Thomas Friedman Skewered in New Book

Nice to see that someone has finally sat down with all of Thomas Friedman's columns since the 1990s, analyzed them thoroughly, and held them up for some well-deserved - and much overdue - scrutiny.  From Jadaliyya, a portion of a conversation with Belen Fernandez, author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work:

I was of course already familiar with the general characteristics of Friedman’s writing—hubris, clichéd jingoism, Orientalism, favoritism of Israel, self-contradiction, a severe handicap in the realm of metaphor construction, reduction of complex phenomena to simplistic and baseless theories. However, reviewing three decades of his work made it clear just how frightening, as opposed to simply laughable, it was that such a character had accrued three Pulitzer Prizes and risen to the position of journalistic icon at the US newspaper of record.

Though in earlier decades Friedman was often constrained to writing about innocuous topics, such as “Iowa Beef Revolutionized Meat-Packing Industry” (published in the New York Times in 1981), his post-1995 incarnation as a foreign affairs columnist—or, in his words, as a “tourist with an attitude”—has intermittently evolved into a license to prescribe military onslaughts and collective punishment, generally in the Arab/Muslim world, in obvious violation of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting such practices.

Consider, for example, his decree in a column published a few days prior to Israel’s devastation of Jenin in 2002 that “Israel needs to deal a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Or consider his suggestion during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 that Israel should repeat the strategy it employed in Lebanon in 2006, when the IDF supposedly achieved “the education of Hezbollah” by “exact[ing] enough pain on [Lebanese] civilians…to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

As Foreign Policy aptly notes in its justification for awarding Friedman slot number thirty-three in the 2010 list of the FP Top 100 Global Thinkers: “Friedman doesn’t just report on events; he helps shape them.”

Indeed.  And not for the better, I would submit.

Ms. Fernandez devotes attention as well to Friedman's first major book, From Beirut to Jerusalem - which, I now shamefully confess, I adopted as required course reading for the first iteration (mid-1980s) of my undergrad survey course on the history of the Middle East from Muhammad to the Present.  Although I was the creator of the course, I was then just beginning to get some footing in the material I was teaching.  I also was mystified when told later that two of my students (both of them Muslims) had gone to my department chair to complain that I was having the class read a book that, in their estimation, was so biased.

Of course, it didn't take me long to figure out why.  But bear in mind, I was at the time (like millions of other Americans of my generation) still laboring under the impression that the movie Exodus (starring Paul Newman, Sal Mineo, etc., with John Derek - perhaps most famous as later the hubby of short-term hottie starlet Bo Derek - playing the role of the only English-speaking, "good" Arab) was a gem of history-based movie-making that might be suitable for classroom screening as a reliable depiction of the events of 1947-1949.  

Yes, I was indeed that naive, and that stupid - but I never did screen Exodus for that course.  But I might, someday - but for reasons for which its producer (or Leon Uris, who wrote the book upon which the movie was based) never intended.

And if I knew where those two former students were now, I just might send them a personal check to refund them the money I made them waste on buying Friedman's book.

Meanwhile, Ms. Fernandez's book just might be worth a look.

The Tunisia Elections: Will the West Accept the Results?

Rami Khouri on the Tunisian elections as marking a new "birthday" for the Arab world: the birth of real democracy there.  (And, sorry, all you neocons: Iraq does NOT count; nor will any democracy that the US and pals install - that is, impose.)

But can the US and pals handle what's going to be in the offing?

There is already much discussion of the implications of the Islamist party Ennahda winning the most votes, and the possible coalitions it may form with other leading vote-getters, such as the secular leftist parties, the Congress Party for the Republic and Ettakol, or the center-left Progressive Democratic Party.

The emphasis on the American and other Western media on Ennahda’s performance is understandable, in foreign lands where Islamists are feared in large part because they are not known. Ennahda and its coalition partners will now be subjected to the greatest test that any political group can experience: the accountability of incumbency. They must deliver what the Tunisian electorate demands, in terms of economic growth, jobs, social justice, security and that long absent sense that this and other Arab governments exist to serve their people above all else. If the governing coalition delivers what the citizenry expects, it will be voted into power again and again, as we have witnessed in Turkey over the past decade.

