| Al Jazeera, April 14, 2009 | ||||||||
| By Rob Reynolds, senior Washington correspondent | ||||||||
The US easing of travel restrictions to Cuba is a small step – but considering that US-Cuban relations have been frozen in hostility for decades, any step is significant. The new policy allows Cuban-Americans unlimited visits to family members on the island and permits them to send money and gifts such as clothing and personal items. It also gives US telecommunications companies permission to apply for Cuban government permits.
Until now, Cuban-Americas have been restricted to one visit every three years and an annual limit of $300 in remittances.”It sends a signal that the US is ready to engage diplomatically, where there has been virtually no engagement with Cuba for 50 years,” says Johanna Mendelson Forman, a Latin American policy specialist at the Centre for International and Strategic Studies in Washington. When Barack Obama began his campaign for the White House he promised to take the steps outlined on Monday. The White House says Obama’s aim is to “help bridge the gap among divided Cuban families and promote the freer flow of information and humanitarian items to the Cuban people”. The “people-based” approach to improving ties with Cuba won praise from Vicki Huddleston, a former US envoy to Cuba. “It’s a great thing to allow for human contact,” she says. “I think you’ve seen all over the world that you get change through contact, not isolation.” Cuban-American support The new policy is likely to be broadly popular among the Cuban-American community where many felt harsh restrictions imposed by the administration of George Bush, Obama’s predecessor, nearly five years ago were hurting ordinary Cuban citizens.
There about 1.5 million Americans with relatives in Cuba.Many of those families provide vital financial assistance to relatives, benefiting the Cuban economy as a whole. Legislation now before the US congress would lift all travel restrictions on all American citizens, not just Cuban-Americans. A flood of curious, free-spending American tourists would have an enormous impact on Cuba’s economy and society. After 47 years, the US economic embargo on Cuba has been condemned by some as one of the worst foreign policy failures in US history. Fidel Castro, the former president, remained firmly in control during all those years, thumbing his nose at “Yanqui” power and 10 US presidents, until ill health forced him to transfer power to his brother, Raul, in February last year. Almost every country in the world except the US has normal relations with Cuba. A steady supply of oil and money from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has helped the Castro government survive and continue suppressing freedom of speech and political activity. The constant state of siege brought on by the embargo gives the Castro brothers an important emotional prop and exposes the US to charges of bullying behaviour towards its smaller neighbour. It could have died years ago had it not been for the political clout of the conservative Cuban-American exile community, concentrated in the key electoral state of Florida. By well-organised public relations efforts and bloc voting, emphatically anti-communist, anti-Castro Cuban-Americans were able to dictate US foreign policy. No president dared oppose them, for fear of losing Florida and the White House on election day. Liberalisation hope But while many of the older generation of exiles and expatriates still harbour a fierce hatred for Castro, a younger generation has softer views. A new poll shows a majority of Cuban Americans now oppose continuing the embargo.
And among all Americans, 71 per cent want a positive change in Cuban-American relations.Because of the embargo, the US has very little diplomatic or economic leverage on Cuba. The Obama administration hopes its travel gesture will encourage Havana to allow more human rights and economic freedom. Raul Castro’s government has taken some tentative steps towards liberalising its tight control over society, allowing Cubans to own mobile phones, computers and foreign currency. Obama has repeatedly said he would consider holding talks with Cuban leaders. But while the US president is more inclined to break the old standoff with Havana, he says he is not about to do away with the embargo until Cuba institutes more human rights and democratic reforms Obama will attend a hemispheric summit meeting in Trinidad this week, where he is likely to be pressed by Latin American leaders to move more boldly towards normalising relations with Cuba. He can at least offer this small but significant measure as evidence he is committed to change. |
Britain and Iraq: fortunes of war
April 14, 2009- Editorial
- The Guardian, Tuesday 14 April 2009
They swept in from the Fao peninsula on 20 March 2003 with their commanders proudly explaining how their troops could fight, feed and emote with their foes all at the same time. This was the army that had been through Malaysia and Northern Ireland. It could do counter-insurgency. It knew about hearts and minds. It will finally leave Basra this month a humbler force. What happened in the intervening six years was traumatic. Historians will be harsh in their judgment.
