WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2012 (IPS) - Congress’s rush to pass new sanctions against Iran ahead of the August recess comes amidst an intensified drive to pin the Iranian government to deadly acts of international terrorism and amplified moves by U.S. politicians to demonstrate their support for Mideast ally Israel ahead of [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2012 (IPS) - Congress’s rush to pass new sanctions against Iran ahead of the August recess comes amidst an intensified drive to pin the Iranian government to deadly acts of international terrorism and amplified moves by U.S. politicians to demonstrate their support for Mideast ally Israel ahead of the November presidential election.
The push to implement more punitive measures against an increasingly demonised Iran could undermine efforts to resolve the longstanding impasse over Iran’s nuclear programme peacefully.
Jamal Abdi, policy director for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told IPS that even the mere “threat” of the new sanctions, which will be a combination of two bills passed in December and May by the House of Representatives and the Senate that target Iran’s energy sector and its ability to conduct financial transactions electronically, “have had a negative effect on the Iran nuclear talks and limited the president’s ability to use sanctions as a tool for leverage”.
“When this bill passes, it will further aggravate the chain of escalation between Iran and the U.S., and if it includes ‘economic warfare’ measures on top of those already in place, the Iranians will be inclined to respond with equal escalation,” he said.
A Jul. 25 hearing on Iran’s alleged support for international terrorism saw testimony from expert witnesses recommending that U.S. policy should be focused on gathering international support for holding Iran responsible and weakening its influence in the region.
According to the written testimony of Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP or the Washington Institute), “…Iran cannot win a conventional war against the West, but it can exact a high price through asymmetric warfare.”
“Exposing Iran’s involvement in international terrorism is now more important than ever, both to deny the group its coveted ‘reasonable deniability’ and to build an international consensus for action against Iran’s support for terrorism,” he wrote.
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign policy programming at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), wrote in her testimony that “the fall of the house of Assad would be devastating to Iran. So we clearly have an interest in Syria’s future.”
Pletka also claimed that U.S. policy is geared towards “tolerance for Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism” and during her oral statements asked why U.S. officials had not publicly declared that Iran was responsible for a bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists. To date, no evidence has been presented to support that allegation.
Amidst ongoing efforts to tie Iran to international terrorism, the U.S.-led sanctions regime charges ahead. But while the full traditional legislative process has now been bypassed so the pending Iran sanctions can be passed before Friday, the details of the bill in question have been waiting to be finalised for more than half a year.
Republican-spearheaded efforts to include harsher measures have clashed with Democrat-led moves to pass the bill as is, resulting in gridlock until a compromise is reached.
According to a NIAC press document, one such provision, the “Kirk Amendment”, would result in “unintended consequences” that would harm ordinary Iranians such as prohibiting Iranian-American citizens from sending money to family members in Iran and stopping pharmaceutical companies from selling medicines to Iranian hospitals “regardless of whether the Treasury Department granted them a license to do so”.
M. J. Rosenberg, a veteran Israel analyst who worked for years at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), told IPS that Congress is rushing to pass the sanctions because they “promised AIPAC that they would and want to deliver before the election season goes into full swing in September”.
“Sanctions bills seem to originate from Congress, but they actually originate from inside AIPAC,” he said.
Rosenberg, who has been consistently critical of AIPAC and other U.S. Israel lobby groups in his writings and commentary, also said that Iran is at the top of AIPAC’s agenda.
“Look at AIPAC’s conference in the spring. The Iran sanctions issue was AIPAC’s main issue. If you want to show your donors that you are 100 percent for the cause – the cause being first sanctions and then war with Iran – you have to cosponsor bills and get them passed,” he said.
On Jul. 27, President Barack Obama’s signing into law of the “United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012”, which gives Israel an additional 70 million dollars in military aid and expands military and civil cooperation, coincided with the presumptive Republican White House Nominee Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel for the foreign-policy focused portion of his campaign.
While in Jerusalem, Romney had a friendly meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and attended a fundraiser that reportedly resulted in more than one million dollars in donations from 45 Jewish donors.
According to the AP, billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has pledged to spend 100 million dollars to defeat President Obama, was seated next Romney at the event and joined in a standing ovation when Romney declared Jerusalem to be the Israeli capital.
Ongoing efforts by the presidential contenders to demonstrate their support for Israel have been described by analysts as an effort to capture a traditionally Democrat-aligned “Jewish vote”.
On Jul. 27, Gallup issued new polling data showing that from Jun. 1-Jul. 26 Jewish registered voters still favoured Obama over Romney by 68 percent to 25 percent.
