Steven Eidman's Blog

The Official Blog of Steven Eidman

Archive for the ‘UN’ Category

The Two Faces of Michael Mukasey

Posted by steveneidman on February 15, 2010

Michael Mukasey: Then and now

To promote his partisan fear-mongering attacks, the former Judge invokes the very arguments he once scorned

Glenn Greenwald

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey has become the leading spokesman for a Cheneyite national security attack, which relies on scaring Americans into believing that Obama is endangering their lives in those rare instances when he deviates from Bush’s Terrorism approach.  Toward that end, Mukasey has yet another fear-mongering Op-Ed, this time on today’s oh-so-liberal Washington Post Op-Ed Page (along side Michael Gerson’s stirring tribute to the virtues of GITMO, Bill Kristol’s call for regime change in Iran, a warning from Blackstone Chairman Steven Schwarzman to stop being so mean to banks, and a Charles Krauthammer column blaming Obama for something or other).  Mukasey specifically accuses the Obama administration of losing valuable intelligence by allowing Abdudlmutallab access to a lawyer, and insists that the accused Christmas Day bomber had no constitutional rights because — despite his being detained in the U.S. — he is merely an “enemy combatant.” 

But when Mukasey was a federal judge, he made the opposite arguments.  In 2002, the Bush administration detained Jose Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, publicly labeled him The Dirty Bomber, declared him an “enemy combatant,” transferred him to military custody, and refused to charge him or even to allow him access to a lawyer.  When a lawsuit was brought on Padilla’s behalf, Mukasey was the assigned judge, and he ordered the Bush administration to allow Padilla access to a lawyer.  When the Bush administration dithered and basically refused (asking Mukasey to reconsider), Mukasey issued a lengthy Opinion and Order threatening to impose the conditions himself and explaining that Padilla’s constitutional right to a lawyer was clear and nonnegotiable.  So resounding was Mukasey’s defense of Padilla’s right to a lawyer that, when he was initially nominated as Attorney General, many anti-Bush legal analysts — including me — cited Mukasey’s ruling in Padilla to argue that he was one of the better choices given the other right-wing alternatives.  Indeed, I analyzed his decision in Padilla at length to argue that, at least in that case, Mukasey “displayed an impressive allegiance to the rule of law and constitutional principles over fealty to claims of unlimited presidential power,” and that he “was more than willing to defy the Bush administration and not be intimidated by threats that enforcing the rule of law would prevent the President from stopping the Terrorists.” 

What’s most striking is that, in the Padilla case, Mukasey emphatically rejected the very arguments he is now making to attack Obama.  The Bush DOJ repeatedly insisted that Mukasey — by allowing Padilla access to a lawyer — would destroy their ability to interrogate him and obtain life-saving intelligence, thus endangering all Americans.  As Mukasey put it:  the Bush DOJ is “none too subtle in cautioning this court against going too far in the protection of this detainee’s rights, suggesting at one point that permitting Padilla to consult with a lawyer ‘risks that plans for future attacks will go undetected‘.”  Incredibly, that argument — which Mukasey decisively rejected back then — is exactly the one he’s now making against Obama.  Listen to what the Bush administration told Mukasey in demanding that he withdraw his order directing that Padilla be given access to a lawyer — this is what Mukasey quoted from a Bush DOJ brief and refused to embrace back then: 

DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and the interrogator. Developing the kind of relationship of trust and dependency necessary for effective interrogations is a process that can take a significant amount of [redacted]. There are numerous examples of situations where interrogators have been unable to obtain valuable intelligence from a subject until months, or even years, after the interrogation process began. 

Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool. Even seemingly minor interruptions can have profound psychological impacts on the delicate subject-interrogator relationship. Any insertion of counsel into the subject-interrogator relationship, for example — even if only for a limited duration or for a specific purpose — can undo months of work and may permanently shut down the interrogation process. Therefore, it is critical to minimize external influences on the interrogation process. . . .
 

Permitting Padilla any access to counsel may substantially harm our national security interests. As with most detainees, Padilla is unlikely to cooperate if he believes that an attorney will intercede in his detention. . . . Any such delay in Padilla’s case risks that plans for future attacks will go undetected during that period, and that whatever information Padilla may eventually provide will be outdated and more difficult to corroborate. 

 

Mukasey dismissed all of those fear-mongering claims as speculative hyperbole, and explicitly told the Bush DOJ:  “if the government had permitted Padilla to consult with counsel at the outset, this matter would have been long since decided in this court” — i.e., Mukasey told the Bush DOJ that the dilemma was its own doing because it should have allowed Padilla access to counsel from the start.  Yet in order to try to convince Americans now that Obama is endangering their lives by allowing Abdulmutallab access to counsel, Mukasey resorts to the very fear-mongering that he long ago rejected.  That’s called being a dishonest hack of the lowest order. 

