At first glance, it doesn’t add up; why is Azerbaijan, a country brimming with oil and gas, interested in developing nuclear power capacity?

It’s a question befuddling local experts and environmental activists in Baku. But the questions don’t stop there. Under a May 8 executive order, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has given [...]]]> by Shahin Abbasov

At first glance, it doesn’t add up; why is Azerbaijan, a country brimming with oil and gas, interested in developing nuclear power capacity?

It’s a question befuddling local experts and environmental activists in Baku. But the questions don’t stop there. Under a May 8 executive order, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has given responsibility for the nuclear project not to the Ministry of Energy or the Ministry of Industry and Economy, but to the Ministry of Communications and High Technologies, specifically, to a National Center for Nuclear Research that is answerable to the ministry.

The executive order stressed that Azerbaijan’s nuclear capabilities would be “for peaceful purposes,” according to Azerbaijani news outlets.

Work on the nuclear project is slated to begin by the end of 2014, with a hoped-for completion date “within three to four years,” Communications Minister Ali Abbasov announced on his ministry’s website May 13. Abbasov did not specify the cost of the project or the scale of the future power plant, though he referred to the construction of “several nuclear reactors.”

In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued to Azerbaijan a preliminary agreement for construction of a single 10-15-megawatt nuclear reactor for research purposes. Baku has not yet formally applied to the IAEA for an agreement about additional reactors.

The nuclear facility would be situated on a plot of government-owned land 15 kilometers north of the capital, Baku.

Abbasov, a 61-year-old native of President Aliyev’s ancestral Nakhchivan region with a doctorate in microelectronics and a passion for digital IT, has no experience in nuclear energy. Nor, for that matter, do any of his deputies.

Baku’s interest in developing nuclear power dates back to the Soviet era. Those plans were mothballed amid the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as Azerbaijan’s involvement in a prolonged conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

France, which generates over three-quarters of its energy from nuclear power and already has longtime energy ties with the Aliyev administration, apparently senses an opportunity.

During his May 12 trip to Baku, French President François Hollande mentioned that unspecified French companies are willing to work with the Azerbaijani government on the construction of a nuclear-power plant. Earlier, Abbasov had named VINCI Construction Grands Projets, one of the world’s largest builders of mega-infrastructure facilities, as among the French concerns interested in getting involved in the nuclear project.

Some local economic experts question the logic behind Azerbaijan “going nuclear.”

The country’s economic growth rate is relatively brisk; the Asian Development Bank projects up to 5 percent growth for 2014. Economist Natik Jafarly believes that oil-and-gas-rich Azerbaijan already has the energy and electricity it needs to keep its economy going strong.

According to official data, Azerbaijan in 2013 consumed 20.6 billion kWt/h of electricity out of a production supply of 21.5 billion kWt/h. The extra supply was exported to neighboring Georgia and Russia.

Azerbaijan, though, does not produce uranium or nuclear fuel, and would have to look for exporters. “It will make Azerbaijan dependent on uranium price-changes and also politically dependent [on exporting countries],” argued Jafarly, head of the non-governmental Society of Economic Bloggers. The government has not named any possible sources for such uranium supplies.

Other experts believe that the plant will not generate power. In February 2012, the director of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Radiation Problems, Adil Garibov, told ANS TV that the government would build a reactor strictly for research purposes, including the production of isotopes for use in medical treatments. Garibov added that his institute had hired 16 young physicists who were being trained at nuclear centers abroad for such tasks.

Whatever the project’s purpose, environmentalist Farida Huseynova, head of the Greens Movement of Azerbaijan, believes that the 2011 Fukushima and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disasters show that the dangers of nuclear power outweigh the benefits for a country like Azerbaijan. “Supporters of this project say that Azerbaijani scientists will get the chance to conduct nuclear research. However, there are very few such nuclear physicists in Azerbaijan and they could do their research in other countries,” Huseynova said.

Rather than nuclear power, building up alternative energy resources well suited to Azerbaijan’s climate and geography — hydropower, solar power or wind power – would be preferable, she underlined. Jafarly agreed, noting the contradiction with the Azerbaijani government’s long-term demand that neighboring Armenia close its 38-year-old Metsamor plant, currently the only nuclear facility in the South Caucasus, because of its regional environmental risk.

“Since Baku consistently demands the closure of the Armenian plant, it is not clear why the government wants to create a new threat on its own territory,” Jafarly said.

As yet, government officials have not commented publicly on the nuclear project.

– Shahin Abbasov is a freelance correspondent based in Baku.

Photo: Oil- and natural gas-rich Azerbaijan has hinted it may be interested in developing nuclear energy capabilities. While a preliminary agreement only allows for a 10- to 15-megawatt facility, the government has not disclosed the scale of a project slated to start construction by the end of 2014. Credit: Tennessee Valley Authority

* This article was first published by EurasiaNet and was reprinted here with permission.

by Shireen T. Hunter

Not long after the outbreak of the crisis over Ukraine and Crimea, many observers began asking the following question: what impact could renewed Russo-Western tensions have on the fate of the ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program? Will the Russians encourage Iran to become more obdurate [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Shireen T. Hunter

Not long after the outbreak of the crisis over Ukraine and Crimea, many observers began asking the following question: what impact could renewed Russo-Western tensions have on the fate of the ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program? Will the Russians encourage Iran to become more obdurate and change its current and more flexible approach to negotiations with the P5+1 countries (the US, Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany), stop complying with sanctions on Iran, or even help it financially and militarily, for example by delivering the promised-but-withheld S-300 air defense system or even shipping the more advanced S-400?

Other questions are also important. Notably, what impact has the West’s treatment of Iran had on Russia’s ability to pressure Ukraine and in general to regain its influence in independent states of the former Soviet Union, including the Caucasus and Central Asia? Indeed, the Western policy of containing Iran and excluding it from many regional and transnational energy and other schemes has facilitated Russia’s policy of consolidating its position in the former USSR.

A major tool that Russia has used in its quest to regain influence over its former possessions has been its vast oil and gas reserves. This is quite evident in Ukraine’s case, where Russia has switched the gas spigot on and off as a way of pressuring Kiev. Iran is only second to Russia in its gas reserves and could have been an alternative to Russia in many countries of the former USSR, including Ukraine. Yet the Western policy of preventing any foreign investment in Iran’s energy sector, coupled with preventing any transfer of Iran’s oil and gas to Europe via various pipeline routes, has meant that Russia has gained an excessive share of the European energy market. Iranian gas could have easily been transported to Europe, especially the East European countries, through Turkey, Bulgaria and so on. Even Ukraine could have satisfied some of its energy needs through Iranian gas.

The same has been true in the Caucasus. Both Georgia and Armenia have wanted more energy cooperation with Iran. However, they were discouraged by the West and, in the case of Armenia, also pressured by Russia. The result has been their greater vulnerability to Russian pressure.

Meanwhile, preventing any of the Central Asian energy sources to pass through Iran, the only country with common land and sea borders with these countries (with the exception of Uzbekistan, which is a land-locked country), has made it more difficult for countries like Georgia to get, for instance, Turkmen gas. In other areas, too, excluding Iran from regional energy schemes, and discouraging Central Asian and Caucasian countries from cooperating with Iran, has worked either in Russia’s favor or created opportunities for China.

Even in the areas of security and conflict-resolution, Iran’s exclusion and the West’s encouraging regional countries to adopt anti-Iran policies has had negative effects. This has even given rise to new tensions and problems, for instance, between Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, as well as exacerbated sectarian tensions. For example, Azerbaijan’s resulting animosity to Iran has led it periodically to favor Sunni radical Islamists. Consequently, today Azerbaijan has a serious Salafi problem, and sectarian tensions in the country have been on the rise.

The experience described above provides important lessons for Western policy towards Iran and regional issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South Asia. The first lesson is that a policy of containment on several fronts is not practicable, at least not in the long run. For twenty years, the US has tried to contain both Russia and Iran in these regions and to bar Iran’s interaction with these regions, while also looking askance at China’s progress.

A second lesson is that excluding Iranian oil and gas from global markets inevitably limited Europe’s and Central Asia’s energy choices, making both more vulnerable to Russian pressures since, with the exception of Qatar, the Persian Gulf oil giants are not major players in the gas market.

The last and the most important lesson is that the West should press forward with negotiations with Iran, toward a satisfactory conclusion to the nuclear dispute. This should be followed by lifting sanctions, encouraging the return of Western energy companies to Iran, and planning new networks of energy transport which would include Iran. In the long run, this kind of engagement would also translate into better political relations between Iran and the West and produce a positive impact on Iran’s political evolution and hence issues of human rights and other freedoms in Iran.

With regard to broader regional security issues, the West should work with Iran on a case-by-case basis wherever this serves Western interests, rather than making all aspects of relations with Iran hostage to its stand on the Palestinian question. As shown by the example of Afghanistan — where Iran supported US interests in toppling the Taliban, only to be deemed part of an Axis of Evil — isolating and excluding Iran harms the West as much if not more than it does the Islamic Republic. Right now, the only real winner is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The brewing rapprochement between the United States and Iran, signified by the Geneva nuclear deal signed in January, seems likely to scramble American strategic priorities in the South Caucasus, especially for Azerbaijan.

In recent years, the United States deemphasized democratization in its dealings with Azerbaijan on account of Baku’s strategic position as [...]]]> by Richard Kauzlarich 

The brewing rapprochement between the United States and Iran, signified by the Geneva nuclear deal signed in January, seems likely to scramble American strategic priorities in the South Caucasus, especially for Azerbaijan.

