in Iran as a wholesale revolt against everything the Islamic Republic stands for, a sober analysis reveals that we are witnessing the renegotiation of political power in the country. The protagonists represent different wings within the system; the contours of their politics are drawn upon the expanding canvas of the Islamic Republic. In short: Iran is in a post-revolutionary state, not a pre-revolutionary one.
At the height of the demonstrations after the contested election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad during last summer, I argued, in an article that was disputed and challenged by many skeptics, that we were not witnessing another revolution. But simply because there is a consensus amongst many people with vested interests that the Islamic Republic must be subdued and vilified by any means, one should not be bullied into overlooking the nuances of the changing political landscape in Iran. Simply because the legitimate yearnings for democracy and justice by Iranians are misinterpreted as a rebellion against Iran’s bias toward the Palestinian cause or indeed Islam itself, one should not be fooled into underestimating the capabilities of the state-sanctioned proponents of the political order in the country. What supporters of “regime change” can hope for, and what every Iranian, Arab, Muslim and any other person who empathizes with the plight of the people in the region must fear, is an entrenched civil war that would rip the country apart.
But I don’t think it will come to that. We are already witnessing signs of accommodation. Mir-Hossein Mousavi has written a conciliatory letter, which was followed up by Mohsen Rezai in his own communication with the Supreme Jurisprudent Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Behind the curtains the political factions are negotiating in order to rescue the political system in Iran from further destabilization. The opposition figures, Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, Mohammad Khatami and most notably Ayatollah Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, emerged out of the revolution and would never devour the project they have been busy building up. They are disciples of the Islamic Republic, and they are revealing themselves as such at this very moment.
My following article appears on ABC’s Unleashed:
The Iraq war has virtually dropped off the media radar.
The country remains far more dangerous than Afghanistan and yet Barack Obama’s “surge” against the Taliban and al-Qaeda is the biggest international story of the day.
Even leading neo-conservative William Kristol writes in The Washington Post that Obama has “acknowledged that he and his party were wrong about the Iraq surge in 2007 – after all, the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s and the hope is for a similar success”.
What a difference a few years make. Baghdad-based reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, Jane Arraf, lamented this decline in coverage by arguing for renewed interest from global news services “in a country with 130,000 US troops fighting a war that still costs tens of billions of dollars a month”.
It’s a distortion that the US military is happy to continue.
Explosive revelations occur but soon sink without a trace. Former UN weapon’s inspector, Hans Blix, told The Daily Mail that the Iraq conflict was “illegal”. A British inquiry currently investigating the reasons behind the invasion found that former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon “banned” preparations for the war in 2002 and 2003 to hide information from the public.
Former defence chiefs said that the US simply presumed that Tony Blair’s government would participate in the invasion even if no attempts were made to resolve the struggle with Saddam Hussein through the UN.
Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw tells The New Statesman that he “regrets” the huge loss of life in Iraq. A few in the mainstream media even dare to call for legal accountability for Western leaders who launch wars of aggression.
History is being re-written as official denials become the basis for further investigation. “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied”, said reporter Claud Cockburn.
The corporate media in America and Australia barely acknowledge that there is even a war in Iraq. A study by the US-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that anti-war voices were virtually invisible in The New York Times and The Washington Post this year, despite the general public growing increasingly opposed to American involvement in the world.
Leading commentators are part of the problem.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued in late November that US foreign policy over the past two decades “has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny”.
He included Iraq and Afghanistan in his calculation. Over one million civilians have died in both these countries since 2001.
Time columnist Joe Klein told Obama that he should, like former President Ronald Reagan, create a narrative to support ongoing wars in the Middle East, even if the chosen stories were untrue.
Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria instructed his readers that, “Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis”. Tell that to the killed and maimed in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, all suffering under American bombs.
Sloganeering has replaced serious analysis. Real war consequences are ignored. The embedded mindset has taken over the media asylum.
So, here’s what’s really happening.
There are over 250,000 private contractors deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai even accepted the depth of the problem with a little noticed comment recently. “Within the next two years,” he said, his government intended to end “operations by all private national and international security firms” and transfer the duties to “Afghan security entities”.