More dishonestly still, Mukasey in today’s Op-Ed claims that he ordered Padilla to have access to counsel only “as a convenience to the court and not for any constitutionally based reason,” and only because Padilla (unlike Abdulmutallab) was a U.S. citizen.  Both of those excuses are blatantly and demonstrably false.  The whole legal basis for Mukasey’s ruling was that (1) he would order Padilla to have access to counsel even if he had believed Bush’s fear-mongering claims because Padilla had a constitutional right to counsel; and (2) the basis for that right is not that Padilla is a citizen, but rather, that all “persons” on U.S. soil have that right.  Just listen to what the Mukasey back then said in order to see how blatantly dishonest the Mukasey of today is (emphasis added): 

Even if the predictions [of the Bush DOJ] were reliably more certain than they in fact are, I would not be free simply to take the counsel of Admiral Jacoby’s fears, however well founded and sincere, and on that basis alone deny Padilla access to a lawyer. There is no dispute that Padilla has the right to bring this petition, and, for the reasons set forth in the Opinion, the statute makes it plain that he has the right to present facts if he chooses to do so. . . . 

Arbitrary deprivation of liberty violates the Due Process Clause, Foucha v. Louisiana, 504 U.S. 71, 80 (1992), which “applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States,” Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 693 (2001). . . . [U]nless he has the opportunity to make a submission, this court cannot do what the applicable statutes and the Due Process Clause require it to do: confirm what frankly appears likely from the Mobbs Declaration but cannot be certain if based only on the Mobbs Declaration — that Padilla’s detention is not arbitrary, and that, because his detention is not arbitrary, the President is exercising a power vouchsafed to him by the Constitution. . . . 

The Court in Hamdi took pains to point out that its holding was limited to “the specific context before us — that of the undisputed detention of a citizen during a combat operation undertaken in a foreign country and a determination by the executive that the citizen was allied with enemy forces.” Hamdi, 316 F.3d at 465.  That wise restraint is well worth following in this case by recognizing explicitly the limits of the current holding, and thereby recognizing as well the contrast between this case and Hamdi. Unlike Hamdi, Padilla was detained in this country, and initially by law enforcement officers pursuant to a material witness warrant. He was not captured on a foreign battlefield by soldiers in combat. The prospect of courts second-guessing battlefield decisions, which they have resolutely refused to do, e.g., id. at 474; cf. Stencel Aero Eng’g Corp. v. United States, 431 U.S. 666, 673 (1977), does not loom in this case. 

 

It’s true that this decision did not address the question of Miranda warnings, but the point is that Mukasey’s reasoning there directly negates what he is now arguing.  Based on those two findings — that (1) there was no clear evidence that allowing access to a lawyer would jeopardize intelligence-gathering and, even if there were, it wouldn’t matter, because (2) Padilla, as someone detained on U.S. soil., had a constitutional right to a lawyer — Mukasey ordered the Bush DOJ to comply with his directive in unusually strong language: 

Lest any confusion remain, this is not a suggestion or a request that Padilla be permitted to consult with counsel, and it is certainly not an invitation to conduct a further “dialogue” about whether he will be permitted to do so. It is a ruling — a determination — that he will be permitted to do so. 

 

Note, too, that Mukasey insisted that courts have the constitutional obligation to ensure that presidential-ordered detentions “are not arbitrary,” a claim both the Bush administration and now the Obama administration, in some circumstances, vigorously contests. 

This entire Miranda/Abdulmutallab controversy has been rife with deliberate misconceptions from the start: 

  • the inane notion that super-dangerous Terrorists innocently believe that they’re required to spill their guts if they aren’t given Miranda warnings (recall that the premise of Bush officials, including Mukasey, is that Terrorists are so hardened and Evil that they have to be tortured to get them to speak; the very idea that they would feel compelled to answer all questions unless told they did not have to is laughable on its face);
  • the empirically false claim that defendants stop co-operating — and that interrogations must stop — once they are Mirandized (huge amounts of co-operation from the accused occur once they’ve been Mirandized and have lawyers);
  • the invented allegation that Abdulmutallab was speaking freely until he was Mirandized, at which point he stopped talking;
  • the obviously misleading suggestion that it’s easier to interrogate and convict Terrorists in a military commission system than in civilian courts (the exact opposite has been true, by far); and,
  • the dishonest implication that we somehow lost something by Mirandizing and trying Richard Reid in our civilian court system, which sentenced him to life in prison with little effort, in contrast to the debacles produced by the military commission system).  

 

The ignorance of media stars about these issues allows fear-mongering politicians to make these claims over and over without challenge (although see Savannah Guthrie’s impressively aggressive, well-informed and effective interrogation of Sen. Kit Bond about this case: it’s the exception that proves the rule, and illustrates what effective adversarial journalism can accomplish).  And much of this is the fault of the Obama administration:  because they themselves have embraced the Bush/Cheney policies of military commissions and indefinite detentions, they’re incapable of articulating any coherent principle why civilian trials are needed, and are instead reduced to the pitiful spectacle of relying on a “Bush-did-it-too” defense to try to show that they’re sufficiently “tough on Terror” (as though the same administration which Obama spent two years depicting as radical, destructive and lawless is the standard-bearer for how Terrorists should be handled). 

Still, Mukasey’s dishonesty is worse than the standard political/media freak show, both because he knows better and because (as a judge) he renounced the very myths which (as a hardened right-wing partisan) he is now disseminating.  He has become a leading practitioner of the hysterical fear-mongering he once rightly scorned. 

