As Iran and six world powers scramble to reach a deal over Iran’s nuclear program by the deadline of Nov. 24 in Vienna, Washington is seeing a flurry of last-minute events focused on the pros and cons of pursuing diplomacy with Tehran.
While advocates from both sides made their arguments on Capitol Hill this week, two distinguished former US ambassadors told an audience here Wednesday that a deal between world powers and Iran over its nuclear program offers “huge advantages” and that the chances of a “complete breakdown” in the talks at this stage are low, even if the prospect of a comprehensive accord being signed before the looming deadline is also unlikely.
Stuart Eizenstat, who played a key role in promoting sanctions against Iran under both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, endorsed the diplomatic process with Iran at a Nov. 19 panel discussion hosted here by the Atlantic Council.
“I am of the belief that an agreement is important, and that there are huge advantages—to the United States, to the West, and to Israel—in having an agreement along the lines of what we see emerging,” he said.
Last month the veteran diplomat, who was named special adviser to the secretary on Holocaust issues last year, offered a key endorsement of diplomacy with Iran in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Eizenstat, who currently chairs the Coucil’s Iran Task Force, also emphasized the consequences of failing to reach an accord with Iran:
Without an agreement, one always has to ask, “What’s the alternative?” No deal means an unrestrained [Iranian] use of centrifuges, it means a continuation of the Iranian plutonium plant in Arak, it means no intrusive inspections by the IAEA, it means no elimination of [Iran’s] 20% enriched uranium, it means less likelihood of eliminating weaponization, it means undercutting those who are relative moderates in Iran. So there are enormous implications.
Thomas Pickering, who served as Washington’s chief envoy in virtually every hot spot—from Moscow to San Salvador and from Lagos and Tel Aviv to Turtle Bay (in the run-up to and during the first Gulf War)—meanwhile explained why a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program is highly preferable to the “military option.”
“Nobody believes that the use of force is a guaranteed, one-shot settlement of the problem of Iran’s nuclear program,” said Pickering, who co-runs the Iran Project, which promotes diplomacy between Iran and the United States, along with several other top foreign policy experts.
Pickering also argued that a deal would open the door to “further possibilities” for US-Iranian cooperation on a host of regional issues, most immediately in serving the president’s plan of “degrading and destroying” Islamic State (ISIS or IS) forces in Iraq and Syria and in bringing stability to Afghanistan.
“I remain optimistic,” he said, “but only on the basis of the fact that reasonable people could agree.”
Pickering argued that domestic politics in both countries could be the ultimate impediment to a final deal.
“The real problem is that there is a lot of unreasoned opposition, in both countries, that is affecting the situation,” he said.
On the American side, the “unreasoned opposition” Pickering referred to is rooted in Congress, where key members of the House and Senate advocate the Israeli government’s position that any deal should completely or almost completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which would be a non-starter for the Islamic Republic.
Yet whereas Pickering was critical of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for having “overreached” last November in calling last year’s interim Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) a “historic mistake,” Eizenstat suggested that his hardline stance may actually have toughened the P5+1’s (US, UK, Russia, China, France plus Germany) resolve to minimize Iran’s enrichment program as much as possible.
But Uzi Eilam, the former director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense Mission to Europe, argued that Netanyahu is “getting used” to the idea that Iran will retain some enrichment capacity under a comprehensive deal.
A deal that includes stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a third party (Russian) commitment to process Iran’s enriched uranium into fuel and assume responsibility for spent reactor fuel would be enough to meet Israeli security concerns even with an active Iranian enrichment program, said Eilam.
Pickering also noted that sanctions relief remains a sticking point, with the Iranians wanting full relief immediately and the P5+1 insistent on maintaining some sanctions in order to ensure Iran’s continued compliance with the terms of the final accord. But he was joined by Eizenstat in arguing that it would be “almost impossible” (Eizenstat’s words) for both sides to just walk away from the talks at this point.
While both Iran and the P5+1 continue to insist that they are focused on reaching a comprehensive accord by the deadline, with just three days to go, it appears highly unlikely.
As to how long the talks would go on in the event of an extension, Pickering argued that “short-term would be better than long-term,” though he acknowledged that “short-term is harder to get because everybody’s tired, they want to go home and think.”
Eizenstat added that the impending political change in Washington, where Republicans will take control of the Senate in January and are expected to oppose any deal with Iran, would make a short extension more desirable than a long-term one.
]]>by Derek Davison
The challenge of rebuilding the once strong but now broken ties between the United States and Iran was the topic of a June 3 Atlantic Council event, “US-Iran Relations: Past, Present, and Future.” The discussion, moderated by Barbara Slavin, included John Marks, founder of the international NGO Search [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
The challenge of rebuilding the once strong but now broken ties between the United States and Iran was the topic of a June 3 Atlantic Council event, “US-Iran Relations: Past, Present, and Future.” The discussion, moderated by Barbara Slavin, included John Marks, founder of the international NGO Search for Common Ground, and former Iranian diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian. Much of the event focused on Mousavian’s insights from his time as a member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team (2003-05), and his involvement in talks between the US and Iran on combatting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Mousavian identified three distinct stages in Iran’s historical relationship with the United States. From 1856, when the first treaty between the two nations was signed, until 1953, when the CIA participated in a coup that overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced it with the autocratic rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, US-Iran ties were friendly, albeit not extensive.
Mutual distrust
Iranians believed that the American people and their government supported Iranian reform and anti-colonial efforts (an American missionary, Howard Baskerville, was killed by government forces while participating in Iran’s 1909 constitutional revolution). But the 1953 coup, and the response by the US and UK to Mossadegh’s plan to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, represented a fundamental shift in America’s policy toward Iran. Where it once opposed colonialism and autocracy, America, as a co-sponsor of the coup and as the Shah’s new great power patron, was now, as far as Iranians were concerned, fundamentally identified with both. According to Mousavian this period of “dominance,” ended in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis. Hostility has been at the root of US-Iran relations ever since.