Earlier in the year, a survey of more than 1,000 self-identified Jews conducted between late February and early March by the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI) showed that Jewish voters, who make up only about two percent of the national population but comprise more than that in several key “swing states”, such as Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois, remain largely liberal and Democratic in their political orientation and that U.S. Jews are more concerned about issues such as social justice than foreign policy.
Asked what issue was most important to them in the upcoming election, 51 percent cited the economy and 15 percent the growing gap between rich and poor. Only two percent of respondents cited Iran.
The relative lesser importance accorded by respondents to both Israel and Iran is remarkable in light of strenuous efforts over most of the past year by all but one of the Republican presidential candidates, as well as Republican lawmakers in Congress, to drive a wedge between Obama and his Jewish supporters over precisely those two issues.
According to Rosenberg, campaigning to the Pro-Israel community is “not about the votes, it’s about money”.
“Adelson is big in the Romney camp and has lots of friends in the Israel community and is trying to pull them away from supporting Democrats by saying he will be tougher on Iran,” he said.
“It’s not about votes, it’s about getting these millionaires and billionaires into your corner,” said Rosenberg. “I would say that about politics in general. Ultimately money turns into votes. But really, when it comes to the pro-Israel community, it’s strictly about the money.”
]]>Slavin highlighted remarks made by retired four-star Admiral William Fallon at an American Iranian Council conference on June 7.
Fallon resigned as head of US Central Command in 2008 after a profile in Esquire magazine portrayed him as opposing a military strike on Iran. This is how Thomas P.M. Barnett introduced him in the article that led to his retirement:
If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it’ll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it’ll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance.
Slavin also quotes Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, who warns that some Israeli officials will continue to press for US military action on Iran regardless of the US’s stance or the judgement of internal advisers like Meir Dagan who infuriated many with his recent comments. According to Thielmann:
Some in Israel want to prod us into an attack while others want to wave the saber so that the U.S. will have more sanctions and not consider talking to Iran.
Fallon continues to argue that the best solution would be negotiations with Iran, as long as Iran is committed.
The interests of both people are better addressed with engagement and cooperation rather than antagonism and hostility.
Of course, one reason why “there is no clear path to this preferred alternative anytime soon” is not only the Iranian administration’s current unwillingness to bend to US pre-conditions at the bargaining table. It’s also because of powerful anti-Iran voices within the Israel lobby which Jeffrey Goldberg would like us to refer to in quotations, and which, according to him, is powerful because of some whimsical, naturally ingrained American allegiance with Israel, rather than pro-Israel lobbying activities.
]]>AEI scholar Michael Rubin recently took to the blog of the neoconservative flagship Commentary and attacked Tehran Bureau, an excellent resource on all things Iran, for linking to what he called “fake biographies of conservatives,” which, he suggested, warranted a Congressional investigation. His reference was to profiles on the website Right [...]]]>
AEI scholar Michael Rubin recently took to the blog of the neoconservative flagship Commentary and attacked Tehran Bureau, an excellent resource on all things Iran, for linking to what he called “fake biographies of conservatives,” which, he suggested, warranted a Congressional investigation. His reference was to profiles on the website Right Web (RW), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive DC think tank.
If Right Web sounds familiar to our readers, that’s because we often link to RW profiles. In fact, though he never mentioned it, the two Tehran Bureau articles with RW links Rubin mentioned were written by us (one by Ali on his own; the other co-authored). We’ve also both contributed to RW’s illuminating features section (that’s called disclosure, kids). Needless to say, we think RW is a useful website and a valuable resource.
Rubin, obviously, does not share our view. In his post, he wrote:
Someone at [PBS's] Frontline website has been substituting fake biographies of conservatives written by an organization called Right Web for legitimate institutional biographies.
That someone, of course, is us. Rubin‘s feigned ignorance of our work is comical. He’s raised his objections of our coverage in person before at an AEI event, asserting to Ali that he was not an “Iran hawk,” and, while researching an article last November, Ali e-mailed Rubin with an interview request to which he replied:
Ali, the more you link to Right Web, the less you have credibility as a journalist. I’ll pass.
Rubin appears to have been waging a private jihad against RW for some time. In his initial Commentary post, Rubin cited a 2009 correspondence with RW’s director, Michael Flynn (Rubin refers to him as the “editor”). The actual correspondence, which RW reprinted on its website, demonstrates that Rubin mischaracterized Flynn’s response to an inquiry. (The e-mails contained this lovely rebuttal to Rubin‘s objection to being called an ‘Iran hawk’: “In our humble opinion, suggesting assassinating a country’s leader is tantamount to attacking that country.”)
