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Nir Rosen holds forth from Afghanistan’s recently-escalated Helmand Province in his latest for Mother Jones. Along with Rosen’s characteristically illuminating anecdotes from the front lines (like encountering a group of doped-up Afghan National Police), we also get some sobering analysis. It turns out that counterinsurgency — supposedly at the center of this latest “surge” — in Afghanistan is likely not all it’s cracked up to be.

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For those who have not yet read it, Bob Dreyfuss’ skewering of the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Michael Rubin and his long-running love affair with Ahmad Chalabi earlier this week is well worth the time, particularly in light of Chalabi’s reported responsibility for the ongoing political crisis in Iraq over the fate of the 500-some mostly Sunni candidates in next month’s elections. I’ve often wondered why AEI, whose foreign-policy wing, led by Richard Perle and Danielle Pletka, has always been in the forefront of those demanding “regime change” in Tehran, continues to defend Chalabi who, if not an Iranian agent, is clearly considered a key asset by the intelligence apparatus of the Islamic Republic. At least, AEI (perhaps not Rubin) changed its mind about its current hero, Gen. David Petraeus, whom Rubin pilloried as late as 2007 for trying to make nice to the Sunnis. You would think it might reassess its long association with Chalabi, too, unless it derives some other benefit — which can only be imagined — from that association.

Speaking of AEI and its love affair with Chalabi, alumnus Reuel Marc Gerecht — now with the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) — published a nearly 1,600-word (!) op-ed in the New York Times Thursday in which he looks forward to Iran’s “democratization” (a goal with which I am in agreement) as “the most momentous Mideastern event since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.” In his words: “Iran could easily become …the model that transforms the Middle East…” (Sound familiar?) Continue Reading »

While I’m in the follow-up mood, I’ve got a thing or two to say about Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic.

Daniel had this incisive post about Wieseltier and his accusation of anti-Semitism against Andrew Sullivan, and the larger effects of these sort of wanton attacks on even the most reasoned of critics. I’ll let his post speak for itself.

But I do want to hit on the notion that Wieseltier’s attack fits perfectly the neoconservative meme — selective information (Iraq war build-up), character assassination of critics (Plame/Wilson affair), and arguments built on delusional premises (just about everything this cadre does, from the Iraq War heralding a new Middle East to support for expansionist Israel, an untenable position that will be the bane of the Jewish state). In short, the screed against Sullivan reads like a literate Michael Goldfarb.

But there is much, much more than his modus operandi connecting Wieseltier to neoconservatives.

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By way of a follow up on Marsha’s post, I thought I’d expand on some tidbits of coverage as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin teeters between Tea Bagger and neocon patsy — and what it might mean for the newly-invigorated Republican Party’s foreign policy.

The article on Palin in Saturday’s New York Times caught my eye. The main gist of the story is raising questions about what’s next for Palin, who has, according to the report, carved out a comfortable niche for herself. She’s got the pulpit and the money without having to bother with elections or governing.

But buried deep in the story, we got a quick glimpse of some neoconservative rifts developing over Palin.

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It seems that everybody is talking about Leon Wieseltier’s long screed against Andrew Sullivan, in which the New Republic literary editor insinuates at great length that his former colleague is an anti-Semite, while — in cowardly fashion — attempting to maintain deniability by refusing to make the allegation explicit. Any number of commentators from across the political spectrum have demolished Wieseltier’s piece, and I won’t link to them all; Glenn Greenwald’s is especially good, however, and well worth reading in full. Sullivan has also rebutted his ex-friend’s charges at great length, although I tend to agree with Greenwald that it would have been better not to dignify Wieseltier’s rather pathetic rant with a response.

It is clear from every sentence that Wieseltier writes that the man considers himself a Great Intellectual, and I am told that his writings from twenty years ago (and his book about his father’s death) are worth reading. I will have to take this on faith, because I certainly can’t remember ever reading anything particularly interesting by the man. His articles tend to be compendiums of liberal hawk cliches, made notable only by the fact that they are delivered in the most pompous prose style this side of the New Criterion. He tends to rely on superficial displays of erudition to draw attention away from the weaknesses of his argument; note the long and rather gratuitous disquisition on Auden that opens the Sullivan piece. And frankly, one wonders what would happen if others applied to his writing the remarkable oversensitivity he applies to Sullivan’s. Consider Wieseltier’s account of his celebration upon learning that Barack Obama had been elected president:

I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown’s for fried green tomatoes.

