The delays in the Iranian program are important because they add strategic warning time for the West to respond to any Iranian push for a bomb. U.S. officials [...]]]> Here’s David Ignatius, in The Washington Post, writing about the revised Israeli intelligence estimates about an Iranian bomb (2015, if you must know), with my emphasis:

The delays in the Iranian program are important because they add strategic warning time for the West to respond to any Iranian push for a bomb. U.S. officials estimate that if Iran were to try a “break out” by enriching uranium at Natanz to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb, that move (requiring reconfiguration of the centrifuges) would be detectable – and it would take Iran one to two more years to make a bomb.

The Iranians could try what U.S. officials call a “sneak out” at a secret enrichment facility like the one they constructed near Qom. They would have to use their poorly performing (and perhaps still Stuxnet-infected) old centrifuges or an unproven new model. Alternative enrichment technologies, such as lasers or a heavy-water reactor, don’t appear feasible for Iran now, officials say. Foreign technology from Russia and other suppliers has been halted, and the Iranians can’t build the complex hardware (such as a “pressure vessel” needed for the heavy-water reactor) on their own.

And here’s Eli Lake in the Washington Times, with a good article on the same subject in which he talks with neoconservative pundit Patrick Clawson of WINEP, again with my emphasis:

Patrick Clawson, a specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “Certainly, the IAEA reports and what we hear from people knowledgeable about the nuclear program is that Iran is encountering significant technical problems.”

“The great worry is that Iran has clandestine facilities that will allow it to overcome these technical problems,” he said.

Now here’s Columbia professor Richard Bulliet, speaking at a forum called  “War With Iran?”, where the event poster featured a gas mask emblazoned with the Israeli, Iranian, and U.S. flags (video here; start at minute 41):

Recently I was reading about the buildup to the war on Iraq, and one of the things that became apparent as you look back… is that after 1991, the U.S. put sanctions on Iraq that were essentially sanctions that could not be positively satisfied. Iraq could say ‘okay, we have completely given up WMD.’ And we could say, ‘we don’t believe you, and the only way we can be sure is to get rid of your regime.’

My worry is that we’re moving a little bit in this direction with Iran, that we’re creating a focus on a sanctions regime that it may not be possible for Iran to ever satisfy the fear of the people that are putting on the sanctions.

…If you had a statement from Iran that ‘we have stopped purifying uranium,’ you would have some people who would say: ‘Well, underground someplace they’re still doing it; there are hidden facilities. There are centerfuges going day and night, and we just don’t know where they are doing it. They’re in Saddam’s palaces which have now been shipped to Iran.’

And under that circumstance, you get to a logic that’s saying, if you sanction a regime to get it to change its behavior, but you do not believe there are any circumstances under which a claim to behavior change would actually be credible, then regime change is your only option.

How many of the people that campaign most tirelessly for sanctions think that they will work? How many thought they were a good idea in Iraq for a decade, then went ahead and pushed for a war there anyway?

This last point is at the crux of critically examining sanctions–which hurt ordinary Iranians. In Iraq, infant mortality rose from 1 in 30, in 1990, to 1 in 8, in 1997. That’s more than a threefold increase, in just seven years, of babies who did not live to see their first birthdays.

There was no evidence in Iraq of a weapons of mass destructions program. Was it a result of those same sanctions? I couldn’t say. But I do know that neoconservatives and their allies in power remained determined, even with the draconian sanctions, to make war on Iraq.

Ross is an influential adviser to [...]]]> At a release event for the U.S. Institute of Peace’s (USIP) Iran Primer: Power, Politics and U.S. Power – an exhaustive collection of new writings on the country — the opening address came from  Dennis Ross, a top national security adviser to President Barack Obama on the Mid East.

Ross is an influential adviser to Obama on Iran issues, where he’s thought to be the prime architect of a policy aimed foremost at curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“The president has made it clear he is determined to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons,” said Ross. “The president has been very active in this area to mobilize the international community to the aims we want to pursue. Every meeting he’s had around the globe, Iran has featured very prominently.”

Ross gave a sweeping account of U.S. policy toward Iran since the start of the Obama administration, discussing motivations behind the both aspects of the White House’s “dual-track”  engagement and pressure  plan for Iran, noting the failures of the former and the successes of the latter.

As a Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory, Iran is entitled to nuclear power  and repeatedly denies the widely held Western belief its program is aimed at producing weapons.

“We’re prepared to respect Iran’s rights, but rights come with responsibilities,” said Ross. “They have to restore the confidence of the international community in order to get those rights.”

Though Ross said there were many reasons for tensions, he believed the lack of a formal diplomatic relationship between Iran and the United States — “an absence of contacts between officials” – for the past thirty years has been a factor.

“Absence of contact had done nothing to prevent Iran from pursuing it’s nuclear program and it didn’t do anything to prevent Iran from increasing its reach in the region,” said Ross.

“If there’s one thing President Obama wanted to change it was that. He wanted to have an engagement program,” he continued. “He was prepared from the very beginning to reach out and did.”

Some analysts have suggested the United States never seriously tried engagement. Comments from diplomats, including those found in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, reveal many believed negotiations were bound to fail even at the start of implementing the dual-track strategy.

