RUTHFULLY YOURS

While reading Obama’s Wars, I was struck by the fact that – as the fate of the war with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the AfPak unfolded – a primary player was noticeably absent in Bob Woodward’s insider account of a young Obama administration’s crafting of foreign policy.

For those closely following the dawn of the Obama White House, it became apparent that the “messaging” of the Obama brand was paramount in the eyes of the team’s handlers. On the subject of the inherited wars in Muslim majority countries and the prospects of generating peace in the Middle East and Central Asia, Dennis Ross rose as the first messenger.

The message of Ross was plain: reconciliation through negotiation – in a word, Engagement. In this respect, the statecraft of the Obama administration was the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood over the Bush Policy and the completion of a schism within the counterterrorism fellowship of the West.

The Bush policy on the matter was simple: Never negotiate with terrorists. The reasoning behind this policy was twofold. First, in general, setting the precedent of negotiating with one villain virtually guarantees the rise of more terrorists who seek gain by violent means. And second, more specifically, all Muslim terrorist organizations operate with the aspiration of legitimization.

Legitimacy, in the Muslim terror frame, can be accomplished in three distinct ways: (1) through lauding by the world’s incited Muslim extremists for rising as a force of jihad to be reckoned with due to the principles on which they stand and die as shaheed; (2) by forcing “the little Satan”, Israel, to negotiate from a position of weakness by laying siege to the state and holding its people hostage in a twisted game of pirate diplomacy; or (3) by forcing “the great Satan”, the United States of America, to seek the negotiation table after being weakened on the battlefield or after rationalizing the claims of the jihadists as legitimate grievances, thereby verifying the validity of the revisionist narrative history of the jihadi cause.

Dennis Ross felt he could solve the impasse between the United States and “extremist” Islam’s elite with a hybrid option of statecraft, molding the hawkish stance of the neoconservative Bush camp with the “Realism” of the Jimmy Carter doves, who held that negotiations without preconditions were essential to establishing a dialogue that would, or, in the best of all possible worlds, could, yield a cessation of hostilities. Ross called this hybrid diplomatic paradigm “New Realism” in his May 2009 book release Myths, Illusions and Peace, co-authored with Fellow and Washington Institute for Near East Peace (WINEP) associate, David Makovsky.

By 2008, the hate-Bush messaging campaigns of the agitated left in America, led by Daily Kos and Media Matters, had softened the ground for a transition to New Realism in the White House. The result of the softening was an internal government memo, instructing U.S. administration heads to refrain from conflating Islam with terrorism in official correspondence and publication. In effect, then, under Bush’s watch, the concept of “jihad” was scrubbed from the lexicon of U.S. Government documents relating to the terror threat – America’s leaders sought to reframe the threat, refusing to accept the reality that Islamic Radicalism and jihadi indoctrination was inherent in the laws and morals of the religion, Islam, itself.

At the field level of counterterrorism studies, seeing the writing on the wall of the impending Democrat ascension to the White House after two years of Reid and Pelosi holding the Congressional gavel, experts and fellows in the think tanks of the West began utilizing seemingly moderate or reform-minded Muslim Brotherhood contacts in their efforts to track and map Islamic-styled terrorists, in hopes that the multicultural shift in their stance would guarantee more grant dollars from the U.S. government for their research projects.

One noteworthy example of this trend was the Dennis Ross associate Matthew Levitt, a Senior Fellow at WINEP and director of the Stein Program on Terrorism. Levitt, who in 2006 authored a pioneering work exposing the linkage between the Islamic call (da’wa) and Palestinian terror, entitled Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, led the effort to seek clarity with Muslim Brotherhood insiders while working with the U.S. Treasury to uncover the terror financing apparatus, hawaladar networks and crime syndicates of the Middle East, the GCC, Central Asia and extremist pockets throughout the world. Yet, though America’s technocrat researchers were tracking terror dollars, by the year 2008, without a lexicon that could link Islam with terrorism in U.S. Intelligence and Homeland Security documents, Shariah Compliant Finance remained hidden from the public in America as well as from the U.S. leadership.

