Backtracking: Jim Lobe's January 18th post about Bush's failed efforts to form an anti-Iran coalition in the Gulf

A must-read: "Anti-Iran Coalition in the Gulf? Read This,"posted by Jim Lobe on January 18th. From this article, it appears that President Bush’s main purpose in visiting the Gulf a couple of weeks ago – to build a containment and isolationist strategy against Iran – not only failed but also was counterproductive.

In the last paragraph, there’s a link an article at the Royal United Services Institute of Defence and Security Studies (RUSI)*, "Dire Straits: U.S. Mid-East Policy: The Gulf Arab States and US Iran Relations" my next must-read.

*RUSI was founded in 1831, the oldest such institute in the world, at the initiative of the Duke of Wellington. Its original mission was to study naval and military science, what Clausewitz called the ‘art of war.’

(photo of Jim Lobe from LobeLog.com)

Action alert: What can we do to reduce the risk of a naval incident between the US and Iran triggering a war?

Yesterday I heard about Incidents at Sea agreements for the first time and posted about it here. According to Jim Lobe, there exists “…[T]he possibility that the Navy and the Pentagon chose to dramatize the incident [the recent confrontation in the Straits of Hormuz] not so much to isolate and embarrass Iran as to enhance the chances for a new “incidents-at-sea” agreement that they have been pushing on the White House without success for many months now.

Here’s what I’ve learned and what I think we can do to jump start an effort to get the Bush Administration to start talking with Iran about an Incidents at Sea Agreement.

1. What is an Incident at Sea Agreement? According to the Federation of American Scientists, “The Incidents at Sea Agreement serves to enhance mutual knowledge and understanding of military activities, to reduce the possibility of conflict by accident, miscalculation, or the failure of communication, and to increase stability in times of both calm and crisis."

2. Has the U.S. entered into an Incidents at Sea Agreement with other countries?

Yes.

A. Russia (formerly the USSR): The Agreement was signed by Secretary of State John Warner and Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov during the Moscow summit meeting in 1972. There’s a good summary of the Agreement at Global Beat Syndicate. This agreement was reached in the middle of the Cold War.

B. China. In January, 1998, China and the United States signed the Agreement.

3. Why won’t the Bush Administration enter into an Incidents at Sea Agreement with Iran if the Navy and Pentagon want it? Beats me.

4. Is Iran open to it? Yes, according to William Arkin, who blogs for The Washington Post, they appear to be open to it. “At this point, Washington has two choices: It can release every shred of intelligence and information it has in an attempt to show how the Iranians are lying. Or it can let the matter drop and focus instead averting these types of incidents in the future. If it chooses the latter, it may find that Iran is a more willing partner than it appears. What Tehran is saying, after all, is quite similar to what the U.S. Navy is saying.”

5. What can we do? Former Secretary of the Navy, John Warner, who signed the Agreement on behalf of the US with the USSR, is an influential Republican US Senator. He retiring at the end of his current term. Why not contact him and ask him to use his power and influence to persuade the Bush Administration to start Incident of the Sea Agreement negotiations with Iran?

How to contact Sen. Warner:
1. Use the CONTACT FORM on his website
2. Call his office: Capitol Switchboard: 800.828.0498, or directly, 202.224.2023
3. Fax or mail a letter: fax: 202.224.6295; Senator John Warner, 225 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C., 20510.

(photo of US Naval ships: op-for.com)

An alternate explanation for the Straits of Hormuz incident

This evening, Jim Lobe, who blogs at LobeLog.com, made an interesting observation about the recent naval incident in the Straits of Hormuz. Lobe is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration. He is also the Washington Bureau Chief of the international news service agency, Inter Press Service.

In his post, About that Straits Incident...., Lobe raises “…[T]he possibility that the Navy and the Pentagon chose to dramatize the incident not so much to isolate and embarrass Iran as to enhance the chances for a new 'incidents-at-sea’ agreement that they have been pushing on the White House without success for many months now….

“It’s been no secret for some time now that the Pentagon, and the head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), Adm. William Fallon, in particular, have been pressing the White House — without success — for negotiating a new ‘incidents-at-sea’ agreement with Iran that would reduce the risk of a an accidental confrontation in the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf itself.

“Frustrated until now in their efforts to get the White House to authorize negotiations over a new agreement, could it be that Fallon … and other Pentagon and Navy officials decided to dramatize the danger just as Bush was embarking on his trip, anticipating that the president would get an earful from his Gulf state hosts about their fears that a naval confrontation could quickly escalate into a real war in which they would suffer significant collateral damage?”

It will be interesting to see if there are any other articles or posts about the “incidents-at-sea” agreement.

See previous posts linking to Jim Lobe’s blog: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

(photo of Jim: LobeLog.com)

Patterson's EXILE perpetuates the belief that Iran is Israel's biggest enemy

Last night I started reading Richard North Patterson's EXILE and at 1:30 a.m., had covered 300 pages. I picked up the book, lent to me by a friend months ago, because Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly recommended it in his Tilting at Windmills column in the December issue. Peters describes EXILE as “factual fiction.”

