There will be no Zoom call this Friday, April 3 because of the Jewish holiday of Passover. We will instead release a pre-taped conversation with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, about how to think about Passover, and Judaism more generally, a time when so many Jewish institutions have fused Judaism with the state of Israel.
Ask Me Anything
This Tuesday, March 31, at 1 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.
Fundraiser
A few weeks ago, I interviewed Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg, the rabbi of Shir Tikvah in Minneapolis, about her extraordinary work opposing ICE. Shir Tikvah is now raising money for Salsabeel Abunada, a Palestinian student from Gaza who is studying Cloud Engineering Technology at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis. Salsabeel is excelling academically but needs financial assistance to complete her education. In this period before Passover, Jews traditionally give ma’ot chitim (literally, “wheat money”) to those in need. Spring is a season of renewal for people of many religions, and for those of no religion. And in that spirit, I’ll hope you’ll consider supporting Shir Tikvah’s effort to help Salsabeel.
Cited in Today’s Video
Iran’s new National Security Advisor is so hardline that Qassim Soleimani resigned rather than work with him.
Only five percent of American academics who study the Middle East supported attacking Iran.
In 2023, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) erased all the material from their website about their advocacy for war in Iraq.
Mark Dubowitz of FDD’s recent interviews with The New York Times, CNN and NPR and co-authored article in The Atlantic.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about why opponents of the Iran war should applaud Joe Kent’s resignation but question his claims that Israel got the US into the wars in Iraq and Syria.
Last weekend I read a remarkable new novel, Paradiso 17, by the author Hannah Lillith Assadi. It’s based on the experience of her father, who was expelled from his home in Safad in 1948 and eventually married an American Jewish woman. She writes about one of her last conversations with him here. I can’t recommend it more highly.
Zachary Truboff on Zionism’s hidden question.
Appearances
On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
On April 19, I’ll be speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.
See you on Tuesday for the Ask Me Anything session,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, I recently came across an anecdote that I think captures just how badly America and Israel’s war in Iran is going. The anecdote is from a podcast called “Hold Your Fire!” which is put out by the International Crisis Group. And, in the podcast, they’re interviewing the International Crisis Group’s Iran expert, a guy named Ali Vaez. And Ali Vaez says this: ‘The regime’—means the Iranian regime—‘is more entrenched and cohesive right now than was the case a few weeks ago. Israel’s decapitation of the political system has transferred power in Iran to the most hawkish part of the Revolutionary Guard.’
And then he tells this extraordinary anecdote. The anecdote that Alivea says is that Iran’s new national security advisor, because the last one was killed in this war. Iran’s new national security advisor is a guy named Mohammed Bagher Zolghadr. I’m not pronouncing his name probably very well. But this new National Security Advisor that Iran now has is so radical, so hardline, so extreme, that Qasem Soleimani resigned from the Revolutionary Guard in the 1990s, rather than work alongside him.
Qasem Soleimani, let me remind you, was the guy that the United States assassinated in 2020 because he, you know, described as kind of like the personification of evil, right, in the Iranian political system. And that guy resigned because this guy, the new National Security Advisor, who’s now taken over the job, was considered so hardline and extreme that Soleimani didn’t want to work with him, right? Like, you really don’t kind of know whether to laugh or cry.
And this war is such an extraordinary thing, right? It was a war that was launched without the support of the American people, and also, without the support of the Americans who know Iran best. There was a poll that came out recently, there’s a kind of periodic poll they do of academics who study the Middle East, political scientists, historians, other fields. It found that only 5% of American scholars who work on the Middle East supported this war before it happened. So, a war that is not supported by the vast majority of people who actually know something about the region, is not supported by the American public, and is being waged by a president who supposedly was elected to keep us out of these kind of wars.
How do these things happen? There’s not one answer to that question, but I think one thing that is important for us to pay more attention to is the kind of permanent foreign policy class that exists in Washington. These are people who are often described as experts, but they’re very different than academics, right? Academics have more academic freedom and independence, right? They can change their views about things, and they don’t lose their job.
But many of the people who work with these think tanks, the think tanks have a very clear ideological line, and it’s connected to the fact that the think tanks are getting money from interests that have an interest in that ideological perspective. And usually it’s very hawkish because they’re getting money from defense contractors. They’re often sometimes also getting money from foreign governments that often have an interest in the United States doing things militarily that would be in the interest of other governments.
So, before the Iraq War, two very influential think tanks pushing the war were the American Enterprise Institute, and also a smaller think tank called the Project for a New American Century. And I think when we think about this ecosystem that has now gotten us into the war in Iran, it’s worth looking at another think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as a kind of a case study in what’s wrong here. Now, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is extremely hawkish, and also extremely pro-Israel, pushed for the war in Iraq, right? It was another one of these things needs to push for the war in Iraq.
Now, the Foundation for Defense of Democracy is not particularly interested in people knowing that it did that because, as it was reported in 2023, that it actually took down a lot of the materials on its own website in which it advocated for the war in Iraq, right? It’s not a particularly good look now for people to know that you were a big supporter of the war in Iraq.
