Politico/@JoshMeyerDC Supply Ammo To Warpath Trumpists, But Obscure Helpful Debate On Policies Towards Hezbollah And Iran

Politico’s Josh Meyer has produced two main pieces related to Hezbollah, Iran and the nuclear deal this past year: One in April about how the Obama administration allegedly “derailed” counter-proliferation efforts in order to massage the nuclear deal and the second this week on how Team Obama essentially did the same to counter-narcotics/money laundering efforts targeting Hezbollah in the main.

For serious researchers and policymakers – i.e. those who can pick out the gaps in both stories, the points where the journalist and/or the editors have apparently chosen to highlight the “sexiest,” most clickable claims, bury contradictions/counter-rationales or simply to leave out key facts and context – both pieces are more useful as polemical indications of how a “hawkish” approach is (re-) forming in DC vis-a-vis Iran and Hezbollah rather than as well-balanced, long format investigations for better understanding the costs and benefits of the previous administration’s approach, not to mention the best way forward.

This is particularly unfortunate since there is a genuine debate – as well as a specialist and public interest – when it comes to understanding the costs and benefits of the nuclear deal as well as related policies and practices that involve Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

[I should say here that some of the claims and intermittent cases over the years that point to Hezbollah’s involvement in money laundering, the drug trade, arms procurement and even operational planning for “homeland” attacks ring true. Using such involvement as a kind of moral indictment is not a particularly useful political-rhetorical tactic, however, not least because of  our (US) longstanding involvement with deeply morally problematic actions, including when it comes to the intelligence-narcotics nexus (think Latin America). What is useful, though, is putting these mostly alleged, “shadowy” activities (which are near impossible for the non-intelligence public and journalists to properly weigh) into a broader context of US interests. When one does that, a key result is that the Hezbollah-Iran military+terror threat to the US is radically different from that posed by ISIS-type groups (crudely put) and, most importantly because of these differences, is open to a range of policy choices which do not need to involve military action or interventions broadly construed (in fact, far better approaches have been available and are still available along these “non-kinetic” lines, perhaps even at various points in association with some “kinetic” approaches). This, for me, is the main framework that one needs to explicitly consider in order to adequately process the reportage produced by Meyer et al.]

As such, Meyer’s two pieces – and especially this week’s more overtly polemical article on the counter-narcotics dereliction of duty charge – can contribute to a sober and potentially productive policy process, but only if the reader 1) picks out and compares key points that the author chooses to omit or de-emphasize in each of the two articles and then also 2) brings in additional facts and context which necessarily softens the main implications (all of which will, of course, make the pieces far less clickable and sellable).

In this endeavor, however, one needs to be clear about the thrust of the pieces: Both are written and edited in the classic “hit piece” vein (see the points below), smelling strongly of a deep desire to prove – without actually addressing it directly – that Team Obama’s nuclear deal (which of course has overwhelming international support as well) was indeed a terrible deal a la Trump’s oft-repeated claim (Meyer and others must naturally consider if Trump is really the standard bearer and proof positive that a policymaker, government or even a polemicist wants for their prefered policy approach?). As but one indication of this crucial defect, the piece this week has seemingly shorn itself of the complications and push backs on facts and logic that April article’s had at least buried, but nevertheless presented to the reader.

— Vanishing Structural Counter-Rationale. The April article makes clear that by 2014, the Obama Administration was pushing aggressively forward with a range of legal-oriented counter-proliferation operations against Iran, Hezbollah and the nuclear program. Both articles, however, diminish the fact that the US was also engaged in an aggressive, “kinetic” intelligence war on all three fronts just as key ally Israel was also doing the same with the full knowledge and in some cases, coordination with US efforts. Both articles therefore fail to mention the successive Hezbollah commanders and Iranian nuclear scientists assassinated during the run up to the nuclear deal, or the CIA agents rounded up in 2011 and 2015 by Hezbollah.) Still, the April article helpfully quotes one Obama administration official in a key, structural push back to the article’s overall thrust: Mainly, that tactical counter-proliferation operations have to be balanced within and sometimes against an overall strategic approach. The December ’17 Meyer apparently now wants to wholly avoid the (absolutely necessary) consideration of whether the nuclear deal is fact a net win for US interests – since such an exercise would reduce the force of his claim – but at least in the April Meyer piece he throws the reader some meat in order to better weigh the issues at hand:

• “The senior Obama administration official acknowledged that the twin sets of negotiations influenced the overall U.S. counter-proliferation effort against Iran, especially the timing of individual investigations, prosecutions and international efforts to bring suspects to justice. Such competing equities are unavoidable when high-level matters of diplomacy and geopolitics are under consideration, the official said. At those times, the White House must be guided by broader policy objectives, in this case de-escalating conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons program and freeing at least four American prisoners. “The White House wouldn’t be getting involved in saying yea or nay to particular arrests or cases or the like” that are the purview of the Justice Department, the administration official said. “It was not uncommon, though, that before we were going to undertake a law enforcement action that we thought would have foreign policy implications, we would alert folks at the White House so that there could be appropriate notice given to a foreign government. That happens.” The former official also acknowledged the complaints by agents and prosecutors about cases being derailed but said they were unavoidable, and for the greater good.”