The ability of a puppet regime to dictate terms to its master is highly questionable, as we have seen this year in Palestine with the US-backed Ramallah clique.
It an open secret that private contractors are one of the key reasons for increased hostility of Iraqi and Afghan civilians towards occupation. Insurgency breeds on tales of debauched US embassy guards in Kabul drinking, fighting and using prostitutes.
An interview with Erik Prince, founder of military contractor Blackwater (now called Xe), in next month’s Vanity Fair will only confirm the impression of a cowboy running riot in Muslim lands.
Some Iraqi bloggers are still writing about freedom from foreign intervention, a dream that will not occur during Obama’s term. No American official has ever answered the basic question of how many US troops or military trainers will remain in Iraq beyond 2011.
Indeed, permanent bases in Iraq suggest a long-term presence. A few brave journalists, such as independent Dahr Jamail, are documenting the effect of the Iraq mission on returned US army personnel.
Unsurprisingly, Iraq’s oil remains a hotly contested commodity, though the politics behind the ownership of the black gold barely cracks a mainstream mention.
One of the few major reports I’ve read this year about the overall geo-political plan for American forces in the Middle East was published last month in TomDispatch and highlighted the expanding reach of Washington in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait. This is occupation re-branded for the 21st century’s second decade.
Writes journalist Nick Turse:
“The money the Pentagon has recently been pouring into the nations of the Persian Gulf to bulk up base infrastructure has only tied the US ever more tightly to the region’s autocratic, often unpopular regimes, while further arming and militarising an area traditionally considered unstable.”
Obama now owns the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and yet few reporters are willing to ask why escalation guarantees success.
The US President spoke last week on the 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan and stated:
“For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.”
The boots on the ground across the globe prove otherwise and resistance is growing from Bolivia to Palestine.
The multi-polar world has arrived with a thud. Washington is not pleased.
Neo-conservative bible The Weekly Standard ran this curious story last week and, if true, highlights a sad reality of the Middle East; lies, delusion and outright bigotry:
With his new film Tetro billed to open Beirut’s recent International Film Festival, Francis Ford Coppola was diverted from landing in the Lebanese capital when it was learned that his private plane used parts manufactured in Israel. Fortunately, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whose Lebanese ally Hezbollah controls security at Beirut International Airport, was able to overlook this minor indiscretion and permitted Coppola to land in Damascus, where he caught another plane to Beirut.
Coppola is revered in the Middle East, as in many other parts of the world, as director of The Godfather, and indeed a new version of the three-part epic has just been released in the region, dubbed into the Syrian dialect. (So how do you say “banana daquiri” in Syria? Banana daquiri.)
The director seemed to enjoy his time in Damascus in late October, where he was wildly impressed with Assad and his glamorous wife Asma. “We have felt so warmly received,” Coppola told Fox News correspondent Amy Kellogg. “The people you meet are kind and welcoming. [Damascus] is fascinating for so many reasons, relating to history. The food is fantastic. The president, his wife and family are lucid, appealing and able to speak on so many levels. In this way he convinces me he has a vision for the country which is positive.”
The issue of illegal, Jewish settlements in the West Bank are getting a lot of press recently.
First, Sarah Palin in a media interview for her newly released book (an utterly deluded affair, writes Andrew Sullivan, and a woman thrust on the world by a group of neo-conservatives, something we should never forget):
I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.
There are many Jews on their way to Israel? That’s news to me. Even J Street has responded to Palin’s comments.
An influential Jewish community leader and Democratic State Assemblyman from New York is currently heading a mission of about 50 Americans through the West Bank and East Jerusalem to promote home purchases in the area and to protest U.S. President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy.
…
“People buy properties in different places, and I can’t think of any reason why people dedicated to the land of Israel shouldn’t own something here, whether they will use it or use it as an opportunity for young families to live in that particular home,” the politician told Haaretz yesterday in Elon Moreh, an Israeli settlement in the Samarian Hills.
Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the “witch-hunt” tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn.
The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor’s call to boycott Israel.
Both groups have been alerting the universities’ external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as “subversive” professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies.
“I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”
Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column.”