The most ignominious moment of Britain’s Iraq war – the subject of a Guardian series this week – came in September 2007, when commanders struck a deal with the Mahdi militia leaders. Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was furious. US commanders accused Britain of cutting and running. Neither told their British counterparts about the Charge of the Knights offensive against the Shia militias, which followed the next spring, until the last moment. The analysis may differ; the crucial flaw may vary from one account to another; but almost all of the players – generals, soldiers and analysts interviewed by the Guardian this week – concur on one point: the Iraq operation, including Britain’s part in it, was an avoidable disaster.
Pre-war planning was negligent. This led to a situation in which 100,000 or more Iraqis may have died. Both Britain and the US were unprepared for the consequences of deposing Saddam and for t he implosion of Iraq’s system of governance. The build-up to the invasion lasted months, yet body armour and plates to protect tanks in the desert were not ordered for fear they would be taken as signs that diplomacy would not be allowed to take its course. There was a serious mismatch between military and civilian resources on the ground. The civilian effort was ad-hoc, hand-to-mouth and left the military too much to do in areas where it had limited experience. Security in Basra, which initially provided troops with a benign environment, might not have degenerated if aid had got in quicker.
Public support corroded and, with it, army morale. There were incidents at welcome home parades. The unspoken bond between a nation and its professional soldiers became strained over the army’s unavoidable guilt by association with Tony Blair’s decision to take part in the invasion. The strategy in the south was less reformist and ambitious than the US operation in Baghdad, which dreamed of bequeathing Iraq with democracy. Britain’s political objective was simply to hold the ring in the south. Even if troops fulfilled their tactical objectives, such as handing over control to the Iraqi army, there was no agreement on the political outcomes.
And bit by bit, US forces, about which British commanders had initially been so dismissive, got better at counter-insurgency. Iraq turned the British argument on its head. US soldiers are now better resourced and trained in counter-insurgency than British ones.
Over-stretched and badly equipped – it all sounds reminiscent of another war the army is waging. And the real question posed by the Guardian series this week is whether anything has been learned. Are miscalculations made in Basra not being reproduced in Helmand? If anything, the task in Afghanistan is harder. The deal which allowed US troops to disengage, and which could still crumble, was between two fairly homogenous groups – the Shia government of al-Maliki and the Sunni tribal chiefs. In Afghanistan, there is neither a central government worth the name, nor a clear enemy. Are the Taliban jihadi foreigners, Pashtu nationalists, farmers by day, fighters by night, or some or all of the above? And are the two allies any more prepared than they were in Iraq to deploy a civilian expeditionary force to assist a military operation in states they judge to be failing? Iraq may already be fading from the headlines, but it casts a long shadow.
Palestinian Christians Exodus
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BETHLEHEM — Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, is losing many of its young Christians who, reeling under the yoke of the Israeli occupation and economic hardships, are seeking a better life abroad.“They can’t easily adapt to the hardships associated with the stressful situation stemming from the Israeli occupation,” Dr. Jamal Khadr, a priest at the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, told IslamOnline.net. In recent decades, thousands of Christians left the occupied West Bank for a new life abroad, especially in North and South America, Australia, Scandinavia and even Africa. No precise statistics are available as to the exact number, though it is widely believed to be significantly high. According to figures compiled by the UN, about one-tenth of the Christian population in Bethlehem and the adjacent towns of Beit Jalla and and Beit Sahour has moved in recent years. Dr. Khadr, also a professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Latin Seminary, says most of the emigrants are young Christians who are distressed by occupation and crises. They largely travelled to North America and Sweden, where usually some family members had previously settled. Nabil Kukali, a professor of education and public opinion pollster, agrees that the stressful conditions under the Israeli occupation are forcing many young Christians to migrate. “These young people want to build a future for themselves and this is very hard to do here,” explains Kukali, a Christian himself. About 50,000 Christians live in the West Bank, Al-Quds (occupied East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip, according to MP Bernard Sabella, a former Professor of Sociology at Bethlehem University. Christians make up less than 1.5 percent of the total population inside the occupied Palestinian territories, 10 percent of Israeli Arabs and slightly more than 6 percent of the world’s Palestinian population of more than 9 million. Economy Factor
