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The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story

by Mark Perry, Foreign Policy, March 13, 2010

On Jan. 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow … and too late.”

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• Behind the Settlements – Daniel Kurtzer – The American Interest Magazine

  Good overview of settlement growth and its illegality by a former US ambassador to Israel (and Egypt).

• Jews sans frontieres: Stupidity and the “peace process”

  A reinterpretation of Mark Perry’s argument about Petraeus.

• Who is Running Egypt While President Mubarak Recovers? | The Middle East Channel

  Nathan Brown.

• LRB · Yonatan Mendel · Hasbara

  BIIGFTJ?

• Final destination Iran?

  “Hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs are being shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran.”

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Paul Woodward of ‘War in Context’ has a good post, “Israel is putting American lives at risk”, that expands on the info that Mark Perry blogged Saturday, about the briefers whom Gen. Petraeus despatched recently to go tell JCS chair Mike Mullen that the administration’s Israel-Palestine policy is putting American lives at risk.

Woodward got Perry to discuss the circumstances behind his post a little more, and to give his assessment of what Petraeus is up to.

Perry told Woodward:

My sense is that General Petraeus neither likes nor dislikes Israel: but he loves his country and he wants to protect our soldiers. The current crisis in American relations with Israel is not a litmus test of General Petraeus’s loyalty to Israel, but of his, and our, concern for those Americans in uniform in the Middle East.

It is, perhaps, a sign of the depth of “the Biden crisis” that every controversy of this type seems to get translated into whether or not America and its leaders are committed to Israel’s security. This isn’t about Israel’s security, it’s about our security.

Very well said.

This is, of course, another sign of how the discussion over the nature and value of our country’s currently joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel is fermenting in different sections of the U.S. political elite.

As a serving military officer, Petraeus is of course not allowed to take a “political” stand on anything. But he is also the man who as head of Centcom is charged with ensuring that the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops serving in combat zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other portions of the Greater Middle East are not exposed to any unnecessary dangers. And where he sees that Washington’s policies do indeed place U.S. troops in unnecessary danger, he has a duty to speak out through the appropriate channels.

Though in the past I have accused Petraeus of being a grandstander, I think in the present circumstances there is no evidence at all that he did anything to leak the news of his briefings to Mullen (or about his reported request that Israel, currently handled out of EUCOM, nt Centecom, be transferred to his command. That one, Perry wrote, got shot down immediately.)

… Anyway, readers here at JWN might like to note that when I read interesting and significant things I am now trying once again to tag them and get them onto the “Delicious” zone on the right sidebar of the Main Page here for your edification, with a few comments from myself. I realize the Delicious zone is quite far down on the sidebar, but do try to check it from time to time…. In my current redesign, I’ll try to bring it up a lot higher and more accessible.

For now, note that I put the Woodward piece on there yesterday. And today, there is this good roundup of pieces on the current “tipping point”, by Ali Gharib.

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Following up on my previous post on the “Biden Humiliation,” or whatever you want to call this Israeli-US spat, I just came across at this post by Mark Perry at FP’s Middle East Channel — it’s a must read:

On January 16, two days after a killer earthquake hit Haiti, a team of senior military officers from the U.S. Central Command (responsible for overseeing American security interests in the Middle East), arrived at the Pentagon to brief JCS Chairman Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The team had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander David Petraeus to underline his growing worries at the lack of progress in resolving the issue. The 33-slide 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) “too old, too slow…and too late.”

The January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had  ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus’s instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders. “Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling,” a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. “America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding.” But Petraeus wasn’t finished: two days after the Mullen briefing, Petraeus sent a paper to the White House requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command – or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus’s reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged  in the region’s most troublesome conflict.

Read the rest.

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