* * * * *  

Long-time commenter DCLaw1 has rejuvinated his excellent blog, InsideOutTheBeltway, and has a typically insightful post on how the media has re-cycled blatant myths — grounded in sheer ignorance — about Miranda and Abdulmutallab. 

 

Posted in Democrats, Iran, Iraq, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, Polls, Supreme Court, UN, history, terrorism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

No, Mr. Walt, The Iraq War is Bush’s Fault, Not Israel’s

Posted by steveneidman on February 15, 2010

Rinse, Wash, Repeat

John B. Judis

For the last time, Stephen Walt, Israel did not send the U.S. and Britain into Iraq.
I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a big fan of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main (as they put it) “pro-Israel” lobby in Washington. The only organization of that kind that I’ve ever given money to is Americans for Peace Now. And I have defended critics of AIPAC, including Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of The Israel Lobby, from charges of anti-Semitism. But I think Walt and Mearsheimer have been dead wrong in trying to blame the Israel lobby or the Israeli government for America’s invasion of Iraq. And now Walt is repeating the same nonsense.

Walt, who blogs for Foreign Policy’s website, recently revived the argument, claiming in a self-congratulatory column titled “I don’t mean to say I told you so, but…” that Tony Blair’s testimony last month before Britain’s Iraq War Commission confirmed that “the Israel lobby … played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.” I have read Blair’s testimony. I don’t find it to be proof of anything of the kind; and I don’t think Walt’s accompanying restatement of the argument is any more persuasive than the version he and Mearsheimer put forward in his book.

Walt says that Blair’s statement to the commission “reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation [that is, the decision to go to war] and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.” Here is what Walt, citing a column in the New Statesman, quotes Blair as saying about his early April 2002 meeting in Crawford, Texas, with George W. Bush:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Now there are at least three problems with the inferences that Walt draws from this statement. First, even if we were to grant that Blair is saying that he and Bush were talking about Israel’s role in or importance to the Iraq invasion, this certainly does not show that the Israel lobby had anything to do with the decision to go to war. Nor, secondly, does it show that the Israeli government pressured the U.S. to go to war. The “conversations” could have easily consisted of the Bush administration informing Israelis of their plans.

But these are minor objections. The real problem is that Walt does not seem to have taken the trouble to have read the transcript of Blair’s testimony. If he had, he would have realized that Blair was not talking about how invading Iraq might benefit Israel, but about the conflict then occurring between Israel and the Palestinians. The second intifada had reached a new height with the Passover and Haifa suicide bombings and the beginning of the siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and Blair was concerned that the Bush administration was not actively pursuing the peace process. Blair wanted the administration to put the Arab-Israeli issue on a par with the threat of Iraq. The former prime minister makes this clear in other parts of his testimony. Here is an exchange between Blair and Sir Roderic Lyne:

Lyne: … Just one more point arising from Crawford, but not just from Crawford. You said–you reminded us that the Arab-Israel problem was in a very hot state at Crawford. You said you may even have had some conversations with Israelis from there, and obviously it was something that was a large part of your conversations with President Bush. I think it is right to say–indeed, Jack Straw said it–that you were relentless in trying to persuade the Americans to make more and faster progress on the Middle East peace process. Ultimately, Jack Straw said it was a matter of huge–in his evidence the other day–it was a matter of huge frustration that we weren’t able to achieve something which you had been seeking so strongly …

Blair: … I believe that resolving the Middle East–this is what I work on now–is immensely important, and I think it was difficult, and this is something I have said before on several occasions, it was difficult to persuade President Bush, and, indeed, America actually, that this was such a fundamental question …

Lyne: But surely you must have said to him, “Look, this thing is only really going to have a chance of working well if we can make this progress down the Arab-Israel track before we get there”?

Blair: Well, I was certainly saying to him, “I think this is vital,” and I mean, this was–you could describe me as a broken record through that period …

The talks at Crawford and subsequent discussions led eventually to getting Bush to launch the “road map” for peace. In other words, he and Bush were not saying that they had to invade Iraq to assist or appease the Israelis. Nothing that Blair said in his testimony should have provided the slightest evidence that this was occurring. And it seems clear enough that the discussions Blair and Bush had with the Israelis were not about Iraq but about the peace process.

I am sorry to say that this kind of sloppy research and reasoning is typical of the way that Walt and Mearsheimer deal with the question of whether the Israel lobby influenced the decision to go to war. In their book, they claim that the U.S. would “almost certainly” not have gone to war without the influence of the Israel lobby. That’s a very strong claim, but they do not back it up either in the book or in Walt’s current blogging. Let me briefly deal with their logic here.

There are three ways in which the Israel lobby could have made itself indispensable to the decision to go to war: first, in White House-Pentagon deliberations; second, in significantly influencing the critical Congressional vote in October 2002; and third, in dramatically shaping public opinion. Their argument falls short on all these counts.