Set in San Francisco, the Prime Minister of Israel, Ben-Aron, has come to the U.S. to talk about his peace plan. He is assassinated. The plot is about finding who killed him and the personal courage of the Jewish defense attorney for the Palestinian woman (his lover from college days) who has been arrested as the perpetrator of the killing.

All well and good. An exciting read. However, having recently read Dr. Trita Parsi's Treacherous Alliance - The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S., which I posted about on October 11th, I was dismayed at how Iran was portrayed.

Following is an excerpt from the fictional Ben-Aron’s speech, at page 113, in response to a question about the extremist regimes such as Syria and Iran: “And the most dangerous are the mullahs in Iran. They are extremist and they are fundamentalists….They help Hamas recruit Palestinians, and enlist Israeli Arabs against us. They wish to change the balance of power in the Middle East. That is why – and do not doubt this – they are building a nuclear bomb until they become a dominant force.

“As an ideological matter, Iran wishes to eradicate the State of Israel. As a practical matter, Iran needs violence between Jews and Palestinians to divert the world from its nuclear ambitions. Which, once realized, are a mortal threat to Israel….We must deal with Iran, our greatest threat…”

Anyone who reads Treacherous Alliance, carefully researched and copiously footnoted (1,289 of them!), will understand that Iran is not the inflatable bogey as described in EXILE.

Why am I so exercised about what a work of fiction says about Iran?

1. It’s being presented as “factual fiction” by someone of Peters's stature.
2. As a best-selling thriller, EXILE is being read by lots of people and presenting Iran as the biggest threat to Israel will influence these readers’ opinion of it.

I suspect very few people who read best selling fiction will take time to read:
1. Treacherous Alliance
2. Jim Lobe’s January 3rd post, "More Signs of Iran Detente...From Petraeus", which opens: “In a new blow to the neo-conservative hard-liners at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), their hero, Gen. David Petraeus, has apparently concluded that Iran is indeed following through on its reported pledge earlier this fall to the Iraqi government to cut its alleged supply of weapons to Shi’a militias in Iraq. That assessment comes from none other than the far-right Washington Times which featured a front-page article by Sara Carter Thursday, entitled “Iran No Longer Aids Iraq Militants.”

I hope readers of this post will take time to learn the truth about the shifting relations between Iran and Israel from 1948 to the present, including the complicated triangular relations of these countries and the U.S.

(book cover: Liberty Associates)

Neocons flock to Giuliani's foreign policy team

On September 23rd, I posted Giuliani - a worse president than Bush? I’m convinced that he would be, even though that is hard to imagine.

Giuliani’s foreign policy is the most frightening to me, especially when I see he’s appointing more neo-cons to his foreign policy team, as reported by Jim Lobe yesterday:

“Republican presidential candidate and current front-runner, Rudi [sic] Giuliani, has named seven more people, including four prominent neo-conservatives, to his already-neocon-dominated foreign policy team. The neo-conservatives include Ruth Wedgwood of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; 'terrorism analyst' and free-lance writer often published in the Weekly Standard and the National Review Online, Thomas Joscelyn; and two 'scholars' at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and protégés of Richard Perle – Michael Rubin and David Frum (with whom Perle wrote the ultra-hawkish An End to Evil in 2004). Combined with such incumbent team members as Norman Podhoretz, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Kasten, the team increasingly resembles the cheer-leading squad for the U.S. section of the international Bibi Netanyahu fan club. [re Netanyahu, see my October 11th post.]

“What is really remarkable about the new choices is their announcement during the same week that the latest edition of Newsweek featured a three-page rundown of Giuliani’s foreign-policy team, entitled ‘Would you Buy a Used Hawk From this Man?’ ‘Neocons can’t help but slink around Washington, D.C.,’ it began…. ‘The Iraq War has given the neoconservatives …something of a bad name, and several of the Republican candidates seem less than eager to hire them as advisers. But Rudi Giuliani apparently never got the memo.’”

(photo: Bob McCarty Files)

Freedom's Watch is on a roll...out for war on Iran

On August 22nd, Freedom's Watch was launched. Its message: “Victory is America’s Only Choice.” Its first project was a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq, which was the focus of my September 13th post.

Now that the surge is safe until next March when the next Congressional review is scheduled, it appears that Freedom's Watch is going to become the propaganda machine for an attack on Iran, yet another privatization of what used to be a governmental function (think Blackwater contractors in Iraq). Apparently the group hopes to raise as much as $200 million by November, 2008.

Freedom's Watch [FW] hasn’t yet rolled out its war-on-Iran-promo, but it’s been given its marching orders, according to Scott Horton (who blogs for Harper’s Magazine) posting on October 1st, “…[I]t seems they’ll be advocating the Next War" Horton quotes from The New York Times September 30th article, "‘Although the group declined to identify the experts [who were invited to a Freedom’s Watch private forum focusing on Iran as a threat], several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House....

