Yesterday’s NYT coverage of the failure to produce an Iranian agreement in Geneva featured a photograph of Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister. Who is Fabius? I communicated with David Bromwich about the minister’s role, and he explained:
Fabius was at the front of Western ministers pressing for NATO to repeat its Libya performance in Syria, after the Aleppo gas attack and the Damascus five months later–both times claiming certainty, from special sources, that Assad had ordered the attack; both times out ahead of US policy and embarrassing the US by calling the “red line” bluff; and both times urging what Netanyahu was more quietly indicating as his wish.
Now he’s doing the same with the Iran negotiations: an accord almost achieved, but Fabius steps in and says no. Without this obstruction, it seems possible a preliminary agreement would have been announced. The words Fabius and France appear very prominently in the Times coverage today of the stalled discussions.
His name figured largely also in American and British (as well as French) newspaper coverage of the gas attacks and the recommended response; fast off the mark and almost calling the tune for Kerry. Meanwhile, in late August, Fabius made a visit to Israel which received major coverage there. He spoke alongside Netanyahu, saying France would be Israel’s safety net in dealings with hostile Arab governments. He did not dissociate himself from Netanyahu’s unsupported assertion that Iran was behind the gas attacks.
“Assad’s regime isn’t acting alone,” Netanyahu told journalists after a meeting with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. “Iran, and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, are there on the ground playing an active role assisting Syria. In fact, Assad’s regime has become a full Iranian client and Syria has become Iran’s testing ground.”
That August meeting in Israel was significant for a couple of other reasons. Netanyahu had “snubbed” Fabius, with major emphasis, by saying no to repeated requests for the meeting; then, reluctantly, agreed to see him after all, at the instance of a French businessman with strong Israeli connections, a mutual friend and patron.
[Meyer] Habib, the vice president of CRIF (the umbrella Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions in France), was Netanyahu’s unofficial representative in Paris and helped organize several meetings for him with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy when Netanyahu was opposition leader.
One sticking point had been Fabius’s public statements that Palestine was an essential problem for the region to solve and that Israel was responsible for helping to solve it. Netanyahu took the occasion of that August visit to correct Fabius on the subject of Palestine. [In the video below, Netanyahu lectured Fabius, saying that there’s a delusion in the west that the Palestinian conflict is “the root cause of this instability” in the Middle East, when actually is it “one of the results of the Middle East turmoil.”]
On Fareed Zakaria today, there was an interesting moment. Kenneth Pollack (who along with Peter Beinart has become one of the few neoliberals of the Iraq war party to see they were wrong and to change) was asked by Zakaria about the spoiler position of Fabius. He replied that he didn’t know the meaning of what Fabius was up to. The suggestion was he saw or guessed the meaning of it plainly.
Today Bromwich pointed me to Christopher Dickey’s piece at Daily Beast, Why France is to blame for blocking the Iran nuclear agreement. “He starts out lazy– ‘it is that they are French’, but gets more solid by the end. Dickey:
Under Sarkozy and his longtime Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, the Quai’s policies came to be increasingly dominated by the French version of American neo-cons, many of them former leftists who preached the spread of democracy and dreamed of remaking the Middle East, if necessary, through war.
Sarkozy liked to say if he’d been president in 2003 he’d have backed the American-led invasion of Iraq; Kouchner let it be known he thought an armed confrontation with Iran was more or less inevitable.
History will prove this man irrelevant and terribly wrong.
So sorry for France and for this Foreign Minister — somehow he did not get the message that French is traditionally the “language of diplomacy”. He appears to be an Imperial Socialist, and an obstruction to peace and diplomacy.
Another warmonger, liar and tool of Zionism.
Kenneth Pollack another war pusher who slides through cracks . The man wrote a book filled with false claims pushing the invasion of Iraq.
http://www.jta.org/2005/08/30/archive/prominent-mideast-analyst-says-hes-u-s-official-in-case-of-ex-aipac-men
“Mideast analyst Kenneth Pollack is one of two U.S. government officials referenced in the indictment against two former staffers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, JTA has learned. But Pollack, who was a staffer on President Clinton’s National Security Council, said he didn’t give the AIPAC staffers any classified information. Pollack also said the information that Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former director of foreign policy issues, is accused of passing on to a reporter could not have come from him.
