Looks like the very same Indyk quoted by Hersh in 2007 here?

Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton
Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the
Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.” Indyk, who
is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the
Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear
whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of
its new policy. “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq,”
he said. “It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very
complicated. Everything is upside down.”

https://www.newyorker.com/m...

“The US economy no longer relies on
imported petroleum,” he correctly notes. “Fracking has turned the US
into a net oil and natural-gas exporter.” As a consequence, Persian Gulf
oil “is no longer a vital interest — that is, one worth fighting for.
Difficult as it might be to get our heads around the idea, China and
India need to be protecting the sea lanes between the Gulf and their
ports, not the US Navy.”

Heartless monster. "No longer a vital interest". Hasn't he thought about those struggling lobbyist families which now won't be able to afford even the second pair of Maseratis to their suffering children?

"No long a vital interest"? Not according to Trump seen through the eyes of Iraq’s caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi during a parliamentary session.

"The Americans are the ones who destroyed the country and wreaked havoc on it. They have refused to finish building the electrical system and infrastructure projects. They have bargained for the reconstruction of Iraq in exchange for Iraq giving up 50% of oil imports. So, I refused and decided to go to China and concluded an
important and strategic agreement with it. Today, Trump is trying to cancel this important agreement.”"

https://www.unz.com/wwebb/h...

While I understand why Iraqis are so incensed about the US, basically, abandoning them, I'm also sure it's clear why I see extricating America from the Middle Eastern swamp whatever the cost a much higher priority.

"Martin has been deeply invested in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” and in the proposition that the United States has a vital interest in pursuing that process to a successful conclusion. More broadly, he has subscribed to the view that the United States has vital interests at stake in the Middle East more generally, with regional stability and the well-being of the people living there"

No. The only use he ever had for the peace process was as cover for what Israel was really doing.

The only interest he ever cared about was Israel, not the stability or well-being of any other people but the hawks among Israelis.

He perverted US policy from the inside, in pursuit of those ends of those Lobby partisans. He has never been anything else.

And is about to pervert it AGAIN. One must be a total ignoramus not to notice American public’s changing attitude towards Israel, as well as Israel’s high powered lobbyists.
Before the change turns into an outright hostility, the apologists of the Empire are defusing the nascent rage. So, HE is the one to be PRAISED for being so wise, and deserving our support?
This leopard will keep on changing spots, but never his nature.
He is and will remain ardent apologist of American Empire — for as long as this Empire serves his primary interest. And that interest is clear — interest of Israel AND all of its citizens around the globe.

It is disheartening to read Bacevich praise Indyk-who was, after all, one of the architects of our disastrous Middle East "policy". I guess the Quincy Institute wants to hew a path closer to the mainstream narrative. What will be next? An apologia for Doug Feith and Richard Perle?

People find it hard to resist — what appears to be — a possibility of affecting change. Leopard Martin can change spits, but never his nature. And after a decade or so, Bachevich and all other optimists will relearn the same lesson.

I am wondering if this integrity initiative is in any way linked to its name sake
hatched up by intelligence somewhere in a Scottish barn, to create network of journalists?

I simply cannot wrap my head around Bacevich joining this foundation that uses Koch Brother money as part of its supporting funding...

That we are a net oil exporter right now seems to me like a bad argument for lack of a vital national interest in the Middle East. The argument may play in Peoria, but fracking is losing money, unable to produce oil profitably. What happens when it collapses — or government must underwrite fracking to keep the oil coming a little longer?

It might be worth pointing out that the fact the US is an oil exporter is largely irrelevant. The marginal barrel sets the price. Take several million barrels a day off the world market and WTI will be north of $120/barrel with all the economic consequences in the USA you would expect.

Especially if you look at US energy exports that are NEGLIGIBLE. And fracking is leaving behind mountains of debt, with no clear understanding of profitability. US is still importing oil and gas. Financially — nothing makes sense. And our erstwhile elites are fighting over who screwed up, and who will elbow to the top of power levers and fix it all!
Delusional, but not irrational when it comes to their self-interest.

Indyk's comments read like a neo-con who's lost favor and power. This is not a good sign. This points to the internecine warfare within the halls of conceptual power being closer to decided. With the diplomats out, it leaves the apocalypse cult as the de-facto winner.

Expect more ludicrous demands of US vassals and more effort to attack Iran. They're not going to stop. Where the oil comes from doesn't matter, what currency is used to conduct trade does.

It is exactly so — internecine warfare. But I do not see them loosing power. They are losing NARRATIVE both internationally and domestically. This is a beginning of crafting a new narrative to stem the rising hostility against Israel centric militaristic foreign policy orientation.

Thus switching to “diplomacy”, as military posturing just brings about dead ends to defend.
He wants results, So, change the narrative, diffuse anti-Israeli tide, and become a beacon of reason and wholesomeness. Who can resist these new spots?

Martin Indyk has already done maximal damage. His opportunity to actually help the situation has long past.
He is and always was an Israeli-firster

Saban Institute says it all!

There was never anything Quixotic about US foreign policy in the ME. As for Israel/Palestine, the policy, and "Martin" was central to it, was to pretend to negotiate in good faith while Israel occupied "the land from the river to the sea." In Iraq, except for Cheney's oil lust, it was to carry out the neo-con chant of "the road to Iran is through Iraq." As for Iran, it has been to barely resist Israel's, and US Israel-firster's, pressure for war, though it may still happen.

MY comment, severely critical of Isr*el will likely be "disappeared".

Yup, it's gone.

You will be able to find it at https://whimsicaldog.blogsp...

"Iran's nuclear ambitions"? Israel's "defense" needs no more US gifts, but tell that to the US Congress.

The trouble is, nobody in the "leadership" will follow his changed suggestions.

You mean to say that some establishment guy finally got fed up with all the bullshit?

In any event, Indyk is wrong to believe that Israel can defeat Iran in a conflict. Israeli nuclear weapons are really of little consequence in such a situation as the majority of them must be delivered by aircraft which Iran will simply shoot down. Those that are siloed will most likely meet the same fate. But in either case Russia will not allow any such conflict to go nuclear.

In terms of conventional capabailities, the IDF has never been a very good military unit since it basically has only entered engagements with less than equally capable opponents. However, that has all been changing since Hezbollah's defeat of the IDF in 2006.

Today Israel's IDF faces a combat hardened army in Syria, a combat hardened irregular military force in Lebanon, and increasingly hardened resistance in its own backyard with Hamas. And Iranian ground forces are not pushovers.

The Israeli navy is meaningless in this situation so it is only in the air that Israel now has any claim to fame. However, instead of increasing its Air Force with modernized F15x models, Israel has opted to acquire the F35, which no amount of avionics can make the air-frame fly better. Iran still uses the F14 as a heavy fighter, which Israel also requires for her situation making the acquisition of the F35 rather odd.

In the end, it will be Iranian missile development that places that nation in a position to deal a death blow to the Israeli state.

Indyk's argument, or Bachevic's, appears contradictory to me. On the one hand, he's had "his fill of the peace process," which so far has been led by an army of diplomats, to no avail. And then he "proposes not disengaging from the Middle East but demilitarizing U.S. policy." In other words, more useless diplomacy. The problem with US military intervention is not that it hasn't worked, but that it's been used injudiciously and burdened by too much political and diplomatic interference (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam). By "demilitarizing US policy" one apes Europe, which has renounced the stick in favor of the carrot only, thus never emerging from its foreign policy pygmy status.