In recent years, the United States deemphasized democratization in its dealings with Azerbaijan on account of Baku’s strategic position as Iran’s northern neighbour, a position that made it a key cog in the West’s containment policy against Tehran. But now that the United States — along with other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany – are taking the first steps toward re-establishing a working relationship with Iran, the justification for Washington’s tolerance of Baku rights abuses is starting to recede.

The Joint Action Plan, also known as the Geneva interim agreement, is designed to roll back aspects of Iran’s controversial nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief. This deal is seen as a stepping stone to a comprehensive pact that ensures the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program. Prior to reaching agreement, the nuclear standoff had prompted increasingly tight US-led sanctions against Iran, and raised the prospects of military action.

If developments now unfold as envisioned, the regional order in the Middle East and Caspian Basin could turn upside down. Diplomatic normalization would certainly change the region’s existing energy-export calculus. Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the ensuing diplomatic break with Tehran, the exclusion of Iran from regional security plans and energy-related projects has been a permanent feature of American policy.

Many regional players have come to see opposition to Iran and alignment with the United States as strategically beneficial for them. Azerbaijan is a case in point. Since it gained independence in 1991, Baku has sought the West’s support to achieve its overriding national objective: regaining control over the separatist territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Striving to burnish its pro-Western credentials, Baku was happy to accommodate the United States by excluding Iran from Western-led energy consortia and the regional pipelines that bring Caspian oil and gas to the world markets. US laws forbidding US companies to partner with Iranian entities made that a necessity.

Establishing a partnership with NATO and developing close security cooperation with Israelhelped bolster Baku’s strategic importance for Washington: Lots of experts speculated that Azerbaijan could emerge as a forward operating area for military operations, in the event of a US and/or Israeli strike against Iran. In exchange, President Ilham Aliyev’s administration expected, and mostly got, the West to turn a blind eye to its authoritarian governing practices, especially its muzzling of a free press and its crackdown on political dissent.

The Geneva interim agreement challenges existing arrangements. Not only the probability of a military strike is fading, but also the rise of Sunni jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East is pushing the US and Shi’a Iran towards at least some sort of tacit cooperation — even without waiting for a final agreement on the nuclear issue. While a full-fledged strategic realignment is still far off, there is an obvious convergence of interests in countering the Al-Qaeda-type groups, and, at least in Iraq, some behind-the-scenes cooperation seems already to be occurring.

In this context, emphasising Azerbaijan’s anti-Iranian credentials as a strategic asset for the United States, as some American neoconservative pundits do, is counter-productive to US national security interests. Previously, few questioned those promoting a “strategic” alliance with Azerbaijan to counter Iran. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s war-mongering rhetoric and actions made it easy for anyone in Washington to be an unquestioning backer of Baku. But a more moderate Iranian incumbent, President Hassan Rouhani, now makes it far harder to argue that Iran is a perpetual enemy of the United States and a threat to Western interests.

For its part, Azerbaijan is unlikely to welcome a possible US-Iranian rapprochement. As it is, Azerbaijan is facing an uncertain future as an energy supplier. The shale gas boom in North America and declining demand in Europe threaten the profitability of Azerbaijani energy resources and pipeline projects. Iran’s potential re-emergence as a global energy player could seriously choke Azerbaijan’s existing revenue streams, as investors could easily find Tehran a more appealing option than Baku.

While Aliyev’s administration might not be happy about recent developments, there is little it can do to derail them. Unlike Israel and Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan has no leverage to publicly oppose the rapprochement between the US and Iran without paying a steep price in terms of its relations with Washington. And sitting back and quietly hoping that Israel can torpedo the deal, as seems to be the preference of some policymakers in Baku, is probably not a winning strategy. The Obama-Kerry team has shown that it is determined to make the final agreement happen.

For Aliyev’s team, this means that it will have to find a different basis to articulate its strategic importance for the West. Changing geopolitical circumstances, especially if the nuclear deal places Iran on a more liberal domestic political trajectory, will make it much more difficult for the Azerbaijani government to justify its authoritarian tendencies.

The way to redefine the strategic partnership with the United States and EU would be for Azerbaijan to commit itself to shared values of democracy, human rights and the peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Such a commitment could pay some diplomatic dividends in itself, as the case of neighbouring Georgia has shown. And in the context of engagement with Iran, a democratizing Azerbaijan, with its mainly Shi’a Muslim population, would remain a strategic asset in Washington’s eyes.

Instead of seizing an opportunity, Baku is currently sending all the wrong messages: there are still dozens of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, including a former presidential candidate Ilgar Mammadov, and President Aliyev is maintaining a bellicose posture on the Karabakh question.

While the anti-Iranian rationale for the strategic partnership between the West and Azerbaijan is starting to crack, the Azerbaijani government is showing neither the vision nor the political will to redefine its strategic priorities. Failure to adjust could, sooner or later, render Azerbaijan geopolitically irrelevant.

– Richard Kauzlarich is a former US ambassador in Azerbaijan and is currently Adjunct Professor at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University.

*Originally published by Eurasianet

by Jim Lobe

As readers of this blog know, I’ve had a series of exchanges with editors at ProPublica regarding my critique of an article published July 11 and entitled “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America” by their award-winning national-security and terrorism reporter, Sebastian Rotella, as well as another [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

As readers of this blog know, I’ve had a series of exchanges with editors at ProPublica regarding my critique of an article published July 11 and entitled “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America” by their award-winning national-security and terrorism reporter, Sebastian Rotella, as well as another article he published in the Los Angeles Times in 2008 about an alleged Iranian bomb plot against the Israeli embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, on which Gareth Porter posted his own critique. The latter exchange took place August 22-23. The last exchange on the Iran-Latin America story, which included ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg’s reply to my original critique, was posted on both LobeLog’s and ProPublica’s websites August 14. As I describe below, I regret that it’s taken me so much time to respond — my news-reporting responsibilities for IPS on the crises in Egypt and Syria are my excuse. But I felt that ProPublica’s response to my original critique deserved a thorough reply.

Dear Steve:

I’m sorry for responding so late to yours of August 4. Clearly, a combination of vacation, Egypt, and Syria intervened, and I had to give priority to reporting on the latter two for IPS. And then, amid all that, we had the contretemps over Mr. Rotella’s 2008 article on the alleged Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Baku and Gareth Porter’s response.

But I would like to thank you for taking the time and effort to respond to both my critique of Mr. Rotella’s article and to my appeal that additional corrections to that article be made. As a daily subscriber, I know and respect the importance of ProPublica’s mission.

Unfortunately, however, I was disappointed by the substance of your response, especially the fact that you chose to ignore altogether the harsh assessment of the article by Dr. Pillar that was cited in both my message and the longer critique and to gloss over other key issues, such as the way in which the correction belatedly issued by you actually served to undermine the article’s central thesis expressed in its title, “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads to Latin America.” I would therefore like to take this opportunity to address both the specific points you raised in your response more or less in the order in which they were raised and to raise some more general questions about how you see ProPublica’s responsibilities as the nation’s premier non-profit investigative news agency in covering as fraught and consequential a subject as alleged Iranian terrorism against the U.S. and its allies in the Americas and beyond.

First, some caveats:

When I read an article about alleged Iranian skullduggery around the world, I pay particularly close attention to the sourcing. It is no secret that the government of Israel and its advocates here are particularly hostile to Iran which, at times, they have depicted as an “existential” threat to Israel’s survival. As a result, they have consistently opposed the possibility of any détente or rapprochement between Tehran and Washington. In pursuit of that aim, they have waged a public information or “perception management” campaign designed to promote fear of the Islamic Republic – both here in the U.S. and elsewhere – with respect not only to Iran’s nuclear program, but also to its alleged terrorist activities and other misdeeds; among them, its support for and close relationship with Hezbollah. This campaign has intensified over the past few years as a result of which reporters should, in my view, maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about claims by Israeli government sources (who, it is widely known, often insist on being referred to as “Western officials”) or staunchly pro-Israel individuals or organizations, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its spin-off, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), among others, regarding alleged Iranian plots and conspiracies, just as they should with respect to Tehran’s denials. Extra efforts, I believe, should be made to critically scrutinize the veracity of such claims rather than to accept them at face value before passing them along to the reader. After all, the failure of mainstream media to adequately scrutinize claims made by the George W. Bush administration and its advocates regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs, links to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, etc. has to be considered a major contributing factor to the invasion of Iraq, a precedent that should weigh heavily on reporters covering intelligence regarding Iran and its alleged activities.

If such considerations should apply to daily news reporters like myself, they should apply in spades to investigative reporters. In my view, they have a special responsibility to use the time, expertise and resources available to them to go beneath the surface, to take nothing for granted, to probe deeply and carefully into the subject matter of a story or a source to determine its credibility and, ultimately, its veracity. Thus, for example, while I, as a news reporter, would cover a Congressional hearing by quoting the testimony of the witnesses, adding a little context and background and perhaps a contrary view here and there for balance, I would expect an investigative reporter covering that same hearing or its subject matter to take the time and effort necessary to assess as rigorously as possible the credibility of the witnesses, to carefully check the “facts” on which their testimony is based, their possible motivations, and anything else that could bear on the reliability of their assertions, particularly on a subject as sensitive as Iranian involvement in or direction of terrorist activities. It is in this respect that I believe Mr. Rotella fell short.

Why didn’t the misattributed Clapper quote raise suspicion?

