Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

U.S. Foreign Policy

Bush and Iran: Preparing us for the Worst, Part II

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Here is the second portion of the statement begun in the preceding posting:

 “…    Within the last two week, the CIA found the wherewithal to approve an
op-ed — published in the New York Times on December 8, 2006 — by Kenneth Pollack, another former CIA employee. This op-ed includes the statement
that “..Iran provided us with extensive assistance on intelligence,
logistics, diplomacy, and Afghan internal politics.”

     Similar statements by me have been deleted from my draft op-ed by the
Whit e House. But Kenneth Pollack is someone who presented unfounded
assessments of the Iraqi WMD threat — the same assessments expounded by
the Bush White House — to make a high-profile public case for going to
war in Iraq.

     Mr. Pollack also supports the administration’s reluctance to engage
with Iran, in contrast to my consistent and sharp criticism of that
position. It would seem that, if one is expounding views congenial to the
White House, it does not intervene in prepublication censorship, but, if
one is a critic, White House officials will use fraudulent charges of
revealing classified information to keep critical views from being heard.

     My understanding is that the White House staffers who have injected
themselves into this process are working for Elliott Abrams and Megan
O’Sullivan, both politically appointed deputies to President Bush’s
National Security Adviser, Stephe n Hadley.

     Their conduct in this matter is despicable and un-American in the
profoundest sense of that term. I am also deeply disappointed that former
colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency have proven so supine in the
face of tawdry political pressure. Intelligence officers are supposed to
act better than that.

Bush and Iran: Preparing Us for the Worst, Part I

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Below is Part I of a December 18 Statement by Flynt Leverett, former Bush White House official on Iran and Iraq. It repeats – in more detail – coments made by Mr. Everett in the Ny Times Op Ed pages last week. It is useful to remember the deception and lies used by Bush to gain support for his Iraq fiasco while reading this. Part two follows in the next posting to this blog.
Part I of the December 18 Statement by Flynt Leverett, former Bush White House official on Iran and Iraq:
     “Since leaving government service in 2003, I have been publicly
critical of the Bush administration’s mishandling of America’s Iran policy
— in two op-eds published in the New York Times, another published in the
Los Angeles Times, an article published earlier this year in The American
Prospect, and a monograph just published by The Century Foundation, as
well as in numerous public statements, television appearances, and press
interviews. 

     All of my publications on Iran — and, indeed, on any other policy
matter on which I have written since leaving government — were cleared
beforehand by the CIA’s Publication Review Board to confirm that I would
not be disclosing classified information.

     Until last week, the Publication Review Board had never sought to
remove or change a single word in any of my drafts, including in all of my
publications about the Bush administration’s handling of Iran policy.
However, last week, the White House inserted itself into the
prepublication review process for an op-ed on the administration’s
bungling of the Iran portfolio that I had prepared for the New York Times,
blocking publication of the piece on the grounds that it would reveal
classified information.

     This claim is false and, I have come to believe, fabricated by White
House officials to silence an established critic of the administration’s
foreign policy incompetence at a moment when the White House is working
hard to fend off political pressure to take a different approach to Iran
and the Middle East more generally.

     The op-ed is based on the longer paper I just published with The
Century Foundation — which was cleared by the CIA without modifying a
single word of the draft. Officials with the CIA’s Publication Review
Board have told me that, in their judgment, the draft op-ed does not
contain classified material, but that they must bow to the preferences of
the White House.

     The White House is demanding, before it will consider clearing the
op-ed for publication, that I excise entire paragraphs dealing with
matters that I have written about (and received clearance from the CIA to
do so) in several other pieces, that have been publicly acknowledged by
Secretary Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and former Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and that have been extensively
covered in the media.

     These matters include Iran’s dialogue and cooperation with the United
States concerning Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and
Iran’s offer to negotiate a comprehensive “grand bargain” with the United
States in the spring of 2003.

     There is no basis for claiming that these issues are classified and
not already in the public domain.

     For the White House to make this claim, with regard to my op-ed and at
this particular moment, is nothing more than a crass effort to politicize
a prepublication review process — a process that is supposed to be about
the protection of classified information, and nothing else — to limit the
dissemination of views critical of administration policy.”

Iran Study Group and Iran in Wonderland

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This just in from our correspondent in New Zealand:
The NY Times’ last 2 graphs of its main ISG story on thursday are strangely disjointed as if the writer had omitted a connective graph between them.
From the Times: “Critics of the panel’s conclusion called the approach naïve. “The study group is threatening to weaken a weak government,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the groups that helped sponsor the study group, which was established by Congress. And, he added: “There is no ‘Plan B.’ The report does not address what happens if events spiral out of control.”
(missing paragraph)

The most controversial element of the diplomatic strategy is the panel’s case for engaging Iran, though Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton, the chairmen, acknowledged in an interview that they thought it unlikely the Iranians would cooperate. Mr. Baker insisted that even if that effort failed, “the world would see their rejectionist attitude.”

