Panetta? Ummmmm... Well.....

By Robert Dreyfuss

For an agency whose job it is not to be surprised, nearly everything seems to surprise the CIA these days. So it's not surprising that the agency was surprised by the choice of Leon Panetta to head it. I was surprised too. My first reaction: it's an odd and unsettling choice. Here's why.

First, it's a bad idea to pick a politician to lead the CIA, because it is supposed to be an agency that is not political. Don't laugh -- that's the way it's supposed to be. Think about George W. Bush's most overt effort to politicize the CIA, by picking the Republican ideologue and hatchet man, Representative Porter Goss, in 2006. Goss' tenure was a disaster, and he had the advantage of being a former CIA officer and chairman of the House intelligence committee. Panetta is a know-nothing when it comes to intelligence.

Which brings up the second problem. The Obama transition team is telling reporters that Panetta had experience as a "consumer" of intelligence when he was chief of staff at the Clinton White House. Well, I have experience as a purchaser of computer equipment, but you wouldn't want me fixing your laptop. Fixing the CIA -- and believe me, it needs fixing, along with serious downsizing -- requires someone who knows how the insides work, and Panetta has no clue.

Read More »

January 5, 2009

Bush's Last War Crime?

By Robert Dreyfuss

The Israeli invasion of Gaza, launched Saturday, might very well be George W. Bush's last and final war crime. For eight years, Bush has coupled unparalled ignorance of the Middle East with supreme arrogance. It is precisely that deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance that is on display now, as a politically motivated Israeli invasion of Gaza unfolds with the full support of the Bush administration.

In his weekly radio address, delivered as Israeli tanks and armor rumbled into the Gaza Strip, Bush declared:

"This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas -- a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel's destruction. ... Another one-way ceasefire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not acceptable. And promises from Hamas will not suffice -- there must be monitoring mechanisms in place to help ensure that smuggling of weapons to terrorist groups in Gaza comes to an end. I urge all parties to pressure Hamas to turn away from terror."

Read More »

January 4, 2009

Israel Revives Hamas

By Robert Dreyfuss

As Israel presses its bloody assault on Gaza, dropping broad hints that it is planning a ground attack to complement four days of bombings that have killed hundreds, it's clear that Israel's actions are likely to bolster, not weaken, the very enemy it is fighting.

Writing in the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab points out that, before the latest crisis, Hamas was in sharp decline. The headline on his thoughtful piece is: "Has Israel Revived Hamas?" He says: "Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine."

Over the past two years, Kuttab notes, Palestinian support for Hamas -- an ultrareligious, terrorist-inclined wing of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood movement -- has declined sharply, from a 30 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in August, 2007, to just 17 percent in 2008 -- compared to 40 percent for Fatah, the mainstream, secular nationalist wing of the Palestinian body politic. Kuttab points out that Hamas has "turned down every legitimate offer from its nationalist PLO rivals and Egyptian mediators." Now, he says, the attacks are a "bonanza for Hamas" and says that Israel's assault will achieve "results exactly the opposite of its publicly proclaimed purposes."

Read More »

December 30, 2008

Obama Fiddles While Gaza Burns

By Robert Dreyfuss

Thanks to Hamas' stupid, provocative, and self-defeating rocket assault on, well, nothing, in Israel, the Middle East that Barack Obama will inherit from George W. Bush just got a lot more complicated. And, sadly, Obama seems content to fiddle while Gaza burns.

Yesterday Obama got an official US intelligence briefing on the crisis in Gaza, which may or may not have numbed his brain with data he didn't need. Obama didn't need an intelligence briefing to tell him anything he really needs to know: that, once again, the twin poles of Israeli and Palestinian extremism have flared up in a way that will only undermine, perhaps fatally, the chances of a negotiated accord during Obama's first term in office.

The only useful intelligence Obama might have gained from the briefing is that the Mossad knew, before Israel's massive attack on Gaza, that Hamas was only trying to make a show of force. That is, Hamas' not-too-bright leaders thought that they could get away with a few hundred rocket attacks into Israel and then renegotiate a better ceasefire deal. Like the less-than-brilliant strategists in Georgia, who thought that they could attack Russia with impunity and who instead got their heads handed to them last August, Hamas' own armchair fanatics thought they could get away with it. Oops. The Wall Street Journal reports today:

Read More »

December 29, 2008

Obama's Afghan Escalation

By Robert Dreyfuss

True enough, Barack Obama has pledged to support a "surge" in US forces in Afghanistan, as bad an idea as that might be. (See my article, "Obama's Afghan Dilemma," in The Nation.) But the latest from Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a shock, and outrageous. Mullen said, without even a nod to Obama's role as incoming commander-in-chief, that he's planning to double US forces there by adding up to 30,000 new troops.