There are many reasons to believe, as Mousavian does, that the current state of hostility between Iran and the United States cannot be maintained. The international sanctions that have been levied against it to force the government to agree to limits on its nuclear power program are not meant to last forever. They rely on an international consensus that is almost unprecedented and can be disrupted by any discord among the P5+1 member nations (US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany).
Sanctions have severely damaged the Iranian economy, which President Hassan Rouhani promised to fix during his 2013 election campaign. Politics aside, the human cost of sanctions is also growing by the day. The progress that has already been made in the nuclear talks makes the current moment critically important; if negotiations break down now, it’s difficult to see a way forward without a resurgence of the debate here over military action.
Amidst the debate over how much uranium enrichment capacity Iran “needs” and how much it actually wants, or the dispute over modifications to the proposed heavy-water reactor at Arak, the basic, almost insurmountable challenge to the nuclear talks is that the US and Iran simply do not trust the other side to abide by the terms of a final settlement.
Washington, which maintains diplomatic relations with every country it fought a war with in the 20th century apart from North Korea, is unable to move past the 444 days from 1979-81 in which Iranians held 52 Americans hostages in Tehran, despite the fact that no American hostage was killed in the process. The Iranians meanwhile remember the US’ role in the 1953 coup and its support for Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Mousavian argues that broken American promises have also contributed to Iranian (and particularly Revolutionary Guard) mistrust. The IRGC worked to secure the freedom of Americans taken hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s, and likewise cooperated with US military actions in Afghanistan post-9/11 because, according to Mousavian, American diplomats promised that those efforts would lead to closer US-Iranian ties. In both cases, though, those ties never materialized.
Comprehensive negotiations
The solution, as Mousavian sees it, is for the US and Iran to engage in talks on a broad, comprehensive range of issues rather than focusing only on Iran’s nuclear program. He suggests starting with those areas where the two countries’ interests are broadly aligned: the need for stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fight against regional drug trafficking, the effort to contain Salafi extremism and to combat Al-Qaeda-style terrorist movements, and the need for security and stability for Persian Gulf shipping.
These talks can be supplemented with what Marks characterizes as informal, “person-to-person” diplomacy, especially cultural and scientific exchanges, perhaps eventually leading to formal apologies — from the Iranians, for the hostage crisis, and from the Americans, for the 1953 coup and the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655. Once rapport has been built on these areas of common ground, the two sides can begin to tackle more challenging issues, such as (from the US perspective) Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, its relations with Israel, its ballistic missiles program, and its human rights record.
While Mousavian may be right that a comprehensive approach to US-Iran talks would be preferable to the current process, there’s a problem: comprehensive negotiations will take a very long time. The fact is that the current state of affairs around the nuclear talks will resolve itself, one way or another, long before any comprehensive US-Iran talks have a chance to achieve anything. Likewise, the crisis in Syria, which continually threatens to engulf the region, is too immediate a problem to be part of an extensive long-term framework. Mousavian accordingly suggests a two-track approach, where issues of critical, near-term concern are handled in a multi-lateral way, while longer-term, more comprehensive bilateral talks are undertaken. This may not be ideal, but it’s possible that such an approach could have real benefits. As he points out, the nuclear talks, specifically the P5+1′s recognition of Iranian needs with respect to uranium enrichment, offer a blueprint for progress (to wit, the US being receptive and responsive to Iran’s wishes) on a range of other issues.
This is a critical point for the possibility of renewing US-Iran relations. Regional stability requires Iran and the US to find a way of cooperating together, and the resurgence of Salafi extremism and terrorist groups in the region has aligned the interests and incentives of both countries. But working toward that stability requires a considerable commitment to open, comprehensive negotiations before this potentially vital relationship can be repaired.
Photo: After decades of no contact between high-level US and Iranian officials, a historic meeting between US Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif occurred on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York on September 13, 2013 — one month after Iran’s presidential inauguration of the moderate cleric, Hassan Rouhani.
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
It was like a movie in which different characters see the same events in completely different ways.
At one of those Washington think-tank panel discussions the other day, senior U.S. national security and military officials insisted that the American commitment to security and stability in the [...]]]>
by Thomas W. Lippman
It was like a movie in which different characters see the same events in completely different ways.
At one of those Washington think-tank panel discussions the other day, senior U.S. national security and military officials insisted that the American commitment to security and stability in the Persian Gulf is iron-clad and will not change. The U.S Navy’s Fifth Fleet and the 35,000 soldiers and sailors in the region are staying, they said, and Iran will not acquire or develop nuclear weapons. They reminded the audience that President Barack Obama, his secretaries of state and defense, and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have told all this to Gulf Arab leaders over and over, most recently during the president’s visit to Saudi Arabia in March.
“We are present in a major and significant way,” one senior Pentagon official said at this gathering, organized by the Atlantic Council. “We are not leaving and we are not inattentive.”
The next morning, different panelists, assembled by the Middle East Policy Council, acknowledged that the message had been delivered unequivocally and often, and agreed that Obama and the others were no doubt sincere. Unfortunately, they said, Gulf Arab leaders don’t believe it.
“They think we don’t have the will to uphold our principles,” said Mark T. Kimmitt, a former senior official of both the State and Defense departments. “It’s not about our strength on the ground. It’s about our willingness to use it.” Given the record of the past few years, he said, “There’s not a lot of reason for the Gulf Arabs to be happy.”