The West, led by Israel and the United States, made a terrible mistake in 2006 when many countries refused to deal with Hamas after it won the election in Palestine. The same thing happened in 1992 when the FIS Islamist party won the elections but was barred from taking office due to an army coup, leading to a brutal civil war that saw nearly 200,000 Algerians killed. Now the world gets another chance to react more rationally to an Arab Islamist party that has won a free election and says it wants to strengthen Tunisia’s secular democratic system. The really significant event Sunday in Tunisia was not the victory by Ennahda, but rather the triumph of the combined concepts of pluralistic electoral democracy, republicanism and constitutionalism.

The legitimizing factor that has made all this possible, in the span of just nine months since the overthrow of the dictator, has been the ongoing popular participation of hundreds of thousands of Tunisians, who followed up the initial removal of the former regime by repeatedly taking to the streets, the media, and the political space they opened up to demand that the core aims of the revolution be achieved. This is the new and historic factor that many of us in the region have been pointing out for months, and that is now more evident: These historic transitions to more honorable, credible and accountable governance systems will succeed because an empowered, activist citizenry demands this, and will keep working to ensure that it happens.

Neither promises nor threats will prevent success. The twin core demands of the Arab citizen now being born across the region – social justice and genuine constitutional reforms – drive this ongoing process of historic rebirth. They set down their first roots in Tunisia last Sunday.

Rest assured: Islamists will dominate the new Tunisian democracy.  They will not look kindly on an Israel that has bullied and brutalized so many Muslims, and for so long.  Nor will they rush into the embrace of a US that does not begin to distance itself from an Israeli regime led by hard-core, maximalist Zionists (one of them, Avigdor Lieberman, demonstrably a racist bigot).

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and other Congressmen bought and paid by AIPAC will rant and make threats.  The "experts" at WINEP and Brookings will pen scarifying reports.  Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann will stir the pot.

Obama has professed himself the standard bearer for a new American approach to encouraging democracy and human rights in the Middle East.  (Hell, he even got a Nobel Peace Prize for it!)  Well, the ball's about to be passed to him again.

Will he man up?

Speaking Again of Leverage . . . in Iraq

Spencer Ackerman at Wired, reminding us all that the withdrawal of US regular combat forces from Iraq by 31 December does not signal the end of US-perpetrated violence in that country.  Why's that?  It's because the US's chief war-fighting force - the CIA, with all those drones and led by the US's most ballyhooed (now retired) general, David Petraeus (Saint David of the Surge) - is hardly pulling out; and, because what amount to three private armies of mercenaries will be attached to the US diplomatic missions at Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.

These are the same lethal, trigger-happy cowboy-clowns who shot up Baghdad's Nisoor Square in 2007, killing 17 Iraqi bystanders.  They now become the State Department's own little militia.  And if past practice still holds, if one of them misbehaves (as in, "lights up" one of the locals), the US will whisk him out of the country, and not give a rat's ass about what Iraqis may say.

Ackerman concludes:

It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective. . . .

So far, there are three big security firms with lucrative contracts to protect U.S. diplomats. Triple Canopy, a longtime State guard company, has a contract worth up to $1.53 billion to keep diplos safe as they travel throughout Iraq. Global Strategies Group will guard the consulate at Basra for up to $401 million. SOC Incorporated will protect the mega-embassy in Baghdad for up to $974 million. State has yet to award contracts to guard consulates in multiethnic flashpoint cities Mosul and Kirkuk, as well as the outpost in placid Irbil.

“We can have the kind of protection our diplomats need,” Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough told reporters after Obama’s announcement. Whether the Iraqi people will have protection from the contractors that the State Department commands is a different question. And whatever you call their operations, the Obama administration hopes that you won’t be so rude as to call it “war.”

Obama's Lost Leverage on the Global Stage

The NYT's Thomas Friedman pens what's on the whole a reasonably well-argued essay on how Mr. Obama has done much better on achieving the Bush/Cheney "war on terror" objectives than Bush/Cheney did (and let's not forgotten Condi, America's then embattled brainiac/Barbie doll secretary of state); has bungled Afghanistan/Pakistan; and has little leverage to use, owing to American economic decline and reliance on Middle Eastern oil (a very big drum that TF bravely keeps banging - and God bless him for it.)