— Buried Tactical Counter-Rationale, Absent of Supporting Facts. By the piece this week, however, the structural push-back is almost completely absent. Little consideration is therefore given to whether a counter-narcotics/money laundering should in fact have been made subservient to an overall policy approach to Iran and Hezbollah. Meyer therefore raises the common fight former enemies had against ISIS – which of course was already engaged in major attacks by 2014 and thereafter against the US, Europe and allied states – but provides almost no credence or support to such considerations for the reader to weigh. Was containing ISIS and AQ attacks against civilians in Europe, the US and Lebanon and their overall push for supremacy in Iraq and Syria enough to de-emphasize conflictual operations against Iran and Hezbollah who were also engaged in fights against the violent Sunni extremist groups? Would it really have been a good idea to destabilize Lebanon and have another failed state on the Med? Should we have listened to the DEA agent who Meyer quotes as wanting to roll into Beirut and arrest Hezbollah officials and extradite them? And then there is the larger question that Meyer prefers not to raise, much less answer now even though he at least saw fit to bury such problematics in the April piece: Was the nuclear deal important enough and within overriding US interests to de-emphasize other operations involving counter-narcotics and even counter-proliferation? One wonders: Why the omissions and the lack of complication now?

Meyers does raise one official, tactical objection to his narrative in this week’s story – one that is rich for further consideration and that was strangely left out of his april piece. Law enforcement figures cited in the story thought that only nuclear deal considerations were limiting their efforts, but there may have been serious tactical intelligence considerations as well:

• “A former senior national security official of the Obama administration, who played a role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, suggested that Project Cassandra members were merely speculating that their cases were being blocked for political reasons. Other factors, including a lack of evidence or concerns about interfering with intelligence operations could have been in play. “What if the CIA or the Mossad had an intelligence operation ongoing inside Hezbollah and they were trying to pursue someone . . . against whom we had impeccable [intelligence] collection and the DEA is not going to know that?” the official said. “I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on in the broader universe are grasping at straws.” The official added: “The world is a lot more complicated than viewed through the narrow lens of drug trafficking. So you’re not going to let CIA rule the roost, but you’re also certainly not going to let DEA do it either. Your approach to anything as complicated as Hezbollah is going to have to involve the interagency [process], because the State Department has a piece of the pie, the intelligence community does, Treasury does, DOD does.”

Meyer, however, immediately undercuts the importance of this particular push-back and moves on saying: “Nonetheless, other sources independent of Project Cassandra confirmed many of the allegations in interviews with POLITICO, and in some cases, in public comments.” Of course, this doesn’t address the primary issue of a central reason why the law enforcement operations may have been curtailed. Most tellingly, Meyer’s does not raise (or was not aware of) the 2011 and 2015 announcements by Hezbollah of having captured CIA spies deep within its organization. Could these agents have been involved in the various proliferation and/or narcotics networks the Obama official was alluding too? This is a crucial line of inquiry so we can balance against the more limited claims of the law enforcement figures quoted, but Meyer doesn’t go down this path; just as by this week’s article he also chooses not to raise:

1. The absolutely indispensable discussion about the overall costs and benefits of the nuclear deal;
2. Legitimate fears of potential sabotage by forces within and outside the government opposed to the deal;
3. The merits of Team Obama’s approach to Hezbollah and Lebanon;
4. And the overall merits of balancing tactical operations with strategic concerns.

There are a variety of other criticisms to make when it comes to Meyer’s two pieces on factual grounds and also, crucially, when it comes to his unfortunate turn to only two Hezbollah experts for backup, both of whom have a long history on only one particular side of the debate (Levitt and Ranstorp – two of the leading neo-con voices who have long favored the “hawkish” approach… which has repeatedly failed when actually tired – remember the Bush-Israel 2006 Lebanon War and the Beirut May 2008 disasters for Eliot Abrams, Jeffrey Feltman, Condi Rice and Team Bush overall).

The primary problem remains, though, a disturbing lack of context and interrogation lines – especially along the lines of balancing tactical concerns with strategic ones – all of which would have cut the impact of the headlines and sub-headings, surely, and would have expanded the discussion to the nuclear deal merits itself, but that would have produced a more helpful, nuanced picture for all of us to consider on a crucial set of issues that, regrettably, appear consigned to a Trumpo-chaotic, military-only approach.

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