Just Foreign Policy News, January 14, 2013
Neocon attack on Hagel re-fights Iraq; Haass rebukes Abrams; #BabalShams
I) Actions and Featured Articles
NYT: Palestinians Rally Support Online for West Bank Protest Camp
Collects photos, twitter feeds, from the #BabalShams protest camp against Israeli settlement construction in "E1" in the West Bank. Supporters of the protest fear that Israeli settlement plans will cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank. [See also #2 and #3 below – JFP.] http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/palestinians-rally-support-online-for-west-bank-protest-camp/
** Action: Jewish Voice for Peace: condition US aid to Israel on compliance with U.S. human rights laws
50,000 have signed this letter initiated by Jewish Voice for Peace (Just Foreign Policy is a co-sponsor.) The letter tracks the recent statement by Christian leaders calling for U.S. aid to Israel to comply with U.S. human rights laws. Wednesday deadline. The letter will be delivered as part of the inauguration festivities.
http://www.obamaletter.org
**Action: Urge Senators to Challenge Brennan on Drone Strikes
President Obama has nominated John Brennan to lead the CIA. Human Rights Watch – and the Washington Post editorial board – have called for the CIA to stop conducting drone strikes, because of the CIA’s lack of transparency and accountability to international law. Urge your Senators to question Brennan on drone strike policy and the demand that the CIA get out of drone strikes.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/cia-head-drones
**Action: Senators: Confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense
President Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense. As Secretary of Defense, Hagel will push to end the war in Afghanistan, cut the Pentagon budget, and avoid war with Iran. Right-wing pro-war groups are trying to obstruct Senate confirmation. 28,000 people have signed a Just Foreign Policy petition at SignOn urging the Senate to confirm Hagel.
http://signon.org/sign/senators-confirm-chuck-1?source=c.url&r_by=1135580
Micah Zenko: Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies
Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations calls for the end of signature drone strikes.
http://www.cfr.org/wars-and-warfare/reforming-us-drone-strike-policies/p29736
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The campaign now being waged against Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense is in some ways a relitigation of the dispute between Hagel, a combat veteran, and "chicken hawks" prior to the Iraq war, the New York Times reports. It is also a dramatic return to the public stage by the neoconservatives whose worldview remains a powerful undercurrent in the Republican Party and in the national debate about the US relationship with Israel and the Middle East. To Hagel’s allies, his presence at the Pentagon would be a very personal repudiation of the interventionist approach to foreign policy championed by the so-called Vulcans in the administration of President George W. Bush.
"This is the neocons’ worst nightmare because you’ve got a combat soldier, successful businessman and senator who actually thinks there may be other ways to resolve some questions other than force," said Richard L. Armitage, who broke with the more hawkish members of the Bush team during the Iraq war when he was a deputy to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who championed the Iraq invasion and is leading the opposition to Hagel’s nomination, says the former senator and his supporters are suffering from "neoconservative derangement syndrome."
The most outspoken neoconservatives had leading roles in developing the rationale and, in some cases, the plan for invading Iraq, the Times notes; several of them are involved in the campaign against Hagel, including Kristol, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Michael Goldfarb.
2) Scores of Palestinian activists erected tents on Friday in a hotly contested piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1 and said they intended to stay put, the New York Times reports. The protest comes six weeks after Israel announced that it was moving forward with plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, stirring international outrage. About 200 activists issued a statement announcing the establishment of a village named Bab al-Shams (Arabic for "Gate of the Sun"), after the title of a novel by a Lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, that portrays Palestinian yearnings for an independent state.
3) The IDF removed protesters from a Palestinian tent village in the sensitive E1 area near Jerusalem, overriding a court order and invoking military powers to shut down the nonviolent demonstration, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Critics of the Israeli government’s crackdown say the nonviolent protest hardly amounted to a security threat. "Is this going to incite the local goat population to sedition?" asked Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney and founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, which tracks developments that could jeopardize a two-state solution. "It is transparent that this was a use of military authority in order to thwart a nonviolent and legitimate political protest."
4) It’s time for Congress to play a role in addressing problems with U.S. drone strike policy, writes Rep. Keith Ellison in the Washington Post. Lawmakers have yet to hold a single hearing examining U.S. drone policy. Rules must provide adequate transparency, respect the rule of law, conform with international standards and prudently advance U.S. national security over the long term.
5) If AIPAC is to be believed, it has no role in the campaign against Chuck Hagel, writes Max Blumenthal for Alternet. But AIPAC may be outsourcing the attacks to its longtime former spokesman, the notoriously combative pro-Israel operative Josh Block. "Because Josh Block does not work for AIPAC anymore, he can say whatever he wants," said MJ Rosenberg, a former AIPAC research director who is now one of the Israel lobby’s premier critics. "And he does: when AIPAC wants a message sent, it tells journalists, ‘We have no comment but you can call Josh Block.’ And Block, who is in constant contact with AIPAC, gives the line but AIPAC has deniability – they can just say, he doesn’t work for us."
"The whole anti-Hagel effort is coordinated by AIPAC," claimed Rosenberg. "If it didn’t want Hagel to be smeared as anti-Israel, he wouldn’t have been. So he is being smeared nonstop and if the effort fails [AIPAC] can say, ‘It wasn’t us. We are neutral. These attacks came independently.’ "That’s why they use cutouts," he added. "I know because I used to be one of them."
6) Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday that ad hominem attacks on Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s choice as the next Defense Secretary, are "over the line," Think Progress reports. In an effort to derail Hagel’s nomination, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and the neocons have been trying to convince the public that Hagel is an "anti-Semite." CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration official who was convicted of charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal, claimed last week that Hagel "seems to have some kind of problem with Jews." But Haass, Abrams’ boss, rebuked those charges and the tactics Abrams and his neocon allies are using.
7) CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams in a National Review Online post on Saturday backed away from his charge that Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel is anti-Semitic, but in the very same piece, Abrams again suggested that Hagel may be anti-Semitic, Think Progress reports. In particular, Abrams takes issue with Hagel once telling an audience member at a talk that he was U.S. senator, not an Israeli senator.
Hagel himself has explained what he meant regarding the "Israeli senator" line. "A couple of these guys said we should just attack Iran," Hagel said, adding, "And this guy kept pushing and pushing. And he alluded to the fact that maybe I wasn’t supporting Israel enough or something. And I just said let me clear something up here, in case there is any doubt."
Afghanistan
8) President Obama announced Friday that U.S. forces will accelerate the transfer of primary security responsibilities to their Afghan counterparts and take on an exclusively support and training role beginning this spring, Inter Press Service reports. As noted by Obama himself, the [Afghan] Army’s leadership "doesn’t mean that coalition forces, including U.S. forces, are no longer fighting. They will still be fighting alongside Afghan troops," he said.
Iran
9) Hundreds of thousands of Iranians with serious illnesses have been put at imminent risk by international sanctions, which have led to dire shortages of life-saving medicines such as chemotherapy drugs for cancer and bloodclotting agents for haemophiliacs, the Guardian reports. Waivers are not functioning, as they conflict with blanket restrictions on banking, the Guardian says.
There are over 8,000 haemophiliacs who are finding it harder to get blood clotting agents, the Guardian says. Operations on haemophiliacs have been virtually suspended because of the risks created by the shortages. An estimated 23,000 Iranians with HIV/Aids have had their access to the drugs they need to keep them alive severely restricted. The society representing the 8,000 Iranians suffering from thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder, has said its members are beginning to die because of a lack of an essential drug, deferoxamine, used to control the iron content in the blood.
Venezuela
10) OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, said the OAS "fully respects" the decision of Venezuelan authorities to postpone President Chavez’ inauguration due to his health, Mercopress reports.
Bolivia
11) Bolivia has obtained an exemption from the 1961 UN convention on narcotic drugs, the framework that governs international drugs policy, allowing its indigenous people to chew coca leaves, the Guardian reports. "The Bolivian move is inspirational and ground-breaking," said Danny Kushlick, head of external affairs at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which promotes drug liberalisation. "It shows that any country that has had enough of the war on drugs can change the terms of its engagement with the UN conventions."
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Hawks on Iraq Prepare for War Again, Against Hagel
Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, January 12, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/us/old-foes-lead-charge-against-chuck-hagel.html
In the bitter debate that led up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said that some of his fellow Republicans, in their zest for war, lacked the perspective of veterans like him, who have "sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off."
Those Republicans in turn called him an "appeaser" whose cautious geopolitical approach dangerously telegraphed weakness in the post-Sept. 11 world.
The campaign now being waged against Mr. Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense is in some ways a relitigation of that decade-old dispute. It is also a dramatic return to the public stage by the neoconservatives whose worldview remains a powerful undercurrent in the Republican Party and in the national debate about the United States’ relationship with Israel and the Middle East.
To Mr. Hagel’s allies, his presence at the Pentagon would be a very personal repudiation of the interventionist approach to foreign policy championed by the so-called Vulcans in the administration of President George W. Bush, who believed in pre-emptive strikes against potential threats and the promotion of democracy, by military means if necessary.
"This is the neocons’ worst nightmare because you’ve got a combat soldier, successful businessman and senator who actually thinks there may be other ways to resolve some questions other than force," said Richard L. Armitage, who broke with the more hawkish members of the Bush team during the Iraq war when he was a deputy to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who championed the Iraq invasion and is leading the opposition to Mr. Hagel’s nomination, says the former senator and his supporters are suffering from "neoconservative derangement syndrome."
Mr. Kristol said he and other like-minded hawks were more concerned about Mr. Hagel’s occasional arguments against sanctions (he voted against some in the Senate), what they deem as his overcautious attitudes about military action against Iran and his tougher approach to Israel than they were about his views on Iraq – aside from his outspoken opposition to the American troop surge there that was ultimately deemed successful.
[Actually, many observers – like Juan Cole – think the claim the Iraq surge was "successful" is dubious – the fall-off in violence was due to other factors, like accommodation between the US and some groups of militants and the dying down of the civil war in Baghdad when sectarian "ethnic cleansing" of neighborhoods was complete – JFP.]
Mr. Kristol’s latest editorial argues that Mr. Hagel’s statement that he is an unequivocal supporter of Israel is "nonsense," given his reference in a 2006 interview to a "Jewish lobby" that intimidates lawmakers into blindly supporting Israeli positions.
"I’d much prefer a secretary of defense who was a more mainstream internationalist – not a guy obsessed by how the United States uses its power and would always err on the side of not intervening," he added. Of Mr. Hagel and his allies, Mr. Kristol said, "They sort of think we should have just gone away."
In fact, the neoconservatives have done anything but disappear. In the years since the war’s messy end, the most hawkish promoters have maintained enormous sway within the Republican Party, holding leading advisory posts in both the McCain and Romney presidential campaigns as their counterparts in the "realist" wing of the party, epitomized by Mr. Powell, gravitated toward Barack Obama.