RW rightly called Rubin‘s attacks “smears” against the website. The profiles are all fully sourced and based on publicly available news clips. And they were hardly “substitut(ed)” for “legitimate institutional biographies.” In a letter to the editors of Commentary (which Flynn reproduced in an article on Right Web after Commentary failed to respond to his queries), Flynn wrote that RW profiles
do not attempt to be comprehensive, nor do they try to mislead readers into thinking that they are somehow “official” biographies. At the top of each profile we state, “Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.”
Again, that statement is at the top of every single RW profile.
A few days after Rubin‘s attack, Tehran Bureau appended an editor’s note to the two pieces Rubin mentioned. Part of the note read:
After reviewing the matter, we find that the biographies on the Right Web site are not at all fake or fabricated, and seem to be well-sourced.
Rubin, predictably, threw a hissy fit in a second Commentary post:
That the editors at PBS Frontline are unable to differentiate between assertions of opinion on hard-left blogs and fact-checked news sources suggests an unfortunate lack of judgment and professionalism and an organization undeserving of tax-payer subsidy.
By way of an example, Rubin attempts to deconstruct the RW page for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a short-lived and controversial outfit in George W. Bush’s Defense Department that was widely criticized as a nexus of neoconservative ideologues who selectively spread intelligence to the White House and the press in order to build a case for war against Iraq.
Rubin attacks the integrity of Robert Dreyfuss, a veteran national-security reporter for the The Nation whose work is cited in the RW profile of OSP. Rubin, as he always does, dredged up Dreyfuss’ past work for controversial conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine. That bit is true, but Dreyfuss long, long ago disassociated himself from the LaRouchie scene, and has since distinguished himself as an excellent reporter on U.S. foreign policy.
Rubin goes on to attack a retired air force officer and whistle blower; impugns the credibility of legendary investigative reporter Sy Hersh (because of one admittedly bizarre speech); and cites a Pentagon Inspector General report that he claims exonerated OSP and officials involved therein. The IG report actually states that the OSP was not directly involved in the intel scandals that provoked the investigation, but rather had become a generic term to refer to the work of the Office of the then-Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, led by Douglas Feith, whose intel work the IG characterized as “inappropriate” and misleading. Rubin, of course, does not mention these rather important and relevant findings, which are, however, mentioned in Feith’s RW profile).
Rubin criticizes our piece in Tehran Bureau for asserting that Pentagon analyst Harold Rhode “worked in the” OSP, an assertion we actually never made. We wrote that he had been “involved with” OSP’s work, as has been widely reported and as one would expect given his very close and long-standing ties with Richard Perle who helped Feith get his job. (Feith’s son, David, currently an assistant editorial features editor at — surprise! — the Wall Street Journal, helped Perle and David Frum research their 2003 neo-conservative classic, An End to Evil when he was still in high school, according to the book’s acknowledgments.
Does it sound like Rubin is doing more than looking out for the integrity of news sources that receive federal assistance? It should: He’s actually defending his career. What Rubin omits, and as his actual institutional biography and RW page demonstrate, is that he in fact worked in the Defense Department at the time. He was closely associated with other ideological neoconservatives involved with OSP who have been blamed for misleading Americans on the Iraqi threat (WMD’s and Al Qaeda ties) and worked as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. The latter was the U.S. occupation government in the early days of Iraq, at the time when the U.S. mismanaged the situation there and missed — or selectively didn’t report to the U.S. public — the rising signs of the deadly impending sectarian violence and eventual civil war. With a track record like that, perhaps one can’t blame Rubin for highly selective disclosure (‘Heckuva job, Rubin‘).
Lastly, Rubin takes a shot at RW director Michael Flynn’s CV:
Let’s hope that the editors of PBS Frontline never fact-check the editor of Right Web’s claim that he has published in the Washington Post because neither LEXIS-NEXIS nor WashingtonPost.com seem to have any record of any such article.
That’s funny: We’re not even ‘scholars’ at any institution (let alone under the tutelage of Danielle Pletka), and yet, through cunning research skills, we were able to quickly search the Post‘s website and turned up an abstract of Flynn’s 2005 article. (If Rubin wants to read the whole thing without paying, he can find a copy here — or get a new research assistant.)
