Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
I don't think that we can allow Iran to have a chokehold over the international economy and the Gulf. Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bullork and the Miller center of Public affairs at the University of Virginia. I'm Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, non resident fellow at the Miller center and a Bulwark contributor. I'm joined by my partner in all things strategery, Elliot Cohen, professor emeritus of strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and an Atlantic contributing writer. Elliot, how are you on this somewhat chilly Friday? It hasn't been quite as warm as advertised, at least where I'm sitting.
- [00:47]
B
Well, I like it. I wish it was cold and wet and rainy with high winds, but that's because I'm from Boston. But actually it's it's really nice. We're, we've been looking at our freshly planted garden and our the consultant who helped put it in said, don't worry, once you get a week's worth of warm weather, that thing's going to explode. So listen, we have a we have a very large agenda today. I'm going to begin for our Jack Asery segment, except this time I'm going to begin not with Jack Asri, but this is really more of the Useful Idiot Award. And my my target today is Nick Kristof, who wrote a an article in the New York Times which is this long and quite ferocious indictment of sexual war crimes, sexual crimes committed by the Israel Defense Forces and their prison service. And this has aroused a bit of a furore, to be clear. I think everybody acknowledges there have been abuse of prisoners, including sexual abuse in Israeli prisons. The Israeli military itself has jailed people for that, as happens in American prisons and as unfortunately has also happened and been kinds of things have been committed by American soldiers, British soldiers, Canadian soldiers and others. But he really makes it out to be something that is massive and a matter of policy. And he really is, you know, does basically in effect says it's the equivalent of what happened on October 7th in which as an Israeli report that was released that was actually released the day after. He says the timing is a coincidence. That may be the case I don't know document. I mean the October 7th was really systematic. The thing the thing about his story though, which has really caused outrage, interestingly, particularly on the Israeli center left, think about journalists like Haviv Reddigor are a number of things in it which are so problematic. That Useful Idiot is the kindest thing one can say about it, there are two items in particular. First, he. The main human rights organization that he cites, most of his sources are unnamed, of course, is something called the Euromed Human Rights Monitor, which is based in Switzerland. Now, what's interesting about this is it's founded and its current chairman is a man named Rami Abdu, who the Israelis have long designated as a Hamas operative. There's a very good story in free press by Eli Lake about this, although there's also a very long article in Quillet and Aviv Redigor on X and his podcast. Also the Wall Street Journal has covered it. So on October 8, Rami Abdu posted the following on X. In this battle Palestine offered the elite of its youth and men on the path of freedom and dignity. Succeeding generations will remember you and history will immortalize you as nightly heroes who forged for us a pure glory untainted by the mud. Preserve their names well and teach the tales of their immortal valor to your children and grandchildren. That's to the mob of murderers and rapists that Hamas unleashed on October 7th of, of 2023, killing over 1200 people and committing really mass and systemic rape. The other thing is he had a. There's a story in there which he does not source, certainly by name, that the Israelis have dogs trained to rape Palestinians. Now, there was a response from a lot of people saying that's not actually false, physically possible, including a whole bunch of statements by dog handlers. And he wrote back a kind of a snarky, not to say snotty X saying, well, this is documented in three medical journals, psy. And I quote, when it turns out a number of doctors kind of began, he didn't say which journal articles they were. Other people began digging them up and they were all actually about bestiality, that is to say, where the humans were initiating things. And even those, you know, as the articles make clear, it's not even clear that these things actually happened. And the, the basic view of the dog handler seems to be this is, this just isn't really possible. And, and the thing that I guess that gets me about this is, you know, obviously the bad stuff has happened and Israelis know it, and the best Israelis are anguished about it. But this goes way beyond that. And, and I find it particularly galling, I have to say, that the, that the New York Times editorial page, which if you remember, fired a bunch of people for the crime of tolerating a potential op ed by Senator Tom Cotton, is just standing by this, standing by reporting, which is obviously deeply, deeply problematic. So like I said the nicest thing I'm going to call him is useful idiot. Over to you for some jackassery.
