George Washington Political Science Professor Mark Lynch in Foreign Policy:
With military action in the background but not imminent, and sanctions taking a real political and economic toll inside of Iran, now seems to be the right time to begin a serious effort at real talks with Iran over [...]]]>
George Washington Political Science Professor Mark Lynch in Foreign Policy:
With military action in the background but not imminent, and sanctions taking a real political and economic toll inside of Iran, now seems to be the right time to begin a serious effort at real talks with Iran over its nuclear program — and to be prepared to take yes for an answer.
Roya Boroumand, the executive director of the Iranian human rights-focused Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, for the Huffington Post:
But there is still hope. Today, unlike the immediate post-revolutionary years, the Iranian leaders are concerned about their image abroad. They also respond to their critics and deny the routine violation of their obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Since 1975, Iran is bound by the ICCPR, which set forth the rights and freedoms essential to an open, safe and pluralistic political system where citizens can be heard and determine their own destiny.
For too many years, the international community, including the United States, has dealt with Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its use of violence in foreign policy independently from the abysmal human rights situation inside the country. It is time for a long-term strategy that would seriously challenge the leadership by shifting the focus to their human rights record, the non-representative nature of Iran’s political system and on the rights of citizens to organize and express themselves.
Former senior State Department intelligence analyst, Greg Thielmann, in Arms Control Now:
Any successful solution to the Iran nuclear crisis will have to include Iran’s agreement to again abide by the terms of the Additional Protocol, if not to grant even wider access to IAEA inspectors. As former IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen stated in an October 31 email exchange with the author, “[the Additional Protocol] will be indispensable in understanding [Iran’s] enrichment and heavy water programs…”
Various Iranian officials have suggested a willingness to accept the Additional Protocol if Iran’s right to enrichment is made clear. Endorsement of the Additional Protocol by Iraq, one of Iran’s few friendly neighbors, should help to increase pressure on Iran to do likewise.
Iran scholar and Lobe Log contributor, Farideh Farhi:
Unless Khamenei and company are given a way out of the mess they have taken Iran into (with some help from the US and company), chances are that we are heading into a war in the same way we headed to war in Iraq. A recent Foreign Affairs article by Ralf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the UN special Commission on Iraq, and Malfrid-Braut hegghammer, is a good primer on how this could happen.
The reality is that the current sanctions regime does not constitute a stable situation. First, the instability (and instability is different from regime change as we are sadly learning in Syria) it might beget is a constant force for policy re-evaluation on all sides (other members of the P5+1 included). Second, maintaining sanctions require vigilance while egging on the sanctioned regime to become more risk-taking in trying to get around them. This is a formula for war and it will happen if a real effort at compromise is not made. Inflexibility will beget inflexibility.
Former chief analyst of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center, Paul Pillar, in the National Interest:
On that all-preoccupying matter involving Iran’s nuclear program, the Iranians have given ample indication of flexibility on restricting their enrichment of uranium and on much else. But they would be foolish to make unilateral concessions with no prospect of getting anything in return on matters of importance to them.
When someone seems to be adhering to a position that ought not to be a vital interest to them, we should not make the mistake of interpreting this as a mark of obduracy and unreasonableness. More likely it means they are willing to bargain.
Also for the Huffington Post, Reza Marashi and Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council:
]]>Both Tehran and Washington have realized that their opening offers this past summer were non-starters. Iran wanted all sanctions lifted before it would begin limiting its enrichment program. American sought Iranian concessions upfront only to offer sanctions relief at the very end of the step-by-step process. Moreover, “going small” — that is, demanding less of Iran in order to justify the absence of sanctions relief — was politically unfeasibly.
This gave birth to the idea of ‘Going Big’ — circumventing the politically tricky sequencing and instead putting everything on the table. But somehow, ‘Going Big’ was mysteriously linked to an ultimatum. If the Iranians did not agree to our last (and first) big offer, there would be war.
This would be a serious mistake that would guarantee war. While going bigger may be necessary to reach an agreement, we can’t get a big offer right through a single attempt. If the Iranians presented a big offer to the P5+1 — “or else,” the world would rightly reject it and see it as an attempt to justify Iranian intransigence.
Similarly, Tehran — and the world — will view any US ultimatum as an attempt to create a path towards war. Diplomacy should help avoid war, not lay the groundwork for it.