Not only did Michael Rubin’s government service coincide with the run-up to and botched execution of the Iraq occupation, and not only does his research acumen leave something to be desired, but he’s also proven himself a less than stellar military analyst. When he was still vigorously boosting Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, Rubin was a early, vociferous and persistent critic of Gen. David Petraeus’s attempts to co-opt the Sunni insurgency. What Rubin denounced as “appeasement” — as opposed to the now-discredited “deBaathification” pushed by Chalabi and his neoconservative allies at Rubin’s and Perle’s American Enterprise Institute — turns out to have salvaged the war. Over his opposition, the Petraeus-led table-turning made the general a hero among Rubin’s ideological comrades.
His attacks on Tehran Bureau, Right Web and us are only the latest chapters of a less-than-sparkling career in punditry for Michael Rubin. Despite calling for a Congressional investigation into PBS’s linking to Right Web profiles and an end to PBS’s federal funding, Rubin fails to show how any of the profiles are “fake” or “conspiracy-riddled.”
Rubin’s blog posts attacking our articles and RW are indicative of the sensitivity that he must feel, along, we would imagine, with many of his colleagues, over RW’s well-sourced and factual descriptions of neoconservatives’ (including Rubin’s) and other militarists’ careers in both the public and private sectors.
Michael Rubin‘s own career suggests misjudgment after misjudgment. And yet, he’s calling for a Congressional investigation into a news outlet based on their sources. If Rubin were to better explain and own up to some of his dubious contributions to U.S. foreign policy over the last decade — as outlined in his RW profile — instead of sweeping them under the rug, his criticisms might hold more weight.
]]>Slavin hits on the tenor of administration officials’ comments, as well as the effort to boost Voice of America‘s public diplomacy bona fides as a [...]]]>
Slavin hits on the tenor of administration officials’ comments, as well as the effort to boost Voice of America‘s public diplomacy bona fides as a way of talking to Iranians over the heads of their government.
Carnegie Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour tells Slavin that the U.S. shift may reflect an administration belief that a deal to ratchet down tensions between the West and the Islamic Republic over the latter’s nuclear program may not be possible:
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that the administration was more inhibited when protests broke out following Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential elections because “Obama still held out hope of reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran. Today I think the White House has come to the conclusion that they can’t reach a modus vivendi with a regime that seemingly needs them as an adversary.”
On the public diplomacy front, Slavin notes an interesting turn at VOA‘s Persian News Network, which is illegally beamed into Iran by satellite. Slavin writes that neoconservatives have already attacked a new VOA official, a State Department Foreign Service officer heading up PNN, for comments related to the National Iranian American Council. (NIAC is run by Trita Parsi, a former IPS colleague and frequent neoconservative target who wrote for IPS before Slavin began writing for the wire .)
Slavin (with my emphasis and links):
]]>The Obama administration has struggled to find ways to communicate support for Iranian protesters without giving the Iranian government ammunition to blame unrest on outside interference. Broadcasts by the Persian News Network (PNN) – the Farsi service of the Voice of America – are a component of the strategy even though VOA’s mandate is to present news without political bias.
On Monday, Ramin Asgard, an Iranian-American Foreign Service officer whose last posting was as a political adviser to Central Command – took the helm of the PNN. VOA executives said it was the first time since the waning days of the Cold War that a non-journalist has assumed such an important position in U.S. government-funded broadcasting.
VOA management has had difficulty finding the right person to run the sprawling service, which has one hit show – a “Daily Show” clone called “Static” or “Parazit” in Farsi – but has been riven by disputes among its staff over what vision of Iran’s political future to promote. Some members of Congress as well as some Iranian expatriates have complained that PNN is too critical of U.S. policy and too accommodating to Tehran.
Asgard, who also served as head of an Iran watch office in Dubai, did not seek the position but was offered it after several others turned VOA down or were deemed unsuitable, according to a source with knowledge of the process.
On the job only three days, he has already been the target of an attack on a blog run by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Trey Hicks, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, accused Asgard of undermining U.S. policy toward Iran by suggesting U.S. taxpayer support for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a group that has in the past advocated engagement with Iran but has also taken a tough stance on human rights abuses. Hicks also questioned Asgard’s command of Farsi.
Asgard did not respond to requests to reply to the allegations.
Trita Parsi, head of NIAC, said Asgard had once suggested that the grassroots group help him recruit interns for the Dubai office but Parsi said he was not in a position to help and no funds were offered. While in Dubai, Asgard did promote scientific and cultural exchanges with Iran, which was – and remains – the policy of the U.S. government.