- [06:32]
A
Well, just one quick comment on all of this, and I think the point you made at the outset is crucial here. There have been cases of abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israelis. There have been cases of abuse in Gaza by Israeli troops. There's been a terribly unsettling pattern of abuse of Palestinians in the west bank by settlers that is deeply troubling, I think, to people who support Israel, or should be. The problem is when you get excesses like this that you've described, poorly sourced, tendentious accounts, et cetera, it makes it all too easy for those who would like to whitewash all of that to do so by saying, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan from his debate with Jimmy Carter, there you go again, and wish it all away. And so the reality is bad enough that we have to confront from time to time, as you point out, Abu Ghraib, other things like that without kind of inventing things that didn't happen. So much jackassery, you know, as we come on, the Justice Department is about to make a settlement with President Trump, even though he's on both sides of the transaction to deal with the leak of his tax returns to the New York Times by a non governmental contractor who's already serving jail time for what he did. And it's going to be a, you know, going to lead to, he's going to drop his suit before a judge could throw it out. And, and they're gonna create a truth and reconciliation commission for anybody, quote, unquote, you know, targeted by the weaponization of the Justice Department by the Biden administration. It's gonna be a $1.7 billion fund to which Trump gets to appoint all the trustees, can remove them at will. There's no transparency on the process, how they're gonna do this, who they're gonna give the money to. It's anyway, you know, that would be an easy target. Or maybe Kash Patel, you know, who took a snorkeling trip while on official travel to Hawaii around the USS Arizona, which is, I'm sure most of our listeners and viewers know, is hallowed ground after the attack on Pearl harbor in 1941. That would be a great nominee. You know, I would point out the Wall Street Journal, I think maybe listening in on our podcast last week ran a piece after we talked about the hollowing out of American diplomacy. And the diplomatic service pointed out that there are 100 crucial ambassadorships that have not yet had an appointee named by the administration, including in the Gulf and including Russia and Ukraine. But I prefer to defend one of our own colleagues and a friend of ours, Robert Caram, a senior aide to Senator Mitch McConnell who now chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. And President Trump, singled out Robert for approaching McConnell in a hearing and whispering in his ear a screed on Truth Social about what a terrible person Robert is. He's a never Trumper approved by Obama's people without.
- [10:33]
B
Who served in the first Trump administration, let us point out.
- [10:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, someone who served his own administration as Assistant Secretary for International Security affairs in the Department of Defense and for a long part of his service was actually acting under secretary, the position I once once held, a distinguished public servant who we've worked with over the years, both in the executive branch and in his congressional hats. It's absurd, and it's aimed at someone who is trying to remedy the mess that Trump has made of defense funding. I mean, McConnell is trying to get the Department of Defense additional resources that it does need. They have made a mess of this with dividing up the money in the budget, some of it in the base budget, some of it in. In the reconciliation package that they're trying to put together. There's no detail in it. So members of Congress don't know what they're voting for and whether it's actually going to the things that members of Congress rightly are concerned about. It's just, it's unbelievable. And it's, I think, really symbolic of the broader mismanagement of the Department of Defense that that has gone on in the Hegseth era. We've picked on Pete Hegseth a lot on Shield of the Republic, but what's going on is very serious business. The US Army Department of the army is about to run out of money in part because of five or six billion dollars that have been wasted on these National Guard deployments to major urban areas and sending troops to the border. NBC has reported that the department has been incapable of actually getting munitions that are sorely needed and which they keep whining about on contract. It's really just a terrible picture of gross mismanagement. And his attack on someone who's actually trying to fix the problem is just symptomatic of the disorder and chaos it is, actually.
- [12:44]
B
You've been on a writing streak this week. We'll talk about one of your pieces at the end of the show. But you had a wonderful piece, I thought, in the Dispatch, talking about the Reagan defense buildup, which I think is part of a separate effort with the Reagan forum. And the, you know, I think the, the thing that really comes through, and we should post it in the show notes, is this is what happens when you have a well managed defense buildup, which, as you also point out, in many ways has its origins in the Carter years and some very talented leadership by Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense, and William Perry, Under Secretary of Defense. And you know, the, and, and the fact is, as you again correctly point out, the US military has been living off the Reagan buildup for 30 or 40 years now. And that's a problem, actually, because, you know, the basic items of equipment are now long in the tooth and you can only modernize them or modify them so long. I mean, some of them you continue to produce, but you produce them with different modifications. So you're right. And, and it is, you know, we, we have dunked quite a bit on, on Pete Hegseth, but I think you're, you're absolutely correct to call our attention to what happens when you have systemic, poor, incompetent management. Could we move on? Unless there's something else you want to say about that to Iran?