Upon election to the White House, President Obama offered Dennis Ross a blank check – a position of his choosing – within his administration. With the guidance of the New Realism of Dennis Ross, President Obama institutionalized the self-censoring lexicon shifts on Islamic Radicalism across the counterterrorism outlets of the State Department and the alphabet soup of U.S. Homeland Security, handicapping U.S. officials in the execution of their office. The enemies of America that attacked on 9/11 were no longer jihadists or Islamic terrorists, they were simply “extremists” that happened to be Muslim – we were at war with al Qaeda not Islam.

After a brief stint by Ross under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, the schism among the counterterrorism researchers and theorists in the West was actualized upon Ross’ rise to the White House executive position of Senior Director of the Central Region in June of 2009, one month following the release of his book Myths.

Those fellows and academics in the West who sought to work with Muslim Brotherhood moderates in the counterterror field sought to “Regionalize, Engage, and Reconcile” the al Qaeda styled terrorist threats.   The idea was relatively easy to grasp – by regionalizing the threat, the severity of the problem in terms of public and media perception is diminished. For instance, on the whole, the presence of Islamic terrorists throughout the European Region is very small; and, if one looks across the Middle East, only 5% or so of the land can be considered hotspots of extremism. By placing this perspective on the problem, rationalizing engagement and negotiation with a “small” enemy such as the Taliban is a matter of lexicon shifts and diplomatic talks – enter Dennis Ross’ New Realism in which secret back channel discussions are the order of the day. Reconciliation as the exit strategy for the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia was, then, in the end, a matter of messaging, born in the think tanks of America at the sunset of the Bush tenure.

It must be reckoned with that Dennis Ross did not rise as the U.S. Ambassador to Iran, he rose as the Senior Director of the Central Region – Obama’s White House had regionalized the threat. It is only through the prism of regionalization, then, that the decision to replace General McKiernan with General McChrystal makes sense. The Afghanistan mission was being reframed as an “AfPak” problem. And while Bob Woodward writes off the McChrystal assessment team as a number of researchers who couldn’t find anything better to do during the summer, the resultant assessment-centric change in the rules of engagement after the review, which accompanied the promised March 27^th troop buildup and entry into Helmand Province in late June and early July of 2009, was the first salvo in the Dennis Ross “engagement” messaging mission, working toward reconciliation with the Taliban.

Woodward’s single aside in Obama’s Wars on the ROE changes in the Afghan theatre are lacking the pivotal context of Ross’ influence when one considers the heated discussion of the matter in the American media.

The hybrid option of statecraft envisioned by Dennis Ross was based on maximizing American “leverage” in geopolitical matters. The methodology showed its face on multiple occasions in the young Obama administration’s foreign policy. One prime example of a Ross-styled world stage decision was the scrapping of the Missile Defense Shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, designed by the Bush administration to protect Europe from Russian and Iranian aggressions. Ross’ book Myths discusses the possibility of shelving the program as a means of placing pressure on Europe to bring stronger economic restrictions on Iran, while developing secret talks with the Iranians. Rather than direct talks without preconditions or track two talks that would set the stage for eventual summits, Ross’ hybrid option recommended “trying to set up a direct, secret back channel.” This move would “protect each side from premature exposure and would not require either side to publicly explain such a move before it was ready.” In short, the process of deterring Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a New Realist theory that would play in the dark as a counterpoint to the neocon drive for regime change in Tehran. Transparency would be sacrificed for the possibility of leveraging behavior change from Iran’s leadership.

Engagement, in the Ross mold, then, would require a U.S. government that was willing to mislead its people on matters of national security to secure shady, backroom deals with zero oversight from Congress, in a move to provide the U.S. diplomatic corps with an undue level of power in coddling enemies of state.  By September 2009, the Iranian leadership had no doubt read and debated Myths, Illusions & Peace and launched the secret discussions by sending a letter to the Council on Foreign Relations agreeing to rise as the superpower of the Middle Eastern region through a process of engagement.