Sadjadpour said Asgard was chosen in part to insulate VOA from Congressional complaints that the service was not sufficiently taking account of U.S. government views.
“The heads of VOA think they need to protect themselves against Congress and he [Asgard] checked some of the right boxes,” Sadjadpour said.
There’s constant action at [...]]]>
There’s constant action at #jan25 on Twitter, where I’ve been working away @LobeLog. And there’re many more amazing places to be getting reporting, information, and analysis.
Below this post is Emad Mekay’s dictated dispatch from Cairo by phone, which I worked into an IPS piece that included the big speeches from teetering (with one hand behind his back?) Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and, after a 30 minute delay, during which the two had their own phone chat, U.S. President Barack Obama.
For a focus on how U.S. officialdom is reaction — playing catch up, basically — check out the other IPS piece I co-authored, this one with Jim Lobe. Me? I’m going to get some sleep. But expect more soon.
]]>Jim Lobe and I wrote an IPS article last week challenging the right-wing talking points that the WikiLeaks cables were a nail in the coffin for those in the Obama administration who believe, as does the military’s top leadership, that linkage is an important concept if the U.S. is going to contain Iran and withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Basically, the “linkage” argument holds that continued irresolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hinders America’s ability to achieve its national security goals in the region, both by serving as a driver of extremism and a source of anti-American sentiment. Critics of the argument contend that the significance of the conflict has been vastly overblown, and that “the Palestinian issue” is simply an excuse used by violent extremists and lacking genuine salience among Arabs, despite what they may say in public.
Duss reviews the many WikiLeaks cables in which Arab diplomats endorse the concept of linkage and the countless op-eds from Iran hawks claiming that WikiLeaks shows that Arab leaders don’t care about Palestinians or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He writes:
All of this would seem to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the linkage argument. In reality, what it demonstrates is the willingness of some analysts to ignore evidence.
But, despite the overwhelming evidence in the cables, hawkish groups such as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) have shown a shocking willingness to misrepresent and twist the words of Arab leaders and the Foreign Service Officers who wrote the cables.
Duss concludes:
It is of course true that hostility toward Israel and its U.S. patron will not simply dissipate upon the end of Israel’s occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state — the completeness of that de-occupation, and the contours of that state, matter greatly. There are also problems and pathologies in the Middle East that have nothing to do with Israelis or Palestinians. Securing a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will, however, make addressing some of those problems easier, by sealing up one well of resentment from which demagogues and extremists have for decades drawn freely and profitably.
Indeed, the WikiLeaks cables provide abundant evidence that Arab leaders collectively agree that containing Iran–and in the process weakening Hezbollah and Hamas–requires removing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the lightening rod for anti-West, anti-Israel and anti-U.S. sentiments in the Middle East.
]]>Memarian’s piece draws on Iranian sources to describe the political context of, and gauge reactions to, Mottaki’s firing and his interim replacement by Ali Akbar Salehi, until now [...]]]>
Memarian’s piece draws on Iranian sources to describe the political context of, and gauge reactions to, Mottaki’s firing and his interim replacement by Ali Akbar Salehi, until now the head of Iran’s nuclear agency.
Down at the end, Memarian speaks to the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour, who says the move is unlikely to affect Iran’s ongoing diplomacy with the West:
Analysts believe Ahmadinejad’s surprise move is very unlikely to affect the negotiations, as Mottaki had little say in the country’s major foreign policy positions over the past five years.
“Mottaki’s firing will have little substantive impact on Iranian foreign policy,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, told IPS. “The Iranian foreign minister doesn’t formulate policy. It’s the equivalent of the State Department spokesperson being replaced.”
“Salehi is much smarter and smoother than Mottaki and may prove more effective at creating divisions in the international community,” Sadjadpour added. “The Iranian foreign minister’s job these days is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It’s ugly no matter how you try and sell it.”
I covered some other reactions yesterday — mostly speculative at this point, and unlikely to become any more certain before the upcoming round of negotiations in Istanbul next month.
]]>While one Western official who attended the talks told Slavin, on the condition of anonymity, that the Iranians “were not terribly [...]]]>
While one Western official who attended the talks told Slavin, on the condition of anonymity, that the Iranians “were not terribly serious” in their willingness to engage in a constructive manner, they also added that the Iranians did discuss their nuclear program—something that they had promised not to do in the days leading up to the talks—but “mainly to complain about the IAEA.”
