2013-05-22T23:06:31-04:00 Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=leon-t-hadar Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Leon T. Hadar Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1919264 2012-09-27T13:03:43-04:00 2012-11-27T05:12:01-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
It would probably be a waste of time and space to recall here for the one-hundredth-and-one time the many ways in which the geo-strategic thinkers aka the neoconservatives, who occupied top positions in the administration of President George W. Bush, and who now dominate Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's foreign policy team, had led the United States into one of the most horrendous strategic disasters in American history in the name of doing a "regime change" in Iraq and spreading democracy in the Middle East.

It's difficult to imagine that there is anyone out there who still believes that it made sense for the United States to pay the huge costs, in terms of lives and treasure, military over-stretching and loss of diplomatic credibility, for carrying out the military adventure in Mesopotamia and launching the so-called Freedom Agenda in the rest of the Middle East.

Oops! I forgot. Our former Iraqi ally Ahmed Chalabi, the Shiite rulers in Baghdad and their patrons in Tehran beg to disagree with the American critics of the Buscheney administration and of the policies concocted by the neocons. The members of Iran-led Shiite Axis would tell you that ousting Saddam Hussein from power was actually a great idea and helped strengthen Iran's position in the Persian Gulf and the rest of the Middle East.

And the guys in the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Weekly Standard, FOX News, and Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the rest of the cheerleaders for the Iraq war continue to argue that the script they had written for "liberating" Iraq was great. The diplomats and the generals were the ones who screwed up and should be held responsible for the lousy production.

Indeed, with few exceptions, none of the neocons have apologized for the mess they had made in the Middle East, and have instead been trying to defend their foreign-policy narrative, especially after the election of a new president who seemed to be offering a different one.

But then how can you attack President Barack Obama for "appeasing" the Ayatollahs in Tehran, if it was your own policy of removing Saddam Hussein from power that helped strengthen Iran and its satellites in the region? Or can you really criticize the White House for failing to back Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and for supporting the Arab Spring or for helping oust Muammar Gaddafi after urging Americans to spread democracy in the Middle East before, during, and after the Iraq War?

In fact, much of what President Obama has been doing in the Middle East in the last four years has been to try to save U.S. hegemony in the region, in the aftermath of the fiasco in Iraq and the series of other diplomatic and military failures in the region that occurred under the Bush administration, including the emergence of Hezbollah as the main power-broker in Lebanon; the holding of the election in Palestine that brought the radical Islamist Hamas to power; the stalled Israel-Palestine peace process; and the growing tensions between Washington and Ankara.

While trying to get out of the quagmire in Iraq and to improve the relationship with Turkey and other Arab and Muslim countries, President Obama has embraced a cautious and cost-effective approach in response to the so-called Arab Spring which recalled a similar and successful strategy employed by the administration of President George H. W. Bush in dealing with the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union 25 years ago.

The notion that Obama has "lost" the Middle East, that his policies were responsible for the fall of the pro-American autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt and that his administration could (or should) have prevented that from happening is quite preposterous.

Are Romney and his neoconservative advisors proposing that President Obama should have called on the military rulers in Tunisia and Egypt to suppress the popular uprising in those countries? Would the American people have supported such a policy that could have led to direct U.S. military intervention in domestic political crises that would have evolved into full-scale civil wars? In reality, the U.S. has neither the power nor the will to determine the outcomes of the political changes taking place in the Arab World, but only to try to influence them at the margin by working together with other regional and global powers.

Moreover, in Libya, where the Obama administration -- operating "from behind" -- did provide some indirect military support for the uprising there, the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi occurred without any American casualties. Would the United States be better off today if it had deployed ground troops in Libya that would have become targets for attacks by radical Islamist groups?

Obama's critics in the Romney campaign seem to be suggesting that launching new wars of choice in Iran or Syria a la Iraq would advance U.S. interests in the Middle East. Assuming that the American people, exhausted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, would support such new military crusades in the Middle East (and opinion polls suggest that they won't), are the Republicans ready to increase the defense budget to the stratosphere in order to achieve these ambitious goals, perhaps by raising new taxes? I didn't think so.

Operating against the backdrop of the mess in Iraq, the continuing war in Afghanistan and the expanding federal deficits and a slow economic recovery, and as he tries to shift U.S. geo-strategic focus to East Asia and respond to the economic and military rise of China, President Obama has wisely resisted the pressure to open new military fronts in the Middle East.

It remains to be seen whether a President Romney would end up following the advice of his neoconservative foreign policy advisors. But the fact that he has recruited them to play such an active role in his campaign raises doubts about his judgment. The kid who killed his parents may have been pardoned by the judge, but it is doubtful many couples were standing in line to adopt him.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1590016 2012-06-12T12:27:37-04:00 2012-08-12T05:12:06-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
Indeed, based on these and other social and economic indications, Asian-Americans as an electoral bloc should have been a natural ally of a Republican Party that is, after all, committed to the principles of the free market, supports the interests of small businesses and celebrates social-conservative values.

In fact, if presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wanted to demonstrate to voters that energizing the private sector -- and not growing government -- is the most effective way to provide Americans with an opportunity to advance their economic standing, he could point to Asian-Americans, whose median weekly earnings have been greater than those earned by whites during the last decade and whose unemployment rate has remained relatively low even during the recent recession.

Indeed, a 2011 U.S. Labor Department report concluded that Asian-Americans are more likely than either whites or blacks to be employed in the private sector, with more than 8 to 10 percent of employed Asian-Americans working for private companies, and that the number of Asian-owned businesses expanded at the rate of 40.4 percent, a rate that more than doubled the national average between 2002 and 2007.

Moreover, that many Asian-Americans trace their roots to countries that have been and still are under the control of Communist regimes that had repressed their families should have been another reason for many of them to vote for the party of Ronald Reagan and the other Republican Presidents with impressive anti-Communist credentials.

Yet, according to a recent study conducted by Lake Research Partners, Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters prefer Democratic President Barack Obama over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

There are an about 17.3 million people of Asian or Pacific Islander descent in the United States, comprising 5.6 percent of the population. Many of them are concentrated in key "swing" states, like Virginia, Nevada and Florida and close to 80 percent of these voters plan to take part in the 2012 election.

The Lake Research survey showed that Asian-Americans tend largely now to identify themselves as Democrats by more than a three-to-one margin. Fifty-nine percent of Asian-Americans favored U.S. President Barack Obama, while only 13 percent preferred presumed Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Twenty-seven percent said they were undecided. That Democrat-Republican split remained largely unchanged since the 2004 presidential election.

During the post-1945 era the majority of Asian-Americans voters that included refugees from Communist-ruled China, Korea and Vietnam tended to identify with the conservative and anti-communist agenda of the Republican Party. Republican George H. W. Bush received 55 percent of the Asian-American vote compared to 31 percent for Democrat Bill Clinton.

But in 2004 it was Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry who won the majority (56 percent) of Asian-American vote, with Obama making even a stronger showing in 2008, getting 62 percent of the Asian-American vote.

While Korean-Americans resist the voting trend among Asian=Americans and continue to lean Republican -- not unlike Cuban-American voters who remain a faithful Republican voting bloc among the pro-Democratic Hispanic community -- the indications are that younger and more educated Asian-Americans are drifting by large numbers to the Democratic side.

According to the Labor Department study, 57.5 percent of employed Asian-Americans who are 25 or older have a degree, a proportion that is 60 percent higher than among whites, and more than twice that of blacks.

Moreover, 7.8 percent of jobs in this the high-tech industries are going to Asian-American workers, making them well-represented there compared with their overall representations in the labor force (5 percent). And Asian-Americans are similarly well represented in science, technology, engineering and math occupations, accounting for more than 9 percent of jobs there.

In short, the younger and more educated Asian-Americans tend to fit into the demographic profile of the highly-educated and upper-middle class professionals who reside in area like northern Virginia or North Carolina's Research Triangle who voted for Obama in 2008 and made it possible for him to win these two crucial "swing" states.

In a way, these Asian-American voters -- very much like the white members of what sociologist Richard Florida refers to the "creative class" -- mirror image the problem that Democrats face when it comes to white blue collar workers. In both cases, it's cultural affinity and not economic interests that seem to determine voting behavior.

Your average Asian-American (or white) high-tech entrepreneur, software engineer or graphic designer may have benefited professionally and economically from the free market environment of the 1990's. But he or she feels less comfortable with a political party perceived to be dominated by white politicians that exhibits what many see as being intolerant toward minorities and immigrants.

Most Republican leaders and voters don't share xenophobic and anti-immigration attitudes. Republican politicians of Indian-American ancestry (who converted to Christianity) were elected as governors of Louisiana and South Carolina. And when Republican politicians, like former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, adopt an election platform that is tolerant of minorities and immigrants, the majority of Asian-Americans are inclined to support him.

Indeed, if the Republican Party would have elected such a pro-immigration candidate as former Utah Governor (and former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore and China) Jon Huntsman to run against Obama in November, it's quite likely that when it came to Asian-American voters, he would have given the Democratic president a run for his money.

But the continuing obsession of so many Republican and conservative activists with "birtherism" and with the president's alleged "Muslim" faith only helps to accentuate the notion that Republicans are hostile toward immigrants and toward Americans who are non-white and non-Christian.