White House: To contend that the “Israel lobby” influenced the White House decision to invade—which had more or less been made by the spring of 2002 when Blair visited Crawford—Walt and Mearsheimer expand the “lobby” to include “neoconservative intellectuals” such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. They then imply that Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives favored regime change in Iraq primarily because it would benefit Israel.  No evidence has surfaced to show that Wolfowitz was acting in this manner.  There were other neo-conservatives in the administration – such as David Wurmser and Douglas Feith – who had in the past explicitly linked regime change in Iraq to Israel’s welfare, but they were not in a decision-making capacity. Indeed, the two people outside of the President who appear most responsible for the decision to invade — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — could not be categorized, even by Walt and Mearsheimer’s absurdly broad standards, as part of an Israel lobby.  So while it would be foolish to rule out that Israel’s welfare was not discussed or mentioned in discussions about whether to invade Iraq, there is no basis for saying that the White House decision to invade Iraq was driven by neo-conservative preoccupations with Israel’s security.

Congress: Walt cites my quoting of AIPAC head Howard Kohr’s boast that AIPAC had been “quietly lobbying” Congress to pass the war resolution in October 2002. I don’t doubt that AIPAC officials favored going to war, as did the leaders of some other pro-Israel organizations. But AIPAC did not aggressively lobby for the war resolution the way it lobbied in 1981 against the AWACs surveillance plane sale to Saudi Arabia or recently for refined petroleum sanctions on Iran. I have interviewed AIPAC people and members of other Jewish lobbying organizations on this question, and they say the same thing. It was not a make-or-break legislative priority. And there is very good circumstantial evidence to back this up. Some of AIPAC’s most dependable supporters on the Hill—such as Senators Daniel Inouye and Carl Levin and Representative Jerrold Nadler—opposed the resolution. So, yes, AIPAC probably did “quietly” make its preference known; but it can’t be credited or blamed for the outcome of the vote. And no other pro-Israel or Jewish lobby possesses comparable clout on the Hill.

Public Opinion: Did the Israel lobby have a sine qua non influence on public opinion in favor of the war? If so, one would expect that its influence would at least show up among Jewish Americans, who would be most likely to listen to their arguments. In a 2003 survey, the American Jewish Committee found that 54 percent of Jewish Americans disapproved of going to war with Iraq and only 43 percent approved. At the time, a majority of Americans approved of going to war. So, far from being a leader in pro-war sentiment, American Jews were lagging behind. Walt and Mearsheimer concede this point, but it’s important nonetheless to include it because it is the only other way in which the Israel lobby might have had a decisive effect on the decision to invade, but did not.  

There is, in other words, no basis at all for accepting Walt and Mearsheimer’s contention that, without the Israel lobby, the U.S. would likely not have invaded Iraq.  It’s not anti-Semitic to make these charges–they have quotes and anecdotes in their book–but they don’t add up to the proof of any overriding influence. Nor does Walt’s use of Blair’s testimony to the Iraq War Commission. I think it’s time for Walt and Mearsheimer to put this part of their argument to rest.

Posted in Antisemitism, Democrats, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, Steven Eidman, UN, history, terrorism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador, vs. Andrew Sullivan

Posted by steveneidman on October 8, 2009

Deep Denial

Why the Holocaust Still Matters

  • Michael B. Oren

Toughened by their frontier ethos, steeled by serial wars, Israelis are not prone to flattery. Most, in fact, eschew using the closest equivalent to the Hebrew word for flattery–chanupa–in favor of the derisive Yiddish-derivative, firgun. An Israeli joke holds that the word, slashed by a red diagonal line, graces the exit from Ben-Gurion Airport, together with the warning, “You are now entering a Firgun Free Zone.”

Not surprisingly, then, several Israeli commentators reacted unflatteringly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly. Though many international leaders and even the audience in the U.N. hall applauded Netanyahu, his words were lambasted in Haaretz by Tom Segev as “unnecessary and embarrassing” and by Gideon Levy as “demagogic” and “insulting to the intelligence.” Aluf Benn, one of Israel’s most respected journalists, faulted the prime minister for failing to address a global, rather than an Israeli, audience.

The bulk of the speech highlighted the threat of Iranian nuclearization, the travesty of the Goldstone Report, and Israel’s hopes for a peace with the Palestinians based on security and mutual recognition. Yet criticism of the prime minister virtually ignored these topics and focused instead on his opening remarks, about the Holocaust. “One third of all Jews perished in the great conflagration of the Holocaust,” Netanyahu reminded the delegates. “Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own.” He went on to assail President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world’s premier Holocaust denier, who had addressed the same assembly the previous day, as well as those ambassadors who did not walk out on him. “Have you no shame?” Netanyahu upbraided them. “Have you no decency?”

Detractors of Netanyahu alleged that, by asserting the reality of the Holocaust, he stooped to Ahmadinejad’s level–worse, that he granted credibility to the Iranian thug by debating him over a universally accepted truth. “If 64 years after World War II concluded with Hitler’s fall … the debate on the reality of the Holocaust has reached the UN General Assembly,” Benn wrote, “then Ahmadinejad has succeeded in instilling doubt.”

Perhaps because they were raised in a society suffused with Holocaust consciousness, some Israelis might be unaware of the extent of ignorance of the Final Solution throughout the world, even in the United States, and especially among youth. Confronted with the enormity of the horror, many young people today–much like American Jewish leaders in 1942–react with incredulousness, rendering them susceptible to denial. Millions of Muslims, moreover, subscribe to the syllogism: If Israel was created by Europeans out of Holocaust guilt, and the Holocaust never occurred, then Israel’s existence is unjust. Where better than the General Assembly, a body established in response to World War II and affording a global audience, to reaffirm the veracity of an event now so widely questioned if not refuted?