The tough economic conditions in the occupied territories, aggravated by the strangling occupation, are a major factor in making migration decisions.“Palestinian Christians are economically better off than most other Palestinians,” notes Khadr. “They are generally accustomed to a certain pattern of bourgeoisie life.” He insists that emigration is not confined to Christians and that Muslims, too, are moving out. Khadr explains, however, that emigration within the Christian community is more conspicuous due to the small size of the community. Mazen Qumsiyeh, an American-Palestinian professor of genetics and former academic at Yale University, says pressures on Muslims are just as daunting but Christians are more economically able to find a way out. “Both are subject to the same pressures,” he told IOL. “Christian are usually more economically and in other ways, language, church and other connections, able to leave than their fellow compatriots who are Muslim.” Battle Unsettled by the phenomenal shrinkage of their community, Christian leaders are trying to find ways and means to encourage mainly young Christian males to resist the temptation of emigration. “The only way to prevent a further deterioration is by discouraging emigration and encouraging people to stay through lasting incentives,” a Greek Orthodox clergyman told IOL. He added that the exodus has created a serious social imbalance. “Today in Bethlehem there are two or three young [Christian] females for every young [Christian] male within the marriage age, and that is a real problem.” Christian organizations in the West Bank, subsidized by Christian groups abroad, have been making strenuous efforts to encourage potential emigrants to stay home. They are offering young Christians financial assistance in housing, education and in maintaining businesses. Christian or mainly Christian institutions of higher education, such as the Catholic University of Bethlehem, also try to help in resisting the phenomenon of emigration. “There is a real problem, and it won’t go away just by talking about it,” says Kukali, the education professor. “I believe that the Palestinian Authority should create work opportunities here and enhance the overall psychological atmosphere.” He notes that for some Christians, fleeing is just not an option. “I was born here, my father is buried here, and my grandfather is also buried here. So I am staying here. I have no other homeland. “I am Palestinian and will always be Palestinian.” |
Why Europe Won’t Fight America’s War
April 13, 2009By Pat Buchanan | creators.com, April 10, 2009
“No one will say this publicly, but the true fact is we are all talking about our exit strategy from Afghanistan. We are getting out. It may take a couple of years, but we are all looking to get out.”
Thus did a “senior European diplomat” confide to The New York Times during Obama’s trip to Strasbourg.
Europe is bailing out on us. Afghanistan is to be America’s war.
During what the Times called a “fractious meeting,” NATO agreed to send 3,000 troops to provide security during the elections and 2,000 to train Afghan police. Thin gruel beside Obama’s commitment to double U.S. troop levels to 68,000.
Why won’t Europe fight?
Because Europe sees no threat from Afghanistan and no vital interest in a faraway country where NATO Europeans have not fought since the British Empire folded its tent long ago.
Al-Qaida did not attack Europe out of Afghanistan. America was attacked. Because, said Osama bin Laden in his “declaration of war,” America was occupying the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, choking Muslim Iraq to death and providing Israel with the weapons to repress the Palestinians.
As Europe has no troops in Saudi Arabia, is exiting Iraq and backs a Palestinian state, Europeans figure, they are less likely to be attacked than if they are fighting and killing Muslims in Afghanistan.
Madrid and London were targeted for terror attacks, they believe, because Spain and Britain were George W. Bush’s strongest allies in Iraq. Britain, with a large Pakistani population, must be especially sensitive to U.S. Predator strikes in Pakistan.
Moreover, Europeans have had their fill of war.
In World War I alone, France, Germany and Russia each lost far more men killed than we have lost in all our wars put together. British losses in World War I were greater than America’s losses, North and South, in the Civil War. Her losses in World War II, from a nation with but a third of our population, were equal to ours. Where America ended that war as a superpower and leader of the Free World, Britain ended it bankrupt, broken, bereft of empire, sinking into socialism.