Republicans should recognize the obvious: that they cannot rely in the long run in their quest for the presidency and other national political offices on the votes of the diminishing demographic groups of white blue-collar workers, and that changing economic and sociological trends are strengthening the electoral power of the fastest growing immigrant community of Asian-Americans, many of whom are joining the ranks of the "creative class" whose members could determine the outcome of elections in key states.

The GOP is probably not going to win the support of the majority of African-American and Hispanic voters anytime soon. But Republicans are now in danger of losing the votes of another important demographic group that could have been its natural political ally.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1293836 2012-02-22T12:40:48-05:00 2012-04-23T05:12:01-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
I could imagine the poor guy confronting family and friends and insisting to no avail that what he had was more than just the common cold or the seasonal flu.

'You are not sick' is the kind of reassuring message that Robert Kagan is sending to the nation's foreign policy hypochondriacs aka 'declinists' in his new non-fiction book The World America Made, contending that America is in tip-top military and economic health and ready to take care of the rest of the world. He recalls that the same kind of hypochondriacs had complained that America was really, really in decline in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

But, as the sad case of our late Key Westerner demonstrates, even hypochondriacs do get sick. In the same way, great powers do decline, both in relative and absolute terms. Hence American global economic power started to decline relative to rising economic players like Japan and Germany in the post-1945 era, and relative to China and India more recently.

And while in absolute terms the US continues to maintain the largest economy -- and remains the pre-eminent military superpower based on any standard one applies -- it still has to operate by the realist axiom that in the long run, no great power can preserve its military superiority on the basis of a weakening economic superstructure.

Kagan, the son of a renowned historian who had studied the Peloponnesian War and the brother of the author of a book on the Napoleonic Wars, likes to present himself as a hard-core Realpolitik analyst of foreign policy, and tends to bash his intellectual rivals, the so-called 'declinists' as idealists. He says they place their faith in the dreamy notions of an evolving international community and the abolition of war through peaceful diplomacy and international law.

Not unlike your average hypochondriac who dismisses the advice of the medical doctor, these declinists refuse apparently to face reality and listen to a rational scientist of power like Kagan, and instead assume that the US interests and values would continue to prosper in the more multipolar system in the kind of post-American world that commentator Fareed Zakaria imagined in his book on the same subject.

His views matter now as he is a top foreign adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

But if anything, it is Kagan who refuses to face the reality of current American global power. He also misrepresents the views of Zakaria and other realist foreign policy analysts who believe that the most ineffective way to maintain American power and influence is by continuing to do what Kagan has been advocating since the end of the Cold War -- engaging in unnecessary and wasteful wars in the Middle East and picking-up costly diplomatic fights with China and Russia while raising US defense budget to the stratosphere, igniting anti-American sentiment worldwide and eroding US credibility.

Which brings me back to the inscription in the Key West cemetery. Imagine now that the physician who was taking care of that very sick Key Westerner -- let's call him Dr Kagan -- was not only dismissing the dangerous symptoms exhibited by his patient. How would we have reacted when we found out that the medical doctor was actually the one who had recommended that his patient take an health-inducing (and democracy promoting) trip to the Greater Middle East -- with a long stay in Iraq -- where the poor man contracted the deadly virus that led eventually to his demise?

Military quagmires

Indeed, there is an element of the theatre of the absurd in the spectacle of Kagan, the geo-strategist who was the leading intellectual cheer-leader for the decisions to invade Iraq and launch the Freedom Agenda in the Middle East that were so central to the erosion of US global position. He is now lashing out at others for their lack of faith in American power that he had so helped to diminish so much.

Kagan also fails to recognise that the policies he and other neo-conservative intellectuals advocated -- that were embraced by the Administration of George W Bush -- played directly into the hands of the Chinese, who were delighted to see the Americans drown in the military quagmires in the Middle East while they were spending their time and resources in opening new markets for their trade and investments, including in Afghanistan and Iraq where security was being provided by US troops.

And much of what Kagan writes about the potential threat to the post-World War II international system created by the US makes little sense. The policies pursued by the second Bush Administration based on the unilateral and pre-emptive strikes against against real and imaginary aggressors with weapons of mass destruction, and right and obligation of the US to do 'regime changes' in other sovereign nation-states, were the ones that ran contrary to the set of international rules promoted by the US and its allies after 1945.

In fact, these policies violated international rules established by the Westphalian Peace of 1648 to which China and Russia continue to adhere (hence, their most recent opposition to Western military intervention in Syria).

Moreover, it seems that Kagan believes that continuing to accumulate power and using it more often is the surest way prevent American decline. Preoccupied with the high-brow discourse about high-power he refrains from engaging in such 'boring' subjects, like how to fix America's fiscal problems, to revive its manufacturing base, and to reform its ailing public education system.

All Americans need to do is to believe in their power -- and it will come to be.

It is quite depressing to see that despite the fact that Kagan the geo-strategist has been so wrong in the past and helped to contribute so much to the decline in American power, he continues to be taken seriously by American policymakers and the media.

Dr Kagan, our imaginary medical doctor from Key West, would have lost his license to practice medicine a long time ago.

The commentary was originally published in the Singapore Business Times on 2.21.12]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1266412 2012-02-09T16:05:05-05:00 2012-04-10T05:12:01-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
And while research institutions have conducted interesting exercises to try to figure out the military, diplomatic and economic repercussions of a confrontation between Israel and Iran, the dictum that no military plan survives the contact with the enemy applies also here -- in addition to the unintended consequences, blowbacks and the proverbial 'black swans' that are bound to show up even in the unlikely scenario under which Israel achieves all or most of its military goals.

If I can put my ten cents worth of strategic thinking, it seems to me that the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the American fiasco in Iraq helped tip the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the Levant in the direction of Iran and its allies. And that made it more likely that Israel and other Sunni Arab players that regard the Islamic Republic as a threat to their core national interests would use all their available resources to deprive Iran from having access to a military instrument that would allow it to formalize the new regional balance of power.

In his magisterial study of the 1812-1814 military campaigns in Europe, Russia Against Napoleon, historian Dominic Lieven suggests that while Tsar Alexander recognized that France would never be able to control Europe, he also concluded that the price of adhering to Napoleon's Continental System would have undermined Russia's position as a great power and that the Russians had no choice but to use the full power of their military to prevent that from happening.

My guess is that Israel, as well the Saudis and their Arab-Sunni allies, know that it would be possible to contain a nuclear Iran -- in the same way that Russia could have embraced a cost-effective strategy to contain Napoleon's France. But as long as Israeli leaders believe that they have a realistic option of blocking Iran's nuclear program -- and by extension, of setting major constraints on its ability to assert its position as a regional power -- they will probably use their military capacity. The Saudis and their Gulf partners would probably cheer them behind close doors while publicly condemning them.

But as quite a few Israeli and American military experts have warned, a military strike on Iranian facilities would not achieve the declared Israeli goal of ending Iran's alleged nuclear military program and the expected costs in terms of Israeli casualties could be very high.
Moreover, if Iran gives the green light to its Shiite Hezbollah allies in Lebanon to attack Israel and mobilize the Shiites in Iraq and the Persian Gulf to retaliate against American and Saudi targets, Tehran would be in a position to strengthen its regional power. The ayatollahs would also be able to exploit an Israeli attack to ignite Iranian nationalism and win support even from those Iranians who actually oppose the ruling clerics and would like to see them removed from power.

And while the Obama administration insists that it wants to apply peaceful means to get Iran to freeze its nuclear enrichment program, it is not clear that Washington and its Europeans allies would succeed in coming up with a diplomatic formula that would be acceptable to Iran and to Israel (and its supporters in Washington) or that the Americans would be able to prevent Israel from taking military action against Iran. Those of us who believe that an Israeli military attack would not serve American and Israeli interests and may actually help consolidate the power of Iran in the Middle East and that of the clerics in Teheran should also recognize that President Barack Obama -- who probably agrees with these assumptions -- is not in a position for a diplomatic confrontation with Israel during a presidential election year.

In fact, even in a non-election year, there will be very little incentive for Mr Obama to launch a creative diplomatic opening to Iran at a time when the Iranian leadership does not have the power to make a deal with Washington and is facing strong opposition at home from liberal and conservative forces alike (who, despite their differences, want Iran to acquire nuclear military capacity).

And at a time when the Middle East is going through the political turmoil of the Arab Spring and the US is engaged in a steady drawdown from its military occupation of Iraq, the shaky balance of power in the region would make it difficult for Washington to try to reach a 'grand bargain' with Iran. Such a move, coming in the aftermath of the collapse of the pro-American regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, would be perceived by the Saudis and other Arab-Sunni governments as another sign of US weakness.

If Israel decides to attack Iran, expect the Obama administration to provide it with logistical and other support, including by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel (unlike the Reagan administration which did join the Security Council's censure of the Israeli attack on the Iraq nuclear reactor in Osirak in 1981).

Leaf from History

Yet, in the same way that the outcome of the 1973 Middle East War provided the then Nixon administration with an opportunity to protect and even strengthen its position in the Middle East, by renewing diplomatic relations with Egypt and working to bring peace between the Egyptians and the Israelis, the Obama administration could find itself in a position to advance its interests in the aftermath of an Israel-Iran military confrontation and an ensuing Middle Eastern war. A potential leading player in such a post-war scenario would be Turkey which until now has played a clever diplomatic game vis-a-vis Iran. In the most significant act of military cooperation between Washington and Ankara since 2003, Turkey agreed last year to station sophisticated American radars, part of a US-led system to defend Europe against a potential Iranian missile attack, and has expressed strong opposition against any move by Iran to acquire nuclear military weapons.