But in concentrating on the prime minister’s preamble, critics overlook the deeper connections between the Holocaust and his subsequent themes. Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report. Reasserting the factuality of the Holocaust is a prerequisite for peace.

Many factors contributed to the Holocaust–European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference–but none more elemental than the Jews’ inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.

Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d’être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews’ need to defend themselves. So, the Iranian leader proceeds to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and produce nuclear weapons while claiming that the Jews of Israel–like those of 1940s Europe–have nothing to fear. But Ahmadinejad does not stop short at merely deeming the Holocaust a “fairy tale;” rather, he portrays Israel as a Nazi state–guilty of perpetrating the very offenses against the Palestinians that the Nazis never did to the Jews.

Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists. The U.N. mission purports to have investigated Israel’s military action in Gaza last winter, an operation launched in response to the firing of more than 7,000 Hamas missiles at Israeli towns since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Strip. But instead of probing Hamas’s deliberate effort to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and its doctrine of hiding behind Palestinian human shields, the judges interviewed handpicked Hamas witnesses, several of them senior commanders disguised as civilians, and uncritically accepted their testimony. Inexorably, the report, which presumed Israel’s guilt, condemned the Jewish state for crimes against humanity and for mounting a premeditated campaign against Gaza civilians.

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.

Ahmadinejad’s genocidal rhetoric and the iniquity of the Goldstone Report notwithstanding, Israel will, of course, continue to defend its citizens. No amount of vitriol will compel Israel onto a course of self-destruction. But what will be destroyed is any chance for peace. Having twice withdrawn unilaterally to recognized borders and received only onslaughts in return, and having suffered censure for protecting themselves from that aggression, Israelis will understandably recoil from additional retreats that will leave them vulnerable. Israelis, moreover, will not withdraw from any territory liable to become staging grounds for terrorist groups empowered by international agencies and convinced of their ability to murder Israelis with impunity.

Israel will pursue policies with or without firgun. But by making the connection between the Holocaust and its denial, the Iranian nuclear program, and the Goldstone Report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has exposed the venal narrative that concludes with Israel’s paralysis. By reaffirming Israel’s right to safeguard its citizens, he has demarcated the only path to peace.

Michael B. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

 

The Undiplomatic Michael Oren

Andrew Sullivan

I thought ambassadors were supposed to smoothe over rifts, not inflame them. And I thought they were supposed to speak to the broadest number of citizens in the countries to which they have been appointed, not provide inflammatory rants to the already-persuaded. But this Michael Oren piece in TNR abandons any pretense of diplomatic balance.

The premise of Oren’s piece is that Israel faces a new Nazism represented by Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers but, to an even greater extent, by the South African liberal, Richard Goldstone, and the United Nations. Oren seems to be arguing that Gaza was a war of survival for the Jewish state and that Israel had no choice but to launch a war that killed, by one conservative Israeli count, 320 children, destroyed 4,000 homes, and up to 80 government buildings. Even if one is sympathetic to the horrific barrage of Hamas rockets that Israeli citizens endured (and what decent human being wouldn’t be?) – every single rocket being a war crime – it helps no one to use language this extreme or to distort history in this manner.

One might ask what the response of Michael Oren would be if Palestinian terrorists pulled off a major coup by killing 320 Jewish children, and destroying 4,000 homes in Tel Aviv, because Israel had lobbed primitive missiles at its territory, missing human targets an overwhelming proportion of the time. This is not to defend Hamas’ wickedness and war crimes. It is not to say that Israel deliberately targeted children. It is to insist that the laws of war be applied equally to both parties in a conflict. It is to ask Israel to live up to its own ancient moral values – values that were pioneered when my own ancestors were running around painted in wode.

It is also to ask beleaguered Israel to get some perspective and to see, for a moment, how things might look from the outside. I can see why they may feel encircled and alone. But they’re not. Even those of us who have been made angry by their recent actions and seeming unconcern for the needs of their most powerful friend, want to help. God knows I love Israel and its people; and I understand that some of the extremism among neocons is really an excess of passion and love rather than mere belligerence and orneriness. But, seriously guys, get a grip. Help the US help you. And try to see the wider picture.

Here’s a graph that tells the story of the comparative human toll in the year before the conflict broke out:

800px-Israelis_killed_by_Palestinians_in_Israel_and_Palestinians_killed_by_Israelis_in_Gaza_-_2008_prior_to_Gaza_War

Over eight years, 28 Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets in what were clearly war crimes, as Goldstone emphatically reports. Four times that many Palestinians were killed by Israelis in one month in 2008. In the subsequent conflict, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths was close to 100 – 1. With this tally, Oren writes:

If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all.

Seriously? No; the issue is whether Israel committed war crimes in its self-defense in Gaza and whether that self-defense was disproportionate to the threat it faced. At the time Bret Stephens offered the just war theory behind the Gaza war thus:

For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of “proportionality” is just the endgame that Israel needs.

