Settlements, Schmettlements

This NYT op-ed by Tony Judt, a Jew, about the illegality of all Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory illustrates the best in Jewish thinking on the Israel situation. And it's published in the NYT, which is owned by Jews. So there is open-minded thinking on this issue in the Jewish community, even in the US. (Israelis appear more open-minded on Israeli issues in general than American Jews do.) Meanwhile Paul Wolfowitz seems to be spouting a right-wing Zionist diatribe in the Washington Post calling on President Obama to take a stronger, more public stand against Iran. So, is Wolfowitz just a neo-con like many fundamentalist Americans, or does he have an Israeli agenda, since Iran is a much greater threat to Israel than to the US?

Elliott Abrams Is Back

I was unhappy to see an op-ed by Elliott Abrams in today's NYT about Lebanon and Iran. I was going to write a letter to the editor saying that they should have mentioned in his profile that he is a convicted felon; however, according to Wikipedia, he is not a convicted felon. It says that while felony charges were prepared against him for Iran-Contra, he pleaded guilty only to two misdemeanors. It doesn't sound as good to say that he is a confessed petty criminal. Plus, it says Bush I pardoned him; does that mean he's no longer guilty even of a misdemeanor?

He has gone on from success to success despite Iran-Contra, serving as a senior official in Bush II's NSC and now at the Council on Foreign Relations. My opinion of the Council on Foreign Relations just went down several notches.

With all the furor over the recent shooting at the Holocaust Museum, there's a lot of talk about anti-Semitism. But it's people like Abrams who stir up anti-Semitism. He's held high positions in government mainly because he is a Jew with strong Jewish network connections. Another example is Michael Milken, who really is a convicted felon. Now he's back in the news, hobnobbing with the rich and famous. Bernie Madoff is unlikely to follow in Milken's and Abram's footsteps of redemption, because Madoff hurt other Jews, not Gentiles, i.e., he cut his ties to the Jewish old boy network. Another member of the club -- Mark Rich, whose pardon by Bill Clinton almost cost Eric Holder his appointment as Obama's Attorney General.

Apparently it's okay (politically correct) to complain about the old boy network of white men, but it you say the same thing about Jews, it's anti-Semitic.

Diplomatic History Only Interesting If White Men in Charge

The NYT reports that traditional history is decreasing in importance at most universities. It says that while universities are giving decreasing importance to diplomatic or international history, they are giving increased importance to the history of things like women's studies, race, and cultural issues. The ironic thing is that just as history is getting away from a "great man" focus of history that until recently focused on white men, because they were at the top of the heap, women and other races are becoming more important. In tandem with the drop in diplomatic history, the leading diplomats in the US have been Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Hillary Clinton, none of them white men.

My own concern about this is that the loss of interest in diplomatic or international history is likely to result in a lack of the expertise needed to conduct diplomacy. My experience was that diplomacy really is directed by the man (or woman) at the top. As I move up in the State Department (not particularly high), I found that the higher I went, the more likely it was that senior people would take an interest in, and control over, the issues I was working on. In fact, often the issues would be decided by the White House, not just by the Secretary of State. Historians might resent that the system works this way, but denying that it does is likely to result in an unrealistic understanding of history.

I was just listening to Obama talk about health care, and he repeated a line I've heard before when people complain about all the things he is involved in, such as the auto industry, he said he would rather not be involved in these issues, because he already has so much on his plate, and then every issue he mentioned was a foreign policy issue -- North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Republicans Destroyed the CIA

Today's NYT front pages the conflict between Admiral Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA over who should be station chiefs at embassies around the world. In describing the dispute, the NYT simply says, "Mr. Blair took over an office born out of the intelligence failures before the Iraq war." In retrospect those intelligence "failures" were born out of the Bush administration's desire to have the CIA produce the intelligence that the White House wanted. Because the CIA was reluctant to produce politically motivated intelligence, the White House moved to reduce its clout by installing a new bureaucracy above it -- hence Blair vs. Panetta. But it's also the military versus the civilians. The NYT says one dispute is whether to make the head of London station an NSA officer rather than a CIA officer. Then it goes on to say the Defense Intelligence Agency might be more appropriate to head up the Iraq station, etc. However, NSA is primarily military; it's always headed by a military officer. DIA of course is military, as are most other intelligence operations. It's interesting that in the run up to the Iraq war the two small intelligence organizations that were least willing to buy Cheney's claims about Iraq's development of nuclear weapons were the State Department's and the Department of Energy's, two civilian organizations. The CIA is the other big civilian spy operation, and Bush/Cheney hated it and wanted to destroy or emasculate it. It looks like they succeeded to some extent. Hopefully the CIA will go down fighting.