At the same time, the Turks have also been in the forefront of the diplomatic opposition against a military strike against Iran and, working with Brazil, it proposed a diplomatic deal to freeze Iranian uranium enrichment in exchange for ending the US-led sanctions against Iran.
And while Turkey is a member of NATO and remains a close military ally of Washington, its recent diplomatic assertiveness and its tensions with Israel coupled with its strong support for democratic activists in the Arab World, has strengthened its status in the Middle East and could allow it to play the role of grand mediator between the US and Iran in a post-war scenario.

Indeed, working with Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the Arab League, as well with the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the European Union, the Obama administration could propose the convening of a Middle East Conference chaired by Turkey that would bring together all the Arab states, Iran and Israel and that would set the stage for the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in the region (which would apply also to Iran as well as to Israel's nuclear arsenal) and to a series of diplomatic initiatives to help stabilize Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and revitalize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process along the lines of the old Arab League proposal.

In that context, the US and Iran could also start repairing their diplomatic ties and Teheran would be encouraged to support any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is agreed on both sides. Not for the first time in history, the end of a war could help create the conditions for stability, cooperation and peace. It could be worth the try.

The commentary was published originally in the Business Times of Singapore on 2.9.12]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1199603 2012-01-11T18:03:52-05:00 2012-03-12T05:12:01-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/ New York Times' headlines would be proclaiming "A Huge Victory for Anti-War Democrats," and Fox News pundits would be warning that the Democratic Party was being taken over by "anti-American appeasers" and "secret Muslims."

But Kucinich ended up winning only 1.35 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote in 2008. Chicago Senator Barack Obama who was a critic of the Iraq War did get 36.45 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in the Granite State that year. But his foreign policy views had never amounted to a coherent anti-interventionist agenda.

If anything, when it comes to foreign policy, it is former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and this year's Republican presidential candidate who is calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that sounds today like candidate Obama did in 2008 when he was urging an end to the war in Iraq.

You can describe both Huntsman and Obama as "realist internationalists" in the tradition of Republican President George H. W. Bush and Democratic President Bill Clinton. They have never pretended they that they were waving the anti-war flag; but still, they were critical of the neoconservative let's-invade-the-world agenda.

So if you consider that Huntsman came in third in New Hampshire, winning 17 percent of the vote, and you combine that number with the 23 percent that Paul mustered there, it is possible to conclude that 40 percent of the Republican voters in New Hampshire have rejected President George W. Bush's global military adventures and democratic crusades.

Moreover, the three most radical neocons in the race -- former House Speaker News Gingrich, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, and Texas Governor Rick Perry -- who cannot wait to start bombing Iran -- in the case of Perry, to re-invade Iraq -- got altogether 20 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

The MSM will probably continue dismissing Paul as "unelectable" and argue that his anti-interventionist foreign policy positions are "outside the mainstream" while continuing to take seriously the push for war with Iran by Gingrich and Santorum (not to mention their support for the bizarre anti-Sharia campaign in this country).

It is true that it may too early to predict whether Paul would do as well (and perhaps even better) in the primary in South Carolina and other states in the South and the Mid-West -- where Republicans tend to espouse more nationalist positions -- as he did in New Hampshire and Iowa.

And the fact is that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney who did win in Iowa and New Hampshire continues to adhere to foreign policy positions that are very similar to those of former President George W. Bush and former presidential candidate John McCain. And he could win the Republican primary race.

In fact, Romney has surrounded himself with national security advisors that belong to the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party and the conservative movement and continues to accuse President Obama -- under which Osama bin Ladin was killed, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan have increased, and an effort to raise the diplomatic status of the Palestinians at the United Nation was averted -- of "appeasement," of gutting the U.S. military and of abandoning Israel.

But Romney whose main strength has been his ability to adjust his earlier more moderate political views on social-cultural issues -- like abortion of gay rights -- to the prevailing ultra-conservative views of rank-and-file Republican, will now have to deal with another changing political reality: W's era neoconservative strategy of maintaining American global hegemony has ceased to be the dominant view among Republican voters.

At the minimum, there is going to be a serious and heated debate among Republicans about the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the coming years. Indeed, many conservatives have concluded that the notion of using the power of the U.S. government to do "regime change" and "nation building" around the world runs very much contrary to conservative values that highlight skepticism about the ability of government to promote political and social change -- whether it is in Dubuque, Iowa, or in Baghdad, Iraq.

Moreover, the emphasis that Republicans and conservatives have been placing on the need to cut the federal deficit has already forced many of them to figure-out that it is not possible to put the U.S. fiscal house in order without slashing the gigantic defense budget. That in turn, is also leading these Republicans and conservative to start reassessing the expensive U.S. military presence abroad.

If Republican candidate Romney wants to ensure that the supporters of Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman -- that include many young voters and the kind of middle class professionals that constitute the critical bloc of "independent voters" -- he would need to respond to their opposition to military adventurism in the name or regime change and nation building and accommodate their views by embracing a more prudent and realist foreign policy agenda that looks more like that of George H. W. Bush than that of his son.

Or Romney is going to find out in the general election that it is his own neoconservative foreign policy views that may be "outside the mainstream" of the Republican Party and majority American opinion..

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1194814 2012-01-09T19:00:00-05:00 2012-03-10T05:12:01-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
Or to put it differently, if Iran with nukes is indeed a strategic threat, it is the Europeans more than the Americans who should be worried about it.

Some Europeans were hoping to pursue once again their all-too-familiar approach of free riding on U.S. military power -- counting on the United States and/or Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (Win I for Europe) while allowing European nations that depend heavily on Iranian oil to continue doing business with the Islamic Republic (Win II for Europe). They could have then distanced themselves from the American and/or Israeli action while facing no disruption in the flow of Iranian oil into their economies (Win III for Europe).

But as the Obama administration has already demonstrated in Libya, with the U.S. military overstretched (hence, the plans to shrink it) and the American fiscal house in a mess (while the Europeans continue to maintain their expensive welfare programmes), the Americans were not going to allow the Europeans to do more free riding on their military power in the Middle East -- which is (and that includes Iran) in Europe's strategic backyard.

Hence, the Obama administration has made it clear that it would not launch a unilateral military strike against Iran and would instead pursue a 'graduated' strategy of slowly escalating economic and military pressure on Iran. But that would require a unified Western front for it to succeed, since any proposed sanctions would not bite Iran without EU participation.

The expected EU decision to ban Iranian oil imports comes after President Barack Obama signed into law last month a measure (included in the Defense Bill) targeting Iran's central bank and financial sector following similar steps against Iran's financial institutions that the British had taken last November (in retaliation for demonstrators' storming of the British embassy in Teheran).

The new measures signed by Mr. Obama in December would punish foreign firms that continue dealing with Iran's central bank to facilitate oil transactions by imposing restrictions on their access to the American economy and its financial sector.

But it would take some time for the U.S.-EU moves to go into effect. The southern European countries that are heavily dependent on Iranian oil import (and are also in the midst of a devastating financial crisis) will probably resist the planned EU ban.

Moreover, Turkey and Japan have already requested waivers from the U.S. financial sanctions against Iran (and Mr. Obama has the authority to grant them), while China and Russia, two leading trade partners of Iran, could circumvent the sanctions, by shifting to barter deals with Teheran.

Feeling the heat

It is obvious that the Iranian economy has taken a hit in the form of rising food prices and a dramatic drop in the value of the Iranian currency as a result of the sanctions imposed on it by the U.S. and the United Nations in recent years. So the new sanctions that would target Iranian oil exports on which its economy is dependent could have the effect of forcing it to the brink of bankruptcy.

But it is not clear that these Western steps are going to bring about the desired changes in Iranian policy. If anything, against the backdrop of the Iranian parliamentary elections in March and a growing split inside the leadership -- pitting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his political allies against even more conservative clerical groups -- policymakers in Teheran are under pressure to project diplomatic and military toughness vis-Ã-vis Washington and its partners. That explains Teheran's threats to stop the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz if sanctions were imposed on its oil exports. It also threatens to stop U.S. warships crossing this strategically important strait.

The West has cheered the emergence of the anti-clerical and more liberal Green Movement in Iran. But Iran's clerics and its notorious Revolutionary Guards could exploit the confrontation with the U.S. to mobilise public support by stirring up nationalist sentiments.

The set of financial sanctions imposed on Iran by the U.S. in September 2006, and that were integrated into a UN Security Council resolution in March 2008, have targeted Iran's elites and highlighted the growing isolation of the country. It also allowed the Obama administration to demonstrate that its non-military strategy on Iran was working while insisting the military option world 'remain on the table.'

White House officials argue that a war with Iran would not be cost-effective in terms of securing long-term U.S. interests. A military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities could perhaps slow down Iran's drive to build nuclear weapons by a year or so. But it could also ignite an all-out Middle Eastern war involving Israel and the Hizbollah (Iran's allies in Lebanon) and lead to a major rise in world energy prices that could bring the U.S. economic recovery to a halt.