As you note in your correction – and unfortunately gloss over (as if the opinions about alleged Iranian terrorism in the Americas by a virulently anti-Iranian Miami politician should be given the same weight as those of the Director of National Intelligence) — Mr. Rotella, apparently relying on the written testimony of AFPC’s Ilan Berman, quoted DNI Clapper as saying that Iran’s Latin American alliances could pose “an immediate threat” by offering it a “platform in the region to carry out attacks against the United States, our interests, and allies” when those words were actually spoken by Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Unlike Mr. Rotella, I am no expert on Latin America and Iran’s activities there, but I suspected immediately upon reading the misattributed quote that something was wrong, and that, if indeed Clapper had publicly made such a remarkable assertion in January 2012, I assumed I would have heard about it since then.

Moreover, the quote in question was clearly inconsistent with statements by “two senior administration officials” during a May 31 State Department background briefing on the topic of “Iran, the IRGC, and Hezbollah’s Increased Terrorist Activity Worldwide,” a briefing which apparently went completely ignored by Mr. Rotella. So I started Googling, and, within just a few minutes, I had reason to believe that it was Ros-Lehtinen’s quote, not Clapper’s. I then went to the DNI website to search if the relevant phrase appeared there. It did not. When I called the DNI’s office a few days later to make absolutely certain I had not missed something, the press officer went through the same process and, within a similarly short period of time, came to the same conclusion (and then, apparently, called ProPublica the following day to request a correction).

Given his own expertise on both Latin America and terrorism, how was it that Mr. Rotella didn’t also suspect something was wrong with the quote and take just the few minutes it would have required to ensure its provenance and accuracy? I assume that, as a matter of course, he would have closely followed whatever the DNI was saying about Iranian cover activities in Latin America, because the DNI obviously speaks for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Moreover, how could he have missed State’s background briefing (the transcript of which was available on the State Department’s website at the time his story was written) in which one of the two senior officials stated flatly:

“We don’t have evidence of an operational network – Hezbollah across South America, but it’s something that we watch for very, very, very closely. We know that Hezbollah as an organization does benefit from fundraising activity or commercial activity that ultimately benefits the organization back in Lebanon. But as for an operational link to activities in South America, Central America, or Mexico, we don’t have that. [Emphasis added].”[1]

Would the administration briefer have been so categorical if s/he didn’t have the backing of the intelligence community on this question? To me, these two oversights are simply incomprehensible under the circumstances.

If the misattribution of Clapper’s quote deserves a correction, why not the misinformation about undocumented Iranians seeking asylum in Canada?

As you note, however, ProPublica immediately issued its correction when informed by a government official about the misattribution. While I will address below why I think the correction itself clearly undercut the main thesis of the article, the fact that ProPublica felt obliged to make it raises a second question regarding your refusal to make a correction regarding Joseph Humire’s testimony about Iranian migrants going to Canada. It is true that Humire wrote what you said he wrote: that “Iran is the number one source of improperly documented migrants to Canada” and that most of these migrants apply for refugee status. But Mr. Rotella included only the first part of that sentence: “Witness Joseph Humire, a security expert, cited a report last year in which the Canadian Border Services Agency described Iran as the top source of illegal migrants to Canada, most of them coming through Latin America.” There’s nothing in his paragraph about refugees at all. Imagine what kinds of images his sentence conjures up in the minds of average American readers, especially in the present context: that there are more illegal immigrants coming to Canada from Iran than from any other country, including Mexico or Central America or the Caribbean (which is why I used the word “flood” to describe what Mr. Rotella’s words were suggesting). But if Mr. Rotella or his editors had stepped back for a moment and examined that assertion, would they not have questioned whether Iran could really be the top source of undocumented immigrants to Canada? The notion seems quite bizarre on its face. Would such an assertion not invite a little further investigation, such as by actually looking at the CBSA report cited by Mr. Humire to ensure that what he is quoted as saying was in fact true? Apparently, neither Mr. Rotella nor his editors believed that was necessary.

Of course, had he looked at the report, he would have realized that Mr. Humire’s statement was flat-out wrong and that Iran was the not Canada’s biggest source of undocumented migrants; it was Canada’s biggest source of undocumented migrants who were applying for refugee status (at the rate of only about 300 a year), a fact which casts an entirely different light on both the nature and scope of Iranian migration to Canada and on its consistency with the rather sinister context in which Mr. Rotella placed this bit of misinformation. Moreover, had he looked at the report, as you note, he would have found that most Iranian asylum-seekers since at least 2010 left for Canada from embarkation points in Western Europe, not Latin America – a very significant fact because it contradicts Mr. Rotella’s assertion (which he attributes to the Canadian report) that “most” of the illegal Iranian migrants were “coming through Latin America.”

That is why I requested a correction, and, frankly, I don’t see how why you would issue a correction on the Clapper/Ros-Lehtinen misattribution and not on Mssrs. Humire’s and  Rotella’s misstatements about the findings of the Canadian report. In both cases, Mr. Rotella relied on the questionable testimony of a hearing witness apparently without bothering to check its veracity. In both cases, the testimony turned out to be seriously flawed. In both cases, those flaws were easily discoverable with a few minutes’ research. In both cases, those flaws were brought to ProPublica’s attention by outside parties. Yet in only one case has a correction been made.

According to ProPublica’s code of ethics, “When mistakes are made, they need to be corrected — fully, quickly and ungrudgingly.” So why not publish a correction regarding the mistaken assertions made by Mr. Humire in his testimony and by Mr. Rotella’s account of the embarkation points for most undocumented Iranian migrants seeking asylum in Canada? Why leave your readers with mistaken information?

A second provision in the code of ethics provides that: “No story is fair if it omits facts of major importance or significance. Fairness includes completeness.” Obviously, a number of very important facts about Iranian flows of illegal migration into Canada were omitted in Mr. Rotella’s account, facts that I included in my critique. Those facts were, in my view, of major importance not only because their inclusion would have presented a much different picture of the actual situation regarding Iranian undocumented migrants going to Canada than that presented in the story. They were also important because Mr. Humire’s testimony is used by Mr. Rotella to set the stage for his closing argument about the crucial role allegedly played by Venezuela in providing documents to Iranians and other “suspected Middle Eastern operatives” to carry out their sinister designs, as he described them in his portentous introduction about last year’s secret meeting between the mysteriously unnamed senior IRGC official and his Venezuelan counterparts. It’s the kind of device that I think Dr. Pillar, who, in addition to his work as NIO for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also served as chief of analysis and later deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) during the 1990s, was referring to when he described Mr. Rotella’s article as appearing “to go out of the way to raise suspicions about Iranian activities in the hemisphere, by dumping together material that is either old news or not really nefarious, and stringing it together with innuendo” – a remarkably damning criticism considering the credentials of the source — that you failed to address seriously in your reply.

Kadir: Another Case of Innuendo Without Supporting Evidence

As to the Kadir case, Mr. Rotella’s and your contention that Kadir was indeed a “longtime intelligence operative for Iran” and constituted the kind of “platform in the region to carry out attacks against the U.S….” that Ros-Lehtinen – not the DNI — was apparently referring to rests on two major sources: the Justice Department press release about his sentencing and the Nisman report which also quotes the FBI investigator, Robert Addonizio as testifying that Kadir’s activity “were those of a spy.” In responding, I am at a disadvantage because I have only the DOJ’s press release and the 31-page summary of the Nisman report that FDD published on its website.[2]  The clear implication of this part of Mr. Rotella’s story and the context in which it was presented is that Iran was behind – or at least condoned — the JFK plot.

But what was the evidence for such an insinuation? No Iranian was indicted in the plot (as there was in the Arbabsiar case, for example). No testimony that Kadir was involved in the plot at the behest of any Iranian authority was presented at trial or mentioned in the Justice Department’s press release. (Indeed, the release alleged that Kadir was trying to travel to Iran apparently in hopes of “enlist[ing]” its support for the plot when he was arrested, which raises the question of why such a trip would be necessary if he was in such consistent contact with highers-up in the Iranian intelligence services.) Mr. Addonizio’s original complaint on which the arrest warrant was based did not even mention any ties between Kadir and Iran. And what precisely is the relevance of Kadir’s testimony that he felt “himself bound to follow fatwas from Iranian religious leaders,” unless there’s evidence that one of those leaders had issued a fatwa authorizing an attack on JFK airport? (Quoting one of the alleged conspirators, FDD’s summary of the Nisman report maintains that Kadir was travelling to Iran in hopes of obtaining a fatwa.) In any event, Mr. Rotella’s strong suggestion that Iran had endorsed Kadir’s involvement in the plot is yet another example of the story’s use of innuendo.[3]

Part of that innuendo, of course, is the use of the word “operative” by Mr. Rotella to describe Kadir’s relationship to Iran’s intelligence service(s). But was he really an “operative”? I took the liberty of sending to Dr. Pillar both Mr. Rotella’s original description of Kadir’s role and your description as provided to me in your response to my critique and asked him whether, given his 28-year career in the CIA, Kadir could be called an “operative.” This was his reply:

The description is that of a source.  This is so whether he was doing what he was doing on a totally voluntary basis, or he was blackmailed, or he was motivated by money, or whatever.  It also is true whether he was spying or was collecting openly available information.  And it is true whether the information he passed reflected his own selection or was in response to questions levied on him. Although “operative” is not part of an official lexicon, I think most people familiar with the lexicon would equate “operative” with what our services would call an operations officer or case officer.  That means a professional intelligence person who recruits and manages sources of information (including sources who are doing spying).  That is quite different from being one of the sources whom an operations officer might manage.

So, according to this definition, Kadir was a “source” which, of course, sounds a lot less menacing and sinister than “operative” and would thus have undermined the portentous nature of Mr. Rotella’s narrative.