- [14:20]
A
Yeah, well, yes, we can move on. I just would point out that, as you said, Harold Brown, Bill Perry did enormous service to the country by investing in some incredibly important capabilities. I quote Bill Perry in the piece himself as saying, we started to develop all these capabilities, precision guided munitions, stealth technology, but we had no idea where the money was going to come from to fund them. And it was only in the Reagan administration where the money was put to actually procuring these capabilities at scale, which allowed us to, as you say, benefit from the buildup for some 40 years. Maybe one way to sort of segue from that into Iran is to talk about something that you were quoted on in the New York Times, which is the appropriate role of the chairman in briefing the President on these issues. So why don't you explain kind of what, what you said and we can go from there and then build out into the larger questions that face us with regard to the war.
- [15:40]
B
Right. So there was a piece by Greg Jaffe, who's a very good journalist who we both know at the New York Times, formerly at the Washington Post, and the issue was General Kaine and how forthcoming or not forthcoming he's been in public about American strategy. There was, there was something which I thought was actually kind of a distraction. He said, you know, he hasn't been talking about the Iranian center of gravity. That's a term of art derived from Clausewitz, which I, I won't go into here. I think that's a bit of a distraction. And the question is, well, is that what he's supposed to be doing? Some people said yes. Among them, Heidi Urban, retired Army colonel here in town. And I said no. My strong view, actually, is it. It's okay. The chairman has to respond to Congress. If, you know, if Congress asks for his honest opinions and his honest assessments, he absolutely has to do that. I mean, this is a, you know, that's the nature of our system of government. But do I think that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should go around volunteering, you know, our strategic concepts for fighting a war first? I think it's imprudent in the middle of a war to say, yeah, we think the most important thing about Iran is, let's say, the top 100 leaders. Because that does sort of tell the top 100 leaders that if the bombing starts, they really need to make themselves scarce or anything else of that kind. I mean, it's showing more of your hand than you absolutely have to. But in any case, it seems to me it is absolutely the responsibility of the civilian leadership to articulate those kinds of things in public and until. And, and they should not hide behind the military, which off often. What happens, moreover, you know, when you talk about the higher direction of war, and here I really do follow Clausewitz. It's all about politics, wars. You know, Clausewitz famously tells us, is the use of military force to pursue the ends of policy, which means, you know, it's fundamentally a political activity, and it rests on judgments which are at least in large part political. I mean, and are not actually in a. Necessarily in a general's area of expertise. You know, I, I don't expect the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually to be an expert on Iranian internal politics. So, you know, my, my strong view was Cain did the right thing, has done the right thing thus far by not divulging that. The only. The exception I would make is if Congress asks him publicly or, you know, hopefully in closed session, then he has an absolute obligation to be forthcoming. What's your take?
- [18:30]
A
So, you know, I get frequently asked whether I think General Kaine has been, you know, quote, speaking truth to power or telling the President, you know, what he needs to hear, and particularly about risks. A lot of people said, well, President said no one told him that the Iranians might close the strait. And my usual answer is, I'm quite certain that General Kaine has, whenever he's briefed the President talked about whatever risks there are inherent in whatever they were talking about, and that one of the main risks that we have known about collectively, those of us who've been involved in government over the last 40 years, is that Iran might close the strait. And there's. Now, whether the President heard it or not, that's a different, you know, different question. Where it starts to get a little kind of fuzzier, I think, is the issue of whether the president. Whether there's a perception in the department that the chairman might be kind of shading things a little bit. And that's a broader question. It's not just about Cain briefing the president. It's about everything that we see going on in the department. And I worry a little bit that because the survival with President Trump requires you to sometimes either avoid the truth or walk your way around the truth, that there may be a perception that's brewing among officers. I'm thinking 06 is here, colonels, people who are about to maybe become general officers, that the way to get ahead is to keep your head down and not necessarily be completely straight with everything. I don't think that's Cain's fault. I'm not laying blame with him. It's part of just the miasma that's been created by Trump and his hyperbole and his inability to articulate what the objectives are and his inability to understand that tactical accomplishments don't necessarily. It's not math. It doesn't add up to strategic achievement.