Indeed, the WikiLeaks cables have given the Iranians much to complain about. Slavin writes:
An October 2009 cable disclosed recently by Wikileaks quotes an unnamed U.S. diplomat as saying that IAEA chief Yukiya Amano of Japan is “solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision”. That contrasts with Amano’s predecessor, Egyptian Mohamed ElBaradei, who often criticised the U.S. approach to Iran. It is not clear whether the Iranians brought up the comment at the Geneva meetings.
U.S. officials had hoped to revive discussions of a fuel swap agreement but, after the United States and its partners rejected a swap brokered by Brazil and Turkey in May, it appears the discussion of such an agreement did not occur this week.
Slavin writes:
The Western official said there had not been “much discussion of a revised TRR” this time in Geneva, suggesting that the U.S. and its allies did not think enough progress had been made to reopen the topic.
The Iranians, for their part, had said going into the talks that they would be willing to discuss limitations on uranium enrichment. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had said that talks would only progress once U.N. sanctions were lifted.
Slavin writes:
With the Geneva talks brought to a close Slavin looks at what we can expect from next month’s resumption of talks in Turkey.
Some analysts have suggested that Iran will feel more comfortable resuming negotiations in Turkey, whose Islamic- leaning government has expressed understanding for Iran’s position and need to keep face in front of a restive domestic audience.
And
]]>The Geneva talks were “pretty much what we expected”, the Western official said. “We are trying to start a process that will have practical steps that can begin to build confidence. We’ll see where this leads. Good thing we still have time and can continue to ratchet up sanctions pressure.”
The notion that Iran occupies the sole spot of concern for autocratic Arab regimes was a quickly rising meme among hawkish commentators.
The notion that Iran occupies the sole spot of concern for autocratic Arab regimes was a quickly rising meme among hawkish commentators.
Here’s what we wrote on their reactions and why, perhaps, they shouldn’t be so quick to think that Arab leaders are not also focused on Israel:
Neo-conservatives and other war hawks, including those in power in Israel, have responded to those comments with barely concealed glee.
“[T]he most interesting thing to come from the latest WikiLeaks round is Arab world leaders’ being forced to come out of the diplomatic closet and declare Iran’s regime the number one enemy in the Middle East,” wrote Benjamin Weinthal, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, on the website of the National Review.
“In the Israeli media, defense analysts are concluding that the leaked comments vindicate Israel’s longstanding position on the need for swift and powerful action against Iran’s out-of-control regime,” Weinthal continued.
“The corollary to this is that Arab leaders very generally will not speak to Americans – though they will speak to others – about their fear of Israel,” Chas Freeman, a former diplomat who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told IPS. “So the fact that Israel doesn’t feature in these conversations says nothing other than the Arabs are tactfully obsequious.”
(I’ve added the links and italics, which the wire does not accomodate.)
]]>In our IPS piece, Jim Lobe and I quoted much of this portion of Sick’s blogged reactions to the lastest WikiLeaks document dump:
[...]]]>In our IPS piece, Jim Lobe and I quoted much of this portion of Sick’s blogged reactions to the lastest WikiLeaks document dump:
The US undertook its engagement strategy with Iran with the clear conviction that it would fail. At the same time, it was preparing (and disseminating in private) an alternative pressure strategy. This is the most serious indictment of all.
According to the record, the Obama administration was briefing allies almost from the start — and before Iran had even had a chance to respond to offers of engagement — that we expected this initiative to fail and that we were actively preparing the pressure track that would immediately follow.
Iran could hardly have been unaware of all this, so the chance that they would respond favorably — even before the contested election in June 2009 and the brutal crackdown that followed — was essentially zero. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.
We also drew on comments by Trita Parsi e-mailed to Politico reporter Laura Rozen, whose entire post of reactions to the document dump is worth checking out. Parsi, the National Iranian American Council president who’s currently at D.C.’s Woodrow Wilson Center, says the fall-out from the dump, particularly the revelations about some Arab leaders’ over-heated rhetoric “doesn’t significantly change realities on the ground, [but] does exacerbate an already dire situation.”
Parsi sees stark choices ahead for the Obama administration in dealing with Iran:
]]>Finally, Washington has some tough decisions to make. The cables reveal that even though Obama came in with a strong vision for engagement, that vision has since inauguration day 2009 been compromised for several reasons, including opposition from some Arab states, France and Israel as well as the actions of Tehran. In the end engagement was pursued, but with the expectation it would fail. It is unlikely that the resources and dedication needed for success was given to a policy that the administration expected to fail. The choice now is between trying diplomacy in earnest or prepare for the confrontation that inevitably will come if the current trajectory of tensions prevail.