“There are deep structural sources of anxiety” about the United States among leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, said Colin Kahl, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in Obama’s first term. First among these, he said, is “the widespread perception that the United States is simply politically exhausted” after more than a decade of war and has no appetite for further involvement. Witnessing the U.S. troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, “They wonder when the U.S. will begin to draw down in the Gulf.” The GCC leaders were taken aback, he said, by the strong popular opposition among Americans to military intervention in Syria, and drew their own conclusions.
Michael Gfoeller, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia, said the Saudis and others have been disconcerted by the way the United States and its partners have conducted nuclear negotiations with Iran without input from them. In their view, he said, Washington is proceeding “with almost no input from us and yet we are going to be the front line of what we think is going to be a nuclear armed Iran…They think that when we don’t consult with them it’s a sign that we don’t take their national security seriously.”
These panelists said it was useful that President Obama went to see King Abdullah and other senior princes in Riyadh, but not sufficient to overcome the doubts that have been built up about U.S. staying power. Ford Fraker, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said that a week ago he asked Prince Muqrin, now second in line to the Saudi throne, how he assessed the Obama-Abdullah meeting. Muqrin, who speaks fluent English, “looked at me and said, ‘We did have the opportunity to clarify a number of important issues,’ and that’s all he said,” Fraker reported.
The two forums amounted to a fascinating but also baffling conversation about a topic that has been a focus of analysis in Washington and the Gulf states for months. The United States and its allies in the region have compelling interests in common — combating al-Qaeda and its affiliates, seeking a solution in Syria, ensuring the free flow of oil through the Gulf, stabilizing Yemen and Iraq, and countering what they see as the malign activities of Iran in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Bahrain. The Gulf states buy American weapons, depend on the United States for military training and assistance with cyber-security issues, and share intelligence about terrorist financing. And these relationships have been in place for many years. Why, then, have the Gulf leaders, and particularly the Saudis, been so vocally unhappy about U.S. policy?
The first answer participants gave was the nuclear negotiations with Iran, from which they are excluded. In the view especially of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, panelists said, these negotiations are dangerous either way: if they fail, nothing will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but if they succeed, sanctions will be lifted, Iranian oil exports will surge, and Iran will be free to pursue its quest for regional hegemony. Moreover, in the Gulf view, if the negotiations succeed, the United States will have another incentive to reduce its military commitments in the Gulf.
Gulf Arab leaders, panelists said, are well aware of the constraints that are curtailing Pentagon spending. Cuts will have to be made somewhere, and they see their region as a target, especially if the United States reaches some accommodation with Iran.
The Gulf leaders were shocked by the alacrity with which Washington turned its back on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak after demonstrations against him broke out in 2011. They think “Maybe the United States won’t be a reliable ally for them,” Kahl said. These doubts have been stoked, he and other panelists said, by all the talk about growing U.S. oil output in the fracking boom, and the possibility that the United States will feel itself safely insulated from developments in the Gulf.
Despite assurances from Washington to the contrary, panelists said, the Saudis and Emiratis believe that the United States is focused exclusively on the nuclear issue in its negotiations with Iran, ignoring other troubling aspects of Iranian policy. Kahl said it’s actually a good idea to confine the current negotiations to the nuclear issue because Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani does not control the other Iranian activities that so trouble its neighbors. Those matters are under the jurisdiction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Kahl said, and it would be counterproductive to bring the IRGC into the nuclear discussions.
In a separate commentary published during the same week as the panel discussions, Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that, “One Saudi businessman complained to me recently that there was no discernible U.S. global strategy, and that its absence makes it impossible for Saudi Arabia to construct any strategy at all. The quandary is common among many U.S. allies, and it raises fundamental questions about U.S. commitments abroad. Is there anything for which U.S. allies can rely on the United States, and under what circumstances might it change? Equally confounding, how can America’s friends make themselves vital to the United States if the United States has no clear understanding and ordering of its own interests?”
In some ways, however, as several of the panelists noted, it is not just the United States that seems to be groping for an effective regional strategy. The six monarchies that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council have deep policy differences among themselves, about Iran, about Syria, and about the dangers of religious extremism. Oman, for example, hosted the secret diplomacy that led to the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and is reportedly planning a $1 billion natural gas pipeline link to the Islamic Republic. And on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that the United States has identified Kuwait as the major source of funding for jihadist groups fighting in Syria — groups that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are trying to defeat. If Alterman’s Saudi friend is having difficulty discerning a comprehensive U.S. strategy in the region, perhaps it’s not surprising.
Several of the panelists said that the key to assuaging the anxiety among GCC leaders is more and closer consultation, more often. It’s well and good for the president and cabinet members and officers from the U.S. Central Command to go to the region from time to time, they said, but the Gulf leaders want to see the deputy assistant secretaries and other policy worker bees out there more often. To some extent they made the Gulf leaders sound like spoiled children demanding mommy’s full attention right this minute.
Photo: President Barack Obama meets with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during a bilateral meeting at Rawdat Khuraim in Saudi Arabia, March 28, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Today, while Iran and six world powers resumed talks over a comprehensive nuclear deal in Vienna, here in Washington the possibility of an US diplomatic presence in Tehran was discussed at a prominent think tank. Two years ago a lede like that would have made you look twice, but [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Today, while Iran and six world powers resumed talks over a comprehensive nuclear deal in Vienna, here in Washington the possibility of an US diplomatic presence in Tehran was discussed at a prominent think tank. Two years ago a lede like that would have made you look twice, but since the Rouhani government took power in June 2013 and an interim nuclear deal was reached between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) on November 24, this seems more possible than ever.
According to Ramin Asgard, a former US foreign service officer who worked on a range of Iran-related issues during his recent 16-year career at the State Department, re-establishing an official US presence in Iran would benefit US national security as well as US citizens. He explains why in a new report commissioned by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), which conducts essential polling of Iranian-Americans as well as related advocacy and outreach.
