The Dreyfuss Report

WTOP Yellow Journalism on Iran-Venezuela

By Robert Dreyfuss

Earlier this week, I lambasted Robert Morgenthau for his alarmist, fear-mongering speech at the Brookings Institution and op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which he suggested darkly that Iran and Venezuela were engaged in cooperation on nuclear weapons and that the two countries were secretly building ominous factories in remote areas of Venezuela. He seemed to imply a 2009 version of the Cuban missile crisis is in the works, and like some modern-day Paul Revere, he's riding to the rescue.

In the blog entry, I mentioned that Morgenthau's thesis was transmitted, in even more simplistic and alarmist form, over WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., by J.J. Green, the station's national security correspondent. After seeing my blog posting, Green helpfully sent me an audio of the broadcast, which I've transcribed below. In my mind, it's a stunning example of bad journalism. As you will see, if you bother to read it, not once do Green or the WTOP anchors express an ounce of skepticism about Morgenthau's thesis, nor do they raise an single question about it. They simply regurgitate what Morgenthau said, as if the Manhattan D.A.'s tendentious and ideologically driven analysis is the Word of God. The transcript, in italics, follows below, along with my comments:

ANCHOR 1: There's an East-West connection that's raising alarm bells in the US because of who the players are and what they might be up to. It's about Iran and Venezuela, two countries with half a century of diplomatic ties, but now those ties appear to be morphing into something more cohesive, more directed, and more threatening.

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September 11, 2009

Door Open for Iran Talks

By Robert Dreyfuss

The drums of war are beating again over Iran, but sadly it's a representative of the Obama administration who wielded the heaviest drumstick.

Glyn Davies, the US representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), delivered what can only be called a one-sided and alarmist opinion about Iran's ongoing nuclear enrichment program:

"This ongoing enrichment activity ... moves Iran closer to a dangerous and destabilizing possible breakout capacity. Taken in connection with Iran's refusal to engage with the IAEA regarding its past nuclear warhead-related work, we have serious concerns that Iran is deliberately attempting, at a minimum, to preserve a nuclear weapons option."

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September 10, 2009

Robert Morgenthau's Black Propaganda

By Robert Dreyfuss

Later this week, I'll write something more detailed about the Iranian nuclear issue. It's one that doesn't lend itself to rational dialogue all the time, but today's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Morgenthau, adapted from a speech he delivered at the Brookings Institution, is so far over the top that it boggles the mind.

And, apparently, Morgenthau has lost his-- his mind, that is. The intrepid Manhattan D.A. finds a new Cuban missile crisis brewing. This time, Venezuela is playing the role of Cuba, says Morgenthau, and Iran is taking on the part of Russia.

The title of the piece is: "The Emerging Axis of Iran and Venezuela." It's both creepy and conspiratorial, with almost no facts, and full of rhetoric and dark insinuations. He makes this shocking accusation:

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September 9, 2009

Obama Readies Afghan Escalation

By Robert Dreyfuss

Don't look for surprises from President Obama on Afghanistan. During the two year campaign, and since taking office, he's been consistent. For Obama, Afghanistan is the right war, and he's staked his presidency on winning it. In order to placate the liberal-left and its allies in Congress, Obama is putting out the word (from the National Security Council) that he's willing to listen to all points of view, including those who believe that it's time to cut and run. Listen, he will. Cut and run, he won't.

The big papers today are full of showdown talk. "US Buildup: A Necessity?" headlines the New York Times, citing George Will-style alternatives such as fighting Al Qaeda long distance, via intelligence, Predator drones, and US special forces. The Times likens the conflict to a "quagmire with a muddled mission," but it then cites a litany of experts from the terrorism-industrial complex explaining why the US can't scale back its commitment. The Washington Post headlines Afghanistan as a "pivotal moment" for Obama. But after raising questions about US strategy, the Post answers them, too, suggesting that the US can't back down because of "the stakes involved and the investment already made." Also in the Post, columnist Anne Applebaum stresses the importance of the war, adding: "Obama needs to cajole and convince [and] campaign, in other words, and campaign hard."

A passel of neoconservatives, under the leadership of the Foreign Policy Initiative -- a group founded earlier this year as a reconstituted version of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Project for a New American Century -- has written to Obama urging him to stand fast. It's ironic, since unlike 2001-2004, when they had plenty of co-thinkers inside government, this time the neocons are on the outside looking in, with few if any friends inside the White House. But that doesn't stop them from providing free advice, calling on the president to "fully resource" the war, i.e., to escalate it. In its letter, the FPI crowd, including Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, warns:

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September 8, 2009

Afghan Apocalypse, Part II

By Robert Dreyfuss

This is the second of two accounts of thinktank evaluations of the war in Afghanistan. The first was a report from the Brookings Institution on Tuesday. Today, the Heritage Foundation.

The highlight of Thursday's event at the Heritage Foundation was analyst Marvin Weinbaum's scathing review of the Afghan elections. Weinbaum, who served as a member of Barack Obama's advisory task force on Afghanistan, is a former analyst for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). His report on the election, where he served as an observer during the vote, contrasted sharply with the happy talk from the administration and from official and semi-official Afghan agencies who presented the vote as an inspiring exercise in democracy.

It wasn't.