Now, the 32-page summary of the Nisman report goes into much greater detail about Kadir’s alleged role and activities going back all the way to 1983 when Tehran allegedly “accepted Abdul Kadir as its agent in Guyana.” According to this account, Kadir was “trained and supported by Iran,” although it does not indicate how precisely he was supported and what he was trained to do besides “propagat[e] the fundamentalist vision emanated from Iran.” (If he was trained as an “operative,” the fact that he used the Guyanese postal service to transmit his letters to the Iranian ambassador in Caracas and Rabbani suggests that his training was less than professional.) Unlike the U.S. prosecution, which made no such allegation, Nisman’s report, quoting a confidential informant, maintains that Iranian intelligence was itself, coincidentally, already developing its own plans to attack JFK airport at the time but decided that the plot hatched by Kadir’s confederates was better. And yet despite Iran’s alleged approval of the plot and the “ideological, logistical and financial support” it allegedly provided to Kadir for this purpose, the report asserts that the plotters decided to use the funds “collected for charity by voluntary donations of Muslims, with the purpose of financing the passport expenses of the person sent to Iran to pitch the terrorist plot.” (Emphasis mine.)  So it appears that this “longtime Iranian operative” had been given no expense account with which to travel to Tehran. Perhaps not even a passport.

This is not an incidental point, because, at least insofar as the Nisman summary is concerned, the Kadir prosecution is the only concrete case, besides the AMIA bombing 13 years before, in which Nisman asserts Iranian responsibility for a specific terrorist plot and the only one in which the conspirators were arrested and actually convicted. However, if, in fact, the Iranians did not approve of, let alone provide support for, the JFK plot, the central thesis of Nisman’s latest report would seem deeply flawed.

Now, it may be that the report on which the FDD summary is based is far more coherent and provides a lot more detail. But frankly I found major parts of the narrative about Kadir presented in the summary rather difficult to believe. In fact, the entire summary aroused considerable scepticism in me, characterized as it was by breathtaking leaps of logic and history that leave yawning gaps in the analysis, highly tendentious argumentation, mind-numbing repetition of the major themes; and reliance on the testimony of discredited or highly questionable witnesses (see below) – all of which makes me wonder why Mr. Rotella throughout his article appears to accept the report’s allegations uncritically (just as he took at face value the testimonies of Mssrs. Berman and Humare).

The Nisman Report(s): a case of unreliable sources?

Indeed, there is strong reason to retain a high degree of scepticism regarding Nisman’s investigation. In that connection, I would like to draw your attention to the rather astonishing findings of my colleague, Gareth Porter, regarding Nisman’s 2006 indictment – an English copy of which has only recently become available — on the 1994 AMIA bombing. That report concluded that, at an August 1993 meeting in Mashad, top officials of the Iranian regime, including then-President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the bombing (whose alleged mastermind, Mohsen Rabbani, was the same man, according to the second Nisman report, was Kadir’s superior). Having reviewed the nearly 700-page English version, Mr. Porter, who won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism and also wrote an investigative article about the AMIA bombings for The Nation in 2008, was shocked to find that all of the evidence cited by the report regarding the purported 1993 meeting was based[4] on the testimony of four members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political front for Mojahadin e-Khalq (MeK), the armed opposition group that allied itself with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war and that was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group until last year when its leadership promised to cooperate in the repatriation of its members from Iraq to third countries. Even more remarkably, Nisman insisted that the fact that these witnesses were members of a group that had tried for decades to violently overthrow the Islamic Republic did not in any way affect their credibility. “The fact that the individuals are opponents of the Iranian regime does not detract in the least from the significance of their statements,” Nisman declared in his report, adding that their testimony could be trusted as “completely truthful.”

In the absence of any other concrete evidence and given the MEK’s history and credibility, Mr. Nisman acceptance of the word of its activists or Mesbahi regarding the Iranian leadership’s alleged authorization of the AMIA bombing raises very serious questions about the integrity of his investigation. Yet, remarkably, in the summary of Nisman’s latest report, Mesbahi and the MEK witnesses again figure prominently as witnesses regarding Iran’s alleged terrorist activities in Latin America. Which again raises the question: why hasn’t Mr. Rotella demonstrated the kind of skepticism toward Nisman’s work and conclusions that he has with respect to, say, the State Department’s most recent report on the alleged terrorist threats posed by Iran and Hezbollah activities in the Americas, especially given his own expertise about the attack? After all, if Iran was not involved in the AMIA bombing, nor in the Kadir case, what is left of Nisman’s thesis that the Iranian regime has been establishing “clandestine intelligence stations and operative agents which are used to execute terrorist attacks when the Iranian regime decides so…”?

One other point about the latest Nisman report that bears mentioning: the identity and associations of its most enthusiastic promoters, aside from FDD which published the English-language summary. According to a Nexis search of “Nisman” and “Iran,” the first releases announcing publication of the report in late May were put out by the American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (who put out two other press releases on the report over the following three months, as did Rep. Duncan). Op-ed writers who have devoted by far the most space to the report in U.S. publications have been strongly pro-Israel and neoconservative in their political orientation. They include Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board (“Uncovering Iran’s Latin Network”, June 3); WINEP’s Matthew Levitt[5] on foreignpolicy.com (“Exporting Terror in America’s Backyard: Is the United State Downplaying the Threat from Iranian Agents in Latin America?” June 13; Douglas Farah (who testified before the Subcommittee) and FDD’s Mark Dubowitz in the Miami Herald (“Terror and Foreign Policy: Iran in Latin America,” June 26); AFPC’s Berman and Netanel Levitt on USNEWS.com (“Terror Can Leak in Through America’s Borders,” July 15); the Hudson Institute’s Jaime Darenblum in the weeklystandard.com (“The Iranian Threat in Latin America”, July 15) and again in The Weekly Standard (“Terror Threat in Latin America,” Aug 15); and Aaron Sagui, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, in the Miami Herald (“AMIA Bombing: Truth Found, Stop Looking – Iran to Blame,” July 17). (Of course, Levitt, Farah, and Berman also testified at the subcommittee hearing.) In addition, an organization called the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which was created by a group of hedge funds – or “vulture capitalists,” according to their critics – who bought heavily discounted Argentine bonds and have sued the Argentine government in U.S. federal court to collect the bonds’ full value, has also taken out full-page ads in The Washington Post and other newspapers denouncing Argentina’s ties to Iran and extolling the Nisman reports and their findings about alleged Iranian terrorism. The group is led by Elliott Management whose chief executive is Paul Singer who, according to a recent article in Salon, contributed nearly 11 million dollars to FDD between 2008 and 2011, the latest year for which tax records are available.

Fernando Tabares

Clearly, you are much better informed about Tabares’ testimony in “the Argentine investigation” and any statements by a “second Colombian intelligence official” since you have read the full version of Nisman’s report in the original Spanish, while I have seen only the English summary. So I must defer to your judgment. But I would like to make the following few points:

1)    Shouldn’t the reader have been informed that Tabares was either facing or serving an eight-year prison sentence for breach of trust and illegal wire-tapping at the time that he gave his testimony? Isn’t that relevant to assessing his credibility as a source – especially given the vagueness of his statement as reported in the article (if not in the Nisman report itself)? Your response failed to address this question.

2)    Tabares, according to Adam Isacson, the Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), was not “the former director of Colombia’s intelligence agency,” as claimed by Mr. Rotella. He was the chief of a division of the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the country’s civilian intelligence agency which, according to Mr. Isacson, is dwarfed in size by the country’s police and military intelligence agencies. The suggestion in the story that he was Colombia’s equivalent of the DNI is “misleading,” he told me. It may also be worth noting that, according to Mr. Isacson, Israeli intelligence is known to have a particularly close relationship with its Colombian counterparts, closer than any other South America country’s intelligence service.

3)    As you note, Mr. Rotella’s story names “the Argentine investigation” as the source of Tabares’ testimony, but you can see from the FDD Summary paper (p. 30) that he also “informed” the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice about alleged Iranian and Hezbollah activity, so it’s unclear in the article what testimony Mr. Rotella was referring to.

4)    Again, the Nisman summary regarding Tabares’ testimony makes a series of leaps – such as the notion that funds transferred to both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda from a Colombian city where an alleged Hezbollah operative allegedly maintains a residence came from the same source (the Hezbollah operative?) — that appears to be based as much or more on speculation than real evidence. Presumably the actual report provides some additional evidence on this and related issues.

Balanced? Seriously?

In your response to my critique, you claim that Mr. Rotella’s story was “far more balanced and restrained” than I had described it, and, it is true that I did not cite his quotation of the two-sentence conclusion of the unclassified appendix to the State Department report that was the subject of the Subcommittee’s hearing; nor did I cite the unnamed senior U.S. government official who defended it; nor Rep. Thompson’s quote (which Mr. Rotella immediately cast into doubt in his concluding sentence). But, frankly, I find the notion that the story overall had even a modicum of balance to be rather bizarre, to say the least.

As I understand it, the basic issue raised by the story (and the hearing) was whether or not the terror threat deriving from Iran’s and Hezbollah’s activities in Latin America was on the rise or not. That certainly was the subject of the hearing in question, as it was the subject of the latest Nisman report whose clear message was set out in the very first sentence of the report: that Iran has built a formidable infrastructure in Latin America that is “used to execute terrorist attacks …both directly or through its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah.” Indeed the Nisman report, the hearing’s witnesses and its Republican convenors all appeared dedicated to refuting the State Department report and its conclusions – that Iranian influence, including, presumably, its alleged terrorist infrastructure and activities, was on the wane in Latin America.