Asgard essentially argues that due to the continued absence of a US diplomatic presence in Iran, for the last 35 years the US’ Iran policy has been informed largely by intelligence, governments, think tanks and other third-hand information rather than the reality on the ground. This has resulted in a “lack of a locus of policy discipline in America’s Iran policy, directly decreasing America’s ability to advance its foreign policy goals.” But Asgard points out that some of the benefits of a US diplomatic presence in Iran include the ability to directly engage with the Iranian government on important US national security issues and the possibility of a US Public Affairs Section in Tehran, which could engage local media in explaining US policy positions as well as support US-Iran academic and cultural exchanges.
Of course, just this month millions of Iranians, according to the Iranian government, were celebrating the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which kicked off with the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by Iranian students and the detainment of US hostages for over a year — so there would need to be assurances by the Iranian government that this wouldn’t happen again, along with several other important agreements. As for Iranian opposition to this venture, Asgard responds that this “wouldn’t be a unilateral measure” and that the Iranian government also has interests in this project, including an upgraded Iranian diplomatic presence in the US (at present, Iranian officials at their UN headquarters in New York are limited to travel within a 25-mile radius of the building).
To be sure, Asgard addresses the greatest cons of his proposal in his report, including the argument that re-establishing an US official presence in Iran betrays its opposition — in response he asks, has the US-Iran cold war actually led to the improvement of Iranian human rights? Ultimately, the point that more than 3 decades of hostility between the two countries has actually advanced the interests of destructive forces for many Iranians and US interests is undeniable, but the question remains: is re-establishing an official US presence in Iran even possible?
Going beyond expected US and Iranian domestic opposition, according to John Limbert, an academic and former US hostage in Iran, while Asgard’s proposal is ideal, it’s too soon to pursue. He argued today on the panel he shared with Asgard at the Atlantic Council, which hosted the release of PAAIA’s report, that US diplomats could be used as “pawns” if something goes wrong between the US and Iran as it often has at critical stages in their collective history. At the same time, Limbert also noted that US engagement with Iran “shouldn’t be held hostage” to progress on the nuclear issue.
Perhaps most interestingly, Asgard repeatedly stated that establishing an official US presence in Iran doesn’t have to involve rapprochement — the establishment of US diplomatic relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union support that notion — and that could also help reassure Iranian hardliners. Still, it does make the prospect of better US-Iran relations seem all the more possible, which is why this discussion will no doubt continue — as a debate — especially as Iran and world powers try to inch towards that final nuclear deal…
Photo: The US embassy compound in Tehran, known as the “den of spies” in Iran, which has been out of US control since its seizure by Iranian students in 1979.
]]>via IPS News
Increasing U.S.-Iran cultural exchanges could lay the groundwork for better relations between the two countries, believes a prominent think tank here, despite the prevalence of stereotypical memes of the United States as the “Great Satan” and Iran as part of the [...]]]>
via IPS News
Increasing U.S.-Iran cultural exchanges could lay the groundwork for better relations between the two countries, believes a prominent think tank here, despite the prevalence of stereotypical memes of the United States as the “Great Satan” and Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil”.
According to an issue brief released on June 27 by the Washington-based Atlantic Council, the United States should reach out to Iran’s people through a variety of cultural exchanges, even as the Jun. 14 election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next president may present an opportunity for the United States and Iran to mend their decades-long cold war.
“Cultural and academic exchanges between the U.S. and Iran are a low-cost, high-yield investment in a future normal relationship between the two countries,” said the brief, authored by the council’s bipartisan Iran Task Force.
Recommendations from the task force, comprised of an array of U.S. national security experts, included creating a non- or quasi-official working group “comprised of bilateral representatives from academia, the arts, athletics, the professions, and science and technology” and an U.S. Interests Section in Tehran.
“When it comes to countries that have no diplomatic channels like the U.S. and Iran, people-to-people diplomacy is the only route available to us,” Reza Aslan, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS.
Scepticism towards cultural diplomacy
Major roadblocks stand in the way of the kind of diplomacy that led to improved U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War.
“Yes, cultural diplomacy is good and has been tried before with decent results during the Khatami presidency,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar at the University of Hawaii, told IPS.
“But note that the context was different. The United States had not yet fully embarked on its ferocious sanctions regime which makes cultural exchanges quite difficult and reliant on the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control granting exceptions to literally every exchange,” she said.
The council conceded that conducting U.S.-Iran exchange programs between nations without bilateral diplomatic channels is “challenging”.
It also stressed that “selling such programming as a means to drive a wedge between the Iranian government and people makes any successful execution problematic”.
But the “goodwill of the Iranian people is ultimately the biggest U.S. asset in changing the direction of the Islamic Republic” and “maintaining active people-to-people linkages during periods of strained bilateral relations has many benefits for U.S. national security, particularly over the long term”, according to the brief.
Addressing animosity
Even so, decades of mutual mistrust between U.S. and Iranian governments, fuelled by what both consider consistent acts of hostility from the other side, has also filtered into the media of both nations.
“The media in Iran is obviously state media which just espouses the propaganda of regime and that’s not going to change,” Aslan told IPS.
“On the U.S. side, the media is a commercial enterprise…As with any soap opera, the only thing the media cares about is eyeballs, which are attracted by sex, violence, fear and terror, and right now, the biggest boogie man is Iran and nothing change is going to change that,” he said.
“While public diplomacy is absolutely vital and really the only outlet we have, the question of whether it’s going to change the larger media perception in the two countries of each other remains a complex one,” said Aslan.
In his first press conference as Iran’s president-elect, the reformist-backed Rouhani appeared as a stark contrast to Iran’s current controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Our main policy will be to have constructive interaction with the world,” Rouhani, Iran’s nuclear negotiator during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, during a televised broadcast on Jun. 17.
