by Peter Jenkins
On Dec. 2 the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, What a Final Iran Deal Must Do. The authorship is ascribed to Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, but it is hard to believe that this piece is really the work of such distinguished statesmen, so striking are the [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
On Dec. 2 the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, What a Final Iran Deal Must Do. The authorship is ascribed to Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, but it is hard to believe that this piece is really the work of such distinguished statesmen, so striking are the misleading depictions of crucial facts and the shortcomings in their reasoning.
The authors open by reminding readers of their Cold War experience of confronting “nuclear perils”, implying an analogy between a Soviet Union that by the 1970s possessed tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and an Iran which at present possesses no more than an unproven, very basic and as yet unused nuclear weapons capability.
They go on to argue for the dismantling or mothballing of parts of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, omitting to mention that they never tried to persuade the USSR (or China) to dismantle any of their nuclear infrastructure (and would have been given short shrift, had they done so). Instead, they negotiated balanced arms control agreements that reduced “nuclear perils” by improving mutual understanding and providing for confidence-building verification measures.
In addition, they write as though there is a clear distinction between a nuclear weapons capability and a “plausible civil nuclear program” (to which they, rightly, raise no objection). The essential problem posed by a dual-use nuclear technology like uranium enrichment is that no such distinction exists. An enrichment plant that is producing fuel for reactors one day can be reconfigured the next to produce weapons-grade uranium.
Because that is the case, it is a mistake to fixate on technical capabilities. Far more useful is to minimise the risk that a state that possesses nuclear weapons potential will ever want to realise it. The world is full of states that possess the capacity to inflict death and destruction on other states. Mercifully, most of that capacity remains unused because most governments are smart enough to recognise that picking a fight is a pretty dumb thing to do, i.e. not in the national interest, in a post-1945 world.
So it would have been wise of the authors to focus, not on a misleading distinction between civil and military capacities, but on the desirability of developing the mutual understanding that they, in their prime, were so adept at fostering, and on confidence-building verification measures.
It would also have been reassuring if they had shown awareness of the divergence of the outlook that has been a discernible characteristic of Iran’s leading politicians since the late 1980s. President Rouhani’s outlook has little in common with his predecessor’s. He shares with former presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami a pragmatic and defensive mind-set. None of these three leaders (all are still alive) seeks to export Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Defending Iranian interests is their guiding objective.
A penchant for treating facts misleadingly transpires in the authors’ description of Iran’s nuclear program. They write as though it had been established beyond all doubt that this is a military and not a civil or safety-net dual-use program. It has not.
They also imply that the program is on a vast scale, whereas in fact it is modest. Nearly eight years after the re-opening of the Natanz plant (following a negotiated two year suspension of activity there) Iran only possesses enough low-enriched uranium for four nuclear weapons (which it has not attempted to make). Its stock of LEU would barely supply one quarter of the fuel needed to re-load its 930MW power reactor at Bushehr. The 40MW reactor at Arak is still incomplete.
Here are a few more egregious statements:
…progress on a heavy water reactor and plutonium reprocessing facility at Arak
There is no trace of a reprocessing facility at Arak or anywhere else in Iran. Since 2003 Iranian negotiators have steadily disclaimed any intention of reprocessing spent fuel from any of their reactors.
IAEA directives have demanded…unconditional compliance with an IAEA inspection regime
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s board resolutions (which only have political, not legal force) have urged Iran to grant exceptional access to IAEA inspectors. Iran has complied with the regular Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) inspection regime.
…we must avoid an outcome in which Iran…emerges as a de facto nuclear power leading an Islamist camp.
Do the authors really envisage Turkey, Egypt, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan hailing Iran as their leader? They ought to know better.
…[Iran has] proceeded with a major nuclear effort…in violation of its NPT obligations
None of the nuclear facilities built by Iran is outlawed by the NPT. Since 2003 the IAEA has reported regularly that all nuclear material known to be in Iran’s possession is in peaceful use, as required by the NPT, and has not reported any evidence of undeclared nuclear material.
The flaws in this article matter because the ostensible authors are so distinguished that they are likely to be seen as authoritative sources of wisdom on the subject at issue. This impertinent critique of their analysis stands little chance of correcting the perceptions of those who have been influenced by this Dec. 2 piece. Nonetheless, here’s hoping.
]]>By Robert E. Hunter
As President Obama assembles his new national security team, all eyes are on the four top jobs. These choices obviously matter, to ensure effective US diplomacy (Secretary of State); relevant but reduced military power (Secretary of Defense); an intelligence function attuned to understanding the world rather than [...]]]>
By Robert E. Hunter
As President Obama assembles his new national security team, all eyes are on the four top jobs. These choices obviously matter, to ensure effective US diplomacy (Secretary of State); relevant but reduced military power (Secretary of Defense); an intelligence function attuned to understanding the world rather than fighting the nation’s wars (CIA Director); and a National Security Advisor who asks searching questions and gets the team to work together.