All of Europe’s empires are gone. All her great navies are gone. All her million-man armies are history. Her populations are all aging, shrinking and dying, as millions pour in from former colonies in the Third World to repopulate and Islamize the mother countries.
Because of Europe’s new “diversity,” any war fought in a Muslim land will inflame a large segment of Europe’s urban population.
Finally, NATO Europe knows there is no price to pay for malingering in NATO’s war in Afghanistan.
Europeans know America will take up the slack and do nothing about their refusal to send combat brigades.
For Europeans had us figured out a long time ago.
They sense that we need them more than they need us.
While NATO provides Europe with a security blanket, it provides America with what she cannot live without: a mission, a cause, a meaning to life.
Were the United States, in exasperation, to tell Europe, “We are pulling out of NATO, shutting down our bases and bringing our troops home because we are weary of doing all the heavy lifting, all the fighting and dying for freedom,” what would we do after we had departed and come home?
What would our foreign policy be?
What would be the need for our vaunted military-industrial complex, all those carriers, subs, tanks, and thousands of fighter planes and scores of bombers? What would happen to all the transatlantic conferences on NATO, all the think tanks here and in Europe devoted to allied security issues?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO’s mission was accomplished. As Sen. Richard Lugar said, NATO must “go out of area or out of business.”
NATO desperately did not want to go out of business. So, NATO went out of area, into Afghanistan. Now, with victory nowhere in sight, NATO is heading home. Will it go out of business?
Not likely. Too many rice bowls depend on keeping NATO alive.
You don’t give up the March of Dimes headquarters and fund-raising machinery just because Drs. Salk and Sabin found a cure for polio.
Again, one recalls, in those old World War II movies, the invariable scene where two G.I.s are smoking and talking.
“What are you gonna do, Joe, when this is all over?” one would ask.
Years ago, we had the answer.
Joe stayed in the Army. He couldn’t give it up. Soldiering is all he knew. Just like Uncle Sam. We can’t give up NATO because, if we do, we would no longer be the “indispensable nation,” the leader of the Free World.
And, if we’re not that, then who are we? And what would we do?
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Peres Raises Prospect of Attacking Iran
April 13, 2009Israeli President Calls to Unify Sunnis, Europe Against Iran
In an interview today, Israeli President Shimon Peres once again raised the prospect of attacking Iran, saying that if the talks proposed by President Obama did not get Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to “soften” its stance on its civilian nuclear program “we’ll strike him.”
The threat is the latest in a long line of bellicose statements by Israeli officials about the prospect of attacking the Shi’ite nation, but the first since Israel’s new rightist government took power. Israel’s previous government, of which Peres’ Labor Party was also a part, repeatedly threatened to attack Iran over the program.
Peres seemed optimistic about the recent falling out between Egypt and Iran would enable them to “unify all his opponents – the Sunnis and the Europeans, as well as those afraid of nuclear weapons and terror.”
The Israeli government has repeatedly accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons, though the most recent US National Intelligence Estimate says Iran has not had such a program in many years and the IAEA has repeatedly certified that Iran is not diverting any of its uranium to any use other than its nuclear energy program.
Torturer-In-Chief
April 13, 2009Published on Sunday, April 12, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Former President George W. Bush may be indicted for torture.
Far fetched? Not anymore.
In March Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge, asked prosecutors to determine whether there is enough evidence to charge six former members of the Bush administration with torturing prisoners. Should they be indicted as now seems likely it will be hard to argue that their superiors up to and including the former President himself should not be indicted as well.
Imagine if that should happen and a trial take place. It would rivet the attention of the world like no legal action since the prosecution of German and Japanese officials after World War II. More importantly, it would provide credence to the concept of universal jurisdiction championed by Judge Garzón.
Universal jurisdiction is the principle that certain crimes are so egregious and/or such a threat to world peace that those who commit them may be arrested and tried in any country of the world. Torture is one of those crimes.