But the problem, this is the problem in the media foreign policy kind of discourse that exists, that comes out of Washington, is that you can have people from the Foundation of Defense of Democracies going out, relentlessly pushing for war with Iran, and they’re never questioned on the consequences of the last war they pushed for, right? There should be, in any healthy system of discourse, some accountability for what you’ve done in the past, so that you don’t get to start with a clean slate every time, right? So, when you go out and say, this war in Iran is gonna be great, people should ask you, well, didn’t you say that about Iraq too, right? But that’s not what happens, right?
So, just in the last couple of months, the guy who runs the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a guy named Mark Dubowitz, has had interviews with The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and he’s also co-authored an article in The Atlantic. Now, in none of those, all basically either pushing for war, or once the war had started, saying the war is going to be a success of some kind, right? In none of these interviews is he ever held to account for his institution’s position on Iraq.
This is something that’s very personal for me, actually, because as some of you may know, I supported the war on Iraq. It was earlier in my career, when I was at the New Republic. It was a catastrophic error. I’ve never, in some ways, like, intellectually, like, really recovered from it. It completely changed my whole worldview because I was so wrong. I wrote two books trying to come to terms with it, and I just felt like it didn’t even occur to me that I could go out there and make prognostications on war and peace without actually having to put the question of some analysis of what I got wrong on Iraq, like, at the front and center of all future judgments I was going to make.
But the U.S. media does not require that people do this, right? And so just to give you a flavor of what Dubowitz is saying, right? This is the interview with National Public Radio. He’s asked, do you not worry—this is before the war—do you not worry about what would be seen as a war of choice, causing a wider regional conflict that could be a catastrophe with many thousands of people dead? And Dubowitz basically says, no, no reason to worry about that.
He says, quote, about Trump. He said: ‘he killed Qasem Soleimani in the first term, who was Iran’s most deadly, and I would say probably brilliant, battlefield commander. Everyone felt there would be World War III. There wasn’t. When the Israelis struck Iran last year, there wasn’t. They thought there would be World War III when President Trump brought 14 massive ordinance penetrators on the Fordow nuclear facility and eliminated that, and there wasn’t World War III.’ So basically saying, this war is gonna turn out fine.
Then, on March 16th, in The Atlantic, writing with another employee of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Rich Goldberg, he writes, ‘two weeks after the United States and Israel launched their combined military campaign against Iran’s clerical regime, the outlines of victory are beginning to emerge.’ The outlines of victory are beginning to emerge, right? This is exactly the kind of stuff that we heard people at exactly this think tank, and think tanks like it, say before the war in Iraq, that it would go great, and then in the early stages of Iraq, that actually things were going to be great, right? That we shouldn’t let the naysayers make us think that this war was getting bogged down, or that it was having problems, that actually it’s going to work out fine, right?
I’m not saying that people who are hawkish or people who are pro-Israel or whatever shouldn’t ever be interviewed in mainstream publications. I think it’s fine to interview people across a wide ideological perspective. But what really bothers me is the fact that people can go and make virtually the same kinds of arguments that they’ve made in the past, when those arguments have led to catastrophic consequences for the United States and also for the Middle East, and never be called to account for their past positions. This is how a country fails to learn, right? This is why America doesn’t learn, and why we continue to do these kinds of things. And this is not only a problem in Republican administrations.
If you look at a lot of the people who are in the Biden administration, they don’t necessarily come from exactly the same think tanks, but they come from kind of democratic-oriented think tanks or consulting firms that also get a lot of money from defense contractors, and also have a hawkish orientation, not exactly the same as their Republican counterparts, but oftentimes they are closer ideologically to people at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies than they are to the Democratic Party base, right, which is much more actually anti-war. And similarly, they’re much more likely to buy into the kind of pro-Israel assumptions that exists on a bipartisan basis, in the kind of permanent foreign policy class that you see in these think tanks, than to challenge them in the way that the Democratic Party base—and actually some of the Republican Party base—really wants.
I really think that if we’re ever going to get out of this totally disastrous cycle that the United States is in, it’s going to require that we demand that the next Democratic presidential nominee not just take a different position, but commit in some way to bring in a very different kind of group of people than the permanent bipartisan foreign policy class that we’ve had in recent decades.
And it’s also going to require the media to simply act differently towards members of this permanent foreign policy class. There’s just much too much deference to these people. I’m not saying you need to be rude and be an asshole to them, and I’m not saying that you need to basically try to cancel them and say they could never be able to be interviewed, but basic, it seems to me, journalistic practice should be that when people are advocating for something, you look at their track record of advocacy in the past, and you see how it’s worked out, and you ask them to account for that, right?
And if that basic thing were done, someone like Mark Dubowitz and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies would simply not be able to play the role that they have played in American political discourse in the run-up to this war in Iran. And the consequences, the impact of what they’ve done has really been disastrous, and we’re seeing the disaster unfold before us every day.