“It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail,” National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi observed.

“The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy,” wrote Columbia professor and Iran expert Gary Sick. “It has yet to be tried.”

When asked directly about diplomatic engagement, Ross responded: “Everyone we have been dealing with knows quite clearly — they understand that we are quite serious and remian quite serious,” he said. “The president believed it was important to pursue diplomacy not as some kind of charade, but to change Iran’s behavior.”

He said that the robust sanctions passed in the UN Security Council last summer — which he hailed as a major success of the overall policy — are an indication of the U.S. seriousness.

“If we were seen as not being for real we would not have been able to do that,” he said.

On Tuesday, Iran announced it agreed to join the P5 + 1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – China, France, Russia, the U.K, and the United States  - and Germany) for negotiations next week in Geneva. Ross said he had hopes for serious talks, which he reportedly will attend.

Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), where Ross used to work, asked whether there will be talk of “pursuing other steps” at the P5 + 1 meetings — perhaps a nod at using the “military option” or addressing a choice the administration might face between that and pursuing the containment of an Iran with a nuclear weapons (or the capability to make them).

Either way, Ross deftly dodged the question: “I think you give plan A a chance before you go to plan B.”

“I think the most important thing is that we want these negotiations to get underway,” he added. “The expectation should not be that you go into the meeting and everything gets resolved.”

Addressing the aims of the Western negotiating group more broadly, Ross said, “The 5 +1 was created to deal with the nuclear issue. If you want to put other issues on the table, that’s fine. But there has to be a discussion of the nuclear issue.”

Last month, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said of the upcoming talks that Iran’s nuclear rights were “not negotiable,” though many diplomats and experts thought the statement reflected Iran’s longstanding defense of its rights to nuclear power under the NPT.

“We will be watching the nuclear issue,” he continued. “[Obama is] not in talks for their own sake. If (the Iranians) are not serious, we’re going to see that.”

Ross dedicated much of his prepared comments to discussing Western successes in pressuring Iran, citing the UN and U.S. Congressional sanctions.

“There’s no doubt the impact of the sanctions is being felt,” he said, naming examples of many international companies that have reduced business with Iran, especially in the energy sector. “What it all adds up to is something pretty clear: The pressure on Iran is starting to grow.”

“Iran has the possibility to be (in the international community),” he said. “I hope it will take the chance because if not it will be squeezed more.”

In our IPS piece, Jim Lobe and I quoted much of this portion of Sick’s blogged reactions to the lastest WikiLeaks document dump:

With Iran seemingly recalcitrant on its nuclear program and the United States unwilling to put up “robust economic, political and strategic incentives that will give Iran’s leaders [...]]]> At the Middle Eastern affairs journal Muftah, Hani Mansourian takes a well warranted critical look into the human cost of sanctions against Iran.

With Iran seemingly recalcitrant on its nuclear program and the United States unwilling to put up “robust economic, political and strategic incentives that will give Iran’s leaders reason to cooperate,” many proponents of escalating measure hold out hope that the people of Iran to rise up and oust their regime due to ever tightening sanctions and perhaps even an eventual military attack.

While a regime change as a result of military attack is regularly dismissed by people in the know — just ask top Iranian activists what they think — far less attention is given to the viability of tough sanctions leading to a mass uprising.

Remember that the U.S. State Department has admitted its sanctions have expanded to pressuring ordinary Iranians — Jamshid Average, if you will — thus conflating the people with the government of Iran.

Mansourian examines precedents — focusing on the failures of broad-based sanctions against Iraq and targeted ones against Zimbabwe — and contrasts these with the situation in Iran. He shows that even the targeted sanctions will prove counterproductive, because they are crushing Iran’s fragile economy and thereby destroying the middle class that drives the Iranian opposition.

Mansourian writes:

Many years of sanctions coupled with sub-optimal economic policies in Iran has resulted in a weak economy and a fragile middle-class. The latest round of UN, U.S., and EU sanctions on Iran is likely to drive millions into poverty and destitution. As economic opportunities for the growth of a solid middle-class disappear, the young Iranians that have historically been the agents of change in the country will lose their social base.  Ironically, then, sanctions may do more to increase the power of the Iranian government and to weaken the domestic opposition movement, to the ostensible detriment of U.S. interests

The Iraq example is especially compelling. In the 1996, Secretary of State Madeline Albright notoriously told a CBS reporter that sanctions were “worth it,” even though a half a million dead Iraqi children had died. Iraq’s infant mortality rose from one in 30 in 1990 to 1 in 8 in 1997. “Worth what?” one might ask, considering that as far as the hawks were concerned Iraq still needed to be invaded.

Note that Mansouraian’s analysis takes for granted the questionable notion, put forward by sanctions-hawks that the Green Movement is anywhere united behind regime change rather than incremental reform.

But sanctions as a means to regime change isn’t the only goal based on questionable premises. Even the notion of sanctions as a means to change Iranian behavior on the nuclear program is unlikely to succeed.