Does that sound like the desperate act of a country on the brink of extinction? Glenn Reynolds explained the actual rationale:

Israel’s just playing by Chicago rules:  “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.  That’s the Chicago way!”

Whatever else that is, it is not a just war. The disproportion was the point: it was designed to teach the Gazans and Hamas a lesson they would never forget. Michael Goldfarb, McCain’s former spokesman, echoed Reynolds’ statement but embraced the murder of children as well:

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely.

Now it is a completely fair point that many other nations are in no position to criticize, including the US. Israel has to survive on a tiny strip of land which is surrounded by enemies. The Jews have achieved there such a miraculous, inventive, dynamic state it puts most other countries to shame. And its moral standards and its internal airing of debate have no peer in its own region. In some respects, the US has recently had lower standards.

 

The US, by invading Iraq and failing to provide any security for the civilians trapped in the chaos the US tolerated, (“stuff happens”), by torturing hundreds of prisoners, innocent and guilty, and by unleashing entities like Blackwater on civilian populations is in no position to judge. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the Iraq occupation in sectarian violence that an invading army has a fundamental moral responsibility to restrain. To have invaded a country with no thought for the security of its civilians is one reason I came to see the execution of the Iraq war as morally intolerable. Israel, moreover, has seen its Supreme Court outlaw the torture methods championed by the US under Bush and Cheney. The US, in stark contrast, refuses to investigate its seven-year policy of torture and abuse of individuals, some of whom it knew to be innocent.

But that doesn’t make either war just. As Matt points out, even if you believe the Israeli attack on Gaza was justified, that doesn’t exclude the possibility of war crimes in its execution. Is this so hard to understand? Jews of all people – the victims of war crimes of unimaginable evil – should know this. And exchange anger and paranoia for the integrity they once had.

Posted in Antisemitism, Iran, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, UN, culture, history, terrorism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Think Obama’s Soft? Think Again

Posted by steveneidman on June 24, 2009

The Obama Method

First he did it to Boehner, now Ahmadinejad.

by Jonathan Chait

The thing that people haven’t figured out about President Obama’s conduct of foreign policy is that it’s the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries–Republicans at home, Islamists abroad–and strengthen his own position. Obama’s speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was simply the foreign analogue of his dealings with the GOP.

Obama’s method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions of respect for the adversary’s core beliefs, and profuse hope for cooperation. In his iconic 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, Obama famously announced that Democrats, too, “worship an awesome God.” In his Cairo speech, Obama pointed to the contributions and freedoms of American Muslims. In both speeches, Obama signaled cultural respect by adapting the other side’s own rhetorical formulations–invoking “a belief in things not seen” (2004) or calling the Middle East the region where Islam “was first revealed” (Cairo).

This rhetoric removes the locus of debate from the realm of tribal conflict– red state versus blue state, Islam versus America–and puts it onto specific questions–Is the American health care system fair? Is terrorism justified?– where Obama believes he can win support from soft adherents of the opposing camp.

Naturally, Obama’s pacific expressions tend to alarm the more hawkish elements of his own camp, who interpret his idealistic rhetoric as naivete or weakness. A few months before the 2008 presidential primary, columnist E.J. Dionne reported, “Several Democrats also said Clinton’s claim that she can deal with the Republican ‘attack machine’ rings truer to an angry party than Obama’s call for an end to partisan polarization.”

Democratic partisans think the enemy is vicious and must be met with uncompromising force. That’s exactly how conservative foreign policy hawks feel about the world. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing foreign policy critique of Obama today sounds eerily like the partisan Democratic critique of Obama during the primary.

In January 2008, Obama told a newspaper editorial board that Ronald Reagan provided a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Paul Krugman complained, “Where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?” Likewise, in his Cairo speech, Obama touted the historic role of Muslims in the United States. Conservative pundit David Frum complained: “One of the most disturbing things about the Cairo speech is the persistent misrepresentation of history. It is really absurd to say that Islam for example has ‘always been a part of America’s story.’”

Obama probably realizes that Muslims have played a marginal role in American life throughout most of its history. He also probably believes that the U.S. economy in the 1970s suffered primarily from oil shocks and irresponsible monetary policy rather than from the absence of a Reaganesque cheerleader for entrepreneurship. But Obama’s method entails small acts of intellectual dishonesty in the pursuit of common ground.

Critics such as Krugman and Frum are correct that surrendering intellectual ground comes at a cost. Our most successful presidents articulate clear, forceful public rationales for their beliefs –think of Roosevelt or Truman excoriating reactionary Republicans at home, or Truman, Kennedy, or Reagan standing up to the Soviets internationally. It is a mistake, however, to view Obama’s strategy as an act of submission.

Consider how Obama explained his approach toward Iran during a recent interview with Newsweek:

Now, will it work? We don’t know. And I assure you, I’m not naive about the difficulties of a process like this. If it doesn’t work, the fact that we have tried will strengthen our position in mobilizing the international community, and Iran will have isolated itself, as opposed to a perception that it seeks to advance that somehow it’s being victimized by a U.S. government that doesn’t respect Iran’s sovereignty.