CFR’s passage of the Iranian letter, claiming the Shi’a Islamic Establishment’s role as hegemon in the Middle East, to the Obama White House in early September 2009 led to the initiation of U.S. engagement with Iran on October 1, 2010 at Geneva’s P5 plus 1 talks. As a researcher at the time, following the think tank wars for influence over the Obama administration’s policy decisions, the rise of Iran as a “rational” actor in the intelligentsia of western diplomacy was a startling development – preparing for Iranian hegemony in the central region, after all, would require the American public to recognize Iran as a slighted ally in the war on terror.  Modern Orwellian doublespeak, it seemed, was a matter of historic revision, alone.

This, all, in the shadow of the June 2009 Iranian street demonstrations, in which a silent Obama administration expressed regret for a loss of life rather than admonishing a dictatorial Islamic Establishment in Tehran – a response only possible if 30 years of terror sponsorship was ignored, a regret only possible if the Bush “axis of evil” logic was rejected in principle by the Obama White House. Indeed, for a glimpse of the Ross and Makovsky’s revisionist whitewashing of the events of the last 30 years in relation to Iran, one needs only to turn to Dore Gold’s 2009 release The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West and compare the history with Myths, Illusions & Peace.

The fallout of these events and academic revisionism displayed by the influential Ross is completely missed by Woodward’s fly on the wall accounting of the AfPak troubles of a young president; however, Iran’s diplomatic presence is, today, being felt on the matter.

On Monday, October 18, 2010 high-level diplomatic talks on the prospects of a future endgame for the war in Afghanistan began with, for the first time, Iranian participation. Richard Holbrooke (pictured) figures prominently in Woodward’s release; his “contact group” methodology of diplomacy was designed to create a regional peace, bringing all of Afghanistan’s neighbors to the table as stakeholders. Iran was the missing link in Holbrooke’s strategy; and, on cue, Ross’ engagement delivered Iran to the table at the critical moment when the July 2011 drawdown date for U.S. combat troops began to look like a pipe dream, with troops jammed up in Marjah and NATO supply lines burning in Pakistan along the Torkham and Chaman corridors.

According to an AP report, “Iran sent its special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Qanezadeh.” Further, the story quotes Holbrooke as telling reporters, “This is a meeting on Afghanistan and it is restricted to Afghanistan.” Interestingly, he continued on, “What we are discussing here is not affected by, nor will it affect, the bilateral issues that are discussed elsewhere regarding Iran.” But considering the Ross understanding of “secret” talks, can America believe its Ambassador? Moreover, is it not a natural turn of events in the engagement agenda of Dennis Ross to expect the Taliban to hold negotiations with Afghanistan’s President Karzai as was reported on Wednesday, October 20, 2010? Considering the fact that the Iranian government has been implicated by American and NATO commanders on the ground for supplying weaponry to the Taliban, is it wise to have the regime at the table in the discussion of the transition? And more importantly, how intimate are the discussions regarding American plans in the region with Iran during the secret talks? Can American lives be lost due to small leaks in the information stream on the Iranian side of the coin?

These issues were neither foreshadowed nor discussed in Woodward’s release Obama’s Wars due to the omission of Dennis Ross.

Geopolitical and diplomatic context for the actions of the cast of characters in Woodward’s book could have been provided, partially, through an understanding of the architecture instituted by Dennis Ross through an overall inspection of his leveraging methodology of engagement statecraft.

Interestingly, following the pivotal rise of Ross, a second messenger arose to uncommon power early on in the Obama White House. Pradeep Ramamurthy (above) rose to head a shadowy four-person team within the ranks of the White House elite known as the Global Engagement Directorate. The G.E.D. was born on May 26, 2009, beneath Obama’s Counterterrorism Advisor, General Jim Jones.   The New Realism of Dennis Ross was now an Executive institution, and within a year and a day, its damaging impact would be felt from Obama’s June 2009 Cairo Address to Secretary Clinton’s release of the 2010 National Security Strategy.

Ramamurthy and the G.E.D. are, as is Ross, curiously absent from the Woodward account.   Were these calculated omissions the price of full access? Who was the source of Bob Woodward’s September 2009 leak of the McChrystal Assessment? Could it have been Dennis Ross? Ramamurthy? Jim Jones kept a little black journal, sure…but Ross and, by extension, Ramamurthy are the unseen peddlers of pull in Obama’s Wars.