I was reminded this week while listening to John Pilger in Sydney during his Sydney Peace Prize public engagements that there are moments in his films, such as the one below, from “Breaking the Silence”, that perfectly capture a razor sharp attitude. Taking no bullshit. Actually challenging those who help shape our pro-war policies. If only more journalists saw their role as not simply being popular:
The following missive was just sent out by J Street. It’s hard to share their optimism (why? Try here), but here’s the message:
Last week, with our first national conference, we took a major step forward as a movement.
Reuters said we had “arrived as a serious participant in the foreign policy debate.” [1] The BBC reported that we “filled a gap in the Washington Map.” [2] The New York Times headline captured the moment: “A Moderate in America’s Jewish Lobby Causes a Stir.” [3]
It wasn’t just the wall-to-wall media coverage — General Jim Jones, President Obama’s National Security Advisor, promised during his keynote that the Administration “will be represented at all future J Street conferences.”
We’ve established ourselves on the national scene, and now it’s time to bring J Street to states and cities around the country.
That’s why – with the energy from our conference still fresh and in partnership with Brit Tzedek v’Shalom’s national grassroots network – we are launching an ambitious new national field operation with staff and chapters all over the country.
Our ability to bring J Street to your backyard depends on your financial support. Can we count on you to get this program off the ground?
Click here to chip in $50 right now to help kick off our national field plan.
Make no mistake — the enforcers of an unsustainable status quo have marked J Street and this entire movement for political destruction.
Isi Leibler, the former chairman of the governing board of the World Jewish Congress and now a Jerusalem Post columnist, even called recently for “a global Jewish solidarity conference” in order to “exorcise the renegades from our midst” who might dare to be pro-Israel, pro-peace. [4]
Neoconservatives have launched smear campaigns against J Street to scare away members of Congress from affiliating with us. One small far-right pro-Israel group called StandWithUs even contacted every member of Congress on our Gala Host Committee last week with a smear sheet of the nastiest lies and racist attacks leveled against J Street thus far.
Attacks like these will only grow stronger as our successes mount. But know this — we will not be intimidated nor deterred. The stakes for Israel, the Palestinians, and the whole Middle East are simply too high.
Yet if we are to continue to win, we need to take our message directly to your local communities and congressional districts.
Nothing makes as big of an impact on members of Congress as hearing directly from their constituents. Imagine if we could tell members of Congress all over the country, in their home districts, that supporting Israel means favoring active American engagement to achieve a two-state solution?
Click here to make your gift of $50 to kick start this new field program.
We’re thrilled that the chapters and activists of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, the leading pro-Israel, pro-peace grassroots network, have decided to join our field effort. [5]
We’ll be building on their excellent work and taking it to the next level.
Please consider a gift now – and make an investment to grow the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement. With enough resources, we really will win this battle.
Thanks so much for all you do.
John Bolton, neo-conservative, former George W. Bush official and Fox News contributor:
So we’re at a very unhappy point — a very unhappy point — where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program , Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.
The Australian Committee for Truth in the Middle East, a group with a fine pedigree, offers some advice to journalists covering the Middle East:
1. In Gaza and the West Bank Hamas won popular support – enough to win an election generally regarded in the West as fair (except for the result, of course) – by providing health and other social services to people forsaken by everyone else. It looks like the Taliban are moving this way.
2. General Stanley McChrystal is not looking too smart by calling for another “surge” in Afghanistan. The “surge” in Iraq did not lessen the carnage there. The improvement, such as it was, came about after the US occupiers discovered, after more than three years, that tribal relations played a crucial role.
3. Russia has just swung a little America’s way, towards putting anti-nuclear pressure on Iran. This did not come about by pressuring Russia but by de-pressuring Russia, that is by moving to downgrade NATO’s missile presence in eastern Europe.
4. Don’t think that President Obama’s domestic health problems are unconnected with his administration’s efforts to get Israel out of parts of Palestine. If his health program can be weakened, or preferably wrecked, Obama will be in a weaker position to lean on Israel. Most neo-cons are pro-Israel Republicans so they have two reasons for upsetting Obama’s health program.
5. The great financial crisis is far from over and the weaker the US gets economically the less influence it can exert on Israel.