But his myopia kicked in when he then wrote:

Obama’s frustrations in bagging a big, nonmilitary foreign policy achievement are rooted in a much broader structural problem — one that also explains why we have not produced a history-changing secretary of state since the cold war titans Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker.

The reason: the world has gotten messier and America has lost leverage. When Kissinger was negotiating in the Middle East in the 1970s, he had to persuade just three people to make a deal: an all-powerful Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad; an Egyptian pharaoh, Anwar Sadat; and an Israeli prime minister with an overwhelming majority, Golda Meir.

To make history, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, need to extract a deal from a crumbling Syrian regime, a crumbled Egyptian regime, a fractious and weak Israeli coalition and a Palestinian movement broken into two parts.

Actually, even if Kissinger et al. were "cold war titans" at a time when US-Soviet relations called the tune for global geopolitics, Kissinger's lopsidedly pro-Israel intervention in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war was part of a long history of such pro-Israel decisions on the part of the US.  Those decisions relentlessly undercut the US's leverage in the eyes of the people who - in this era of the "Arab spring" - are now beginning to count perhaps the most in the Middle East: the once disdained (and, as far as the US was concerned, largely ignored) "Arab street" (and add to that now the Turkish and Iranian streets).

 Of the three presidents whose tenures those three Secs of State reflect, only George H. W. Bush (with Baker as his Sec State) dared take a stand (in 1991) against Israeli colonization of the Occupied Territories.  (And it cost him on the American "street": that the victor of the 1991 Desert Storm war against Saddam went down to defeat vs. Bill Clinton in Nov. 1992 was due in no small part to Bush's threat to retract loan guarantees if Israel did not curb its colonization of the West Bank.)  Throughout that time, the US was content to make protecting Israel's interests one of the lynchpins of its Middle East policy.  And it played ball with dictators of the ilk of Hafez al-Assad and Anwar al-Sadat in order to achieve that goal.  The vaunted 1979 Camp David Accords that Jimmy Carter spearheaded (and for which Sadat became a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) got Israel a treaty with Egypt and got the Sinai back into Egyptian hands, but it essentially hung the Palestinians out to dry.  In the years to follow, the US played ball with Sadat's successor, the president/dictator Hosni Mubarak, and with Syria's president/dictators Assad (pere et fils) whenever it furthered Israeli interests.

So now, those dictators are gone or (probably) going.  And as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi have found out, the Arab street, previously discounted as all "bark," turns out to have a nasty "bite."  Its denizens have long, deeply seared memories - of US support for dictators who ruined and tortured them, and for an Israel that has killed thousands of them (on the streets of Beirut as well as Ramallah).  Since 2001, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed tens of thousands of them on the streets of Baghdad and Basra, Kabul and Kandahar.  And in the process, a largely Islamophobic American public that let itself be whipped into a frenzy of misguided revenge in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 have reveled like triumphant crusaders in the gore of thousands of Muslims its military - with the blessing of its Congress - has killed worldwide.

Slowly, but  inexorably, the dictators are passing from the Middle Eastern scene, to be replaced (one fervently hopes) with representative democracies.  As reports pouring in from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria have made abundantly clear, the new democracies and their parliaments will be brimming with political Islamists of various stripes; and (at least relative to the regimes they will replace) they will be much more attuned, and responsive, to the "street," with its charnel-house memories.

On that street, the USA will have little leverage indeed.  And Mr. Friedman ought to chalk up that lost leverage, in significant part, to those State Department "titans" of the Cold War yesteryear.

John McCain: Bomb-Bomb . . . Syria?

It happens in every profession, every walk of life.  One hangs in, hangs on, beyond the span of one's usefulness.  Begins to cross that thin, faint line that separates old-school from old-age, lovable codger from danger to the cause he claims to love.

I give you, Senator John McCain:

With NATO bombing of Libya set to end, U.S. Sen. John McCain on Sunday raised the possibility of some kind of military attack on Syria, where the government of Bashar Assad has been accused of brutally cracking down on protesters.

“Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what partial military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan. “The Assad regime should not consider that it can get away with mass murder. Kadafi made that mistake and it cost him everything.”