So, if the story was “balanced,” one would expect there to be roughly the same number of sources on each side of the question: Is the Iranian/Hezbollah terrorist threat from Latin America rising or diminishing? But if we count up the number of sources on each side of that question, the results are really indisputable: the story is tilted almost entirely in favor of the former position and against the conclusions of the State Department’s report. Consider, for example, all of the “on-the-record” quotes by identified sources in the story: I counted eight (including the Committee and Subcommittee chairs, the DNI/Ros-Lehtinen quote, and the Nisman report quotes, among others) in the “rise” category and only two – the two sentences from the State Department report’s appendix and Rep. Thompson’s quote — on the “wane” side.

If we carry that quantitative analysis further to include background quotes by unidentified individuals (like “Western officials”) or sentences whose substantive content is attributed to a source (like the “Argentine investigation”, or “critics,” or “Argentine, Israeli, and U.S. investigators”, or the hearing witnesses, including Humire and Berman, the proportion is about the same: 26 tend to confirm the notion that Iranian activity – and hence the threat — is on the rise; only five suggest this may not be so. And that doesn’t include the story’s headline: “The Terror Threat and Iran’s Inroads in Latin America” and Mr. Rotella’s unattributed assertion: “The attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s revealed the existence of Iranian terror networks in the Americas.”

But putting aside the sources, both the article’s portentous opening about the secret meeting between the unidentified senior IRGC officer and his Venezulean interlocutors, as well as the ending in which Mr. Rotella reminds the reader that Chavez’s successor was the “point man for the alliance with Iran” when he served as foreign minister, appear intended to convey not only a sense of threat to the average American reader. It also makes it clear that, on the basic question raised by the article, the State Department’s report is wrong – a conclusion that is naturally bolstered by the article’s uncritical treatment that Mr. Rotella gives to the testimony of the hearing’s Republican sponsors, its witnesses, and the Nisman report, not to mention the DNI/Ros-Lehtinen’s misquote.

Moreover, your citation of the article’s assertion that there is “considerable debate inside and outside the U.S. government” about the extent and nature of Iran’s activities in Latin America as evidence of the story’s balance seems especially bizarre (unless you include Republicans in Congress as part of the “U.S. government”). On this very question, Mr. Rotella clearly takes sides. He thus quotes Rep. Duncan as stating, “We know there is not consensus on this issue, but I seriously question the administration’s judgment to downplay the seriousness of Iran’s presence here at home.” And then, later in the story, he notes that “State Department officials say the[ir] Iran report reflected a consensus among U.S. government agencies.”

So when Mr. Rotella introduces the subject by asserting flatly that there is “considerable debate inside …the U.S. government,” he is clearly siding with Rep. Duncan and against the State Department officials with whom he spoke. And, remarkably, he provides no additional evidence – in the form, for example, of either on-the-record or background quotes by senior officials of other government agencies who take issue with the State Department report’s conclusions — to support his and Rep. Duncan’s assertion that indeed there is considerable debate within the government.

When I asked the State Department about whether other U.S. government agencies cleared the report, a spokesperson told me the following by email:

“A team of seasoned career Department of State employees, in cooperation with experts from other USG agencies, crafted the report which in turn was based on and is fully consistent with the analysis and conclusion of the longer classified report prepared by the intelligence community.

Those members of Congress who read the entire report will see a thorough, whole-of-government review that incorporates the most current information available to the intelligence community, as well as diplomatic and open source information, regarding Iran’s activities in the hemisphere. In writing the report, the Department of State consulted with the Departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and Treasury, along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the United Trade Representative. We consulted extensively with regional and partner governments to obtain information contained in the report.” (Emphasis added.)”

I later asked an ODNI official who confirmed that his office had indeed been consulted.

Now, it may be that Mr. Rotella and Rep. Duncan are correct: that the extent and nature of Iran’s activities in Latin America are indeed the subject of considerable debate within the U.S. government. But where is the evidence that such a debate is taking place beyond the assertion of a highly partisan Republican congressman? Particularly when the State Department insists that its report is consistent with the conclusion of a longer classified report prepared by the intelligence community? I can’t find any in the article.

Anonymous Sources: Is it too much to ask that the nationality of sources be identified?

I agree with you that, in the field of intelligence – especially on an issue as sensitive as this – it is difficult to get officials to speak on the record, and I certainly agree that the recent leak investigations has contributed to a chilling effect that has made matters worse, at least insofar as the U.S. government is concerned. But my plea is for some precision in identifying who these officials are. I count six attributions or quotes in the article to “Western officials,” or “Western intelligence officials,” or “an intelligence official” who, in the context, is apparently one of the “Western officials” cited by Mr. Rotella. But, as noted above, Israeli officials, whose government clearly has an interest in promoting the specter of Iranian terrorism, often insist to reporters that they be described as “Western” officials. So the question arises: are these officials Israeli, American, French, British, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Canadian? In assessing the credibility of these assertions by “Western” officials, it’s clearly relevant to know what governments they work for. Given ProPublica’s and Mr. Rotella’s stature in investigative journalism, isn’t it possible to insist as a condition for quoting such officials or providing their accounts of alleged terrorist plotting that they be identified by their nationality? Particularly on an intelligence issue as fraught and politicized as this is? (I should note parenthetically, that, in his 2008 Nation article, Gareth Porter got two serving U.S. officials and one retired U.S. official – the ambassador to Argentina at the time of the AMIA bombing, James Cheek – not only to speak on the record, but also to publicly cast doubt on the theory that Iran was involved.) Of all news services, one would expect ProPublica to be particularly tough in dealing with sources who insist on anonymity as broad as “Western official.”

Your correction undermined the thesis of the article.

As I noted above, I was particularly disappointed by the way you glossed over the significance of the correction by simply referring to Mr. Berman’s gracious acknowledgment of responsibility. In doing so, you failed to address the fact that attributing to DNI Clapper what Rep. Ros-Lehtinen said about Iranian “platforms” for attacking the U.S. undermined the basic thesis of the article in important ways.

First, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, a politician with no known expertise in intelligence and who, after all, has been among the foremost champions the late Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles – both of whom were heavily implicated in the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner and other terrorist acts — has been probably the single-most aggressive promoter of the Nisman reports in the U.S. Congress. The ODNI, on the other hand, was consulted about the State Department report and presumably raised no serious objections to it. To suggest, as the corrected version of Mr. Rotella’s article does, that the views of DNI Clapper and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen on the question of Iranian terrorism in the Americas largely coincide is simply irresponsible.

Second, DNI Clapper is the only named “Western intelligence official” in the entire story, and his inclusion lends it a credibility that it would otherwise lack. But he never said anything about Iranian terrorist activities in Latin America; he confined his remarks to the Arbabsiar case about which, as I pointed out in my original critique, Mr. Rotella himself expressed considerable skepticism when the story first broke.

Third, if the thesis of the article, the Nisman report, and the witness testimony is correct – that Iran has built a formidable infrastructure for conducting terrorist attacks against the U.S. – why would the Quds Force feel it had to resort to recruiting a totally inexperienced, obviously unstable Iranian-American used-car salesman (whom the correction referred to as an “Iranian-American operative”) to make contact with the Zetas to arrange the assassination? It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. And if Hezbollah, whose activists, according to a 2011 article by Mr. Rotella, have already been deeply involved with the Zeta cartel for years, why wouldn’t the IRGC have used its connections with its trusted ally/client (which carried out the AMIA bombing with such success) to make the appropriate arrangements either through its relationship with the Zetas or with its own “sleeper cells” which Mr. Nisman and others insist are already in place throughout the United States? As written, the correction clearly begs all of these questions.

Finally, as to whether I think Mr. Rotella is pushing an ideological agenda, I have no idea since it would take a serious  study of the entire corpus of his work to answer such a question. With respect to this particular article (or the corrected version, at least), however, he appears to have more or less accepted the narrative of the Republican sponsors of the July 9 hearing, the hearing’s witnesses, and Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, a right-wing politician who is not known for her neutrality relating to Iran, Venezuela, or terrorism. I think it also showed a surprising credulousness and lack of curiosity for an investigative journalist of Mr. Rotella’s experience and stature that, in my view, appeared inconsistent with ProPublica’s other work, but whether that is explained by ideological preferences or other factors I cannot say. Again, I would refer to Dr. Pillar’s critique of the article, since, as a former top-ranking professional intelligence analyst specialized in counter-terrorism and the Middle East, his critique would be far more informed than mine.

I have no doubt that I have tried your patience exceedingly, but I think your response to my original critique deserved a thorough reply, and I have tried to provide one. Again, I apologize for its delay but hope you will consider it seriously.

Best regards,

Jim

[1] Except for the Arbabsiar case, Iranian activities in the Americas were never mentioned in the briefing despite its “worldwide” scope.

For those of you who have followed the recent exchanges between myself and ProPublica, another one took place following the publication of Gareth’s piece on Sebastian Rotella’s coverage of an alleged Iranian/Hezbollah plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2008. Tom Detzel of ProPublica [...]]]> via LobeLogby Jim Lobe

For those of you who have followed the recent exchanges between myself and ProPublica, another one took place following the publication of Gareth’s piece on Sebastian Rotella’s coverage of an alleged Iranian/Hezbollah plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2008. Tom Detzel of ProPublica initially responded in the comments section to that story, but the issues he raises are significant enough to warrant a separate post with responses from Gareth, myself and Tom’s reply.

[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay [...]]]> via LobeLog
by Gareth Porter

[While the terrible events in Egypt have delayed my plans to reply to ProPublica’s response to my critique of Sebastian Rotella’s report on the alleged build-up of Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in the Americas, Gareth Porter has written the following essay on a 2009 article by Rotella for the Los Angeles Times about an alleged bomb plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2008. It offers a very good illustration of some of the problems raised in my original critique of Rotella’s most recent work, notably the virtually exclusive reliance on sources that are clearly hostile to Iran with an interest in depicting it in the most negative light possible. But you be the judge. -- Jim Lobe]

It happened in Baku, transforming the capital of Azerbaijan into a battleground in a global shadow war.