Who was most responsible for the torture during Bush’s “war on terror?” Was it the functionaries who carried it out, the members of the administration who justified it, or the Torturer in Chief who authorized it? And if any or all of them are left unpunished what does it say about the commitment of our nation to the rule of law and human rights? The world knows we can talk the talk. The question it is asking is will we walk the walk.
Walk the walk would mean leading the charge to bring those who violated our laws and international law by torturing prisoners to justice. That is what President Obama should be doing. Instead he says “look forward not back.”
We tortured native Americans. We tortured slaves. We tortured prisoners under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. At the School of the Americans we taught future dictators to torture. We supported governments that torture their opponents. Nevertheless, because in our words if not always in our actions we also promoted human rights and the rule of law, the Statue of Liberty was the icon of our country for more than 100 years.
George Bush changed that. Now, because he authorized the torture of people he termed “illegal enemy combatants” the icon of our country is a hooded prisoner with wires attached standing on a box in a prison in Iraq. Still, President Obama says, “let’s just ignore all that.”
Baltasar Garzón, on the other hand, says, “let’s not.”
Garzón is best known for bringing about the arrest of the former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction. Pinochet was apprehended in 1998 while visiting England. It was the first time the doctrine was applied for crimes against humanity.
Now Garzón is asking the public prosecutor in Spain to determine if a David Addington, Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith, William Haynes, John Yoo, and Aberto Gonzáles may be charged with violating laws that prohibit the mistreatment of prisoners by providing President Bush with the legal rationale for ordering “harsh interrogation” techniques. “Harsh interrogation” is a euphemism for torture.
Harsh interrogation meant being chained for days with hands extended over the head, being denied toilet facilities, prolonged nudity, waterboarding (a form of torture in which the victim is suffocated to the point of dying), severe beatings, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold temperatures, prolonged solitary confinement, and more. That, according to a Red Cross report, is how suspected terrorists held by the U.S. were treated.
Yet after pictures of U.S. army personnel torturing prisoners at the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq surfaced on the web in 2004 the Bush administration maintained that they depicted the actions of a few rogue soldiers. “We do not torture,” the President said in 2005 even though his administration had long before sought and obtained legal cover from the six former officials now being investigated by Garzon for interrogators to use “harsh interrogation techniques” against suspected terrorists.
“Behind much of the savagery of modern history,” wrote Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, “lies impunity. Tyrants commit atrocities, including genocide, when they calculate they can get away with them.” If President Obama heeds those words he will join Baltasar Garzón’s effort to bring to justice all those responsible for torturing prisoners in Bush’s war against terror.
Pope urges Middle East peace effort
April 13, 2009| Al Jazeera, April 13, 2009 |
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Pope Benedict XVI has called for a renewed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace in his Easter message, just weeks before he travels to the Holy Land for the first time as the Roman Catholic pontiff. He told tens of thousands of people gathered in St Peter’s Square in Vatican City on Sunday that he would carry a message of reconciliation on his May 8 – 15 trip to the Middle East. “Reconciliation – difficult, but indispensable – is a precondition for a future of overall security and peaceful coexistence,” the pope said in his twice-yearly “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) address. “It can only be achieved through renewed, persevering and sincere efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” ‘Cry of victory’ The pope also said in his message, delivered as Christians around the world commemorated Jesus Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday, that all those fearful of losing their jobs during the economic crisis should not to lose hope. “At a time of world food shortage, of financial turmoil, of old and new forms of poverty … it is urgent to rediscover grounds for hope,” the pontiff said. At the morning Mass, the pope told the faithful that the story of the resurrection was a “cry of victory that unites us all today”. The German pope, who turns 82 this month, will visit the Jordanian capital Amman before heading for Jerusalem and Nazareth in Israel, and Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem. It will be the first trip by a pope to the Holy Land since Pope John Paul II visited in 2000 and, at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, asked God forgiveness for offences by Christians against Jews over the centuries. ‘Stay hopeful’ It follows the worst crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations in half a century after Benedict lifted the excommunication of British Bishop Richard Williamson. Williamson said in January that no more than 300,000 Jews lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the six million figure widely accepted by historians. Williamson also said he did not believe there had been any gas chambers at the camps. The Easter celebrations at the Vatican took place nearly a week after a devastating earthquake killed at least 293 people in the Italian town of L’Aquila. The pope, who says he plans to visit the disaster zone in nearby Abruzzo region soon, sent out greetings to those “suffering from the earthquake”. On Good Friday, he prayed that survivors remain hopeful despite the tragedy, which made nearly 40,000 people homeless. |
Growing Anger at US Killings in Afghanistan
April 11, 2009The Khost Province killings yesterday have sparked a growing level of outrage at the behavior of US forces across Afghanistan, and have led Afghan President Hamid Karzai to demand once again that foreign forces adhere to their previous agreement to coordinate planned raids with the national government, and base them on accurate information.