Mercifully, Mr. Obama is finally about to extricate the United States from the colossal strategic blunder that was the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.  The American adventure in Afghanistan has reached a point perhaps best compared to a clogged commode in which the turds resist the inexorable erosion from the water's flow, only to be dislodged and flushed forever down the pipes.  The American digression into Libya now smells like a rose, its blooming from the fertilizing blood of local rebels; but the petals are likely to begin dropping within days.

The relatively new ethnic/sectarian confection that is Iraq must now do whatever it must do.  (Can we please step back and remember that "Iraq" is less than 100 years old - a drop in the bucket of the millennia that went into the making of what was Babylonia for  2000 years?  "Iraq"'s warranty may be about to expire.)  Those who accuse Mr. Obama of "losing Iraq" (now that he has announced that all US troops will be withdrawn from there in less than two months) need to remember that (those proponents of how "the Surge worked" notwithstanding) the US never "won" Iraq in the first place.  In the "Middle East," the US is the new kid from the block on the other side of town.  The Iranians are the next-door neighbors who've been standing in the parlor forever.  They're not going anywhere, and for the US to think that it can make them step outside, walk down to the sidewalk, and never come back is beyond stupid.

In other words, it's time for the US to exit, stage left, and get its own act together - especially at home - before it even thinks about riding to the rescue anywhere else in the Middle East.

And John McCain now tries to rattle the US sabre against Syria - even though the scabbard is empty?

Go home, senator.  Put on lots of sunscreen.  Stick to the shade.  

And remember that your time in the sun gave you cancer - and got a lot of Americans killed, in the cause of a "victory" that was never theirs to win.

The Racist Violence of Jewish West Bank Settlers

A disgusting, disheartening, enraging report from David Schulman at the NYRB blog, about a brutal attack by the Jewish settlers of the West Bank settlers at Anatot on a local farmer and his wife (and on members of an Israeli peace group) when the farmer tried to visit his land (land that even the Israeli courts ruled was legally his).  Didn't matter to the settlers - or to the security forces accompanying them, who simply didn't intervene.

On the morning of September 30, the activists accompanied him to the rocky hillside that is still nominally his; they were carrying with them a Palestinian flag. The Anatot settlers seemed to have known ahead of time about the visit, and within minutes, a large contingent of them—estimates range from 60 to 100—arrived and attacked the group. First they cracked open Yasin’s head and attacked his wife, breaking her ribs, and then they beat the Israeli activists with clubs and rocks. Many were injured; four were hospitalized (Yasin himself is still recuperating), and, as usual, some activists—in this case three of them—were arrested (generally, settlers are above the law). There were uniformed Israeli police there—some were present on the scene ever before the attack began—who made no effort to stop the assault. There is no question that the attack was premeditated, and its scale was impressive. Cameras documenting the violence were smashed by settlers and police; vehicles belonging to activists and Palestinians parked nearby were savaged.

And it is, of course, racist hooligans such as these who know that they can act with such impunity when the Netanyahu/Lieberman duovirate and a right-wing Knesset, a US Congress bought-and-paid-for by AIPAC and the Israel lobby, a vote-hungry Barack Obama, the pro-Israel propaganda machine that is Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, and those millions of so-called Christians who would be overjoyed to see every last Arab removed from the "Holy Land - when people such as these have your back, you may believe you can do whatever you want.

That Israeli society as a whole will tolerate, even embrace, acts such as this, even as Israel's leaders pursue policies that have left Israel basically friendless, isolated, in the Middle East, can only mean that at some point, quite possibly in the near future, when some match lights up the tinderbox, there's going to be a terrible, terrible reckoning.

US's Dilemma in Iraq

As widely reported today (here's the NYT's report), hundreds of Turkish soldiers, supported by Turkish warplanes, crossed more than 2 miles into Iraq today to go after members of the PKK militia who attacked and killed about 25 Turkish soldiers.  The US ambassador to Turkey has issued a statement deploring the PKK attacks, noting that that organization is on the US's official terrorist list.