“We will not pursue adding to tensions. It would be wise for the two nations and countries to think more of the future. They should find a solution to the past issues and resolve them,” said Rouhani said regarding future U.S.-Iran relations.
Rouhani, who served on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council for 16 years and is known as the “diplomatic sheik”, has elicited much commentary in the United States about his possible impact on Iran’s nuclear negotiating stance.
How his new position will affect Iran’s interactions on the world stage, including its controversial nuclear program and its backing of the Assad regime in Syria, remains to be seen.
On Jul. 1, tough new sanctions to which President Barak Obama has already committed will also take effect. Among other provisions, they will penalise companies that deal in Iran’s currency or with Iran’s automotive sector.
The Republican-led House is expected to pass legislation by the end of next month (on the eve of Rouhani’s inauguration) that would sharply curb or eliminate the president’s authority to waive sanctions on countries and companies doing any business with Iran, thus imposing a virtual trade embargo on Iran.
Other sanctions measures, including an expected effort by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham to get an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) resolution passed by the Senate after the August recess, are lined up.
“Unless there is a change in the overall frame of Washington’s approach to Iran, cultural exchanges will be perceived with suspicion in Tehran and effectively undercut by powerful supporters of the sanctions regime in Washington,” Farhi told IPS.
]]>by Farideh Farhi
From the looks of it, the second round of talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan was a complete failure, with both sides unable to even find a common language to begin a process of give and take. The sense I get is that the US side is rather [...]]]>
by Farideh Farhi
From the looks of it, the second round of talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan was a complete failure, with both sides unable to even find a common language to begin a process of give and take. The sense I get is that the US side is rather unhappy, even more than expected, with Iran. After all, it made a slight move during the first round by reportedly not demanding the complete dismantling of Fordo and rather asking for its suspension with provisions that would make its return to operation difficult. In return, it offered some sanctions relief regarding the gold trade and petrochemical industry.
The Iranian leadership did not think this was a balanced offer even if they acknowledged the US move as a positive step. The closure or non-operation of Fordo is a key component of a solution to the nuclear conflict while the slight sanctions relief offered in return hardly impacts the complex web of trade and financial sanctions that have been imposed on Iran. More importantly, for negotiation purposes, Fordo — an under-mountain site built in reaction to the repeated refrain of “all options are on the table” — is Tehran’s most important leverage for the talks. So, giving it away cheaply is just bad negotiating strategy.
There were attempts by some members of Iran’s foreign policy establishment to sell the US offer as a good first step to the Iranian public but that didn’t work out. In private conversations, even those hoping that Tehran would take the offer talked about the need for the Leader to take the “poisoned chalice,” a reference to Islamic Revolution founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous words when he accepted a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988. In other words, even those hoping for the acceptance of the offer considered it unbalanced and only necessitated through circumstances.
Subsequent efforts to make the offer more balanced during the technical talks in Istanbul failed. Hence, as they have done before, the Iranian negotiating team shifted gears and began talking about a comprehensive solution to the Iran question that will address other regional issues (i.e. Syria and Bahrain) as well as delineate what the end game will be. The endgame for Tehran since everything began in 2003 has always entailed the right to enrich uranium on Iranian soil. In retrospect, we should have expected Iran’s shift back toward a comprehensive discussion — which also happened in Moscow — after efforts during the technical talks to make the revised proposal more balanced failed.
As a result, the question of “now what?” will have to be on the table for the US. By moving a bit, the Obama administration has acknowledged that just making demands without at least appearing to address some of Iran’s bottom lines won’t move the process forward. Similarly, the presumption that a successful sanctions regime will convince Tehran to accede to a perceived bad deal in order to rescue Iran’s economy also just received a solid beating.
The US can of course continue to tighten the economic noose on Iran, although it is not clear how much more “useful” damage that will actually do. Two recent reports from completely divergent outlets — the National Iranian American Council and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — suggest that Iran’s economy is adapting to the limits that have been imposed on its oil exports. Neither of these reports deny the harm sanctions have inflicted or the opportunity costs that have resulted, but they do acknowledge that Iran has been able to adjust and limp along at least in terms of macro trade and budget numbers. Even a recent joint-report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Federation of American Scientists — while focusing on the costs and risks of Iran’s nuclear program — ends up acknowledging that costs from the loss of oil exports and opportunity costs resulting from the loss of foreign investment has been absorbed by Iran.
Indeed, continuing with what hasn’t worked in the past with the hope that it will one day work is what Gary Samore, Obama’s former nuclear advisor, expects. I guess the hope is that something magical will happen with Iran’s June 14 election and a newly elected president who will take charge by August. Perhaps he will be able to convince the Iranian leadership across the board that the offer Iran just designated as neither balanced nor comprehensive needs to be accepted.
This expectation or hope is a risky one. It is premised on the belief that Iran is a contested political environment and the harshness of sanctions will eventually pave the way for folks who think it’s time to abandon Iran’s nuclear program in favor of economic riches to gain the upper hand or argument. But the logic of Iran as a contested political terrain actually brings us to the opposite conclusion. One can more easily argue that the inability to begin a process of give and take on the nuclear issue before Iran’s election provides incentive to those who insist on Iran’s nuclear rights — and also happen to be in charge of the country — to make sure that a president is elected who will continue to toe their established line. In other words, the further escalation of sanctions may end up impacting the Iranian election, but not in the way that was intended.
So are there other options? Yes, according to another recent report by the Atlantic Council called Time to Move from Tactics to Strategy on Iran. It calls upon the Obama administration to “lay out a step-by-step reciprocal and proportionate plan that ends with graduated relief of sanctions on oil, and eventually on the Iranian Central Bank, in return for verifiable curbs on Iranian uranium enrichment and stocks of enriched uranium, and assurances that Iran does not have undeclared nuclear materials and facilities.”