It is believed that the omitted middle graph would have read something like this:

“An un-named ISG advisor, who wanted anonymity in order to keep his balls and still be able to sleep at night, told this reporter that Plan B in fact consisted of “events spiraling out of control”. “Once we regionalize the political conflict and further weaken any Iraqi institution that might get in the way of total anarchy then the world will see that rejectionist Iran needs a spanking.” This source acknowledged that there was controversy among the ISG’s “old geezers” about how explicit to be with “this most controversial element. “

The Iraq Study Group’s Shell Game

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Turns out that the Iraq Study Group (ISG) is a colossal shell game. Most of what they recommend won’t work and therefore Bush could argue for doing whatever he comes up with – for instance, bombing Iran, a favorite tactic of his neocon friends and one consistent with his schoolyard bully persona.

I was struck by Baker and Hamilton’s inability in their TV interviews to mention that this particular “Iraq problem” exists only because Bush created it. And what of the Orwellian idea that we need to punish those incompetent Iraqis who do not seem able to fix what we created and totally screwed up? So therefore we pick up our game pieces and go home? But not right away because we need a bipartisan solution  – that is, one in which no one in America need take responsibility for what has turned out to be perhaps the most destructive American foreign policy blunder in the country’s history.

And the ISG can’t come out and say any of that because the president might get pissed off and do something truly nutty just to show everyone who is in charge: mucho macho presidento.

There was a time in the not so distant past when bipartisan support of foreign policy was a centerpiece of American political life and it worked fairly well. Bush has destroyed that for now and perhaps forever. He lied the country into this fiasco, the members of Congress lay down and let him run over them, and Bush has refused to discuss options for over three years while Iraq burned and American soldiers died. And he is psychologically unprepared to take responsibility for this massive foreign policy failure.  We have not had a truly bipartisan foreign policy since the late 80s and are in desperate need of strong, intelligent leadership.

Anyone watching today’s press conference of Bush and Blair has to wonder whether the President is beginning to spin off this planet into a universe all his own. It was not pretty. Look for it on C-Span.

Iraq Reality vs. President Bush

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In an earlier posting to this blog the point was made that as a lameduck president George W. Bush has nothing to lose other than whatever shreds of dignity might cling to him. We now await the Baker-Hamilton report which is widely reported to include recommendations for phased withdrawal of American troops as well as direct negotiations with Iran and Syria. But we are in the Bush universe and President Bush will commit to neither while his pal Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki, says he is ready for both and Iraqi President Talabani has just concluded a visit to Iran where he received a commitment of $1billion for reconstruction.

The only point here is that we have a president who simply refuses to recognize reality. Indeed, he is reminiscent of President  Nixon when he went bonkers in the aftermath of Watergate. So the danger is real that as leader of the free world, Bush will stay the course in Iraq, bomb Iran and ignore Syria while Lebanon burns.

Since a strike at North Korea’s nuclear sites would risk the death of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans Bush is unlikely to act there – but he is equally unlikely to open direct one-on-one negotiations without getting some concessions in advance – which is not really negotiating at all.

Some, including most of the press, ignore the fact that leaders have psychologies and that these can drive actions. Stubborn commitment to failed policies, an unwillingness to recognize or address reality, an inability to hear differing points of view, a refusal to admit mistakes – these are all characteristics of a person we would not trust with a business let alone an entire nation.

“Civil War” or “Faith-Based Melee”?

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The Bush administration is wrangling with the press over whether to call whatever is happening in Iraq a “Civil War”. While Jon Stewart has come up with “Faith-Based Melee” as a possible reference, President Bush spends more time trying to define it as something it is not than figuring out how to stop the bleeding. Bleeding which he started; by choice, not necessity. When the discussion moves into these kind of surreal details it is clear that the game is up and that we are watching the death twitches of a miserably failed operation. The next step will be to announce that the operation was a success but – alas – the patient died of his own hand. For a short but sweet discussion of the great Iraq War Terminology Debate go to the American Journalism Review website for Rem Reider’s take on it all, which includes this straight-forward advice to America’s journalists:

“At any rate, the Bush administration isn’t the nation’s copy desk chief, at least the last time I checked. America’s newspapers and TV stations and news Web sites should start calling the Iraq war what it is, not what someone wishes it were.”

Run-up to Iran??

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Seymour Hersh reports in this week’s New Yorker that while VP Cheney (and presumably the President) are seriously considering preemptive bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran, they are sitting on a report from the CIA indicating that there is no evidence that Iran is actually moving toward production of nuclear weapons. Hersh is careful to point out that the CIA report is not definitive in terms of eliminating the possibility, but he maintains that the report is being purposely ignored by the administration.