Iraqi Kurdish politicians are not happy with Turkey's incursions into their territory - the latest in a series of Turkey's attacks into the territory of Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which, at least officially, is part of the state of Iraq, which is governed from Baghdad.  For Iraqi pols who hope to rebuild a truly Iraqi "nation" that incorporates the country's diverse ethnic groups and religious communities, Turkey has attacked the sovereign state of Iraq.  From Turkey's point of view, however, the PKK has to be eliminated, which means not allowing them a safe haven inside Iraq.  (One wonders how much the US is keeping an eye on this situation as a template for a possible future incursion of US forces into Pakistan to eliminate Taliban who flee from Afghanistan to shelter there.)

Will the US at some point need to choose between Turkey (the emerging new power in the Middle East, and one that it hopes to cajole back into an embrace of Israel, which is rendering itself more isolated by the day) and Iraq (the country where the US expended so much blood and treasure to "liberate" it, and which it desperately wants to nurture as an ally against Iran)?  

If Iraq's oil industry ever gets truly up and running, to exploit the bazillions of barrels of oil and cubic meters of natural gas now encased beneath its soil, American weapons-manufacturers (and the Congressmen at their collective teat) will expect a bonanza of sales to the Iraqi military - which, the US says, it wants to see beefed up enough to fend off outsiders and control its own airspace.

Has anyone envisioned the possibility of an Iraqi prime minister scrambling Iraqi fighter jets - supplied by Lockheed, General Dynamics, whomever - to defend northern Iraq (the current KRG) against bombings and strafings from Turkish warplanes?

UPI reports on some of the other implications for US policy in the Middle East if a full-blown civil war erupts in Turkey's southeast, and if Turkey ramps up its incursions into Iraq to go after the PKK.

the Americans may find themselves drawn into the conflict as Turkey launches air raids on PKK sanctuaries in Iraq and is expected to mount a major ground offensive, as it has in the past, if the Kurds keep up attacks on Turkish forces.

The Islamist government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan could well be supported by U.S. Predator drones that are expected to be deployed on Turkish soil as the Americans withdraw from Iraq.

Indeed, Ankara's growing campaign against the PKK is becoming interlocked with a worsening revolution in Syria, Turkey's threat to use military force to stop Greek Cypriots and Israel from exploiting offshore natural gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean and deteriorating relations between Iran and the United States.

As U.S. troops move toward completing their withdrawal from Iraq by Dec. 31, Washington is having to increasingly depend on Turkey, which has the second largest military within NATO, to help support Iraq, moderate with Iran and pressure the beleaguered regime in strife-torn Syria.

Erdogan last week launched weeklong military maneuvers on Turkey's border with Syria, as it did in 1988 when the two neighbors almost went to war over Damascus' backing for the separatists of the PKK.

Erdogan, who wants to make Turkey the paramount power in the region, has allowed the Syrian National Council, the umbrella for the myriad opposition groups that have been seeking the downfall of the minority Alawite regime in Damascus since mid-March, to operate out of Istanbul.

Syria's intelligence services, a key pillar of the embattled regime of President Bashar al-Assad, have threatened to resume arms deliveries to the PKK unless Erdogan minds his own business.

Turkish authorities uncovered an arms cache in the southern Kurdish city of Diyarbakir on Oct. 3 that may have originated in Syria.

Damascus accuses the Turks of arming the Free Syrian Army and the Syria Free Officers Movement, two groups formed by soldiers who defected from the Syrian military to join the uprising in which the United Nations says more than 3,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed.

These two groups, along with other dissident factions, operate from refugee camps on Turkey's border with Syria.

The regional upheaval is further complicated by Iran stepping up attacks on PJAK, the PKK's Iranian wing, which also has bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.

With the U.S. military pullout from Iraq, Washington's need for Erdogan's support will almost certainly intensify. The U.S. State Department has already branded the PKK a terrorist organization.

"I think Turkey has America's complete support regarding the PKK," says Soli Ozel, professor of international relations at Istanbul's Kadir Has University.

"The U.S. is so dependent on Turkish backing when it comes to Syria and Iraq, I don't think they'll think twice about writing off the PKK."

The Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank, cites regional analysts as saying Iran "is using PJAK and the PKK to militarize the border regions in case of an American attack."