Police intercepted a fleeing car and captured two suspected Hezbollah militants from Lebanon. The car contained explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers and reconnaissance photos. Raiding alleged safe houses, police foiled what authorities say was a plot to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic that borders Iran.

Thus begins the only detailed English-language press account of an alleged Iranian terror plot in Azerbaijan in 2008: a May 2009 article, written with a Paris dateline, by Sebastian Rotella for the Los Angeles Times.

But despite the sense of immediacy conveyed by his lede, Rotella’s sources for his account were not Azerbaijanis. Rather, the sources Rotella quoted on the details of the alleged plot, the investigation and apprehension of the suspects consisted of an unnamed “Israeli security official”, and Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the author of a constant stream of articles, op-eds, and Congressional testimony reflecting the Israeli government’s interest in promoting the perception of a growing Iranian terrorist threat around the world.[1]

It was Levitt who described the alleged plot in Baku to Rotella as having been “in the advanced stages” when it was supposedly broken up by Azerbaijani security forces, an assertion echoed by the anonymous Israeli security official cited in the article:

 ”[Iran] had reached the stage where they had a network in place to do an operation,” said an Israeli security official, who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “We are seeing it all over the world. They are working very hard at it.”

So readers of the LA Times received a version of the plot that was filtered primarily, if not exclusively, through an Israeli lens.[2] Relying on Israeli officials and a close ally at a pro-Israel US think tank for a story on an alleged Iranian bomb plot against an Israeli Embassy is bound to produce a predictable story line where the accuracy can hardly be assumed at face value. Indeed, in this case, there were and remain many reasons for skepticism.

Yet, three years later, in a July 2012 article for ProPublica, he referred to the plot as though it was established fact.

Had Rotella sought an independent source in Azerbaijan, he would have learned, for example, that such alleged plots had been a virtual perennial in Baku for years. That is what a leading scholar of Azerbaijan’s external relations, Anar Valiyev, told me in an interview last November. “It’s always the same plot year after year,” said Valiyev, Dean of the School of International Affairs of the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku.

In fact, security officials in Azerbaijan had claimed the existence of a similar plot in October 2007 and January 2012 and only two months later, authorities arrested Azerbaijani suspects in two different allegedly Iranian-initiated plots to carry out terrorist actions against Western embassies, the Israeli Embassy and/or Jewish targets. In early 2013, prison sentences were announced in yet another alleged terrorist plot to attack the Eurovision song contest in Baku in 2012. Valiyev told me that those detained by Azerbaijani security officials are always charged with wanting to kill Israeli or US officials and subsequently tried for plots to overthrow the government, which carries the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

In a 2007 article in Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus, Valiyev observed that plots, assassination and coup-attempts were “thwarted” with regularity in Azerbaijan. “Periodically the government finds a scapegoat,” he wrote, to justify attacks on domestic critics, including “Wahabbis”, followers of Kurdish-Sunni scholar Said Nursi and/or Shiite radicals. Valiyev suggested that security officials might be “trying to show that radical Islamists could come to power…should the incumbent government lose the election.”

The Azerbaijani government and its security forces are not known for their devotion to the rule of law. The current president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of Azerbaijan’s first president, Heydar Aliyev, who, in turn, was the head of the Soviet KGB before Azerbaijan’s independence. According to Jim Lobe, who visited Baku last year, dissidents regard the first Aliyev’s tenure as relatively liberal compared that of his son. A 2009 State Department cable described Ilham Aliyev as a “mafia-like” figure, likening him to a combination of Michael and Sonny Corleone in the “The Godfather”.

Valiyev observed that virtually nothing about the alleged plot made sense, beginning with the targets. According to Rotella’s story, the alleged Hezbollah operatives and their Azerbaijani confederates had planned to set off three or four car bombs at the Israeli Embassy simultaneously, using explosives they “intended to accumulate” in addition to the “hundreds of pounds of explosives” they had allegedly already acquired from “Iranian spies.”

But the Israeli Embassy is located in the seven-story Hyatt Tower office complex along with other foreign embassies, and no automobiles are allowed to park in close proximity to the complex, according to Valiyev. So the alleged plotters would have needed a prodigious amount of explosives to accomplish such a plan.

For example, the bomb that destroyed the eight-story US Air Force barracks at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was estimated at 23,000 pounds of explosives detonated less than 100 feet away from the building. Valiyev told me that it is “practically impossible to find such components in Azerbaijan” because “Even a few kilograms of explosives would be tracked down by the ministry of national security.”

In his article, Rotella also referred — though only in passing — to the prosecutor’s charge that the alleged conspirators were planning to attack a Russian radar installation at Gabala (sometimes spelled Qabala) in northern Azerbaijan. But that part of the plot was also highly suspect, according to Valiyev. No reason was ever given for such a target, and it would have made no sense for either Hezbollah’s or Iran’s interests.

Built in 1984, the Gabala radar station was leased to the Russians until 2012, and 900 troops from the Russian Space Forces were stationed there. An attack on the station by Hezbollah or its supposed proxies in Azerbaijan would have represented a major provocation against Russia by Iran and Hezbollah, and was therefore hard to believe, as Valiyev pointed out in a July 2009 report for the Jamestown Foundation. Valiyev said it was far more plausible that the alleged plotters were simply carrying out surveillance on the station which, according to some reports, was being considered for possible integration into a regional US missile defense system.

Rotella failed to mention yet another aspect of the prosecution’s case that should arouse additional skepticism. The indictment included the charge that the leader of the alleged terrorist cell plotting these attacks was working simultaneously for Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Even though it has been long been discredited, the idea of an Iran-al-Qaeda collaboration on terrorism has been a favorite Israeli theme for some time and one that continues to be propagated by Levitt.

Rotella’s account of how the suspects were apprehended also appears implausible. In May 2008, when the bombings were supposedly still weeks away, according to his story, the suspects realized they were under surveillance and tried to flee.

But instead of hiding or destroying incriminating evidence of their terrorist plot — such as the reconnaissance photos, the explosives, the cameras and the pistols with silencers — as might be expected under those circumstances, the two suspects allegedly packed all that equipment in their car and fled toward the border with Iran, whereupon they were intercepted, according to the official line reported by Rotella.

Somehow, despite the surveillance, according to anonymous “anti-terrorist officials” cited by Rotella, “a number of Lebanese, Iranian and Azerbaijani suspects escaped by car into Iran.” Only those with the incriminating evidence — including, most implausibly, hundreds of pounds of explosives — in their car were caught, according to the account given to Rotella.

Even Rotella’s description of the two Lebanese suspects, Ali Karaki and Ali Najem Aladine, as a veteran Hezbollah external operations officer and an explosives expert, respectively, should not be taken at face value, according to Valiyev. It is more likely, he said, that the two were simply spies working for Iranian intelligence.

Even the US Embassy report on the trial of the suspects suggested it also had doubts about the alleged plot. “In early October after a closed trial,” the reporting cable said, “an Azerbaijani court sentenced a group of alleged terrorists arrested the previous Spring and supposedly connected to Lebanese Hezbollah plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku AND the Qabala radar station in northern Azerbaijan” (emphasis in the original). It added, “In a public statement the state prosecutor repeated earlier claims that the entire plot was an operation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”

Yet another striking anomaly about the alleged plot was the fact that nothing was published about it for an entire year. No explanation for the silence was ever made public. This silence is all the more significant because during 2009 and 2010, the Israeli government either publicly alleged or leaked stories of Iranian or Hezbollah plots in Turkey and Jordan about which the host country authorities either did not comment on or offered a different explanation. But despite the extremely close relationship between Azebaijani and Israeli intelligence services (confirmed by this US Embassy cable), neither the Israeli media nor foreign journalists were tipped off to the plot until the Israelis leaked the story to Rotella a year later.[3]

The complete absence of any leak by the Israelis for an entire year about an alleged Iranian plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Baku casts some circumstantial doubt on whether such a plot had indeed been uncovered in 2008, as claimed in the article.

Despite the multiple anomalies surrounding this story — the complete lack of any publicly available corroborating evidence; the well-established penchant for the Aliyev government for using such alleged plots to justify rounding up domestic critics; the US Embassy’s apparent skepticism, his failure to consult independent sources; and the 2009 publication by the Jamestown Foundation of Valiyev’s own critique of the “official” version of the case — Rotella has shown no interest in clarifying what actually happened.  In fact, as noted above, he referred to the plot again in a July 2012 article for ProPublica as if there was not the slightest doubt with regard to its actual occurrence, identifying it, as he did in the original article, as an attempted retaliation for the assassination of a senior Hezbollah operative three months before:

Conflict with Israel intensified in February 2008 after a car bomb in the heart of Damascus killed Imad Mughniyah, a notorious Hezbollah military leader and ally of Iranian intelligence. Iranian Hezbollah publicly accused Israel and vowed revenge.

Within weeks, a plot was under way against the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan. Police broke up the cell in May 2008. The suspects included Azeri accomplices, a senior Hezbollah field operative and a Hezbollah explosives expert. Police also arrested two Iranian spies, but they were released within weeks because of pressure from Tehran, Western anti-terror officials say.[4] The other suspects were convicted.

