Candid Panetta Gives Obama Administration Headaches

By Jeremy Herb and Amie Parnes, The Hill

05 February 12

efense Secretary Leon Panetta caused an international stir Wednesday when he said the U.S. would seek to end its combat mission in Afghanistan in 2013, jumping out ahead of both the White House and NATO.

It wasn't the first time that Panetta has made statements in his seven months as defense secretary that sparked headaches for the White House - as well as attacks from President Obama's Republican opponents.

But don't expect Panetta to change his tune anytime soon.

Defense observers and those who have worked with Panetta say that the former congressman, White House chief of staff and budget director will always speak his mind, sometimes on his own time, even if it isn't always diplomatic to do so.

Panetta's off-the-cuff remarks are a sea change from his predecessor, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who spent most of his career in the CIA and was calculated and careful in his public statements.

One administration official who has known Panetta for years said the defense secretary has always been "an independent guy" and leads the Defense Department the same way.

"I don't think he's the most careful speaker," the official said. "He speaks off the cuff. I think it's because he's always been an independent player."

A senior administration official said that Panetta "is a straight shooter who doesn't use inside-the-Beltway jargon when he speaks."

"He's direct and blunt, which has earned him points within the administration, and with Congress, the military and foreign officials," the senior official said. "That's an asset and helps the president when key messages need to be delivered. This isn't about being an independent actor. It's about having an authentic voice on the president's national security team."

The White House found itself having to explain Panetta's remarks after the defense secretary said for the first time Wednesday that the Afghanistan combat mission could end in 2013. Faced with a flurry of questions the following day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney found himself having to "clarify" Panetta's comments.

Nothing had changed, Carney reassured reporters.

Asked if there was any "daylight" between the president and Panetta, Carney replied quickly, "Not at all."

Obama was hammered on the right, as presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said it showed Obama's "naiveté" on foreign policy issues.

Panetta's past statements have also led to Republican fire on Obama.

In December, Panetta said that Israel should "get to the damn table" and negotiate with the Palestinians, prompting a fresh round of Republican criticism that the president wasn't standing together with Israel.

Republicans have repeatedly quoted Panetta on the devastating impact that the $500 billion in defense cuts through sequestration would have on the military as they attack Obama for allowing the cuts to potentially take effect in 2013.

Panetta has also caused some diplomatic dust-ups with his blunt assessments of foreign policy issues. It happened twice this week, when Panetta said he thought Pakistan knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding and after he was cited in a report believing there was a strong chance Israel would attack Iran in the spring.

Often when Panetta makes headline-grabbing statements, he's committing the classic Washington "gaffe" of telling an uncomfortable truth.

"That sort of honest reaction is refreshing, especially after the Gates-era where he didn't say anything at all," said a congressional source who works on defense issues.

One former administration official, who has known Panetta since the Clinton years, said that Panetta gets the latitude he has "because presidents know he's incredibly loyal."

"He knows who he works for," the official said. "I think both Presidents Clinton and Obama know he's someone who will execute their strategy but in his own way. And when he does it in his own way, he's never out of line."

When President Obama tapped Panetta to head the CIA, it was viewed as a bit of a surprise pick. Panetta then moved into the Pentagon last July after Gates left - but not before he had taken down bin Laden.

It recently was revealed that when Obama asked his top advisers whether to move forward on the bin Laden mission, Panetta was the one who gave a definitive ‘yes.'

"The White House sees this as a strength of Panetta's: the ability to be bold and make headline-worthy statements," said Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. "In many ways this is seen as an asset, and once in a while it can lead to some risk like it has this week."

Panetta's background has been focused mostly on politics and budget issues, as he was first a congressman and then White House Chief of Staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Clinton administration.

As a member of Congress, Panetta "could speak his own mind," said the first administration official. "There was no one ever constraining him. He's used to being in positions where he's not constrained and I think that has carried over to his current role."