“‘If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,’ said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. ‘Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.’”

Jim Lobe, who blogs at LobeLog, posted Freedom's Watch Bears Watching on September 30th: “It seems that last week’s full-page ad by Freedom’s Watch (FW) denouncing Columbia University for hosting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the New York Times was the tip-off to what will clearly be a high-powered, high-priced, and well-orchestrated campaign to rally support behind an attack against Iran. That assessment is bolstered by Sunday’s lengthy article by the Times’ Don Van Natta, Jr., entitled ’Big Coffers and a Rising Voice Lift a New Conservative Group’, “ the same article Scott Horton referenced.

Lobe surmises that FW is going to be ascendant because…"[T]he administration and its dwindling clutch of hawks have lost virtually all of the credibility they enjoyed in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The hawks within the administration have also lost the control they once exerted over the government’s own formidable propaganda machinery. That is precisely why they must now rely to a much-greater extent than in 2002-03 on a 'private-sector' group making their case and mobilizing behind it. Much like the White House Information Group (WHIG), whose purpose was to sell the Iraq invasion, FW may well become the hub of a new effort to create an ‘echo chamber’ with the usual suspects at AEI…the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Fox News, the [Wall Street] Journal’s editorial page, and sympathetic journalists and columnists for attacking Iran. As evidenced by last week’s vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment last week, it may be able to count on the timidity of Democrats, as well.” [emphases mine]

The Lobe post is well worth reading.

(logo from the FW website)

"Defend-the-Surge" campaign about to be launched

I’m glad Jim Lobe is back from his vacation. On August 24, he posted AEI sets launch for all-or-nothing campaign. The American Enterprise Foundation is described by Lobe as the neo-conservative organization “…[W]hich contributed so much to the propaganda and planning for the Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation….”

The AEI “…[A]ppears set to launch its ‘Defend-the-Surge’ campaign in the run-up to the presentation of and Congressional debate over the Petraeus-Crocker report on Thursday, September 6, with an afternoon forum whose title, ‘No Middle Way’ in Iraq.”

Lobe describes the speakers at the forum, adding, “...[A] a partial preview of the upcoming forum and AEI’s arguments in favor of sustaining the Surge is available in an analysis in Kristol’s ‘Weekly Standard’ posted today in which Fred Kagan gives his take on Thursday’s NIE…”

The NIE referred to above was described in The New York Times on August 23: Report offers grim few of Iraqi leaders: “A stark assessment released Thursday by the nation’s intelligence agencies depicts a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year.” [see my post yesterday, Is the surge working?]

In Kagan’s analysis, he states, “Critics of the current strategy can use parts of the NIE to raise concerns about the political process in Iraq. Using those concerns to justify abandoning the current strategy, as the NIE itself clearly states, will jeopardize the enormous progress already made against al Qaeda in Iraq, which remains a potent threat that could reconstitute itself rapidly if we lifted the pressure from it. The fact that we have achieved a great deal without yet achieving all of our objectives is not grounds for abandoning a successful strategy. It is grounds for continuing it.”

Lobe, referring to Kagan’s comment above, “That is certain to be a major theme of the September 6 forum and indeed of the neo-conservative effort to keep the Surge alive.”

If Kagan's position is premised on his and the AEI's position that the surge is working when in fact it isn't, I hope Congress learns this on or before the Petraeus/Crocker hearing on September 6.

(photo of Jim Lobe from LobeLog.com)

Today's Must Read: Intellience Community's Assessment of IRAN on Eve of 2003 Invasion

In yesterday’s post, I referenced the Washington Post and New York Times articles about the January 2003 CIA assessment of the chaos likely to ensue in Iraq if attacked. Until I checked Jim Lobe’s blog late yesterday, I had no idea that assessments produced at the same time also discussed the likley consequences of an attack on Iraq on our relationship with Iran. A quick online news check this morning didn’t turn up anything.

The post, Intelligence Community’s Assessment of Iran on Eve of 2003 Invasion is a must-read. It opens with. “In an analysis that may still be pertinent on the eve of the long-awaited U.S.-Iranian talks next week on stabilizing Iraq, the U.S. intelligence community concluded just before Washington’s invasion more than four years ago that Tehran was prepared to cooperate with occupation authorities so long as its interests were given due regard.”

Jim Lobe describes this assessment as “…contained within a January 2003 report prepared by the NIC and widely distributed to senior officials throughout the Bush administration, was contained within a larger study, entitled ‘Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq’, a partially redacted version of which was released Friday as part of a 226-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence."

I urge you to read Lobe’s report in its entirety. Then ask yourself why the mainstream media isn’t covering this important information.

(photo of Jim Lobe, courtesy of the Scott Horton Show)