Bob Dreyfuss | The Nation

A member of a rebel group called the Martyr Al-Abbas throws a handmade weapon in Aleppo, June 11, 2013. (Reuters/Muzaffar Salman)

Here’s the thing about a slippery slope: sometimes you maintain your footing and don’t go tumbling down, and sometimes you slip and slide right into disaster. With the apparent decision to arm the Syrian rebels, President Obama looks like he’s going to go kersplat! onto his face and land smack dab in the Syrian quagmire.

It is, of course, a quagmire partly of his own making. Though he’s instinctively resisted getting directly involved in Syria, Obama’s first mistake was made in 2011, when he demanded that President Bashar al-Assad step down. Not only did Obama have no power to make that happen, but by demanding it he turned a relatively small-scale rebellion into a raging civil war pitting an amalgam of rebels, including large numbers of Sunni extremists and Al Qaeda types, against a fully armed modern state army. Second, Obama compounded his mistake by helping Saudi Arabia and Qatar arm the rebels, despite the fact that much of that aid went to the extremists. And then he ordered the CIA to get involved in training the rebels, secretly, in Jordan. Finally, his comments about a “red line” if and when Syria used chemical weapons gave ammunition to hawks, neoconservatives and the far right to demand that Obama go to war in Syria once evidence of a very limited, marginal use of some gases became apparent.

That’s the slippery slope that Obama created, and now he tumbling in.

So yesterday the White House decided to send weapons to the rebels. Reading the White House’s statement on the matter, it’s clear that they’re not quite ready to go all in, but that’s the problem with a slippery slope: once you send in small arms and ammunition, next comes anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and—oops!—before you know it, you’re bombing Syrian airports and imposing a no-fly zone.

In its statement, backed by an on-the-record briefing, the White House says:

The President has augmented the provision of non-lethal assistance to the civilian opposition, and also authorized the expansion of our assistance to the Supreme Military Council (SMC), and we will be consulting with Congress on these matters in the coming weeks.

Saying “coming weeks” makes it sound as if adding the weapons isn’t all that urgent, but the message is clear: the United States will be arming the Supreme Military Council, and it will get worse. Added the White House, the United States will “increase the scope and scale of assistance that we provide to the opposition, including direct support to the SMC.” In case we missed the point, the White House added: “These efforts will increase going forward.”

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In fact, it may be too late for the United States to alter the course of the war. The commander of the Syrian Military Council himself has flatly turned down Secretary of State John Kerry’s invitation to attend a peace conference, insisting instead that the rebels get advanced, high-tech weapons. In recent weeks the Syrian government has made important battlefield advances, and by all accounts the tide of war has turned sharply against the Saudi Arabia– and Qatar-backed fighters, the Al Qaeda forces and others.

As in Vietnam, when the United States persisted in that hopeless war in part because it felt like to withdraw would damage American credibility, in Syria there is a real chance the President Obama will slide all the way down the slope to full-scale war simply because he won’t want to tolerate an Assad victory. Such a victory would be a big win for Assad, for Iran, for Hezbollah—and for Russia, too, which has bet on Assad’s ability to hang on. If that happens, it’s only because Obama naïvely bet that the Arab Spring movement that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia—and in Libya, with an American military push—would easily knock off Assad.

James Harkin chronicles the battle for Aleppo from behind rebel lines.

An audience member uses their smart phone to take a picture of President Obama speaking at a fundraiser on May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The news about the National Security Agency isn’t a molehill, but it’s not a mountain either. When all is said and done, it’s very likely that it will turn out to be a situation where there’s less than meets the eye at first—at least, if what seems to have met the eye this week is a massive, unchecked NSA that sees all and knows all.

Plus, comparing Obama to George W. Bush is wrong. Bush, you will recall, invaded several nations in search of terrorists that didn’t—as in the case of Iraq—actually exist. Except for Obama’s diminishing use of drones, the Obama administration apparently believes that counterterrorism ought to be the work of intelligence and police. From everything we know, the current program at the NSA is approved by the president, legislated and known to Congress and backed by the courts. That doesn’t mean it’s right. But it also doesn’t mean that it’s the Second Coming of Richard Nixon, the Plumbers and illegal domestic spying by the CIA.