As narrowly sourced as it was, Rotella’s original 2009 story thus helped make a dubious tale of a bomb plot in Baku part of the media narrative. More recently, he continued that pattern by promoting the unsubstantiated charge by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman and various pro-Israel groups and right-wing members of Congress, such as Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, that Iran poses a growing terrorist threat to the US in the Americas. While Jim Lobe has helped deconstruct that story line, I have recently marshaled evidence showing that Nisman’s charges about alleged Iranian involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing and the 2007 JFK airport plot were tendentious and highly questionable.

Photo: Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a dinner hosted by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in November 2010.

[1] In one illustration of Rotella’s and Levitt’s long-time symbiosis, Levitt cited Rotella’s account of the alleged Baku plot as his main source about the incident in a 2013 article on alleged Hezbollah terrorism published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC).

It’s June 15, 1992. A news nugget on page A-12 of the Washington Post reports that the chief of Israel’s Air Force believes military action might be necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons:

Maj. Gen. Herzl Budinger told Israeli television that if Iran’s intensive effort to develop [...]]]> via Lobe Log

It’s June 15, 1992. A news nugget on page A-12 of the Washington Post reports that the chief of Israel’s Air Force believes military action might be necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons:

Maj. Gen. Herzl Budinger told Israeli television that if Iran’s intensive effort to develop atomic weapons is not “disrupted,” the fundamentalist Islamic nation will become a nuclear power by the end of the decade. Earlier, the air force commander told reporters that “the greatest disruption possible, whether military or political,” is necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of the Middle East and prevent a world war. By “disruption,” Budinger said he meant “international political action, and aggressive action, if needed.”

This was the birth of what we can now look back on as two decades of threats by Israel to “bomb Iran” — with or without the consent, assistance and/or leadership of the United States — to prevent Iran’s impending development of nuclear capability.

Iran was struggling to recover economically from the ravages of its eight year war with Iraq (1980-1988). Its firebrand revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had died three years earlier. A US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE 34-91, Oct. 1991) viewed Iran’s president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as a pragmatic nationalist who “is likely to move slowly and prudently to repair relations” with the US but conceded that “Iran’s major foreign policy goal is to foster a more stable regional environment conducive to Iranian security and economic development.” Although it would be a “nuisance,” Iran’s becoming “more dangerous” was viewed by the NIE as a “less likely scenario.” The Israeli defense establishment thought otherwise.

Fast forward a decade. Weeks after Iran had quietly assisted the US in achieving its initial victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush branded Iran as part of an “axis of evil” during his 2002 State of the Union speech. In an interview with the London Times, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on the international community “to target Iran as soon as the imminent conflict with Iraq is complete.” Sharon insisted that the day after the Iraq war (which had not yet begun) ended, the war against Iran must begin.

Fast forward another decade…

During 2012, not a month passed when the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran didn’t generate hyperventilated headlines. To mark the end of the 20th anniversary of “the Iranian threat,” here’s a look back at some of the articles that kept the about-to-happen war against Iran’s nuclear program in the headlines last year.

January 2012: The year started with a bang…at least in the press. Foreign Affairs features an essay “Time to Attack Iran” by Matt Kroenig, reinforced by “The Case for Regime Change in Iran”, a commentary by Jamie M. Fly and Gary Schmitt, alongside of which are two pieces critical of Koenig’s arguments: “Not the Time to Attack Iran” by Colin H.Kahl” and “The Flawed Logic of Striking Iran” by Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro. Also weighing in with a totally contrarian view was neorealist Kenneth Waltz, who contributes “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” to the debate. An astute critique of Fly and Schmitt, which remains timely, is Simon Tisdall’s piece in the Guardian, “An Iran War is Brewing From Mutual Ignorance.”

A noteworthy pro-war attention grabber that reaches a much wider and more diverse audience outside policy wonk circles is Ronen Bergman’s cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Will Israel Attack Iran?”, which concludes, ”After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”  Ira Chernus provides a takedown of Bergman’s arguments a few days later in the Huffington Post. Also contradicting Bergman is a draft of an Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) report, arguing that Iran would not be capable of building a nuclear weapon in 2012 and that a a military attack wouldn’t effectively prevent Iran from building one if it made the decision to do so.

February: David Ignatius reveals in a Washington Post op-ed, “Is Israel Preparing to Attack Iran?”, that US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s biggest worry is that Israel may be preparing to attack Iran in the spring. Ignatius’ scoop goes viral, eliciting commentary from all directions within the mainstream media and blogosphere. Charles Krauthammer immediately infers that such a leak would not have occurred unless an Israeli attack was “certain” and concludes it’s a done deal. Gareth Porter argues that the leak brings into sharper focus “a contradiction in the Barack Obama administration’s Iran policy between its effort to reduce the likelihood of being drawn into a war with Iran and its desire to exploit the Israeli threat of war to gain diplomatic leverage on Iran”. In the New York Times, former Israeli military defense chief Amos Yadlin demands ”an ironclad American assurance that if Israel refrains from acting in its own window of opportunity — and all other options have failed to halt Tehran’s nuclear quest — Washington will act to prevent a nuclear Iran while it is still within its power to do so.” Jonathan Marcus at BBC News provides a step-by-step blueprint of “How Israel Might Strike at Iran.”

March: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Israeli media that he had assured President Obama during their talks in Washington that Israel had not yet decided whether or not to strike Iran in the next few weeks. Within days, a front page piece in the Sheldon Adelson-owned Israeli daily Israel Hayom by headlined “Difficult, Daring, Doable”, propounds the feasibility and desirability of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Mark Perry exposes what his sources believe to be a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran from Azerbaijan; the neoconservative and right-wing media are divided as to whether the story is a hoax or another deliberate leak by the Obama administration intended to thwart Israeli plans.

April: It’s spring and there are no signs of an Israeli attack. Slate’s Fred Kaplan suggests that Israel might launch an “October surprise” just before the US elections:

If they started an attack and needed U.S. firepower to help them complete the task, Barack Obama might open himself up to perilous political attacks—for being indecisive, weak, appeasing, anti-Israel, you name it—if he didn’t follow through. It could cost him the votes of crucial constituencies.

May: In the May/June issue of World Affairs Journal, Elliott Abrams and Robert Wexler debate whether the time for an Israeli attack on Iran has finally arrived. Abrams calls for immediate action and Robert Wexler argues “not yet.” After numerous reports in the right-wing blogosphere cite Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz in arguing that Israel is about to attack Iran, Gantz slams the “public chatter” about the Iranian nuclear issue by people who used to know things about Iran’s nuclear program but no longer do,” while assuring the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel is “super ready” for military action. A temporary lull in war rhetoric from Israel fuels mid-month speculation that the top echelons of the Israeli government are in “lockdown” in preparation for a military strike. The surprise formation of a national unity government, Reuters infers, is reflective of Netanyahu’s desire for “a strong government to lead a military campaign,” particularly one that includes Iranian-born Shaul Mofaz, a former Israeli Chief of Staff and a veteran soldier in the coalition:

‘I think they have made a decision to attack,’ said one senior Israeli figure with close ties to the leadership. ‘It is going to happen. The window of opportunity is before the U.S. presidential election in November. This way they will bounce the Americans into supporting them.’

June: In another op-ed, David Ignatius rings alarm bells:

It’s clear that Israel’s military option is still very much on the table, despite the success of economic sanctions in forcing Iran into negotiations. ‘It’s not a bluff, they’re serious about it,” says Efraim Halevy, a former head of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. A half-dozen other experts and officials made the same point in interviews last week: The world shouldn’t relax and assume that a showdown with Iran has been postponed until next year. Here, the alarm light is still flashing red.

July: Chief of Staff Benny Gantz refutes rumours that he is opposed to war with Iran. “The IDF will carry out orders to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if it receives them from the government,” he declares. Mofaz leaves Netanyahu’s coalition, revivifying the need for Israeli elections. Charles Krauthammer opines to Fox News that Israel will attack Iran if it appears that President Obama will win re-election.

August: During Panetta’s visit to Israel, Netanyahu informs him during closed talks that Israel is prepared to defend itself from Iran with or without the help of the US and that he is prepared to accept the consequences. Barak Ravid of Haaretz reports that others at the meeting believed that Netanyahu’s comments were part of a “psychological warfare” campaign waged by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak “in order to pressure the U.S. into attacking Iran itself.” Two weeks later, Panetta tells the press that the Israelis have not yet “made a decision as to whether or not they will go in and attack Iran at this time,” while Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey incurs the wrath of Israeli political leaders when he asserts that an Israeli attack “could delay but not destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

September: Among the questions that Lesley Stahl asks “The Spymaster” — the former head of Israel’s Mossad, Meir Dagan — in a Sixty Minutes interview is whether an Israeli attack on Iran could succeed. Although she opens the interview with a Dagan quote asserting that “Israel attacking Iran was the stupidest idea [he] had ever heard,” she insistently argues that he ought to believe otherwise, sometimes even putting words in Dagan’s mouth despite his clear resistance.

Netanyahu’s speech before the UN General Assembly on Sept. 27 becomes an iconic moment when the Israeli leader literally draws a line with a red marker on a crude graphic of an incendiary device. “Ladies and gentlemen, the relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb,” he said. Netanyahu’s use of the “Wile E. Coyote” rendition of an Iranian nuclear weapon evokes disapproving frowns as well as irreverent mockery: “I’m hearing ridicule of that stunt from people in the United States government who are a) militant on the subject of Iran, and b) needed by Israel to carry-out effective anti-proliferation efforts,” Jeffrey Goldberg fumes in The Atlantic. Goldberg, normally a staunch defender of Netanyahu, also complains:

Netanyahu’s constant threats, and warnings, about Iran’s nuclear program have undermined Israel’s deterrent capability. Netanyahu spent much of this year arguing, privately and publicly, that soon it would be too late to stop the Iranians from moving their centrifuges fully underground. He knows full well that the Iranians could soon enter the so-called zone of immunity, by moving the bulk of their centrifuges into the Fordow facility, where Israeli bombs can’t reach. But he’s now kicked the can down the road until next spring.

