The Dreyfuss Report

The Mind-Boggling Stupidity of Michael Rubin

By Robert Dreyfuss

The 2000's produced a panoply of villains, cretins and bunglers on Iraq and the broader Middle East. Truly, however, none of them can hold a candle to the pudgy-faced boy wonder of the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Rubin.

On March 1, six days ahead of Iraq's March 7 parliamentary election, Rubin will be a featured speaker at an AEI conference entitled: "Iraq's Elections: Progress or Peril?"

For an organization that was obsessed with Iraq for years, especially in the period before and after the 2003 U.S. invasion, when it held an endless series of "black coffee briefings" on Iraq that often featured people like Ahmed Chalabi and his confreres, the AEI has been remarkably silent on Iraq lately. Perhaps that's because AEI, and Rubin, had consensual intercourse with Chalabi for years, and now Chalabi has emerged in full blossom as a pro-Iranian villain purging Tehran's opponents in Iraq.

Read More »

February 9, 2010

Bad to Worse in Iraq

By Robert Dreyfuss

The election in Iraq is less than a month away -- that is, if indeed it is held as scheduled on March 7 -- and things are going from bad to worse.

Last month, an unelected commission held over from the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, the Justice and Accountability Commission, issued a shocking ruling banning more than 500 candidates from taking part in the election, including a number of members of the current parliament running for reelection. That commission, successor to the old De-Baathification Commission, is controlled by Ahmed Chalabi and one of his cronies, Ali al-Lami. Chalabi, the darling of Bush-era neoconservatives, who pushed Chalabi as Iraq's leader after 2003, has long had close ties to Tehran, and in this case the ban struck at those Iraqi politicians most opposed to Iran's growing influence in Iraq.

Last week, an Iraqi appeals court seemed to overturn the ban. Its action followed a visit to Baghdad by Vice President Joe Biden, who has assumed the Iraqi portfolio for the Obama administration, and Biden pressed the Iraqis to reinstate the candidates. After the appeals court ruling, US officials congratulated themselves. "We were heartened by the decision earlier this week to reverse the deletion of the 500 names from the list for the upcoming election," said Hillary Clinton.

Read More »

February 8, 2010

Talking to the Taliban, Again

By Robert Dreyfuss

Is there any chance that the logjam on negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan is loosening up? You might think so, from the spate of reports that various parties -- including the United Nations and the government of Afghanistan -- are serious about reconciliation talks with Taliban officials. So far, however, the United States seems to be taking a hands-off attitude.

Let's review the bidding.

In six weeks or so, President Karzai of Afghanistan -- yes, that supposedly discredited figure who stayed in power by rigging last summer's election -- will convene a grand tribal council, or loya jirga, to seek a broad pact of reconciliation that, he says, is meant to include Afghan leaders of the Taliban. To the horror and consternation of US officials, who say that they support "reintegration" of the Taliban's fighters into Afghan society but oppose "reconciliation" with the Taliban as an organization, Karzai is offering to deal with the Taliban all the way to the top, including Mullah Omar, the one-eyed thug and would-be caliph who holds the loyalty of many if not most Taliban insurgents.

Read More »

February 2, 2010

Insulting China

By Robert Dreyfuss

Just like Hong Kong, soon enough Taiwan -- the so-called Republic of China -- will be absorbed into China proper. It's a goner. The sheer force of China's gravitational pull will draw the island to the mainland. So what, exactly, is the Obama administration thinking?

In what can only be seen as a calculated insult to Beijing, the Pentagon is selling a huge arsenal to Taiwan -- according to The Australian, more than $8 billion worth -- following upon a $6 billion sale by the Bush administration in 2008. According to the New York Times, the sales include "60 Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot interceptor missiles, advanced Harpoon missiles that can be used against land or ship targets and two refurbished minesweepers." The Obama administration is praising its own retraint for having held off on selling advanced F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as well, though it hasn't ruled out that in the near future, either.

Not surprisingly, China is furious. The Chinese government has officially protested the sale, freezing military cooperation with the United States and announcing retaliatory measures that apparently will include sanctions against US arms makers involved in the deal, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Action against Boeing could potentially be devastating to the company, which relies on enormous sales of civilian aircraft to Chinese airlines, but it isn't clear how far China would go, say, in shifting its purchases to European-made Airbus aircraft, for instance.

Read More »

February 1, 2010

Two Cheers for Obama on Foreign Affairs

By Robert Dreyfuss

Make no mistake -- to use one of President Obama's favorite phrases -- the United States faces a difficult and daunting foreign policy challenge over the next three years of Obama's first term.

Still, it was a pleasure to listen to a State of the Union address, especially after eight years of his predecessor's alarmist warnings and warlike thundering, in which war, terrorism, and "rogue states" went almost unmentioned.

During an hour-plus speech, the president devoted about eight minutes to foreign affairs, and much of that dealt with issues other than war and terrorism, things like negotiations on nuclear disarmament, HIV AIDS, and climate change. Even though the problems are still out there, it was wonderful to listen to a president who didn't try to scare us to death or mobilize us for some misguided military adventure.

Read More »

January 28, 2010

A Manifesto: Ending the War

By Robert Dreyfuss

How will the war in Afghanistan end?

This isn't a trick question. The answer is simple: the war will end when President Obama signs an order ending it; that is, when the president tells his commanders: "It's over." Opponents of the war -- including left-wing antiwar activists, liberal progressives, centrists, "realists," and conservative libertarians -- will have to unite to pressure, cajole, persuade, and convince Obama to issue that order.

Fortunately, in his December 2009 speech at West Point, President Obama provided the war's opponents with a tactical wedge to use in driving their point home: the president's announcement that beginning in July 2011 -- just eighteen months from now -- US forces in Afghanistan will start to draw down.

Read More »

January 25, 2010

Petraeus Gets It Wrong

By Robert Dreyfuss

Yesterday, I had a chance to question General David Petraeus about President Obama's Afghan timetable. From the transcript that follows, you'll note that Petraeus, who repeatedly interrupted my questioning to preempt where I was trying to go, doesn't even acknowledge that the president's deadline for beginning the withdrawal of US forces is July, 2011. It leads one to suspect that if Petraeus, McChrystal, and Co. are ever going to leave Afghanistan, they'll have to be dragged out kicking and screaming.

For the record, first let me quote President Obama, from his December 1 speech at West Point, on the deadline:

"These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011."

Read More »

January 22, 2010

Iran's Power Play in Iraq

By Robert Dreyfuss

For years, I've written about Iran's untoward influence in Iraq. Now, it appears as if Iran is making a power play, using its Iraqi allies, that could checkmate US influence in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Back in 2003, many observers, including me, began reporting that the toppling of Saddam Hussein's government had opened the door to the expansion of Iran's power. Most of the exiles installed into power by the United States, including Ahmed Chalabi, had close ties to Tehran. Now, it's paying off.

According to Iraqi sources, the decision to ban more than 500 Iraqi politicians from running in the March 7 election has been applied on a strictly sectarian basis. Although the action is based on the claim that the barred candidates are either current or former members of the Baath party, supporters of the party, or ex-officials from the Saddam-era military and intelligence service, nearly all of those barred are Sunnis, the sources say, while many former Baathists who are Shiites have been left untouched.

Read More »

January 20, 2010

Holbrooke: Not Hostage to Pakistan

By Robert Dreyfuss

Last week, during an appearance by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at the Brookings Institution, I had a chance to ask him a key question about the war, concerning the Pakistan-Taliban alliance. Oddly enough, in his answer, Holbrooke -- who is the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that discussion of how to defeat the opponents of the US in Afghanistan shouldn't be conducted "in public." Here the transcript of the exchange:

DREYFUSS "Good afternoon, Ambassador. I'm Bob Dreyfuss with The Nation magazine. ... Isn't it true that the Pakistani military and ISI is still to this day giving significant support to the very enemies that we're fighting, the Taliban, Hekmatyar, Haqqani? And that if we squeeze [Pakistan] too hard on this that they could cut off our ability to supply our forces logistically so that we're kind of hostage to the Taliban's main supporter which we depend on in order to supply our forces in Afghanistan. Isn't that the central paradox you're facing?"

MR. HOLBROOKE "This is of course a much debated question, Bob, and all I can say is you're welcome to your interpretations of what happens, but I do not believe we are hostage as you put it. It is true that well over 50 percent of our supplies into Afghanistan come in over the Khyber Pass and that's a difficult piece of logistical resupply. It's the longest logistical resupply in the history of the United States military. I've sat down with the logisticians, the logistics officers in the field and talked to them about the immense difficulties of bringing things in, although we are diversifying. But I don't see the hostage issue.

Read More »

(259) Comments

January 12, 2010

Iraq: A New Civil War?

By Robert Dreyfuss

The "good war" in Afghanistan isn't going so well, but the Obama administration may soon learn that the "bad war" -- that would be the one in Iraq -- isn't over yet.

Although President Obama has repeatedly promised to draw down US forces in Iraq to about 50,000 by August -- and to remove those forces by the end of 2011 -- it's fair to wonder if that will happen. First of all, because Iraq's upcoming parliamentary elections have been postponed from this month until March 7, and since US forces are expected to remain above 120,000 until the elections are over, the United States will have to complete a helter-skelter withdrawal, taking out 70,000 troops in just five short months, in order to meet the August deadline.

If that happens, it's likely to occur against the backdrop of spreading political chaos in Iraq, new insurgent violence, the threat of renewed civil war, and the whispered possibility of a military coup d'etat.

Read More »

January 11, 2010