Kenneth Pollack

A few minutes ago in a speech before the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and NSC official, attacked Kenneth Pollack, the "thinker" at Saban/Brookings who served up the Iraq war on a silver platter for liberals. Leverett said Pollack had made a "deeply-flawed and flat-out wrong case regarding WMD," which led him to assert in his book The Threatening Storm that invading Iraq was "the conservative option."

The speech was remarkable because Leverett once worked alongside Pollack at Brookings. Sort of like Anatol Lieven, who had to parachute out of Carnegie when they didn't want to hear what he had to say about Israel. "People at the thinktanks have courage somewhere between a seaslug and sheep-guts," Lieven told me earlier this year. What a pleasure to watch the war-party delaminate.

But how amazing is it that Pollack maintains credibility? "Now he's doing it on Iran," Leverett notes, pointing to a Dec. 8 Op-Ed in the Times. And at a CFR event not long ago, Pollack was all-but-praising neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht's burn-down-the-house option for Iran.

Richard Perle is back! The man is resilient. He was around in the '70s and '80s and, between journeys to his sock in France, the Prince of Darkness was sure around in the enfant siecle as well. These days he is holding forth on Baker-Hamilton in the pages of the Times and the WSJ. I.e., space they could be giving to, say, Kenneth Pollack or Ken Adelman, is going to him.

I find it's wise to keep a copy of Perle's book An End to Evil (penned with fellow AEIer David Frum three years ago), close at hand. Has helped me through many a crisis.

"The gloomsayers... have been proven wrong when they predicted the United States would sink into a forlorn quagmire in Iraq... The aftermath of war is always messy and often bloody... Post-Saddam Iraq has emerged from more than three decades of totalitarian rule and mass murder... Should anyone have been surprised that it took the United States a few weeks to get the lights working?..."

Just how wrong were the gloomsayers?

"Like General Barry McCaffrey, they predicted a military disater in which the United States could potentially suffer, 'bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties.'"

Public broadcasting stars Terry Gross and Judy Woodruff have both now paddled Jimmy Carter for the "provocative" title of his book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. In each case the gentlemanly grandfatherly prez bore up beautifully under the treatment, stuck to his guns. I chose the title deliberately, Carter said, because Americans don't understand the situation in the Occupied Territories. In fact, he went on, conditions in the West Bank are "worse" than apartheid. Which is just what a South African church worker told me on my visit to Hebron last summer. I.e., the word "apartheid" is not provocative, but descriptive.

While we're on provocative matters, let's talk about Robert Satloff, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Kenneth Pollack, of Brookings's Saban Center, holding forth on television about Syria. Satloff all but dismisses the idea of engaging Syria. Pollack says (with his usual indirection), There will be a high price for the U.S. to pay.

Syria may finally be the Elian Gonzalez moment I've been waiting for on the Israel lobby—the moment when U.S. interests and Israeli interests part sharply, for all to see. It is now a commonplace to hear Republican congressmen saying We should talk to Syria. I.e., any idiot knows we should be talking to Syria, to try and save lives in Iraq.

It may not be in Israel's interest to talk to Syria. That is, Israel has time and again declined Syria's overtures in the last few years. For whatever reason, foolish arrogant or visionary, because they don't want to part with the Golan, or think they have pulverized Hezbollah, Israel's leaders don't want to talk to Syria. Their call.

This is a good line in the sand: Israel doesn't want to talk to Syria, the U.S. maybe does. Where do you stand, Ken Pollack, of the Saban Center (a thinktank funded by an Israeli)? And Satloff of WINEP, hirer of Israeli generals? Are Israeli and American interests always congruent? Now that's a good question for public broadcasting.

The Observer did what I wanted a newspaper to do: reporter Jason Horowitz stuck Israel into the Connecticut Senate race. He asked Lieberman how Israel played out in the politics of the primary, and Lieberman said (in a lovely allusion to Rabbi Hillel's famous trope on the Torah), "That's too big a question to answer on one foot." Then Lamont ran away as though his hair was on fire. He told Horowitz that since 9/11 he's come to admire that "feisty" democracy, Israel. Of course many observers of the race regard the Lamont groundswell as drawing life from subterranean criticism of Israel. Some supporters of Lieberman are angered by this, and point to what they see as antisemitic comments on Kos. The one statement Horowitz quotes is inflammatory—all about Lieberman's Israel "graft"—but it does touches on what is central to understanding the Israel issue in American politics: money. This issue should not be dismissed as antisemitic; it should be dealt with head-on, because it is so important. Here, for instance, is Harvard Professor Steven Walt, till lately a dean at the Kennedy School of Government, talking about money in his 2005 book, Taming American Power:

Israel is able to obtain U.S. support and influence U.S. policy because it receives sustained political support from the comparatively wealthy, well-educated, well-connected, and politically mobilized community of Jewish Americans, and from other social groups allied with them.

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The Times has a fine piece today on Hillary Clinton that mentions that Jonathan Tasini is going to primary her over her dismal Iraq policy.

This touches on the LA Times articleI mentioned a couple days back that says that neoconservatism is not limited to the Bush Administration, that neocons are a significant part of the Democratic Party braintrust. By neoconservatism, I mean here the belief that using force to change regimes in the Arab world is a good thing, and essential to establishing stability in the Mideast. This doctrine is widely held among even Dems who call themselves liberals, from Lieberman to Berman. It's important to identify this strain of thinking because if you have any hope of winning political campaigns based on an antiwar policy, or a liberal internationalist realist policy (the various antimilitarist ideas that are in the air, from Fukuyama to Lieven), you have to attack this thinking and offer an alternative.  read more »

Put simply, more than half the country has come around to the dovish position that the Iraq war was a mistake. Who will address that majority constituency? And how? If the Democratic party is going to do it, it will have to sort out those who favor the use of force to change regimes from those who don't. This is hard political work. Especially if you believe, as I do, that it means stating forcefully: we must have a more evenhanded approach to Israel/Palestine. Howard Dean tried to say that two years ago and then quailed because of the pro-Israel lobby.

The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq , by Kenneth M. Pollack.  read more »