6. Similarly, if Obama can be weakened in Afghanistan, or in dealing with Iran, or anywhere else, he will have less weight to bring to bear on Israel.
7. If Israel can weaken Obama’s efforts to reduce nuclear weapons, even by drawing attention to its own nuclear weapons and making clear it is going to keep them, this will play into Israel’s hands by encouraging Iran to persist with its alleged nuclear weapons program. This diverts attention from the settlements issue. See yesterday’s Washington Times.
8. The more international or domestic damage the Obama administration suffers, the better things will look for Israel. Would Israel act to damage the US in any of the above ways? Stranger things have happened.
The fine Israeli blog Promised Land discusses the concept of Neo-Zionism and its ramifications for the Jewish state:
The settlers are by no means neo-Zionists. They represent the old fashion right wing, the one that still dreams of colonizing Eretz Israel Hashlema (the great land of Israel). Netanyahu was supposed to be their natural leader, but even he is drifting in the neo-Zionist direction, leaving them without real political leadership. Liberman himself, a settler and a right-wing man, has very little support in the settlements, and he is subject to repeated attacks from the extreme-right.
Other neo-Zionists organizations are the student movment Im Tirzu (אם תרצו “if you wish”), who even call themselves “the second Zionist revolution”, and the right wing publishing house Shalem Center, who is sponsored by Billioner Sheldon Adelson and is influenced, and sometimes linked, to the American neo-cons (I will try to add more about the relations between neo-cons and neo-Zionists in the future).
If you understand this new idea – of linking a future retreat from the WB with a strengthening of the Jewish nature of the state, at the expanse of its democratic and liberal nature – you can understand many current political developments, such as Netanyahu’s pre-condition to negotiations with the Palestinians: that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
The settlers are by no means neo-Zionists. They represent the old fashion right wing, the one that still dreams of colonizing Eretz Israel Hashlema (the great land of Israel). Netanyahu was supposed to be their natural leader, but even he is drifting in the neo-Zionist direction, leaving them without real political leadership. Liberman himself, a settler and a right-wing man, has very little support in the settlements, and he is subject to repeated attacks from the extreme-right.
Other neo-Zionists organizations are the student movment Im Tirzu (אם תרצו “if you wish”), who even call themselves “the second Zionist revolution”, and the right wing publishing house Shalem Center, who is sponsored by Billioner Sheldon Adelson and is influenced, and sometimes linked, to the American neo-cons (I will try to add more about the relations between neo-cons and neo-Zionists in the future).
If you understand this new idea – of linking a future retreat from the West Bank with a strengthening of the Jewish nature of the state, at the expanse of its democratic and liberal nature – you can understand many current political developments, such as Netanyahu’s pre-condition to negotiations with the Palestinians: that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
…
The American neo-cons never really recovered from the Iraq war, and with the end of the Bush Administration their influence was severely damaged. But in Israel, neo-Zionism’s finest hour is still ahead. While many of the neo-Zionists are not racists themselves, racist tendencies in the Israeli society provide them with popular support, and as Israelis feel ever more isolated and intimidated, more ideas, regulations and laws that threaten the Arabs’ rights are introduced into the public debate. This process is likely to go on for sometime.
Forget the struggle between Right and Left (it’s easy, the Left doesn’t really exist anymore). The ideological battle of the future in Israel is between a Jewish-Arab post Zionist coalition, and a “Jews only” neo-Zionist side. This fight has only just began.
Michael Shaik, from Australians for Palestine, writes in Murdoch’s Australian:
In 1973, Ariel Sharon announced his intention to make a “pastrami sandwich” of the Palestinians by building strips of settlements across the West Bank, “so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart”. Today, 40 per cent of the West Bank is under the control of the settlers as the pastrami slices thicken and Palestinian transport, agriculture and commerce are stifled by the web of Israeli-only settlement roads that link up the settlements.
While that strange constellation of Jewish irredentists, Christian fundamentalists, neoconservatives, Hamas hardliners, Iranian mullahs and advocates of global jihad will no doubt welcome the quiet death of the road map, it is unlikely any other party will benefit from a return to a peace process of empty gestures.
