Tomgram: David Bromwich, The Neoconservative Empire Returns
By David Bromwich
Posted on August 23, 2015, Printed on August 23, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176039/
Everyone knows the basics of the dispute over the nuclear deal with Iran. In
no time at all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaped directly
into the American political arena to take potshots at that agreement in a
way that, had any other world leader acted similarly, would have been
denounced across the political spectrum. And he did so backed not only by
his own party and government but by established opinion makers in Israel,
all of whom are deeply convinced that the deal is neither reasonable nor in
Israels best interests. Similarly, when the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) and other similar organizations got involved in a giant,
multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to ensure that the agreement is given a
congressional thumbs down, they represented not just the interests of
Netanyahu and the Israeli ruling elite but of American Jewish opinion, which
naturally believes that a deal bad enough to be nixed by Israel is not in
the best interests of the United States either. All of that seems obvious
enough -- the only problem being that it isnt so.
Lets start with Jewish opinion in America. When Steven Cohen, a professor
at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, conducted a poll
of American Jews, including those who, like myself, are not religious, he
found that an astounding 63% approved of the nuclear deal, a figure
impressively higher right now than American opinion on the subject
generally. In other words, with the single exception of J Street, all the
major Jewish organizations that are lobbying against the deal and claiming
to represent American Jews and Jewish opinion dont. As Cohen and Todd
Gitlin wrote recently in the Washington Post, Plainly, the idea that
American Jews speak as a monolithic bloc needs very early retirement. So
does the canard that their commitment to Israel or the views of its prime
minister overwhelms their support for Obama and the Iran deal. So does the
idea that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads, or represents, the
worlds Jews.
So call that a bit of a surprise on Jewish opinion. But what about Israel,
where support among key figures for deep-sixing the nuclear deal is
self-evident? Again, just one small problem: almost any major Israeli figure
with a military or intelligence background who is retired or out of
government and can speak freely on the matter seems to have come out in
favor of the agreement. (The same can be said, by the way, for similar
figures in this country, as well as Gary Samore, a former Obama
administration White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass
Destruction and until recently head of United Against Nuclear Iran, a
Sheldon Adelson-funded group whose job is to knee-cap such an agreement. He
stepped down from that post recently to support the nuclear deal.) In
Israel, a list as long as your arm of retired intelligence chiefs, generals
and admirals, officials of all sorts, even nuclear scientists, have publicly
stepped forward to support the agreement, written an open letter to
Netanyahu on the subject, and otherwise spoken out, including one ex-head of
the Mossad, Israels intelligence service, appointed to his position by none
other than Netanyahu.
In other words, the well-financed fast and furious campaign here against the
nuclear deal (which has left just about every Republican senator,
representative, and presidential candidate in full froth) and the near
hysteria churned up on the subject has created a reality that bears
remarkably little relationship to actual reality. Fortunately, TomDispatch
regular David Bromwich is available to offer a cool-eyed look at just whats
behind that version of reality and Im sure you wont be shocked to learn
that, in the process, one familiar label instantly pops up: neoconservative.
Tom
Playing the Long Game on Iran
The Neoconservatives, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Republicans Game the
System
By David Bromwich
Were going to push and push until some larger force makes us stop.
David Addington, the legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, made that
declaration to Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel in the months
after September 11, 2001. Goldsmith would later recall that Cheney and
Addington were the first people he had ever met of a certain kind: Cheney
is not subtle, and he has never hidden the ball. The amazing thing is that
he does what he says. Relentlessness is a quality I saw in him and Addington
that I never saw before in my life.
Goldsmith did not consider himself an adversary of Cheney and Addington. He
probably shared many of their political views. What shocked him was their
confidence in a set of secret laws and violent policies that could destroy
innocent lives and warp the Constitution. The neoconservatives -- the
opinion-makers and legislative pedagogues who since 2001 have justified the
Cheney-Bush policies -- fit the same description. They are relentless, they
push until they are stopped, and thus far they have never been stopped for
long.
The campaign for the Iraq war of 2003, the purest example of their
handiwork, began with a strategy memorandum in 1996, so it is fair to say
that they have been pitching to break up the Middle East for a full two
decades. But fortune played them a nasty trick with the signing of the
nuclear agreement between the P5+1 powers and Iran. War and the prospect of
war have been the source of their undeniable importance. If the Iran nuclear
deal attains legitimacy, much of their power will slip through their
fingers. The imperialist idealism that drives their ventures from day to day
will be cheated of the enemy it cannot live without.
Iran might then become just one more unlucky country -- authoritarian and
cruelly oppressive but an object of persuasion and not the focus of a
never-ending threat of force. The neoconservatives are enraged and their
response has been feverish: if they were an individual, you would say that
he was a danger to himself and others. They still get plenty of attention
and airtime, but the main difference between 2003 and 2015 is the absence of
a president who obeys them -- something that has only served to sharpen
their anger.
President Obama defended the nuclear deal vigorously in a recent speech at
American University. This was the first such extended explanation of a
foreign policy decision in his presidency, and it lacked even an ounce of
inspirational fluff. It was, in fact, the first of his utterances not
likely to be remembered for its eloquence, because it merits the higher
praise of good sense. It has been predictably denounced in some quarters as
stiff, unkind, ungenerous, and over the top.
Obama began by speaking of the ideology that incited and justified the Iraq
War of 2003. He called it a mindset, and the word was appropriate --
suggesting a pair of earphones around a head that prevents us from hearing
any penetrating noise from the external world. Starting in the summer of
2002, Americans heard a voice that said: Bomb, invade, occupy Iraq! And do
the same to other countries! For the sake of our sanity, Obama explained, we
had to take off those earphones:
We had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a
mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a
mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking
work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats
beyond what the intelligence supported. Leaders did not level with the
American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily
impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture
and history. And, of course, those calling for war labeled themselves
strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak -- even
appeasers of a malevolent adversary.
In this precise catalogue of mental traits, Obama was careful to name no
names, but he made it easy to construct a key:
A mindset characterized by a preference for military action: President
George W. Bush ordering the U.N. nuclear inspectors out of Iraq (though they
had asked to stay and complete their work) because there was a pressing need
to bomb in March 2003;
A mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action: Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld dismissing the skeptical challenge and eventual
non-participation of France and Germany as proof of the irrelevance of old
Europe;
A mindset that exaggerated threats: the barely vetted New York Times stories
by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which an administration bent on war
first molded and then cited on TV news shows as evidence to justify
preventive war;
Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war:
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pooh-poohing the estimate by Army
Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki that it would take 400,000 troops to
maintain order in Iraq after the war;
Insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a
profoundly different culture and history: the bromides of Bush and National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the indwelling Arab spirit that yearns
for American-style democracy across the Middle East.