Of course, the fact that Wieseltier believes that the election of an African-American president calls for soul food rather than classical music does not make him a racist. Still, it is easy to imagine how he would react if he caught Sullivan (or anyone else) making a comparable statement about a Jewish politician.

I am less interested in what the whole affair says about Wieseltier, however, than in what it says about the changing politics of anti-Semitism. Continue Reading »

In a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace on Sunday, political aspirant and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin confused and conflated the neocon “bomb, bomb Iran” message of Daniel Pipes, founder and Director of the right-wing neoconservative Middle East Forum with the views of conservative MSNBC news commentator and Townhall.com blogger Pat Buchanan.

Last Tuesday, in the National Review (see Jim Lobe’s comments, Feb. 2), and reproduced in the Jerusalem Post , Pipes declared that bombing Iran was the only way that President Barack Obama ( “a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear and whose policies I work against”) could salvage his failed presidency and assure his re-election in 2012.

In a Friday column headlined “Will Obama Play the War Card?”, Buchanan noted the popularity of sanctions and military strikes against Iran in several recent public opinion polls and in Congress, among members of both parties, particularly in the Senate. Buchanan suggested that the most recent Iran sanctions, lopsidedly approved in the House and agreed to in a voice vote by the Senate, targetted Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad less than they did the President of the United States:

The Senate is trying to force Obama’s hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war — a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003.

If it is in the interest of the US to support “those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West,” Buchanan wrote, the recent sanctions legislation in the Senate and House “seem almost diabolically perverse.” Continue Reading »

As Daniel just wrote, the sensational campaign by Im Tirtzu to discredit the New Israel Fund (NIF) and the Israeli human rights groups that it supports has received increasing attention from both US and Israeli media in recent days.

We’ve been looking at some of the publicly available documents about the Central Fund of Israel (CFI), the shadowy, U.S.-based group that has bankrolled Im Tirtzu, and, while we will offer a more complete report in the coming days, we’ve found that a notorious — not to say, bizarre — 32-year old multi-millionaire contributed generously — that is, some $280,000 worth of generosity — to the CFI in 2007 and 2008 alone.

Guma Aguiar is no stranger to the gossip columns in Israel.

The nephew of billionaire Thomas Kaplan, he grew up in Florida as an evangelical Christian before reportedly rediscovering his Jewish roots in 2003. Along with Kaplan, Aguiar appears to have funded the efforts of controversial Rabbi Leib Tropper to enforce more rigorous standards on Jewish converts.

According to Tablet Magazine, Aguiar emigrated to Israel in 2007 after he and Kaplan sold their natural gas company. Aguiar netted $200 million on the deal.

On Aug 25th, 2009, The Miami Herald reported that:

“On June 19, Aguiar was pulled over in his 2009 Bentley after a deputy saw him repeatedly drift across the double-yellow center line on North Dixie Highway in Oakland Park, according to the arrest report.

When stopped, Aguiar got out of his car and said, `Call my lawyer, I’m going to jail,’ the report states.

Aguiar admitted he was smoking marijuana, the car smelled of the illegal substance and the deputy found five grams of the drug as well as pipes stashed inside, according to the arrest report.

Once he was brought to Broward County Jail, Aguiar threatened other inmates and reportedly said, `I have money and could buy you, Mr. Deputy,’ according to an internal BSO memo.

The memo said Aguiar tried to head-butt a deputy and repeatedly resisted jail staffers.’’ Continue Reading »

Wednesday’s Christian Science Monitor reports on the intensifying campaign being waged by the Israeli right against domestic human rights organizations. The story reports that rightists in the Knesset are calling for “an investigation to determine whether the work of those [human rights] nonprofits undermines Israel’s legitimacy,” with the ultimate goal of outlawing some of these groups for providing evidence that was used in the Goldstone report.