As the last prospects of a viable Palestinian state collapse, Israel is changing from a Jewish state into an Arab country ruled by a Jewish minority. Rather than marking the beginning of a new era, Obama’s Cairo address seems destined to be remembered as a footnote in the tragic history of US Middle East diplomacy.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the frustration of Zionist neo-conservatives who only imagine a world with violence and occupation:
Neocons arrogate unto themselves the right to make appeals to what they believe is the “dual loyalty” of American Jews — most of whom, in fact, reject their radical ideology — when trying to coerce support for their agenda. Podhoretz’s Commentary Magazine convened a “symposium” of some of the nation’s most typical war-loving neocons to discuss his new book, and virtually everyone of them argued that American Jews should shift their political loyalties to the Right because the Right is “better for Israel” — as though considerations of what’s best for a foreign country is how most American Jews (rather than just neocons) decide how they vote in American elections. Neocons have long gotten away with this manipulative game: simultaneously demanding that American Jews support the Right on the ground that the Right is allegedly better for Israel (i.e., a “dual loyalty” appeal) while branding as “bigots” and ”anti-Semites” anyone and everyone who points out that neocons think this way…
Not only do the vast majority of American Jews reject virtually every core neocon tenet of American politics, but they also have the same priorities as Americans generally when it comes to deciding their political loyalties (the economy, health care, social issues — not Israel). In 2008, while most American Jews said they “care about” Israel in general, only 6 % identified “support for Israel” as the most important factor in determining their vote.
My following essay is published in Sydney Ideas Quarterly magazine:
John Mearsheimer, a leading US scholar on international relations, has strong views on political issues from the Middle East to Iraq but until now, the establishment has been slow to listen. He spoke to Antony Loewenstein
During this year’s Iranian uprising, which followed the disputed presidential election result, Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defence during the Bush administration, wrote in the Washington Post: ‘It would be a cruel irony if, in an effort to avoid imposing democracy, the United States were to tip the scale toward dictators who impose their will on people struggling for freedom.’
Leading American blogger and journalist Andrew Sullivan was incredulous. ‘The architect of one of the greatest mistakes in the history of American foreign policy gets to lecture Obama on Iran,’ he fumed. ‘The neoconservative movement refuses to acknowledge error and refuses to take responsibility for the past.’
John Mearsheimer, who had met Wolfowitz a few times before the 2003 Iraq invasion, was not as surprised.
‘Wolfowitz was remarkably idealistic about how easy it would be to topple Saddam and bring democracy to Iraq,’ Mearsheimer said. ‘I think he was foolish in the extreme but his motives were good and he did believe that we would succeed easily. Virtually all neocons believed that America should deal with Iraq first, then Iran and Syria.’
Mearsheimer, unlike Wolfowitz and fellow neoconservatives, knows something about warfare. Before he became a professor of political science and a leading scholar on international relations, Mearsheimer graduated from West Point military academy in 1970 and served five years as an officer in the US Air Force. Today, in foreign policy circles, he is known for his ‘offensive realist’ position, which, according to him, means he argues against human nature being a determinant in global affairs. Rather, he argues that security competition among great powers is the reason behind chaos in the international system.
Mearsheimer, whose book on offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, acknowledged in a 2002 interview that ‘there is not much place for human rights and values in the realist story. Realists basically believe that states are interested in gaining power’.
With the death of Samuel Huntington last year, Mearsheimer’s prominence in the field is virtually undisputed. Huntington, the author of the controversial Clash of Civilisations, was a spur to Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s even more controversial book, The Israel Lobby and US Policy. Walt, from Harvard University, explained in the magazine Foreign Policy, that although both of them often disagreed with Huntington, ’some of his own writings contain similar warnings about the distorting influence that ethnic groups could have on US foreign policy’.
It was this last work that catapulted the conservative academic Mearsheimer to bestseller status. The US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has called Mearsheimer ‘Sheikh Hassan Mearsheimer’, in reference to the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Critics have labelled him an anti–Semite, a Jew–hater and an Israel basher but Palestinian, Jewish and peace activists have saluted him for daring to write about the power of the Likudniks in the US administration. Mearsheimer says the book caused a storm principally because he and Walt were two establishment figures with authority in the academic and public policy world. ‘It wasn’t so much what we said but who said it.’