October: Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak tells Britain’s The Daily Telegraph that Iran has used up to a third of its enriched uranium to make fuel rods for a medical research reactor, thereby delaying progress towards a weapon for 8-10 months. Barak speculated that Iran’s “ruling ayatollahs” may be trying to reduce tension over the nuclear issue until after the US presidential election, or convince the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Iran’s willingness to cooperate. Barak said this did not change Israel’s view that Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

The threat of an October surprise immediately before the US election subsides. The alliance of Netanyahu’s Likud party with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s even more hardline Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”) party leads to concerns that the PM is forming a war cabinet that would make a military confrontation inevitable. According to Aluf Benn of Haaretz:

…he announced that the top priority of his next government will be preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The merger with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party will dissolve any domestic opposition to the war, since after the election, Netanyahu will be able to argue that he received a mandate from the people to act as he sees fit. Ministers and top defense officials will have a hard time arguing with him. From now on, only American opposition is liable to delay, or even prevent, a command to the Israel Air Force to take off for Iran.

November: Netanyahu vows to stop Iran’s nuclear progress, even if it means defying the US. In a joint press conference at the Pentagon, after Panetta implied that retiring Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak agreed that “there is time and space for an effort to try to achieve a diplomatic solution” with Iran — which Panetta said “remains, I believe, the preferred outcome for both the United States and for Israel” — Barak undercuts his host, stating that Iranian leaders would have to be “coerced” into ending their nuclear program. Barak predicts this will happen in 2013.

December:  On Dec. 31, in a Haaretz article headlined “Bibi’s Strange Silence on Iran,” Uzi Benziman wonders what has become of the Iranian threat, which suddenly vanished from Israel’s national conversation, with the exception of a single unremarkable mention as part of a list of challenges in a political party speech by Netanyahu last week:

Since his [Netanyahu's] In a joint press conference at the beginning of the month with Panetta, retiring Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak anyahu’s] resounding appearance at the United Nations, where he pointed to the Iranian threat by means of a ludicrous drawing, this fateful issue (from his perspective ) has somehow dropped from the public eye. It’s a strange turn of events considering the fact that the Iranian nuclear program topped Netanyahu’s agenda during his entire current term in office, and that the manner in which he handled it cast a pall of palpable existential threat over Israel.

But according to former Obama national security adviser Dennis Ross, 2013 will be “the decisive year” in the showdown with Iran’s nuclear program. “If by the end of 2013 diplomacy hasn’t worked, the prospects for use of force become quite high,” he said.

A new year, with new possibilities, which will probably include more talk of an impending war with Iran (that Lobe Log will continue to track and report on). Elections are coming up in both Israel and Iran, opening the door to a range of events that can seriously impact the US and Israel’s Iran policy, as well as Iranian foreign policy. And while total peace may be unlikely, one can at least hope that past predictions of war with Iran will be as accurate in 2013 as they have been in the past.

American political discourse regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran has always had an Orwellian flavor. Escalating economic sanctions are presented as an earnest effort at diplomacy; covert actions and industrial sabotage are pitched as an alternative to war. Now, courtesy of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), we have the introduction of another [...]]]> via Lobe Log

American political discourse regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran has always had an Orwellian flavor. Escalating economic sanctions are presented as an earnest effort at diplomacy; covert actions and industrial sabotage are pitched as an alternative to war. Now, courtesy of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), we have the introduction of another alternative to the “military option”: the dismemberment of Iran.

According to a letter Rep. Rohrabacher sent to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton last week:

Aiding the legitimate aspirations of the Azeri people for independence is a worthy cause in and of itself. Yet, it also poses a greater danger to the Iranian tyrants than the threat of bombing its underground nuclear research bunkers.

I am not going to dwell on the audacity of this particular call. US politicians have always assumed rhetorical and behavioral privileges that they denounce as outright ugly, even evil, when practiced by others. Imagine a member of a Parliament from another country sending out a letter to their government asking for support to be given to Hawaiian nationalists or for the return of California to Mexico. I guess being a superpower has its privileges.

I am not going to dwell on the history that comes to mind after reading Rohrabacher’s letter either. Nevertheless, 1828 was the year that Iran, under the Qajar Dynasty, was forced to sign the Turkmenchay Treaty, ceding territory to Russia after its defeat in war (along with territorial loss, Iran also lost all navigation rights in the Caspian Sea while the Russians gained capitulation rights and the privilege of sending consulate envoys anywhere in Iran). So, it will be quite a revelation for most Iranians, including most Azeri-Iranians, that according to Rohrabacher’s press release, the Azeri “homeland was divided by Russia and Persia in 1928” ; even if this revisionist history may do good for the Iranian ego by portraying the abysmally weak Iran of 1828 as quite a power.

What is most troubling, though, is the desire – you can also call it a dream or an urge – to harm contemporary Iran in any way possible and without any concern for implications. Rohrabacher’s letter was apparently prompted by recent news stories concerning a budding military cooperation between Israel and the Azerbaijan Republic.

“It would be wise for the United States to encourage such cooperation, as the aggressive dictatorship in Tehran is our enemy as well as theirs,” writes Rohrabacher. “The people of Azerbaijan are geographically divided and many are calling for the reunification of their homeland after nearly two centuries of foreign rule.”

Let’s decode this. In a single sentence, a people and a territory are joined and the separation of one territory from a country so that it can be joined to another country is made simple. Given the desire to pose a danger that is even “greater than…bombing its underground nuclear research bunkers,” there seems to be no need to contemplate the fact that millions of Iranian Azeris live outside of the four Iranian provinces of East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, Ardebil, and Zanjan wherein Azeris are prominent, and a large percentage of the population in West Azerbaijan are Kurds and not Azeris. These are apparently irrelevant facts for Rohrabracher and most of the Iran-obsessed US politicians who also cannot be bothered with inconvenient details.

The task of posing “a greater danger” – read destabilizing the Islamic Republic – is all that matters without a second of thought given to the potential costs of fomenting this kind of destabilization in terms of lost lives and livelihoods. Let’s make trouble is the motto and who cares what happens afterwards. Nothing — not even the calamities that the invasion of Iraq and now the unplanned escalation in Syria have wrought – worries the conscience of these US politicians.

It would have been easy to ignore the “let’s do more harm” crowd if their philosophies have not at least in part shaped US foreign policy. Rohrabracher’s call for the independence of greater Azerbaijan will probably be ignored, at least for now, but the urge to make as much trouble for a country that is ridiculously – given its comparatively limited resources – identified as “the greatest threat to U.S. Security” without any thought given to the implications for Iran’s social and political fabrics or consequential further regional instability remains.

“Facing [competition with emerging regional [...]]]> Because U.S.-led sanctions freeze Iran out of many markets, the Islamic Republic is always trying to find new places to dip its fingers. At Foreign Policy, Haley Sweetland Edwards gives an interesting breakdown of Iran’s attempts to woo the countries of the Southern Caucusus — Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

“Facing [competition with emerging regional powers and a decline in Iran's own] regional importance — in addition to a fresh round of EU, U.S., and Kremlin-backed U.N. sanctions, internal unrest and an array of external military threats — Tehran has chosen to fight back with vigorous diplomatic campaigns in its near abroad,” Edwards writes from Tbilisi.

Iran’s outreach, as well as some Caucasian reciprocity, has been robust: They exchange envoys, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has traveled to Georgia, rail roads and pipelines have been proposed, Azeris and Georgians no longer need visas to travel to Iran, and trade deals, especially for energy, are always in the works.

Much of the effort is directed at keeping the countries on Iran’s northern border from “getting too chummy” with hostile nations, particularly the U.S. One Georgian executive, speaking anonymously, tells Edwards that the Iranians are clear that they don’t want any U.S. bases to their north.

But what’s going to come of all of it? Taking a rather great leap that Iran’s central fall back strategy might simply be a nuclear bomb, Edwards concludes:

The real economic and geopolitical dividends of all this Iranian diplomacy in the South Caucasus are mostly theoretical at this point. For example, an Iranian business community that has developed a taste for the lucrative transit market might act a moderating force on the Iranian government. For another, Iran’s willingness to behave diplomatically and encourage stability in the Caucasus could produce a potential backchannel through which Tehran is able to begin to soften its 30-year history of isolation from the West.

Realistically, though, that’s not likely to happen any time soon. Iran-watchers caution that Tehran’s ambition may exceed its true reach. Another east-west pipeline from Azerbaijan, through Georgia, to Turkey — from which Iran was deliberately excluded — is already in the works. Neither Moscow, which currently has a chokehold on the European gas supply, nor Washington, with its policy of containment of Iran, are likely to allow Iranian pipelines to reach Europe. Politics aside, the gas industry hardly sees Iran as a reliable supplier. And despite big talk, real economic partnerships between Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are still small. In 2008, for instance, only about 1 percent of Georgian imports were Iranian.

Even if everything goes Iran’s way in the South Caucuses, it doesn’t amount to a long-term strategy for the Islamic Republic. Rapprochement with the West doesn’t seem to be in the cards, and it’s unclear how increased regional trade will counter the effects of international sanctions. If Tehran has a grand strategy, it seems to be oriented toward the acquisition of nuclear weapons. At some point, one imagines, that’s also going to have to be the subject of discussion between Iran and its neighbors.