The US’s Acting Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland disclosed the information in an exchange with a number of American activists and journalists against the US’s undeclared drone war waged primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the country.
The US Government has not published casualty lists for Pakistanis reported killed and [...]]]>
The US’s Acting Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland disclosed the information in an exchange with a number of American activists and journalists against the US’s undeclared drone war waged primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the country.
The US Government has not published casualty lists for Pakistanis reported killed and wounded by drone strikes. A similar policy of non-disclosure is present with respect to US operations in Yemen and Somalia.
Available information on Pakistani drone casualties comes from investigative reports produced with the assistance of local NGOs. But according to Robert Naiman, the Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, Amb. Hoagland offered a rare public acknowledgement of the program itself and civilian casualties:
“Well, first of all, for the numbers, to be very honest, I looked at the numbers before I came here today, and I saw a number for civilian casualties that officially — U.S. government classified information — since July 2008, it is in the two figures, I can’t vouch for you that that’s accurate, in any way, so I can’t talk about numbers. I wanted to see what we have on the internal record, it’s quite low.”
I won’t bother going over her recommendations and rebutting them, because so many have already done it for me:
Matt Duss at the Wonk Room, whose entire post is a definite must-read:
What’s Farsi for ‘Cakewalk’?
…Maybe there are Iranian democrats who support the U.S. bombing their country, I’d love to hear from them. But I think we’ve gotten far too casual about proposing these sorts of attacks. If we’re going to talk about it, let’s at least talk about it seriously, recognizing that very many people will very likely die. They deserve a lot better than than you know, if everything goes just right, it just might work!
Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists.
…The “car accident” line in her post is a clear reference to the bombing of two scientists’ cars last month in Tehran. Here is a BBC account of those attacks, carried out by unknown men on motorbikes. One of the scientists was killed and one was wounded. Both of their wives were also reportedly wounded. Another nuclear scientist was killed in a similar bombing earlier this year.
No one has argued that any of these men could be considered combatants. It’s also still unclear who was behind the attacks, though Iran has accused the United States and Israel of having a role. But even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.
At Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss picks up on this same inconsistency, but has a broader point about the Post:
The Washington Post has replaced the American Enterprise Institute as the primary hub of neoconservative arguments for U.S. aggression in the Middle East. AEI served a Republican administration, and cannot perform that role for Democrats. So the Post is now doing the job, percolating militarist ideas for the Obama administration. Old wine in a new bottle. Jennifer Rubin is the latest hire, fresh from Commentary magazine, arguing for an attack on Iran…
Later on Weiss comes back to the issue, and points us to a Huffington Post piece by David Bromwich, who calls it “barbarous dialect”:
There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why?
Bromwich focuses on President Barack Obama’s decision to assassinate a U.S. citizen who preaches violent extremism against the U.S., and the fact that even the president can joke about “drone strikes” — that is, shooting missiles down on villages from on high. Bromwich:
]]>A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.
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.
]]>These are the same allegations that Dennis Ross, Obama’s top National Security Council official for [...]]]>
These are the same allegations that Dennis Ross, Obama’s top National Security Council official for Iran policy, pushed back against in his talk yesterday at a U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) event.
In the Leveretts’ piece, they cite a Huffington Post article by Reza Marashi, who just joined the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) as research director after four years in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs:
It should now be clear that U.S. policy has never been a true engagement policy. By definition, engagement entails a long-term approach that abandons “sticks” and reassures both sides that their respective fears are unfounded. We realized early on that the administration was unlikely to adopt this approach. [...]
Moreover, as the leaked cables show, the highest levels of the Obama administration never believed that diplomacy could succeed. While this does not cheapen Obama’s Nowruz message and other groundbreaking facets of his initial outreach, it does raise three important questions: How can U.S. policymakers give maximum effort to make diplomacy succeed if they admittedly never believed their efforts could work? …And what are the chances that Iran will take diplomacy seriously now that it knows the U.S. never really did? The Obama administration presented a solid vision, but never truly pursued it.
This is pretty damning stuff from a guy who just left the Obama State Department. He was on the inside. And the Leveretts are feeling vindicated:
This, of course, provides additional powerful and public confirmation—from inside the Obama Administration—for our argument, in a New York Times Op Ed published in May 2009, that the Obama Administration’s disingenuous approach to dealing with Iran had already betrayed the early promise of President Obama’s initial rhetoric about engagement.