The anti–Semite label will not go away, even though Mearsheimer is on the record as consistently supporting a two–state solution for Israel and Palestine, the official position of both President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘[It's] a position I share with Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak,’ he said. ‘Both of them have said in the last year that if there is no two–state solution, Israel will end up in a South African–style situation. I think one could make an argument that Israel is already an apartheid state. This would be a disaster for Israel and I don’t understand for the life of me why Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish allies in Israel and the US don’t understand that the two–state solution is the best outcome for Israel.’
In the end, Mearsheimer says, it is virtually impossible to have a serious foreign policy debate in the US these days because the boundaries of discussion are so narrow, especially about Israel.
His comments about China over the years have also caused displeasure. He has criticised the US’s relationship with the world’s most populous nation, worried that short–term policy decisions are undermining Washington’s super–power status. Mearsheimer argues that by openly trading with China and therefore helping its economy, the US is aiding Beijing’s rapid rise. He has prescribed a containment policy against China not unlike the one used against the Soviet Union. In short, Mearsheimer does not see China rising peacefully.
Asked what advice he would give to our Mandarin–speaking prime minister on China, he said, ‘Prime Minister Rudd and his successors should make it clear to Beijing that Australia wants to live in peace with a powerful China, but that means China will have to put limits on its ambitions. And if it does not, an intense security competition will occur in Asia and that will not be good for either Australia or China.
‘If China continues to grow economically at a rapid pace, it will surely build a much more formidable military capability than it has now, and it will probably try to dominate Asia the way that the United States dominates the Western hemisphere. Of course, it would not be in Australia’s interest to allow China or any other country to become a regional hegemon.’
What about Prime Minister Rudd’s proposed Asia–Pacific community as a way of heading off China’s regional ambition and securing long–term US interest in the region?
‘I don’t think there is any need to bind the United States more closely to Asia,’ he said. ‘Most Americans, and certainly their leaders, think that the United States has a moral and strategic responsibility to run the world, which means that Washington is going to be deeply involved in Asia — as well as other places around the globe — for a long time to come.
‘This certainly has some benefits for Australia, but it has a downside as well, since Washington sometimes pursues boneheaded policies, as evidenced by what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. One should be careful what he or she wishes for with regard to the United States, because what you get is not always an unalloyed good.’
These days, the normally conservative Mearsheimer calls himself a radical, one who is largely out of step with many colleagues on the role of government and US military force. He is resigned to the fact that he is unlikely ever to be appointed to a senior government position; criticising Israel ruined those opportunities.
‘There is a belief in the policy politic I don’t share, that America is the indispensable nation and has a moral and strategic responsibility to go into the Middle East and re–order the region. The idea that the US could transform the Mid–East into a sea of democracies at the point of a rifle is harebrained. It’s a radical strategy, not conservative. The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal often get very excited over exporting the American way of life with a gun.’
Mearsheimer remembers a golden age of intellectual life in the US that no longer exists. Now, he says, professional think tanks with strong political agendas have profoundly changed the landscape. He sees overly aggressive positions being pushed by a narrow intellectual base. ‘I am somewhat reluctant to call people who work at think tanks intellectuals because they’re heavily politicised and mainly interested in a particular agenda,’ he said.
In the years of Ronald Reagan, Mearsheimer argues, the conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation were not interested in policy debates. ‘They wanted a solely conservative agenda,’ he said. The American Enterprise Institute, as the mouthpiece of the neoconservative movement in the Bush years, did the same.
Mearsheimer, who has been teaching political science at the University of Chicago since 1982, laments that over time, intellectuals in the academy have had less impact on public life. ‘This is the function of two factors,’ he said. ‘One, with increasing professionalism, intellectuals find themselves talking more and more to each other and to students than to the general public. Second, when the Cold War first started, the US had very little intellectual capital in Washington, so what happened in the academic world had more impact on the policy world. It’s no accident that some of the first national security advisors were from the academic world, such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.’
