In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I ran into this short piece at Tablet , one of the sites that broke the Malley-Tabatabai story the week before the Hamas invasion of Israel, which points out that they'd been contrarian over US policy over Israel and Iran all along, with links to prove it. One of those links, from May 2021, is The Realignment: In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board. A little searching indicates that this was re-linked frequently at the time, but it's gone dormant until the new questions have come up about Blinken and Malley. Is the new president [Biden] forging his own path in the Middle East, or is he following in the footsteps of Obama? Until now, those who feared that his presidency might become the third term of Obama fixed their wary eyes on Robert Malley, the president’s choice as Iran envoy. When serving in the Obama White House, Malley helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, which sought accommodations with Tehran that...

I'm deeply skeptical of this week's news. Israel, as it has every right to do, has carefully controlled news from its war in Gaza to the point that anything we hear is days old at best, and it reveals almost nothing. So naturally, across the board, legacy media and Conservative Inc lead with Israel-Hamas non-news or the sideshow of pro-Hamas demonstrations elsewhere. There are occasional notes that Joe Biden hasn't been very visible for much of the week -- his big event was tripping on some steps in Philadelphia yesterday. But enough other news still dribbles out to convince me there's stuff we aren't being told. For instance, it sounds as if, instead of being in the White House Situation Room being briefed with his cabinet on the Hamas war, Joe spent Sunday and Monday of the holiday weekend in an interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel for his own classified document investigation: Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office...

Just poking around the web for information on the on again-off again $6 billion payment to Iran, I found this as of June 16 : U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports Friday that Washington and Tehran were close to deals on limiting Iran's nuclear program and releasing U.S. citizens detained in the country. "With regard to Iran, some of the reports that we've seen about an agreement on nuclear matters or, for that matter, on detainees, are simply not accurate and not true," Blinken said when asked about indirect talks via Oman. As of August 10, we heard this : The United States and Iran reached a deal on August 10 for Tehran’s release of five Iranian-American dual nationals to house arrest in exchange for Washington’s release of several jailed Iranians and the unfreezing of about $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue. . . . The latest prisoner release is not the first time Iran has demanded ransom payments in exchange for releasing hostage...

Recent developments have focused attention on Ariane Tabatabai, in particular that she is currently Chief of Staff for the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. On the other hand, a web search brings up what almost looks like too much information. She appears on web sites as adjunct professor at Goergetown University , Middle East Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an adjunct senior research scholar at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) , and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which says of her Ariane M. Tabatabai is an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Prior to joining RAND, she served as the director of curriculum and a visiting assistant professor of security studies at the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and an international civilian consultant for NATO. Previously, Tabatabai ...

I notice as of this morning that the narrative has shifted: over the weekend, and due in large part to the revelations about Robert Malley that emerged in the Tablet report I've linked here , there were initially two intellegence failures, one at the Mossad, which didn't see the Hamas attack from Gaza coming, and one at the FBI, where an Iranian agent, Ariane Tabatabai, currently works as Chief of Staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. This came on the heels of the revelation that Robert Malley, US Special Envoy to Iran and the architect of Democrat Iran policy since the Clinton administration, had had his security clearance suspended and been placed on leave from his position between April and June of this year. Neither the State nor the Defense Department has been responsive to congressional requests for explanation, and Tabatabai remains in her Defense Department position. As of today, this is all off the radar. L...

There's been a near-immediate consensus that the Hamas invasion over the weekend was a failure of Israeli intelligence, less so that US intelligence missed anything. NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed Blinken on “Meet the Press” on whether it was an intelligence failure. Blinken said that the violence in the region was “an attack that I don’t think anyone saw coming,” but fell short of calling it a failure. . . . Deputy national security adviser Jon Finer also dodged answering whether it was a failure, again reiterating that there will be time in the future to look into it. So far, only a few observers are looking at the causes of the invasion. Yesterday's New York Post editorial is a good start: The Obama administration’s vision saw an empowered Iran as a fulcrum to force action from Israel on the Palestinian question. Thus the Iran deal, which set the mullahs on the path toward nuclear breakout and regional hegemony they are now speeding down. . . . Obama’s Whit...

As of this posting, Robert Malley's Wikipedia entry is a version that was last updated on October 3 , in response to an October 1 story in the Tablet that I linked yesterday. The Wikipedia entry notes, "On June 29, 2023, Malley was placed on unpaid leave as special envoy to Iran, his security clearance was suspended amid an investigation into possible mishandling of classified material." I took note of the Tablet story only over this current weekend, assuming it must have been part of the prior weekend's bad news dump. But as I dug deeper, the story is months old. It was covered in a Washington Post op-ed on September 6 , referring to events four months earlier: Anyone who criticized the Chinese government for its secrecy surrounding the disappearance of former foreign minister Qin Gang (including me) is guilty of hypocrisy unless they acknowledge that the U.S. government is being similarly opaque about the fate of one of America’s top diplomats. Congre...