- [20:54]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, I may be in a slightly different place than you. I certainly acknowledge the miasma. And, you know, I don't think I'm guilty of paying too many compliments to Trump, although I may have a somewhat. Somewhat higher estimate of some things than you do, which we can discuss that a little bit later. But I think, you know, with Kane, I don't think it's fair to assume that he's not being completely candid with Trump. You don't know. You don't know. And if there's one problem that we've had, I think in assessing all things Trump, it's the unwillingness of so many people to say we really don't know. And. And, you know, I. I think it's really problematic to, you know, assume the worst when you have no evidence whatsoever. And in this case, we just. There is no evidence of what he said in private. You know, my. My guess is, historians being what they are, we will find out, you know, maybe after we're both dead. I don't know. The other thing is I think about the moment when actually you and I first met, which was just before the first Gulf War, when Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And unlike many people who have a very, very warm and high regard for Powell, I don't. And one of the reasons why I don't is I think he consistently stepped over the mark in terms of being a public figure, shaping perceptions of what the war is all about, what are reasonable limits, what are unreasonable limits. I don't think he actually gave very good military advice to the George H.W. bush administration. I think, you know, the fact is that we, we had such incredible overmatch that it didn't matter. And I would rather not have that kind of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, honestly.
- [22:46]
A
Well, I completely agree with that. And I think it's going to be interesting how history treats General Powell, because I think as people go back and look at the record, particularly once, I think a lot of records start to be declassified and more and more now is being declassified on the Bush 41 administration, I think some of this has become more evident. I mean, the fact that he was consistently talking to and leaking to Bob Woodward about what the course of policy should be in the run up to Desert Storm at variance with what the President was pursuing, I think is going to not look good and not stand well in his case, before history. So, I mean, I agree with you that the chairman should not be playing politics and should not be shading, you know, shouldn't be addressing the political objective of a military activity. I think the issue becomes more. Is he telling the President, and we just, as you say, don't know the answer to this, that if we, you know, if we hit X number of targets, we will have achieved, you know, our strategic objective. That's, I think, the question.
- [24:10]
B
And I think, you know, that is, unfortunately, having had a lot of experience with the US Air Force, I think that is the natural predispos. Predisposition of, of pilots, in my experience, is to think of victory in terms of working your way through a target deck. And once you work your way through the target deck, you've won. Listen, before we go to the, the big Iran question that I wanted to ask you, there was another piece which got into the papers, including the Times, but also the Post and others, which I thought we might discuss briefly because I'm sure many of our listeners and viewers have seen it. And it was one which said, okay, intelligence report comes out, shows the Iranians can access 30 of their 33 missile sites which then gets translated effectively into this thing is a failure. And I had some strong reactions to that. But I think in addition to whatever the strong reactions are, it, I think it might be of interest and, and even of use to our viewers and listeners if we talk about how do you read something like that? I mean, how should you interpret something like that when it pops up on your iPad or for those people who are still looking at print, you read it in the newspaper. I mean, there are probably a few people our age and older who, who actually remember things called newspapers. So do you want to start?
- [25:37]
A
You can afford to buy one.
- [25:39]
B
Yeah, well, there's that too. Do you want to start off? And I've got some thoughts on it too, obviously.