Eaglen said that Gates was also skilled at getting out his message, but he did it in a very deliberate, intentional way.

"Everything that came out of his mouth had serious forethought, and you could assume it was given its proper weighing of the pros and cons in his own mind," she said.

Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official and senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said that Panetta wasn't looking for a job with the administration when he was tapped for the CIA position.

"So he can push the envelope a little more than somebody else who wants the job and wants to keep it," he said.

Korb said that Panetta has been "a great asset" to the Obama administration, and that Panetta's experienced political instincts are honed.

"On balance he's been good for them," Korb said. "With the Afghanistan thing, the American people want out. We're getting out a year early - that's great."

Return of Cheney's One Percent Doctrine

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

05 February 12

weak point in the psyches of many Americans is that they allow their imaginations to run wild about potential threats to their personal safety, no matter how implausible the dangers may be. Perhaps, this is a side effect from watching too many scary movies and violent TV shows.

But this vulnerability also may explain why the current war hysteria against Iran is reviving the sorts of fanciful threats to the United States last seen before the Iraq War. Since right-wing Israelis and their neocon allies are having trouble selling the U.S. public on a new preemptive war in the Middle East, they have again resorted to dreaming up hypothetical scenarios to scare easily frightened Americans.

For instance, in a New York Times Magazine article on Jan. 29 by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman - which essentially laid out Israel's case for attacking Iran - Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's vice prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, is quoted as explaining the need to make Americans very afraid of Iran. Bergman wrote:

"It is, of course, important for Ya'alon to argue that this is not just an Israeli-Iranian dispute, but a threat to America's well-being. ‘The Iranian regime will be several times more dangerous if it has a nuclear device in its hands,' he went on. ‘One that it could bring into the United States. It is not for nothing that it is establishing bases for itself in Latin America and creating links with drug dealers on the U.S.-Mexican border.

"‘This is happening in order to smuggle ordnance into the United States for the carrying out of terror attacks. Imagine this regime getting nuclear weapons to the U.S.-Mexico border and managing to smuggle it into Texas, for example. This is not a far-fetched scenario.'"

But it is a far-fetched scenario. Indeed, there is zero intelligence to support this fear-mongering about such an Iranian plan. That the New York Times would publish such a provocative assertion without a countervailing pushback from serious U.S. intelligence analysts represents the kind of irresponsible journalism that the Times, the Washington Post and much of the mainstream U.S. news media displayed during the run-up to war with Iraq.

The fact is that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded - and the Israeli Mossad apparently agrees - that Iran has NOT even decided to build a nuclear bomb, let alone that it would do something as nutty as give one to people outside its direct control to attack the United States, thus guaranteeing Iran's own annihilation. [For more on the intelligence, see Consortiumnews.com's "US/Israel: Iran NOT Building Nukes."]

Bergman's article, which covers nine pages, also manages to avoid any mention of the fact that Israel has a real - and undeclared - nuclear arsenal. The Times might have regarded this as a relevant point to include both to explain why Iran might feel it needs a nuclear deterrent and to put into context the actual strategic balance in the Middle East. Instead, the Times article poses the nuclear threat to the region as emanating entirely from Iran.

In a New York Times report on Friday, Ya'alon was back again, pushing the claim that Iran had been developing an intercontinental missile that could travel 6,000 miles and strike the United States. "That's the Great Satan," he said, using Iran's epithet for the United States. "It was aimed at America, not at us."

In response to that claim, even the Times felt obliged to add some factual counterweight, noting that "the assertions went far beyond what rocket experts have established about Iran's missile capabilities, and American officials questioned its accuracy." There is also the point that such a hypothetical missile attack on the United States would be detected immediately and ensure a devastating counterattack on Iran.

‘One Percent Doctrine'

But it should be clear what the game is. Israeli hardliners and American neocons want a return to former Vice President Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine," as described by author Ron Suskind. That is, if there is even a one percent chance that a terrorist attack might be launched against the United States, it must be treated as a certainty, thus justifying any preemptive military action that U.S. officials deem warranted.

That was the mad-hatter policy that governed the U.S. run-up to the Iraq War, when even the most dubious - and dishonest - claims by self-interested Iraqi exiles and their neocon friends were treated as requiring a bloody invasion of a country then at peace.

In those days, not only was there a flood of disinformation from outside the U.S. government, there also was a readiness inside George W. Bush's administration to channel those exaggerations and lies into a powerful torrent of propaganda aimed at the American people, still shaken from the barbarity of the 9/11 attacks.

So, the American people heard how Iraq might dispatch small remote-controlled planes to spray the United States with chemical or biological weapons, although Iraq was on the other side of the globe. The New York Times hyped bogus claims about aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges. Other news outlets spread false stories about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger and about supposed Iraqi links to al-Qaeda terrorists.

There was a stampede of one-upsmanship in the U.S. news media as everyone competed to land the latest big scoop about Iraq's nefarious intentions and capabilities. Even experienced journalists were sucked in . In explaining one of these misguided articles, New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges told the Columbia Journalism Review that "We tried to vet the defectors and we didn't get anything out of Washington that said, ‘these guys are full of shit.'"

Based in Paris, Hedges said he would get periodic calls from his editors asking that he check out defector stories originating from Ahmed Chalabi's pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress. "I thought he was unreliable and corrupt, but just because someone is a sleazebag doesn't mean he might not know something or that everything he says is wrong," Hedges said. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Iran/Iraq ‘Defectors' and Disinformation."]

More Scary Talk

Even after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the eventual realization that the fear-mongering was based on falsehoods, President Bush kept up the scary talk with claims about Iraq as the "central front" in the "war on terror" and al-Qaeda building a "caliphate" stretching from Indonesia to Spain and thus threatening the United States.

Fear seemed to be the great motivator for getting the American people to line up behind actions that, on balance, often created greater dangers for the United States. Beyond the illegality and immorality of attacking other countries based on such fabrications, there was the practical issue of unintended consequences.

Which is the core logical fallacy of Cheney's "one percent doctrine." Overreacting to an extremely unlikely threat can create additional risks that also exceed the one percent threshold, which, in turn, require more violent responses, thus cascading outward until the country essentially destroys itself in pursuit of the illusion of perfect security.

The "one percent doctrine" is like the scene in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as the lazy helper enchants a splintering broom to carry water for him but then cannot control the ensuing chaos of a disastrous flood.

The rational approach to national security is not running around screaming about imaginary dangers but evaluating the facts carefully and making judgments as to how the threats can be managed without making matters worse.

But Israel's right-wing leadership and the American neocons apparently believe that the U.S. public is not inclined to rush off into another costly war if a realistic assessment prevails. Americans might be even less supportive if they understood that what Israel is actually after is a continued free hand to launch military campaigns against Palestinians in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

At more candid moments, that is what Israeli leaders actually indicate. For instance, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Bergman that the real worry was not that Iran would hurl a nuclear bomb at Israel but that a nuclear-armed Iran could offer some protection to the Palestinians and the Lebanese when Israel next decides it must inflict military punishment on them, as occurred in 2006 and 2008-2009.

"From our point of view," Barak said, "a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over 50,000 rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations."

But Americans are not likely to favor getting dragged into another war so Israel can freely use its extraordinary military might to pummel lightly armed Arab militants and the surrounding civilian populations. For such a cause, would Americans be happy to see gas prices spike, the fragile economic recovery falter, the federal budget deficit swell, and more American soldiers be put in harm's way?

Almost certainly not. So, the propaganda target again must be that weak point in the American psyche, that tendency to let the imagination run wild with movie-like scenarios of danger and violence.

For more on related topics, see Robert Parry's "Lost History," "Secrecy & Privilege" and "Neck Deep," now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq" and "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'" are also available there.