It's hard to ready this any other way than the worst way, however: that Mullen is speaking with Obama's (unspoken) approval. During the campaign season, and since, Obama said that he'd send "at least two or three additional combat brigades" to Afghanistan, which ought to mean something like another 10,000 forces or so. But 30,000 is a huge escalation.

Currently, the US has something like 32,000 troops in that hell-hole, including 14,000 under a rickety NATO coalition. Mullen's plan would send at least four combat brigades and thousands of additional support forces.

Read More »

December 23, 2008

Maliki's Secret Crackdown

By Robert Dreyfuss

The story of the sweeping, and secretive, arrests, in Iraq's national security apparatus is getting curiouser and curiouser. It now appears as if the whole thing was a clumsy effort by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to get rid of political opponents, in advance of January elections.

Iraq's provincial elections take place 11 days after Barack Obama becomes president next month, and they could present him with his first international crisis. In several key provinces -- Nineveh, Baghdad, and Diyala -- the ruling alliance may face crushing electoral defeats, and Prime Minister Maliki is apparently trying to preempt that by force. But it's looking more and more likely that the elections in Iraq will be rigged, and that could touch off violence. The secret arrests are just the tip of the iceberg.

Reported the Post:

Read More »

December 19, 2008

NATO in Palestine? Not A Good Idea

By Robert Dreyfuss

Pro-Israel activists in the United States and Israeli defense officials are already getting energized in opposition to the idea of a NATO military force in Palestine, as part of an arrangement for security guarantees in connection with an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. General James L. Jones, Obama's national security adviser, spent much of the past year on a Palestine mission for the State Department, and he favors the idea of a NATO presence there.

Personally, I agree with the opposition to the idea. Jones, a former NATO commander, is an outspoken advocate for an expanded, out-of-area role for NATO. But there's no need to station NATO forces along an Israeli-Palestine border.

In Israel, the Jerusalem Post says that Israeli defense officials are mounting a preemptive strike against Jones' plan:

Read More »

December 17, 2008

Bush Finds WMDs in Iraq, Umm, or WMHs

By Robert Dreyfuss

President Bush finally found the long-missing Weapons of Mass Humiliation in Iraq. Iraqis, millions of them, are wearing them on their feet. Not exactly WMDs, but WMHs will have to do.

Unfortunately, Bush discovered the WMHs when a pair of them sailed past his head at a press conference in Baghdad. The hurler, Muntader al-Zaidi, is already a hero in Iraq, and beyond.

I hope I don't get in trouble with the Secret Service by saying that I, too, found satisfaction in the display of anger toward Bush, whose reckless war costs hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed an entire nation. What Zaidi did was to put an exclamation point on Bush's war, fittingly -- and, given the fact that the smoothly bipartisan, rancorless Barack Obama isn't likely to investigate the crimes of the Bush adminstration in Iraq, it might be all we get before Bush rides off into the Texas sunset.

Read More »

December 15, 2008

Scowcroft, Gates, Jones: Go Slow on Iraq

By Robert Dreyfuss

When it comes to predictions about Obama's Iraq policy, we can discount the supercilious Rush Limbaugh, who "predicted in a speech last week that Democrats will back down from their pledge to rapidly withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq." But it's harder to ignore what Brent Scowcroft, Robert Gates, and James Jones are saying.

Let's start with Scowcroft. The ultimate Republican realist, who distinguished himself in 2002 by writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying bluntly that the United States should not attack Iraq, has had Obama's ear on national security matters for a while now. In a speech at the end of October, Scowcroft laid down a marker on Iraq, supporting limited troop withdrawals but urging caution -- exactly the sort of caution that will be urged on Obama from Gates and the generals:

Progress is being made. But it's a very fragile process. ... And it's getting to that point now that I think it is reversible, and so I think while the U.S. can probably begin to reduce some troops as the security situation improves, we have to be very careful about pulling out before we have a situation there that is clearly able to be sustained by the local system. And therefore, I would caution against a withdrawal of the United States according to a calendar, rather than according to the situation on the ground.

Read More »

December 11, 2008

Obama's Ross: Our Loss

By Robert Dreyfuss

There's a lot of buzz -- much of it generated by AIPAC, WINEP, and other parts of the Israel lobby, and a lot of it, no doubt, by Ross himself -- that hawkish Dennis Ross is going to get a big job in Hillary Clinton's State Department.

It's an insider battle, one that I've chronicled since last summer, between Obama's more dovish Middle East advisers and hawks such as Ross. Among the doves: Dan Kurtzer, Dan Shapiro, and the once-upon-a-time exiled-from-Obamaland folks such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Malley, who may be back in Obama's good graces. But Ross is, according to insiders, making a comeback.

A blog at Politico reports that "Obama backers concerned with Israel, are carefully eyeing the interplay between two of his most important advisers on the Middle East," Ross and Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew who served as US ambassador to both Israel and Egypt.

Read More »

December 10, 2008