Jack Kelly Sunday

This this week's column, Jack Kelly has officially joined what Robert Dreyfus at The Nation has called a "thunderous, coordinated assault" targeting President Obama's Chair for the National Intelligence Council.

Jack detours, if ever so slightly, into spinning on Obama advisor Samantha Power along the way:

Harvard professor Samantha Power has accused Israel of war crimes, and once recommended U.S. troops be sent to impose upon the Israelis a peace settlement by force. She's been appointed by President Obama to a senior foreign policy job at the White House. Mr. Peretz assured his readers in December that Ms. Power "truly, truly loves Israel and the people of Israel."

Let's start with the war crimes charge. Power gets into trouble, for example here at Commentary magazine, for what looks to be a rhetorical sleight of hand on her part:

Samantha Power: I have a question for David about working for the New York Times. I was struck by a headline that accompanied a news story on the publication of the Human Rights Watch report. The headline was, I believe: “Human Rights Report Finds Massacre Did Not Occur in Jenin.” The second paragraph said, “Oh, but lots of war crimes did.” Why wouldn’t they make the war crimes the headline and the non-massacre the second paragraph?

(The article to which Power refers is here, and its headline is: “MIDEAST TURMOIL: INQUIRY; Rights Group Doubts Mass Deaths in Jenin, but Sees Signs of War Crimes.” Obviously, Power has misremembered the headline.)

Here we have another window into the thinking of Power: Israel is accused in sensational press reports of a massacre in Jenin, and is subjected to severe international condemnation; HRW finally gets out a report and says there was no massacre; the NYT reports this as its headline; and Power thinks the headline still should have been: Israel guilty of war crimes!

Commentary seems to be saying that because there was no massacre, there were no war crimes. And because she made the war crimes charge, she's wrong wrong wrong. However if you take a look at the Times article Power referred to:

A day after Israeli opposition killed plans for a United Nations fact-finding mission into the Israeli Army's disputed attack on this refugee camp, a weeklong investigation by an American rights group found that Palestinian claims of hundreds of civilian deaths are exaggerated.

But the report, the most authoritative to date, also contains conclusions beneficial to the Palestinians in the international furor surrounding just what occurred here.

For instance, it found what it described as evidence that Israeli forces used civilians to walk protectively in front of them throughout the incursion; destroyed more houses than needed for ''any conceivable military purpose''; and blocked the passage of ambulances and relief groups to the camp for 11 days.

The document, based on more than 100 interviews and written by Human Rights Watch, a group that is generally considered fair-minded, concluded that those actions, among others, constituted ''strong prima facie evidence'' that Israeli soldiers ''committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, or war crimes'' and called for further investigation by Israeli or international bodies.

So Power isn't alone in accusing Israel of committing war crimes. Here she's quoting Human Rights Watch (And you can read more from Human Rights Watch here if you'd like.) Then there's the "imposing a peace settlement by force" stuff. That's Jack's own rhetorical sleight of hand. He writes that she:

...once recommended U.S. troops be sent to impose upon the Israelis a peace settlement by force.

Without pointing out her own reaction to that "recommendation." Shmuel Rosner has the story at Haaretz.com (note the headline - "Obama`s top adviser says does not believe in imposing a peace settlement"):

In recent weeks, a young and talented writer named Noah Pollack, who writes for the right-wing magazine Commentary, has delved deeply into Power's statements on record. Among other things, he found the following things she said, in a 2002 interview, about what should be done to stop the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "[It will] mean sacrificing - or investing, I think, more than sacrificing - billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence."

In that same interview, Power said that the situation will "require external intervention." Pollack very reasonably interpreted this as an expression of support for a "ground invasion of Israel and the Palestinian territories." Otherwise, he wrote, what did she mean when she spoke of "a mammoth protection force"?

Power herself recognizes that the statement is problematic. "Even I don't understand it," she says. And also: "This makes no sense to me." And furthermore: "The quote seems so weird." She thinks that she made this statement in the context of discussing the deployment of international peacekeepers. But this was a very long time ago, circumstances were different, and it's hard for her to reconstruct exactly what she meant. Anyway, what she she said five years ago is less important that what she wants to say now: She absolutely does not believe in "imposing a settlement." Israelis and Arabs "will negotiate their own peace."

This was posted at Haaretz way back in August, 2008 - some seven months ago. A serious piece of information Jack avoided telling you, isn't it?

Now let's move onto Chas Freeman. Dreyfus writes that the story:

...began with alarmist postings on a blog by Steve Rosen, the former official of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee who's been indicted for pro-Israeli espionage in a long-running AIPAC scandal. Rosen, whose blog is entitled "Obama Mideast Monitor," is published by the Middle East Forum, a rabid, right-wing Zionist outlet led by Daniel Pipes, whose Middle East Quarterly is edited by Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.

Andrew Sullivan writes much the same thing. Though Sullivan goes on to write:

My colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote on February 23 that Freeman was "well-known for his hostility toward Israel," but argued that the Saudi connections were more "substantively" problematic. The evidence Jeffrey provided for "hostility to Israel" is this essay. Read it yourself.

After posting this:

Tragically, despite all the advantages and opportunities Israel has had over the fifty-nine years of its existence, it has failed to achieve concord and reconciliation with anyone in its region, still less to gain their admiration or affection. Instead, with each decade, Israel's behavior has deviated farther from the humane ideals of its founders and the high ethical standards of the religion that most of its inhabitants profess. Israel and the Palestinians, in particular, are caught up in an endless cycle of reprisal and retaliation that guarantees the perpetuation of conflict in which levels of mutual atrocities continue to escalate. As a result, each generation of Israelis and Palestinians has accumulated new reasons to loathe the behavior of the other, and each generation of Arabs has detested Israel with more passion than its predecessor. This is not how peace is made. Here, too, a break with the past and a change in course are clearly in order.

Sullivan writes:

This is Freeman's cardinal sin among his critics: to blame Israel, even in part, for the plight it finds itself in, and to ask that US foreign policy be more neutral with respect to the parties in the Middle East.

And Jack, as they say, has joined the queue.