Hersh then morphs into a discussion of a range of issues around the decision-making apparatus in the Bush White House during a time of lame duck presidency, control-freak vice-presidency, and Geroge H.W. Bush bringing in his troops to salvage junior’s presidency. It is not a pretty sight and is full of real-world ambiguities. Read the Hersh piece for a look into the surreal world of the Bush Presidency.

Also – ask yourself why I can find discussion of the Hersh piece in the press in Germany, Turkey, China, and France – but virtually nothing in the U.S. mainstream press. When Bob Woodward, the Bush Court Stenographer, publishes his notes form conversations with the powerful the press is all over it. When Sy Hersh, perhaps the last of the great investigative journalists in America breaks a story everyone waits to see what the competition says about it before they even describe it, let alone comment on it.

For what it is worth the Bush White House commented that the Hersh story had no merit. Pretty much what they said when he broke the Abu Ghraib story.

The Man is Baffling

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“HANOI, Nov. 17 — In his first day in the capital of a country that was America’s wartime enemy during his youth, President Bush said today that the American experience in Vietnam contained lessons for the war in Iraq. Chief among them, he said, was that ‘we’ll succeed unless we quit.’ ” [link to NYTimes]

So stated our President during a visit to the nation the US fought for over 10 years before retreating bloodied and bowed. The US lost more than 57,000 in Vietnam and the Vietnamese lost more than 2 million. And here comes Bush telling the Vietnamese that we should have fought longer – “stayed the course” as it were. He is the first sitting President to visit Vietnam (I believe) since that dreadful episode in our nation’s history. So what does he offer? Gracious apologies? No. Essentially he says that – and this is said on Vietnamese soil – if we had just stayed longer, whatever it would have taken – 5, 10, 50 years – we could have beaten those commies. And that’s the lesson of Vietnam according this man – if we just stay in Iraq for 5, 10, 50 years, whatever it takes -we’re gonna beat those Iraqis. Whew. Nothing else to say to that.

Russell Feingold’s Presidential Ambitions: R.I.P.

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Senator Feingold (D, Wisconsin) has announced that he will not be running for President in 2008. I imagine Hillary has just heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Feingold joined Senator McCain in promulgating one of the great frauds on the American public in the guise of an Election Reform Bill. Maybe I was in a different country but I think I just witnessed one of the nastiest, most expensive midterm campaigns in American history. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics the cost is estimated at over $2.6 billion.  The 2000 election, which included the presidential race cost over $4.2 billion.  McCain and Feingold trumpeted their success in getting their bill passed but strangely do not say much about it in the face of the realities of current campaign spending, much of it on repulsive, insulting TV ads.

Another highlight of the Feingold record was his near-successful effort to close Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in 1993-4. Feingold was a freshman Senator who had run a campaign focused on trimming the federal budget and where better to start now that the Cold War was over?  (full disclosure: I was employed at the RFE/RL Research Institute from 1991-1994).  There is a long story here for future postings on  public diplomacy to this blog.  For now, it is enough to look at the sorry state of America’s public diplomacy program, the lack of a free press in Russia and many of its allied nations (Belarus, Uzbekistan, etc.), the emerging need for improved broadcasting to countries in the Middle East (incl. Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq) and the relatively low cost of surrogate international broadcasting as an historically effective tool of American foreign policy. Feingold never understood any of this and grandstanded his way through Senate hearings that included a mini-scandal related to salaries of some 14 managers of RFE/RL – and the fact that the then President of the Radios used company funds to have his piano tuned.

I suppose I am having a touch of schadenfreude here, but it is not in the interest of the United States to have as President a man who lacked basic understanding of the importance of soft power.

Lame Duck Or Wounded Elephant?

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“It is only when the elephant has been attacked or wounded, that he becomes a dangerous enemy.” (from, The Bush Boys, by Captain Mayne Reid, [1856])

There is much talk in the press of checks and balances, and of the President’s expressed offer to cooperate with the victors in the election. Kiwi has suggested that one good test of this would be for the congress to pass legislation calling for an increased commitment to stem cell research.  Then see if he vetoes it.

But the most worrisome part of the current situation is foreign policy.  While there is a lot of talk about Baker-Hamilton dragging the president out of his fog of denial in Iraq, this President is a man who has commented that God chose him for the job and who is, by all reports, stubbornly committed to a foreign policy aimed at proving how big and strong we are.  This in spite of significant evidence that however big and strong we are it is not big and strong enough to handle Iraq, let along North Korea and Iran – short of using the very big and strong weapons.  But like that wounded elephant he has not much to lose now and if he chooses to bomb Iran – well, let the next guy (or gal) pick up whatever pieces are left.

We have had six years of the President telling us to be very, very scared.  Well, OK – now I am – well – at least worried.