At the same time, the Obama administration is facing enormous pressure from the Israeli government that has threatened to use military force against Iran if intelligence reports indicate that the Iranians are close to manufacturing a nuclear bomb. Interestingly enough, leading Israeli national security figures have echoed the American view by arguing that a war with Iran would result in many casualties while failing to end its nuclear programme.

Playing into the hands of Israeli and American supporters of the military option was a report issued earlier in the year, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that expressed its concerns that Iran may be on the threshold of making a nuclear warhead small enough to be put on top of a ballistic missile.

Republican lawmakers and the leading presidential candidates of the party -- and their neo-conservative allies in the media and the think tanks -- have accused the Obama administration of failing to force the Iranians to end their nuclear programme and have urged that Washington take immediate military action -- or at least give Israel a green light to do the job.

Saddam-era scenario

These let's-bomb-Iran crowd consists of the same politicians and pundits that not so long ago were warning that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the world-as-we-know-it would come to an end unless the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Recent reports suggest that the Israelis have agreed to refrain from taking military action against Iran while the Obama administration continues to use diplomatic means and widen the anti-Iran international coalition to pressure the clerics in Teheran to change course. American and Israeli officials have apparently drawn a set of 'red lines' that would determine if and when a use of a military option against Iran becomes acceptable to both sides.

Mr. Obama and his diplomatic and national security aides are confident that they have a relatively long window of opportunity -- at least until after this year's presidential and congressional elections -- in pursuing their diplomatic option. They believe that the collapse of the Assad regime in Damascus is imminent and this has deprived Iran of a central regional partner, making it much more difficult for the Iranians to provide support for Hizbollah if war breaks out with Israel. At the same time, the withdrawal of U.S. military from Iraq makes it unlikely that American troops there would be threatened by Iranian retaliation in case of a war with Iran.

These developments coupled with the more assertive anti-Iran position of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies (that pledged to increase oil exports to the West and China if tighter sanctions on Iran's oil exports go into effect) may have weakened the diplomatic bargaining power of Iran and putting may be more pressure on Teheran to reach a compromise of sorts with the U.S. and its European allies.

Turkey's role

Turkey, which notwithstanding some of the recent tensions with Washington and Paris -- not to mention Israel -- remains a Nato member and a key U.S. ally, is emerging as a leading Middle Eastern power that is counter-balancing Iran and certainly does not want to see Teheran with nuclear arms.

But it also wants to avert a military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran and could play a major role in trying to facilitate a diplomatic deal under which Iran could agree to put its nuclear programme on hold in exchange for enhanced diplomatic and economic ties with the West.

Moreover, notwithstanding the heated rhetoric coming out of Teheran, its leaders are worried about its growing diplomatic and economic isolation and the disastrous impact that a war with the U.S. could have on the ability of the regime to continue maintaining its power in the long-run.

Similarly, there is very little support for a war with Iran in the Obama administration, which recognises that such a course could draw the U.S. into a new costly military quagmire in the Middle East. And considering that both on Iraq (over the issue of maintaining U.S. military presence there) and on Afghanistan (over the issue of changing the timeline for withdrawing troops) Mr. Obama has been able to resist the pressure from the political right, it is not inconceivable that he could continue pursuing his graduated approach on Iran and counter the calls to go to war.

But things can go wrong. As Britain's prime minister during World War I, David Lloyd George, explained in his memoirs: 'Nobody wanted war' in 1914. 'The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay,' he recalled.

Indeed, the danger is in a regional and global strategic environment under which the balance of power remains very shaky. U.S. power is being challenged. The Iranian leadership feels that it is being pushed into a corner. The Israelis are feeling isolated as the Middle Eastern political system continues to go through dramatic changes.

Unexpected provocations and miscalculations could lead the kind of war that once again nobody wants.

The article was originally published in the Business Times of Singapore on January 9, 2012]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1176503 2011-12-30T12:36:25-05:00 2012-02-29T05:12:01-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/ Time magazine. The insurgency targeting the ruling political elites, first in Tunisia, and then in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, has not been confined to the Middle East. Protests have taken place in Spain, Greece, Italy, France, Britain and Israel. And in the United States, the Occupy Wall Street protesters began demonstrating first in New York, and then in Washington, Chicago, and in other cities across the country.

The 2011 global uprisings against the status quo have been compared to the revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848, when working-class socialists and middle-class liberals in Paris, Milan, Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Berlin tried to bring down the old regimes.

And indeed, not unlike the Spring of Nations of 1848, the Arab Spring and the ensuing protests in New York's Zuccotti Park or Tel Aviv's Rothschild Avenue have raised expectations for change and the forging of a new order based on the principles of freedom and equality.

But with the benefit of hindsight, the 1848 revolutions are seen as failures. The old social and political order remained in power. So is it possible that the rebellions of 2011 could also leave some disappointment behind in 2012 if and when the members of the old order start fighting back to protect the status quo just like the counter-revolutionaries in 1849?

Of course, history does not repeat itself. But some of the reasons that led to the expiration of the revolutionary momentum in Europe after 1849 -- tensions between and inside the opposition movements, the lack of wide public support and the enormous power retained by the ruling elites -- could also end up stalling the pressure for change in 2012. Come the Counter-Revolution?

In the Middle East, expect the military to reassert its power and force fragile and precarious ruling coalitions with the rising Islamist movement. Expect Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with the support of the US and its allies, to lead an effort aimed at re-establishing a delicate regional status quo that protects Israel.

In the West, centrist political parties will contain the pressure for reining in the financial markets and take baby steps to reform the bloated welfare state. Washington will count more and more on its partners worldwide to help sustain its global interests.

The fall of the Arab nationalist rulers of Tunisia (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali), Egypt (Hosni Mubarak), Libya (Muammar Gaddafi) and Yemen (Ali Abdullah Saleh) in 2011 could be followed by the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria in 2012. But it has already become clear in 2011 that the secular, liberal and social-democratic members of the Arab opposition are not going to emerge as winners in the post-revolutionary struggle for power.

Indeed, the elections that took place in Egypt and Tunisia have demonstrated that the young, multilingual and Internet-savvy spokesmen for the revolution who had become prominent on Al Jazeera and CNN television coverage from Tahrir Square lack any strong base of electoral support.

Instead, Arab-Sunni Islamist political parties are expected to take power not only in Egypt and Tunisia, but also in Libya, Yemen and Syria, countries that will continue to be plagued by divisions along religious, ethnic and tribal lines. Shiite-Arab Islamist parties are already playing a dominant role in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and in Lebanon, where Sunni Arabs are playing political defense.

The end of authoritarian rulers such as Mubarak, Gaddafi or, for that matter, Bashar Al-Assad, and the holding of free elections, giving citizens their first taste of political freedom, may provide some hope for those clamoring for change. But majority rule in countries that lack constitutional guarantees that protect individual rights, gender equality and religious freedom is likely to become rule by the Islamist parties that could pose a threat to women and religious minorities, such as the Coptic Christians in Egypt and Chaldean Christians in Syria and in Iraq. This could accelerate ethnic, sectarian and tribal rivalries in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt and create the conditions for a series of civil wars in 2012 in these countries.

Moreover, much of the sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or in Bahrain -- where a Sunni minority rules over the Shiite majority -- is going to be exacerbated by the growing concern by Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council -- which is shared by Turkey -- over the rising power of Shiite Iran and the potential for growing secessionist movements among their own Shiite minorities.

And like the Saudis, the Turks are interested in preventing the disintegration of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon into civil wars -- which could provide an opportunity for Kurdish secession from Iraq -- and in ensuring peaceful transition to power in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya; in maintaining the status quo in Jordan and Morocco; and in moving towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In that context, helping create mechanisms for cooperation between political forces affiliated with Egypt's military and the Muslim Brotherhood aimed the establishing law and order and opening the road for economic recovery in that country will be one way that Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with the backing of the majority of Egyptians and the support of the US and Europe, will try to control the revolutionary change.

Thus, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will emerge as the two leading counter-revolutionary players in the Middle East in 2012, pursuing the kind of regional policies that seem to align with the interests of the US. Indeed, at a time of weakening American military power and eroding economic base, Washington will encourage regional powers such as the Turks and the Saudis in the Middle East, or its partners in East Asia (Japan; Korea; Australia) to play a more active role in promoting the global US security agenda.

This strategy could prove to be effective in 2012 but could face serious challenges in the coming years as these players embrace policies that may run counter to US interests.

But even as it sheds come of its military commitments in the Middle East (Iraq), the US will continue to play the role of a global balancer of the last resort in 2012, especially if it ends up being drawn into a diplomatic and military confrontation with Iran that will probably not ignite a full-blown war next year but could allow President Barack Obama to engage in an exercise in brinkmanship with Teheran around the time of the 2012 presidential campaign.

Western scenario

Not a lot will change in the way fiscal and monetary policies will be pursued in Washington whether Mr Obama vacates the White House in the aftermath of a Republican presidential victory in November or if he is re-elected. (And the same applies to France, if President Nicolas Sarkozy loses in next year's election.)

The interests of the financial industry and Corporate America that fund the election campaigns of both parties will continue to pre-dominate the legislative and policy-making process while pressure from the electorate and labour unions representing public workers will make it difficult to slash the major government-backed retirement and health-insurance programmes.

There is no reason to believe that short of a devastating economic catastrophe, this kind of political-economic order that prevails also in much of Western and Central Europe will be brought down anytime soon.