As a leading opponent of the war, Mearsheimer rarely appears in its pages. It is depressing, he says, adding that those who were right about Iraq remain largely unpublished in the US mainstream media today while the neocons and their backers continue to pollute op-ed pages across the country.
Things are changing, though, in the age of Obama. The number of invitations to events has increased in the last six months, Mearsheimer says. Still, he is sceptical that Obama will reel in real change. He believes in the policy continuity at the top of the US political class — that while the faces may change, the policies do not.
‘America has a long history of supporting terrorist groups when leaders thought it was in America’s national interest,’ he said. President Obama has continued this long–standing policy in Africa and Central Asia.
‘You can’t underestimate the liberal, imperialistic streak inside the elite foreign policy establishment,’ he said. ‘Many liberal Democrats supported the war, along with neocons. Obama opposed the war but he does not have a single foreign policy adviser at the higher levels that opposed it. Think of Richard Holbrooke, Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross.
‘There is consensus in this country on what foreign policy should be. It’s no accident that Obama kept Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defence as he’s as comfortable serving Bush as Obama. It’s equally hard to see differences between Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, as they’re trying to do similar things in similar ways.’
Antony Loewenstein is a journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.
What Palestinian Nakba, asks neo-con Daniel Pipes?
A fascinating review of a new French book about French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner. The thesis, simply put, is that the humanitarian interventions pushed by the French elite are essentially the same as American neo-conservatives. Democracy promotion is the tag; military power is the supposed answer:
Kouchner has spent the last three decades trying to translate his humanitarian reputation into political, military and diplomatic influence of a more traditional kind. In 1988, Mitterrand created a post for him as secretary of state for humanitarian affairs. Kouchner’s great achievement at the time was to theorise (with the help of the international lawyer Mario Bettati) the droit d’ingérence – the right to disregard national sovereignty and intervene in countries experiencing humanitarian crises – and to get it codified, in UN Resolution 43/131. There was something sneaky about the way the measure was implemented: it calls for intervention in case of ‘natural disasters and similar emergency situations’. Political turmoil turned out to be similar enough to storms or earthquakes, and in 1990 and 1991 the UN Security Council invoked 43/131 to open a ‘humanitarian corridor’ for Kurds fleeing Iraq.
This changed everything. It rendered national sovereignty conditional, and led to the increasing militarisation of humanitarianism, starting in Somalia. On the eve of the invasion of Somalia in December 1992, Kouchner wrote in Le Monde: ‘We believe in an armed and saving intervention by the international community.’ Péan notes the outrage that greeted these pronouncements: the defence minister Pierre Joxe objected that Kouchner gave ‘the impression of disposing of the lives of French soldiers without even consulting the minister of defence’, and Rony Brauman later wrote, dismayed, that ‘for the first time, in Somalia, we killed under the banner of humanity.’ Yet these views, which would have seemed the merest common sense five years earlier, were in the minority. Public opinion, or at least public sentiment, was squarely behind Kouchner. Péan sees the droit d’ingérence as the start of a path that leads from Iraq to Somalia to Kosovo and then back to Iraq. He is right.
Never trust Zionist neo-conservatives on Iran.
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who has spent this year writing extensively about Iran and Israel/Palestine, sends his latest dispatch from the streets of Tehran:
When I was here earlier this year, I argued that Iran was an unfree and repressive society but also a nation offering significant margins of liberty, at least by regional standards, with which Obama’s America must engage. After Iraq, I was deeply concerned that facile stereotyping of a society of “mad Mullahs” bent on nuclear Armageddon could once again set America in lockstep to war.
I underestimated how brutal the regime could be. But my critics underestimated how strong and broad the Iran of civic courage and democratic impulse is, and they misread how important this election was, dismissing it as the meaningless exercise of a clerical dictatorship.
I still believe there is no alternative to engagement. But it is not the time for Obama to talk about talks. He should be talking about his outrage at the violence.
This is the city of whispers. Its people crave to know that their hushed voices are being heard. Obama, lover of words, is the message man. “Message received” is what he must convey.
There are currently fierce battles on the streets. Twitter feeds explain more.
Meanwhile, Jewish neo-con Daniel Pipes continues to not care about anything or anybody. He’ll no doubt be invited to Australian Jewish events within the month.