At a conference called “War With Iran?” last month at Columbia University, Prof. Richard Bulliet expressed fear that the U.S. Iran policy may be heading down the same path as Iraq policy — implementing a sanctions regime that can never work, followed by a military attack (video):

After 1991, the U.S. put sanctions on Iraq that could not possibly be satisfied. Iraq could say, ‘Okay, we have completely given up WMD.’ And we would say, ‘We don’t believe you. And the only way we can be sure is to get rid of your regime’ … My worry is that we’re moving a little bit in this direction with Iran, that we are creating a focus on a sanctions regime that it may not be possible for Iran to satisfy the fears of the people who are putting on the sanctions.

Give a read to Andrew Cockburn’s essay on the impact of sanctions on Iraq in July’s London Review of Books. The developments with regards to Iran may well seem eerily similar.

The interview, conducted via email, is worth checking out [...]]]> Laura Secor, writing on the News Desk blog at the New Yorker, has an interview with former presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, a leader of the Green movement that took to the streets after the disputed June 2009 election who is now under virtual house arrest.

The interview, conducted via email, is worth checking out in full. Of particular note are his responses to how the Green movement could receive help from outside Iran.

When Secor asked generally about the role of Iranian exiles — some of whom are forceful anti-regime activists — Karroubi said that, while he can’t tell them what to do, they should “try to convey Iranian public opinion and elite thought to the outside world, to help project the voices of those who are voiceless in Iran.”

Then Secor asked the outspoken opposition leader how he thought the U.S. government should relate to the Green movement.

Karroubi replied:

We look to our own people, to our own country and its interests. We try to avoid any dependence on other countries, nor would we suggest any strategy for them. This movement is our own responsibility, and we do not expect other nations or governments to do anything for us. But if they feel a humanitarian obligation to support us, that is another thing.

I wonder what Karroubi would have answered if Secor had followed up by asking him whether that meant public pledges of support or extended his comments to more tangible activities, such as funding satellite news channels (Voice of America’s Farsi service), internet tools to avoid surveillance and censorship or even subversive covert activities.

At a recent event at Columbia University (view it here), Bennington College professor and former Islamic Republic ambassador Mansour Farhang takes a different tack than Karroubi. He said the U.S. should take a more restrained role by focusing on negotiations towards ending the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program and not engage in discussions on Iran’s human rights situation, which would include the political repression that beat back Green movement.

Farhang cautions that because Iran’s leaders can point to such U.S. human rights hypocrisies  as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, successful discussions with Iran require that “[T]he U.S. should not at all pay attention to human rights in [Iran]. Leave that to the NGOs.” He noted his difficulty in making this statement, since he has been a dues paying member of Amnesty International since 1963.

Her comments, says NSN, are part of an attempt to treat Iran as a “political football to scare [...]]]> The National Security Network (NSN), an organization dedicated to promoting “pragmatic and principled” U.S. foreign policy, reports on the comments made Tuesday by 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in an interview with the conservative website NewsMax.

Her comments, says NSN, are part of an attempt to treat Iran as a “political football to scare voters and intimidate policy makers into taking military action against Iran.” The report counters her statements with those of former civilian and military Pentagon officials and former Foreign Service officers who all think such an attack would be a disaster. (We referred to NSN’s list here).

From the NSN report (with my emphasis):

Today, on a Newsmax broadcast, Sarah Palin proclaimed that allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons would result in a battle between good and evil, leading to “Armageddon.” Palin’s remarks are the most recent in a litany of bellicose rhetoric made by extreme conservatives about how to deal with Iran.  Yet despite the attempts to use Iran as a political football to scare voters and intimidate policy makers into taking military action against Iran, national security experts and military leaders disagree with such an approach. In addition, the voters aren’t buying this argument, as a recent poll showed that only two in ten Americans would go to war with Iran if that country tested a nuclear bomb. [...]  Nonetheless, despite the fact that the Obama administration’s dual-track approach towards Iran of sanctions and diplomacy is beginning to bear fruit, the loudest conservative voices continue to be the most militant ones.  However, policymakers should be wary of these arguments during this election season, as we have seen them before in the context of Iraq, where the most militant rhetoric won out during the midterm congressional campaign season of 2002. A skeptical eye needs to be drawn towards those who would use military action against Iran as a political tool rather than treating it as the serious national security issue that it is.

[...]  “We have to realize that at the end of the day that a nuclear weapon in [Iran's] hands is not just Israel’s problem or America’s problem – it is the world’s problem,” [Palin] said. “It could lead to Armageddon. It would lead to World War III that could decimate so much of this planet.”

At last week’s “War With Iran?” conference at Columbia University, I asked if either side in the nuclear stand-off — the Iranian leadership or the U.S. administration — was capable of cutting a nuclear deal while facing domestic political constraints. John Limbert, a former Iranian hostage who went on to serve as a Foreign Service officer and an Obama administration State Department official, responded that Iran is not an election issue. He cited the attempts of both Hillary Clinton (in the primaries) and Sen. John McCain (in the general election) to score points against Obama on the issue, noting that both failed and Obama won.

Limbert might be right. But it looks like Iran hawks won’t stop trying to make war with Iran a politically polarizing issue.