That prospect may have gained traction from U.S. allegations that Iran's Revolutionary Guards were involved in a plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington.

Tehran vehemently denies that and some analysts suspect the incident was fabricated by U.S. authorities to discredit Iran and pave the way for possible military action.

Kamikaze Drones?!

As reported by AFP,

A miniature "kamikaze" drone designed to quietly hover in the sky before dive-bombing and slamming into a human target will soon be part of the US Army's arsenal, officials say.

Dubbed the "Switchblade," the robotic aircraft represents the latest attempt by the United States to refine how it takes out suspected militants.

Weighing less than two kilos, the drone is small enough to fit into a soldier's backpack and is launched from a tube, with wings quickly folding out as it soars into the air, according to manufacturer AeroVironment.

Powered by a small electric motor, the Switchblade transmits video in real time from overhead, allowing a soldier to identify an enemy, the company said in a press release last month.

"Upon confirming the target using the live video feed, the operator then sends a command to the air vehicle to arm it and lock its trajectory onto the target," it said.

The drone then flies into the "target," detonating a small explosive.

For the sake of US relations with Japan, I do hope that the "kamikaze" moniker doesn't last.  The original kamikazes were piloted by real human beings, Japanese pilots of enormous courage and dedication who were willing to embrace the prospect of a sure death in defense of their country and service to their emperor.  To compare to such men the joystick aces who'll be "flying" these drones is a travesty.

US War with Pakistan: Only a Matter of Time?

The NYT's C. J. Chivers reports on how US forward bases in Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, are taking deadly fire (3 Afghan soldiers were killed by such fire several weeks ago) from just inside the Pakistan side of the border - and US officers on scene are convinced that the Pakistani military are either directly involved or else turning a blind eye.  And US soldiers, says Chivers, are "seething" and just want to be allowed to "do our job" - in other words, launch reprisals by firing into Pakistan.

If US officials give them the green light, it's only a matter of time before American fire kills Pakistani soldiers.  The Pakistani press long ago turned against the US presence in the region.  The country is ablaze with hatred of the US, for reasons (frankly, most of them legitimate) too many to catalog here.

But we're now in full election-campaign mode (the "silly season") back home.  Senators and congressmen will be vying with each other to bray the loudest about protecting "the troops," and what's Obama doing about it.  Obama, facing a tough re-election fight, will need to at least look as if he's doing something about it.  He'll talk tougher to his Pakistani interlocutors, and then he'll approve some kind of fire mission as a kind of shot over the bow of the Pakistani military leadership (who, of course, are really in charge of that country).

How all this ends up . . . .?  Well, don't forget that the last thing that Iran (which already feels embattled,surrounded, and picked on by the US) wants to see is the US hunkering down to take on yet another country with a common border with Iran.  And as a recent WaPo report noted, the Iranian government recently hosted (without much fanfare) a delegation from the Afghan Taliban, with whom it almost went to war only 10 years ago.

Finally, Pakistan has been trying for months to cultivate ties with China.  The Chinese have not exactly been rushing into that embrace, but they will not be reassured about American intentions in the region if the US decides to play hardball with the Pakistanis.

Idea for Mr. Obama: the US effort in Afghanistan is going nowhere.  Speed up the withdrawal, get US troops out of harm's way, quit antagonizing the people of Pakistan with what have become incessant drone strikes, and come to terms with the reality that the US presence in Afghanistan has become the premier reason why the entire region, including Pakistan, has become so unstable.  So, pack up, get out - ignore the advice of people like Bruce Riedel (who wants Obama to toughen up on Pakistan and adopt of policy of "containment") -  and, while you're at it,  ignore idiots like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who demand that you fight on to the last soldier, and penny.

"Iraq has been a blindingly fast success"

I know, I know . . . I gagged when I read it as well, but thus says neocon cheerleader Robert Kagan in his NYT review of a new book by a UT-Austin professor.  The title says it all: "Liberty's Surest Guardian."  His thesis? That America has been doing nation-building for a long time, and ought not shrink from doing it again.

Rick Perry has been after college profs lately, but I imagine he'll want to give this guy a bonus.

