| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:52 pm Post subject: The NYT's New Pro-War Propaganda |
| Keep in mind that Pollack has also been associated with the AIPAC espionage case as well:
Jerusalem Post: Mideast analyst Pollack named in AIPAC indictment
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/31/prominent-mideast-analyst-associated-with-aipac-espionage.php
CBS had him on the 'Evening News' again last night as he is all for Americans to continue dying/getting horribly maimed for Israel in Iraq.
PS: The Saban Center at Brookings is also named after Haim Saban whose main issue is Israel (see http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/10/us-billionaire-i-m-a-one-issue-guy-israel.php ). Isn't it interesting how Brookings has proposed the 'soft partition' plan for Iraq (which seems to be in accordance with Israeli Oded Yinon's 'divide and conquer'
plan for Israel's enemies as mentioned by Dr. Stephen Sniegoski in his 'Israeli Origins of Bush II's War' via the following URL):
Israeli Origins of Bush II's War:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/26/the-israeli-origins-of-bush-ii-s-war.php
Hoping that the soon to be released Mearsheimer/Walt book (can currently be pre-ordered at Amazon.com via doing a search there for 'Mearsheimer') will address the above as well.
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http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/073007.html
The NYT's New Pro-War Propaganda
By Robert Parry
July 30, 2007
No need to wait until September. It’s already obvious how George W. Bush and his still-influential supporters in Washington will sell an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Iraq – just the way they always have: the war finally has turned the corner and withdrawal now would betray the troops by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
At one time, the Iraq story line was how many schoolrooms had been painted or how well the government security forces were doing. Now there are new silver linings being detected that will justify a positive progress report in September – and the U.S. news media is again ready to play its credulous part.
President Bush signaled the happy-news judgment of his hand-picked commander, Gen. David Petraeus, in a round of confident public appearances over the past two weeks. With his effusive praise of “David,” as Bush called the general at a White House news conference, the President acted like a smug student arriving for a test with the answers tucked in his pocket.
Another key element of the coming propaganda campaign was previewed on the op-ed page of the New York Times on July 30 as Michael E. O’Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution portrayed themselves as tough critics of the Bush administration who, after a visit to Iraq, now must face the facts: Bush’s “surge” is working.
“As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with,” O’Hanlon and Pollack wrote in an article entitled “A War We Just Might Win.”
Yet the authors – and the New York Times – failed to tell readers the full story about these supposed skeptics: far from grizzled peaceniks, O’Hanlon and Pollack have been longtime cheerleaders for a larger U.S. military occupying force in Iraq.
Indeed, Pollack, a former CIA analyst, was a leading advocate for invading Iraq in the first place. He published The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq in September 2002, just as the Bush administration was gearing up its marketing push for going to war.
British journalist Robert Fisk called Pollack’s book the “most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent [war] ‘debate’ in the United States.” (Meretricious, by the way, refers to something that is based on pretense, deception or insincerity.)
Neocon ‘Full Monte’
Pollack’s influential book offered the “full monte” neoconservative vision for remaking the Middle East, with the Iraq invasion as only the first step in the transformation. Ousting Saddam Hussein “would sever the ‘linkage’ between the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Pollack wrote. “It would remove an important source of anti-Americanism.”
But Pollack was wrong in his predictions. If anything, the Iraq War has deepened Arab-Israeli animosities while enflaming the region’s anti-Americanism.
Also, in Fisk’s view, “Pollack’s argument for war was breathtakingly amoral. War would be the right decision, it seemed, not because it was morally necessary but because we would win. War was now a viable and potentially successful policy option.
“It would free up Washington’s ‘foreign policy agenda,’ presumably allowing it to invade another country or two where American vital interests would be discovered. [Pollack’s] narrative – in essence an Israeli one – is quite simple: deprived of the support of one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations, the Palestinians would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation.” [See Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilization]
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq failed to locate the promised weapons of mass destruction – and a stubborn Iraqi insurgency emerged – Pollack offered an apology for his high-profile role in promoting the war.