Various sections of the report appear like they have been written by different members of the Council’s Iran Task Force, but the process laid out is pretty close to what the Iranians have articulated; if the issue is Iran’s nuclear program, then let’s lay out a roadmap and endgame for how the nuclear issue can be resolved to the relative satisfaction of all sides. The report also calls for opening an US Interests Section in Iran and increased people-to-people contact. Although it doesn’t come right out and say it, it effectively endorses various improved relations (people-to-people or government-to-government) as a companion to or simultaneous with a clearly defined step-by-step framework that reduces pressure on Iran in exchange for limitations on its nuclear program.
I’m not sure if the individuals who wrote the section on people-to-people contact and the need to use stepped-up public diplomacy to make Iranians “aware of the real reasons for sanctions” (to ensure the peacefulness of Iran’s nuclear program) understand how hard it is even for the most adept propaganda machine — and our country does have a pretty good one — to sell the idea that the US is justified in collectively punishing Iranians for the policies of their leaders. Nevertheless, making the case that the US is really not that bad while the sanctions regime is being relaxed through a step-by-step process of negotiations is a whole lot easier than what is being done right now: escalating the process of squeezing Iran while denying responsibility for it.
The Council report curiously does insist on maintaining one aspect of the Obama administration’s approach. It says that the majority of the Iran Task Force favors maintaining the military option as a last resort. It calls on the Obama administration to make sure that the option remains credible despite the acknowledgment that “While the drawbacks of a nuclear Iran are grave, the ramifications of a premature military strike—what the US military refers to as “second- and third-order effects”—could also be dire.” My dictionary tells me that “dire” is much worse than “grave” and I guess the report tries to ignore this by highlighting its rejection of a “premature” strike, whatever that means. But the dire effects of the premature strike are the same, I suppose, as a rightly timed strike.
Beyond this, I am truly puzzled by the inability of those promoting this type of public discourse to understand the corrosive impact that the language of “all options are on the table” has on the so-called international community that the Obama administration claims to represent, as well as various stakeholders in Iran, including the “Iranian people” who we apparently love and are so interested in establishing contact with. These fighting words do nothing to make the threat of military attack credible to those who run Iran’s nuclear policy precisely because of the “dire” effects that the Council report lays out. They also undercut any claim to righteousness regarding the nuclear row for the people who occupy the land and buildings that are being threatened. I cannot claim to know what the “Iranian people” think, but I can say that the overwhelming majority of Iranians I know, inside and outside of Iran, consider this language vulgar and appalling and reflective of an utter disregard for other people’s lives and livelihoods. Who else speaks this way nowadays? North Korea?
America’s “now what?” moment regarding Iran could be a productive moment if it begins to come to terms with the fact that the sanctions regime has not changed the calculation of the Iranian government — as evidenced by what just happened in Almaty. It can only do so, however, if it acknowledges that the military option cannot be made credible because the idea is both stupid and offensive.
]]>Two interesting — but little-noted — developments on the Hagel front over the last couple of days.
First, Paul Wolfowitz endorsed former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy to replace Leon Panetta based on her understanding of and advocacy for the importance of training Afghan forces to prepare [...]]]>
Two interesting — but little-noted — developments on the Hagel front over the last couple of days.
First, Paul Wolfowitz endorsed former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy to replace Leon Panetta based on her understanding of and advocacy for the importance of training Afghan forces to prepare them to fight on their own against the Taliban. Whether this constitutes a kiss of death for Flournoy’s candidacy, I have no idea. But I imagine that, given his record on both Iraq and Afghanistan, Wolfowitz’s endorsement is one of the last she would want to have at this moment. (Remember: it was Wolfowitz who denounced Gen. Eric Shinseki’s estimate that it would take hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to pacify the country as “wildly off the mark.”) Worse for Flournoy, Wolfowitz concludes that it is a “vital” U.S. interest to prevent the Taliban from returning to power, suggesting that Flournoy at the Pentagon would somehow ensure that this would not happen (despite the fact that the Obama administration has repeatedly indicated it could accept the return of the Taliban in some kind of power-sharing agreement based on certain conditions, notably its definitive break with Al Qaeda). According to Wolfowitz:
[I]t’s also vital for the US to prevent the Taliban from returning to power in Afghanistan, so we have a huge stake in the Afghan Security Forces.
Flournoy not only grasped the centrality of that strategic point, but she pursued it skillfully and without seeking credit for what she did. As far as I know, none of this has been reported before. But it deserves to be.
It leads me to think that Flournoy might be the best possible candidate for the top Pentagon job during the coming difficult years in Afghanistan. She does not seem to be someone who would comfortably let that war be lost.”
Now, to conclude that Flournoy would or could prevent that outcome, one would have to assume that U.S. troops would remain heavily engaged there after the 2014 withdrawal date, more engaged than I would imagine Obama would prefer. Plus, as in Iraq, if the Kabul government does not agree to a provide legal immunity to U.S. soldiers there as part of a future Status of Forces Agreement, what, if anything, can Flournoy do about that?
The second development was the announcement, in an “exclusive” to the Washington Post’s resident hard-line neo-con blogger, Jennifer Rubin, that the Senate Minority Whip, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, opposed Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Defense Secretary. There’s a lot of nonsense in Cornyn’s statement, but my eyes — after Ali pointed it out to me — focused on the part that had played a sort of catalytic role. According to Rubin, Cornyn asserted that Hagel “said he wouldn’t support all options being on the table” during a 2010 Atlantic Council briefing by the Council’s Iran task force. Rubin helpfully linked to the transcript of that briefing.