Thus fawns Kagan: 

 Suri, a professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin, argues not only that Americans have engaged in nation-building throughout their history, but that their impulse to do so springs naturally and inevitably from their character and experience as a people. Having built a single nation out of disparate parts themselves, having solved the problem of competing interests by channeling them through national representative institutions, Americans have continually sought to replicate this experience in foreign lands. They have “deployed their exceptional history in universalistic ways.” And while Suri acknowledges that these efforts have at times been quixotic, he insists that the American proclivity to engage in nation-building is smart. It is, he argues, the necessary compromise between isolationism and empire: a “society of states” that are independent, stable, capable of trading with one another and, above all, modeled after the United States. In response to realist critics, he writes that “the American pursuit of a society of states serves the deepest interests of a people forged in revolution.” Because “alternative forms of foreign government limit American influence, access and long-term trust,” the “spread of American-style nation-states, and the destruction of their challengers, matches the realistic interests of citizens in the United States.”

In other words, presumably because our own style of democratic state is the kind of polity to which all of humanity surely aspires, it's perfectly OK to invade other lands and try to clone them into little Americas.  After all, it serves our deepest interests; and besides, other kinds of governments limit those interests, and our influence.

Seems to me that the Athenians tried that in the 5th century BCE, with the Delian League - and poleis (like that on the Cycladic island of Melos) that didn't accept the Athenian model were, well, conquered, and devastated.

Kind of like the Philippines, where the US military slaughtered Moro tribesmen in the tens of thousands - but which Kagan seems to feel was a success of US nation-building.

Kind of like Iraq - which Kagan nonetheless labels a "blindingly fast success."

Turns out that the US was so successful in Iraq that the Iraqis - whose military probably really could benefit from some US trainer/advisers - want nothing more to do with the US military.  As AP reported today, the wringing of hands and imploring of Iraqi politicians is over.  Evidently the US is going to be pulling out completely; no 5000 trainer/advisers.  Maliki has told the US that he simply cannot get enough votes to support it in the Iraqi parliament.

The ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Haditha still haunt the souls of Iraqis.

On Knee-Jerk Bomb-Iran-ers . . .

There are not that many commentators whose stuff I make a point of reading and bookmarking - but Paul Pillar is one of them.  His latest essay at The National Interest spotlights the useful idiots who seize upon virtually any incident as pretext to call for harsh measures against Iran.  And as he notes, this latest incident - of the US's alleged discovery of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US - as well as bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies - is such a botched piece of work as to call into question the nature of any Iranian involvement in it.

Another salient feature of the plot as detailed by the Justice Department is that it appears to have been designed with the intention of being discovered. This is related to the overall inept tradecraft but in particular to the sending of traceable quantities of money into the United States and the spilling of beans about supposed Iranian government involvement in open telephone calls to untrustworthy foreigners. If the plot was intended to be discovered, then presumably the motive of whoever concocted it was to escalate further the tension between Iran and the United States. A couple of possible instigators outside Iran come to mind; the most plausible ones inside Iran would be rogue elements. Whoever the instigator was, for the United States to respond by pressuring Iran more, and thus raising further the tension in the relationship, would be playing right into the intentions of whoever put the plot together.

A number of other expert commentators have weighed in with similar misgivings.  

• Juan Cole (at Informed Comment), who also cites former CIA agent Robert Baer in support, finds that the whole thing "makes no sense."
• Patrick Cockburn of The Independent claims that "This bizarre plot goes against all that is known of Iran's intelligence service."
• The WaPo's David Ignatius is - characteristically - more willing to accept the official US version and assignation of blame, but his essay about "those Keystone Iranians" suggests that he finds the entire episode rather cockamamie. (And for those not of a certain age, the "keystone" reference is to the prat-falling "Keystone Cops" of the silent-movie era; yes, kids, there was a time when movies had no sound.  Would that some actors took note.)
• Even Vali Nasr, who always plays his cards close to the vest when addressing a topic might incur the ire of the White House, hedges his remarks about the big mistake the Iranians might have made with the proviso, "If true."

As usual, Tony Karon nails down some of the colder realities of the situation:

The plot allegations . . . are unlikely to be a game changer in the long-running effort by the U.S. and its closest allies to isolate and pressure Iran over its nuclear program: Those already on board with that effort -- such as Britain and France -- are backing U.S. calls for action on the embassy plot; those skeptical or opposed to that effort appear less certain of just what the evidence presented thus far by the Administration actually means. 