They mention that Ross was quite displeased with what they then had to say, and he let them know. The Leveretts note that Ross had Ray Takeyh, then his assistant at the State Department, push back against the notion that Obama’s “extended hand” to Iran was a checklist item for building international backing for more pressure on Iran, and possibly eventually military strikes. Takeyh called the idea “wrong and fraudulent.”
The Leveretts want to know what Takeyh thinks now:
]]>In light of the Wikileaks cables and Mr. Marashi’s public confirmation that the Obama Administration was, in fact, pursuing engagement to pave the way for more coercive options, including expanded sanctions, we ask Ray Takeyh: who was perpetrating a fraud with regard to the underlying intent of the Administration’s Iran policy?
At the press conference, the Persian Gulf, the widely accepted name for the body of water, was not mentioned at [...]]]>
At the press conference, the Persian Gulf, the widely accepted name for the body of water, was not mentioned at all. Iran itself was only mentioned once (the arms sale “is not solely about Iran,” Shapiro said).
I suspect that this was not simply a slip, as Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell used the phrase “Arabian Gulf” again today in his briefing to raise the curtains on Secretary Hillary Clinton’s upcoming trip to Asia.
The National Iranian American Council, writing before today’s briefing, said that Shapiro’s use of the term “Arabian Gulf” contradicts State Department policy and also could “fuel ethnic tensions.”
Jamal Abdi, NIAC’s policy director, wrote a blog post on the subject, and NIAC created a webpage with a form to send Secretary of State Hillary Clinton an e-mail demanding that State go back to using the term “Persian Gulf.”
“The term ‘Arabian Gulf’ first appeared fifty years ago as Pan-Arabism propaganda aimed at unifying Arabs against Iranians, Israelis, and other non-Arabs in the Middle East,” wrote Abdi at the Huffington Post, adding that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden had both used the term to win over Arab populations by appealing to ethnic chauvinism.
The NIAC letter campaign page says that the name “Persian Gulf” has been widely accepted for more than two millennia.
Abdi wrote:
]]>While it may sound like a mere matter of semantics to some (though one could predict the diplomatic uproar if the US began referring to the “Gulf of America” along its Southern coast), in a region marred by ethnic tensions, usage of “Arabian Gulf” is a serious signal that could portend a dangerous, counterproductive path for the US ahead. [...]
The State Department’s sudden use of “Arabian Gulf” can only stoke tensions in the region. The move could foreshadow deterioration back to the mutual demonization that characterized much of the previous Administration’s Iran approach. President Obama successfully reigned in much of that counterproductive rhetoric and, while there has been little reciprocation from Tehran, managed to earn back significant credibility necessary for US leadership on the global stage. But by flying in the face of protocol and using the term “Arabian Gulf”, the State Department risks backsliding to a posture in which the US once again bargains away its moral authority in exchange for caustic, emotionally satisfying insults.
Such an ethnically divisive term sends the wrong message, particularly coming just weeks ahead of planned talks with Iran.
Klein and Chesnoff write:
The current Jewish problem with Obama can be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward Israel. According to our sources, Obama said that in order to make good on his campaign promise to extricate 200,000 American troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. had to create a grand coalition of “moderate” Muslim states and Israel to isolate Iran, which has made no secret of its ambition to become the nuclear hegemon in the Middle East.
The only way to accomplish that goal, the president stated, was to eliminate the poisonous effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which provides Iran with an excuse to stir up trouble. Thus it was “a vital national interest of the United States” to stop Israel from building settlements in the occupied West Bank and housing in East Jerusalem, and force the Jewish state to resolve the Palestinian problem.
According to the article, Foxman tried to convince Obama that if the United Staes wants Israel to take risks for peace then “the best way is to make Israel feel that its staunch friend America is behind it.”
“You are absolutely wrong,” the president replied. “For the past eight years [under the Bush administration], Israel had a friend in the United States and it didn’t make peace.”
Obama’s response is the best possible argument against those who reject the concept of linkage, such as Foxman, or endorse a reverse linkage argument, such as the neoconservatives, who argue that pressuring Israel to make peace is best postponed until the U.S. has eradicated all of Israel’s enemies from the Middle East.
Having followed the reverse linkage line of reasoning in invading Iraq — as well as observing that the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2007 Hamas takeover of Gaza and the winter 2008-2009 Gaza War all occurred after Saddam Hussein had been removed from power — it seems clear Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol‘s promise that the road to peace “runs through Baghdad” was a dead-end.
Foxman continues his critique:
“I came away from the meeting convinced that Obama has introduced a new and dangerous strategy and that it’s revealing itself in steps,” Foxman told Edward Klein. “Unlike other administrations, this one is applying linkage in the Middle East. It’s saying that if you resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the messiah will come and the lions will lie down with the lambs. All the president’s advisers on the Middle East, starting with George Mitchell, believe in linkage, and they’re telling the president you have to prove to the Arab Muslim world that you are different than previous presidents and you can separate yourself from Israel, distance yourself from the settlements issue. After all, settlements are something that American Jews don’t like anyway, so it’s a win-win proposition.”
Foxman doesn’t even bother to seriously challenge the validity of linkage. (No one has suggested that “the messiah will come and the lions will lie down with the lambs,” either metaphorically or literally.) Instead, he and those others who oppose the White House’s position on settlements prefer to embellish the claims of linkage supporters, while refusing to engage in a real discussion about the failure of Israeli leadership to make concessions necessary for peace.
While many progressive American Jews are frustrated with the administration’s inability to convince Netanyahu to stop settlement construction, Klein and Chesnoff’s piece offers some of the strongest indications yet that the Obama administration is firmly grounded in the linkage strategy and has soundly rejected the reverse linkage argument.
]]>- Washington Post: In an article focused on President Barack Obama’s address to the UN, Scott Wilson leads with Obama’s reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s insinuation that the U.S. government played a role in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Obama told BBC Persian, which broadcasts into Iran, Ahmadinejad’s remarks were “offensive”, “hateful” and unacceptable: ”Particularly for him to make the statement here in Manhattan, just a little north of Ground Zero, where families lost their loved ones, people of all faiths, all ethnicities who see this as the seminal tragedy of this generation, for him to make a statement like that was inexcusable.”
- Huffington Post: In a Q&A with Shaun Jacob Halper, leading non-proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick says he is convinced that Iran wants a nuclear weapons “capability” if not the weapons themselves. Fitzpatrick answers questions on whether there is a legal and moral double standard applied to the nuclear programs of Israel and Iran (legally, says Fitzpatrick, Israel is not party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but morally the answer is more murky); grades Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on how they deal with Iran (both A’s); and on the viability of a sanctions regime and negotiations. While Iran does not have an “apocalyptic worldview” and is not “irrational,” he’s not sure if the Iranians are “appeasable” if the desire for “a nuclear weapons capability [is] more than anything else.” He concludes, “And if so than no, they are not appeasable.”
- National Review Online: Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, compares the speeches of Ahmadinejad and Obama at the UN General Assembly. She writes Obama extended his hand for diplomacy with Iran and used his speech to corner Israel. “Ahmadinejad got the message,” she contends, adding that “Israel is vulnerable with President Obama in office, and Iran has no serious reason to believe that hate and terror will be on the losing end any time soon.” She said the speeches demonstrate that Obama “does not understand the threat facing America and the world from Iran,” and that “Ahmadinejad, therefore, took the opportunity provided by the U.N. to slam the door once more in President Obama’s face.”
- Commentary: Jennifer Rubin contrasts President Obama’s UN speech, which she labels “namby-pamby” for its failure to detail military options, with the current push by the far-right Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and a group of House Republicans to escalate measures — including a military strike — against Iran. CUFI’s video accuses Ahmadinejad of committing “incitement to genocide” and urges his prosecution by the International Criminal Court. (Eli has written about the hypocrisy of this tack from right-wing supporters of Israel.) The letter from Republican members of the House calls for Obama to “take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. All options must be on the table.” Rubin laments that Obama is not taking Iran’s threats seriously and that should Israel act unilaterally against Iran, the U.S. should “stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel.”
- Washington Times: In an editorial, the hawkish daily chronicles what it calls, “Iran’s emergence as a regional hegemon,” based on its slowly advancing nuclear program and its unveiling of a new line of unmanned aircraft. The editorial cites the Israeli Foreign Ministry in saying that the developments are “totally unacceptable” and wonders if the term means as much to President Obama. Coyly attributing two recent mysterious events to Israeli subversion, the Times takes comfort that “perhaps ‘unacceptable’ means something after all.”
- Foreign Policy: On FP‘s “Shadow Government” blog, the Foreign Policy Initiative‘s Jamie Fly admits that the new Iranian reactor at Bushehr “fails to meet the hype,” but nonetheless reveals a failure in U.S.-Iran policy. He says, “a serious exploration of new options, including the military option, is thus in order if the United States remains unwilling to accept a nuclear Iran.” Fly also disapprovingly notes Russia’s complicity in the reactor’s start-up, and raises questions about Iran’s nuclear time line. On the latter point, Fly wonders “how close Iran should be allowed to get to a nuclear capability before military action is taken.”
- Commentary: On the “Contentions” blog, prolific über-hawk Jennifer Rubin riffs on a Bret Stephens Wall Street Journal column asserting that the United States didn’t act soon enough to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq. She extends the logic of Stephens’ “Twenty Years War” with Iraq to the “the Thirty-One Years War that Iran has waged against the United States and the West,” urging Obama “to finally engage the enemy, thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and commit ourselves to regime change.” She concludes with a note that recalls the measures taken against Iraq by Bill Clinton, which laid the groundwork for Bush’s war there: “But perhaps, if Israel buys the world sufficient time (yes, we are down to whether the Jewish state will pick up the slack for the sleeping superpower), the next president will.”
- Huffington Post: Conservative pundit Tony Blankley lists differences between “1938ers” — those who believe it’s always 1938 and Hitler always lurks around the corner — and the Obama administration’s policies. “So the question today is not whether to appease Iran or not — but whether Iran is appeasable. And if not appeasable, whether its threat can be defeated with acceptable costs,” writes Blankley. He concludes that Obama’s strategy is based on “wishful thinking, at best,” and that, “the grim assessment of the 1938ers seems sadly more realistic.”
- Huffington Post: Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch calls for the United States to bomb Iran. Citing the concerns of Sunni Arab allies, Israel, and even Europeans, who Koch says would be within range of rockets being developed by Iran, Koch quotes 2008 Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain that, the only “thing worse than military action against Iran… is a nuclear-armed Iran.” Koch concludes, “President Obama hopefully will reach the same conclusion.” Most of the post is dedicated to calling for an end to negotiations and comparing U.S. “carrots” for Iran to Neville Chamberlain’s concession of Czech Sudetenland to “Herr Hitler” before World War II, going so far as to explicitly compare Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. For a take-down of the right’s constant use of the Hitler analogy, check out Matt Duss’s Wonk Room post on the subject where he writes, “Just as Churchill had to deal with the consequences of Chamberlain’s misjudgment of the historical moment, so Obama continues to wrestle with problems created and exacerbated by the incompetence of his predecessor, George W. Bush.”
- The Weekly Standard Blog: Michael Makovsky and Lawrence Goldstein argue that in order to secure crude supply oil from the Persian Gulf the Obama administration must pursue a three-track policy of diplomacy, sanctions, and a visible preparation for a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The Obama administration has focused mostly on the first two tracks. However, diplomacy and sanctions will only have the chance to be effective when simultaneously coupled with an active and open preparation for the military option,” they write. Makovsky and Goldstein do acknowledge that, “U.S. or Israeli military action in Iran would trigger a jump in oil prices,” but, “A far greater threat to the oil market would be Iran’s attainment of a nuclear weapons capability.”
- The Washington Post: Janine Zacharia reports on the growing disagreement between the White House and members of Congress seeking to cut U.S. military aid to Lebanon. Several members of Congress have called for a discontinuation of U.S. military aid to Lebanon after last week’s deadly skirmish between Lebanese soldiers and the Israeli Defense Forces. But the State Department has emphasized that supporting the capacity and capability of the Lebanese army is in the United States’ national interest. The United States has supplied over $700 million in military aid to Lebanon since 2006 to help train and equip the Lebanese army and help counter Iran’s support of Hezbollah. Zacharia interviewed many policy-elites in Lebanon and reports that, “…many expressed concern that severing U.S. aid could feed instability in Lebanon and weaken democratic forces that have lost ground since the Cedar Revolution in 2005 swept a pro-Western government to power. Iran immediately said it would make up whatever shortfalls the Lebanese army incurs by a U.S. aid cut.” (Eli wrote about the attempts to suspend military aid to Lebanon on Wednesday.)