In fall 2004, Pollack told an interviewer for the New York Times magazine, “I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence. Of course, I feel guilty about it. I feel awful. … I’m sorry; I’m sorry!” [NYT Magazine, Oct. 24, 2004]
But now Pollack – having re-positioned himself from war booster to war critic – can reinvent himself again as a grudging convert to the wisdom of Bush’s war strategy, without either him or the Times editors alerting readers to this reverse metamorphosis.
This idea of a critic reluctantly admitting the wisdom of a neoconservative strategy has long been one of the neocons’ favorite propaganda tactics dating back to the Cold War days of the 1980s.
Then, a common neocon refrain was that “even the liberal New Republic” supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels. That endorsement supposedly lent the contra cause greater weight because the New Republic had a historic reputation as a leftist magazine.
In reality, however, the New Republic had been taken over by neocon Martin Peretz in the 1970s, and he had turned it into a home for neocon and right-wing pundits, such as Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes.
Yet, if Americans didn’t know those details, they could be influenced by an out-of-date impression, much as many people still recall Brookings as a “liberal” think tank, an image that Brookings has worked quietly to shed since it started moving rightward in the 1980s, bringing in more centrist, center-right and neoconservative analysts.
Surge Backer
In 2002-03, Pollack’s Brookings colleague, O’Hanlon, was more skeptical about the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq than Pollack was. For instance, O’Hanlon correctly doubted the evidence of links between Hussein’s secular government and the Islamic extremists of al-Qaeda.
But O’Hanlon carefully covered all his bases, arguing that “there is a case for overthrowing Mr. Hussein if we cannot re-establish and improve the inspections and disarmament process in Iraq. But it has more to do with the region’s security than with any unlikely Hussein-al-Qaeda link.” [Baltimore Sun, Sept. 26, 2002]
Since the failure to find WMD stockpiles and the stumbling occupation, O’Hanlon and Pollack have constructed reputations as critics of Bush’s war strategy not by objecting to its imperial impulses or the immorality of invading a country at peace but by hitting the administration for an inadequate commitment of troops and resources.
In other words, they have fit themselves in with many Washington insiders who still maintain that the invasion was a fine and noble idea; the only problem was the incompetent occupation.
Along those lines in early 2007, O’Hanlon emerged as a defender of Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. On Jan. 14, he published a Washington Post op-ed entitled, “A Skeptic's Case For the Surge.”
O’Hanlon’s chief pro-surge argument was to hoist Iraq War opponents on their own petard – their supposed complaint that Bush’s failure was in not sending enough troops and not giving the military the necessary tools.
“On the military surge itself, critics of the administration’s Iraq policy have consistently argued that the United States never deployed enough soldiers and Marines to Iraq,” O’Hanlon wrote. “Now Bush has essentially conceded his critics’ point … It would … be counterintuitive for the president’s critics to prevent him from carrying out the very policy they have collectively recommended.”
While perhaps a clever debating point, O’Hanlon’s argument is disingenuous. It is not accurate to say that war critics “collectively” wanted Bush to invade with a larger army and then to throttle Iraq with a bigger occupation force.
Many – indeed probably most – war critics opposed any invasion and any occupation, basing their objections on legal and moral grounds, noting that international law prohibits aggressive wars and that Iraq was not threatening the United States.
It’s also disingenuous today for O’Hanlon and Pollack to present themselves as harsh critics of Bush’s Iraq War when, in fact, they either advocated the invasion (in Pollack’s case) or eagerly promoted the surge (as O’Hanlon did). At minimum, they should have given a fuller accounting of their past positions.
To read their op-ed in the New York Times, an unsuspecting reader would get the impression that these two hard-boiled anti-war skeptics have finally been won over to Bush’s wisdom by the strength of the evidence. That simply isn’t the case; they were predisposed to Bush’s position to begin with.
The reality appears to be that these two on-and-off war supporters were given an administration-sponsored tour of Iraq with the expectation that they would return to Washington with glowing reports about the war’s progress, made all the more believable by them playing up – or puffing up – their credentials as war critics.
In that case, Mission Accomplished.
[For other examples of the U.S. press corps’ misleading coverage of Iraq, see our new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]
While one might yawn about the predictability of the Bush administration and its mouthpieces misleading the public once again, readers of the New York Times might reasonably expect that – given the newspaper’s role aiding and abetting the march into this disastrous war five years ago – that the editors at least might insist on a more accurate ID for these two “experts.”