Yet in fact these top four appointments hardly matter more than what the president and his Cabinet do to marshal a total team, top-to-bottom, that’s able to do the nation’s business abroad. Judging from recent history, this is unlikely to happen.
In reality, most policy is “made,” and certainly both shaped for decision and later carried into action, not at the highest levels, but within the next several layers down. Here, the president and his advisers need to pay as much attention to putting in place people who can do the job “in the ranks” as at the Cabinet level. Yet most sub-cabinet appointments will likely go to individuals who served in the first Obama administration, whether they have done well or poorly — “promotion from within;” who served in the recent presidential campaign (although campaign and governance skills are decidedly different); or who have personal connections with the new Cabinet members, where “comfort level” is often prized over capacity.
Unlike every other Western government, the US professional Foreign Service usually gains admittance to the higher reaches of government only episodically. That means the skills of governing have to be learned on the job by new entrants to State or the civilian side of the Pentagon. It also tends to limit the access of people who have “been there and done that” for years, both abroad and in Washington, in regard to many of the most complex challenges to the US.
The good news is that, by the second term, presidents who are foreign policy tyros when they first enter the Oval Office — and only two recent new presidents, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, have not been tyros because they mastered the national security trade as vice president — have learned a lot about the true requirements of being commander-in-chief.
There is also bad news: since the end of the Cold War, the US has disarmed itself in the capacity to do hard strategic analysis and policy integration even more than it reduced the size of its military. Confrontation with the Soviet Union spawned a major industry in strategic thought, from the 1950s until the Berlin Wall fell, and the afterglow served the nation well for a time afterward — notably in George H.W. Bush’s managing the effects of the Soviet Union’s collapse, fostering Germany’s unification, and promulgating a grand strategy of a “Europe whole and free and at peace.”
Since then, no president has placed priority on hiring and using effectively people genuinely able to “think strategically” and relate the world’s apples to its oranges. In the Holiday from History before 9/11, that did not much matter; now it matters critically. It begins with clear understanding that the US economy is Thing One for national security; and that the imbalance between military and non-military instruments (the dollar ratio is still 17:1) damages the required integration of US efforts abroad, as underscored in both Iraq and Afghanistan. US engagement in North Africa-the Near East-the Persian Gulf-Southwest Asia is still pursued as though these are four only tangentially-related areas, carved up bureaucratically into disparate areas by both State and Defense, rather than as an interconnected region that has to be met and mastered together. Remarkably, none of the last three presidents has engaged a top-flight group of people, from inside and outside government, able to do just that. The recurring inadequacies of US policies are evidence enough.
It is 32 years since Zbigniew Brezezinski left office; 36 for Henry Kissinger — the last two masters of strategic thinking in the US government. Yet while there are available at least several first-rate strategic thinkers and integrators of policy, none serves in the administration.
It will be a year or more before President Obama can be judged a successful foreign policy president; but he can set a course for failure in the next few weeks, unless he chooses his full team wisely and includes at least one person (preferably several) who can provide the strategic insight, analytical skills, and translation into integrated policies he and the nation must have.
– Robert Hunter was ambassador to NATO in the Clinton Administration and until recently was director of the Center for Transatlantic Security Studies at the National Defense University.
]]>There are two ways [...]]]>
There are two ways to look at red lines. One is, “should we make a public announcement than can be used by Israel or any country as its justification for going to war?” That we cannot do.
No. We cannot subcontract the right to go to war. That is an American decision.
Kissinger also merged Washington’s previously stated red line, an Iranian nuclear weapon, with Israel’s red line, nuclear capability, when arguing that the White House needs to decide what preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon boils down to:
Now, we do need to define for ourselves when we say that nuclear weapons are unacceptable — nuclear weapons capability is unacceptable — we need to know for ourselves what we mean by that. What is the definition?
I would say private red line, publicly decided in terms of tactical necessity.
Kissinger concluded by endorsing Mitt Romney’s “responsible foreign policy.”
On Iran, Mitt Romney told ABC that his “redlines” are essentially the same as Obama’s. But he subsequently changed his position on the subject when pressed by pro-Israel advocates in a private campaign forum, the Cable reports. It’s now unclear which position he and his foreign policy advisors agree on.
]]>Perhaps that’s why, just in time for the holidays, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) launched a scathing attack on some of the most prominent — and pro-Israel– [...]]]>
Perhaps that’s why, just in time for the holidays, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) launched a scathing attack on some of the most prominent — and pro-Israel– Jewish Senators and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Noah Silverman, RJC’s Congressional Affairs Director since 2006, may have been moved by the sight of boiling oil when he made his debut as an official RJC blogger. No sooner writ than said, Silverman’s pontifications splattered over to RJC’s e-mail list on Thursday night.
Silverman attacks Jews and Jewish organizations who have come out in support of the immediate ratification of the New START Treaty. Picking up where the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and JINSA left off, Silverman’s rails against “an unprecedented effort to ‘make START a Jewish issue‘ by pressuring Jewish communal organizations to advocate for the treaty’s ratification.”