Indeed, neither the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the left nor, for that matter, the members of the Tea Party movement on the right -- or their political counterparts in Europe -- have come up with new sets of ideas to help bring about major structural changes in the current political and economic status quo.

If anything, at a time of economic insecurity and political uncertainly, angry voters in the West or, for that matter, in the Middle East gravitate to the politics of identity that merge the explosive ingredients of nationalism, ethnicity and religion.

So if the most important legacy of the 1848 springtime of hope was the rise of German, Italian and other forms of nationalism in Europe, the insurgencies of 2011 could start igniting similar pressures in the Middle East and even in Europe in 2012 as disillusionment with the promise of change starts setting in.

(The commentary was originally published in the Singapore Business Times on December 30, 2011)]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1096418 2011-11-16T09:20:49-05:00 2012-01-16T05:12:02-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
Well, if you believe that, I've got a nuclear reactor in Dimona to sell you.

Even before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a report last week concluding that "Iran worked to re-design and miniaturize a Pakistani nuclear-weapon design" and conducted "some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device," which "may still be ongoing," the Israeli media was speculating that the nation's political leaders were debating whether or not to bomb Iran's nuclear research centers. And that a decision on that issue would come sooner than later.

Moreover, Israeli journalists reported that both Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak favored a military strike against Iran while other members of the Israeli cabinet, intelligence officials, and the military chiefs as well as the Obama Administration were opposed to the idea, arguing that the costs of a military confrontation with Iran would outweigh any likely benefits.

Indeed, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week that a military strike would have "unintended consequences" and "could have a serious impact in the region, and it could have a serious impact on U.S. forces in the region." His comments were the latest in series of similar remarks by U.S. officials, including former Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing strong reservations about the wisdom of a military option as a way of preventing the development of Iranian nuclear military capability.

But the notion that there is a major policy split between Washington and Jerusalem over Iran and that the Obama Administration is perhaps the only remaining obstacle to an Israeli military action is far-fetched, as is the suggestion that if push came to shove and Israeli leaders concluded that Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear military capabilities, they would move unilaterally to attack Iran despite American opposition.

Unlike the in the cases of Israeli attacks on the nuclear reactors in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007), an Israeli strike against Iran is bound to trigger a regional war involving Hizbollah, Iran's ally in Lebanon, which is expected to use its current arsenal of 50,000 missiles and rockets to launch attacks on Israeli cities, and could become an opportunity for Syria's leaders to shift attention from their domestic political problems by joining Iran and the Hizbollah in a full-blown war with Israel.

Moreover, Iran and its allies in neighboring Iraq -- ruled by a Shiite-led government -- would probably try to target some of the remaining U.S. troops in Iraq and to destabilize Saudi Arabia and its Arab partners in the Persian Gulf, triggering an American military retaliation.

So in practical terms, a unilateral Israeli military strike against Iran would force the U.S to open a new and costly military front in the Middle East, not to mention the economic repercussions in the form of rising energy prices that could threaten an already fragile economic recovery. That Israel would take unilateral action that could help set the Middle East on fire and devastate core U.S. national interests doesn't make a lot of sense and runs contrary to political or military logic, especially when other non-military means are still available to slow-down Iran's nuclear military program.

More likely, much of the current "noise" over Iran in the media is part a coordinated American-Israeli psychological warfare against Tehran as the Obama Administration puts pressure on Russia and China to join in a UN-led set of sanctions against Iran.

My guess is that during the Israeli Prime Minister's first visit to Washington he and Obama reached an agreement on a gradualist political and military strategy to undermine Iran's nuclear military program through diplomacy and covert action. Part of that agreement also included an understanding that a military action against Iran would be considered if such a strategy would fail and Iran does get close to enriching enough uranium to develop a bomb.

President Barack Obama is hoping that his strategy vis-à-vis would not be a re-rerun of Bush's Iraq adventure and would look like the policy he followed in Libya. Hence, it is the IAEA and not the CIA that is publicizing Iran's effort to develop weapons of mass destruction, and the pressure on Tehran is promoted as a multilateral action, starting with the current diplomatic pressure and use of sanctions with the use of military force considered to be the last resort.

The problem is not only that there is no assurance that this gradualist strategy would work. More troubling is the fact that there has not been any serious debate in Washington over whether the acquisition of nuclear military capabilities by Iran is a direct threat to U.S. national interests and that military force should be used against Iran if diplomacy fails. If anything, the Republican "opposition" seems to be even more intent on forcing Iran to give up its nuclear military program, even if that would lead to a war with Iran. In a way, Obama can present himself to the American public as the "grownup" who refrains from "appeasing" Iran while at the same time resisting the pressure to go to war against that country.

Ironically, there has been more a vigorous public debate in Israel over whether to attack Iran where the idea of a nuclear Iran is seen by many as an "existential threat" than in the United States which, after all, had not gone to war to prevent the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan or North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, and has concluded that a policy of deterrence is the most cost-effective way to deal with them.

President Obama should be applauded for not rushing to war with Iran. But the gradualist strategy he is implementing could eventually lead to the military confrontation that he wants to avoid.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1064092 2011-10-28T18:13:57-04:00 2011-12-28T05:12:01-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
The major elements of Olmert's offer have already been described early this year in Olmert's memoirs, in a long article by Bernard Avishai in the New York Times magazine as well as in internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera.

These and similar reports suggested that the two sides may have been close to reaching a final-status agreement and that "if only" Olmert's political career had not come to a swift end (following police investigation of corruption charges), Israelis and Palestinians would be on the road to concluding a peace accord by now.

Rice tries to place herself at the center of this narrative by creating the impression that under her leadership the Bush Administration played an active role in bringing back to life the dormant Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the peace conference in Annapolis in 2007 and in producing a diplomatic momentum that helped propel Olmert's initiative, and that both President George W. Bush and Rice made serous attempts to exploit the opportunities for peace provided by the Israeli Prime Minister's plan.

This spin seems to be part of a concerted effort by Rice to counter the criticism that during the eight years during which she helped set U.S. policy in the Middle East (first as the National Security Advisor to the president, and later as Bush's Secretary of State) she had placed Arab-Israeli peace on the bottom of Washington's foreign policy priorities and that combined with her role in the Iraq War fiasco, she should be held responsible for diminishing U.S. influence in the region.

Ironically, Rice with the help of her cheerleaders in the American media seems to be blaming President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team for failing to pick-up the torch of Palestinian-Israeli peace processing from her and for picking up instead a fight with the Israeli government by pressing it to freeze the establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied Jewish territories. Nice spin if you can sell it.

Rice, a Sovietologst by training, like a deer caught in the Middle Eastern headlights describes herself as stunned when Olmert during a meeting in Jerusalem in 2008 presented the outlines of his plan. "Am I really hearing this?" she writes in No Higher Honor.

Yet the notion that an ardent Zionist like Olmert was willing to advance a peace plan that was based on setting the borders between Israel and Palestine along the 1967 cease-fire lines together with mutually-agreed swaps should not have come as a huge surprise to anyone who was following events in the Middle East at the time.

In a way, Olmert's plan involved a recycling of the ideas included in the so-called Clinton Parameters which were regarded by the leaders of the Kadima Party -- an off-shoot of the Likud Party to which Olmert and former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon belonged -- as a realistic basis for any viable Israeli-Palestinian accord. So in essence what the Bush Administration did during its last year in office was to join the then Israeli government in embracing the diplomatic parameters in President Clinton's old plan -- which did not amount to a profile in ingenuity or courage.

And this was the same Bush Administration that had wasted eight years trying to "remake" the Middle East while putting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on the policy backburner, with its officials declaring that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad.

Also let us not forget one of the main reasons that the Israeli-Palestinian talks have been deadlocked for so long: The decision by the Bush Administration -- as part of its proclaimed Freedom Agenda -- to hold free parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006 that helped to bring Hamas into power, setting in motion a series of events -- the military conformation between Hamas the more secular Fatah and the establishment of a Hamas-led mini-state in the Gaza Strip that remains at war with Israel -- that are responsible for much of the current Israeli-Palestinian mess.

Even more ridiculous than the self-congratulatory tone of Rice's recollections of her role as a peace processor is the criticism directed at the Obama Administration for supposedly failing to continue pursuing his predecessor's creative Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. In fact, Obama elevated the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to the top of his policy agenda and like his predecessor seemed to be operating based on the Clinton Parameters. Hence, his support for a peace agreement based on setting the borders between Israel and Palestine along the 1967 cease-fire lines together with a mutually-agreed swap of land has been blasted by Republicans as "anti-Israeli."

The fact is that even if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had accepted the Olmert Plan (which he did not), there was no chance that the newly elected Israeli Likud-led government of Benjamin Netanyahu would do so. Obama's call for Israel to accept a temporary halt in the buildup of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories as a part of an effort to revive the direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks made a lot of sense but was rejected by Netanyahu. But then Netanyahu would not have agreed under any conditions to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians on the basis of his predecessor's plan.

But the focus on the Clinton Parameters repackaged as Olmert's plan suggest that partitioning the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is not a mission impossible. The idea of land swaps would allow Israel to maintain control over large settlements in the West Bank in exchange for Israeli territory that would be transferred to the Palestinians could probably win the support of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians.