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.
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http://www.nytimes. com/2007/ 07/30/opinion/ 30pollack. html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
NY Times: July 30, 2007
A WAR WE JUST MIGHT WIN
By MICHAEL E. OHANLON and KENNETH M. POLLACK
*Michael E. OHanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for
Middle East Policy at Brookings.
VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and
Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington
is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially
all credibility. Yet now the administrations critics, in part as a result,
seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are
finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two
analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administrations miserable
handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential
to produce not necessarily victory but a sustainable stability that both
we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in
Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often
found American troops angry and frustrated many sensed they had the wrong
strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in
pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that
they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are
confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they
have the numbers needed to make a real difference.
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi
population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and
economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services
electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation to the people. Yet in each
place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of
the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a
third since the surge began though they remain very high, underscoring how
much more still needs to be done.
In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose
company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi
police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had
built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks
all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups who were now
competing to secure his friendship.
In Baghdads Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst
sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with
stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby
police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they
seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish
Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had
agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi
units arrived.
We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an
ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and
Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the
hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police
officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover
the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly
rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the
dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major
question mark.
But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told
us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once
infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses
that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in
Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces
remain in Iraq).
In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of
ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Armys highly effective Third Infantry
Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45
percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab. In the
past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few jundis (soldiers)
to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a
few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi
formations were useless something that was the rule, not the exception, on
a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.
The additional American military formations brought in as part of the
surge, General Petraeuss determination to hold areas until they are truly
secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the
Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with
insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.
In war, sometimes its important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq
we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American
fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and
other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada
al-Sadrs Mahdi Army.
These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis
to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young
women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the
last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to
the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known
example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has
gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas).
Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its
Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for
every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body
armor.
Another surprise was how well the coalitions new Embedded Provincial
Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team,
we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to
revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although
much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans
and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid
programs often built white elephants.
In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to
fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the
military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and
division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the
war had known little about governance or business but were now ably
immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a
decent life.
Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has
been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local
governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National
Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a
disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local
police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less
sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the
creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.
In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still
face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes
continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when
major steps towards reconciliation or at least accommodation are needed.
This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize,
important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi
security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a
new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer
can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions
underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is
enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress
should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
__._,_.___ | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 8:12 pm Post subject: Commentary: Touching the third rail (Israel!) |
| April 24, 2006 Monday 10:03 AM EST
Commentary: Touching the third rail (Israel!)
BYLINE: ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, April 24
A quarter of a million people marched in Manhattan. One hundred thousand squeezed into Madison Square Garden, many of them in uniform. Over 100,000 tele-grams deluged the White House. All demanded the immediate recognition of the about-to-be-born new state of Israel. Most of President Truman's cabinet was against it. The most formidable naysayer was then Secretary of State Gen. George Marshall.
Following World War II, foreign policy professionals wrote scores of position papers that warned an independent Jewish state would trigger a "reject phenome-non" throughout the Middle East. David K. Niles, in charge of Jewish affairs at the White House, was a persuasive advocate of, and organizer for, Israel. The Holocaust of six million Jews, the telegrams and the marchers in New York clinched it for Truman.
Israel was born at midnight (local time) May 14, 1948. U.S. recognition fol-lowed 11 minutes later. A geopolitical honeymoon lasted until 1956 when Israel, France and Britain secretly joined forces, without informing President Eisen-hower, to invade Egypt to wrest back control of the Suez Canal nationalized by president Nasser, then a budding Soviet protégé. The Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev seized the moment to invade Hungary to suppress an anti-Communist revolution, and then rattled his rockets at Eisenhower over Suez. Eisenhower, angry and indignant at allied perfidy, and anxious to avoid a wider conflict, told the three conspiring powers to clear out of Egypt pronto.
The special U.S.-Israel relationship encountered another major hiccup during the 1967 Six-Day War when friend and foe alike whistled with admiration after Israel decimated three Arab armies in less than a week. Israeli warplanes re-peatedly attacked the USS Liberty, a ship intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides, flying the U.S. flag on a clear day, 15 miles off the Sinai coast, killing 34 sailors, wounding 171.