And while members of both parties think the chances are good that Mr. Hagel will win confirmation, the neoconservatives are behind some of the most aggressive efforts to derail it, through television advertisements, op-ed articles in prominent publications and pressure on Capitol Hill, where some Democrats, including Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, have also indicated reservations.
Their prominence in the fight over Mr. Hagel’s nomination is testament to their continued outsize voice in the public debate, helped by outlets like The Weekly Standard, research groups like the American Enterprise Institute and wealthy Republican financiers like the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, whose nearly $100 million in political donations last year were driven largely by his interest in Israel. The Republican Jewish Coalition, on whose board of directors Mr. Adelson sits, was among the first to criticize the Hagel nomination.
The most outspoken among them had leading roles in developing the rationale and, in some cases, the plan for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.
One critic is Elliott Abrams, a national security adviser to Mr. Bush during the Iraq war who pleaded guilty in the Iran-contra scandal to withholding information from Congress. He called Mr. Hagel an anti-Semite who has "some kind of problem with Jews" in an interview on NPR last week. (The Council on Foreign Relations, where Mr. Abrams is a senior fellow, distanced itself from his comments.)
The Emergency Committee for Israel, a conservative group, has run a TV advertisement and has a Web site calling Mr. Hagel an inappropriate choice for the Defense Department, citing some of his votes against sanctions on Iran and Libya and his calls to engage in direct talks with groups like Hamas. [Actually, Hagel’s call in 2009 – along with Pickering, Scowcroft, and others – was for indirect US engagement with Hamas, exactly the policy that the U.S. and Israel are pursing today.] Its donors have included the activist financier Daniel S. Loeb, and Mr. Abrams’s wife, Rachel, serves on its board.
And of course, there is Mr. Kristol himself, who in the late 1990s helped form a group called the Project for a New American Century. In 1998, the organization released a letter to President Bill Clinton arguing that Saddam Hussein posed a potential nuclear threat to the United States, Israel and moderate Arab states and should be ousted.
It was signed by several future members of the Bush national security team: Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as defense secretary; Paul D. Wolfowitz, who served under Mr. Rumsfeld; Mr. Abrams; and outsider advisers, including Richard N. Perle, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee; and Mr. Armitage. Serving as a research associate was Michael Goldfarb, who is helping to direct the Emergency Committee for Israel’s attacks against Mr. Hagel.
[…] Their relationship broke with Mr. Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq war, and his rare status as a Congressional Republican critical of the intervention led to plentiful TV bookings and the antipathy of the war’s architects and supporters. Besides being a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Hagel had added cachet by way of two Purple Hearts from his service in Vietnam, which left shrapnel embedded in his chest and, he has said, a unique perspective on war.
"Here was a Republican with national security credentials saying that the Republican president was being irresponsible on national security – that’s potent," said Kenneth L. Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Review Board at the time and a frequent sparring partner with Mr. Hagel on television.
[…] Mr. Hagel’s earliest concerns arose before the Congressional vote authorizing the use of force. "You can take the country into a war pretty fast," he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, "but you can’t get us out as quickly, and the public needs to know what the risks are." In the interview, he took a swipe at Mr. Perle, then one of the most visible promoters of the war, saying, "Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad."
Mr. Perle had never served in the military. Along with Mr. Hagel’s comment in Newsweek that many of the war’s most steadfast proponents "don’t know anything about war," his criticism prompted a national discussion about "chicken hawks," a derisive term for those advocating war with no direct experience of it. And his comments drew a rebuke from The Weekly Standard that Mr. Hagel was part of an "axis of appeasement."
Mr. Hagel’s words appear to sting to this day. "Normally you hope your cabinet officers don’t resort to ad hominem argument," said Mr. Perle, who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In an interview, he said his opposition to the nomination stemmed from his fear that Mr. Hagel was among those who "so abhor the use of force that they actually weaken the diplomacy that enables you to achieve results without using force."
Yet Mr. Hagel did ultimately vote to give Mr. Bush the authority to go to war. He has said that he did so to give the administration diplomatic leverage and that he now regrets it. Explaining his vote on the floor of the Senate, he warned, "We should not be seduced by the expectations of ‘dancing in the streets’ after Saddam’s regime has fallen."
2) Palestinians Set Up Tents Where Israel Plans Homes
Isabel Kershner, New York Times, January 11, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/world/middleeast/palestinians-set-up-camp-in-israeli-occupied-west-bank-territory.html
Jerusalem – Adopting a tactic more commonly employed by Jewish settlers who establish wildcat outposts in the West Bank, scores of Palestinian activists erected tents on Friday in a hotly contested piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1, and they said they intended to stay put.
The Palestinians claim E1, just east of Jerusalem, as part of a future state. The protest comes six weeks after Israel announced that it was moving forward with plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, stirring international outrage.
The Israeli military authorities arrived Friday and handed the protesters notices warning them that they were illegally trespassing and that they had to leave, according to a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Mr. Rosenfeld said he expected movement "at some point," with the protesters either leaving voluntarily or by force.
But the protesters said that they had anticipated such action by Israeli security forces and that their lawyers had already gone to the Israeli Supreme Court to argue for a delay in any evacuation until the state details the grounds for such a move. Protest leaders said the court had given the state six days to respond.
About 200 activists began pitching tents on a hill in the barren, stony territory on Friday morning, and issued a statement announcing the establishment of a village named Bab al-Shams (Arabic for "Gate of the Sun"), after the title of a novel by a Lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, that portrays Palestinian yearnings through a metaphorical story of love for the land.
Israeli plans to build in E1 have been vehemently opposed for years by international players, including the United States, who say construction there would partially separate the northern and southern West Bank, harming the prospects of a viable contiguous Palestinian state in that territory. Israel announced its intention as a countermeasure after the United Nations General Assembly voted in November to upgrade the Palestinians’ status to that of a nonmember observer state.
Israel wants to create contiguity between East Jerusalem, which it has annexed, and the large urban settlement of Maale Adumim that lies beyond E1, and says that the future of the West Bank has to be settled in negotiations. In the meantime, critics say, Israel continues to establish facts on the ground.
"We are here as a response to the settlers and to the Israeli policy of settlement expansion," said Muhammad Khatib, a veteran member of the grass-roots Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a resident of Bilin. That West Bank village became a symbol of Palestinian defiance after it held weekly protests and won a ruling in the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007 forcing Israel to reroute its West Bank barrier so as to take in less of the village’s agricultural land
[…] Israel says that most of the E1 area is Israeli land. Protest leaders said they had set up their encampment on a parcel of land owned by a Palestinian family from A-Tur, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem. They added that the landowners had given their full permission for the encampment and had joined the activists at the site.
[…]
3) Israel overrides court, removes Palestinian protest settlement
Palestinians set up the Bab Al-Shams village two days ago in the sensitive E1 area, pointedly mirroring a tactic used by some Israeli settlers to establish facts on the ground.
Christa Case Bryant, Christian Science Monitor, January 13, 2013
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/0113/Israel-overrides-court-removes-Palestinian-protest-settlement
Jerusalem – Israel today evacuated a Palestinian tent village in the sensitive E1 area near Jerusalem, overriding a court order and invoking military powers to shut down the nonviolent demonstration.
Palestinians established the Bab Al-Shams village two days ago, pointedly mirroring a tactic used by some Israeli settlers to establish facts on the ground, to protest the steady expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It’s part of what they hope will become a broader nonviolent movement to pressure Israel.
"We have to move from reaction to taking the initiative, as we did with this activity," said Mohammed Khatib, a protest leader from the town of Bilin and one of the protests at Bab Al-Shams. "I think it will be an inspiration and a turning point for Palestinians to participate in this activity."
Israel signaled that it was unwilling to tolerate nonviolent protest in E1, citing security concerns. But while E1 is among the most poignant and provocative locations Palestinian protesters could have chosen, critics of the Israeli government’s crackdown say it hardly amounted to a security threat.
"Is this going to incite the local goat population to sedition?" asks Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli attorney and founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, which tracks developments that could jeopardize a two-state solution. "It is transparent that this was a use of military authority in order to thwart a nonviolent and legitimate political protest."
[…]
4) Time for Congress to build a better drone policy
Rep. Keith Ellison, Washington Post, January 13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/time-for-congress-to-build-a-better-drone-policy/2013/01/13/aebe7c70-5c2e-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_print.html
[Keith Ellison, a Democrat, represents Minnesota’s 5th District in the U.S. House and is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.]
An unmanned U.S. aerial vehicle – or drone – reportedly killed eight people in rural Pakistan last week, bringing the estimated death toll from drone strikes in Pakistan this year to 35. As the frequency of drone strikes spikes again, some questions must be asked: How many of those targeted were terrorists? Were any children harmed? And what is the standard of evidence to carry out these attacks? The United States has to provide answers, and Congress has a critical role to play.
The heart of the problem is that our technological capability has far surpassed our policy. As things stand, the executive branch exercises unilateral authority over drone strikes against terrorists abroad. In some cases, President Obama approves each strike himself through "kill lists." While the president should be commended for creating explicit rules for the use of drones, unilateral kill lists are unseemly and fraught with hazards.
When asked about the drone program in October during an interview on the "The Daily Show," the president said, "One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in, but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making." It’s time to put words into action.
Weaponized drones have produced results. They have eliminated 22 of al-Qaeda’s top 30 leaders and just last week took out a Taliban leader. Critically, they lessen the need to send our troops into harm’s way, reducing the number of U.S. casualties.
Yet the costs of drone strikes have been ignored or inadequately acknowledged. The number of innocent civilian casualties may be greater than people realize. A recent study by human rights experts at Stanford Law School and the New York University School of Law found that the number of innocent civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes is much higher than what the U.S. government has reported: approximately 700 since 2004, including almost 200 children. This is unacceptable.
Another cost is how drone strikes are shaping views of the United States around the world. You might develop a negative attitude toward the United States if your only perception of it is a foreign aircraft buzzing over your house that occasionally fires missiles into your neighborhood. In Pakistan, where 95 percent of U.S. drone strikes have occurred, people familiar with them overwhelmingly express disapproval (97 percent, according to Pew polling from June) and believe they kill too many innocent people (94 percent). Drone strikes may well contribute to the extremism and terrorism the United States seeks to deter.
U.S. drone use has also lowered the threshold for the use of lethal force in foreign countries. Would we fire so many missiles into Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia if doing so required sending U.S. troops into harm’s way? Our drone policy must be guided by more than capability. It must be guided by respect for noncombatants, necessity and urgency.
It is Congress’s responsibility to exercise oversight and craft policies that govern the use of lethal force. But lawmakers have yet to hold a single hearing examining U.S. drone policy. Any rules must provide adequate transparency, respect the rule of law, conform with international standards and prudently advance U.S. national security over the long term.
[…]
5) AIPAC’s Shadow War Against Chuck Hagel
Max Blumenthal, Alternet, January 14, 2013
http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/aipacs-shadow-war-against-chuck-hagel
"A lobby is like a night flower: It thrives in the dark and dies in the light." – former AIPAC foreign policy director Steve Rosen
If the most powerful Israel lobbying group in America is to be believed, it has no involvement in the increasingly ugly campaign to sabotage the nomination of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to Secretary of Defense. According to Eli Lake, a reliable water carrier for the Israeli government and its various Beltway lobbying arms, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is "sitting out" the Hagel fight. The same day, another faithful pro-Israel partisan, Jeffrey Goldberg, speculated on his blog at the Atlantic that "AIPAC will not mount a significant campaign" against Hagel.
"AIPAC does not take positions on presidential nominations," insisted AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman.
But a closer investigation of the campaign against Hagel indicates that AIPAC — and by extension, the Israeli government — may be outsourcing the attacks to its longtime former spokesman, the notoriously combative pro-Israel operative Josh Block. Through Block, who was until very recently quoted by reporters as a "former AIPAC spokesman," AIPAC has apparently been able to assail one of President Barack Obama’s key nominees without risking the political fallout that such a gambit might invite.
"Because Josh Block does not work for AIPAC anymore, he can say whatever he wants," MJ Rosenberg, a former AIPAC research director and ex-congressional aide who is now one of the Israel lobby’s premier critics, told me. "And he does: when AIPAC wants a message sent, it tells journalists, ‘We have no comment but you can call Josh Block.’ And Block, who is in constant contact with AIPAC, gives the line but AIPAC has deniability – they can just say, he doesn’t work for us."
AIPAC has good reasons to keep its fingerprints off the public campaign to demonize Hagel. For one, AIPAC thrives on its ability to influence lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, requiring it to avoid alienating the key congressional Democrats who rubberstamp the anti-Palestinian resolutions and Iran sanctions legislation it routinely authors. If AIPAC waded into the Republican-led crusade against Hagel in a public way, it might enrage some of its most reliable Democratic allies in Congress, generating unnecessary acrimony that might complicate future lobbying initiatives.
What’s more, were AIPAC to openly oppose President Barack Obama on a key cabinet pick, it would risk deepening the tension between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who came dangerously close to openly campaigning for Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, during the 2012 presidential campaign. Given the already icy relationship between Netanyahu and Obama, it is no surprise that AIPAC has gone to such lengths to distance itself from the campaign against Hagel.
Another reason for AIPAC’s reluctance to publicly oppose Hagel is its complicated legal status. Though it functions as a virtual arm of the Israeli government, AIPAC is not regulated by the US Department of Justice as other foreign agents are. If it were ever exposed for directly coordinating with the Israeli government, AIPAC would be required to register with the DoJ under the Foreign Lobbyist Registration Law. Its staff members would then be allowed to carry the line of the Israeli government, but only under strict regulations that would severely hamper their effectiveness, and erode their image as a homegrown reflection of America’s supposedly pro-Israel sensibility.
According to Rosenberg, this is where Block enters the picture. "The Josh Block phenomenon is a stratagem to get around laws relating to foreign lobbying," Rosenberg explained. "He talks to the Israeli embassy constantly and can and does convey what the Netanyahu government wants. But, hey, he isn’t AIPAC, so he can do that. He’s just a citizen. That’s why Josh Block is infinitely more valuable as ex-AIPAC than he was before."
In June 2012, Block was hired as CEO of The Israel Project, a major pro-Israel advocacy group that focuses on influencing journalists, politicians, and other cultural elites free trips to Israel, lavish seminars, and aggressive lobbying. When Hagel’s name was floated as the likely Defense Secretary nominee in December, Block opened up a series of harsh attacks on Hagel, reportedly disseminating anti-Hagel talking points to sympathetic reporters and neoconservative activists. Block’s Twitter feed has become a clearinghouse for attacks on the former senator, including those that baselessly portray him as anti-American and anti-Semitic, and the former AIPAC spokesman has been quoted in publications ranging from the Daily Beast to Politico disparaging Hagel.
On January 8, I attended an Israeli national election debate sponsored by The Israel Project at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. On a stage before virtually the entire foreign press corps stationed in Jerusalem were candidates from the four leading Israeli political parties. Bombarded with questions from reporters about their opinion of the Hagel nomination, each candidate studiously refused to issue any criticism. Tzachi Hanegbi, a close ally of Prime Minister Netanyahu from the Likud Party, emphasized that it would be inappropriate for any Israeli official to publicly question the judgment of the American president.
Outside the auditorium, I interviewed the Executive Director of the Israel Project, Marcus Sheff. A well-practiced media professional, Sheff grew visibly uncomfortable when I asked him about Block’s attacks on Hagel. "Josh Block has clearly made those statements about Chuck Hagel," he said haltingly, "and you are free to look at those statements, and you would have to ask Josh about that."
When I asked Sheff if the The Israel Project would formally adopt Block’s position as its own – if it officially opposed Hagel – he refused to provide a direct answer. He stuttered: "Uh, again, it’s a subject which is being discussed vociferously in Washington… I would ask you to ask our Washington office about that."
It was clear that The Israel Project’s directors, like those from AIPAC, were deeply concerned about being identified with the attacks on Hagel. Indeed, Sheff was anything but thrilled to be put on the spot about Block’s activities. But The Israel Project’s staff did not have the luxury of waging political warfare under the cover of darkness as AIPAC did. After all, it was their own CEO who was helping orchestrate a campaign to smear a popular three term former senator and Vietnam War hero as an anti-Semitic radical.
Block may have made himself a liability to The Israel Project, but as long as he is employed there, Rosenberg believes he provides AIPAC with a key asset. "The whole anti-Hagel effort is coordinated by AIPAC," claimed Rosenberg. "If it didn’t want Hagel to be smeared as anti-Israel, he wouldn’t have been. So he is being smeared nonstop and if the effort fails [AIPAC] can say, ‘It wasn’t us. We are neutral. These attacks came independently.’ "That’s why they use cutouts," he added. "I know because I used to be one of them."
6) Think Tank President Rebukes Senior Fellow’s Claims That Chuck Hagel Is Anti-Semitic
Ben Armbruster, Think Progress, Jan 13, 2013 at 11:06 am
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/01/13/1440211/haass-abrams-hagel/
Video: Richard Haass rebukes Elliott Abrams attacks on Chuck Hagel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyzTXGphP4A
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) president Richard Haass said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday that ad hominem attacks on Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s choice as the next Defense Secretary, are "over the line."
In an effort to derail Hagel’s nomination, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and the neocons have been trying to convince the public that Hagel is an "anti-Semite." CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration official who was convicted of charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal, claimed last week that Hagel "seems to have some kind of problem with Jews." But Haass, Abrams’ boss, rebuked those charges and the tactics Abrams and his neocon allies are using:
HAASS: The only thing that should be relevant George I would say are his ability to run the Pentagon and his views on policy … Where I think people are going over the line is with an hominem attacks, questioning for example whether he is an anti-Semite. I’ve known Chuck Hagel for more than 20 years for what it’s worth, I think that’s preposterous. I also don’t think that has a place in the public space. We often ask, why aren’t public debates better, why aren’t sometimes the best people going into public life, but this is one of the reasons. … I really don’t think there is a legitimate place in American political life for ad hominem attacks. These are loaded words that are being cast about and I think they’re simply beyond the pale.
A Council spokesperson last week backed away from Abrams’ baseless attacks on Hagel, saying they don’t represent the views of the Council on Foreign Relations. But Haass has now formally criticized Abrams’ attacks.
Critics of Abrams for his anti-Hagel comments are now calling on him to apologize. "I hope that Abrams rethinks his position and apologizes to Hagel and welcomes a genuine debate, Council on Foreign Relations-style, about their policy differences," Atlantic editor-at-large and New America Foundation Senior Fellow Steve Clemons said this week.
7) Facing Backlash, Elliott Abrams Clings To Charge That Hagel Is Anti-Semitic
Hayes Brown, Think Progress, Jan 14, 2013 at 10:46 am
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/01/14/1441891/abrams-hagel-anti-semitic/
Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams in a National Review Online (NRO) post on Saturday backed away from his charge that Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel is anti-Semitic, but in the very same piece, Abrams again suggested that Hagel may be anti-Semitic.
Abrams, a former Reagan and Bush administration official, said he never meant to frame the debate about Hagel in such an incendiary manner in both his Weekly Standard piece and during his interview on NPR last Monday. On NPR, Abrams said Hagel "appears to be" an anti-Semite and that he "seems to have some kind of problem with Jews."
But Abrams backed away in his NRO piece, saying that he was referring to the fact that the "press has carried several articles now suggesting some sort of a problem between him and the Jewish community." Never mind that all of those articles quote Abrams or his neoconservative allies as the ones making the suggestions.
Abrams even makes clear from the onset of his NRO essay that he doesn’t intend to engage with Hagel’s record and in no way wants to imply that Hagel should not be confirmed because of his policy views. Instead, the bulk of the piece is used to further attack Hagel’s past statements on Israel under the guise of further suggesting that Hagel is anti-Semitic. In particular, Abrams takes issue with Hagel once telling an audience member at a talk that he was U.S. senator, not an Israeli senator:
<<What, then, is the meaning of his reply if not this: that he is loyal to the United States, and his oath is to the Constitution of the United States only, "not to Israel," unlike some people, who put Israel’s interests first. This remark seems to me more than merely irascible; it suggests that those who challenged his views have different loyalties. Can such a statement really be left unexamined and unchallenged? […]
Today most pressure from the organized Jewish community over foreign-policy issues is related to the security of Israel and the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. To be treated with indifference by an elected official is bad enough. To be told by a future nominee for very high office that, "I’m a United States senator. I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator," and "my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States" is insulting and unacceptable. It suggests that Senator Hagel believes such lobbying by American Jews to be illegitimate and offensive, and is indeed evidence of loyalty to another country.>>
Hagel himself has explained what he meant regarding the "Israeli senator" line. "A couple of these guys said we should just attack Iran," Hagel said, adding, "And this guy kept pushing and pushing. And he alluded to the fact that maybe I wasn’t supporting Israel enough or something. And I just said let me clear something up here, in case there is any doubt."
Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to six Secretaries of State who first published the quote that Abrams takes issue with, said, "I think Hagel has a view that is not commonly expressed among senators and representatives, and that is, yes, we have a special relationship with Israel, but that special relationship is not exclusive."
"I am very supportive of the state of Israel. So is Senator Hagel," former Bush administration Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell said on Sunday. And Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeline Albright said on Friday, "I think that Senator Hagel has been somebody that has voted for help for Israel over the years, has made very clear his support for Israel, and has talked about the historic bond. And so I think that is just a charge that doesn’t make any sense at all."
Further rebutting Abrams’ accusations, a Senior Rabbi at an Omaha, Nebraska synagouge who has known Hagel for years today said "the facts speak for themselves: His record shows strong support for Israel."
The easily debunked article comes at the end of what hasn’t been a banner week for Elliott Abrams’ already shaky credibility, which has lead to his critics calling on Abrams to actually apologize. The past seven days have seen his employer distance itself from his comments and CFR President Richard Haas calling his statements "over the line."
Afghanistan
8) Obama to Accelerate Handover to Afghan Army
Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service, Jan 12 2013
http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/01/obama-to-accelerate-handover-to-afghan-army/
Washington – President Barack Obama announced Friday that U.S. forces will accelerate the transfer of primary security responsibilities to their Afghan counterparts and take on an exclusively support and training role beginning this spring.
The announcement, which came after several days of meetings between visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and top U.S. officials here, suggested that Washington may draw down its remaining 66,000-troop force in Afghanistan more quickly than previously planned.
But he also stressed that the pace of such a drawdown will be decided after more consultation with his field commanders over the coming months.
"Starting this spring, our troops will have a different mission: training, advising and assisting Afghan forces," he said in a joint White House press conference with Karzai. "It will be a historic moment."
Obama also implicitly admitted that the more-ambitious "national-building" counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy that he had advocated four years ago in hopes of improving governance and spurring economic development had fallen short. "(H)ave we achieved everything that some might have imagined us achieving in the best of scenarios?" he asked. "Probably not. This is a human enterprise, and you fall short of the ideal."
But he insisted that Washington had achieved "our central goal" which he defined as shaping a "strong relationship with a responsible Afghan government that is willing to cooperate with us to make sure that it is not a launching pad for future attacks against the United States."
He also stressed that Washington supports a reconciliation process between the Karzai government and the Taliban insurgency and the long-delayed opening of a Taliban office in Qatar to facilitate it.
While he insisted that such a process must be "Afghan led", he also said Washington believed reconciliation would not be possible "without the Taliban renouncing terrorism" and recognising the existing constitution, including those provisions that protect the rights of women.
In meetings with representatives of the Karzai government in France last month, the Taliban delegates stressed that they were prepared to make compromises, including permitting, for example, girls and women to attend school, albeit in "an Islamic way."
[…] With Gates and Petraeus now departed and Clinton on the way out, Obama appears to be surrounding himself with people who are much more closely aligned with Biden’s thinking. His nominees for secretaries of state and defence, Sen. John Kerry, and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, respectively, are both highly-decorated Vietnam veterans highly sceptical of COIN strategy.
Still, the results of this week’s meetings with Karzai are likely to provoke a lot of criticism, especially from neo-conservatives and other hawks, primarily in the Republican Party.
[…] As noted by Obama himself, the [Afghan] Army’s leadership "doesn’t mean that coalition forces, including U.S. forces, are no longer fighting. They will still be fighting alongside Afghan troops," he said.
But the bigger question is how quickly Obama intends to draw down the remaining U.S. forces, and he stressed that will depend in part on the advice he gets from his military commanders led by Gen. John Allen.
They reportedly want to maintain as many troops in the field as possible through at least the next fighting season, which will end next fall, but Biden and others are pressing for a faster drawdown.
The other big question is how many troops Washington hopes to keep in Afghanistan after 2014. Allen has publicly said he needs a force of at least 6,000 and as many as 20,000 to carry out counter-terrorist operations and provide adequate support and training to the Afghan Army. But the White House in recent days has suggested that 3,000 may be sufficient.
In advance of Karzai’s visit this week, two senior White House officials told reporters that Washington was prepared to accept fewer yet or even none at all if Kabul did not sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that would provide U.S. military personnel legal immunity from prosecution for any actions they carry out in Afghanistan – a demand Obama reiterated Friday.
Karzai appeared to accept that condition, noting that he intended to "argue for immunity for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in a way that Afghan sovereignty will not be compromised…" when he returned to Kabul.
Iran
9) Iran unable to get life-saving drugs due to international sanctions
Western measures targeting Tehran’s nuclear programme have impeded trade of medicines for illnesses such as cancer
Julian Borger and Saeed Kamali Dehghan, Guardian, Sunday 13 January 2013 13.20 EST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/13/iran-lifesaving-drugs-international-sanctions
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians with serious illnesses have been put at imminent risk by the unintended consequences of international sanctions, which have led to dire shortages of life-saving medicines such as chemotherapy drugs for cancer and bloodclotting agents for haemophiliacs.
Western governments have built waivers into the sanctions regime – aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear programme – in an effort to ensure that essential medicines get through, but those waivers are not functioning, as they conflict with blanket restrictions on banking, as well as bans on "dual-use" chemicals which might have a military application.
"Sometimes companies agree to sell us drugs but we have no way of paying them. On one occasion, our money was in the bank for four months but the transfer repeatedly got rejected," Naser Naghdi, the director general of Darou Pakhsh, the country’s biggest pharmaceutical company, told the Guardian, in a telephone interview from Tehran.
"There are patients for whom a medicine is the different between life and death. What is the world doing about this? Are Britain, Germany, and France thinking about what they are doing? If you have cancer and you can’t find your chemotherapy drug, your death will come soon. It is as simple as that."
European officials are aware of the potential for disaster reminiscent of the debacle of the UN oil-for-food programme imposed on Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and discussions are under way in Brussels on how to strengthen safeguards for at-risk Iranians. The US treasury says its office of foreign asset control is seeking to reassure banks that they will not be penalised for financing humanitarian sales.
However, the US and EU bans on doing business with the major Iranian financial institutions still make such transactions extremely difficult and risk-averse western companies have tended to avoid them.
Naghdi, the head of Darou Pakhsh, which supplies about a third of Iran’s pharmaceutical needs, said he can no longer buy medical equipment such as autoclaves (sterilising machines), essential for the production of many drugs, and that some of the biggest western pharmaceutical companies refuse to have anything to do with Iran.
"The west lies when it says it hasn’t imposed sanctions on our medical sector. Many medical firms have sanctioned us," Naghdi said.
A senior British official acknowledged that discussions between London, Brussels and Washington had been going on for months with the aim of unblocking the supply of medicines, but without a decisive outcome. "The problem is that for some of the big pharmaceutical companies and banks it’s just not worth the hassle and the risk of reputational damage, so they just steer clear," the official said.
[…] Meanwhile, the scale of the looming Iranian health crisis threatens to overwhelm recent efforts to mitigate the sanctions regime. At present 85,000 new cancer patients are diagnosed each year, requiring chemotherapy and radiotherapy which are now scarce. Iranian health experts say that annual figure has nearly doubled in five years, referring to a "cancer tsunami" most likely caused by air, water and soil pollution and possibly cheap low-quality imported food and other products.
In addition, there are over 8,000 haemophiliacs who are finding it harder to get blood clotting agents. Operations on haemophiliacs have been virtually suspended because of the risks created by the shortages. An estimated 23,000 Iranians with HIV/Aids have had their access to the drugs they need to keep them alive severely restricted. The society representing the 8,000 Iranians suffering from thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder, has said its members are beginning to die because of a lack of an essential drug, deferoxamine, used to control the iron content in the blood.
[…] Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American business consultant based in Dubai, argues the regime’s own shortcomings may well exacerbate the acute medical problems in Iran but are not their direct cause. "There is a lot of government mismanagement that is compounding the problem. But Iran had the same government before and there was plenty of medicines around. This is not a chicken-and-egg situation. The shortages have come after the sanctions," said Namazi.
[…]
Venezuela
10) OAS respects Venezuela’s decision to postpone Chavez inauguration
Mercopress, Saturday, January 12th 2013 – 11:51 UTC
http://en.mercopress.com/2013/01/12/oas-respects-venezuela-s-decision-to-postpone-chavez-inauguration
Organization of American States Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, said in statements to the press that the hemispheric body "fully respects and how could it be otherwise the decision of the constitutional powers of Venezuela regarding the inauguration of the President of that country".
"The issue has been resolved by the three branches of government of Venezuela: it was presented by the Executive, considered by the Legislature and decided by the Judiciary". "The possibilities have been exhausted and therefore the process that will take place in that country is that which has been decided by the three powers," said Secretary General Insulza.
The head of the hemispheric institution said the Venezuelan state authorities "chose a path that allows time for the situation to be ascertained and provides a waiting period for the President-elect to be sworn in again."
[…]
Bolivia
11) Bolivians demand the right to chew coca leaves
Bolivia wins special exemption from global drugs convention despite international opposition
Jamie Doward, Guardian, Saturday 12 January 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/13/bolivia-drugs-row-chew-coca
A major international row with wide-ranging implications for global drugs policy has erupted over the right of Bolivia’s indigenous Indian tribes to chew coca leaves, the principal ingredient in cocaine.
On Friday, Bolivia obtained a special exemption from the 1961 single convention on narcotic drugs, the framework that governs international drugs policy, allowing its indigenous people to chew the leaves.
Bolivia had argued that the convention was in opposition to its new constitution, adopted in 2009, which obliges it to "protect native and ancestral coca as cultural patrimony" and maintains that coca "in its natural state … is not a narcotic".
South American Indians have chewed coca leaves for centuries. The leaves reputedly provide energy and are said to have medicinal qualities. Supporters of Bolivia’s position praised it for standing up for the rights of indigenous people. "The Bolivian move is inspirational and ground-breaking," said Danny Kushlick, head of external affairs at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which promotes drug liberalisation. "It shows that any country that has had enough of the war on drugs can change the terms of its engagement with the UN conventions."
[…] In 2011, Bolivia – whose president, Evo Morales, is a former coca producer – formally notified the UN of its withdrawal from the convention. On Friday it reacceded to the convention, but with an exemption from the prohibition on the chewing of coca leaves.
The move is the first of its kind in the history of UN drug-control treaties and has sparked concerns that other countries may apply for amendments.
[…] Nancie Prud’homme, projects director at the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, criticised the co-ordinated opposition to Bolivia’s demands. "These objections are legally questionable," she said. "They support an arbitrary and over-broad provision and apply international drug laws in a vacuum. This is not appropriate. No state has paid any attention to decades of developing international norms on cultural and indigenous rights which support Bolivia’s efforts."
[…] The growing of coca leaves is legal and licensed in Bolivia. The policy has been credited with a fall in cocaine production in the country, leading some experts to see the Bolivian model as a way forward for other countries.
—
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