At the same time, reaching Israeli-Palestinian agreement on security would be difficult but attainable, especially in the context of wider regional arrangements backed by the Arab League that could be backed but outside powers, like NATO.

But the main reason why no serious movement towards Israeli-Palestinian peace is going to happen any time soon has to do with two so-called core existential issues that continue to separate Jews and Arabs and that the ideas proposed by Clinton or Olmert were not able to resolve: The religious sites in Jerusalem and the Palestinian "Right of Return."

It is important to emphasize that resolving the territorial dispute over Jerusalem is manageable, with the areas of the city with a Jewish majority becoming the capital of Israel while the Arab neighborhoods constituting the capital of the Palestinian state.

The two sides, however, have failed to even come close to an agreement on the future of the area known in Judaism as the Temple Mount, and in Islam as the Haram Ash-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) where the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located, and the surrounding Old City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians have demanded exclusive sovereignty over the holy sites and the Old City while all the Israelis have been willing to accept is some sort of Palestinian administrative control over the Temple Mount and parts of the Old City. The issue has acquired a semblance of zero-sum-game, making it impossible to develop a formula that would be accepted to most conciliatory figures on either side.

Similarly, notwithstanding some efforts to square the circle over the issue of the Right of Return, it is difficult to imagine even the most moderate Palestinian leadership agreeing to give-up the Right of Return in exchange for a financial package to help settle the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank (and elsewhere) and for allowing a few thousand Palestinian refugees to re-settle in Israel.

It is possible to imagine an alternate universe in which Israel would agree to allow the Palestinians to maintain complete sovereignty in the holy sites and the Old City (excluding the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter) in exchange for a Palestinian agreement to renounce the principle of the Right of Return. But in the real world that is not going to happen anytime soon, Instead, Israelis and Palestinians should try to use the Clinton Parameters as a basis for a long-term coexistence agreement -- a la the Sino-American agreement over Taiwan -- and postpone the resolution of the two core existential issues -- Jerusalem's holy sites and the Right of the Return -- to the distant future.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.967100 2011-09-16T21:02:20-04:00 2011-11-16T05:12:01-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
Indeed, according to a report in Haaretz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet last January that Turkey was "consistently gravitating eastward to Syria and Iran rather than westward over the last two years" and that "the trend certainly has to worry Israel."

Moreover, Netanyahu provided his "full backing" for the diplomatic campaign that his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman was conducting against the Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayip Erdogan -- Lieberman compared Erdogan to Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez -- which included the summoning of the Turkish ambassador to Israel for a meeting in which he was seated in a low sofa, and facing him, in higher chairs, were Israeli officials delivering a reprimand.

And following the Israeli raid on the flotilla, Israeli politicians, pundits and commentators reflecting the Likud-necon narrative were suggesting that under the leadership of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) Turkey was setting aside the secular and pro-Western orientation of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and was being transformed into a radical Islamist state that was pursuing a Neo-Ottomanist strategy aimed establishing close ties with the Arab World and de-legitimizing the Jewish State.

The policy implication of such an account was that the U.S. and Israel had no choice but to regard Turkey -- like Iran -- as an assertive strategic and ideological power that was posing a direct threat to Western interests and the survival of Israel.

So it was a bit surprising that the recent decision by Ankara to downgrade its diplomatic relations with Israel has not triggered the same kind of Turkey-bashing by the usual suspects in Jerusalem and Washington. While rejecting Turkish demand that Israel apologize for the killing of nine people aboard the Mavi Marmara, Netanyahu insisted that Israel "regrets the loss of human life" and expressed his hope "that the way will be found to overcome the differences with Turkey." Israel "never wanted its relations with Turkey to deteriorate, nor does it want them to deteriorate right now," Netanyahu stressed.

"Turkey is not Israel's enemy and Israel is not Turkey's enemy," former Prime Minister Olmert said in a speech last week. "Turkey has previously functioned as a bridge to important and sensitive contacts of the highest importance to our interests, and it can continue to be so in the future," he said, reflecting a more realistic, if not accommodative approach towards Turkey that is shared by many Israelis.

Even a right-winger like Netanyahu recognizes that in the aftermath of the collapse of the friendly regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt -- and against the backdrop of the regional political instability being ignited by the Arab Spring -- Israeli leaders do not have the luxury of turning Turkey into a full-fledged enemy.

Moreover, it was difficult to accuse Turkey of allying itself with Iran and Syria in the same week that Ankara was giving the diplomatic cold shoulder to both Tehran and Damascus. It announced that it would install a radar system designed by the United States as part of a NATO shield against a possible missile attack by Iran on Europe and it joined the United States and the European Union (EU) in condemning the Syrian government's violent repression of demonstrators.

Indeed, the earlier notion that the Netanyahu-Lieberman duo were advancing -- and that was echoed by their allies in Washington -- that Erdogan and the AKP were pursuing a foreign policy based on an Islamist agenda reflected a common fallacy, that ideological principles -- as opposed to considerations of national interest -- are the main driving force behind the foreign policy of Turkey, or, for that matter, of other governments ruled by political movements committed to secular or religious doctrines.

Historians who have studied Soviet foreign policy have noted that many of the major decisions on war and peace that were made by Soviet leaders -- such as signing the pact with Nazi Germany and later joining the West in fighting Hitler -- were based less on abstract communist doctrines and more on traditional core geo-strategic of imperial Russia. In a way, Peter the Great would have probably approved of many of the critical foreign policy choices made by Stalin.

There are of course cases in which ideology does end up being elevated above the pursuit of national interests, For example, the self-destructive policies that were followed by Nazi Germany. Hence, German's Chancellor Bismarck would have not approved of the most important decisions made by Adolph Hitler before and during World War II.

From this perspective, it is very likely that Ataturk would have approved much of the foreign policy agenda being pursued by Erdogan. Or to put it in more concrete terms, most of the decisions made by Erdogan -- remaining in NATO while improving strategic ties with Turkey's neighbors; continuing to campaign for EU membership while strengthening Turkey's economic position in the Middle East; the "trust-but-verify" approach towards Iran's nuclear military policies; conditioning the maintenance of the partnership with Israel on its treatment of the Palestinians -- fit very much with the kind of Realpolitik foreign policy embraced by Ataturk and his secular political successors.

Indeed, there was nothing very "Islamist" in the decision made by Turkey not to support the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its refusal to allow U.S. forces to cross Turkish territory on their way to Iraq, regarded as a turning point in the relationship between Washington and Ankara. The ousting of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Americans attempts to "remake" the Middle East were seen as running contrary to Turkish national interests by religious and secular Turks alike, concerned -- and rightly so -- that U.S. policy would destabilize the Middle East.

And the collapse of the U.S. hegemonic project in the Middle East and the rise of Iran as the new regional power, and French and German opposition to Turkish membership in the EU have created incentives for Turkey to fill the strategic vacuum by strengthening its political and economic ties with Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and other Arab governments as well as with Iran. This Turkish strategy would have been embraced even under the leadership of the staunchest secular leadership.

Nor was the general direction of the Turkish policy towards Israel a demonstration of a new "anti-Israeli" approach. Erdogan's diplomatic effort to serve as a mediator between Syria and Israel made a lot of strategic sense, especially at a time when Washington's power in the region was eroding in the aftermath of the Iraq War, and offered long-term benefits to all those involved in the process, including the Israelis.

At the same time, the 2008 Israeli military operation in Gaza, which led to the collapse of the Israeli-Syrian talks under Turkish auspices, ran contrary to the interests of Turkey which was trying to co-opt the Islamist movement of Hamas and persuade it to moderate its positions. The television images of Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza helped ignite anti-Israeli sentiments in what is after all a functioning democracy. In a way, the democratically elected governments in Ankara -- unlike the military governments that preceded them -- do have to respond to pressure from an electorate that sympathizes with the Palestinian cause. After all, the neoconservatives in Washington should be celebrating the victory of democracy in Turkey. Not!

In any case, the view that there is a direct relationship between the Islamist ideology of the current Turkish government and the deterioration in the relationship with the Jewish State derive from a myth about a "special relationship" between Ankara and Jerusalem. But Turkey has never regarded Israel as an ally -- but as just another important regional player with which it shares some mutual interests. The need to contain the pressure from Arab nationalists led by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and backed by the Soviet Union helped strengthen Israeli-Turkish cooperation during the Cold War. But even then, the relationship suffered a setback when Turkey downgraded its relationship with Israeli after forming the Baghdad Pact with Iraq in 1955 and pledged to come to the support of Jordan if attacked by Israel.

If anything, the recent diplomatic crisis between Ankara and Jerusalem resembles similar dips in the relationship between the two countries that had taken place when secular and/or military regimes ruled Turkey. Growing Arab-Israeli tensions and waves of rapprochement in the relationship between Turkey and the Arab states had major impact on Ankara's ties with the Jewish State under Ataturk's heirs.

In 1947 Turkey voted against the United Nations partition plan and the creation of Israel; but in 1949, after Egypt and Jordan signed armistice agreements with Israel, Turkey became the first Muslim state to recognize Israel. Diplomatic missions were opened in December 1950 at the legation level in Ankara and Tel Aviv, although from 1956, following the attack by Israel against Egypt, the legation in Tel Aviv was reduced to the lowest diplomatic level of charge d'affaires. That changed only in December 1991, six weeks after the start of the Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, the Turks decided to upgrade the diplomatic representation of Israel -- and the PLO -- to the ambassadorial level.