This is a perfect summation of Obama’s strategy. It does not presuppose that his adversaries are people of goodwill who can be reasoned with. Rather, it assumes that, by demonstrating his own goodwill and interest in accord, Obama can win over a portion of his adversaries’ constituents as well as third parties. Obama thinks he can move moderate Muslim opinion, pressure bad actors like Iran to negotiate, and, if Iran fails to comply, encourage other countries to isolate it. The strategy works whether or not Iran makes a reasonable agreement.

The results remain to be seen. But it eerily resembles the way Obama has already isolated the GOP leadership. Obama began his presidency by elaborately courting the opposition party. Republicans in Congress believed that, by flamboyantly withholding cooperation, they could deny Obama his stated goal of bipartisan harmony and thus render him a failure. Instead, they wound up handing Obama the alternative victory of appearing to be the reasonable party. Polls showed that the public, by overwhelming margins, believed that Obama was trying to work with Republicans and that Republicans were not reciprocating.

Likewise, by defusing the complaint among Islamists that the United States disrespects their religion, Obama can more easily force the Iranian leadership to negotiate on the terms of its stated goals. This is actually “a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers,” as American Prospect editor Mark Schmitt wrote in 2007. “One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in,” Schmitt explained, “treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem.”

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama’s political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it’s all the same thing. Obama’s defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Posted in Democrats, Healthcare, Iran, Israel, Obama, Politics, UN, business, economy, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Conservatives Tone Deaf When it Comes to Obama’s Cairo Speech

Posted by steveneidman on June 10, 2009

Purple Prose of Cairo

The trouble with conservative critiques of Obama’s Cairo speech

BY MICHAEL WEISS | 10:00 pm June 8, 2009

President Obama’s speech in Cairo last week, titled “A New Beginning with Muslims,” has already been thoroughly scrutinized for both its substance and the likely effect it had on its intended audience, which one would be forgiven for thinking consisted entirely of ecstatic Western liberals and their wary conservative counterparts. Many on the right have characteristically chided Obama for his frequent dips into moral equivalence. Even as he condemned Iran’s “role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians,” for example, he offered as a counterpoint the U.S.-abetted overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian president Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. This marked the first occasion in which an American president copped to the fact in public, and some observers, including Abe Greenwald at Commentary, found it to be a heaping dollop of catnip to the mullahs of the Islamic Republic (not to mention a too-convenient gloss on just how democratic Mossadegh was upon attaining power).

There’s also a fair criticism that Obama’s history was somewhat shaky. He referred to the “tolerance” exhibited by Islam in Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. But Cordoba is a part of Andalusia and had been reconquered by Christian Spain in 1236, a good two centuries before the forced expulsion and murder of most of Sephardic Jewry. (Muslims, who were tolerated for a spell longer, may have helped Jews find shelter or safe-crossing, but is this really what Obama meant?) And while it’s true that John Adams, in signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, secured the first recognition of the United States by a foreign power—Morocco—Obama left out of this cozy footnote the fact that the treaty marked the formal end of years of piratical kidnapping of sea-faring Americans, and the confiscation of their goods and vessels, by the Ottoman-ruled Barbary States. (There is a chilling passage in Michael Oren’s book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to Present, in which Adams and Thomas Jefferson are told by the pasha of Tripoli that there could be no peaceful coexistence between nations because “[i]t was… written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”)

Nevertheless, as Greenwald’s colleague Max Boot—the most intriguing neoconservative writing on this administration’s foreign policy—points out, this was a speech delivered to a proximate Muslim audience with a global one in mind, and with the intention of winning that global audience over to, if not exactly a pro-American position, then less of an anti-American one. For all the gauziness in Obama’s rhetoric, there were some diamond-hard statements about rejecting terrorism as a means of “resistance,” not judging a true democracy by a state’s mere capacity to hold elections (a crucial point, as Obama was delivering his remarks in the capital city of a dictatorship that masquerades as a democracy), and enfranchising and educating women in Arab countries. It’s true that Obama was deficient in standing up for half the population in the Middle East, which is held in a state of second-class citizenship if not outright servitude. David Frum’s sharpest point against the speech was to note that Obama’s endorsement of the choice for Muslim women to don the hijab in Western countries was an instance of an American president “intervening in an internal Muslim debate–and not only intervening, but intervening on the more reactionary side!”

Obama’s tendency to acknowledge, or apologize for, America’s past sins has been mistaken for supplicancy: how dare he project anything other than unremitting confidence in the world’s only superpower? Doesn’t he know that self-criticism is viewed as weakness by those hostile to that superpower’s interests? Letting aside the fact that Obama’s election was itself an act of national self-criticism, such thinking reflects a curious evolution of the conservative case against him as he graduated from candidate to president. Where conservatives used to deride his prospective foreign policy and cry, “Words, words, words,” they now pore over every detail of his language, while tacitly endorsing his actual foreign policy. (On Obama’s Afghan “surge” strategy, Bill Kristol’s new neoconservative think tank, The Foreign Policy Initiative, was exultant.) Sometimes their only criticism of him is no criticism at all: Greenwald’s earlier post was titled, “Now He Even Sounds Like Bush.”