This latest attack on the Israeli human rights sector comes in the context of an ugly smear campaign launched against the New Israel Fund, the leading progressive Israeli funding organization, by the right-wing group Im Tirzu. The lowlight of the campaign was a full-page ad in the Jerusalem Post attacking NIF head Naomi Chazan, the former deputy speaker of the Knesset. The ad — “reminiscent of Der Sturmer,” in Didi Remez’s words — labeled Chazan “Naomi Goldstone-Hazan” and showed her wearing a horn. (Remez and co. have been doing the best reporting on the war against human rights NGOS over at Coteret.)

This stepped-up attack on human rights groups is a reminder of the fundamental disingenuousness of the argument, frequently made by Israel’s hardline apologists, that international human rights groups should butt out due to Israel’s own vibrant human rights sector. Former Human Rights Watch chairman Robert Bernstein, for instance, attacked his former organization last year for its reporting on Israel, arguing that Israel’s open society and plethora of human rights organizations made international investigation redundant and that resources would be better spent on Arab countries.

But although the hardliners may sing the praises of the Israeli human rights sector in the international context in order to discredit the likes of Goldstone and HRW, one finds that — with few exceptions — they tend to be the same people leading the charge domestically against these very same human rights groups. It is not that they believe that criticism of Israel’s human rights record should be left to B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, rather than Goldstone and HRW; quite obviously, if Gerald Steinberg et al got their way there would be no criticism of Israel’s human rights record whatsoever.

Islamophobe Daniel Pipes makes what has to be considered the strongest case ever (and in a manner entirely consistent with his and other hard-line neo-cons notoriously cavalier attitude toward violence and war) for bombing nuclear facilities in Iran in his op-ed on National Review Online Tuesday. Obama should do it for political expediency.

In a nutshell:

“He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.

Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapons capacity.

…Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene.”

Pipes argues that the present moment is especially propitious for an attack. In addition to averting the danger of an Iranian-delivered electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) “utterly devastating” the U.S., he claims that the intelligence community is about to reverse its main conclusion of its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran suspended part of its presumed nuclear-weapons programme in 2003; that recent polling shows that a majority of the U.S. public supports military strikes to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; and that “If the U.S. limited its strike to taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities and did not attempt any regime change, it would require few ‘boots on the ground’ and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable.”

Pipes’ is the latest contribution to a roiling debate among neo-conservatives about what to do in light of the ongoing post-election political turmoil within Iran, a circumstance of which Pipes in his article curiously takes no account.

Indeed, one of the movement’s chief — albeit more moderate — ideologues, Robert Kagan, warned in the Washington Post just last week against a military attack (by Israel anyway) against Iran precisely because it would destroy the best chances for “regime change” in the Islamic Republic’s 31-year history: Continue Reading »

In a bizarre permutation of traditional political alliances, Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, is catching flack from his usual allies on the right for calling out Rush Limbaugh’s anti-Semitic slurs last week.

By taking on the face of modern conservatism, Foxman either bit off more than he could chew or  pulled off some carefully orchestrated political jujitsu to harden his—and the ADL’s—position as moderates.

The ADL’s attempt to position itself as the mainstream arbiter of what qualifies as “anti-Semitism”–and their frequent willingness to conflate opposition to hardline Israeli policies with anti-Semitism–have served as useful tools in defending Israeli Likud party policies both in the U.S. and around the world.

Recently, South African judge Richard Goldstone was denounced by the ADL for his report detailing Israeli and Hamas war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead, and retired diplomat Charles Freeman came into the cross-hairs of the ADL for his comments questioning unconditional U.S. support of Israel. Freeman, who had been nominated to chair the National Intelligence Council, was forced to withdraw his name from nomination after he was targeted by the ADL, the Zionist Organization of America, the Middle East Forum, and, more discreetly, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

On January 20^th, Limbaugh made comments which cut a little too close to negative stereotypes about Jews and money.

He said:

“There are a lot of people, when you say banker, people think Jewish. People who have prejudice, people who have, you know — what’s the best way to say — a little prejudice about them. To some people, bankers — code word for Jewish — and guess who Obama’s assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”

Abe Foxman fired back the next day.

“Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

When he comes to understand why his words were so offensive and unacceptable, Limbaugh should apologize.”

The ADL’s decision to demand an apology from Limbaugh sparked an uproar from the far-right. Continue Reading »