Earlier on during the First Intifada, Turkey had signaled its support for the Palestinian cause by becoming the fourth country -- and the only government then maintaining diplomatic relationship with Israel --to recognize Palestine as an independent state. Turkey also joined most of the Arab and Muslim governments in denouncing Israel in response to its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories.

Hence, Turkey's long-term interests have always been based on the understanding that geographical proximity, economic interests and civilizational considerations require that it normalize the relationship with its neighbors. This explains why it is unlikely that any government in Ankara would now establish a full-fledged alliance with a Jewish state as long as Israel remained at war with the Arab world. Israelis may not like that. But Ataturk would have approved.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.954417 2011-09-08T15:49:55-04:00 2011-11-08T05:12:02-05:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/ Fox-Xinhua (or New Shanghai Times) content-providing service will analyze the world's geo-strategic and geo-economic balance of power. This might be the way he or she recalls the visit that China's former president Hu Jintao made in April 2006 to Washington, the capital of what was then known as the "United States."

"Now in 2046, the city is a major tourist attraction for Chinese and Indian tourists, many of whom stay at the seven-star hotel previously known as the "White House" (the Lincoln Suite is the most expensive).

He or she (cloned in 2011) might write the following:

"As I downloaded news reports that were published in the American media on that week, what really astonished me was the extent to which President Hu's first visit to the then U.S. capital since becoming China's paramount leader had received so little attention in the American press. The headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post (both of which have since been bought by our parent company) were devoted to U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from gaining access to nuclear military capability -- Iran conducted its first nuclear test two years later and is now a leading nuclear military power -- and to the violence in what was known then as 'Iraq' (now divided between Turkey, Iran, and the Syrian Federation) and was still occupied by the U.S. (which withdrew from there two years later).

"And believe it or not, much of the media coverage on the eve of the visit was focused on the refusal of the Americans to call Mr. Hu's trip to Washington a 'state visit' (as the Chinese had requested).

"Indeed, in retrospect it does seem quite incredible that the nation that was the global superpower of that period seemed to have ignored China's dramatic rise in economic, political, military, and cultural power while devoting almost its entire resources to trying to achieve regime changes and implant democracy in the Middle East.

"During the first term of the presidency of George W. Bush (whose nephew George P. Bush is now the president of the Florida-Cuba Federation), he and his aides saw China as a 'strategic competitor' (the Pentagon) and as an important trade partner (corporate America), and committed themselves to place the relationship with Beijing at the top of Washington's global agenda.

"But the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, resulted in the bumping of China to the diplomatic back-burner.

"On the one hand, obsessed with the 'war on terrorism,' the Americans shifted most of their attention to the Middle East while pressing the Chinese to work with them to combat the 'terrorist threat' (which they did).

"On the other hand, when it came to the Chinese, U.S. officials and lawmakers focused most of their energy on forcing them to allow their currency to rise in value, so as to reduce what they considered to be an unfair advantage Chinese exporters enjoyed against U.S. manufacturers, and help shrink the U.S. trade deficit with China, which soared to U.S.$201 billion in 2005.

"At the same time, the members of a group of intellectuals who were known then as 'neoconservatives' and who were a major influence on the Bush administration's policies argued that the U.S. needed to gain hegemony in the Middle East and use its control of the oil resources there as a leverage in its negotiations with China, which they regarded as America's long-term global rival.

"What was missing from U.S. foreign policy at that time was any coherent strategy aimed at integrating China as a rising global power into the international system. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick came close to proposing such a strategy when he called Washington to embrace the 'peaceful rise of China' and asked that Beijing become a responsible stakeholder in global affairs.

"But the failure of president Bush to draw the outlines of such a strategy and try to implement it meant that American policy toward Beijing ended up resembling a mishmash of ad-hoc responses to Chinese moves, most of which reflected the pressures of anti-China forces in Washington (the Taiwan lobby, human rights organizations, protectionist groups).

"With China emerging as the second largest oil consumer after the U.S., Beijing increased its diplomatic engagement worldwide, including with anti-American players such as Iran, Sudan, and Venezuela. The Chinese also started to advance multilateral forums for cooperation in East Asia that excluded the U.S. And the Chinese continued to modernize their military and to assert their claim to Taiwan.

"Moreover, China's impressive economic growth only helped to strengthen the hands of lawmakers and pundits in Washington who blamed the Chinese for America's declining manufacturing base.

"It was not surprising, therefore, that when President Hu visited Washington in April 2006, a politically weak President Bush found himself under pressure from Capitol Hill to 'do something' about the mounting trade deficit with China.

"But there was not much that the White House could do to compel major changes in China's trade practices, especially when the Chinese were using the U.S. dollars they earned from their exports to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury securities, thereby helping not only to finance the American military project in the Middle East, but also to keep interest rates low for American borrowers.

"Mr. Bush and his aides recognized that a trade war with the Chinese would have devastating effects on U.S. economic and diplomatic interests. But during the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, with trade policies -- together with Iraq and immigration -- dominating the campaign, lawmakers demanded that Washington 'punish' China for its 'unfair trade policies.'

"Tensions between the two powers continued to rise. A more assertive China used its diplomatic and military power to gradually erode the U.S. presence in East Asia. In fact, with its military overstretched in the Middle East, Washington had no choice but to reduce its commitments in East Asia, where a unified (and nuclear) Korea, Japan, ASEAN, and India took steps to accommodate Chinese power.

"Interestingly enough, after retiring in 2030 from his position as president of the East Asian Union (EAU), former President Hu, looking back on his trip to Washington, told me: 'We were quite content to see the Americans being drawn into the mess in the Middle East in the name of fighting terrorism. We assumed that the war on terrorism would end one day, and that we -- and not the Americans, exhausted economically and militarily after years of fighting in the Middle East -- would emerge as the winners. We were right."

The following was originally published in the Singapore Business Times on April 1, 2006, during Chinese President Hu Jinato's visit to Washington
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.933267 2011-08-22T17:44:00-04:00 2011-10-22T05:12:02-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/ ad nauseam from a New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, in which an indentified administration official described Obama's actions in Libya as "leading from behind."

The official was trying to contrast Obama's efforts to depose dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya with former President George W. Bush's strategy in Iraq, the argument being that while Obama's predecessor embraced a unilateral, U.S.-led and very costly (money-wise and in American and Iraqi lives) military action in Iraq that, among other things, helped ignite a civil war in Mesopotamia, the current White House refrained from deploying U.S. troops to Libya and instead allowed its NATO allies to take the lead there while providing them with some air support.

I have been very critical of Obama's response to the upheaval in Libya and continue to believe that neither direct nor indirect U.S. military action was required in Libya, considering the very limited effects that developments there would have on core U.S. national interests, not to mention the fact that the White House should have received authorization from Congress before taking such action.

I personally did not have any problem with France or Britain -- or, for that matter, any other European or Arab government -- using military force to help the rebels and depose Gaddafi. But as I suggested in an earlier article, the French have succeeded in maneuvering the Obama Administration into a more active military involvement in Libya that has the potential to draw the U.S. into a military and diplomatic quagmire in that country even if Gaddafi is deposed and the insurgents take power (and it seems that that could happen sooner than later).

My guess is that the collapse of the Gaddafi regime is not going to bring about the establishment of liberal democracy in Libya and could instead unleash political chaos and violence and perhaps even ignite a civil war between the various tribes there. But for the cheerleaders for Bush's Iraq War to bash Obama for his performance in Libya is just very, well, neoconish.

After all, we had that kind of disastrous outcome in Iraq but with much of the costs paid by American soldiers and taxpayers, and with Iran and its allies emerging as the real winners in the story. That a post-Gaddafi Libya could be facing a similar outcome should certainly be of concern to the Libyan people and to some of the countries in the region that could be affected by the developments there.

But the point is that the costs of the (unnecessary) U.S. military involvement in Libya amount to the costs of a week or so of the American military occupation of Iraq. The U.S. should now take steps to bring to an end even that limited military intervention in Libya and encourage the Libyan people to rebuild their country while expanding American diplomatic and economic cooperation with them. And if the Brits, the French, the Italians or some of Libya's neighbors have an interest in establishing military ties with the new government, well, that is their business.

In a way, the basic idea of the U.S. "leading from behind" makes a lot of sense if it means that Washington should encourage regional players to protect their own direct strategic interests in a way that does not require direct U.S. military intervention. The use of direct American military force should be reserved only to those instances when core U.S. interests are being threatened.

In Iraq, on the other hand, those interests had not been threatened, and under the leadership of Bush and the neocons the U.S. lurched ahead and used its full military power, with disastrous results to all concerned. Unfortunately, those who insist on doing reruns of this kind of disaster have not been left behind in Washington.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.925836 2011-08-12T16:52:41-04:00 2011-10-12T05:12:01-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
In Europe, the move to launch a common currency in the 1990s was the outcome of a political decision by the German and French elites to accelerate European integration in the post-Cold War era without creating the necessary political institutions that would provide for a common European fiscal policy.

And the major dilemma facing the European Union (EU) today is in essence political - whether the prosperous, mostly Protestant and Nordic North, led by Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, is willing to subsidize the less advanced (and more corrupt) economies that with the exception of Ireland are in southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal).