As for perceived weaknesses, recall that George W. Bush ran in 2000 with the purpose of exercising “humility” abroad, and at no point after 9/11 and his subsequent about-face as an interventionist did he point out some of the more uncomfortable facts about Islam’s role in human rights abuses. Much as we may pine for Orwellian standards in speechmaking, no international platform can be articulated by a U.S. president without cant or breezy euphemism. Indeed, Obama’s greatest problem may well have been a category mistake. There is no such thing as an umma—that is, a greater Islamic community—in the 21st century, as Lee Smith at Slate shrewdly notes. Islamic identities are today forged as much by irredentist nationalisms as they are by Koranic injunctions, and so any presumption of a global religion is bound to do more alienating than ingratiating.

But as for those sections of the Cairo speech which turned a gimlet eye on the American past, Obama did no more than speak the truth, or tread where others have to lesser fanfare. Condoleeza Rice first compared the situation in Palestine to the American civil rights movement, and Gershom Gorenberg’s recent cover story in The Weekly Standard implicitly did as well by asking why it was that there was no Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Had Obama really wanted to placate Iran, he would not have repudiated Holocaust denial or quoted from the Torah.

As for his status as a “rock star” to Bedouin and sheik alike, Michael Crowley at The New Republic, who witnessed the speech, observed that “[w]hether for cultural reasons, or the awkwardness of instant translation, applause was sporadic and muted. (His call to halt Israeli settlements, for instance, went strangely unnoticed.)” This is one way of saying that the loyal opposition at home misses a more fundamental point of Obama’s style abroad: he can drop his world-citizen C.V. and heed the call of the muezzin all he likes, but so long as Bin Laden still loathes him and U.S. troops remain on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, he’ll never be confused in the Middle East for the capitulationist commander-in-chief some of his more feverish enemies at home wish he were.

Posted in Democrats, Israel, Jewish Interest, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, Polls, Supreme Court, UN, prayer, psychology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

A Different Read on Durban II

Posted by steveneidman on May 3, 2009

After Durban II, Egg on Our Faces

Only Human

By Kathleen Peratis

  • By any conventional standard the declaration issued at the conclusion of the Durban II global conference on racism, held in Geneva in late April, was a signal — and a very, very positive — achievement. It is forward-looking in its commitment to protect victims of racism, includes significant new protections for migrants, omits the pernicious idea pushed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference that religions should be protected from “defamation” and does not single out Israel for anything.

Even though the singular rant of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got all the press, the conference was not the “hatefest” that many Jews had confidently and noisily predicted. As early as February, the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris was calling the Durban II planning process “discredited,” while the Anti-Defamation League cautioned governments and NGOs to say “Not again” and insisted, “This time, no one can say let’s just wait to see what happens.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, Durban II’s secretary general, complained of a “widespread and highly organized campaign of disinformation” regarding the conference. While she has declined to elaborate on this statement, many believe that she was referring to the efforts of Jewish groups.

But the fears expressed by Jewish organizations proved to be unfounded. Indeed, in negotiations over the conference declaration’s text, the Organization of the Islamic Conference did not end up playing a destructive role. Instead, it showed a willingness to accommodate most American (and Israeli) red lines. Before the Durban II conference even began, virtually all significant American concerns — some of which were about Israel and Jews, and many of which were not — had been accommodated, and properly so.

The one demand that was not met proved to be a killer: The conference document endorsed Durban I. This was understood by many observers to be simply U.N.-speak — no conference ever fails to endorse its predecessors. But to many Jewish groups, it amounted to nothing less than the wholesale incorporation into Durban II of all of Durban I’s antisemitic, Holocaust-denying, genocidal ugliness.

I was at Durban I, and I walked out of its NGO forum along with scores of other Jews. In light of the Durban I trauma, Jewish skepticism over anything named “Durban” is understandable. But Durban II was not Durban I. The unshakable assumption that it was, however, led the United States, Israel and eight other nations not to attend.

Despite the no-shows, the 180 or so countries that did attend achieved astonishing consensus. Western and Muslim governments actually worked together effectively — the very goal President Obama fervently promotes but simultaneously undermined by pulling out of this conference.

Still, there are opportunities for redemption. An American endorsement of the conference’s declaration would, even now, help create a powerful global force against racism. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely. Instead, the future of the Durban II process is uncertain.

This is a shame, and it presents a problem to the Jewish community. Jewish groups played such a prominent role in criticizing Durban II that they were the very first to be informed by the White House of its decision to boycott the conference. (Human rights groups were informed second and civil rights groups third.) International human rights groups, however, think that the Durban II declaration is worth fighting for and are stunned that the opportunity it presents is being squandered. Sadder still, it is no longer assumed that Jewish groups will be allies in global human rights work.

Jews were once seen as being at the forefront of the global campaign for human rights, which is surely where we belong. It’s time for us to once again assume our rightful place in this struggle, and there is no shortage of places to start. One of them is here and now: We can urge the United States to signal its approval of the Durban II declaration. It might be awkward for the White House and for Jewish organizations to do such a sudden turnaround, but furthering the global fight against racism is certainly worth a little egg on the face.

Kathleen Peratis, a partner at the New York law firm Outten & Golden, is a board member emerita of Human Rights Watch.

Posted in Israel, Jewish Interest, Politics, UN | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »