Love of the Land: CENTCOM, Gen. Petraeus and Israel

CENTCOM, Gen. Petraeus and Israel

JINSA Report #: 975
25 March '10

Sometimes it takes a while for a story to come full circle. Last week, we reported (JINSA Report #973) on a ForeignPolicy.com blog that said American military officers in CENTCOM blamed U.S. relations with Israel for American weakness in the region. The ForeignPolicy blog went viral on the web, attracting other "authoritative" statements blaming Israel for American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan-and attributing negative comments about Israel to CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus.

Our take was that American weakness in the region is attributable in some measure to the Saudi and Gulf State belief that the United States will not prevent Iran, their nemesis as well as Israel's, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Although the Saudis do frequently complain about what they call "the Israel problem," it is a way of deflecting their own inability to be strong partners. The rest, we said, was a lie, an opportunity to shred the U.S.-Israel security relationship and label Israel a liability rather than an asset to American military planners.

Speaking in New Hampshire this week, Gen. Petraeus addressed the controversy, beginning with the point that some statements attributed to him personally were, in fact, sentences lifted out of context from a 56-page CENTCOM Strategy Document.

"There's... a statement in [the document] that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process. We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean that is a perception; it is there, I don't think that's disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly." He noted other factors listed in the same section of the report, including "a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which, by the way, deny Israel's right to exist. There's a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place...So we have all the factors in there, but this is just one, and it was pulled out of this 56-page document, which was not what I read to the Senate at all."

In response to a question, Gen. Petraeus said he had called Gen. Ashkenazi, the IDF Chief of Staff, and assured him that the web reports were inaccurate.

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Love of the Land: CENTCOM, Gen. Petraeus and Israel

Love of the Land: From the Horse’s Mouth: Petraeus on Israel

From the Horse’s Mouth: Petraeus on Israel

Max Boot
Contentions/Commentary
24 March '10

(One has to be careful to always look around before running with a claim. This was a classic, with Max Boot being one of the few with the proper understanding of what was said from the start. The Biden quotes behind closed doors, may also not have been any better, and have been challenged)

Back on March 13, terrorist groupie Mark Perry — a former Arafat aide who now pals around with Hamas and Hezbollah — posted an article on Foreign Policy’s website, claiming that General David Petraeus was behind the administration’s policy of getting tough with Israel. He attributed to Petraeus the view that “Israel’s intransigence” — meaning its unwillingness to give up every inch of the West Bank and East Jerusalem tomorrow — “could cost American lives.” His item received wide circulation though it may be doubted whether, as he now says, “It changed the way people think about the conflict.”

I tried to set the record straight with two Commentary items (see here and here) in which I suggested, based on talking to an officer familiar with Petraeus’s thinking, that Perry’s item was a gross distortion —in fact a fraud. I noted that in Petraeus’s view, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was only one factor among many affecting U.S. interests in the region and that Israeli settlements were far from the only, or even the main, obstacle to peace. I even suggested — again, based on inside information — that the 56-page posture statement that Central Command had submitted to Congress, which stated that the Arab-Israeli conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” was not the best indicator of his thinking. Better to look at what he actually told Congress — in a hearing he barely mentioned Israel (until prompted to do so) and never talked about settlements at all.

This brought hoots of derision from commentators on both the Left and the Right, who claimed that I was putting words into Petraeus’s mouth — that I was, in Joe Klein’s phrase, taking a “flying leap.” Predictably piling on were Andrew Sullivan, who said I was “glossing over” what Petraeus said, and Robert Wright, who claimed that, “by Boot’s lights, Petraeus is anti-Israel.” Diana West added a truly inventive spin, by suggesting that Petraeus was a protégé of Stephen Walt, who was his faculty adviser many years ago at Princeton before the good professor won renown as a leading basher of the “Israel Lobby” and the state of Israel itself. It was from Walt, Ms. West claims, that Petraeus imbibed his “Arabist, anti-Israel attitudes.”

So who was off-base here: those of us who tried to explain the nuances of General Petraeus’s thinking or those bloggers and commentators who tried to suggest that he is a strident critic of Israel?

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Love of the Land: From the Horse’s Mouth: Petraeus on Israel

Love of the Land: Is General Petraeus Behind Obama’s Dressing Down of Israel?

Is General Petraeus Behind Obama’s Dressing Down of Israel?

Max Boot
Contentions/Commentary
16 March '10

What’s behind the administration’s new get-tough policy with Israel? If you believe Mark Perry, a former Arafat adviser and author of Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies, it’s the doing of General David Petraeus. In a rather imaginative post at Foreign Policy’s web site, he claims that on Jan. 16,

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.”

According to Perry, the briefing “hit the White House like a bombshell,” because in effect the U.S. military was placing itself in opposition to the “powerful … Israeli lobby” by announcing that “America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers.”

That didn’t ring true to me, so I asked a military officer who is familiar with the briefing in question and with Petraeus’s thinking on the issue to clarify matters. He told me that Perry’s item was “incorrect.” In the first place, Petraeus never recommended shifting the Palestinian territories to Centcom’s purview from European Command, as claimed by Perry. Nor did Petraeus belittle George Mitchell, whom he holds in high regard. All that happened, this officer told me, is that there was a “staff-officer briefing … on the situation in the West Bank, because that situation is a concern that Centcom hears in the Arab world all the time. Nothing more than that.”

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Love of the Land: Is General Petraeus Behind Obama’s Dressing Down of Israel?

Love of the Land: Arab States Lose Faith in the United States Over Lack of Action on Iran, Administration Blames Israel

Arab States Lose Faith in the United States Over Lack of Action on Iran, Administration Blames Israel

JINSA Report #: 973
16 March '10

Viral on the web yesterday was a blog post at ForeignPolicy.com about a briefing supposedly given to Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by CENTCOM senior officers following a trip through the Arab world. It contained the paragraphs:

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 [U.S. envoy and former Senator George] Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

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... 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.

This, according to the blog, was the background to Vice President Biden's tongue-lashing of Israel's prime minister and the outrageous slander that Israel is to blame for the difficulties the Obama Administration is having getting our Arab leaders to help us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Damage done.

In our experience, there are three half-truths and an enormous, vicious lie in the post.

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Love of the Land: Arab States Lose Faith in the United States Over Lack of Action on Iran, Administration Blames Israel