He’s irate with the ADL and the American Council of World Jewry, both of whom objected when Senate Republicans made it known that they would use member prerogative to block ratification: “We are deeply concerned that failure to ratify the new START treaty will have national security consequences far beyond the subject of the treaty itself,” a Nov. 19 letter from the ADL to all members of the Senate asserted. ”The U.S. diplomatic strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons requires a U.S.-Russia relationship of trust and cooperation.”
Granted that the ADL was speaking from the perspective of its anti-Iran agenda. Nonetheless — and perhaps especially so — it’s bizarre to hear the RJC’s Silverman challenging the right of Jewish organizations to weigh in on issues other than Israel. And Silverman is livid that Senate Democrats would dare to use an argument about Israel’s security to enlist AIPAC in the effort to get START ratified.
MJ Rosenberg — citing Nathan Guttman in the Forward and Ron Kampeas at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — suggests that
AIPAC is in agony. It desperately wants to support the US-Russia START treaty aimed at limiting nuclear warheads because the treaty would greatly advance Israel’s security.
But it is afraid of defying right-wing Republicans in the Senate. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), in particular, is telling AIPAC “don’t you dare.” His reason is simple: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has ordered Republicans to block anything the President submits to the Senate except, of course, tax cuts for millionaires. That includes START.
Tight-with-the-right Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is Silverman’s source that the involvement of AIPAC in a non-Israel issue is shocking. Rubin writes, “An experienced Israel hand tells me, ‘Well, they of course claim there is a direct link to Israeli security. But, no, this must be very rare.’ A Capitol Hill adviser from another office says ‘I’ve never seen this done with AIPAC on a non-Israel issue.’”
But it’s not all that rare, according to Rosenberg:
AIPAC argues that it does not get involved in congressional battles that do not directly involve Israel. Of course, they do. They always have. Even when I worked at AIPAC decades ago, they put their full lobbying weight behind a then-controversial plan to establish a military base on the Pacific island of Diego Garcia.
Why? Because the Republican President at the time asked them to. More recently, AIPAC made sure that its friends in Congress knew that the “right vote” for Israel was supporting both Iraq wars. (Had AIPAC not indicated its support for war, far fewer Democrats would have voted for the second Iraq war.)
Silverman frames the effort to pass START as evidence of “a panicked White House is scrambling to salvage what it can of its legislative agenda before its influence in Congress is diminished next year.” But the letter to AIPAC which so outrages Silverman was written by two longtime senators who supported arms control long before Barack Obama was elected president.
Michigan Democrat Carl Levin was first elected to the Senate in 1978, where he’s Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He’s been consistently supportive of conventional forces and basic, reliable weapons systems to protect national security. His support for START is anything but last minute. In a column in the Niles Daily Star on July 9, Levin wrote:
As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described it, New START will “make our country more secure and advance our core national security interests.” This treaty is in keeping with a long tradition of bilateral, verifiable arms control agreements with Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, and it strengthens the U.S. commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
Silverman not only ignores Mullen’s endorsement of START, he seems completely oblivious to the support expressed by Republicans for “resetting” the Treaty. They include what Jim Lobe calls are the “big guns in what remains of the Republican foreign policy Establishment, including five former secretaries of state whose service spanned the last five Republican administrations.” They include Colin Powell, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Lawrence Eagleburger, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that there are “compelling reasons” for Republicans to approve ratification of START.
Bloomberg News reports that several Republican senators — among them Richard Lugar, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, Bob Bennett, John McCain, and Kyl himself, are hinting they could support the reset of START in the lame-duck Senate session if (and perhaps only if) the Senate voted to extend the expiring Bush-era tax cuts to cover Americans in all income groups. So it’s domestic politics, not national security, that may determine the fate of START, JINSA notwithstanding. MJ Rosenberg also thinks that “Kyl may come around and then AIPAC can too.”
Silverman, who worked for seven years as a legislative aide in Kyl’s office, also uses his first blogpost to defend Kyl against what he deems to be assaults on his former boss’s reputation. He is no doubt bristling at the thought that his former boss will give in on START out of political expediency. Although the RJC launched some of the most vicious ad hominem attack ads against Obama before the 2008 election, Silverman huffs that “Pro-Obama commentators attacked Kyl in the most demeaning and personal terms — including calling him unpatriotic.”
The “demeaning” attack on Kyl to which Silverman links is a Huffington Post rhymed rant by self-described Ranting Political Poet Jim Parry. The personal attack: a single Tweet by Washington Monthly contributor and blogger Steve Benen. And the accusation of Kyl’s being “unpatriotic”? A tweet by actress Elizabeth Banks, co-star of the frat-boy comedy film Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
Does Silverman really consider two tweets and a rant “pro-Obama news commentary”? If so, it explains alot.
Like why, after 25 years of Republican Jewish Coalition activism, there is only one single Jewish Republican to be found in the U.S. Congress — in either the upper or lower chamber.
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