It should come as no surprise that a scheme whose spectacular hokeyness is difficult to square with everything that is known about Iran's well-established methods for staging terror attacks -- and for which it's hard to provide a rational motive even in the context of Iran's intense regional power struggle with Saudi Arabia -- is proving difficult to pin on the Iranian government's decision makers. 

But, in need of some red meat to feed those (like Rick Perry) who find him weak in confronting "terror" and US enemies - and in backing Israel to the hilt - Mr. Obama is hardly about to look this gift horse in the mouth.  Karon again:

Obama's rhetoric was tough, insisting that Iran be made to "pay a price" the plot and warning that "no option would be taken off the table" in responding, which is code for the threat of military action.  Washington certainly seems to be scooping up everything it can find on alleged Iranian malfeasance to throw into the p.r. battle. U.S. and Saudi intelligence officials told the Washington Post that they believe that Iran was behind the May 16 killing of a Saudi diplomat in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Saudi officials are even taking the opportunity to blame Iran's Quds force for instigating the Bahrain democratic uprising -- a claim that is more likely to undermine the credibility of the p.r. effort than it is to enhance it, with the Saudi-led crackdown in Bahrain enjoying limited sympathy beyond those who support Riyadh's role as sectarian pugilist and enforcer of Arab autocracy.
U.S. military officials also told the New York Times that Quds-forced trained and funded militants had fired rockets at an American position in Iraq, Wednesday, wounding three G.I.s. Perhaps that's just coincidence, but a case seems to be being made that Iran is on the offensive, requiring a response.

And the usual AIPAC-bought, Israel-at-all-costs suspects are piling in.  Thus, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee:

“On October 11th, 2011, the United States approach to the Iranian regime should have undergone a major change,” yet “the administration does not plan to alter its course of pressure and persuasive engagement with the Iranian regime.”
“Let me be blunt,” Ros-Lehtinen added. “This planned murder-for-hire must serve as a wakeup call regarding the determination and capability of the Iranian regime.”

Chiming in, Islamophobe New York Congressman Peter King, who

 "called the Iranians’ alleged scheme to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington “an act of war” against the United States and Saudi Arabia." 

Misgivings or no, we can expect a full-court press from the GOP/neocon/Fox News crowd.  No chance, of course, that they'll heed - or even read - what the Leveretts have to say at CNN, in a piece titled Iranian Plots and American Hubris:

Iran's national security strategy ultimately depends on appealing to the Saudi public not to support attacks against Iran, by harnessing popular anger over Israeli actions and U.S. overreach in the war on terror.
Killing a Saudi Ambassador would have exactly the opposite effect. Whatever Mansour Ababsiar and his cousin may have talked about, it is wholly implausible that the Iranian leadership decided that this was a smart thing to do.
The Obama Administration's calls for more concerted action against Iran will ultimately backfire-because they will be seen in most of the Muslim world (outside Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arab monarchies closely linked to Saudi Arabia) as the United States yet again leveling dubious life-and-death charges as the pretext to contain or even eliminate another Muslim power.
President Obama, his advisers, and all Americans need to ask themselves if this is really the time to bring the United States even closer to another Middle East war fought in blind defiance of the region's strategic realities.

Gideon Levy on Israeli Exceptionalism

I strongly recommend Gideon Levy's newest essay in Haaretz, where he castigates his fellow Israelis for what has become their innate sense of Jewish/Israeli exceptionalism, which he cites as manifesting itself most recently in the national jubilation after the Nobel Prize was awarded to an Israeli scientist.  Dr. Daniel Schechtman's achievements surely merited the award, and the world is better off for his success.

But reading Levy's essay, one can't help but be struck by the parallels with the sense of exceptionalism that has become so ingrained in so many Americans, and that scholars like Andrew Bacevich have lately been pointing out so persistently.  As with Israelis today, the sense of exceptionalism - the sense that alongside Israel, America has become God's "chosen people" - blinds us to the destruction and ill will that spring from our blinkered myopia about the effects of our actions and policies around the globe.