When the killings were reported yesterday morning, US forces claimed that they had killed “four militants” and wounded another one. It was only later that they were forced to acknowledge that the house they attacked belonged to a Afghan Army officer, and that the people killed were his wife, a brother, and two of his children. Afghan health officials revealed today that the wounded woman reported in the initial report was actually nine-months pregnant, and the attacking US forces shot the unborn baby in her womb. The troops now say they don’t believe the people they killed were involved in militant activities.
The Afghan officer, Awal Khan, was flown home after the killing and said he wants “the coalition leaders to expose those behind this and punish them.” US military spokesman Col. Julian says it was “an unfortunate set of circumstances” and that there will be financial assistance to the surviving relatives of those killed.
On the other had Afghan Ambassador to the United States Said Jawad, remarkably, defended the killings, saying it was “a price that we have to pay if we want security and stability in Afghanistan, the region and the world.” Despite the envoy’s support, the killing of an unborn baby seems to have netted Afghanistan little in the way of security.
Dennis Ross’s Iran Plan
April 14, 2009When Dennis Ross, a hawkish, pro-Israel adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, was elevated in February to the post of special adviser on “the Gulf and Southwest Asia”–i.e., Iran–Ross’s critics hoped that his influence would be marginal. After all, unlike special envoys George Mitchell (Israel-Palestine) and Richard Holbrooke (Afghanistan-Pakistan), whose appointments were announced with fanfare, Ross’s appointment was long delayed and then announced quietly, at night, in a press release.
But diplomats and Middle East watchers hoping Ross would be sidelined are wrong. He is building an empire at the State Department: hiring staff and, with his legendary flair for bureaucratic wrangling, cementing liaisons with a wide range of US officials. The Iran portfolio is his, says an insider. “Everything we’ve seen indicates that Ross has completely taken over the issue,” says a key Iran specialist. “He’s acting as if he’s the guy. Wherever you go at State, they tell you, ‘You’ve gotta go through Dennis.'” It’s paradoxical that Obama, who made opening a dialogue with Iran into a crucial plank in his campaign, would hand the Iran file to Ross. Since taking office, Obama has taken a number of important steps to open lines to Iran, including a remarkable holiday greeting by video in which the president spoke directly to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” adding, “We seek engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.” He invited Iran to attend an international conference on Afghanistan, where a top Iranian diplomat shook hands with Holbrooke; he’s allowing American diplomats to engage their Iranian counterparts; and he’s reportedly planning to dispatch a letter directly to Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet Ross, like his neoconservative co-thinkers, is explicitly skeptical about the usefulness of diplomacy with Iran.
Widely viewed as a cog in the machine of Israel’s Washington lobby, Ross was not likely to be welcomed in Tehran–and he wasn’t. Iran’s state radio described his appointment as “an apparent contradiction” with Obama’s “announced policy to bring change in United States foreign policy.” Kazem Jalali, a hardline member of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, joked that it “would have been so much better to pick Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert as special envoy to Iran.” More seriously, a former White House official says that Ross has told colleagues that he believes the United States will ultimately have no choice but to attack Iran in response to its nuclear program.
Not quite a neoconservative himself, Ross has palled around with neocons for most of his career. In the 1970s and ’80s he worked alongside Paul Wolfowitz at the Defense and State Departments, and with Andrew Marshall, a neoconservative strategist who leads the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments. In 1985 Ross helped launch the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Israel lobby’s leading think tank.
From the late 1980s through 2000, Ross served as point man on Arab-Israeli issues for George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, acquiring a reputation as a highly skilled diplomat, albeit one with a pronounced pro-Israel tilt. He led the US side at the July 2000 Camp David summit, but he was deeply mistrusted by Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, and the feeling was mutual. At a crucial moment in the negotiations, Ross threw a tantrum, hurling a briefing book into a table full of juice and fruit. Not surprisingly, when Arafat rejected the Israelis’ less-than-generous offer, Ross heaped blame on the Palestinians for scuttling the talks, the failure of which led directly to Ariel Sharon’s rise to power and the second intifada. Daniel Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew who served as US ambassador to Israel and Egypt and who was one of Obama’s top Middle East advisers last year, co-wrote a book in which he explained, “The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs.”
From 2001 until his appointment in February, Ross was at WINEP, where he helped to oversee a series of reports designed to ring alarm bells about Iran’s nuclear research and to support closer US-Israeli ties in response. Last summer, while advising Obama, he co-chaired a task force that produced a paper titled “Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge.” That report opted for an alarmist view of Iran’s nuclear program and proposed that the next president set up a formal US-Israeli mechanism for coordinating policy toward Iran (including any future need for “preventive military action”). Along with Holbrooke, Ross also helped found United Against Nuclear Iran, a group established to publicize warnings about Iran to the American public and the media. UANI’s advisory board includes former CIA director James Woolsey and Fouad Ajami, perhaps the top Middle East expert for the neoconservative movement.
In September, Ross served as a key member of another task force organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The group assembled a flock of hawks under the leadership of Michael Makovsky, brother of WINEP’s David Makovsky, who served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the heyday of the Pentagon neocons from 2002 to 2006. Its report, “Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development”–written by Michael Rubin, a neoconservative hardliner at the American Enterprise Institute–read like a declaration of war.
The core of the Bipartisan Policy Center report predicted that diplomacy with Iran is likely to fail. Anticipating failure, Ross and his colleagues recommended “prepositioning military assets” by the United States–i.e., a military buildup–coupled with a US “show of force” in the Gulf. This would be followed almost immediately by a blockade of Iranian gasoline imports and oil exports, meant to paralyze Iran’s economy, followed by what they call, not so euphemistically, “kinetic action.”
That “kinetic action”–a US assault on Iran–should, in fact, be massive, suggested the Ross-Rubin task force. It should hit dozens of sites alleged to be part of Iran’s nuclear research program, along with other targets, including Iranian air defense sites, Revolutionary Guard facilities, much of Iran’s military-industrial complex, communications systems, munitions storage facilities, airfields and naval facilities. Eventually, the report concluded, the United States would also have to attack Iran’s ground forces, electric power plants and electrical grids, bridges and “manufacturing plants, including steel, autos, buses, etc.”
Like virtually all of his neoconservative confreres, Ross does not argue that negotiations with Iran should not proceed. Surrendering to the inevitability of a US-Iran dialogue, they insist instead that any such talks proceed according to a strict time limit, measured in weeks or, at most, a few months. In November, Iran specialist Patrick Clawson, Ross’s colleague at WINEP, described any US-Iran dialogue that might emerge as mere theater. “What we’ve got to do is…show the world that we’re doing a heck of a lot to try and engage the Iranians,” he said. “Our principal target with these offers [to Iran] is not Iran. Our principal target with these offers is, in fact, American public opinion [and] world public opinion.” Once that’s done, he implied, the United States would have to take out its big stick.
The reality, however, is that negotiations between Iran and the United States might take many, many months, perhaps years. Putting US-Iran diplomacy on a short fuse, as Ross and his colleagues want to do, guarantees its failure, setting the stage for harsher sanctions, embargoes and the “kinetic action” that Ross has suggested might follow.
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Tags: Dennis Ross, Iran, Israel's Washington lobby, Robert Dreyfuss, United States
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