In fact, however, Hagel did not say he wouldn’t support “all options being on the table” in response to my question about whether it was helpful — to promoting human rights in Iran or improving prospects for a negotiated agreement on its nuclear program — for U.S. officials to constantly remind the Iranians that “all options are on the table.” This was his reply:
I’m not so sure it is necessary to continue to say all options are on the table. I believe that the leadership in Iran, regardless of the five power centers that you’re referring to – whether it’s the ayatollah or the president or the Republican Guard, the commissions – have some pretty clear understanding of the reality of this issue and where we are.
I think the point that your question really brings out – which is a very good one. If you were going to threaten on any kind of consistent basis, whether it’s from leadership or the Congress or the administration or anyone who generally speaks for this country in anyway, than [sic] you better be prepared to follow through with that.
Now, Stuart [Eizenstat, Hagel's co-chair on the task force] noted putting 100,000 troops in Iran – I mean, just as a number as far as if to play this thing out. The fact is, I would guess that we would all – I would be the one to start the questioning – would ask where you’re going to get 100,000 troops. (Laughter.) So your point is a very good one, I think.
I don’t think there’s anybody in Iran that does not question the seriousness of America, our allies or Israel on this for all the reasons we made very clear. And I do think there does become a time when you start to minimize the legitimacy of a threat. When you threaten people or you threaten sovereign nations, you better be very careful and you better understand, again, consequences because you may be required to employ that threat and activate that threat in some way.
So I don’t mind people always, as we have laid out, and I think every president and every administration, anybody of any consequence who’s talked about this can say – does say. But I think it’s implied that the military threat is always there. [Emphasis added.]
So Hagel never said that he doesn’t believe “all options are on the table.” He said that you have to be careful about not repeatedly making such a threat, because the Iranian leadership understands it already, and the more you repeat it, the less credibility it has. This is Hagel’s version of TR’s ”speak softly and carry a big stick.”
What we have here is yet another example of the neo-con propaganda machine/echo chamber. Someone gives a credulous or complicit staffer in Cornyn’s office a list of talking points, at least one of which is demonstrably false; the staffer tells Rubin or someone else close to her that Cornyn is willing to publicly attack Hagel based on these talking points; Rubin calls Cornyn and gets him to spout them (including at least one that is demonstrably false) on the record. (Several others are taken completely out of context). Then she claims that the Minority Whip is now firmly opposed to Hagel’s nomination (based on information that is demonstrably false), quoting him extensively, and thus providing additional evidence and momentum for her previous suggestion (made the day before) that Hagel is “toast.“ And then she has the audacity/chutzpah/carelessness to link to a briefing that she wants her readers to believe proves Cornyn’s claim but that in fact shows that his claim is false. Is this deliberate or negligent on her part? Did she read the transcript before she linked to it? Or did she simply link to it because someone had given her the same or a similar version of the talking points, and she failed to investigate their reliability? I don’t think any of that is important to her; her main goal is to prevent Hagel’s nomination. (For more on Rubin’s work at the Post, read Eric Alterman’s Nation article from last summer, entitled appropriately “Attack Dog Jennifer Rubin Muddies the Washington Post’s Reputation.”)
Then Cornyn’s remarks are immediately reprinted on the Weekly Standard website and linked to by the National Review’s “Corner” blog. I’m sure Commentary’s Contentions blog will pick them up soon, and maybe we’ll see them on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page next week. (Today’s lead editorial deals with John Kerry’s appointment, but the thrust is all about the dangers posed by Hagel, whose views are predictably described as “neo-isolationism.”)
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Iranian oil expert Dr. Sara Vakhshouri, featured this week at the Atlantic Council, asks whether the world can live without Iranian oil and if Iran can survive under further severe economic sanctions. The answer, she says, depends on the timeframe in consideration and a multitude of other factors, [...]]]>
Iranian oil expert Dr. Sara Vakhshouri, featured this week at the Atlantic Council, asks whether the world can live without Iranian oil and if Iran can survive under further severe economic sanctions. The answer, she says, depends on the timeframe in consideration and a multitude of other factors, such as how Iran responds to present and upcoming challenges — like the international sanctions regime and domestic instability – that drive potential customers and investors away.
At present, Iran would seriously struggle to keep its head above water if the price of oil dropped substantially below $100 per barrel where it’s remained mostly constant, says the former advisor to the National Iranian Oil Company International (NIOCI). As to the question of whether the world can survive without Iranian oil, Vakhshouri suggests it likely will in the near future; it has already started adjusting accordingly with increased Saudi output and Iraqi production, Canadian and US domestic production, and other factors such as a global decrease in demand.
]]>Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative polemicist and long-time Iran hawk who joined the Foundation for Defense of Democracies after leaving the American Enterprise Institute in 2008, is being honest when he reminds us here that he has opposed direct US military intervention in Iran. For Ledeen, Iranian-regime change is more attainable if [...]]]>
Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative polemicist and long-time Iran hawk who joined the Foundation for Defense of Democracies after leaving the American Enterprise Institute in 2008, is being honest when he reminds us here that he has opposed direct US military intervention in Iran. For Ledeen, Iranian-regime change is more attainable if it’s executed from the ground up, and the US should do everything it can to facilitate that process. In 2010 he unapologetically argued that the US should covertly or openly support regime change-inclined Iranians during a debate at the Atlantic Council and reiterated that argument in “Takedown Tehran“ this year. (For some reason Ledeen seems to think that the Green Movement would invite the regime-change-oriented US support he advocates, even if key opposition figures have opposed the broad sanctions that he endorses. This may be due to his allegedly well-informed sources, some of whom have led him astray in the past.)
In any case, sanctions should be part of the US regime-change strategy, argues Ledeen, who promoted the US invasion of Iraq (although he later denied doing so), but sanctions alone will never be the means to his desired end:
But I don’t know anyone this side of the White House who believes that sanctions, by themselves, will produce what we should want above all: the fall of the Tehran regime that is the core of the war against us. To accomplish that, we need more than sanctions; we need a strategy for regime change.
Like fellow ideologues — such as Bret Stephens, a Wall Street Journal deputy editor and “Global View” columnist – Ledeen argues that the US must also execute a war strategy with Iran because like it or not, we’re already at war (for a closer look at this line of reasoning, see Farideh’s post):
But even if all these are guided from Washington and/or Jerusalem, it still does not add up to a war-winning strategy, which requires a clearly stated mission from our maximum leaders. We need a president who will say “Khamenei and Ahmadinejad must go.” He must say it publicly, and he must say it privately to our military, to our diplomats, and to the intelligence community.
Without that commitment, without that mission — and it’s hard to imagine it, isn’t it? — we’ll continue to spin our wheels, mostly playing defense, sometimes enacting new sanctions, sometimes wrecking the mullahs’ centrifuges, forever hoping that the mullahs will make a deal. Until the day when one of those Iranian schemes to kill even more Americans works out, and we actually catch them in the act. Then our leaders will say “we must go to war.”
But Ledeen’s Washington Times column this week suggests that he may be pivoting toward the military option:
I have long opposed military action against the Iranian regime. I believe we should instead support democratic revolution. However, our failure to work for regime change in Iran and our refusal to endorse Mr. Netanyahu’s call for a bright “red line” around the mullahs’ nuclear weapons program, makes war more likely, as similar dithering and ambiguity have so often in the past.
Interestingly, in August Ledeen stated that the Israeli strategy was to push the US to attack Iran:
…Israel does not want to do it. For as long as I can remember, the Israelis have been trying to get U.S. to do it, because they have long believed that Iran was so big that only a big country could successfully take on the mullahs in a direct confrontation. So Israel’s Iran policy has been to convince us to do whatever the Israelis think is best. And while they’re willing to do their part, they are very reluctant to take on the entire burden.
“Faster, Please!”, right?
]]>I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on [...]]]>
I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on the same topic was the closest thing to such a study that I’ve come across so far.) “The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble” is sponsored by Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and was authored by Khosrow B. Semnani, an Iranian-American engineer by training and philanthropist. It will be featured this week at a joint event by the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Iran Task Force at the Atlantic Council. With the study Semnani endeavors to scientifically prove something which seems obvious: attacking nuclear facilities in Iran could have devastating effects on possibly hundreds of thousands of Iranians who would be exposed to highly toxic chemical plumes and even radioactive fallout. Case studies were conducted on the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Natanz, Arak, and Bushehr. In Isfahan, a military strike on the nuclear facility there “could be compared to the 1984 Bhopal industrial accident at the Union Carbide plant in India”:
In that accident, the release of 42 metric tons (47 U.S. tons) of methyl isocyanate turned the city of Bhopal into a gas chamber. Estimates of deaths have ranged from 3,800 to 15,000. The casualties went well beyond the fatalities: More than 500,000 victims received compensation for exposure to fumes.
The environmental consequences would also be wide-ranging:
With the high likelihood of soluble uranium compounds permeating into the groundwater, strikes would wreak havoc on Isfahan’s environmental resources and agriculture. The Markazi water basin, one of six main catchment areas, which covers half the country (52%), provides slightly less than one-third of Iran’s total renewable water (29%) (Figure 26). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the groundwater discharge in the basin from approximately 155,000 wells, 22,000 channels and 13,500 springs is the primary water source for agricultural and residential uses.106 It is almost certain that the contamination of groundwater as a result of strikes would damage this important fresh-water source.
The report also touches on the unintended consequences of militarily striking Iran, such as a “short or prolonged regional war” and explains, as reputable analysts have, why the Israeli strike on Iraq’s Osirak facility is a “false analogy”:
The Osirak analogy is the fantasy that there will be no blowback from strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It discounts the complexity, severity, scale, consequences, and casualties such an operation would entail. Iran’s nuclear program is not an empty shell, nor is it a single remote target. The facilities in Iran are fully operational, they contain thousands of personnel, they are located near major population centers, they are heavily constructed and fortified, and thus difficult to destroy. They contain tons of highly toxic chemical and radioactive material. To grasp the political and psychological impact of the strikes, what our estimates suggest is that the potential civilian casualties Iran would suffer as a result of a strike — in the first day — could exceed the 6,731 Palestinians and 1,083 Israeli’s reported killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past decade. The total number of fatalities in the 1981 Osirak raid was 10 Iraqis and one French civilian, Damien Chaussepied.
According to Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association, the report makes a “valuable contribution to “colorizing” the bloodless discussions of the “military option.” Thielmann, who formerly worked on assessments of ballistic missile threats at the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told Lobe Log that he had not seen “a more serious look at the medical consequences for the Iranian population” than provided by this report.
While Thielmann calls the report an “impressive effort”, he also offered criticism. “I take strong exception to the author’s introductory assertion that diplomacy with the Islamic Republic “requires a willful act of self-deception,” and that regime change is the only way to achieve an acceptable resolution to the challenges of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said.
Thielmann was also “surprised” that the strike scenario analyzed in the study includes the Bushehr facility, “which is of much less proliferation concern than the other nuclear facilities mentioned, and which, because of the extensive use of Russian personnel in operating the reactor there, would carry high political costs to attack. ”
“Such an attack would also violate Additional Protocol I of the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” said Thielmann, who provided the following excerpt from Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I:
1. Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population. Other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations shall not be made the object of attack if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.
It will be interesting to see whether the report gets mainstream media attention following the Wilson Center event and if it will spark further examination of this integral — but otherwise barely mentioned — aspect of using the “military option” on Iran.
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