“I believe I am USGO-1,” Pollack told JTA on Monday, using a term in the indictment for U.S. Government Official No. 1.
A second source, speaking on condition of anonymity, has verified the information.
Neither Pollack nor the other unnamed government official — identified by sources as David Satterfield, a former deputy assistant secretary of state — has been charged with a crime. That has raised questions about the government’s case against Rosen, former AIPAC Iran analyst Keith Weissman and Larry Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst accused of passing classified information to the AIPAC staffers.”
“The two men’s interaction with Pollack and Satterfield is believed to be central to the prosecutors’ case that Rosen and Weissman engaged in a pattern of seeking classified information and disseminating it to journalists and the Israeli government.”
Pollack is up to his neck in the blood of the Iraqi people and American soldiers who are dead or injured because of his pack of lies as well as all other very guilty parties in the run up to that invasion.
He should absolutely be required to sign up under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Aipac selected case files
http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/aipac/index.html
I believe Kenneth Pollack is USGO1 in the dismissed (Jane Harman and Saban’s waddling on over to interfere in a federal investigation) Aipac espionage case. Page 8 of this file refers to USGO1
http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/aipac/index.html
Prof Cole has one up about Fabius
http://www.juancole.com/2013/11/france-crashes-scuttles.html
“Then French foreign minister Laurent Fabius showed up and threw cold water on the whole process. He clearly was attempting to torpedo the agreement, rejecting the whole notion of a six-month confidence-building period without substantial Iranian concessions. In the French system, the foreign minister doesn’t typically have a lot of autonomy, so Fabius was almost certainly acting at the orders of Socialist President Francois Hollande, who is way down in the polls and may feel the need to seem strong internationally, asserting himself against the US and Iran. The arrogance of the US and the perfidy of the far right religious government in Tehran are two things that both center-right and center-left French can agree upon. Hollande, having intervened in Mali, seems to want to throw his weight around in the Middle East. He may see an opportunity for France to come up in the world now that much of the Arab world and Israel is angry at Washington for its opening toward Iran. The US for decades has pulled off a balancing act of allying both with Israel and Saudi Arabia, in part by pointing to the danger of Iran to both. Since Obama seems to be abandoning that ploy, Paris may think there is a vacuum that it can fill.”
Over at Foreign Policy too:
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/10/how-france-scuttled-the-iran-deal-last-minute
” Beyond the rhetoric, France’s opposition to the deal carries clear risks. The U.S. negotiators and their Iranian counterparts have both warned that the window for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue won’t stay open forever. Not too long from now, Iran will have enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. If the talks fall apart, France may have effectively scuttled any option of ending Iran’s nuclear program without using military force, something no country — including Israel — wants to do. Paris also risks seriously degrading its relationships with Washington and London, its two closest allies.
“If weeks from now a deal is signed which forces Iran to even greater compromises, the French will come out well,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But if months from now diplomacy has fallen apart and conflict appears more likely, the French could go down in infamy.”
Hope Reid stands by what he has said.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/11/08/youre_going_to_see_the_dam_break_loose_congress_poised_to_pounce_on_iran_deal
“Meanwhile, a restless Senate Banking Committee is poised to move ahead with a new package of sanctions on Iran. The committee’s chairman, Tim Johnson, told Reuters that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has approved the markup, or debate, of the bill. However, Reid said the bill would not move to the Senate floor for a vote until the Geneva meeting is over. “
Laurent Fabius, it should be mentioned, has over 30 years of service in the government in various posts, among them that of Prime Minister. Odd that with all the talk of closeness between Fabius and Israel and of his being French version of a neocon, no one has come close to mentioning his Jewish roots. His Jewish parents converted to Catholicism and raised him as a Catholic. He still must feel a little something towards the Jewish state and its welfare, it’s only natural. There are 3 other Jews in Hollande’s Cabinet.