Let’s not get all paranoid about this.

And that might start with the leaker himself, Edward Snowden. As a journalist, I’m strongly in favor of leaks, and for that I’m grateful to Snowden and to The Guardian team, including Glenn Greenwald, who helped Snowden tell his story. As a civil libertarian, I’m encouraged that Snowden’s leaked documents might start a real debate over secrecy, spying and the intelligence community’s extraordinary anti-terrorist powers. But it’s also possible that Snowden, a computer nerd who backed Ron Paul in 2012, is a little paranoid, too. It’s true that he’s facing possible deportation, arrest and prosecution for what he’s acknowledged that he’s done. But when he says that the CIA might “pay off the Triads” to kidnap him in Hong Kong, that’s a little paranoid.

Too many Americans, of course, have reacted to the NSA story with a shrug and the comment that they “have nothing to hide.” And perhaps most of them believe that, but the fact is that nearly all of us do indeed have something to hide, even it’s no more than personal communications, say, between family members, doctors, bankers and others that we’d prefer don’t become public. But what’s often overlooked in this NSA story is that none of that—at least as far as we know!—is happening. No one, including the NSA, is listening in on your phone calls or reading your e-mails. That, however, is not what Americans apparently think. Most of them, fully 85 percent, according to a poll taken before—yes, before—the NSA revelations, believe that the government can “access citizens’ phone calls, e-mails and Internet use without their consent.”

Well, they can’t.

So what about collecting all of the “metadata” on phone calls made to, from and within the United States every few months and storing it all at some huge NSA data bank? That’s troubling, yes. But not really alarming, unless it can be shown that the data is misused, say, in criminal investigations, in tracking the movements of ordinary citizens, and so forth.

In an editorial today, The New York Times asks the right questions:

Are the calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put innocent people under suspicion? Why is data from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the government suspects of terrorist activity? How long is the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations? Why was a private contractor like Edward Snowden allowed to have access to it? So far, no one at the White House seems interested in a substantive public debate.

Every one of those questions needs to be answered. But some of the answers seem obvious. The reason why “data from every phone call [is] collected, and not just those made by people whom the government suspects of terrorist activity” is because if the FBI or other investigators are going to go back and look for patterns of activity after the fact, they’ll need an historical set of data. That’s something that ought to be debated, and if I get a vote, it will be that the threat of terrorism is so low that so vast a collection of data isn’t needed, especially when measured against the civil liberties lost and the potential for government abuse. That’s a debate worth having.

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In answer to another of the Times’s questions—namely “Can it be used for routine police investigations”—the answer is no, and in this case we have some proof.

Consider this: if the NSA has metadata stored on every phone call made in the United States from every conceivable landline and cell phone, why would the FBI and the Justice Department need to acquire that very same data on a lot of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation? Why not trundle over to the NSA and look it up? And in this case, especially, since it involved a leak involving an incident of terrorism and counterterrorism? The reason they didn’t, and instead sought the intrusive method that they actually used, is because this was a criminal case—a leak investigation—and not a case that actually involved terrorism. That, alone, should tell us that the NSA’s storehouse of phone metadata isn’t likely being used improperly.

On the other hand, in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombers, the FBI and the CIA can indeed use the metadata to search the patterns of the bombers’ phone calls.

Less clear is the case of the would-be subway bomber, Najibullah Zazi, who the administration says was netted in part because of the NSA’s ability to track and monitor e-mail communications. (That’s the subject of another of Snowden’s blockbuster leaks, involving the PRISM program that gives the government entry in social networking and e-mail servers in cases involving foreign targets.) The administration says that Zazi was caught in the NSA’s net, but others say that he could easily have been tracked using the more standard intelligence and law enforcement tools that allow investigators to conduct wiretaps and electronic intercepts. (Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, reportedly said that Zazi was caught using the NSA phone metadata, which definitely isn’t true.)

As I noted at the outset, comparing President Obama to President George W. Bush—and glibly popularizing phrases such as “George W. Obama”—is just plain silly. It’s comparing, well, apples and invasions. President Bush opted to use the military to invade entire nations in search of terrorists, some of whom didn’t even exist. More rational people, including Obama (and myself) have long argued that battling terrorism primarily ought to be the job of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. (Note to Obama: that doesn’t mean that intelligence agencies ought to use drones!) But if counterterrorism is the province of those agencies, not the military, then we need to discuss, as a nation, what powers those agencies ought to have—and what they shouldn’t.

Lee Fang writes about how intelligence contractors have already abused their power.

Two soldiers scan the area with rifles during a security stop on their convoy as members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit drive to a forward operating base in southern Afghanistan. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

Peter Beinart wants everyone to stop talking about the neoconservatives. Perhaps, if we stop talking about them, they’ll go away? No, it’s not that. Beinart, of course, was once a fellow traveler of sorts with the neocons, as editor of The New Republic from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, when its publisher at the time, Marty Peretz, would reasonably qualify as a neocon or “quasi-neocon.” In that post, Beinart famously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and then, even more famously—as that war degenerated into a catastrophic series of horrors—apologized for his support.

In a recent piece in The Daily Beast, Beinart takes several writers to task, including me, David Corn of Mother Jones, and Ann McFeatters of the Chicago Sun-Times for, well, talking about neoconservatives and their penchant for war—in particular because many of their tribe are among the loudest backers of war against Syria.

Writing in his usual supercilious style, Beinart first cites Corn:

Earlier this week, I Googled “neocons and Syria” and learned that the former want America to go war in the latter. The first story Google offered me was by David Corn in Mother Jones. “How to Be a Good Neocon When It Comes to Syria,” read the headline. The subtitle read: “With Obama moving cautiously, some hawks are angling for a US invasion.

Got it, I thought. “Neocon” is a synonym for “hawk.” But then, in the first sentence, Corn wrote that the “most hawkish neocons desire … a full US military presence in the air and on the ground.” Hmm. If some neocons are more hawkish than others, then “neocon” and “hawk” can’t be the same thing. Four paragraphs later, Corn referred to former Bush-administration ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton as a “neocon favorite.” Why just a “favorite,” I thought. Why not a “neocon” himself? Then, in the next paragraph, Corn explained that “real neocons, it seems, do not get squishy when the question is US troops on Syrian soil.” So there are fake neocons? How do you tell the difference?

He goes on to tackle a recent piece that I wrote for The Nation:

Bob Dreyfuss in The Nation made things worse. “Neocons, Hill Democrats Push for War Against Syria,” read the headline of his piece. So neocons can’t be Democrats or work on Capitol Hill? Three sentences later Dreyfuss made a distinction between “neoconservatives and right-wing military types,” which presumably means that you can’t be a neoconservative while in uniform.

Why is Beinart so upset about our using the term neocon? Here’s the real reason:

Frequently, what neocon really means is “Jewish hawk.” In that way, it’s a bit like “gangbanger,” “mobster,” “illegal” (the noun), or even “terrorist,” terms that could theoretically refer to someone of any religious, ethnic, or racial group but in America today are often reserved for members of only one.

In other words, Beinart is trying to resurrect the old canard that when critics speak of “neoconservatives” they really mean “Jews.” This is so unspeakably stupid a charge that I don’t know where to begin.

First of all, as Beinart himself acknowledges, not all neoconservatives are Jews—and, by overwhelming numbers, the vast majority of Jews are not neoconservatives. That said, there’s no denying the fact that many, many neoconservatives—perhaps, even, the preponderance, are indeed Jewish. There are plenty of reasons for that, historically, related to how the neoconservative movement emerged as a coherent, intellectual-ideological faction from the 1970s onward. And, as they emerged, they self-consciously separated themselves from the traditional affiliation of most Jewish political activists, intellectuals and idea people with liberalism, Democrats and progressive views on disarmament, diplomacy, civil rights and other topics.

But among the countless thousands of journalists and analysts who use the term “neoconservative,” I can think of none—not one!—who is somehow subtly trying to imply that neoconservatives are a Jewish cabal and that somehow that cabal represents Jews in general.

Beinart seems troubled by the fact Corn and I use terms such as “hawks,” “right-wing military types” and “neoconservatives” seemingly to mean different things. Well, that’s because they are indeed different things. In 2002–03, during the period before the war in Iraq, a coalition arose in support of that war. Among its key members were neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, human rights activists, people opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and various kinds of hawks from the military-industrial complex. They weren’t all the same, and they weren’t interchangeable—but they found common cause in supporting the war in Iraq. But one would have to be deaf, dumb and blind—or an editor of The New Republic in 2003—not to realize that the true organizers of the war in Iraq were the friends of Ahmed Chalabi, the backers of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, the organizers of the Project for a New American Century and their allies—and nearly all of them were card-carrying neoconservatives.

Not only that, but the neoconservatives use the term in reference to themselves, and they do indeed behave as a kind of collective. Here’s one example of their thinking: Back in 2003, following a conference that I attended at the American Enterprise Institute, I approached Max Singer, a veteran neoconservative activist who co-founded the Hudson Institute, to ask if I might call him later in the day for an interview. “Sure,” he told me, and he gave me his card. After I’d left the room, according to a journalist friend who’d remained behind, Singer approached a top AEI official. “I was asked by Dreyfuss for an interview,” Singer said. “Is he one of us?” Now, it’s possible to read too much into the phrase “one of us,” but it’s also true that the neoconservative movement is very much an in-group, with a strong sense of an us-against-them attitude, in which you’re either a true believer or you’re not.

Not that all neoconservatives agree with each other about everything. They don’t. As Beinart points out, that can make it difficult to define exactly what a “neoconservative” is. The simple answer is that, like pornography, you pretty much know a neocon when you see one.

In his piece in the Daily Beast, Beinart tries manfully to figure out what attributes define neoconservativism. He variously suggests that what might link neoconservatives together could be support for a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy, belief in exporting democracy, backing for American military “dominance,” and so on—all characteristics, for the most part, if most—but not all—neocons.

He then comes very close to accusing me and Corn of anti-Semitism. Corn, he notes, puts Richard Perle in the “neocon” category, while putting Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain in the “hawk” category. And he says:

For his part, Dreyfuss sees Gen. Jack Keane as emblematic of “right-wing military types” while associating the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka with “neoconservatives.” Yet he doesn’t in any way distinguish their beliefs, leading the reader to surmise that what makes Pletka a neoconservative isn’t what she believes but where she works and who she is.

His implication—well, more than an implication—is that I called Pletka a “neoconservative” because of “who she is,” i.e, that she’s Jewish. (For the record, I don’t even know whether Danny Pletka is Jewish or not. And I wonder if she knows whether I am Jewish or not.) The fact is that most politicians, especially current, elected officials, have such a wide range of views on a wide range of subjects that it’s hard to pin them down as being ideological neoconservatives. I doubt that I’ve ever described a politician or a military official as an unalloyed neoconservative. In part, that’s because most politicians and military officers don’t join, affiliate with, or subscribe to the countless thinktanks, ad hoc committees, “open letters,” and other manifestations that mark the neoconservative effort to shape policy, especially since the 1990s. But, as in the case of the Beinart-supported war in Iraq, many hawks and others did support what was indisputably a neoconservative-inspired war of aggression.

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Perhaps I missed it, but in Beinart’s list of things that define neoconservatives, he fails to mention Israel. To his credit, in recent years Beinart has emerged—belatedly, and welcome to the club—as a strident critic of Israel and Zionism. For that, he’s been pilloried by many unthinking backers of Israel’s current policies, including (yes) neoconservatives. But he doesn’t mention in his Daily Beast that neoconservatives—whether Jewish or non-Jewish—are also nearly unanimously united in their militant support for Israel and, especially, for Israel’s right-wing parties affiliated with Herut, Likud and their heirs, including Benjamin Netanyahu. For neoconservatives, the American-Israel alliance—against Palestinians, against Iran, against political Islam, Islamists of all stripes, Al Qaeda et al.—is a defining view. I can imagine a hawk who supports Israel far right but who isn’t a neoconservative. I can imagine a Christian fundamentalist who supports Israel’s far right, as the key to the coming Battle of Armageddon and all that jazz, but who isn’t a neocon. (There are legions of those.) But I have trouble imagining a true neoconservative who doesn’t support Netanyahu and Co.

Beinart wants us to stop using the term neoconservative and replace it with “imperialist.” For my part, I’ll stick with “neoconservative.”

Read Bob Dreyfuss’s take on Kerry’s trip to Israel/Palestine.

A woman fills in her ballot for the Iranian presidential election in Tehran June 12, 2009. (REUTERS/Caren Firouz)

With ten days to go before Iran’s presidential election, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and US neoconservatives are on opposite sides of the regime-change question, as one might expect.

Here’s the reality of Iran’s presidential vote: there isn’t going to be any regime change, despite Khamenei’s fears and the hopes of right-wingers such as Robert Joseph, a former George W. Bush official. The next president of Iran, whoever he is, will settle into a working relationship with Khamenei, and President Obama will have to deal with the actual Iranian government, do business with it, and seek an accord over Iran’s nuclear program. And, because President Ahmadinejad of Iran has been so belligerent and thus so demonized in the United States, Obama will find it a lot easier to sell a deal to the American public that he makes with a president whose name isn’t Ahmadinejad.

Khamenei, widely vilified by outside critics for endorsing the Guardian Council’s decision to ban an Ahmadinejad aide and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from running for president, gave an important speech yesterday—with both Rafsanjani and the Ahmadinejad aide, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, sitting on the stage with him! Apparently, neither man was so miffed by Guardian Council’s decision that he’d refuse to sit with Khamenei, yet another signal that the Islamic Republic’s political system is staying intact.

In his speech, according to The Washington Post:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused foreign and domestic critics Tuesday of attempting to undermine the country’s June 14 presidential election…. Khamenei dismissed these criticisms as misguided plots to undermine Iran’s political system.

And he added:

“A vote for any of these eight candidates is a vote for the Islamic Republic and a vote of confidence in the system and our electoral process.”

So it is. That hasn’t stopped the neoconservatives from demanding that Obama abandon his policy of engagement with Iran and, instead, seek precisely the regime change policy that Khamenei is talking about. Writing for National Review, Joseph says:

Tinkering with current policies will not achieve a non-nuclear and democratic Iran. Instead, it is time to “reset” U.S. policy and recognize the need for regime change. This change must come from within Iran and be led by Iranians, but the United States and the international community can provide essential support to encourage and strengthen the opposition inside and outside of Iran.

Weirdly, Joseph goes on to endorse the activities of the cult-like People’s Mujaheddin (PMOI) and its front group, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), which is apparently holding a big rally of its cult member in Paris on June 22, the day after the possible run-off in the election, whose first round in June 14 and second round, if needed, will be June 21. Joseph says that the NCRI rally “is expected to be one of the largest gatherings of the Iranian opposition to date.”

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In reality, the NCRI and the PMOI have zero influence and support inside Iran, little backing outside Iran, and rag-tag army of sorts—whose terrorist designation was recently lifted by the United States and which has lucrative ties to former top US officials—that is being shipped out of Iraq by Prime Minister Maliki’s security service.

Intelligently enough, Secretary of State John Kerry says that whoever wins Iran’s presidential election, it won’t affect the Obama administration’s policy of seeking a diplomatic solution. From the Los Angeles Times:

“I do not have high expectations that the election is going to change the fundamental calculus of Iran,” Kerry told reporters during a joint appearance at the State Department with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. “The supreme leader will ultimately make that decision.”

He said the United States would “continue to pursue every effort to have a peaceful resolution” of the dispute.

To be successful, the United States will have to make concessions to Iran that it has been unwilling to make so far, including a decision to state forthrightly that, at the end of the talks, Iran will be able to enrich uranium, on its own soil, under tighter international supervision. But at least Kerry is committed to continuing the talks, despite the pressure from the hawks. Talking with Iran, of course, was a key plank in Obama’s 2008 election campaign.

Read more from Bob Dreyfuss on Iran’s critical elections.