- [25:44]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, look, this is a part of a number of leaks that have come out of the intelligence community that have basically suggested that, that the campaign, for instance, against Iran's missile launch and missile inventory capabilities has maybe not been quite as successful as advertised. The 30 out of 33 launch points I think was for anti ship cruise missiles along the Persian Gulf. And I know you will make all the appropriate critical points about. The intelligence community has a tendency to focus on the things that they can measure as opposed to what might actually be the important things. So I think there's that. And there was already pushback today. Brad Cooper, testifying in Congress today said a lot of these numbers, 70% are wrong. He believes that, you know, the numbers are, are better. For instance, he was saying we've wiped out 90% of Iran's 8,000 minds. So I guess, you know, there are a couple of points here. One, there are always deficiencies. First of all, assessments are assessments, they're not fact. And some of our colleagues in the intelligence community, not all, some have the view that only intelligence community professionals who are high priests can look at the information and they reach conclusions. And once they've reached a conclusion, it's the right conclusion. And my view as a consumer always was, yeah, I'm interested in your assessment, but I really want to see the raw intelligence. I want to see the photo intelligence, I want to see the sigint, I want to see this, the that, and then I want to see if I, you know, agree with your assessment because I might weigh the evidence differently than you do. I might put more emphasis, I might put more emphasis, for instance on human intelligence than I do on, you know, what you've gotten from overhead imagery or vice versa, depending on the quality of the sourcing and what have you. So you once wrote A terrific book, Supreme Command, about the importance of political leaders interrogating military officers about military plans in war and not just assume that the military professionals know what they're doing, which I think is right. And I think the same is true of intelligence. Policymakers need to interrogate the intelligence. They need to really get down into it. One of the charges against the late Dick Cheney was that he was trying to manipulate intelligence. And from years of working with him, I know that the answer was he wasn't trying to manipulate the intelligence, he was trying to understand the intelligence. And he read it more closely, I think, than a lot of analysts did in terms of getting into the raw intelligence and looking at it himself and then asking him, well, why do you prefer this piece of intelligence over that? Because it's never clear cut. You're trying to take disparate pieces. It's not that different from being an ancient historian. You have a coin, you've got an inscription, you've got a couple of passages from Thucydides, who we will return to later in the show, and, and then you try and interpret what that means. And the same is true of intelligence, honestly. So there's that element to it. There is also the element, though, that our military does tend to overestimate what it's accomplished for all the reasons you were talking about. They tend to look at war as inputs rather than outputs. And so when Admiral Cooper says we've destroyed 90% of Iran's 8,000 mines, I would point out that number one, that 8,000 number which he used in public, which I had heard privately a few weeks ago, is actually a little bit higher than the 6,000 number that they were publicly carrying a while ago. And that even if you wipe out 90% of 8,000 mines, that leaves the Iranians with 800 mines, which is since they don't even have to lay a mine to actually have impact in the Gulf, they just have to suggest that they have laid a mine. 800 is a lot.
- [30:46]
B
So I agree with all that. I guess I would add this is really, again, for the benefit of people who don't haven't marinated in this stuff over a period of years. I think there are four big questions you should always ask. The first question is, cui bono? Who, who benefits from this leak? Sometimes it can be the administration, sometimes could be an opponent, something. It could be a piece of the bureaucracy, it could be in the intelligence community itself. But, but the point is, it is, in my experience at least, it is never the case that some intrepid reporter, you know, somehow managed to infiltrate themselves into the old executive office building, you know, rummage through the safes and pick something out and exfiltrate himself and then, and then publish it. Somebody's leaking something for a reason to make a point. And, and by definition this is a tiny, whatever report you're citing, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the stuff that comes in over the transom. I mean I, I tried to be selective when I was reading intelligence, but I was always looking at a, every morning about a 2 or 3 inch stack of paper you were probably reading even more. And, and that was after being selective and after having AIDS go through stuff and, and screen it. So that's really the first thing you have to say. What, why this particular piece? Now I think the second question want to ask is the source, to the extent you know, the source of the leak, or to put it differently, did the reporter see the whole intelligence document or are they merely relying on hearsay from somebody who calls them up and says, you know what this report says, X, Y and Z? Again, my experience, reporters don't actually want to be caught with highly classified material in their possession because then they have legal problems. So I think that's, that's the second thing. You know, how do you know this is actually an accurate representation of what the report has to say? Third thing is the common sense test, and this really goes more to the interpretation.