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August 27, 2009

Afghanistan Apocalypse

By Robert Dreyfuss

Yesterday afternoon at the Brookings Institution, four analysts portrayed a bleak and terrifying vision of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan in the wake of the presidential election. All four were hawkish, reflecting a growing consensus in the Washington establishment that the Afghanistan war is only just beginning.

Their conclusions: (1) A significant escalation of the war will be necessary to avoid utter defeat. (2) Even if tens of thousands of troops are added to the US occupation, it won't be possible to determine if the US/NATO effort is succeeding until eighteen months later. (3) Even if the United States turns the tide in Afghanistan, no significant drawdown of US forces will take place until five years have passed.

The experts at the panel were Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran and adviser to four presidents, who chaired President Obama's Afghan task force; Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert and adviser to General David Petraeus; Tony Cordesman, a conservative military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Kim Kagan, head of the Institute for the Study of War.

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August 26, 2009

'Iraq Will Be A Colony of Iran'

By Robert Dreyfuss

Iraq's Shiite religious parties, most with ties to Iran, have reestablished a political bloc called the Iraqi National Alliance. Among its founders are Ahmad Chalabi, the revered darling of US neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute; Muqtada al-Sadr, the brooding, mercurial mullah who has mysteriously retreated to Qom, Iran's religious capital, for quick-study lessons on how to become an ayatollah; and, of course, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, one of the founders of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which has changed its name but not its spots. SCIRI, the anchor of the new coalition, is now called the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), but it still acts as an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which founded it in 1982, and its paramilitary Badr Brigade -- also a part of the new Iraqi alliance -- is a terrorist unit that operates pro-Iran death squads in Iraq.

Let's sort this out.

First of all, although Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has so far opted not to join the pan-Shiite religious alliance, American Pollyannas who see Maliki as a nationalist, pro-American ally are wrong. Like the new INA alliance, Maliki is in thrall to the Iranians, too, only slightly less so. His secretive, cult-like Dawa Party -- which has split and split again -- provides nearly all of his inner-circle allies and advisers, and according to Iraqi sources Maliki is heavily vested in ties to Iran and its intelligence services. He shrewdly, though unconvincingly, positioned himself and his new party, State of Law, as a pro-unity, nationalist party during the January provincial elections, but although Maliki tried to find allies among secular Iraqis, religious Sunnis, and Kurds, nearly all of his votes came from Arab Shiites. He got votes from Iraqis who were unhappy with their country's religious-right drift and who rejected ISCI and its allies, in part by lavishing patronage to newly created tribal councils in the Shiite-majority provinces. As a result, Maliki has been riding high of late, and a well-placed former Iraqi official told me that Maliki felt strong enough to tell the founders of the Iraqi National Alliance that he'd refuse to join unless they let him run the show, with a guarantee that he'd be reelected as prime minister if the Alliance wins a majority in the January, 2010, election. Maliki may or may not have overestimated his strength, but in any case he may decide to join the Alliance at a later date -- or, alternately, he might join them after the election in a coalition government. In either case, Iran will be the big winner, especially as US forces move out.

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August 25, 2009

Washington Post Flops

By Robert Dreyfuss

This is a media rant. I'm not one of those people who are constantly berating the media (the so-called "mainstream media") for their failings. However, for quite a while I've been watching the spiraling downward of the Washington Post coverage of international affairs. But today they hit a new low.

The Saturday, August 22, edition of the Post contains not a single article -- count 'em, zero -- on anything relating to the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, or the ongoing crisis in Iran.

By way of contrast, the New York Times carried a page one piece on the aftermath of the election in Afghanistan, a lead piece in its international section on the Iranian crisis, focusing on President Ahmadinejad's problems in assembling a Cabinet for his second term, and a lengthy piece sorting out the pieces left over from the enormous bombings that devastated downtown Baghdad on Wednesday.

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August 22, 2009

Fixing Afghanistan

By Robert Dreyfuss

Some thoughts on Afghanistan, now that the election's come and gone.

I don't usually find inspiration in the pages of the Washington Times, are rarely if ever in the writings of Tony Blankley, the former spokesman for Newt Gingrich, but his recent column on the mess in Afghanistan struck me as intelligent and provocative. It's called "Empower the local tribal chiefs," and it makes sense to me. Blankley says that the United States is fast making enemies in Afghanistan of the very tribesmen who expelled the USSR, and he makes this essential point about the faulty thinking behind US strategy there:

"It would appear that a policy that calls for substantially increased troop strength for both the American and Afghan forces implies a policy that aspires to build a strong central government in Kabul capable of permanently suppressing the Taliban. But the long history of Afghanistan suggests that, unlike Iraq (or Japan and Germany after World War II), Afghanistan is not likely to accept a strong central government."

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August 21, 2009

Iraq Explodes

By Robert Dreyfuss

The news from the war capitals isn't good. In Kabul, the Taliban is carrying out attacks at the very center of Afghanistan's capital, rocketing the grounds of the presidential palace, launching suicide bombs at Kabul convoys, and last week setting off huge bombs on the heavily guarded road between the US embassy and the presidential palace.

But today I'm focusing on Iraq, where today bombers set off near-simultaneous truck bombs that devasted the Iraqi foreign ministry and finance ministry, killing 100 people and injuring at least 600, on opposite sides of the Tigris River. The entire heart of the Iraqi capital is in shock. At the foreign ministry, an official told the New York Times, "The whole ministry is destroyed."

It's probably the most significant bombings in Baghdad since the attacks on the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations offices in 2003.

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August 19, 2009