Interestingly, the split between North and South is reflected in the political divisions within European countries such as Italy and Belgium. France, with its mixture of northern and southern characteristics, finds itself somewhere in the middle of this political debate, while Britain and some of ex-communist European governments are more sympathetic to the views of Germany and its northern allies.

Similarly, the debate in Washington and around the country over US fiscal policy reflects more than just the philosophical disagreements over economic policies that have received so much attention in the last two years. In a way, this economic debate has also exposed a deep political-cultural split that has all the making of a cold civil war.

On the one hand, you have the Republican electoral base that is located mostly in the Midwest and the South (and other mostly rural 'Red' areas) and consists of a large bloc of older, White and Christian voters whose intellectual roots tend to be conservative, traditional and nationalistic, with its emphasis on the original interpretation of the Constitution, on 'state rights' and a commitment to religious (Christian) values. These people fear the 'Muslim threat' that borders on xenophobia and nativism.

On the other hand, the Democratic electorate is concentrated in the east and west coasts and the large urban centers of the country and includes a coalition of educated professional, minorities and young voters whose members espouse a set liberal, secular, multi-ethnic and open political-cultural system that is more tolerant towards immigrants and more sensitive to the rights of gays and women.

If the Democratic-liberal coalition helped elect the first African-American president, the Republican-conservative bloc has given birth to the Tea Party whose obsessive resentment towards Barack Obama and his real and imaginary traits is well documented.

The political bottom line is this: The Tea Partiers believe that eroding the foundation of the American welfare state -- the proud creation of the Democratic-liberal president and Congress -- would be a devastating political blow to Obama and the 'coastal' elites that they associate with the 'secular liberals' they despise.

Some of the more centrist Republicans and libertarian thinkers express a genuine concern over rising budget deficit and some of the anti-business attitudes among the Democrats. But the current Republican leadership in Congress is driven first and foremost by political and ideological zealots that have no interest in reaching compromises over fiscal or other policy issues with the other side.

And that may be an unresolved political problem that, in turn, explains why it will be so difficult to form a bipartisan national consensus in Washington anytime soon.

So there is something mystifying about the one major element in the criticism in Washington of the recent Standard & Poor's decision on US debt -- that it was too "political," especially when that negative assessment is made by American, well, politicians.

Why exactly should S&P avoid making the judgment that policymaking in Washington has become "less stable, less effective and less predictable" -- a view that seems to be shared by many credible American political analysts -- especially when Republican Tea Partiers admit that they were willing to allow the US government to default on its debt obligations if President Barack Obama and the Democrats refused to raise the political white flag by agreeing to their demands?

It's the politics, Stupid! American and European political leaders will probably continue to muddle through for a while as they try avoid making the crucial political decisions: Should the EU continue to move toward creating political unity among its members and pay the costs involved in this process -- or should the EU be re-established as a free-trade zone under which the nation-state remains the central political player?

And should the United States start demolishing the existing welfare state while relegating more power to states, businesses, traditional institutions and families -- or should the main priority in Washington be the reform of the existing welfare state and its central centers of power as they evolve through the last century?

These are the kind of political decisions that European and American leaders are not able and/or are not willing to make.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.906174 2011-07-21T17:14:35-04:00 2011-09-20T05:12:01-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/ The Washington Post, Representative Joe Pitts, a Republican from Pennsylvania, and other U.S, lawmakers received financial contributions from pro-Pakistan lobbyists who were being funded by the Pakistani military, including by its infamous Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). In return, Pitts and other Pak-paid congressmen, including Dan Burton, Republican from Indiana, and Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, were being asked by the ISI men in Washington to promote the Pakistani position on Kashmir, the border region claimed by Pakistan and India.

It seems that Pitts and the other lawmakers ended up delivering the goods to their paymasters. Hence, a few days after he had received $2,000 campaign contribution from the Pakistani lobbyists, Pitts introduced a resolution in 2004 which, reflecting Islamabad's stance, called for a more activist U.S. role in resolving the dispute over Kashmir.

The FBI has charged that two U.S. citizens of Pakistani descent, who used nonprofit Washington group known as the Kashmiri American Council to carry their lobbying efforts, were unregistered agents of the government of Pakistan. The Post reported that the FBI estimated that the ISI poured at least $4 million into the campaign contributions and the other public relations and lobbying handled by the two agents for Pakistan.

American taxpayers send annually more than $2 billion in security assistance to our "ally" Pakistan (and more than $20 billion in combined military and nonmilitary assistance to Islamabad since 9/11), which goes directly to the coffers of the Pakistani military, including the ISI. The ISI, according to mounting evidence, has been colluding with militant groups operating on its territory and attacking U.S. armed forces and our allies in Afghanistan including Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, (not to mention the allegations that some elements in the ISI were helping to shield Osama bin Laden in a house located a few blocks from the leading Pakistani military academy).

More recently, Admiral Mike Mullen recently said that Pakistan's army or the ISI likely killed journalist Saleem Shahzad, who had reported about militants infiltrating the military.

And now we learn that some of the American taxpayer money that goes to support a Pakistani military -- that is in cahoots with insurgents that kill American soldiers in Afghanistan (whose leader wants us out of his country) and also murders Pakistani journalists -- is directing some of these US dollars to help elect American lawmakers that could be relied on to vote in favor of more financial assistant to the Pakistani military. Want all of this to sound even more absurd? Well, the same lawmakers who are not going to raise the debt ceiling until the government starts cutting spending big time and balance the budget continue approving billions of U.S. dollars in assistance to Pakistan.

Indeed, on Thursday the House Foreign Affairs Committee blocked an amendment to a spending bill that would have banned any assistance to Pakistan. Thirty-nine lawmakers rejected and only five supported the measure introduced by Dana Rohrabacher, Republican from California, who described as "foolishness" the idea of continuing to send U.S. finds to Pakistan while Washington is trying to avoid default on its debt.

"The time has come for us to stop subsidizing those who actively oppose us. Pakistan has shown itself not to be America's ally," Rohrabacher said when he introduced the defunding amendment.

Makes a lot of sense -- but expect the level of military aid to Pakistan to remain the same and to even see an increase in the five-year, $7.5 billion U.S. civilian assistance package approved in 2009 that is supposed to strengthen democracy -- which the Pakistani military is undermining -- and reduce the appeal of the Islamists -- to which the Pakistani military is lending a helping hand.

So here is an idea for Representative Eric Cantor and other Republican House members who want to balance the budget by cutting spending on wasteful government programs. How about putting our money where your mouth is and eliminate the U.S. welfare program for the Pakistani military? ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.890549 2011-07-05T18:35:03-04:00 2011-09-04T05:12:01-04:00

Leon T. Hadar http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/
Netanyahu, who has all but signed in as a political advisor for the 2012 Republican election campaign, is operating under the assumption that if Barack Obama is ousted from the White House next year he would be replaced by a clone of George W. Bush. Driven by faith and ideology, the support of Christian evangelists and the advice of neo-conservative foreign policy intellectuals, the new Republican president will embrace a Middle East policy agenda aligned with that the Likud-led government.

The Likud leader may have devised his Republican strategy after watching too much of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin denouncing the "Muslim" in the White House on FOX television and exchanging too many emails with his neoconservative pals who excoriate Obama for pursuing "anti-Israeli" policies.

But Netanyahu may have missed the foreign policy debate taking place among Republicans who are discovering a cognitive dissonance between their demands for huge spending cuts in federal government and their calls for using the military to fight endless wars in the Middle East.

Republicans, like Democrats, recognize that a ballooning deficit and an overstretched military leave Americans no choice but to make major cuts in defense spending by shrinking U.S. role in the Middle East.

"There's been disquiet for a long time. Republicans have been too eager to support some military ventures abroad," says Republican Congressman Jeff Flake who insists that ending U.S. intervention in Libya and accelerating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East "is perhaps a little more consistent with traditional conservatism."

America's economic problems coupled with the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan and the upheaval in the Middle East helped revive these traditional conservative sentiments among Republican voters while encouraging their leaders to embrace a Realpolitik approach that is in line with the global strategy of First President George Bush, not with the his son's messianic foreign policy.

It's Bye, Bye neoconservatism; hello realism.

Indeed, if Netanyahu had switched his television channel from FOX to CNN to watch the Republican presidential candidates debating in New Hampshire last week, he would have discovered that neoconservatism ceased to be central to the party's foreign policy discourse. Unlike the last Republican presidential nominee John McCain, the current candidates expressed strong reservations about aggressive U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

"There is no vital national interest" requiring American military role in Libya argued Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a darling of the Tea Party movement. Bachmann like other tea partiers scorn Islam and revere Zionism. But she also wants to balance the budget and understands that at a when Chinese bankers are financing its operations, the U.S. is not in a position to launch an attack against Iran that would raise oil prices to the stratosphere and devastate the American economy.

The leading Republican presidential candidate, former Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney said during the debate that it was time "to bring out troops home as soon as we possibly can" and warned that "our troops shouldn't go and try and fight a war of independence for another nation."

Candidate Romney sounded like Bibi when argued that Obama "threw Israel under the bus." But continuing US interest in stabilizing the relationship with the Saudis, improving ties with the Turks and getting along with the Egyptians will leave President Romney no choice but to support the 1967-lines-with-swaps formula, becoming a clone of Barack Obama, not of George W. Bush.

The commentary was originally published in Haaretz.


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