Obama went on to assert that there was a continuity of persons as well as
ideas between the propagandists who told us to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq
in 2003 and those now spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure that
Congress will abort the nuclear deal. The same mindset, the president
remarked, in many cases offered by the same people who seem to have no
compunction with being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to
strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have
done in the decades before or since.
Those people have never recognized that they were wrong. Some put the blame
on President Bush or his viceroy in Baghdad, the administrator of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, for mismanaging the
occupation that followed the invasion; others continue to nurse the
fantastic theory that Saddam Hussein really was in possession of nuclear
weapons but somehow smuggled them across the border to Syria and fooled both
U.S. reconnaissance teams and the U.N. inspectors; still others maintain
that Shiite militias and weaponry dispatched to Iraq from Iran were the
chief culprits in the disaster of the postwar insurgency.
Bear in mind that these opinion-makers, in 2003, hardly understood the
difference between Shiite and Sunni in the country they wanted to invade. To
put the blame now on Iran betrays a genius for circular reasoning. Since all
Shia militias are allied by religion with Iran, it can be argued that Iraq
was not destroyed by a catastrophic war of choice whose effects set the
region on fire. No: the United States under Bush and Cheney was an
unpresuming superpower doing its proper work, bringing peace and democracy
to one of the dark places of the earth by means of a clean, fast, surgical
war. In 2004 and 2005, just as in 2015, it was Iran that caused the trouble.
Simple Facts That Are Not Known
Because the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scorned the
nuclear deal without any attention to detail, the president felt compelled
in his speech to recognize candidly the difference of national interest that
exists between Israel and the United States. Though we are allies, he said,
we are two different countries, and he left his listeners to draw the
necessary inference: it is not possible for two countries (any more than two
persons) to be at once different and the same. Obama went on to connect the
nations in question to this premise of international politics:
I believe [the terms of the agreement] are in Americas interest and
Israels interest. And as president of the United States, it would be an
abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply
because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.
The last affirmation is critical. A president takes an oath to preserve,
protect, and defend the constitution of the United States -- that is, to
attend to the interest of his own country and not another.
The danger of playing favorites in the world of nations, with a partiality
that knows no limits, was a main topic of George Washingtons great Farewell
Address. Permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and
passionate attachments for others, should be excluded, said Washington,
because
a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of
evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an
imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and
infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a
participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate
inducement or justification.
There are Americans today who submit to a ruling passion that favors
uniquely the interests of Israel, and the president had them in mind when he
invoked his duties under the Constitution toward the only country whose
framework of laws and institutions he had sworn to uphold. Genuine respect
for another democracy formed part of his thinking here. Not only was Obama
not elected to support Netanyahus idea of Americas interest, he was also
not elected by Israelis to support his own idea of Israels interest.
In a recent commentary in Foreign Affairs, the prominent Israeli journalist
and former government adviser Daniel Levy pointed out a fact that is not
much remembered today regarding Netanyahus continuous effort to sabotage
negotiations with Iran. It was the Israeli prime minister who initially
demanded that nuclear negotiations be pursued on a separate track from any
agreement about the trade or sale of conventional weapons. He chose that
path because he was certain it would cause negotiations to collapse. The
gambit having failed, he now makes the lifting of sanctions on conventional
weaponry a significant objection to the bad deal in Vienna.
Obama concluded his argument by saying that alternatives to military action
will have been exhausted if we reject a hard-won diplomatic solution that
the world almost unanimously supports. So lets not mince words. The choice
we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war -- maybe not
tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon. A measured statement
and demonstrably true.
But you would never come within hailing distance of this truth if you
listened to the numbers of Congressional Republicans who repeat the
neoconservative watchwords and their accompanying digests of the recent
history of the Middle East. They run through recitations of the dramatis
personae of the war on terror with the alacrity of trained seals. Israel
lives in a dangerous neighborhood. Islamists are knocking on our door
and looking for gaps in the border with Mexico. Iran is the foremost
state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Barack Obama is an appeaser and
its five minutes to midnight in Munich. Elected officials who walk on two
legs in the twenty-first century are not embarrassed to say these things
without the slightest idea of their provenance.
If there was a fault in the presidents explanation of his policy, it lay in
some things he omitted to say. When you are educating a people who have been
proselytized, as Americans have been, by a political cult for the better
part of two decades, nothing should be taken for granted. Most Americans do
not know that the fanatical Islamists, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, the Islamic State
(IS) -- the active and destructive revolutionary force in the greater Middle
East at the moment -- are called Sunni Muslims. Nor do they know that the
Shia Muslims who govern Iran and who support the government of Syria have
never attacked the United States.
To say it as simply as it should be said: the Shiites and Sunnis are
different sects, and the Shiites of Iran are fighting against the same
enemies the U.S. is fighting in Syria and elsewhere. Again, most Americans
who get their information from miscellaneous online scraps have no idea that
exclusively Sunni fanatics made up the force of hijackers who struck the
World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They would be surprised to learn
that none of these people came from Iraq or Iran. They do not know that 15
of the 19 came from Saudi Arabia -- a supposed ally of the United States.
And they do not know that the Islamist warriors who brought chaos and
destruction to Syria and Iraq are bankrolled in part by members of the Saudi
and Qatari elite who have nothing to do with Iran. It has never been
emphasized -- it is scarcely written in a way that might be noticeable even
in our newspaper of record -- that Iran itself has carried the heaviest
burden of the fight against IS.
Throughout his presidency, when speaking of Iran, Obama has mixed every
expression of hope for improved relations with a measure of opprobrium. He
has treated Iran as an exceptional offender against the laws of nations, a
country that requires attention only in the cause of disarmament. He does
this to assure the policy elite that he respects and can hum the familiar
tunes. But this subservience to cliché is timid, unrealistic, and
pragmatically ill advised. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did not
denounce the Soviet Union when they took that countrys dictator, Joseph
Stalin, as a partner in war in 1941, though Stalins crimes exceeded
anything attributable to the Iranian mullahs. Ritual denunciation of a
necessary ally is a transparent absurdity. And in a democracy, it prevents
ordinary people from arriving at an understanding of what is happening.
Nuclear Deals and Their Critics, Then and Now
What are the odds that the neoconservatives and the Republicans whose policy
they manage will succeed in aborting the P5+1 nuclear deal? One can take
some encouragement from the last comparably ambitious effort at
rapprochement with an enemy: the conversations between President Ronald
Reagan and the Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik,
Washington, and Moscow in 1986, 1987, and 1988. At the same time, one ought
to be forewarned by the way that unexpected change of course was greeted.
The neoconservative cult was just forming then. Some of its early leaders
like Richard Perle had positions in the Reagan administration, and they were
unanimously hostile to the talks that would yield the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1988. The agreement set out the terms for the
destruction of 2,611 missiles, capable of delivering 4,000 warheads -- the
biggest step in lowering the risk of nuclear war since the Test Ban Treaty
championed by President Kennedy and passed in late 1963.
But as James Mann recounted in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan -- a narrative
of the anticommunist presidents surprising late turn in foreign policy --
all of Reagans diplomatic efforts were deeply disapproved at the time, not
only by the neoconservative hotheads but by those masters of the diplomatic
breakthrough, former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger; by the most widely quoted columnists of the right, George
Will and William Safire; and by Time magazine, which ran a story titled Has
Reagan Gone Soft? The Reagan-Gorbachev talks were looked upon with
suspicion, too, by realists and moderates of the political and security
establishment, including Robert Gates and then-Vice President George H.W.
Bush. Why Gates? Because he was deputy director of the CIA and the Agency
was thoroughly convinced that Soviet Russia and its leadership could never
change. Why Bush? Because he was already running for president.
The political and media establishment of that moment was startled by the
change that President Reagan first signaled in 1986, as startled as todays
establishment has been by the signing of the P5+1 agreement. This was the
same Ronald Reagan who in 1983 had called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
At the end of his visit to Moscow in June 1988, Reagan was asked by the ABC
News reporter Sam Donaldson, Do you still think youre in an evil empire,
Mr. President?
No, Reagan replied. I was talking about another time and another era.
And he stuck to that answer at a press conference the next day, adding: I
think that a great deal of [the change] is due to the General Secretary, who
I have found different than previous Soviet leaders... A large part of it is
Mr. Gorbachev as a leader.
By 1987, Reagans popularity had hit a low of 47% -- largely because of the
Iran-Contra scandal -- but he still retained his reputation as the most
irreproachable defender of the West against world communism. Obama for his
part has done everything he could -- short of emulating the
invade-and-occupy strategy of Bush -- to maintain U.S. force projection in
the Middle East in a manner to which Washington has become accustomed since
9/11. He doubtless believes in this policy, and he has surrounded himself
with adepts of humanitarian war; but he clearly also calculated that a
generous ration of conformity would protect him when he tried for his own
breakthrough in negotiations with Iran.
In the end, Reagan got a 93-5 vote in the Senate for his nuclear treaty with
the Soviet Union. Obama is hoping for much less -- a vote of less than two
thirds of that body opposed to the Iran settlement. But he is confronted by
the full-scale hostility of a Republican party with a new character and with
financial backing of a new kind.
The U.S. military and security establishment has sided with the president.
And though the fact is little known here, so have the vast majority of
Israelis who can speak with any authority on issues of defense and security.
Even the president of Israel, Reuben Rivlin, has signaled his belief that
Netanyahus interventions in American politics are wrong. Former Prime
Minister Ehud Barak has advised that, however reluctantly, Israel should
accept the nuclear agreement and forge an understanding with the U.S. about
what to do in case of its violation. To this remarkable consensus should be
added the public letter -- signed by 29 American scientists, many of them
deeply involved in nuclear issues, including six recipients of the Nobel
Prize -- which vouches for the stringency of the agreement and praises the
unprecedented rigor of the 24-day cap on Iranian delays for site
inspection: an interval so short (as no one knows better than these
scientists) that successful concealment of traces of nuclear activity
becomes impossible.
Two other public letters supporting the nuclear deal have been notable. The
first was signed by former U.S. diplomats endorsing the agreement
unambiguously, among them Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq
after 2003; Nicholas Burns, who negotiated with Iran for the younger Bush;
and Daniel Kurtzer, a former ambassador to Israel and Egypt who served under
both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. A further letter carried the
personal and institutional authority of dozens of retired admirals and
generals. So close an approach to unanimity on the benefits of an agreement
among the U.S. military, diplomatic, and scientific communities has seldom
been achieved. Even President Reagan could not claim this degree of support
by qualified judges when he submitted the INF treaty to the Senate.
Such endorsements ought to represent a substantial cause for hope. But
Obamas supporters would be hard pressed to call the contest a draw on
television and radio. The neoconservatives -- and the Republicans channeling
them -- are once again working with boundless energy. Careers are being
built on this fight, as in the case of Senator Tom Cotton, and more than one
presidential candidacy has been staked on it.
On the day of Obamas speech, even a relatively informed talk show host like
Charlie Rose allowed his coverage to slant sharply against the agreement.
His four guests were the Haaretz reporter Chemi Shalev; the Daily Beast
columnist Jonathan Alter; the former State Department official and president
of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass; and the neoconservative
venture capitalist, Mark Dubowitz, who has come to be treated as an expert
on the nuclear policies and government of Iran.
Haass, passionately opposed to the agreement, said that the presidents
speech had been way over the top, and hoped Congress would correct its
clear flaws. Shalev rated the speech honest and bracing but thought it
would leave many in the Jewish community offended. Dubowitz spoke of Iran
as a perfidious nation that ought to be subjected to relentless and
ever-increasing penalties. His solution: empower the next president to go
back and renegotiate. Jonathan Alter alone defended the agreement.
Planning to Attack Iran, 2002-2015
By now, the active participants in mainstream commentary on the War on
Terror all have a history, and one can learn a good deal by looking back.
Haass, for example, a pillar of the foreign policy establishment, worked in
the State Department under Bush and Cheney and made no public objection to
the Iraq War. Dubowitz has recently co-authored several articles with Reuel
Marc Gerecht, a leading propagandist for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a
characteristic piece in the Wall Street Journal last November, Gerecht and
Dubowitz argued that the P5+1 negotiations opened a path to a nuclear bomb
for Iran. President Obama, they said, was too weak and trapped by his own
errors to explore any alternatives, but there were three scenarios that a
wiser and stronger president might consider. First, the White House could
give up on diplomacy and preemptively strike Irans nuclear sites; second,
the administration could give up on the current talks and default back to
sanctions; third, new, even more biting sanctions could be enacted,
causing Tehran considerable pain. The range of advisable policy, for
Gerecht and Dubowitz, begins with crippling sanctions and ends with a war
of aggression.
These scenarios typify the neoconservative options. Writing on his own in
the Atlantic in June 2013, Dubowitz informed American readers that there was
nothing to celebrate in the Iranian presidential election that brought to
power the apparently rational and moderate Hassan Rouhani. A loyalist of
Iran's supreme leader and a master of nuclear deceit, Rouhani, as
interpreted by Dubowitz, is a false friend whose new authority doesn't get
us any closer to stopping Iran's nuclear drive.
Consider Gerecht in his solo flights and you can see what made the president
say that these are the people who gave us the Iraq War. They were as sure
then about the good that would follow the bombing and invasion of that
country as they are now about the benefits of attacking Iran. Indeed,
Gerecht has the distinction of having called for an attack on Iran even
before the official launch of the Bush strategy on Iraq.
It is said that Dick Cheneys August 26, 2002, speech to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars marked the first formal description of the War on Terror
offered by a U.S. leader to American citizens. But Gerecht, a former CIA
specialist on the Middle East, stole a march on the vice president. In the
Weekly Standard of August 6, 2002, under the title Regime Change in Iran?,
he declared his belief that President Bush was the possessor of a
revolutionary edge and appeal... in the Middle East. The younger Bush had
sliced across national borders and civilizational divides with an
unqualified assertion of a moral norm. The president declared, The people
of Iran want the same freedoms, human rights, and opportunities as people
around the world. America will stand alongside people everywhere
determined to build a world of freedom, dignity, and tolerance.
The analyst Gerecht took up where the evangelist Bush left off: the relevant
country to attack in August 2002 -- on behalf of its people of course -- was
Iran. Gerecht had no doubt that
the Iranian people overwhelmingly view clerical rule as fundamentally
illegitimate. The heavily Westernized clerics of Iran's religious
establishment -- and these mullahs are on both sides of the so-called
'moderate-conservative' split -- know perfectly well that the Persian word
azadi, freedom, is perhaps the most evocative word in the language now...
Azadi has also become indissolubly associated with the United States.
This was the way the neoconservatives were already writing and thinking back
in August 2002. It is hard to know which is more astounding, the show of
philological virtuosity or the self-assurance regarding the advisability of
war against a nation of 70 million.
General prognostications, however, are never enough for the
neoconservatives, and Gerecht in 2002 enumerated the specific benefits of
disorder in Iraq and Iran:
An American invasion [of Iraq] could possibly provoke riots in Iran --
simultaneous uprisings in major cities that would simply be beyond the scope
of regime-loyal specialized riot-control units. The army or the
Revolutionary Guard Corps would have to be pulled into service in large
numbers, and that's when things could get interesting.
That was how he had it scored. Bush, the voice of freedom, would be adored
as a benevolent emperor at a distance:
President Bush, of course, doesn't need National Iranian Television
broadcasts to beam his message into the Islamic Republic. Everything he says
moves at light speed through the country. The president just needs to keep
talking about freedom being the birthright of Muslim peoples.
Such was the neoconservative recipe for democracy in the Middle East: beam
the words of George W. Bush to people everywhere, invade Iraq, and spark a
democratic uprising in Iran (assisted if necessary by U.S. bombs and
soldiers).
For a final glimpse of the same mindset, look closely at Gerechts advice
on Syria in June 2014. Writing again in the Weekly Standard, he deprecated
the very idea of getting help from Iran in the fight against the Islamic
State. The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy declares the title of the piece,
and the article makes the same point with a minimal reliance on facts. Sunni
terrorists are portrayed as impetuous youngsters who naturally go too far,
but it is too early to gauge their trajectory: the changes they bring may
not ultimately be uncongenial to American interest. The Shiite masterminds
of Iran, on the other hand, have long ago attained full maturity and will
never change. Gerechts hope, last summer, was that substantial Iranian
casualties in a war against IS would lead to the spontaneous uprising that
failed to materialize in 2003.
It is possible that the present Sunni-Shiite conflict could, if the Iranian
body count rises and too much national treasure is spent, produce shock
waves that fundamentally weaken the clerical regime... Things could get
violent inside the Islamic Republic.
The vision underlying this policy amounts to selective or strategic
tolerance of al-Qaeda and IS for the sake of destroying Iran.
Will the War on Terror Be Debated?
How can such opinions be contested in American politics? The answer will
have to come from what remains of the potential opposition party in the war
on terror. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been a remarkable
exception, but for the most part the Democrats are preoccupied with domestic
policy. If almost two-thirds of Congress today is poised to vote against the
Iran settlement, this embarrassment is the result of years of systematic
neglect. Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden, Tammy
Baldwin, and a few others have the talent to lead an opposition to a pursuit
of the war on terror on the neoconservative plan, but to have any effect
they would have to speak up regularly on foreign policy.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party and its billionaire bankrollers are playing
the long game on Iran. They would like to gain the two-thirds majority to
override Obamas veto of a Congressional vote against the nuclear agreement,
but they do not really expect that to happen. The survival of any agreement,
however, depends not only on its approval but on its legitimation. Their
hope is to depress public support for the P5+1 deal so much that the next
president and members of the next Congress would require extraordinary
courage to persist with American participation.
In the Foreign Affairs column mentioned earlier, Daniel Levy concluded that
the long game is also Benjamin Netanyahus strategy:
Netanyahu is going for a twofer -- if he loses on the veto-proof super
majority in Congress, he can still succeed in keeping the Iran deal
politically controversial and fragile and prevent any further détente with
Iran. The hope, in this case, is that the next U.S. administration can
resume the status quo ante in January 2017.
What we are seeing, then, is not simply a concentrated effort that will end
with the vote by the Senate in September on the P5+1 nuclear deal. It is the
earliest phase of a lobbying campaign intended to usher in a Republican
president of appropriate views in January 2017.
One may recognize that the money is there for such a long-term drive and yet
still wonder at the virulence of the campaign to destroy Iran. What exactly
allows the war party to keep on as they do? Within Israel, the cause is a
political theology that obliges its believers to fight preemptive wars
without any end in sight in order to guard against enemies who have opposed
the existence of the Jewish state ever since its creation. This is a
defensive fear that responds to an irrefutable historical reality. The
neoconservatives and the better informed among their Republican followers
are harder to grasp -- harder anyway until you realize that, for them, we
are Rome and the Republican Party is the cradle of future American emperors,
praetors, and proconsuls.
Ideology, as the political essayist and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel once
wrote, is the bridge of excuses a government offers to the people it
rules. Between 2001 and 2009, the U.S. government was run by
neoconservatives; they had a fair shot and the public judgment went against
them; but in a climate of resurgent confusion about the Middle East, they
have come a long way toward rebuilding their bridge. They are zealots but
also prudent careerists, and the combination of money and revived propaganda
may succeed in blurring many unhappy memories. Nor can they be accused of
insincerity. When a theorist at a neoconservative think tank, the Foundation
for Defense of Democracies or the American Enterprise Institute, affirms
that democracy is what the Iranian people will have as soon as the U.S.
cripples the resources of that country, he surely believes what he is
saying. The projection seems as true to them now as it was in 2002, 2007,
and 2010, as true as it will be in 2017 when a new president, preferably
another young man of spirit like George W. Bush, succeeds the weak and
deplorable Barack Obama. For such people, the battle is never over, and
there is always another war ahead. They will push until they are stopped.
David Bromwich, a TomDispatch regular, teaches literature at Yale University
and is the author of Moral Imagination.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 David Bromwich
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176039
Tomgram: David Bromwich, The Neoconservative Empire Returns
By David Bromwich
Posted on August 23, 2015, Printed on August 23, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176039/
Everyone knows the basics of the dispute over the nuclear deal with Iran. In
no time at all, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaped directly
into the American political arena to take potshots at that agreement in a
way that, had any other world leader acted similarly, would have been
denounced across the political spectrum. And he did so backed not only by
his own party and government but by established opinion makers in Israel,
all of whom are deeply convinced that the deal is neither reasonable nor in
Israels best interests. Similarly, when the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) and other similar organizations got involved in a giant,
multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to ensure that the agreement is given a
congressional thumbs down, they represented not just the interests of
Netanyahu and the Israeli ruling elite but of American Jewish opinion, which
naturally believes that a deal bad enough to be nixed by Israel is not in
the best interests of the United States either. All of that seems obvious
enough -- the only problem being that it isnt so.
Lets start with Jewish opinion in America. When Steven Cohen, a professor
at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, conducted a poll
of American Jews, including those who, like myself, are not religious, he
found that an astounding 63% approved of the nuclear deal, a figure
impressively higher right now than American opinion on the subject
generally. In other words, with the single exception of J Street, all the
major Jewish organizations that are lobbying against the deal and claiming
to represent American Jews and Jewish opinion dont. As Cohen and Todd
Gitlin wrote recently in the Washington Post, Plainly, the idea that
American Jews speak as a monolithic bloc needs very early retirement. So
does the canard that their commitment to Israel or the views of its prime
minister overwhelms their support for Obama and the Iran deal. So does the
idea that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads, or represents, the
worlds Jews.
So call that a bit of a surprise on Jewish opinion. But what about Israel,
where support among key figures for deep-sixing the nuclear deal is
self-evident? Again, just one small problem: almost any major Israeli figure
with a military or intelligence background who is retired or out of
government and can speak freely on the matter seems to have come out in
favor of the agreement. (The same can be said, by the way, for similar
figures in this country, as well as Gary Samore, a former Obama
administration White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass
Destruction and until recently head of United Against Nuclear Iran, a
Sheldon Adelson-funded group whose job is to knee-cap such an agreement. He
stepped down from that post recently to support the nuclear deal.) In
Israel, a list as long as your arm of retired intelligence chiefs, generals
and admirals, officials of all sorts, even nuclear scientists, have publicly
stepped forward to support the agreement, written an open letter to
Netanyahu on the subject, and otherwise spoken out, including one ex-head of
the Mossad, Israels intelligence service, appointed to his position by none
other than Netanyahu.
In other words, the well-financed fast and furious campaign here against the
nuclear deal (which has left just about every Republican senator,
representative, and presidential candidate in full froth) and the near
hysteria churned up on the subject has created a reality that bears
remarkably little relationship to actual reality. Fortunately, TomDispatch
regular David Bromwich is available to offer a cool-eyed look at just whats
behind that version of reality and Im sure you wont be shocked to learn
that, in the process, one familiar label instantly pops up: neoconservative.
Tom
Playing the Long Game on Iran
The Neoconservatives, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Republicans Game the
System
By David Bromwich
Were going to push and push until some larger force makes us stop.
David Addington, the legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, made that
declaration to Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel in the months
after September 11, 2001. Goldsmith would later recall that Cheney and
Addington were the first people he had ever met of a certain kind: Cheney
is not subtle, and he has never hidden the ball. The amazing thing is that
he does what he says. Relentlessness is a quality I saw in him and Addington
that I never saw before in my life.
Goldsmith did not consider himself an adversary of Cheney and Addington. He
probably shared many of their political views. What shocked him was their
confidence in a set of secret laws and violent policies that could destroy
innocent lives and warp the Constitution. The neoconservatives -- the
opinion-makers and legislative pedagogues who since 2001 have justified the
Cheney-Bush policies -- fit the same description. They are relentless, they
push until they are stopped, and thus far they have never been stopped for
long.
The campaign for the Iraq war of 2003, the purest example of their
handiwork, began with a strategy memorandum in 1996, so it is fair to say
that they have been pitching to break up the Middle East for a full two
decades. But fortune played them a nasty trick with the signing of the
nuclear agreement between the P5+1 powers and Iran. War and the prospect of
war have been the source of their undeniable importance. If the Iran nuclear
deal attains legitimacy, much of their power will slip through their
fingers. The imperialist idealism that drives their ventures from day to day
will be cheated of the enemy it cannot live without.
Iran might then become just one more unlucky country -- authoritarian and
cruelly oppressive but an object of persuasion and not the focus of a
never-ending threat of force. The neoconservatives are enraged and their
response has been feverish: if they were an individual, you would say that
he was a danger to himself and others. They still get plenty of attention
and airtime, but the main difference between 2003 and 2015 is the absence of
a president who obeys them -- something that has only served to sharpen
their anger.
President Obama defended the nuclear deal vigorously in a recent speech at
American University. This was the first such extended explanation of a
foreign policy decision in his presidency, and it lacked even an ounce of
inspirational fluff. It was, in fact, the first of his utterances not likely
to be remembered for its eloquence, because it merits the higher praise of
good sense. It has been predictably denounced in some quarters as stiff,
unkind, ungenerous, and over the top.
Obama began by speaking of the ideology that incited and justified the Iraq
War of 2003. He called it a mindset, and the word was appropriate --
suggesting a pair of earphones around a head that prevents us from hearing
any penetrating noise from the external world. Starting in the summer of
2002, Americans heard a voice that said: Bomb, invade, occupy Iraq! And do
the same to other countries! For the sake of our sanity, Obama explained, we
had to take off those earphones:
We had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a
mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a
mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking
work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats
beyond what the intelligence supported. Leaders did not level with the
American people about the costs of war, insisting that we could easily
impose our will on a part of the world with a profoundly different culture
and history. And, of course, those calling for war labeled themselves strong
and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak -- even appeasers
of a malevolent adversary.
In this precise catalogue of mental traits, Obama was careful to name no
names, but he made it easy to construct a key:
A mindset characterized by a preference for military action: President
George W. Bush ordering the U.N. nuclear inspectors out of Iraq (though they
had asked to stay and complete their work) because there was a pressing need
to bomb in March 2003;
A mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action: Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld dismissing the skeptical challenge and eventual
non-participation of France and Germany as proof of the irrelevance of old
Europe;
A mindset that exaggerated threats: the barely vetted New York Times stories
by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which an administration bent on war
first molded and then cited on TV news shows as evidence to justify
preventive war;
Leaders did not level with the American people about the costs of war:
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz pooh-poohing the estimate by Army
Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki that it would take 400,000 troops to
maintain order in Iraq after the war;
Insisting that we could easily impose our will on a part of the world with a
profoundly different culture and history: the bromides of Bush and National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the indwelling Arab spirit that yearns
for American-style democracy across the Middle East.
Obama went on to assert that there was a continuity of persons as well as
ideas between the propagandists who told us to bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq
in 2003 and those now spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure that
Congress will abort the nuclear deal. The same mindset, the president
remarked, in many cases offered by the same people who seem to have no
compunction with being repeatedly wrong, led to a war that did more to
strengthen Iran, more to isolate the United States, than anything we have
done in the decades before or since.
Those people have never recognized that they were wrong. Some put the blame
on President Bush or his viceroy in Baghdad, the administrator of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, for mismanaging the
occupation that followed the invasion; others continue to nurse the
fantastic theory that Saddam Hussein really was in possession of nuclear
weapons but somehow smuggled them across the border to Syria and fooled both
U.S. reconnaissance teams and the U.N. inspectors; still others maintain
that Shiite militias and weaponry dispatched to Iraq from Iran were the
chief culprits in the disaster of the postwar insurgency.
Bear in mind that these opinion-makers, in 2003, hardly understood the
difference between Shiite and Sunni in the country they wanted to invade. To
put the blame now on Iran betrays a genius for circular reasoning. Since all
Shia militias are allied by religion with Iran, it can be argued that Iraq
was not destroyed by a catastrophic war of choice whose effects set the
region on fire. No: the United States under Bush and Cheney was an
unpresuming superpower doing its proper work, bringing peace and democracy
to one of the dark places of the earth by means of a clean, fast, surgical
war. In 2004 and 2005, just as in 2015, it was Iran that caused the trouble.
Simple Facts That Are Not Known
Because the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scorned the
nuclear deal without any attention to detail, the president felt compelled
in his speech to recognize candidly the difference of national interest that
exists between Israel and the United States. Though we are allies, he said,
we are two different countries, and he left his listeners to draw the
necessary inference: it is not possible for two countries (any more than two
persons) to be at once different and the same. Obama went on to connect the
nations in question to this premise of international politics:
I believe [the terms of the agreement] are in Americas interest and
Israels interest. And as president of the United States, it would be an
abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply
because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.
The last affirmation is critical. A president takes an oath to preserve,
protect, and defend the constitution of the United States -- that is, to
attend to the interest of his own country and not another.
The danger of playing favorites in the world of nations, with a partiality
that knows no limits, was a main topic of George Washingtons great Farewell
Address. Permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and
passionate attachments for others, should be excluded, said Washington,
because
a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of
evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an
imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and
infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a
participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate
inducement or justification.
There are Americans today who submit to a ruling passion that favors
uniquely the interests of Israel, and the president had them in mind when he
invoked his duties under the Constitution toward the only country whose
framework of laws and institutions he had sworn to uphold. Genuine respect
for another democracy formed part of his thinking here. Not only was Obama
not elected to support Netanyahus idea of Americas interest, he was also
not elected by Israelis to support his own idea of Israels interest.
In a recent commentary in Foreign Affairs, the prominent Israeli journalist
and former government adviser Daniel Levy pointed out a fact that is not
much remembered today regarding Netanyahus continuous effort to sabotage
negotiations with Iran. It was the Israeli prime minister who initially
demanded that nuclear negotiations be pursued on a separate track from any
agreement about the trade or sale of conventional weapons. He chose that
path because he was certain it would cause negotiations to collapse. The
gambit having failed, he now makes the lifting of sanctions on conventional
weaponry a significant objection to the bad deal in Vienna.
Obama concluded his argument by saying that alternatives to military action
will have been exhausted if we reject a hard-won diplomatic solution that
the world almost unanimously supports. So lets not mince words. The choice
we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war -- maybe not
tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon. A measured statement
and demonstrably true.
But you would never come within hailing distance of this truth if you
listened to the numbers of Congressional Republicans who repeat the
neoconservative watchwords and their accompanying digests of the recent
history of the Middle East. They run through recitations of the dramatis
personae of the war on terror with the alacrity of trained seals. Israel
lives in a dangerous neighborhood. Islamists are knocking on our door
and looking for gaps in the border with Mexico. Iran is the foremost
state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Barack Obama is an appeaser and
its five minutes to midnight in Munich. Elected officials who walk on two
legs in the twenty-first century are not embarrassed to say these things
without the slightest idea of their provenance.
If there was a fault in the presidents explanation of his policy, it lay in
some things he omitted to say. When you are educating a people who have been
proselytized, as Americans have been, by a political cult for the better
part of two decades, nothing should be taken for granted. Most Americans do
not know that the fanatical Islamists, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, the Islamic State
(IS) -- the active and destructive revolutionary force in the greater Middle
East at the moment -- are called Sunni Muslims. Nor do they know that the
Shia Muslims who govern Iran and who support the government of Syria have
never attacked the United States.
To say it as simply as it should be said: the Shiites and Sunnis are
different sects, and the Shiites of Iran are fighting against the same
enemies the U.S. is fighting in Syria and elsewhere. Again, most Americans
who get their information from miscellaneous online scraps have no idea that
exclusively Sunni fanatics made up the force of hijackers who struck the
World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They would be surprised to learn
that none of these people came from Iraq or Iran. They do not know that 15
of the 19 came from Saudi Arabia -- a supposed ally of the United States.
And they do not know that the Islamist warriors who brought chaos and
destruction to Syria and Iraq are bankrolled in part by members of the Saudi
and Qatari elite who have nothing to do with Iran. It has never been
emphasized -- it is scarcely written in a way that might be noticeable even
in our newspaper of record -- that Iran itself has carried the heaviest
burden of the fight against IS.
Throughout his presidency, when speaking of Iran, Obama has mixed every
expression of hope for improved relations with a measure of opprobrium. He
has treated Iran as an exceptional offender against the laws of nations, a
country that requires attention only in the cause of disarmament. He does
this to assure the policy elite that he respects and can hum the familiar
tunes. But this subservience to cliché is timid, unrealistic, and
pragmatically ill advised. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did not
denounce the Soviet Union when they took that countrys dictator, Joseph
Stalin, as a partner in war in 1941, though Stalins crimes exceeded
anything attributable to the Iranian mullahs. Ritual denunciation of a
necessary ally is a transparent absurdity. And in a democracy, it prevents
ordinary people from arriving at an understanding of what is happening.
Nuclear Deals and Their Critics, Then and Now
What are the odds that the neoconservatives and the Republicans whose policy
they manage will succeed in aborting the P5+1 nuclear deal? One can take
some encouragement from the last comparably ambitious effort at
rapprochement with an enemy: the conversations between President Ronald
Reagan and the Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik,
Washington, and Moscow in 1986, 1987, and 1988. At the same time, one ought
to be forewarned by the way that unexpected change of course was greeted.
The neoconservative cult was just forming then. Some of its early leaders
like Richard Perle had positions in the Reagan administration, and they were
unanimously hostile to the talks that would yield the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) of 1988. The agreement set out the terms for the
destruction of 2,611 missiles, capable of delivering 4,000 warheads -- the
biggest step in lowering the risk of nuclear war since the Test Ban Treaty
championed by President Kennedy and passed in late 1963.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691161410/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691161410/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20But as
James Mann recounted in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan -- a narrative of the
anticommunist presidents surprising late turn in foreign policy -- all of
Reagans diplomatic efforts were deeply disapproved at the time, not only by
the neoconservative hotheads but by those masters of the diplomatic
breakthrough, former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger; by the most widely quoted columnists of the right, George
Will and William Safire; and by Time magazine, which ran a story titled Has
Reagan Gone Soft? The Reagan-Gorbachev talks were looked upon with
suspicion, too, by realists and moderates of the political and security
establishment, including Robert Gates and then-Vice President George H.W.
Bush. Why Gates? Because he was deputy director of the CIA and the Agency
was thoroughly convinced that Soviet Russia and its leadership could never
change. Why Bush? Because he was already running for president.
The political and media establishment of that moment was startled by the
change that President Reagan first signaled in 1986, as startled as todays
establishment has been by the signing of the P5+1 agreement. This was the
same Ronald Reagan who in 1983 had called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
At the end of his visit to Moscow in June 1988, Reagan was asked by the ABC
News reporter Sam Donaldson, Do you still think youre in an evil empire,
Mr. President?
No, Reagan replied. I was talking about another time and another era.
And he stuck to that answer at a press conference the next day, adding: I
think that a great deal of [the change] is due to the General Secretary, who
I have found different than previous Soviet leaders... A large part of it is
Mr. Gorbachev as a leader.
By 1987, Reagans popularity had hit a low of 47% -- largely because of the
Iran-Contra scandal -- but he still retained his reputation as the most
irreproachable defender of the West against world communism. Obama for his
part has done everything he could -- short of emulating the
invade-and-occupy strategy of Bush -- to maintain U.S. force projection in
the Middle East in a manner to which Washington has become accustomed since
9/11. He doubtless believes in this policy, and he has surrounded himself
with adepts of humanitarian war; but he clearly also calculated that a
generous ration of conformity would protect him when he tried for his own
breakthrough in negotiations with Iran.
In the end, Reagan got a 93-5 vote in the Senate for his nuclear treaty with
the Soviet Union. Obama is hoping for much less -- a vote of less than two
thirds of that body opposed to the Iran settlement. But he is confronted by
the full-scale hostility of a Republican party with a new character and with
financial backing of a new kind.
The U.S. military and security establishment has sided with the president.
And though the fact is little known here, so have the vast majority of
Israelis who can speak with any authority on issues of defense and security.
Even the president of Israel, Reuben Rivlin, has signaled his belief that
Netanyahus interventions in American politics are wrong. Former Prime
Minister Ehud Barak has advised that, however reluctantly, Israel should
accept the nuclear agreement and forge an understanding with the U.S. about
what to do in case of its violation. To this remarkable consensus should be
added the public letter -- signed by 29 American scientists, many of them
deeply involved in nuclear issues, including six recipients of the Nobel
Prize -- which vouches for the stringency of the agreement and praises the
unprecedented rigor of the 24-day cap on Iranian delays for site
inspection: an interval so short (as no one knows better than these
scientists) that successful concealment of traces of nuclear activity
becomes impossible.
Two other public letters supporting the nuclear deal have been notable. The
first was signed by former U.S. diplomats endorsing the agreement
unambiguously, among them Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq
after 2003; Nicholas Burns, who negotiated with Iran for the younger Bush;
and Daniel Kurtzer, a former ambassador to Israel and Egypt who served under
both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. A further letter carried the
personal and institutional authority of dozens of retired admirals and
generals. So close an approach to unanimity on the benefits of an agreement
among the U.S. military, diplomatic, and scientific communities has seldom
been achieved. Even President Reagan could not claim this degree of support
by qualified judges when he submitted the INF treaty to the Senate.
Such endorsements ought to represent a substantial cause for hope. But
Obamas supporters would be hard pressed to call the contest a draw on
television and radio. The neoconservatives -- and the Republicans channeling
them -- are once again working with boundless energy. Careers are being
built on this fight, as in the case of Senator Tom Cotton, and more than one
presidential candidacy has been staked on it.
On the day of Obamas speech, even a relatively informed talk show host like
Charlie Rose allowed his coverage to slant sharply against the agreement.
His four guests were the Haaretz reporter Chemi Shalev; the Daily Beast
columnist Jonathan Alter; the former State Department official and president
of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass; and the neoconservative
venture capitalist, Mark Dubowitz, who has come to be treated as an expert
on the nuclear policies and government of Iran.
Haass, passionately opposed to the agreement, said that the presidents
speech had been way over the top, and hoped Congress would correct its
clear flaws. Shalev rated the speech honest and bracing but thought it
would leave many in the Jewish community offended. Dubowitz spoke of Iran
as a perfidious nation that ought to be subjected to relentless and
ever-increasing penalties. His solution: empower the next president to go
back and renegotiate. Jonathan Alter alone defended the agreement.
Planning to Attack Iran, 2002-2015
By now, the active participants in mainstream commentary on the War on
Terror all have a history, and one can learn a good deal by looking back.
Haass, for example, a pillar of the foreign policy establishment, worked in
the State Department under Bush and Cheney and made no public objection to
the Iraq War. Dubowitz has recently co-authored several articles with Reuel
Marc Gerecht, a leading propagandist for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In a
characteristic piece in the Wall Street Journal last November, Gerecht and
Dubowitz argued that the P5+1 negotiations opened a path to a nuclear bomb
for Iran. President Obama, they said, was too weak and trapped by his own
errors to explore any alternatives, but there were three scenarios that a
wiser and stronger president might consider. First, the White House could
give up on diplomacy and preemptively strike Irans nuclear sites; second,
the administration could give up on the current talks and default back to
sanctions; third, new, even more biting sanctions could be enacted,
causing Tehran considerable pain. The range of advisable policy, for
Gerecht and Dubowitz, begins with crippling sanctions and ends with a war
of aggression.
These scenarios typify the neoconservative options. Writing on his own in
the Atlantic in June 2013, Dubowitz informed American readers that there was
nothing to celebrate in the Iranian presidential election that brought to
power the apparently rational and moderate Hassan Rouhani. A loyalist of
Iran's supreme leader and a master of nuclear deceit, Rouhani, as
interpreted by Dubowitz, is a false friend whose new authority doesn't get
us any closer to stopping Iran's nuclear drive.
Consider Gerecht in his solo flights and you can see what made the president
say that these are the people who gave us the Iraq War. They were as sure
then about the good that would follow the bombing and invasion of that
country as they are now about the benefits of attacking Iran. Indeed,
Gerecht has the distinction of having called for an attack on Iran even
before the official launch of the Bush strategy on Iraq.
It is said that Dick Cheneys August 26, 2002, speech to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars marked the first formal description of the War on Terror
offered by a U.S. leader to American citizens. But Gerecht, a former CIA
specialist on the Middle East, stole a march on the vice president. In the
Weekly Standard of August 6, 2002, under the title Regime Change in Iran?,
he declared his belief that President Bush was the possessor of a
revolutionary edge and appeal... in the Middle East. The younger Bush had
sliced across national borders and civilizational divides with an
unqualified assertion of a moral norm. The president declared, The people
of Iran want the same freedoms, human rights, and opportunities as people
around the world. America will stand alongside people everywhere
determined to build a world of freedom, dignity, and tolerance.
The analyst Gerecht took up where the evangelist Bush left off: the relevant
country to attack in August 2002 -- on behalf of its people of course -- was
Iran. Gerecht had no doubt that
the Iranian people overwhelmingly view clerical rule as fundamentally
illegitimate. The heavily Westernized clerics of Iran's religious
establishment -- and these mullahs are on both sides of the so-called
'moderate-conservative' split -- know perfectly well that the Persian word
azadi, freedom, is perhaps the most evocative word in the language now...
Azadi has also become indissolubly associated with the United States.
This was the way the neoconservatives were already writing and thinking back
in August 2002. It is hard to know which is more astounding, the show of
philological virtuosity or the self-assurance regarding the advisability of
war against a nation of 70 million.
General prognostications, however, are never enough for the
neoconservatives, and Gerecht in 2002 enumerated the specific benefits of
disorder in Iraq and Iran:
An American invasion [of Iraq] could possibly provoke riots in Iran --
simultaneous uprisings in major cities that would simply be beyond the scope
of regime-loyal specialized riot-control units. The army or the
Revolutionary Guard Corps would have to be pulled into service in large
numbers, and that's when things could get interesting.
That was how he had it scored. Bush, the voice of freedom, would be adored
as a benevolent emperor at a distance:
President Bush, of course, doesn't need National Iranian Television
broadcasts to beam his message into the Islamic Republic. Everything he says
moves at light speed through the country. The president just needs to keep
talking about freedom being the birthright of Muslim peoples.
Such was the neoconservative recipe for democracy in the Middle East: beam
the words of George W. Bush to people everywhere, invade Iraq, and spark a
democratic uprising in Iran (assisted if necessary by U.S. bombs and
soldiers).
For a final glimpse of the same mindset, look closely at Gerechts advice
on Syria in June 2014. Writing again in the Weekly Standard, he deprecated
the very idea of getting help from Iran in the fight against the Islamic
State. The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy declares the title of the piece,
and the article makes the same point with a minimal reliance on facts. Sunni
terrorists are portrayed as impetuous youngsters who naturally go too far,
but it is too early to gauge their trajectory: the changes they bring may
not ultimately be uncongenial to American interest. The Shiite masterminds
of Iran, on the other hand, have long ago attained full maturity and will
never change. Gerechts hope, last summer, was that substantial Iranian
casualties in a war against IS would lead to the spontaneous uprising that
failed to materialize in 2003.
It is possible that the present Sunni-Shiite conflict could, if the Iranian
body count rises and too much national treasure is spent, produce shock
waves that fundamentally weaken the clerical regime... Things could get
violent inside the Islamic Republic.
The vision underlying this policy amounts to selective or strategic
tolerance of al-Qaeda and IS for the sake of destroying Iran.
Will the War on Terror Be Debated?
How can such opinions be contested in American politics? The answer will
have to come from what remains of the potential opposition party in the war
on terror. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been a remarkable
exception, but for the most part the Democrats are preoccupied with domestic
policy. If almost two-thirds of Congress today is poised to vote against the
Iran settlement, this embarrassment is the result of years of systematic
neglect. Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden, Tammy
Baldwin, and a few others have the talent to lead an opposition to a pursuit
of the war on terror on the neoconservative plan, but to have any effect
they would have to speak up regularly on foreign policy.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party and its billionaire bankrollers are playing
the long game on Iran. They would like to gain the two-thirds majority to
override Obamas veto of a Congressional vote against the nuclear agreement,
but they do not really expect that to happen. The survival of any agreement,
however, depends not only on its approval but on its legitimation. Their
hope is to depress public support for the P5+1 deal so much that the next
president and members of the next Congress would require extraordinary
courage to persist with American participation.
In the Foreign Affairs column mentioned earlier, Daniel Levy concluded that
the long game is also Benjamin Netanyahus strategy:
Netanyahu is going for a twofer -- if he loses on the veto-proof super
majority in Congress, he can still succeed in keeping the Iran deal
politically controversial and fragile and prevent any further détente with
Iran. The hope, in this case, is that the next U.S. administration can
resume the status quo ante in January 2017.
What we are seeing, then, is not simply a concentrated effort that will end
with the vote by the Senate in September on the P5+1 nuclear deal. It is the
earliest phase of a lobbying campaign intended to usher in a Republican
president of appropriate views in January 2017.
One may recognize that the money is there for such a long-term drive and yet
still wonder at the virulence of the campaign to destroy Iran. What exactly
allows the war party to keep on as they do? Within Israel, the cause is a
political theology that obliges its believers to fight preemptive wars
without any end in sight in order to guard against enemies who have opposed
the existence of the Jewish state ever since its creation. This is a
defensive fear that responds to an irrefutable historical reality. The
neoconservatives and the better informed among their Republican followers
are harder to grasp -- harder anyway until you realize that, for them, we
are Rome and the Republican Party is the cradle of future American emperors,
praetors, and proconsuls.
Ideology, as the political essayist and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel once
wrote, is the bridge of excuses a government offers to the people it
rules. Between 2001 and 2009, the U.S. government was run by
neoconservatives; they had a fair shot and the public judgment went against
them; but in a climate of resurgent confusion about the Middle East, they
have come a long way toward rebuilding their bridge. They are zealots but
also prudent careerists, and the combination of money and revived propaganda
may succeed in blurring many unhappy memories. Nor can they be accused of
insincerity. When a theorist at a neoconservative think tank, the Foundation
for Defense of Democracies or the American Enterprise Institute, affirms
that democracy is what the Iranian people will have as soon as the U.S.
cripples the resources of that country, he surely believes what he is
saying. The projection seems as true to them now as it was in 2002, 2007,
and 2010, as true as it will be in 2017 when a new president, preferably
another young man of spirit like George W. Bush, succeeds the weak and
deplorable Barack Obama. For such people, the battle is never over, and
there is always another war ahead. They will push until they are stopped.
David Bromwich, a TomDispatch regular, teaches literature at Yale University
and is the author of Moral Imagination.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 David Bromwich
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176039