Since then Israeli and U.S. interests have gradually merged, a perception carefully nurtured by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, ar-guably Washington's most powerful lobby, or at least co-equal in influence with the NRA (National Rifle Association) and AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). With some 200 employees and 100,000 wealthy benefactors, AIPAC claims it doesn't have to register as a foreign agent because all its funding comes from U.S. sources. There are also over 500,000 Israelis with dual citizenship, a number of them AIPAC contributors.
Over the years, AIPAC has maneuvered to make Israel the third rail of Ameri-can foreign policy. The handful of Congressmen who have been critical of Israel over the past 40 years have been publicly chastised with a figurative dunce cap, or, worse, lost their seats to AIPAC-backed opponents. Israel is an integral part of America's body politic.
Yet the recent publication of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," an 83-page paper published on Harvard's website by two prominent academics, ran into a firestorm of vilification from government, academia and the media for documenting what is already well established.
The co-authors are neither neo-Nazi skinheads nor anti-semites. John J. Mearsheimer is a political science professor and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. Stephen M. Walt is academic Dean and a chaired professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Both are members of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Some of their conclusions about the Israel lobby's goals:
-- "No lobby has managed to divert foreign policy as far from what the Ameri-can national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical."
-- American supporters of Israel promoted the war against Iraq. The senior Administration officials who spearheaded the campaign were also in the vanguard of the pro-Israel lobby, e.g. then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Un-dersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Elliott Abrams, director of Mideast affairs at the White House; David Wurmser, Mideast affairs advisor to Vice President Cheney; Richard Perle, first among neocon equals, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory body of strategic experts.
-- A similar effort is now underway to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
-- AIPAC is fighting registering as foreign agents because this would place severe limitations on its Congressional activities, particularly in the legisla-tive electoral arena. American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.
-- The co-authors recall it was Perle, Feith and Wurmser who put their names to a 1996 policy blueprint for the then incoming Netanyahu government in Israel. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)," the three neocons said the rebuilding of Zionism must abandon any thought of trading land for peace with the Palestinians (i.e., repeal the Oslo accords). Next, Sad-dam Hussein must be overthrown and democracy established in Iraq, which would then prove contagious in Israel's other Arab neighbors.
-- When NBC's Tim Russert on Meet the Press asked Perle about his geopoliti-cal laundry list for Israel's benefit, he replied, "What's wrong with that?"
-- For all this to succeed, the neocon strategic thinkers wrote, "Israel would have to win broad American support." And to ensure this support, they ad-vised the Israeli Prime Minister to use "language familiar to Americans by tap-ping into themes of past U.S. Administrations during the Cold War, which apply as well to Israel."
-- An Israeli columnist in Ha'aretz said Perle and Feith had been "walking a fine line" between "their loyalty to American governments" and "Israeli inter-ests."
Clearly, the FBI did not understand the role and power of AIPAC when it launched an investigation into espionage on behalf of Israel. The accused was Larry Franklin, an Iranian expert in Feith's 1,600-strong Pentagon shop. Classi-fied Pentagon documents on Iran had been shared with senior AIPAC officials Ste-ven Rosen and Keith Weissman. An Israeli diplomat was the ultimate recipient. When Franklin was arrested, the Israeli was promptly recalled. AIPAC fired its two senior officials who then were also indicted on charges of receiving and transmitting classified defense information in violation, not of the Espionage Act, but an obscure World War I-era statute.
Franklin was sentenced to a prison term of almost 13 years -- but allowed to remain free with a promise of a much-reduced sentence if he helped the prosecu-tion of Rosen-Weissman. But Rosen, as AIPAC's brilliant director of foreign pol-icy issues, has a global Rolodex of 6,000 influential friends. For the past 23 years, he has been the architect of numberless Congressional initiatives to meet Israel's strategic and funding needs.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III and prosecutors were running in to an in-visible buzzsaw of pressure for a dismissal motion. Ellis authorized defense subpoenas for calling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, two ranking officials Rosen claims also shared classi-fied information. Ellis then postponed the trial from May 17 to early August -- when most chattering class cognoscente will be on vacation and a motion to dis-miss will hardly be noticed. | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
